Episode 48 – Robots, Beer, Cash for Consultants, and Team Effectiveness.

Recorded: March 3, 2020

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About the Podcast

Topic: The episode starts off rather professional (read dry) with Antlerboy sharing some rather serious endeavors he is launching.  He introduces two new podcasts; “Joy in Work; The public service transformation” and “Transduction; the systems complexity and cybernetics” – neither of which pose any competition to The Outliers Inn (not even close).  And he also shares another project; Requisite Agility managing change and uncertainty (http://requisiteagility.org/), where “requisite” is required by the nature of things and “agility” being the ability to successfully adapt, cope, or exploit changing situations.

That (thankfully) being done and dusted (read buried), the guests (mercifully) come to visit and breathe life back into the conversation with talks of; robot competitions, beer (again), heaps of cash for consultants in the UK, and the tragedy of a video being removed from YouTube causing one of our guests to actually do work.

We welcome our first guest, David, who has been working with high school students design and build robots that have to complete a fixed series of tasks.  The robot that completes the tasks the most completely wins.  The team that David and five other mentors coach consists of 148 students.  And although they came in force, the take-away lesson was “don’t forget the ‘Loctite”.

Don is still brewing beer and promises to share with the other visitors to The Outliers Inn.  He has been producing a bunch of lagers because the temperature has been cool.  And they just did two high gravity beers; a “Scottish Wee Heavy” which will take months to mature and come in at 10% and a “Barley Wine” coming in at 9%.  Made for sipping not for sessioning.

John returns to visit us.  He is in much better spirits than his last visit – and we are sure it’s not because of Don’s concoctions.  Rather, he shares with us that the UK Government has a program with whole pots of money for helping smaller companies and the supply chain into aerospace – and that this will make consultants (including himself) very happy.  In the interim, he’s found a job to keep him busy in logistics – as a delivery driver.

Our last guest is Stephane, who is rather desperate today.  He is working on team effectiveness and coming up with a brand new model.  He was disappointed that a YouTube video by Richard Hackman – which used to be there – was now longer there.  This meant he was going to have to actually do some work.  After it is complete, he will be rolling it out to his team, and perhaps further. 

And the debate over the best beer continues; Belgian, German, or Don’s…