Lora Cecere supply chain visionary interviews Anthony Howcroft, founder of SWARM Engineering
Lora Cecere, the founder of Supply Chain Insights interviews our CEO, Anthony Howcroft. Listen to the podcast here or read the full transcript below.
Transcript
Lora Cecere
Today I'm interviewing Anthony Howcroft. Anthony is the founder of Swarm Engineering and I recently interviewed him for the Digital Showcase for the Supply Chain Insights Global summit. I really loved the work that he's done on formulating questions. Anthony, thanks for joining this show. Tell the group a little bit about yourself.
Anthony Howcroft
Thanks, Laura. Well, as you can probably tell from the accent, I'm English from Oxford, but I do live in Southern California.
I have two large dogs that like to bark during podcasts and conference calls, and I've always worked in technology in companies like Microsoft and Texas Instruments along with a bunch of startups. I was going to say as well, I didn't go to university and started my career as a computer operator at Kraft Foods. Later in life, I did go to Oxford University and did a creative writing course and I've subsequently had a whole bunch of short stories published as well as the non-fiction book, Questions.
Lora Cecere
Well, let's talk about your book. What was the genesis of the book on questions, and what did you learn?
Anthony Howcroft
The Genesis came from a business trip to South Africa where I was asked to present to what I thought was going to be four or five people. It turned out to be 300 CEOs of all the top companies in South Africa. I'd written a little presentation on the flight and the concept was we had a technical platform that I thought could answer people's questions and I thought therefore it was more important for people to understand what type of questions they should be asking at the platform rather than worrying about the technology and I did this presentation which was a bit terrifying with this huge audience I hadn't quite anticipated, but I got a phenomenal reaction to it, and I realized there was something really key about questions that everyone was fascinated with, and I decided I'd explore it more and over six or seven years, that turned into a book.
Lora Cecere
And what you find out about the formulation of good questions, because I just think this is such a deep discussion, because I often see people chasing after the answers, but having the wrong question or not being clear on the question and I just think this is such a really important topic.
Anthony Howcroft
I agree, and I think maybe I'll come out and give you my five key learnings at some point, but I think it would be good if I could give you the real example that kicked me off and show the difference between a good or a bad question. And it's the example I used in South Africa too. And it's a very simple one which is I'm a runner. Just you know amateurs just go out and run every couple of days and I've been doing a lot of 10K runs so 6 miles of your imperial and my time was pretty static at about 50 minutes and every month.
I was thinking to myself how do I run faster? That was my personal question, how do I run faster?
And the magazines were all about, you know diet and visioning and new trainers and all these various different things. But a friend asked me a very specific question which was to run faster.
Do you increase cadence or stride length? And it was a really specific question that made me think, and I went and did some research and I found that the real answer is you do both, but cadence is much easier to change so the very next day I went out and did a run and I just tried changing my cadence as in I discovered on social media. The best way to do it.
And instead of running 15 minutes, which is what I've been doing for two years, my next run I did in 44 minutes.
So absolutely huge difference. And it took me from running and I was doing a few races and I was coming in the middle of the pack, and I suddenly started winning medals at all the races and I thought the reason that had happened is 'cause someone had asked me.
Such a great specific question and I thought what if the question was about sales revenue. You know, we're always thinking, how do I improve my sales revenue?
But what if there was a really good specific question that you could ask that would have the same impact that that guy’s question had had on my run?
And that was really the genesis of if you get the right question, it can make a huge difference to the performance.
Lora Cecere
Absolutely, and let's take this to business. 'cause Anthony. I know you work with a lot of business leaders and you're doing quite a bit of work in manufacturing. Can you give a similar example in business?
Anthony Howcroft
Yeah, sure, I think I mean.
I get examples every day, literally every day when I'm talking to people. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day about they were doing daily replenishment or they're about to start a daily replenishment on their supply chain.
It's very easy sometimes to just ask questions for the sake of questions and start asking about you know how many trucks they're using.
Or, you know which carriers they want to use and what the price is, and so on.
But actually, when they started to make daily replenishment, I asked a question around the impact that had on their use of LTL so whether they were filling the trucks, 'cause if you do daily replenishment, suddenly the challenges you may not have enough to fill your truck and the reaction I got from the customer in this point was phenomenal.
He said, well, you know that's an amazing question. It really and shows you know the challenge we've got and that is the big problem with what we're facing with daily replenishment. We can't fill the trucks effectively, so it's too costly.
So, for me, sometimes the right question and one of the things I've learned from doing the question book. It's about having an underlying model where you're trying to understand what it is people are trying to achieve and what I see you mentioned earlier.
Laura, about you, know where you see questions that don't work so well, and they're often where people are asking questions for questions.
And I think where questions work really far more effective is when you've actually got an underlying model of how something works, and you're trying to fill in the missing gaps with the questions to understand what's actually occurring.
Lora Cecere
I think that's brilliant. I also believe that questioning is part of active listening and I also believe that if you can't be open to the outcome to listen for the mental model that you're not able to formulate the right questions. What are your thoughts?
Anthony Howcroft
Yeah, I completely agree, I think.
I think that the questions we ask actually reveal a lot about ourselves and our mental models as well. I got asked a while back by our sales team to list my favorite sales questions and I'd be realized when I sat down to do it. I didn't have any because I actually don't go in with a bunch of questions.
About budget or you know what people are currently doing. What I go in with is a mental model.
About how does this business operate? How does this process operate? What's the scale? Who are their customers? Where do they meet money?
Where do they lose money and what I'm really doing is asking questions to understand that mental model, see where there might be gaps. So, and I saw something fascinating by a psychologist who said she does the same with people.
So, she has a mental model about healthy ways. The mind works when she's asking people questions.
She's really trying to understand their mental model to see where they may have gaps or issues, so I think those models are really critical and those models themselves of course come from our questioning of how things work and understanding something. So, questions are fundamental to the way we actually build our mental maps and then.
Detail them for specific instances.
Lora Cecere
And I think our ability to be self-reflective and to ask ourselves what our mental model is really key in this whole process.
But what have you learned about questions Anthony, as you've written the book and you've talked to people about it? What kind of insights can you share?
Anthony Howcroft
So, I was thinking about this. I have a whole long list, but I picked five that I think are the key learnings that I personally came to understand having researched the book so I just stepped through them. So, number one is that questions are fundamental to everything we do, and they're a key element that makes us human.
We've actually trained different animals, like chimps and dolphins and pigeons and so on to answer questions, and they've got very good at doing it.
And they can, you know, answer questions as well as a 5-year-old and things. But the only animal known to have asked a question of a human is a parrot who actually looked in the mirror once and asked what color it was.
It was an African grey parrot and I think it's fascinating in that it seems to be uniquely human capability to actually formulate questions.
So, I think my first learning was that questions are genuinely fundamental to what makes us human. The second one, which is fairly terrifying, is that questions can actually change our memories.
There was a fantastic study by a lady called Elizabeth Loftus in the 1970s who showed people some videos about cars.
Crashing and then asked questions, and in some of the questions, they use the verb smashed and then other questions they are they use the verb contacted and they asked the group how fast the vehicles were going. Using those different verbs.
And there was a 10 mile per hour difference in the estimate based on the way the question had been phrased, and even more remarkable they did at a later test where they just asked people whether they'd seen any broken glass in the video. And depending upon the way they asked the question, they got double the number of people to say yes, just by the way they phrased the question.
So, they were fundamentally changing the way people had actually remembered an incident based on the questions they asked, and so I found that that was something I had never really come across, and I find that quite remarkable that actually the way we use questions actually changes the way we think and the way we remember events. So that was my second one.
Third, one is a quick one, which is I discovered that science is really just knowledge built by layering questions. The whole scientific method, the scientific approach. It's really my head like compound interest for ideas.
You come up with a question. You test it, you validate it. You try and build a hypothesis that lets you prove it false, and then once you've proven that you move on to the next question.
So, science is really just layering of questions and the 4th one which is connected to that is that every profession and science in a way is a profession.
Has specific questioning methodologies so salespeople ask questions in a very different way to policemen or our teacher. There are whole different industries just to train people.
How to ask questions in each of those industries and the final one you've actually already covered Laura. The final one is that questions really reveal a lot about ourselves. The questions we ask and our.
Internal mental model.
So, I think it's as interesting to listen to people's questions as it is to ask them.
Lora Cecere
You know, as I think about technology, Anthony and I think about the data scientists, and I think about what tremendous potential there is with the evolution of technology.
But I watch people struggle to frame the questions for the data scientists, and I think it's a huge gap and opportunity for them.
Any insight about how people with different disciplines and different mental models can make bridges through questions?
Anthony Howcroft
Yeah, that's great. That's a great question and it is tough. As you say, people, people do have different mental models.
I think one of one of the things I look at for doing that actually helps people document what their mental model is. We're actually doing some work at swarm at the moment on creating what we call no parse or.
Knowledge, paragraphs, and really what we're doing is building out mental models of specific processes in the supply chain. We're not fixing those people can change and adapt them.
But I found if you put a man a model out there and say this is what we think a load plan looks like, or this is what we think yield optimization looks like, then you give people the opportunity to challenge that and question that and to put their own mental model against it. So, I actually think a great way of bridging the gap between people from different areas.
Is to share those mental models in a written format in a way that lets people test their own models and reality is, you know your model and my model will be subtly different.
But if we put them together, they'll be stronger. So, I think my recommendation there is to actually help people document what the mental model is they have on a particular process and share them and discuss those. I think that's a great way of bridging the gap.
Lora Cecere
That's where we do that Anthony. Is it? A whiteboard is a, you know, some kind of visual map. Any insight on what works?
Anthony Howcroft
I think it's whatever works for those people, so I've definitely done it on a whiteboard. I've done it in a Word document.
We're actually specifically putting, you know, time and effort into giving a modeling tool that lets people do this. We actually do it with a series of questions. You won't be surprised to hear.
We use something. It looked that the no path thing I mentioned looks a little bit like the kid’s mad Lib grid that you might play in a car with like a paragraph with some blanks in, but I think the approach can vary depending upon who it is you're dealing with.
You know, some people are more auditory, so more visual, so I think whatever technique works best for the people.
Involved, but the key is it must be something that everyone can look at and touch, so we do it as a model with text and we produce a PDF document to share.
But I have done it on whiteboards as they have done in Word documents as well.
Lora Cecere
Well, I'm so excited you're going to be joining us at this year's global summit, and I was actually very flattered.
And when you told me you thought it was one of the best summits you'd ever attended, so I can't wait to have you join the group and help us answer and ask better questions.
Anthony Howcroft
Yep, and it's one of those terrifying things, isn't it, Laura?
But it's a bit like learning a language. If somebody says, hey, I'm an expert on questions and then you get asked about questions. You can't think of a single question to say it's a bit like.
Yeah, well, but I was going to say I I'm going to give you one example of a question that I'd just like to highlight as what I would call a killer question.
And I'm going to mention it 'cause I saw it at a conference and it's probably one of the best questions I've ever seen asked in the book. I talk about these killer questions is really one that stops the room.
Makes everybody reconsider the way they were thinking, and they can be very powerful. I've seen it in a few meetings, but I saw it at this particular conference.
And the speaker was talking about our technology in the next wave of smart weapons, and he talked about, you know bullets that could swerve towards their targets and the latest advances in drones and robots.
And the damage that they could deliver. And at the end, when the speaker asked for questions, one lady put her hand up and they gave her the mic and she said.
Thank you for the information on smart battlefields. When will we get smart diplomacy and it just stopped the whole conversation dead. The guy didn't know what to say, but I thought what a brilliant quest.
Because it completely transformed the way we were all thinking about what that person had just presented, and it wasn't.
It wasn't negative, it was. It was very. She did it in a very humble way, but I thought it was a brilliant question and it really challenged the thinking of a lot of people in the room.
Anthony Howcroft
So, let's hope we get some questions like that at the conference. It's not always comfortable for the speaker.
But I think it's fantastic for the audience when you get people that are really that engaged and that that thoughtful to come up with questions like that.
Lora Cecere
Absolutely, and so together we're going to imagine 2030 and I look forward to great questions and I always love working with the audience 'cause they're just the smartest people I know, and they're really thinking hard.
3rd, and hopefully you'll help the pepper. Some of those great questions into the dialogue. I look forward to seeing you there.
Anthony Howcroft
Absolutely yeah, I was I. I look forward to coming and I'll tell you what Laura, I'll bring a handful of copies of the book which you can give away for. For people at the event as well.
Lora Cecere
Awesome, and if people want to buy your book, I bought your book from Amazon, what would you recommend? Where should people go to get your book?
Anthony Howcroft
Yeah, Amazon is the best place. It's there is a Kindle or a paperback, so I'm sure we can put a link up somewhere or they can come and check out our website.
Lora Cecere
Awesome, well Anthony. Thank you so much for joining us today. Any last minute thoughts before we leave?
Anthony Howcroft
I would just say I think one of the things that I also discovered was that AI doesn't yet answer questions.
And I say that from a business context we're all sometimes a little scared about AI taking all our jobs.
Well, one of the things I really learned from the book is that humans and AI worked together, really.
Well, because the thing that humans are good at as questions and what AI is quite good at doing these days is answering them.
So, I see when we talk about supply chain 20-30, I think the democratization of AI with humans asking the questions is the next really big thing, so I'm excited to talk about that at supply chain 2030.
Lora Cecere
And it's not very thank you, Anthony.
Anthony Howcroft
Thank you, thanks, Laura.