S2E4 - HR Is Dead (Kind Of): Wrestling, Stand-Up Comedy & Blowing Up Bullsh*t Training with Toby Kheng

HR is supposed to care about people.

So why does so much of it feel like policy updates, tick-box training and vibes of “please sign to say you’ve read this”?

In this episode of Why Not and What If, Siobhán Godden and Andy Cracknell sit down with HR disruptor, stand-up comic and former chef-turned-wrestler Toby Kheng (Founder of Freeformers) to ask a very simple question:

If HR vanished tomorrow... would anyone actually notice?

Together they dive into a very spicy mix of:

• Why traditional HR and L&D are obsessed with knowledge retention instead of real behaviour change
• The brutal truth about sexual harassment training, policy updates and why none of it shifts culture on its own
• How behavioural economics and human-centred design can transform employee experience far more than another LMS login 
• What wrestling and stand-up comedy can teach leaders about performance, feedback and genuine stakes
• Why so many HR teams are quietly de-skilling themselves by leaning on AI for everything
• The danger of L&D arrogance: “we’ll just build our own presentation skills course”
• How leaders destroy their own credibility with robotic comms and why humility, self-awareness and a bit of self-deprecation land so much better

Toby shares how learning stand-up and stepping into the wrestling ring gave him more powerful lessons than any corporate programme, and why he and his co-founder Emily are rebuilding the employer–employee relationship from the ground up through Freeformers. 

Siobhán brings the HR realism (and the 2am wake-ups over clients’ people problems), while Andy owns his history of being “told off by HR” and why he still believes tone of voice, values and culture cannot be imposed from the top.

If you work in HR, L&D, people, internal comms or leadership and you suspect a lot of what you’re “supposed” to do is nonsense, this one might hit a nerve in the best possible way.

Connect with Toby & Freeformers

• Freeformers website: search “Freeformers employee experience” or visit freeformers.com
• Toby on LinkedIn: search “Toby Kheng Freeformers”

Got a topic you want us to dive into?
Email us at letstalk@whynotwhatif.com – your ideas genuinely fuel this chaos.

If this episode made you think, laugh or rage-text your HR WhatsApp group, hit follow/subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who still thinks “updating the policy” is a culture strategy.

Got a story or a view? Email letstalk@whynotwhatif.com
— we might do a follow-up episode with your takes.

Transcript

Siobhan: 0:00

Welcome to Why Not and What If. And I'm Siobhan Godman, a HR consultant, coach, and the one who listens through the noise to what really matters. Think of me as the calm to Andy's creative storm. Hi! This is Andy Cracknell, creative whirlwind, destructor of dull thinking, and allergic to doing things the usual way.

Andy: 0:22

Thanks, Yvonne. I'm also a marketing and communications consultant.

Siobhan: 0:26

And this is the podcast where we explore the messy, magical intersection of life, work, leadership, and all the bits we're not supposed to talk about. Let's get into it.

Andy: 0:38

We're still not cancelled, Siobhan. We've not been cancelled yet.

Siobhan: 0:41

Well, nobody's heard episode um series two yet, so give it time.

Andy: 0:45

Yes. Ye of little faith. So in one of our episodes, towards the end of series one, Siobhan and I opened up with a bit of a lover's tiff, and that was the fact that she cheated on me with Toby King. Toby is a force to be reckoned with within the HR world on LinkedIn. If you've seen any of his stuff, I've been watching him for ages, and I was never entirely sure that he'd made the connection between me and the person that was watching him, but I'm reassured that he has. We've got Toby on ours now. So Chimon, I'm gonna hand over to you to do all the uh conversation stoking because HR and people are your world. But I understand there's gonna be stuff about wrestling, stuff about stand-up comedy, and stuff about uh employee engagement. So go on then.

Siobhan: 1:31

Yeah, there is. So welcome Toby. Thanks for giving us your time. So Toby and I keep bumping into each other at conferences with other HR people, and we've managed to surround ourselves with some quite cool people who want to do different things. And what I find great about our conversations with Toby is I'm obviously a HR consultant. I've been in HR for years and years and years, and since going out into the big bad world, I you know open my mind to different theories and ways of approaching HR, but Toby completely smashes them out the park and really challenges us, and I love it, and I I like that banter and I want to be challenged in HR. I think we all need it, so I'm open for some bit of debate. Toby's opinion of the world of HR today and in the future, what he thinks, and what the blim and hell does wrestling and love comedy have to do with it? Probably he said, What are we gonna say? Not much, but I know you fe weave it in some way, don't you, Toby?

Toby: 2:32

Um somehow, thank you. Yeah, yeah, somehow. I'm not quite sure, but uh it is all relative. I I've been trying to reflect on my career to date to in preparation for this podcast, kind of going, well, what do those moments mean and wh why does it influence how I kind of think and act and design stuff? And I think I've about managed to figure that out. So hopefully I can bring some sort of narrative rather than just garbled, gobbledygook about stuff I've done in the past that has no impact on the world. But uh, I think it I think it does. So let's let's explore it together and see where it goes. But thank you for the lovely introduction as well. That was that was nice, and it's it's cool to be in your both of your orbit. You know, Andy, I've seen you appear on comments in the in my live streams in the past, and I think you maybe even quoted on our website somewhere because we we blog about those live streams as well. I've because I've put your profile picture on our website somewhere. You are famous. Siobhan hasn't made it onto our website yet, but I it's it's probably only a matter of time. So you know, even though Siobhan has cheated with me in podcast land, Andy, you really have stolen our hearts by being so you you you got prime positions.

Andy: 3:45

My work's done, I'm just gonna sit here now.

Siobhan: 3:50

Yeah, you can just relax. I mean, but Andy, you're kind of in the in the the our world to a certain degree, aren't you? Because you do touch on kind of coachy styles and using assessment tools and things like that, which is how we got to know each other.

Andy: 4:07

That's right. And I think the the main link between me and the HR world is the bit where you have it's internal comms really, but it's the the tone of voice for the business and behaviours and values and that kind of stuff. So that's where the real link for me is. But yeah, there's the other bit with coaching and assessing tools and bits and pieces like that. So yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Siobhan: 4:30

Yeah.

Andy: 4:32

I spent the first 10 years of my career getting told off by HR. So, you know, I mean, there's that element as well.

Siobhan: 4:39

And and this is a really good point, actually, because that's one of the things that we one of our early conversations was the fact that your opinion of HR, because your history has probably not been amazing, is it? Because you're like, Oh, you're not like other HR people. I was like, aren't I? I don't know what that means.

Andy: 4:57

Just to frame it, because this could come off as me looking really bad right now. So if you go back if you go back to the intro to the podcast, I like to do things differently. And within limits, I like to break rules. But I'm also ADHD and also highly creative, so I tend to push back against the status quo, and I don't like boring stuff, and that's what's got me in trouble, nothing else. I listen to add. That's literally where the friction comes in.

Toby: 5:27

So, what Andy, what Andy is saying there surreptitiously, is that HR is in charge of boring stuff, and HR does boring stuff.

Siobhan: 5:34

And it's the traditional HR, the police, isn't it? No, you are the police, Andy, actually, so you know.

Toby: 5:41

Shivan, you do a very good caveat. Traditional HR is boring and not fit for purpose for sure. Yes. But um, yeah.

Siobhan: 5:49

And that's it. So your experiences, Andy, would probably reflect why Toby wants to break it up and start again.

Andy: 5:56

I'm I'm all for that. Because I think, I mean, fundamentally HR serves a purpose, let's let's be clear on that. But I think my perception, and I'm very conscious as that this is my perception, is that it does feel very police and very lacking income or did because I haven't been employed for 10 years, I've worked for myself, but it's been it just it just seemed to lack common sense and morals.

Toby: 6:22

And my my good friend Rocket, based over in Dallas Fort Worth, he uses a phrase quite a lot and he goes, human resources is the most inhumane department within an organization. And I think it's it's quite true, you know, in the way that traditional HR goes about its work, it it does things by policy, by training. Like I I will but I don't want to go into a long HR round, but if I take the the sexual harassment kind of updates to employment law at the moment, is that every HR person out there who's selling their services is selling policy updates and and training.

Siobhan: 7:00

Yeah.

Toby: 7:01

What is that? What is that bill designed to do is to reduce the uh sexual harassment happening in the workplace. And you're telling me by updating policy and sending one on a training course, you're going to fundamentally change that behaviour? Absolutely not. Yes, the policy and the law is important. Yes. Is training the best way to affect a change in that environment? Absolutely not. Yet HR will perpetuate itself. Even people like you know, Sherman CIPD will try and pedal this stuff because it's in the known universe, it's uh it's what you can do to affect that change. And I think some of the stuff we'll lean into today is that you know, human behaviour is way more complicated than well, if you tick the box and you attended a day, then you've changed, and nothing could be further than the truth.

Siobhan: 7:44

No, as we see time and time again. So, what's your solution to sexual harassment?

Andy: 7:53

I've got one, I've got a solution.

Toby: 7:55

Thanks for bailing me out there because I was about to fly. I haven't got Andy, please take it.

Andy: 8:01

So, this is something that we've touched on a number of times in previous podcasts, and it's something that's all over LinkedIn. I'm gonna reference Charlotte Del Signor again, which was the one of the posts that I was talking about in Cat Calls Kilts, and LinkedIn is a Tinder episode, which was series one, episode nine. But actually, the most effective way to deal with anything, sexual harassment, discrimination, or sogeny in the workplace is to educate men so that they can call other men out. And it's about educating them to call other men out, but also making sure that their eyes are open and they're seeing it because we grew up in a culture where we're almost blind to it. It can happen in front of us and we don't see it necessarily. This is for some men. So I actually think the effective way of doing it is not to sit there and say, you can't say this, you can't say that, you can't do this, you can't do that, because you can't be that prescriptive with something like sexual harassment. You need to equip people to call it out when it happens, and then that's when real change happens.

Toby: 9:00

Uh and I think so. Here's my answer, because Andy's now just fired something off. I I did come up with an answer, was that I don't know if anyone, uh either of yourselves or anyone listening is aware of the comedian Daniel Sloss. But if you look at Daniel Sloss's bit he does on sexual harassment, there's a hugely powerful monologue he delivers as part of a comedy set. Hugely powerful, went viral, and still to this day prompts me to think differently, gives me chills about even just the words he says. But he got up on stage and said that to a group of people over and over again on tour. And hearing that was is one of the things that can create the biggest shift.

Siobhan: 9:42

Yeah.

Toby: 9:42

And one of the things we tried to do, and a client said no eventually, but to open up a conversation about gender equality within an organization. And my idea was like, right, you've got a hundred employees, there are about a hundred seats in your local cinema. Get everyone to go and watch the Barbie movie together, and then everyone just go and have a discussion about what they just saw and see what kind of conversation that prompts up, open up that conversation. Because for me, you know, Barbie is full of incredible messages that prompt new and different thinking in probably some more traditional people's brains, right? Yeah, either you agree with it or you don't. That's also driving the conversation with the organization, but it's surfacing conversations that ordinarily wouldn't happen in the organization. Training very rarely drives new conversation because it's like I've got a curriculum I need to get through of activities and flashcards and flip charts and post-it notes. But ordinarily, the thing that's going to inspire that change is someone creating something that inspires you to think differently. And that's where I worked for a creative agency for two years. I'll never work for a creative agency again because it's one of the craziest places to work. However, we created stuff for employees that made them cry, made them laugh, made them think, and that changed behaviour. And none of it was in a workshop, and none of it was in a policy.

Siobhan: 11:01

Yeah, and I also think it's a little bit of a good with the government. I find that because I was a governor at a school, and and this this this is connected by the way, thinking, what the hell are you on about? But it feels like they devolve a lot of responsibility to these volunteers effectively. And I feel that it's the same with sexual harassment, and it's not just it's not just the government, and I know this is a problem we need to try and fix, and I know there's been a lot of bad behaviour in organisations, but it feels like, oh, do you know what? We'll just get all these employers to do a policy and that will solve the issue. And they're all being forced to do a policy. It's not even like they're doing it out of the right thing to do, it's because they've made it law, and I just don't know how fair that is as well, in terms of will that really change society or not? I don't know. What do you think?

Toby: 11:55

Well, I I I love behavioural economics. Behavioral economics is something I've studied for about six or seven years now and apply it in everything I do. And I think the lovely segue that you've opened me up to here is that in 2010, David Cameron's government, not probably him himself, set up an organization called the Nudge Unit, essentially, that looked at how you apply behavioural science to public policy. So, yes, you can create the public policy, but how are you actually using behavioral economics to nudge that behavior? Which is incredibly forward-thinking for what? So we're 2010, right? We're 15 years down the line.

Siobhan: 12:32

I didn't know they'd done that.

Toby: 12:34

Ah, so if you the whole the the go-to book on behavioral economics called Nudge is is all about it isn't about what the government did, but they were taking those principles, those heuristics, those nudges, and going, well, how do we change how do we change behaviour over time? Because policy isn't going to do it. So say what you like about any any government at any moment in time, but it's incredibly forward thinking and a very different approach than let's just create and develop the policy, which we've all just discussed, doesn't influence behaviour at all. But the principles of behavioural economics definitely do.

Andy: 13:13

But is it not the whole point of creating a policy, surely, really, is to cover the organization's backside from getting sued. Because it's a document that just says, We've told our people this, they haven't followed it, it's on them. And I know that's been really crude, but that's the gist of it.

Toby: 13:29

Yeah, absolutely, but it's gone to the next degree where you expect that to to manage an informed behaviour, and it doesn't. Because it still happens. You've created the policy, but people still have tribunals, still people behave in certain ways. So what yes, policy is there to to cover your ass in in from both parties in in case something goes wrong, but also it's often it's now just like the D we defer to it as like, well, you acted this way, and the policy says you shouldn't act this way. You're like, well, you as an employer, you've got the custodian of your employees that are you know working for you, and that you talk about creating culture and values and all this kind of stuff. If you do not think that putting policies in place and managing by policy isn't affecting your culture, like it's no wonder that there are garbage organizations out there that treat their people incredibly badly.

Siobhan: 14:26

Yeah.

Toby: 14:26

And it's not because they, in most cases, it's not because they set out to treat people badly. It's the way they go about trying to create values, culture, and all this kind of stuff. It's just so stupid, so fundamentally stupid. Like the ways we try and do it inside the world of work, you wouldn't try and create that kind of change in in society outside the world of work using those mechanics. You'd be stupid too. But because there is this transactional relationship between employer and employer with this flow of money and activity, there seems to be like this contractual obligation that we kind of go, well, well, we don't really have to try because it's you're contractually obliged to do what we say.

Siobhan: 15:04

Yeah.

Toby: 15:05

Uh but again, it's human behaviour, it's not about the transactional relationship, then it's about how do you inform and support human behaviour in you know an organization.

Andy: 15:14

You've given me my first rabbit hole. Brace yourself. So a few years back, I was involved in defining an organization's tone of voice. And it was a large, it was a large national, big national organisation in the public sector. And very crudely the method was to speak to the relevant stakeholders, those people who could be bothered to be interested and see the value in the tone of voice of an organization which still beats me as to why people can't see why it's important, but they don't and then they they the the the inference was basically okay, cool. So you've spoken to six or seven others, now you know what you're doing, so let's just write the document up. Oh, wait a minute, what? Excuse me. Uh hang on, there's about 4,000 people back there that need to be spoken to about this. I can't just it's not right just to impose a tone of voice on people. Because you need to understand what your people see in the organisation and how your suppliers and your clients or your customers see the organization as well, because they're the people that are relevant, not you not sitting in your ivory tower owning six figures. So that instantly switched them off. They weren't interested then. So I was like, okay, fine, well, I'm still going to go and do the work because it needs to be done, and being a little bit self-conscious, I didn't want to ruin my reputation by just listening to what the exec said. So I went and spoke to 4,000 people, not literally, we surveyed them and did all the other bits and pieces, customers, suppliers, all the rest of it. We came back with a very different perception of the tone of voice that they wanted for the organisation. So then selling it in made it was quite complicated, but I ended up effectively saying to them, look, you've got probably nearly six thousand people out there saying this, and there's eight of you saying you don't agree with it. So what are we going to do here? Now, the knock-on effect to that then is the behaviours piece and the values piece. Anyone out there in a senior leadership role, HR or otherwise, that thinks that they can impose values and behaviours on an organization is hugely misguided because it's the same concept, it's about your culture, and you need to understand how people perceive you to be able to define one way your challenges are, but two where your strengths are, and then you build off of that basis. But again, I mean it just beggars belief, the number of and I'm gonna say it, the number of HR leaders that that don't get that. You know, they've they're very much okay, HR will set values and behavior. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how this works. If you don't want a toxic culture, then you you can't be sitting there dictating to everybody else this stuff.

Toby: 18:09

I I think the well you're you're bang right. But at the heart of it is human-centred design as a principle fixes all of that, and it's something that you know customer experiences teams have done done the world over. Because if you get human-centered design right in delivering products and services to customers, you make more money. But we've not applied it to employee experience because, like, well, it doesn't really matter for them. Well, crucially, it does, you know, we've come up with a measurement methodology that shows that it does right. So the thing, so human-centred design becomes a really, really important part of it. And but I think the it just as the level of arrogance that we're talking about, and I'm not gonna say all HR leaders, but I'm gonna use the L and D function, I'm gonna get a bit more specific, right? It's the L and D part of learning and development part of HR. You know, presentation skills. Presentation skills as a concept is needed in pretty much every organization, yet there is this level of arrogance within an internal learning and development team. It's like, we'll create our own presentation skills workshop. And you're like, why? Presentation skills in your business so fundamentally different to any other organization that you think you're you've kind of got this, you've got the best people to create the best solution. No, actually, the probably the best presentation skills training comes from uh a chap called Toby Kenck. No, uh it comes from but it comes from someone who has to commercialise presentation skills training, not from someone whose job it is to come up, you know, with two-day workshops for problems that an organization thinks they have. It's like it's such a fundamental waste of money. Yes, try and create behavior change, try and create learning opportunities for things that are specific to that organization, but presentation skills is just one, right? It could be communication skills, leadership. Like, what is leadership so fundamentally different in your organization to any others that you think you think you have to go away and create your own and employ a whole department to do it? I failed, I fail to believe it. Yes, there are some very specific challenges. I'm not going to say that there aren't. However, most of the experiences and training you might receive, if you design it right, you enable someone to put their own context, their own viewpoint onto that material. The problem most LD and training and HR functions do is like they give you the context, they give you how you apply it to your role. It's like, no, there's gotta be, you've got to allow someone the opportunity to connect these two nodes together, not go, here you go, this is the concept and this is how you apply it in your role. And then you wonder why you don't have an always learning culture or transformation organizations is really hard because you've been going, no, eat the spoon, eat the stuff off the spoon, yes, and it doesn't work.

Andy: 20:48

So therein lies the problem because you've just said in that piece about how is leadership in your organization so fundament fundamentally different to every other organization that you feel you have to create your own custom training. The the problem is that I wouldn't be surprised if a fair percentage of organisations out there were actually answered yes, it is to that question. Yeah, they're morons.

Siobhan: 21:08

Yeah, and actually, as an external looking in, I see the same blueprint for every single learning development, leadership development. Certainly, it's the same blueprint. So it's not different, is it?

Andy: 21:22

And and that in that in and of itself creates a toxic culture because then you get that bre breath of arrogance from the leadership down, and everybody at the bottom sitting there looking up, going, like like Toby just said, you got morons, you've got no credit.

Siobhan: 21:38

No, no, absolutely, and I actually had a leader once who was talking about presentation skills, he was a great presenter. Really, it was one of his only redeeming features, to be honest. But he was great at it. And over a period of 18 months, two years, the the comms team and the HR team completely broke him through presentation skills training, and he ended up a robot when he's presenting. And it was like that was his only redeeming feature. Now he can't even do that because you've broken him. That was terrible.

Toby: 22:12

I I well, I I remember seeing a senior leader at an organization I used to work for, and and and they went, Oh, yeah, they've uh they've done a video to you know introduce something, a new concept. Honestly, it looked like she was a hostage, like literally up against the wall, camera right in her face, and it was like, Cool, say something exciting and passionate about the organization, and it was done with the the level of stillness and excitement of uh of a grain of rice. I don't know if I'm trying to get a grain of rice, but like there was no movement in any facial expression. Um boy, oh boy, there's a lack of personality there. But also, that's not their job. They're not their job, isn't to well, you kind of argue it probably is, they get paid a lot of money, they should be good at multiple things, not just one.

Andy: 22:58

But speaking to the organization or the or the the audience that's your job, right? You have to be able to do that. They absolutely should be able to do that, and if they can't, that's fine, but then they need to get the support to be able to do it.

Toby: 23:09

Or get someone else to do the job because you you're incapable.

Siobhan: 23:13

Yeah. Never admit that though.

Toby: 23:16

No. And I have been actively told off for telling someone that they weren't a very good leader because they couldn't communicate effectively. And they said, How dare you tell me that? And I'm like, Okay, so we're in that kind of hierarchical relationship. Never mind.

Siobhan: 23:29

But you communicated that effectively because they took they understood what you were saying.

Toby: 23:34

They definitely did understand what I was saying, but as you know me, I probably don't have the subtleness filter that I probably need with senior leadership. But then unfortunately, if you work with me, you get the whole shebang. You get that you get I'm not gonna I'm not gonna try and sugarcoat it. There's not much point. I haven't got the time or energy or the willingness to sugarcoat something to placate you. You're either gonna get it or you're not in the nicest possible way. I will I but if you do get it and you you you understand it, then I'm more than willing to help. It's not that I'm saying it in like I'm not saying it to make you angry, I'm not saying it to make you feel bad about yourself. I'm saying it to help you and that there is help there to do that. But if especially if you've been in an organization for a long period of time and you've been somebody has inflated your arrogance and ego up to the point where you just believe that you're incredible, like that's that's not useful either. You need to pop the balloon. I can't just kind of go, oh, I'll just put a little nick in the balloon and hope it deflates over time. You've literally got to pop it and kind of go. Again, I'll go back to uh my good Fred Rocket, he talks about like you have to blow shit up to make space for other stuff to happen. You can't just kind of keep building on top and top on top of it. You do need to destroy some stuff for new stuff to emerge. And if it if some of that new stuff is, you know, completely recrafting the way you appear on camera or on stage, then you've got to get a little stick of dynamite somewhere.

Siobhan: 24:56

Just want to highlight somebody that you've had an impact on, Toby, is your business partner, Emily. And she's doing a lot of presentations and stuff now, and she would never have done that before, would she? She's amazing.

Toby: 25:09

She is is incredible, and very, very like this. Is the other thing, right? Is I have a very, very specific style of communicating, of presenting, of getting on stage, and seeing, all that kind of stuff. If I tried to make Emily do exactly as I do, I would lose. Emily would lose. Emily would be herself, I would feel bad about it. And so there are way there are definitely more than one way of communicating, absolutely. And it's been an absolute joy to see Emily, because Emily has such an important voice that needs to be heard in the world. But typically, you know, it wouldn't people wouldn't hear it because Emily's like, well, I don't want to get on stage, I don't want to do live streams. Uh but we're getting to that point now where it's been hard and it's been challenging, of course. You know, change always is and learning always is, or and it should be, and if it's not, then it's not it's not really pushing you hard enough. No, which I'll talk about when we maybe talk about a bit of the stand-up comedy and the wrestling stuff. But Emily has has pushed herself, and I have also pushed her to do that, and she has absolutely herself on stage, and therefore you you see the best of her. And that's not because of I've said this is how I present. Yeah, I'm a good presenter, this is how I present. It's like, what makes you amazing, and how can we amplify that on stage and get you to a place where you're comfortable being yourself on stage? It's I I say it's as simple as that. Obviously, there's a lot more under the hood, but yeah, that's been a really cool thing to have done this year for sure.

Siobhan: 26:36

But it's also it's something that people aren't told often enough, are they? I always tell this story about because I don't mind presenting and I don't mind standing up in front of people, but I did when I was a kid, and I was really shy. And I always tell this story because it was quite an influence at the time, but I was running this I was quite junior in my career, and I was supporting the head of head of an LD in this big it was an onboarding programme, so they had all new starters joining this this uh onboarding session. It was like three days in HQ in Germany, and all the C-suite were there as well. It was a really in terms of onboarding, it was a fantastic programme, actually. I've never seen one better since, and this was years ago. But my boss, who was supposed to run it, was she had a family emergency and she couldn't do it. Her stand-in was the head of HR who was heavily pregnant and was told she wasn't allowed to fly. And this was like a couple of days before the event, so they said, Chevron, you're gonna have to do it because you're the only one that knows the content. Now I was the young girl behind the scenes, I was the the the gopher basically. I'd never done anything like that before, but uh literally, you're the only one that could do it. We believe in you, you can do it. And when I landed at the airport, I can't remember if it was Munich or Frankfurt, but somewhere in Germany, I was so nervous I threw up in a bin in the airport. That's how scared I was. But I did it, I literally just stood up there in front of it was that it was about 300 people and the C-suite, and I said, Yeah, you've got your third choice. And I just kind of owned it, and they were so kind to me that it was it was fine. And I thought I'll never be that scared again because I was so scared I knew I couldn't physically be that scared again. Now I wouldn't impose that on other people on purpose, but it did change everything.

Toby: 28:28

But but you did, there's a really cool, really cool technique that I tell most people if you're getting on stage is that the element of self-awareness and self-deprecation, don't bully yourself, but this element of self-deprecation is really important as like a to break the fourth wall of you on stage. Just because you're on stage doesn't mean you're on screen. You you have to break that fourth wall and allow you don't necessarily have to talk to the audience, but you are talking to the audience, right? Because you're saying stuff and there's this call and response. I say something, you laugh, you cry, you go, ooh, that there is that you're having a conversation, and so what you did there really nicely was like you broke that down. So people kind of go, Oh, okay, you've either said the thing that was on your mind or their mind or both, and you kind of go, Okay, we've got a collective understanding of the dynamic of this relationship now. We're being open and honest with each other, we're being authentic, and therefore I feel more relaxed, you feel more relaxed, and we all know what's going on. The worst people, or certainly in the stand-up comedy world, like there are some comedians I've seen that will get on stage and just launch straight into their material, which is good material, but they just didn't take even 10 to 15 seconds at the beginning just to break that wall down a little bit. I I remember I did uh so I did some presentation skills coaching, and and the how I do it is the first thing we do is we take you we take the cohort on to see a stand up comedy gig. Right. We we go and see four or five comedians at a comedy night. And three of them did exactly what I just said, and one of them didn't. Now, the one that didn't was really actually quite funny. But was not getting the two-way engagement with the audience. They would go out and fish for comment or laughs, and it just they never came back. And I kind of would assume it's down, they just didn't spend the time to set the the kind of the parameters of how they were going to engage the audience. Because you kind of go, okay, you're in your material now, you've started telling me stories. I'm going to sit here and I will I will watch.

Siobhan: 30:24

Yes.

Toby: 30:24

Whereas all the other comedians said, no, I'm going to engage you and your brain and your responses, and you'll know that now this is a two-way, and therefore you're going to feel more relaxed and you'll laugh more. It's really interesting. But it's always very just a really great way to break people from the cycle about, okay, regardless of whether you're funny or not, doesn't matter. I'm not trying to make people funny. I'm trying to make people realize that what stand-up comedians do is so nuanced and intelligent that even if you just took 10 to 20% of their stuff and put it in their skill, like their skill set or their coding and put that into your own presentation skills, you'd wit you'd you know, you'd you'd do way, way better.

Siobhan: 31:04

Yeah.

Toby: 31:05

And and invariably people do, which is why people pay to come on the course.

Andy: 31:09

There's another point here as well, which is when you were saying what you were saying about the connection with the audience, I was thinking about Lee Evans. So with Lee Evans, he we're talking about brand and perception, right? So if you're going to a company event and you know the CEO's going to stand on stage and you've been there for 10 years and you've seen him before, your previous perceptions of him standing on stage and speaking are going to come into play in terms of how you interpret what he's saying and how you receive it. The same way that your judgment of them in terms of their visibility around the business or what they've done in a time of crisis, all of this stuff comes together and that impacts the way you hear the message that they're delivering. Now, when you look at Lee Adams as an example, the the way that he connects with his audience, I mean, that guy is is, I would argue, one of the funniest comedians that's ever lived. He is just a pure comedy genius. But the way he connects with his audience is because he's so incredibly humble. So at the very beginning of his gigs and the very end of his gigs, he's almost apologetic about the fact that he stood in front of these people and they've paid money to see him. That's just one example. So I completely agree with what you're saying. I think the other point to add though is that from my perspective, when you're building that ability to present, it's also that level of self-awareness of it's not just how you behave on stage and the messaging you have on stage. Yes, 100% it's that opening gambit, especially if you're an up-and-coming comedian that people haven't seen. There's another one that springs to mind, his first name's Andrew, but I can't remember his surname. And he fell flat on his face because he doesn't make the connection with the audience. His stuff is quite extreme and it can be quite funny, but it just he doesn't, he's not he's he I think he had two or three months on various TV panel shows, but then he just fell flat on his face because he wasn't connecting. But the point here is when you're coaching these individuals around how to present on stage, is having that per is giving them the awareness because invariably they don't have it, that actually your audience sat in front of you, that first 30 seconds is critical. It can also change people's perceptions of you who have had a perception for a while, and that is a great opportunity, not just for the presentation, but actually your relationship with the business as a whole, to evolve. And that's a point that's quite commonly missed is that it's not just about that one presentation, it's also about bigger picture brand, personal brand within the organization.

Siobhan: 33:40

Yeah. So, how how did you get into the stand-up comedy then, Toby?

Toby: 33:46

Weirdly, I got into stand-up comedy the same way I got into behavioral economics, just to bring this all full circle. So I worked for an organization seven, eight years ago, and they said they were they were a very small organization, right? So they didn't have a HR person, they didn't have an L and D team, but they said, We'll give everyone a thousand pounds to spend on learning and development. And you tell us what you want to go and do, and if it you can align it to the goals of the business, big challenge there. Uh we we'll let you spend it. So I was like, Cool. I will behavioral economics is is gonna has already changed the world outside the work. It will change the way we do stuff inside the world work, so I'm gonna start studying that. That was my banker, and like that will definitely get signed off. That then left me with that didn't take up all the thousand all of the the £1,000. And I was like, cool, what else do I do? Well, I do a lot of pitching and proposing and talking to clients, so I could probably do with improving my on-stage presence. By that point, I had been, you know, standing up at events and workshops and talking to groups of people for about eight or nine years. So it wasn't completely new, but I was like, I've never had any formal training in it apart from the very first moment in my career when I started doing it, when I had an incredible leader called Christine Knott trained me to be a trainer. And so I got some really cool tips and tricks there. But I was like, okay, let's revisit it. And I was like, well, let's try stand-up comedy. So I looked for some stand-up comedy courses, and so that was my proposal to the business. I want to spend £1,000 learning behavioural economics and stand-up comedy. And both of them have uh, I think we've already uncovered right through this conversation that both of them have quite a profound impact on me and my career. But essentially, that was, I think it was like an eight-week programme. So above the umbrella shop in London, can't remember what it can't remember exactly where it is, it's near Tottenham Court Road, and there's a Sam Smith's pub below it because that's where we all went for a drink afterwards. But it was eight two-hour sessions every like every Wednesday evening, culminating in get in front of 200 people and do a five-minute set. Wow. And that's how I got into it. And the thing that really profoundly changed how I think about creating and developing people inside the world of work is that the the the comedian that taught me is called Tans and Kelly, incredibly funny, incredibly hilarious, and is going on. I imagine, I can't imagine she still does that course because she's on to bigger and way better things now. Hugely talented and forever grateful that I got the opportunity to be essentially coached by her, not trained, right? Because she has no formal CIPD qualification in corporate learning, she doesn't have a learning management system backing her up with loads of content and kind of any surveys or anything like that. She literally just rocked up every Wednesday for a couple of hours and took us through some stuff. How much she planned it and stuff, I don't know. But there must have been this element of you plan it, you don't just rock up and do it. But she knows her craft incredibly well. She knows how to then bring people on board to do that. But most of it was cool, Toby or whoever in the group, stand up and and talk for five minutes. Tell us what you got. And then we'd throw it out to open the conversation, we'd iterate and we'd do that, right? So over that eight weeks, that's what was happening. We were just, you know, practicing and delivering. We weren't necessarily sitting there listening to Tunzin talk and kind of telling us all the rules of comedy. That was, I think, half an hour of the first class, and that was it. These are the these these are the pretty much the ten rules. If you can do these, then you'll probably be fine. Right now, let's fucking get on with it and do some stand-up comedy. But because there was this performative element at the end, you have to go and perform in front of 200 people, and you've got your peers sat in this room with you as well, who are going to go through this. Like, you have no option but to perform or just drop out the course completely, and one person did, right? I have never seen someone so more petrified. But he was an IT director, and his CEO had paid for him to go on this course because he's like, you need to be better at presenting, and this IT director literally look like it was about to have a heart attack. And the fear, and I was like, I I think it would do you good, but I think there's a step before this that you need to do. You've literally just been chucked to the depot by a CEO. He didn't come back for the the second session, didn't come back, but to any of them. But the this this it completely reframed that what was re what really led me to be able to do stand-up of passable quality. One, there was that moment in time where I was gonna have to do it, and people were expecting friends, family, they all came, work colleagues, they came. Of course they did because work paid for it, so I had to invite them.

Siobhan: 38:46

You know, their money went. How funny are you?

Toby: 38:50

Exactly. Um high stakes. So the the stakes were high. If I didn't do that at that moment in time, then I will have failed.

Siobhan: 38:59

Yeah.

Toby: 38:59

And most learning and development programs are change initiatives. There's no critical moment of failure. There's no, there's there's there's there's no no one's got any skin in the game. Leadership training. Yeah, like there's no single moment where you kind of go, shit, I've got to now start performing, otherwise I'm gonna look like a mug. Yeah, you're kind of allowed to just exist and not actually have to change at all. The the system of work enables you and also almost rewards you for not changing, to be completely honest. Absolutely. And to Andy's point, not challenging the status quo.

Siobhan: 39:29

Yeah.

Toby: 39:29

Um, regardless if you've been on a two-day workshop that tells you to. The other thing was the time and spacing, right? So some of the biggest learning I had was just recording myself, voice noting it, videoing myself, and talking into a bottle of water as a microphone, and looking at myself and seeing how I would improve it based on what Tamsin Kelly had said and all my peers had said. Now that I've watched myself over and over again, what would I change? And there was massive in between those sessions, massive leaps of learning there, and then application at those actual sessions. So, in that regard, right, there was no, like I say, there was no formal coaching qualification, no formal learning management system. I wasn't being performance managed idea. It wasn't a form to fill out, it was the most analog experience ever. And to date, apart from the wrestling, is the best learning experience I've ever been on. However, you come to the world of corporate, and the the programme I've I've designed, the coaching program I've designed to help people get better at presentation skills, is kind of built off that experience, right? But the amount of clients I've turned away because they can't you just deliver it as a one-day workshop? Like, absolutely not. Oh, but please, what do you think? Say please is gonna make me do it way more. I think I think you'll find I want to be paid more, way more money to do it poorly. Um so it's like, can you do it in a one-to-day workshop? I've turned clients away because of that, and people think I'm mad, but I'm like, Well, I I do the work I do to have impact, not to pick up a bank a paycheck. If I was doing it to pick up a paycheck, honestly, I wouldn't start my own business. Uh that would be the last thing I would have done if I wanted to make lots of money. So realistically, you've got to be able to create time, space, and conversation with the right people to perform at a moment in time to get anybody to change. Because if you don't, then all you're doing is I go back to it, tick in a box.

Siobhan: 41:23

Yeah, absolutely.

Toby: 41:24

Sexual harassment. Yeah, like there is no critical moment of failure of you doing that. You don't pass or fail. There's no performative element, you've not made any statement about changing yourself to your peers. There's no social pressure for you to change. All you've done is done literally the bare minimum. You've signed that you've read a policy and you've attended some training where it might have shifted your mindset. But again, I go back to just watch Daniel Sloss on stage. He's a comedian. He's not trying to stop. He, you know, his job isn't to stop sexual harassment in the UK. But fuck me, he did a better job than most policies and training has done. Mae Martin changes, you know, perceptions about sexuality and gender. Nish Kumar does it about politics. Phil Wang does it about being, you know, an Asian person. He calls himself Chinese and he's from Malaysia. Like he plays heavily on the concept that we have a fundamental misunderstanding of you know, Asia in this country. His best joke, let's just go on this uh on a tangent. His best joke is about like British people, white British people are petrified of reheating rice. We've been told that reheating rice is the I've seen that one, is the worst thing you can do. Yet in Chinese takeaways up and down the land, they've been serving fried rice, which is essentially reheated rice to people for many, many years. So it's the biggest swindle. But all of these people aren't necessarily trying then their MO might not be to create systemic cultural change in the world, but they're doing it. Why are they doing it? Because they're able to take people on journey and create a message in a way that no organization, no leader has ever done.

Siobhan: 42:59

Yeah.

Toby: 43:00

Broad strokes. I I've never worked for a leader that's been able to do it. I've maybe no, I've never worked for a leader that's been able to do it. But I've seen loads of stand-up comedians that are that can.

Siobhan: 43:09

Yeah.

Andy: 43:10

It was really funny when you were talking about those training courses because I think the other thing, and and Toby and well, both of you will know this, is that actually there's this expression horses for courses. When you're creating courses like these, you can't just write one size fits all because every person's going to be affected individually. And that again flies in the face of this one size fits all training programmes written by learning and development to roll out to entire organisations, and what they're not doing is recognising that people within the organization think and act and behave and believe completely differently. So it just infuriates me because why the fuck aren't they getting it right? Like, how long has HR banged on about the fact that we know that everybody's different and people, you know, that's why they use profiling tools like Myers Briggs, which incidentally is fundamentally bloody flawed. I'm gonna bang this drum again. It was written by a parent child trying to determine if the child's partner was gonna fit into the family, and 80% of organizations globally spend billions on this bloody tool with no scientific backing, no fundamental theory behind it, apart from this introvert extrovert thing. That that's flawed. Because we're not introvert or extrovert, we're ambivalts, or is it omnivert? Whatever, with both, depending on the environment you put, it's all bollocks. Anyway, I'm gonna show up now.

Toby: 44:31

So the there's there's there's three things, three things there. Number one, the fact that you were up the night before sweating and worrying about it, isn't it better to do it then rather than on an actual thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it's like, oh, but we we you know, we we can't we you have to create emotion in people. You have to. That's again for all its failings. The one thing the creative agency taught me is like you have to create emotion. Because if you can't, then you are just being it's a passive experience and it's not gonna change.

Siobhan: 45:00

Yeah.

Toby: 45:00

The the second thing about the you know, what uh you said me and Siobhanna are really awesome. Absolutely.

Siobhan: 45:07

That's my takeaway too.

Toby: 45:08

Yeah, that's the that's the only bit I heard. Um, but but but what but what we do there is that we are concerned with like the design of the operating system in which someone someone works in, right? That's that's what you should do. You have to you can design for that, but most don't, because it brings me to my third point when you're talking about HR, right? Is that the whole system of work is pred uh of HR work specifically is predicated on knowledge acquisition, retention, and delivery. Now, that's stupid, and it's gonna get even more stupid in the modern world because like what is really good at knowledge acquisition, retention and delivery? Artificial intelligence. So as long as you can be assured of the fidelity of that process, AI takes that away from you. Yeah, you don't need that anymore. So, what do you do? Well, you do what me and Siobhan do, promo, but like you you you do you do that kind of thing where you think about the design and the implementation of this stuff that affects the human experience. And let's bring it full circle. We talk about talk about law, right? I studied law at A level, and I went, you know what, that's enough for me. I don't want to do five more years of this, six more years or whatever, because it will drive me insane. I am bored to tears because I'm reading and trying to learn case law. Now, case law, again, the law, the actual law, and all everything in between, right, is about knowledge, acquisition, retention, and delivery. And so, what what what does a lawyer become in the future if you take all that stuff away and the same as HR, right? It's about compelling storytelling, creating the argument in the case, pushing the little levers like they did in the courtroom for you, Andy, to that the AI wouldn't necessarily come up with to just kind of how do I test and poke that is way more important as a human skill set than the than the knowledge retention. So, regardless of if you're doing it now, it's coming. Where I'm not saying uh well, Shivan knows I say go around saying HR is dead all the time. Someone put it a lot more nicely. It's it's end of life, right? It's coming to the end. If it's not dead now, it is it as you know, it's coming because you can spend all this time and money as a lawyer or in a HR professional trying to learn all the stuff you need to do and then gatekeeping all that knowledge for yourself instead of disseminating to the organization and enabling the organization to use that information. Again, law and HR, very kindred spirits. We have all this knowledge, we're gonna keep it to ourselves because we are the department that looks after this, and if it gets past this department, ah, we're in trouble because what do I then do?

Siobhan: 47:40

Yeah.

Toby: 47:40

And the thing you do, Andy, is just what you've described is you you play in the white space that's left in trying to create behavior change and culture and understanding through intentional human-centered design rather than this all this admin shit that we've got to do. And that's honestly, that's case law or HR policy is is is is all about admin. And there are a million on one HR consultants out there talking about the new employment rights bill.

Siobhan: 48:08

Yeah.

Toby: 48:09

Jesus wept, I am bored to tears. It's coming, it's coming. This is what's happening, this is the latest update. It's like you are you are presenting yourself as a subject matter expert based on the knowledge that is literally just freely available to any other human being on the planet that has access to the internet. That is not your skill set, that is your knowledge. And it's not even your knowledge, it's democratized knowledge because of technology. What do you do over and above that? Well, I help you write the policy. Well, hang on a minute. If AI's got all of that information about what the policy and the law, uh what the law is and what the policy could be, then surely I would just use that. Well, yeah, you're probably right. Okay, I can't charge you 350 quid a day to do that anymore. Cool, so what can you charge me for? Don't know. Great. I think you have to go and find a different job. It's like I don't like I said, I don't sugarcoat it, but that is where we are going to head. Yeah. You can argue it to the hill if you want, but I am more interested in the people like Chavard and yourself that get it and understand this is coming. I'm not saying that AI is going to take your job, but it's going to take away elements of your job that if you don't think about what you do once it has, then there's not a full-time headcount there for you. So you either go part-time or you don't have a job anymore. Yeah, anyway, I'll just quickly step off my soapbox.

Siobhan: 49:19

No, stay with your soapbox. What scares me even more is the fact that we're churning out kids from school, telling them about, oh, we're going to test you in an exam. This is all about knowledge retention. So even the next generation aren't even getting the program, are they? What hope have we got?

Toby: 49:36

It's it's it's it, you know, it's it's critical thinking, it's presenting that information, it's being able to, you know, link two points together. It's it it's all this idea of like using your brain. And I think this is this is the dangerous territory that why AI does get a bad rap, right? It's because most people are just using it. It's like, hey AI, do this for me, let it do its thing, and then they just use that. And it's like, well, that is actively, you know, I think Emily was telling me about some research. It's like the studies show that that is literally rotting your brain, yeah. Because it's what happens when you retire, right? Is you start putting your brain to sleep.

Siobhan: 50:09

Yeah, yeah.

Toby: 50:09

You know, you you start you stop using it in critical ways, and therefore your brain starts just killing itself off and going, yeah, right, you don't need this part anymore, or this part. And so I I am massively maybe misquoting the research, but I'm sure uh Emily will back it up if you ask her, not me. But that's what's happening with AI, right? If you just use it and just put go, I want to push this over here so I don't have to deal with it, okay. So, where are you using your critical thinking? Where are you using your innate human ability to do stuff? And if you're not anymore, then you're not needed in the world of work.

Andy: 50:44

Yeah. That's a really powerful point because you're right. That re I I've caught wind of that research as well. The challenge is that if you well, let's just be blunt, sod it, I'm gonna take Toby's a break. So marketing and communications consultants are de-skilling themselves because they're using AI. Now, what they're doing at the moment and getting away with, and this is not something I'm party to, is they're using AI to create all the content they're giving to their clients. That's a bold statement to make, and there will be backlash on it. There are AI consultants, sorry, marketing or comms consultants who will use AI to create frameworks to then build content on, which is fine in my mind because it's it's efficacy and everything else. But if you're a marketing or comms consultant out there and you're just using AI and then you're trying to pass that off, one people see straight through it anyway, courtesy of the M-dash and various other phrases that are continually reused and recycled by AI. Two, you're de-skilling yourself. So if you come into the business and you're just being lazy, you're actually doing yourself out of work. So this echoes Toby's point. We're in a transitional period now where we have to prove our worth. Whether you're HR, marketing, comms, I don't know, professional witnesses, whatever it is, we can't sit on HR uh on AI and just think, yeah, it's gonna be fine. You know, I I've still got my place. Because until you define that, the world's looking at AI for everything, and that's quite scary.

Siobhan: 52:17

It is scary. It is scary. I had um a recent issue with a company where the owner used Chat GPT to it it was to do with some employee relation stuff or it was communication anyway, and what Chat GPT had thrown out was all factually correct. It was like this is what ACAS says you have to do, you know, that kind of stuff. So certainly not breaking the law, it was fine, but five people left the next day as a result of that action because there was no consideration around the human side of it, like what's the impact of this? How are they gonna react to it? What am I actually trying to achieve by doing this? What's the outcome we're looking for? None of that. Oh, chat says I can do this, so I'm gonna do it.

Toby: 53:06

And and just go back to the you know, the experience of how I learnt stand-up comedy. There was nothing techna technological about that experience whatsoever. I beg your pardon. I went to a website to book and pay for it. That was the that was the technology I used. Oh, and you know what, a camera recorded it as well, right? That was the extent of the technology used on that program. So, you know, someone like Tasman has like this innate human ability to do something that is very human. And if you aren't able to do that, you know, that's a very human-forward thing. But the the opposite would be a corporate would kind of go, okay, how do I create an AI chatbot to do all that for us? It's like we can't, quite bluntly. The the only way you'd be able to do that is if you actually made some sort of robot that looked like a human and was able to act in human ways and all that. Then we can start and talk and sound like a human. Then you could start to think about okay, maybe there's something here. We are away off that. It'll come because just watch Westworld, and Westworld does all this kind of stuff, right? That that's the world you get into, is the you know, that then you start to be able to capture data on human behaviour and all sorts. Like the Westworld is a there's a podcast in that itself, is is just a great template for creating a world where humans and robots work together, or or or not if you get to season two and three. Spoiler alert. But but I but it translates it to the wrestling thing as well, because the thing that drew me to wrestling was the joy I got out of wrestling as a child, and that there was a wrestler who made it big in the States from Norwich, and like, I'm from Norwich. Wow. And so I ended up, she came back to do a show in the UK, and me and my friends went to go and you know watch some wrestling. And I got drunk and said, That looks easy. I bet I could do that. Uh of course I did. I'd I'd had four cans of red stripe, but then what happened a month later was the the family of of this famous wrestler said in Norwich, we're gonna do an eight-week intensive course, and we need you to come in two hours every week. Uh actually, it was four hours every week because it was on a Tuesday and a Thursday. So, but you will then perform live in front of 300 people and and uh do a wrestling match. And so my friend saw the advert for that went, Well, you said you could do it, so uh go and do it. And so it's it's very much like uh calling uh Biff from uh Back to the Future, calling him chicken. It's essentially what they did, and so I went and did it, and it then leveled up the experience from stand-up comedy because what was involved there was pain was involved. Like if this goes wrong, I hurt myself. Even when it goes right, I actually hurt myself quite a lot, but also you you're this isn't dependent on an individual's performance now. This is a team performance. The person I'm wrestling with, spoiler alert, you know, it's scripted, but it still hurts. But the person I'm wrestling with, I have a duty of care for, not only for their physical health, but also like their performance is predicated on my performance. So it kind of took it to the next level where you're kind of like, okay, now we're getting into team dynamics, and this group of 13 people that went through the experience all had each other's back, and we were we acted as a team to put on the very best show that we could. Because if any one of us let the other like let part of that show down, the whole show doesn't work. Yeah, yeah. And so that's where it's even more genius that in this element that you know had the whole family teaching me, her two brothers and the mother who was just scary as fuck, like did some training with her, and I was just like, I'm in so much pain and I'm so out of breath, and I just want to go home. But again, no learning management system, no coaching qualification, no artificial intelligence, that none of the frameworks that we've built in the corporate world were used or executed to try and get me to perform in front of 300 people, as the the the coat and glasses will indicate. There's Ken Kong, my persona, right? So when you take that approach, you're like, well, what does it all fucking mean? Like you go to a learning and learning and HR Technologies conference, you go, what is all of this bullshit that people are selling to try and get people to act and behave in different ways? It's all surface level and doesn't matter. And then AI comes along and goes, Well, we just need to put AI on top of everything. So you've got these already quite stupid mechanics to try and get people to learn and change the world of work, and then we get AI and goes, Well, we've assumed that this was the right thing in the first place, and now we're gonna slap AI on top of it and make it more efficient, but you've just made shit more efficient, you've not made good stuff more efficient, and so this is why the whole HR and learning and development industry is ripe for disruption and and genuine disruption. Not there are certain social media influencers that even have disrupt in their business name, they're not disrupting. How to be a really good HRBP? Uh uh wow, how disruptive! Like, but you what what would happen in a world where you got rid of all the technology and you got rid of all of HR? You know what? Everyone would probably just crack on and carry on doing the same stuff they're doing. Yes, tribunals may go up. I doubt they would. I think you still people I'd still you'd have the same amount because people will call out the shitty behavior.

Siobhan: 58:33

Yeah.

Toby: 58:34

So you kind of go, well, what's the point in all of this stuff that we're doing? And that's why I started Freeformers two years ago. Because I was like, well, no organization I've worked for, either inside the large corporate or an agency that provided services to a corporate, has ever been able to convince me that they're doing the right things for the right reasons, other than making money. And that goes for every employer. I'm happy to go on record and say that. And I'm I hope a previous employer is listening because you are never you have never predicated doing the right thing because you've always tried to make the most money. And I go back to what I said earlier. It's like, if I was in this game for making more money, uh what a stupid idea. Because I'm trying to fight against a huge system of work that is fundamentally broken, and I can either sit there and be part of it and pick up a paycheck and do that stuff, or I can try and redesign it. And I'll just try and redesign it. And if I don't, I'll just go back to being a chef because it was far, far easier and far nicer to work with chefs than it is to work with anyone in HR and L and D.

Siobhan: 59:34

I didn't know you were a chef. That's all right.

Toby: 59:36

I I I so it I got bored at university because I was doing radio production and they were teaching me how to use mini-disc as a as a pioneering technology, and I was like, this this feels fairly redundant already. Why am I using minidisc? The fact that I used GarageBand and a hard drive, the only one hard drive recorder that they had available. In the studio at the time, I used those two things to do my final project. Where my my tutor told me, it's like, if you don't use mini disc and use the Sadie system that we have in the radio studio, I'll be able to tell. I got a 2-1. It wasn't a first, but I still managed to cheat the system and prove my tutor wrong. But I was a little bit disenfranchised by the whole system because it was like, Well, I'm not going to get into radio because I've got to go and work in London for free for a couple of months, and I don't have the money to do that. I'm not from you know money where I like my mum didn't have the money, just go, okay, here you go, go live in London for a couple of months and go and get an internship. Just I physically couldn't do it. So I started being a chef whilst I was at university because I needed to pay for rent and all those and alcohol. And so I was a chef, and then I was like, actually, I quite like this. I I worked under some incredible people with some incredible people, and I think hospitality and retail, if you've worked in any of those industries, that is the best bit of character building you can do as a young person ever. Because you're it's all human again. You go back to it, you meet the best of society, and more often than not, you meet the very worst of society, and it and having that awareness that the world is so much bigger beyond your own front door or the industry that you're in is incredibly important. And so, yeah, I was I was a chef for three or four years before everyone, all of my friends got nine to five jobs, and I went, Well, I need one of those because otherwise I'm not gonna see my friends. Yeah, so I can I so I gave I gave it up. If if anyone listening has watched The Bear, the Bear is literally there are these most beautiful moments in the bear where they just cook food to music. There's no talking, there is just there is just food and cooking, and this the montages are like that, and I'm getting goosebumps talking about it now. The most beautiful moments of like cinematography and food, and it literally is like someone has put their fingers in my brain and gone, relax, and it's beautiful. So if if if I can ever you know, like when you see fingers in fact, that's what it genuinely feels like. And my wife guys got like she sees me completely just going to this trance state where those things that that that comes on. So I yeah, uh chefs inherently have bad behaviours as well, you know. I if if you think about all of the foibles of any of the characters in the bear, I I do exhibit those as well. They're they're not necessarily the best behaviours to have, but they come from a place of care and purpose. That's the that's those rebels that care and want to create the best thing to create change. And I can't I can't sit in the world of work and not create impact or the best thing that I can just because it has a big paycheck associated to it. Some people can though, and I've worked for most of them.

Siobhan: 1:02:37

Yes, absolutely. And I think you know, I'd resonate with that. I don't think anyone sets up their own business. Well, but there'd probably be some people that set up their own business because I think they're going to be multimillionaires, but most of us are just maybe disenfranchised, want to make a difference, and actually it's easier to make a difference from the outside in than it is in the inside sometimes, once you see it.

Toby: 1:02:59

Absolutely. I think where I get a little bit pissed off is that there are people that do that, but still then just revert to the stuff they were doing before anyway.

Siobhan: 1:03:07

Yeah, yeah, true.

Toby: 1:03:08

And then and then they get kind of disenfranchised with the stuff they're doing because it's like, well, you've not tried, you've not made any sacrifice to change and do something different. Because it's hard and it's not going to make you any money as well to go through that journey, you know. But the first 18 months were barren, you know, looking at the pit of despair that was my bank balance, like I was just like, there's no way that this is I'm doing this for financial gain. Otherwise, I would assume this would look very different. And so I get why I get why the system of both the economy, society, and the world of work leads to people not doing that. Yeah. But you've just got to hope that there are people like ourselves, enough of us, to show that doing it different can work, and so when we do it, then other people want to copy it and steal it. And and that's when I know I know I'll have I'll know I'll have made it, not because I've got lots of money, but because one of the big four consultancies will look at what we're doing and go, we're gonna copy it and steal it. And that's fine. Copy it, steal it, because it'll make the world work better. I don't give a shit. Yeah, but uh, that's when I know that's when I first designed what freeforms is going to be, that was like that'll be my measure of impact when someone tries to copy it.

Andy: 1:04:21

Here you go. So I'm gonna pull out some threads now. So as a final thought, think about the why not and what if. So out of everything that we've talked about today, what's the biggest why not and what if you can identify in that approach in that conversation?

Toby: 1:04:38

Uh just what if you unplu and there's a great book called Bullshit Jobs, which has a spicy title, so of course I like it. But like there was this one story where and I think this must have been told a million and one times, but a guy died, a guy died at work, died in his office, and no one found him for three weeks. So, what happened if you unplugged yourself from an organization? Would anyone notice? Would anything different happen? Right? Not that severe that would anyone notice, but in terms of the stuff you were doing, would it be missed? Would anyone care? Would it have a detrimental impact on performance? And just hypothesise the world. Don't necessarily say that's not what I'm saying, like you don't deserve a job, you don't deserve it. But I'm saying at least think about that because then that allows you to think about what what what a future state might be. The what that helps you think about the what if. If I wasn't there, what would happen?

Siobhan: 1:05:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Toby: 1:05:30

And I I I mean I'm gonna catch the comments already, but it's like, well, they'd have a lot of you know, they'd have a massive law bill. Every time I say that argument, it always comes back to they'd have they'd be swimming in tribunals, there'll be there'll be lawsuits coming out of their eyeballs, and you're just like, no, they wouldn't. And that limits your thinking that you can't even think of a world where you don't exist to try and create something new.

Andy: 1:05:54

Toby, if people want to get hold of you and talk to you about what you've spoken about or find out how they can acquire your services, what's the best way to get hold of you?

Toby: 1:06:03

Uh don't. No, if if you've listened, if you have listened to this and and you want a a bit of a bit of a bit of something different, then just find me on LinkedIn. Toby came on LinkedIn. I am founder of a company called Freeformers, where as Siobhan has mentioned, my business partner Emily are rewriting the playbook for how you define the employee-employee relationship. So, yeah, just find us on LinkedIn, find us on our website, and I will literally talk to anyone and everyone about this because the more I talk about it, the more chance we have of changing the world. So, yeah.

Andy: 1:06:35

Well, that's it for this episode of Why Not and What If, where the conversations get messy, magical, and a little bit rebellious. If it made you think, laugh, or rape text your mate, job done. That's all we're here for. Got a topic you think we should dive into? Drop us a line at Let's Talk at why notwhatif.com. Seriously, your ideas fuel detail. Don't forget to follow, subscribe, channel, but your WhatsApp group is unlimited. And come back next week for more free to be honest, occasionally unated, and always human conversation. See you next time.