Dare to design across generations - Benji Wiedemann

0:09So from its cultural equity, what can we learn and build from? So often we talk about place shaping, that you take the cultural mass and you shape that into something that is understood locally, regionally and internationally. While they're all connecting. and I think one of the greatest quotes that we got from a client is you don't only listen, you show us how we've been heard. What we mean by we don't go in and do this immersion and listening as a box ticking exercise.

0:49Welcome to Daring Forever, a podcast about being human, wired for wonder, capable of courage, perpetually becoming. It's about the waves that knock us under and the strange stubborn grace with which we surface. My name is Radim Malinic. I'm an author, creative and an eternally curious human being on a mission to speak to incredible people whom I call forever daring humans, those in pursuit of an extraordinary life. Every week I share an interview that is packed with amazing stories, value and I can only ask you, how will you dare forever? This podcast is inspired by my upcoming book titled Derek Forever, which is now available for pre-order out in October.

1:34My guest today has spent over two decades turning brand thinking into something far bigger. Cities don't exist yet. Museums and cultural strategies build to outlast a single lifetime. Benji Weidman is a co-founder and executive creative director of Weidman Lamb, the consultancy he built with his partner, Alex Lamb. In this conversation, we trace the line from a boy who couldn't read in a German classroom to a designer shaped in city-scale culture from Riyadh to Mediterranean. We talk about family history, self-doubt as a sharpening tool, and why the only strategy an audience ever sees is the one they experience.

2:12This is a conversation about listening, legacy, and daring to build for generations you will never meet.

2:21Benji, so great to see you today. Hey, welcome to Daring Forever. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm really well. Slightly hot. It's the hottest day, I think, on record in the UK today. Until tomorrow, yeah, it'll be hot today. And then we're going to be again at the end of the summer. So I'm in our office right now with hardly anybody because everybody's working from their blow-up pools in the garden. That's the curse of a business owner, isn't it? Benji, I want to introduce you to my audience. I think what you do with your partner, Alex, and with your agency, I think is remarkable. I'm a big fan of what you guys do.

2:54And I think we should put a lot more focus and more color into what you do and how you do it. But if someone hasn't heard of Benji Wiedemann, how would you introduce yourself? Who are you? What do you do? Yeah, man. Just to really say thank you so much for having me. Big fan of what you do and having met you a couple of times. So I'm really excited to do this. But yeah, my name is Benji Wiedemann and I'm co-founder and executive creative director of Wiedemann Lamp, which I set up around next year, 20 years ago with my business partner, Alex Lamb. And yeah, it's a brand and business consultancy.

3:25We work on cultural strategies. And I think this is quite important to explain. So we work on really two levels, cultural strategies for governments and how they get embedded into the cultural anchors. So for example, museums and educational bodies, et cetera. So all those kind of like points where you encounter direct culture. And I always like to see it. It's like mycelia, the cultural strategy that runs through the whole forest. And then you get these reproductive organs, which are the mushrooms that you can come like that engage with. And I think what fascinates me about culture the most is also what makes it really difficult to deal with.

4:04It's total intangibility and complexity because you're really dealing in the abstract and And many organizations really struggle and often fail to articulate this shared purpose and their positioning. So our aim is to support organizations like that in bringing them together to articulate the singularity and their shared purpose. And often what we find is quite incredible is when you ask organizations what success looks like and you ask 10 people, you get 30 different answers. And I think a lot of the work that we do is bringing that focus into what does actually success look like for you internally and externally.

4:51So we start with the internal structure, the organizational culture, and only then through the experience itself can you seep it out. And why we do this is really, we always talk about a cultural impact at scale. And I think it's worth then also unpacking what the word culture means for us. Because again, everybody has different ideas because I think it's an interesting word. Everybody uses it a lot. But if you're asking, well, what is culture? That clear articulation, I think it has to be clear to oneself, needs defining. and how we define it. It's the handing over of beliefs, values, and identity for the next generation.

5:36And when we talk about cultural impact at scale, it's really not only from a physical scale, but actually time is a massive part of the work that we do. So it's that intergenerational thinking that we're really keen on. But yeah, that's it in a nutshell. Let me trace it back. And this is what I normally do, and I'm still predictable with this. Let me trace it back on how did you get into all of this? Because we will get to questions like what is success and what is culture? As you said, we can have zillions of different answers. But I want to know more about you. How did you get into this position to be doing this type of work?

6:11Because I don't know many people like you. There might be a lot of people who do something similar, but I don't know anyone who's as passionate at the forefront of this sort of cultural impact and this type of work. So I want to know, where did Benji come from? How did you get into creativity and what drives you forward right now? Amazing. So I think I can take that into two sections. One is how did I end up as a designer at the forefront, graphic designer, and how do I work in culture, right? And I was born in Germany to a German father and a British mother. So my mom comes from Richmond and she was here in the 60s and she was the stylist for Michael Joseph and David Bailey.

6:56And she did the styling for Beggar's Banquet, a Rolling Stones cover and stuff like that. So she was working with the photographer. And my dad is a art director, he's creative director of McCann Erickson back in Germany. And he commissioned Michael Joseph for one of these big shoots that he does, lots of people. and my mom was a stylist and that's where they met and she then moved to Germany and that's where they had me and I'm very happy to say that I'm almost proud of it I was extremely bad at school it's not because I'm disrupted by anything it's just there's something slightly different in the wiring and I see it with my kids now that linear educational systems don't believe it so I spent a considerable amount of time in my dad's advertising agency because he had his own advertising agency and for me this is like the world that I live in right and I said well this is what I have to do and my dad said if you want to do it correctly you go to London and this is now a key part so as I'm a German Jew and this is a really important part of the narrative my mom's parents are actually German Jews who fled Germany and I'll get back to that in due course because it's very important to my second part of the story around the culture.

8:15But yeah, so I followed that strand and then I went to the UK in 98. So I just turned, I think, 18 or 19. I didn't have to do national or civil service because of my Jewish roots. And all of a sudden, I'm in London, 98, in an advertising agency in Soho. And I was like, this is it. And because I never fitted into Germany and I was thinking I'm the oddball I was like no Germany is possibly the oddball maybe don't belong here maybe I belong into London and from that point my life completely changed and it turned and I got really excited about creativity and then I did the company was called Evans Hans Scott and I stayed longer I had a month internship but they took me on and I stayed longer and longer and then I decided to study and everybody says go to Bournemouth and that's when I like fully fell in love with graphic design so I came from advertising studied graphic design and then I was like this is now my world and how I divide it is the advertising points at the thing it says advertises the thing whereas design and branding is the thing itself and I quite like I don't want to say the extrovert and introvert side but there's something more more intimate I think in design advertising is a little bit louder and I gravitated to that but then I did that and I graduated I then got a job at Lewis Mobley for Mary Lewis.

9:36I don't know if you know her. She's an absolute legend. She was the first female president of D &AD. And that's where I met my business partner, Alex. And Alex, I read and heard about the year before I graduated because he graduated the year before me because he's this total wunderkind because you need to capture and study him because he is an incredible designer, but also an incredible programmer. He was always like, how does this work? How do you write the code for this and what you think about this is like in early 2000 2001 when he graduated and so he was working for Lewis Mobley which is a brand packaging agency and we started working there together became kind of we used to hang out then I got a freelance gig then he did the website for that and that got traction and then that eventually when we were 27 we then set up the business and we had three months of work like just freelance bits and pieces and six months of salary in the bank and that was then going forward now that's how I got into graphic design the other side is the culture side is how we use the design thinking to really amplify culture and now I mentioned that my grandfather was a German Jew and he was quite young when he left and he had a lot of family there that weren't so young and so they had houses and families there and all of them ended up in Auschwitz and stuff like that so we've got a big kind of like gap in the family tree on that side and so he just packed us back ran off and he said to me once and to my mom if you can't fit it into your pocket you can't have it because at any given time you have to uproot and get going and what was really fascinating that they built their life here in London and he had a rag business and did blouses and they never owned anything no buildings nothing because of this this fundamental thing and as I'm growing up and I think about it the thing that fascinated me the most is if you have nothing what is it you actually have so you're separating the physical embodiment of your life which we We project ourselves into the deductive sense of embodiment.

11:49These are the values. These are the actions. This is how I conduct my life. And all of a sudden, this whole path of separating out the physical embodiment, but what is it you are then has completely fascinated me and totally driven the business into working solely in culture where our clients don't tend to have monetary transactions. It is the exchange of value and belief systems, and it is just a completely different game. This is interesting, Benji, because I often get to this situation in many episodes where I don't know the person too well or enough on purpose because I want to find the breadcrumbs looking backwards.

12:39and what you just described and the reason why you do what you do with the background and the family values just makes bloody good sense right now it's just like oh that's why you do this because i want to stay with the sentence where if you don't fit it in your pocket you can't have it i'm really enjoying how we're unraveling this because sometimes i feel like people just falling into something by accident but i think you were kind of always destined to create this to become who you are. So what I want to know, we talked about your mom and dad, creative director at Mac Khan, your mom was a stylist working with the Rolling Stones.

13:14What was the feeling of creativity when you were surrounded by it at a younger age before you came to England? Because coming to England, London in 1998 is remarkable. I came two years later and it was still incredible and still is an incredible city. But what was the impact of creativity from your parents? Did you see it as something extraordinary or did you see that as a norm of what they did? In our lives, creativity was a very available practice. And it's the same thing with my kids now. It's like everywhere you look, there's drawing stuff and it's just everything is just there to facilitate creativity.

13:52And I remember really fondly. So my dad used to like having his own agency it's sometimes very difficult running your own agency as we can maybe both agree on other times and so I didn't see him that often because he was always up really early I came home very late but there were these moments I would have with him that we'd have breakfast together before I had to go to kindergarten or school because he's incredibly gifted painter and drawer and so he would say hey let's draw a scene underwater so he'd draw sharks then he's like what do you want? I want an octopus. I want a mantis or something like that.

14:28So he draw all these things. So I have this beautiful A4 page with these black key line joints that I would always take into nursery and school. And when they have a moment, I just color them in. And for me, the pride of saying, hey, my dad did this. And the kids, they're like, whoa, that's cool. And so for me, this was always an incredible skill to have creativity as a form of expression. Now, that doesn't mean that I can draw. I can't draw anything. It's really bad. And even if I say, hey, I've got it. And so there's a big block between my ability to draw and my thoughts. And people always say that the hand is the extension of your thoughts.

15:06It's the same way as vocabulary being the limit to your ideas, right? If you can't express them, there's certain limits to it. So my dad took me then to a Niki de Saint-Falde exhibition when I was, I think, 10. she's a for people who don't know a french sculptor who did these beautiful female shapes called nanas and it was chicken wire and papier mache and so my dad straight after that went to build a base where you get all your hardware stuff and we bought chicken wire we bought papier mache and i just started making all these sculptures so our house is full of birds and this ambitious dinosaur that we once did and stuff so going back to your question creativity was always in our lives because we are as a family not gifted in academia that's the side i still can't read to this day i can chew through sentences but man if you put me in front of a brief that i have to read it's insane man it's really hard is that a form of dyslexia or is it look back in germany there wasn't such thing there was just a dumb kid smart kid right and i'd fall into the dumb kid thing.

16:17And that's what you grew up with. And I was always, and this is a bit sad maybe, but as a kid, I was always convinced I would be homeless. That was always like, because you're not good at school, this is your path. And if you're not, if you're good at this, you won't get employment. You won't get money. The result is you're going to live on the streets. That was always one of my biggest worries. It's very black and white 1980s upbringing, isn't it? It's the love and care and the nuances and what people needed didn't exist as you said there was a cookie cutter for pass and one pass and i grew up in chicke republic so across the border from where you were around the same time and the empathy compassion understanding the multi-identity in a certain way didn't exist because i always said no one really wanted you to be anything specific they just wanted you to be good enough so they don't look bad for teaching you you're thinking like how do you get that uniqueness and expression because you mentioned some of the traits of yourself after running your family obviously we pass on our dna our genes onto our kids and they follow in our footsteps and obviously they wrap it up in different information with different skill set i think we are in a remarkable time where the information is so much more widely available we understand more people more widely but still there's so much work to do to help everyone to almost be the unique flavor in the world that still prefers the dumb kids and the wise kids yeah it's really interesting because i'm going through the whole thing again now watching my kids grow up so i've got a 10 and an 8 year old boy both of them are pretty energetic to say and going back to the educational system so we had this choice between head and heart there was the school that they got the Rachel White read room and all those things.

18:08It was very creative. And then there's a school, which I would say, the regime has been imported from North Korea. And we're looking at this and we're like, oh, which one do we go with? And our heart always said we have to go to where they celebrate art and stuff. But our mind went like, hang on, they get all of that stuff at home. what happens if we actually put them into a school that is super structured really clear on the rules what is on what isn't on what happens if we put them there so we put them into that school and this is the crazy thing my son and my older son i'm sure there's lots of neuro spice going on didn't want to read all this stuff and somehow they managed him and he's 10 years old he's chewed through the whole hunger games books he's now started dune which i think he's struggling a little bit, but I don't know how they managed to get up there.

19:02And my question is to myself, if I was to have gone to school there now, would I be able to read? It's an interesting observation, Benji, because I'm going to borrow a quote from fantastic Sir Ken Robinson who said, the role of the gardener isn't to make the flower grow. The role of the gardener is to create the optimal conditions for the flower to grow. So your boy has found himself in that situation. What they did, they may have created ideal conditions for him to see that is he reflecting to other kids is he seeing something that inspired him because you can't make anyone read if they don't want to read you can't make anyone do anything if they don't want to do it and i was thinking when you were talking about the option creative or north korea i was thinking which one would it go because you're thinking of surely they would want to have creativity 24 7 but your answer surprised me and your outcome surprised me even more but it has the positive connotation to it because what you've created to a certainnd mind neurodivergent mind or whatever you want to think what i'm not going to be guessing here but some of the structure is helpful because you need to know how to operate within the realms of reality let's call it a black and white world like you want to know how the rest of the world exists because the rest of the world is not looking for magic 24 7 so it's good to know how to navigate the world with the guardrails and then to know okay let them go let the guardrails off i can actually do whatever i want to do because i have managed to tap in into the norm if that makes sense and i think understanding norm is not a problem it's a question of actually having a reality check going okay this is what the regular people do and then there's the space above it which you can do anything with it so that was really interesting answer yeah just really quickly because that's cool because we knew we were going to stay local, but it's a little bit further away.

20:55And when we talk further away, it's a 10-minute cycle down the canal. And we just went to look at it and we had all these horror stories. Well, oh, sounds absolutely nightmarish. We have to go and visit. And everyone who told us these horror stories hadn't actually visited. So we went to the parents' evening and they said they've got crazy stuff. Like one of their motto is no excuses. Well, I got to see that. I got to hear that. And I say, is it true? And they say 100 % because there is no excuse from no matter what background you come from to not excel in academia. And all of a sudden I was like, Yaman, sign me up because what they teach is to learn.

21:35And that's the key, not maths. When you think about it, like a great designer is a person who learns how to solve a problem. The application, the tools you can learn, but if you don't know how to learn to solve a problem, then that's the first struggle that you can have there. So that's interesting. I remember being actually, speaking of school experiences, I remember looking at schools years ago. And we went to a school which was meant to be okay. And then all the parents were having an argument at the Q &A. They already had some kids in the school. And you were like, this is toxic. This is not a nice place to be.

22:12because you want to create the ideal conditions. And I think if you have that guided philosophy that it's there to teach you how to learn, you've got nothing else to lose. I think everything else comes from it, right? But I think there's what you're addressing and maybe this is something that rings true with you because you've got a daughter. Yeah, I've got a daughter and a son. A daughter and a son. I remember we spoke about that. Nothing's good enough for your kids, right? And I think you go into school and there's, oh, nothing's ever good at it. I'm on the WhatsApp group and there's so much complaining going on.

22:44I say, look, this is a good school. You're not paying for it. There's give and take. That's why I'm always grateful for the work that they do. And I don't join in the pile-ons. We'll be back after a quick break. This episode is brought to you by Lux Coffee Co. The first creative speciality comfy company building a platform to shine the light on emerging global talent with a mission to make a positive impact on a creative industry and beyond. Lux Coffee Co. offers exceptional coffee sourced from around the world through ethical and sustainable practices. And you can discover the current range of signature blends and single origins, coffee hardware and accessories along with exceptional apparel at luxcoffee.co.uk.

23:36You can use the code podcast to get 15 % off your first order.

23:48I can tell you that there's WhatsApp groups for schools that we pay for and people are still not happy. They're slightly more, I have to say it, more cryptic about what they like and what they dislike because it's a certain expectations that you have from the education system and you're thinking that's something really interesting now what i did because obviously i like to talk to anyone and everyone i spoke to our headmaster and i made him to watch my tedx talk and what i really enjoyed from the school they were like teaching the kids for future i never not say like okay this is what we taught five years ago we're gonna teach you again they're like okay we want these kids to be ready for what's coming right and then one day he really surprised me he said these kids they have really wild ideas but they're not always rooted in reality it's like do you think that's right or wrong and i'm like this is the only time they can be unfiltered and fucking wild that's what you want you don't want kids to be filtered because you can't make it if you don't want to because it might be technically impossible let them run wild so i was like wait a minute i feel like sometimes you have the expectation of someone not that he was wrong or anything it was clearly like his mind was going to be in life and unfiltered you're like no just let them run riot because we can shoehorn this boring stuff into reality if we need to because yes sometimes the tools and technology don't provide it but how amazing is to be a kid and just come up with utter utter craziness going yep that's what i believe in cool do it until it gets stamped out of you yeah but this is interesting one is it who stumps it out of you?

25:22Because I always believe if we all go through the same system, how can we have artists and how can we have accountants and doctors? Because the stumping out, I think it's personal. I'm beginning to question like how much is the system and how much is the lack of accountability or direction? What do you reckon? It's a difficult one because what you're looking at is nature and nurture, right? And the whole idea that if people say, oh we are creative family we're not good at educationals like academia and things like that from my understanding there's a lot of evidence that whole theory has been debunked because you get children growing up all over the world all sorts of conditions whether it's in the desert or it's in arctic they are brains are so adaptable to the surrounding that they are not like up there living in no one eyes and they're like oh i'm more of a beach kind of kid so there's like a lot of comic research that the nurture side is a incredibly large part that's then overrides the nature now i don't want to sound like i'm an expert in that but i get like these my dad sends me things isn't this amazing isn't this interesting and then you pick up the snippets and you start building your picture of the world that's constantly evolving and constantly changing i don't know how far you can follow that strand to find this piece of truth this is what it is because i think there's so much interpretive layers and so many individual experiences and differences and stuff yeah i think it's individuality because when you think ancient hard wiring from the times we used to worry about saber-toothed tiger eating us for lunch we were very much designed and evolved for pursuit now we're searching pleasure you know i think things have changed we've got more comfort we've got more convenience we've got different lives but i think it takes us back to the beginning of where you talked about culture and we talked about success because I would like you to define to me your definition of success.

27:34I always believe that any word has got a dictionary meaning, societal meaning, and a personal meaning. How would you define culture? So it took me a while to get there because you've got such a clear understanding of what culture is. But when you start to articulate it, it becomes really difficult, the language that because bratsama is culture but when we talk about culture we talk about slow culture intergenerational culture we always go back to it's the shared beliefs and identity and values we cultivate we choose to hand on to a next generation the cultivation of these that's what we want to see live on not the toxic stuff but the good stuff you want to cultivate the good bacteria and that for us became this whole to define it in that way just really unlocked the way we understand this work that we do and especially when we start to extrapolate this over timeline so So everything that you look at is to gain your attention, push some ideas onto you, and everything's about the pace.

28:56And we've come to this place where TikTok, Reels, Instagram, all this stuff, it's just so much stuff. And when I used to say content is king, no, content is slop now. And especially with the AI being compounded into this mess. So Alex and I, we realized that the work that we do, this is across generations. We're working on city scale projects that won't be fully developed and delivered until 2050. safety so if you're looking at that so the one thing that we often say is that we can solve this in our lifetime we're not thinking long and deep enough and it's really interesting to build these cultural foundational pieces that allow for so much interpretation and evolution and cultivation and across time whilst still being true to its original framework.

29:55And that's a real kind of like sensitive push and pull. And that fascinates us. And that's how we identify culture. I always say for those looking around the room going, what's a city scale project? What is it that you deliver? So we need to zoom in a little bit on what is it that you do? Because I like when you said, if we can solve it now, it's potentially not a good solution because it will take time for it to work. So what is it that you do and deliver and what problems do you solve? Okay, so let's start with the scale, like a musical scale. We started off designing exhibitions for museums.

30:29Then we started designing positionings and identities for museums. Then we started designing for public realms. Then we started designing districts for districts. and now we're designing city scale projects so we work closely with governments and master planners and the thing is like and there's some wild statistics that would have been in the talk that we did for off etc and i'm going to not quote because i know i'm going to misquote them but 70 percent of the population lives in cities and only 30 percent of that structure like exists there is immense pressure on cities to grow and develop and there's also opportunities to build entirely new cities and that comes I think in three forms that we're working on projects for example one project is a past city that was the birthplace of the Saudi kingdom it's called Durea it was made entirely of mud because it was at a bend of a river called Wadi Hanifa so it slowed the water down brought fertile ground fertile mud so it was the first settlement and that whole city got flattened by the ottoman empire and that's when riyadh got built etc now what we're doing with them is working on rebuilding the city not physically so that's one of these giga projects but it's rerouting it to the core principles of the saudi national values which is super interesting so we worked on that city strategy level into how do all these architectural pieces fit together from a brand point of view because again you need enough pointedness to have a real sense of identity for a city whereas enough organic sprawl and then we're into designing lots of assets etc So then there's another city that is expanding rapidly.

32:31So we are developing the positioning of these new bigger parts of the city. And I think that's about 200, 250 ,000 people by 2040, I think. and then there's cities that do not exist and one of them is at the south coast of the Mediterranean and that city will be the size of Barcelona so that's got to be two million people there and they haven't broken ground yet wow I've got questions you can expect let's stay with the Saudi place for an hour because I always believe that behind ideas you've got impact influence and inspiration right you've got someone else's impact someone else's influence and inspiration and you put together you do that what do you do your ideas produce impact influence and inspiration for the city to grow or develop obviously to have identity impact on culture what i want to know obviously culture is sometimes very local very specific to a local place how much of the learning and immersion do you have to do to understand the nuances because i can imagine that being a London-based studio, you get a lot of sort of gravitas and a lot of credit for understanding multiculturalism.

33:47But how do you go and make impact? How do you influence and how do you inspire? And how do you learn? The cultural nuance is really important. And it's the big question is, what do we know? We are in London. What do you know about our culture? And I think the key thing is going in there with nothing. There's no bias. There's nothing. And shedding yourself from bias is the first part. It's just the purge, getting rid of all the preconceptions that you think you have and going in there with a total open mind. And I think one of the key differences, and I'm actually quite sad to say that working in the industry, is to go in not with the idea of what we're going to push onto the project, but what we can extract and grow out of it.

34:39So from its cultural equity, what can we learn and build from? So often we talk about place shaping, that you take the cultural mass and you shape that into something that is understood locally, regionally, and internationally, while they're all connecting. And we, I think one of the greatest quotes that we got from a client is, you don't only listen, you show us how we've been heard. What we mean by we don't go in and do this immersion and listening as a box ticking exercise. It's very clearly being able to reflect back to this is what we heard. And these are the patterns that we are detecting.

35:28And once you understand these aspects, you can then extrapolate that into something really succinct. And it's that immersion phase that I often say, I say it in jest, but I think effort-wise and things like that, it's 70 % of the work we do is listening. And why we have such great relationships with our, I don't want to call them clients, It's too transactional with our partners because we listen with intent and we are able to really reflect that back to them into a structure that really understands. And when you talk about the cultural nuance, we've developed our own, it sounds again really technical, but workshops and mechanisms to find out what's the vernacular of a place.

36:15What are the do's and the don'ts? What is the good, the bad, the ugly? So you're creating this kind of cultural dashboard. And we did that for San Francisco when we worked over there. We did that for Durea. But it's a really effective way of like finding out super funny stuff. Like in San Francisco, there's the spandex mafia and the granolas. And so there are all these little tribes that you have. And it's a wonderful way of kind of like immersing yourself. And I think there's a really important part of not being from there because everything is new. whereas when you're from there you might not see these things because they're just part of your world and you often don't understand oh that is actually something really special very specific to you but then saying that we are currently working on the whole brand for Haringey London Borough of Culture and this is London based but it's the same immersion that you do for a borough here in London as you would for a city in Derea and for a city that doesn't exist yet.

37:17That's incredible because you talk about obviously being really good at listening and making sure that people got heard. How do you make sure that you've heard enough voices to get the full picture of what you need to create? You can't hear every single voice, but how do you know that you've got far enough? Yeah, that's a very good point. How far is far enough? So there's multiple different ways there's qualitative and quantitative and so at the beginning of every project we create a stakeholder engagement map and saying how far can draw the circle and there are different layers that are levels that inform that which are for example how much time do we have how much willingness is there and also how much finances because the more voices you incorporate the more work it is to process all of that.