Lots of people get stuck on the big idea, whether it's for a new business or a next step at work. It’s easy to believe that what separates the successes from the failures is that moment of inspiration. But the reality is that the answer often lies much more in execution. In hard work. It’s that cheesy but accurate Thomas Edison quote: it’s 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Loads of people have good ideas. But they will remain just ideas unless you learn how to execute. How to take that idea from your mind, beyond a powerpoint presentation or a business plan, to something real and functioning.
Helping us to explore this topic in this episode, we have someone who has taken their ideas and made them real to great success, not once but twice. Jennie Jonson MBE is the CEO of My First Five Years, the next-generation parenting app designed to combat anxiety and give parents evidence-based tools, knowledge and support. Within a year of founding in 2021, MFFY had raised over £1.5m in seed-funding and is now growing at a fantastic rate.
Prior to My First Five Years, Jennie founded one of the UK’s largest nursery groups, Kids Allowed, running it for 17 years before successfully exiting in 2020. She was the first female to win the UK Private Business Awards CEO of the Year and was voted UK’s Businesswoman of the Year in 2019.
We took loads away from our conversation with Jennie. Here are the top tips for making it real:
Validate your ideas with your personal experience - or someone else's. Sense check: will this work?Check what's already there: is someone else already trying to solve the same problem?If they are, that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't do it - maybe it's validation of the need. But maybe you should work with not against them.Find your 'brains trust': who's experience and talent can you leverage?Work fast: minimise wasted time and effort by filtering ideas quicklyAccept feedback: Listen to what people are telling you. You don't have to agree with everything you're told but sometimes you need to accept the weight of feedback and make a change or walk awayCan you make it real on your own? Or do you need a co-founder or sponsor?Make it simple: you need to be able to explain your idea very quickly and in a way that people can just 'get' whether it's in a few sentences or a couple of slides (and maybe even just one line)Be resilient: Take feedback, change as needed, but don't be dissuaded if you still believe there is the core of a good idea.What's your measure of success? Set yourself some goals and targets that you can benchmark against.
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31:14
How to edit your ideas, with Sarah Butler
A critical part of the creative process is the ability to refine things, whether your own or others. Whatever it is you are creating, there’s almost zero chance that the first draft will be perfect. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing, drawing, designing in 3D, making music or a video, the editing process is absolutely critical.
But it’s not necessarily one that comes naturally. We get very attached to our own creations. And it’s not always easy to tell other people that their work needs improvement and change. No-one likes to hear that their baby is ugly! So it’s hugely important that we think and talk about this skill, and train ourselves to improve it as part of our career development.
To help us learn how to refine our ideas, as ever in this episode, we have a real expert. Sarah Butler is the acclaimed author of Ten Things I've Learnt About Love, Before the Fire and Jack & Bet. Her writing has been translated into fourteen languages. She is a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University, and works with publishers and authors, reviewing and developing new work.
We learnt so much in the conversation with Sarah. Here are our key takeaways:
As Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Don't expect perfection first time!Get something down on paper or into some form you can mold. As Sarah says, it's clay to work with.The creative process is also a learning process: you're not just pouring out things you know. What you know is evolving as you produce, so accept that there will be iterations.The creative process can be like farming: sometimes you're sowing, sometimes you're harvesting, but sometimes there will be fallow moments as well. Accept that sometimes you need some fallow days and you can't always force progress.For big ideas you probably can't hold the whole thing in your head. Break it down into manageable chunks but make sure you keep a holistic view. Work on individual components but remember how they fit together.Appreciate the value of feedback. It can be scary sharing your ideas but the once you overcome that fear the benefits are enormous. Share ideas early with a diverse group - you might get different types of feedback from different people.This is much easier if you can grow a culture of sharing inside your organisation, so that everyone gets used to sharing their ideas - and gets practice at giving feedbackEdit other people's work by asking questions. Don't try to impose your approach.Be generous and kind. No-one wants to hear that their baby is ugly!
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33:14
Remix & Recombine: How to put things together to make something new, with Graeme Park
In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we're looking at recombination: how to bring old things together to make something new.
To help us to get our heads around mixing and remixing, we have a real expert in the studio today. Graeme Park has been one of the biggest names in the house music scene since the late 1980s. Well known for his residency at the Hacienda and long stints on a number of major radio stations, Graeme remixed tracks by the likes of Brand New Heavies, New Order, Eric B & Rakim, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor.
Graeme has most recently been one of the founding forces behind Hacienda Classical, bringing together classic dance tunes with a full live orchestra. He has even found himself behind the microphone, going back to his musician roots.
Here's what we learned from Graeme:
Remixing is a creative art! Just because you're working with existing components, it doesn't mean this isn't real innovation. Recombining things can fulfill that creative urge.Seperate the technical skills required to remix something from the relevant domain knowledge. You may only have one or the other. For example, you might understand the business processes you're working with, or the industry sector. But you might not know the technology or have the political clout to build something new. Partner with someone who does.Play with your tools and components. Get to know the things that are at your disposal. What can you draw on in terms of resources: people, data, partners, platforms? And what can you use to stick them together? Software, systems, or just a telephone and some bits of paper?Agility: respond to what the audience wants. Don't set out with a singular vision and keep pursuing it without showing it to anyone. Get it out there early and change direction based on feedback.Collaborate. Bring in different ideas, perspectives and skill sets. You don't want design by committee but you're more likely to succeed with two heads than one.
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34:33
Mid-Season Recap (with out-takes)
Just before we take a break for the summer, we jumped on a call to chat through what we have learned from the season so far. we're about half way through and we've learned from some incredible people.
Our first segment was all about Curation: how to discover and qualify information.
The BBC's Chris Warburton joined us to talk about how to ask good questions.Psychologist Dr Simon Moore taught us about all the different ways of listening.Dr Lauren Kirwan helped us to understand empathy better - what it is, and what it is not.Gemma Milne talked to us about the importance of scepticism and our responsibility to challenge and ask questions.Elections analyst Professor Rob Ford helped us to understand the meaning in people's words - even when they don't say what they mean.Finally, data scientist Caroline Keep taught us how to extract meaning from numbers.
Then we kicked off our segment on Creation: how to make new things.
Fashion designer Supriya Lele shared where she finds inspiration.And start-up investor Jon Bradford talked to us about iterations and pivots.
Coming up we have loads more great guests. Superstar DJ Graeme Park talking about remixing, acclaimed author Sarah Butler on the editing process, and the brilliant Bec Evans on how to write.
Listen in to find out what has really stuck in our brains so far. And what we've got coming up.
Even though this was a very short episode, it had a lot of outtakes. And we thought they were pretty funny. So just as a one-off, we thought we'd share them at the end.
Have a great summer!
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7:52
Iterate or pivot? Improving ideas with Jon Bradford
In this episode of Future Proof Your Career we speak with Jon Bradford about iteration: how do you take an idea and improve on it?
Jon Bradford is co-founder & managing partner of Dynamo Ventures, an investment fund focused on supply chain and mobility. Jon is one of the most experienced early stage investors in Europe and launched the first accelerator bootcamp outside of the US in 2009. He went on to launch many more start-up programmes, earning him the title “Godfather of European Accelerators”.
Between this work and his own entrepreneurship, Jon has helped to refine many raw ideas into successful businesses, so he’s the ideal person to talk to us about this part of the creative process.
Here’s what we learned from Jon:
Every proposal, every idea is a promise. You’ve got to make it and then deliver on it.Delivering a whole idea in one go is too much. Break any vision down into bite-sized pieces - each of which is a little ‘promise’ you can keep in its own right.At every ‘chunk’ there’s an opportunity to do things differently. Separate the objective from the approach.People should be measuring the progress of your project on ‘lines not dots’, as per this Mark Suster article. What they’re looking for is progress.Steer using feedback - and the most important feedback comes from your ‘customers’ - who will be buying or using your product/service? Your mum doesn’t count as a customer for feedback purposes. She probably isn’t objective.Constant feedback will allow you to make small changes frequently and not pursue blind alleys: ‘fail fast’, as the saying goes.Don’t be afraid to pivot though: make a radical change of direction. The highest potential team in Jon’s portfolio have done at least two major pivots.Make sure you set the bar for testing each stage of progress appropriately. Know what is a stretch goal, but don’t set your sights so low the test isn’t meaningful.Sometimes the problem isn’t the idea itself, it’s the market around it. Sometimes - as Tesla did - you have to build the ‘full stack’
Welcome to Future-proof Your Career, your guide to the most important skills for a long, successful working life. This is a special season of the Talk About Tomorrow podcast, exploring in depth the idea of the Three Cs, three skill groups that are critical to success, in a business or as an entrepreneur. The ability to curate information, create new things, and communicate ideas. In each episode we explore a facet of one of these skills, alongside a guest.
My name is Tom Cheesewright, I’m an applied futurist advising organisations around the globe on how to see and prepare for the future. Alongside me is my co-host Katharine McNamara, communications expert extraordinaire.
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