2345 - Blending Critical and Creative Thinking to Build a Powerful Artistic Strategy with Mandarin Associates' Charlie Curson

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0:58With us right now, it's Charlie Kersen. Charlie, you are a strategist and leadership coach and author, and you are the founder and director of Mandarin Associates. You're found on the web at teammandarin.com. Charlie, it's great to have you. It's great to be here, Josh. Thanks for having me. Before we get going, I always love just kind of hearing what our high-level leaders that we get to talk with like to do on the side. And I understand you and I share a hobby. What have you been into lately? Well, my recent rediscovery has been relearning how to DJ from a world of vinyl many years ago, which I've now lost to a digital world.

1:38I'm getting there slowly, Josh. I'm getting there slowly. But I did do my first live set last summer. Oh, my gosh. No kidding. Well, congratulations. And so when people say, well, wait a minute, I don't get it. What do you mean learning to DJ? what's involved other than you know they might be thinking that you're just kind of load songs in a playlist and push play there's more to it than that yeah well exactly there's a lot more to it there is obviously all the sound of the music and picking your tunes there is learning all the kit there is rediscovering a little bit of touch ironically in a digital world the one thing you can't do Josh is scratch so yeah weirdly people think that you're going to be able to scratch everything but you can't it's not the same you can right but it's yeah it's i mean i've certainly i've seen some youtubers that have figured it out pretty well and so you know some of the professional djs you know have that uh yeah i lost uh i lost a i lost a bet basically and ended up uh committing to play a live gig at a friend's party uh it's fair to say josh i was the most terrified person there as they were all thoroughly enjoying themselves and when i finished i think it was an hour and 45 minute set which was quite intense took about six weeks of prep a lot of my old friends came up to me and said i didn't know you could do that and to your point were you just pressing play how did that work exactly so yeah it opened a lot of eyes six weeks of prep for an hour and 45 minutes set it is is absolutely legit like that that that tracks and uh you know because again it's you know again it's it you got your you got your song you got your keys you got your beat matching you know just working on your transitions, what kind of transition you're going to do in between songs so you can keep that energy high for the crowd.

3:22And Charlie, speaking of keeping the energy high for a crowd, why don't you keep, we'll segue to you right now and have you share what you do with Team Mandarin. I'm a strategist. That's been my world. I was a strategy consultant. A lot of your leaders will probably be familiar with that sort of environment. I must admit, I left that world a little bit disillusioned, a little bit too much PowerPoint and spreadsheets for my liking. A little bit different then because I went into a coaching world. So I qualified as a performance coach. I've also worked outside of the corporate world with areas of military, some of the Olympic teams.

3:57And wind forward another 15 years, I tend to bring those worlds together. So I am a strategic advisor to large corporates down to startups and scale-ups. I'm a coach, I'm a leadership coach, and I also do a lot of upskilling. So I've helped to upskill thousands of people over the last five, ten years on a subject that may be very familiar to your audience, which is this subject of strategic thinking, or as per my book title, to be more strategic, because that's probably one of the most common challenges or issues that I am presented with. Someone who appears at my door and says, I've just been in a performance of you.

4:32I've just been trying to get the top job. I've been trying to be recruited by my perfect company. And I keep being told, you're great, you've ticked all the boxes. But the one thing you need to do is learn to be more strategic. And therein lies the challenge. And that was the essence of what led me to the book. Well, your book is, again, it's called Be More Strategic, 12 Essential Practices to Build the Life and Career You Want. And so, well, Charlie, I'm interested. I would like to learn how the top 1 % manage their work and lives. what are some of the biggest insights that you have gleaned? I think some of them, I'll give you a few actually, and feel free to just jump in with a few questions.

5:12Number one, I would say this may be not an expected answer, is to be more self-aware. It's sort of bridging where strategy bridges into leadership. Strategy is different to planning. A lot of people will be planning something. Why do people plan? Because it's comforting. It is controlling. it makes you feel a little bit less anxious strategy is very different strategy is much more about choices and decisions and looking ahead it's making intelligent bets it's choosing what not to do which requires you to be to do that well i would argue it requires you to be much more self-aware where do you get in your own way um so things like managing uncertainty is probably something a lot of your audience would equate to a lot of people i work with may have 20, 25 years, like I said, an operational role.

6:05And suddenly they are asked, yeah, yeah, you could become a member of the top team, you could get that role, but you're going to need to work a bit on your strategic thinking, but also your decision making, your ability to sit with tensions and paradoxes. But that's, that's quite hard to learn, right? That's quite a hard thing to kind of go and just walk into a room and say, well, how do I learn that? Yeah, well, self-awareness, I think, is, I would argue today is probably one of the most valuable skills, and, you know, and I would probably lump things like critical thinking, you know, being aware of our own biases, being aware of our own shortcomings, our sensitivities, you know, what kind of triggers me, how do I respond, maybe in a less than logical or helpful way um you know is what do you what do you think about that aspect of you know kind of knowing thyself yeah no completely in fact yeah so i'll sort of elaborate a bit actually so the book is based off a framework the framework is uh repeatable or circular as in you can join it anywhere um it falls into four levels the first level is to raise your self-awareness to to become more self-aware level two linking to your comment about critical thinking is to cultivate your open-mindedness and even if i pause there within open-mindedness i would argue includes critical thinking but of course to your point about emotions and biases and triggers i might work with someone who might deem themselves to be a good critical thinker and yet observing them facilitating rooms and leadership teams all the time you will start to observe where their own biases creep in right and their own biases is often because of their own baggage their own development their own progress and you know dare I say it but as a coach you often in the opening 10 minutes of coaching anybody they will often say to you Charlie would it help if I told you a little bit about my my life my childhood my relationships my my upbringing so those two I think sort of are where you begin so raising your self-awareness and I think as you become more self-aware i think you naturally become more open-minded you mentioned critical thinking i think i'd also add in listening skills i think listening skills is an absolute superpower uh even this morning actually first this morning running a global session uh online we were talking about listening with their leadership team you sort of you can have a little bit of fun with it to start with but most people quickly realize that they probably don't listen as well as they might um people are quick to judge they rule things out people jump to advising too quickly uh people compare don't they they sort of they will identify people will start to they sort of misinterpret emotional intelligence with identifying so they're no longer listening because they're actually bringing what someone else is describing back to their own experiences so they're they're the first two levels and this the second two sort of three and four if you imagine i'm doing this with my hands apologies josh moving them around the circle is so you go deepen your self-awareness you cultivate your open-mindedness and then you start to develop those strategic capabilities so capabilities such as being more future focused it sounds obvious but again how much strategy do i see which has never had even been anywhere near anything vaguely future focused it's largely based on yesterday or dragging targets forward and then of course critically the fourth one is your ability to scale that impact which really is about your ability to communicate and influence there's no point in having the best being the best strategic thinker or having the best strategy in the world of course if you can't bring others on board so a lot of the work actually i do with people especially with leadership teams of all shapes and sizes is touching on all four of those levels and then the underlying the underlying practices um you mentioned critical thinking i'll just say one other thing that your audience may find interesting.

10:02I think sometimes I find strategic thinking and critical thinking get kind of muddled. People often think they're kind of one and the same thing, probably because a lot of strategy work is analysis and numbers and number crunching and spreadsheets. That's part of it. But of course, that's only part of a bit like the left right brain argument. It doesn't really tap into all of us. There's also a big dose of being a good strategist and good strategic thinker, which is creativity, which again is something that's quite hard to teach, isn't it? You don't tend to do creativity on an MBA. You'll do lots of critical thinking, but you don't tend to kind of, you know, if you think about it, strategy different to planning.

10:42Strategy is about thinking about what our options are, what are our choices? It's an imagined future. We therefore need a degree of creativity to be able to imagine the future to create the vision to have bold ideas to think about choices that we may not have considered before so identifying working with people you're sort of trying to get them to move through yes areas of critical thinking but also what about creative thinking what about managing uncertainty what about collaboration including other people again apologies i'm using my hands here josh i'm doing this kind of circle i appreciate that for those watching video clips on social you'll see exactly all of the hand gestures and wavings that are going on.

11:23You had mentioned uncertainty, and I think many of us, especially in our daily lives, we spend a great deal of time keeping things shored up to avoid uncertainty, but uncertainty is almost certain in many regards, particularly in business. What have you learned about top-level leaders and their ability to rise to the occasion during a period where there's a lot of uncertainty or movement or surprises or disappointments that weren't necessarily seen in advance? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, well, the first, I think, at an individual level is recognizing or understanding your own relationship with uncertainty.

12:10I think that's really important. So sort of recognizing where maybe even in your own personal life, you're a little bit uncomfortable when things are ambiguous. Do you need to be in control? Why? So a lot of that, of course, is, you know, linking back to neuroscience is it's the most human thing in the world. Right. Things are uncertain and the amygdala starts to kick in and we start to get that rising sense of the unknown, the uncertain. So there's a little bit of this, which is self-awareness and some of the associated practices. So whether it's journaling or meditation or recognition of those patterns, I think more broadly at a business level, I would argue some of the most high performing businesses in the last five, 10 years are those that had a very clear longer term strategy or a lot more comfortable to flex and move with changing times than those that stuck rigidly to a plan.

13:00And in fact, you can probably see around me, behind me, Josh, things like Lego actually is I've got bits of Lego dotted around Lego, I would say is a good example of a business who had a clear strategy and it's kind of amended and altered in time, but directionally has remained largely the same. Albeit the tactics and the plans have probably shifted every few months, depending on what was happening globally and regionally around the world. You've worked with companies like L 'Oreal, Shell, Jaguar, Land Rover, Visa, Audi, a lot of other enterprise and SMBs. Describe the work that you do. Are you consulting, obviously doing some speaking as well?

13:44Yeah, the area that I've really, really grown very fond of and really enjoy and I feel I can have the most impact in is I tend to, I tend to help to design and then facilitate the kind of strategy creation, execution, communication process. I'll be honest with you, having come from my background, the professional service background, where there was an awful lot of, you know, seven, eight, 10 figure, in my opinion, PowerPoints, really, there was a lot of that happening, but a lot of people who weren't really bought into it. I tend to now focus a lot more on working with the leader the leadership team helping them to uh design and create their strategy and then turn that into a set of priorities and into planning and then as a coach i will support them through the execution of that often over a number of years i've had clients i've worked with over a 10 12 15 year period where they might go through that kind of strategy cycle three four five six times i think what i'm a real believer in though is as a facilitator and as a coach you're getting real strategic conversations happening in a room because i think just too often this is the link i guess to performance as well and the sort of high performance world is there are just too many conversations that don't happen when you see really good strategic conversations happen in a room you need a little bit of a little bit of tension there should be a little bit of stress you need to be able to learn to handle the disagreements i mean it kind of takes us back to the conversation about self-awareness and you mentioned triggers and emotions and biases you're trying to help a leadership team rather than just maybe a more dominant leader recognize that they need to co-create their future direction we need to be comfortable to share a ridiculous idea we need to accept that that option that we maybe ruled out last year well maybe it's time we revisited that option maybe it was given due care and attention.

15:40Maybe I had this recently team of 12. Very clearly, there was one person in the room who was probably more naturally introverted, quieter. And yet, how do you find a way that maybe their opinion, their idea was the best idea. So there's a sort of degree here of design and facilitation before we get into execution. But I guess a lot of it is about keeping it simple, making it real, making it practical, and then let's get into action. So So I'd far rather see a group of people start to take action, experiment, learn, go again, learn, go again, learn, go again. And I think to your earlier point, that's necessary, right, in a world that's so uncertain and volatile.

16:19It's still very achievable. I just think you need to sort of know when are we having a more strategic conversation versus when maybe are we having more of a classic progress update. And I think the two often get a little bit muddled. Yes. Charlie, we've got about one minute left. to our friend that's been listening to our conversation. Where would you recommend they engage with you? What are their next steps? So the best next step for me is you kind of gave my domain, but the book. So yeah, Charlie Curzon. The book is called Be More Strategic. It goes on launch November. Go there. That would be my first border call.

16:55It is designed to be accessible and practical. You'll find everything in the book. And again, the website teammandarin.com. The book is Be More Strategic, 12 Essential Practices to Build the Life and Career You Want. Charlie Kersen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Josh. Really enjoyed it. Thank you.

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