What Your Employees Are Really Thinking with James Warren

What happens when you look beyond survey data to understand what's really driving your organizational culture? James Warren, founder of Share More Stories, reveals how analyzing employee and customer stories at scale uncovers the hidden "how" and "why" that traditional data misses.

His most surprising discovery? Trust has become the single most predictive emotion across all industries. Companies with high trust create lasting loyalty, while low-trust organizations remain vulnerable no matter how well they're currently performing.

Warren shares a compelling healthcare case where well-intentioned technology actually destroyed employee experience by preventing human connections, plus insights on why leadership becomes more critical during agile transformations.

Key Takeaways:

• Trust beats everything: Trust is now the most predictive emotion across industries. High-trust cultures create sustainable advantage while low-trust organizations stay vulnerable to competitors
• Leaders must change too: In agile transformations, leadership becomes more important, not less. Leaders need to model vulnerability and change alongside their teams
• Stories reveal hidden patterns: Traditional data tells you "what" happened but stories tell you "why" it happened, uncovering emotional drivers surveys completely miss

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Share More Stories
• 6:00 Understanding Organization Through Stories
• 15:40 Why Stories Matter More Than Data
• 22:10 Trust as Key Driver of Experiences
• 27:40 Building Employee Loyalty and Connection
• 31:14 Leadership in Technology-Driven Companies

Transcript

Peter: 0:04 Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, it's a pleasure to be back here again. I'm joined by Dave and James. So James, would you like to introduce yourself?

James: 0:20 Absolutely! Thanks for having me on the show. My name is James Warren and I'm the founder and CEO of Share More Stories. We're a human experience insights company, and we do storytelling and AI-based analysis of people's experiences to really help companies and organizations understand what's happening in the experiences around them. But more importantly, we help them figure out what to do about it and then actually go do it. I'm hoping to bring some insights today about stories and how they impact organizational culture and customer experience.

Peter: 0:50 Looking forward to it! That's quite relevant to our listeners. We talk a lot about change and how organizations go through transformation - what happens to different people in the organization as that occurs. I'm curious to hear more about your approach and how you're weaving storytelling into the whole organizational transformation journey.

James: 1:14 You know, sometimes in the work we do, you almost have to do triage on the company and culture right from the start. What's the leadership philosophy? What's the subculture from a leadership perspective? How do they talk about leadership? Do they really see themselves as stewards of their employees' experiences, their stakeholders, their customers? Or are they coming from a more hierarchical, dictatorial approach?

Because if it's the latter, it's really hard to do this kind of work with any meaningful outcome. But if you've got the former - even if they don't know how to do it, but their instinct is to say "I value what kind of experiences people have, I want my employees more engaged, I understand there's something more to brand satisfaction and loyalty than just hitting metrics" - those are great leadership teams for us to work with. They've at least got the preconditions. They value the human experience.

If they value it, then we can start figuring out where they are in their journey. If they don't value it, we generally wait for them to come around or realize their current approach isn't working so well.

James: 2:32 But when they do come around, what we often find is that most leaders are still reacting to external triggers first - reacting to what they see in the marketplace. Share is down, or hey, share is up and we don't know how we got it. You definitely want one problem more than the other, but they're both technically problems. Because if you don't know why your business is performing the way it is, you can't sustain it if it's good or fix it if it's bad.

So once we have that conversation, we start moving them upstream.

James: 2:59 Before we can understand customer experience, let's start understanding how your employees are really engaged in this organization. Because in our view, organizational culture and brand identity are just two halves of the same coin.

Once you have those conversations, you start working with leadership teams to examine themselves. What's your experience as leaders in this organization? How is your leadership impacting the organizational experience? We do all of that by collecting stories from people about their personal experiences.

James: 3:35 People used to say it's like qualitative research on steroids - I didn't love that phrase, but their point was we were going deeper than traditional methodologies. The story turned out to be the key differentiator for us.

We ask people to write long-form, several hundred words about what it's like to work in this company. What was the day you felt like you really belonged here? What made you feel like you mattered? As a customer, what's it like being a customer of this brand? Does it speak to you? Tell us about your best day buying this product or using this brand. Those big, open, emotionally driven stories give us a lot to work with.

Dave: 4:15 James, as you're describing all of that, one thing that really strikes me is that so many organizations live and breathe pouring over data coming at them all the time. Yet you're describing something which is still data, but coming from a different place. How do you handle that sense-making piece? I love that gathering of stories because people say things in small phrases and clauses that tell you huge amounts. How do you compare or balance this with traditional quantitative data? Do you ignore it? Merge it? What's the balance, and how do you address the expectation of "real" quantitative data in conversations?

James: 5:05 That's an excellent question because it came up for us in how we positioned our platform, the SEEQ platform. But it also comes up in really trying to help solve the problem, right? You do have so much data and information and insight, and yet you're still struggling.

What we started to realize - and I saw this myself when I was on the other side of the table running brands or large organizations - is you have tons of data from all kinds of sources and you'd still find yourself frustrated, having to connect the dots between the data yourself. That alone was frustrating. But even when I did that, I'd still find myself saying, "Okay, I have a really good sense of who, what, when and where, but I don't have the best sense of how."

James: 5:48 How is this experience happening? And I definitely wasn't hearing the why. For us, the why matters. If you're trying to innovate at the edge, or you're an established incumbent being disrupted by an innovative company, it's really hard to figure out why they're being successful. But your consumer can tell you. They can tell you the why in their own words when you ask them. What is it you love about this experience? Tell me about it. How did it make you feel?

Then they use phrases and words, and they go off into memory land. They're remembering an experience - not answering a survey, not even just participating in a focus group, which can give you meaningful information.

James: 6:12 So your question about how do you treat all the other data? We often tell our companies, especially the larger ones that have invested tens, if not hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars in their data infrastructure - we tell them that data is useful to answer certain questions. But when your question is "why is this happening?" and you don't have answers to that, you need a new tool and methodology. That's the first thing we try to help them understand - different tools solve different problems, and you're probably short one or two tools in your toolkit.

James: 6:53 The second thing we do is we can collect stories at scale. We can collect 500, we can collect 5,000. So those stories are data in and of themselves. When we collect a certain number, they start to bridge that gap of "is this enough for me to make decisions?" or "how do I connect this to the billions of data points I have over here?"

James: 7:22 We do some things where we can help them correlate. We can look for relationships and patterns between the data we collect and some of the things they measure all the time - their demographics, behaviors, key characteristics. We use those to say, "Hey, we're going to understand the experience deeply here, but we're going to talk about it in a way that you can apply it to your business through your existing data."

We've been asked more and more recently, as we work with larger companies, to help them figure out not just what they learn, but how to make it make sense in their organization. It comes down to mapping and saying when you see this kind of information now, you can look for it in your other datasets and collection methods this way.

Peter: 8:12 So you're looking for patterns in all of the stories too, so you can start to see common threads? As you describe how it might tie back into quantitative data and create that fuller picture, I think of it in terms of starting from simpler questions of where and when and moving up to how and why.

As you've been working through this journey and learning more about insights and how you tie them together, have you seen common patterns as you look across organizations?

James: 8:47 Yeah, that's another great question. The patterns have evolved. What we were hearing up through 2021, into the first year or so of the pandemic, versus what we've heard since 2022 - they sort of travel together as time periods.

Up through 2021, we'd often see a stronger split between emotions like joy and sadness in experiences. You'd see people saying "this part of my experience is great and this part makes me sad." I mean, they're not saying that directly, but that's what our analysis reveals because we score their stories for emotion. You'd see more paradoxes in emotions.

Since then, I see fewer paradoxes. I see two or three emotions that rise above lots of others in most people's experiences. I also see a couple of emotions traveling across lots of organizations.

James: 9:31 The biggest one we see most consistently is trust being a driver of the experience. Either organizations, cultures, or brand experiences are marked by very high trust or very low levels of trust. You can correlate that to other parts of their experience, other ways they're feeling about it, or the overall positivity or negativity.

In and of itself, you can use that to prove and disprove hypotheses about your teams or customers - why they're staying, why they're buying the product. Then you realize they're doing that with a relatively low level of trust. That should be a big blinking red sign that they're going to leave as soon as something better comes along, because they're not having that rich experience of trust.

James: 10:31 Maybe that's the break from the pandemic and everything that occurred - the change in how we saw work, how we connected with each other. I don't know. But trust is emerging as a key driver of experiences more than before. It was one of several factors; now it's arguably the most important driver across employee groups, customer groups, community stakeholder groups, regardless of industry. It's becoming the most predictive emotion we have about people's experience.

Dave: 11:01 I'm really interested to dig into this more. Am I understanding correctly that any company trying to build trust would be doing that thinking if we have a high trust culture within our company, then people will hang around longer and commit to the organization? If we have high trust relationships with customers, they'll stick with us more? You mentioned there are companies succeeding with low trust environments, so it's clearly not a requirement.

James: 11:44 That's a great point. There are definitely times where you might be a new market entrant. The product experience addresses what I'd consider lower levels of needs and benefits - functional benefits. They're capturing attention and share and will be successful with that. There's no reason to pretend you wouldn't be, because humans are complex. We sometimes make decisions against our own interests or sacrifice higher interests for lower ones.

But over time, we demonstrate that what we pursue isn't just functional need but also emotional and social need. Some of those emotions don't come into play in that first transactional space where I bought this product, it meets my functional needs, I'm satisfied. Or I work in this company, get a good salary, I'm satisfied. But if you ask that person "do you trust it?" their answer might be no.

Well, if they don't trust the organization, how likely are they to stay indefinitely? You might have to keep moving those functional benefits higher and higher. And guess what? Functional benefits become really expensive in terms of cost of goods because they're directly correlated to what and when you're selling.

James: 12:48 But when you have those higher levels of social and emotional benefits that you've invested in, those pay returns over time. All you have to do is nurture them and curate them in terms of organizational or brand experience. When you make decisions that show the organization "this is a decision we could make - the short, easy one that saves us money. But we're going to take the longer one that's more challenging because it's better for the organization and team" - that builds trust.

Or "I know we have a big organization with lots to manage, but we're going to trust some of our newer associates to make an impact on clients or customers earlier in their career versus waiting three years" - that builds trust.

I think for a while those two things rise together - functional benefits and social emotional benefits. But then you reach a point where there's only so much functional benefit you can give. Now the question is: do you have social emotional benefits?

James: 13:42 When you do, you have a deep well of employee loyalty and brand loyalty. When you don't, you're susceptible to a competitor that can come in and match or exceed your functional benefits, either at a better salary or lower price.

Some executives will say "how much does that matter? Does it matter if they don't love it as much as we hope, as long as they're here?" To which I'd say, let's boil it down to two human beings. Would I be happier knowing that my spouse likes me or loves me?

James: 14:35 I'd be happier knowing my spouse loves me, because it means we've got a future. We're not only lasting for the moment. Like is temporary. Love is hopefully forever. When we have those real relationships, we know they can stand challenges, competitive pressures, organizational pressures. When we don't, we're sort of renting share or renting employee loyalty. When it goes away, it goes away fast and it's expensive.

Peter: 15:07 Have any of your clients taken that insight - because retention connects to attraction - and said "we are a high trust organization, there's psychological safety, and based on the stories we share internally, this is a great place to work. You should come join us." Not only the functional benefit, but the cultural benefit?

James: 15:33 We actually worked with one company in the energy industry around their new hire employee experience program, which went back into the recruitment part of their work. We used stories of people who had recently joined that organization and the people who hired them - their hiring leaders or team leaders - to understand what it was like when you were being recruited, when you accepted, in your first 60-90 days, in your first year.

We heard so many things about that organizational culture that were huge, towering strengths. But we also saw really clear, actionable gaps. They weren't just process gaps you might imagine when you say "what's broken about your onboarding?" They were emotional gaps. "I don't know if I belong here." "I'm not feeling reassured in my first X number of days that I made the right choice." "Everybody knows so much and I feel so inadequate I don't feel like I can make an impact."

James: 16:32 Those aren't things you'd normally say "let's go fix that with a better process." Those are things that make you ask: what's happening between leadership, the leader, the team lead and their team members? What did we say to them during recruitment? How did we extend the employee value proposition before they joined the organization? How do we make them feel those things before they come on board?

As we always say, oftentimes the answers are in the stories. There were examples of when it did feel like that and when it worked amazingly. When people said "I've always wanted to work at this company since I moved here. I always admired this." Why did you admire it? What was so special about the company?

James: 17:22 Those types of stories and insights really become almost like a framework. This is how you want to engage. We told them your new hire experience doesn't start day zero, it starts day negative 60. You need to be engaging these people two months before they join the organization. Yes, by that point they've said "I want to come" and you've said yes, but they're still working through background checks, orientation dates, when they're leaving their old company. That's still a very tenuous time. You don't have them yet. You just have an agreement to have them.

I'd say we moved through that part of recruitment and onboarding. And yes, some of our clients use these insights to develop better messaging, better outreach and engagement strategies, or better training. If the training needs to be more focused on how we're going to engage people differently, then you've got to look for a different answer than the ones you have so far.

Dave: 18:04 There are so many questions you're opening up as we go through this. Peter and I both have such depth of appreciation and curiosity around this. As you've been talking about those experiences and the power of sense-making from the story side, one thought comes to mind: as leaders, we look for signs, validation, or warning signs when interacting with our employees, customers, whatever that might be.

From the many stories you've analyzed, are there any top three things you look for in an organization that's in a strong position - high trust, good employee or customer loyalty, something the organization is doing well? And of course, the corollary: what are the scary pieces you look for?

James: 19:04 There are, and I have a bias I have to work to let go of, especially when we're doing analysis. Part of that bias is the intention with which we do this work - to help organizations and leadership really identify what's driving employee experience and why, then how to make it better. Same thing for customers.

We score for 55 different attitudes and emotions - things like needs, values, the core four emotions of sadness, joy, anger, and so forth. Then we score for personality traits and facets. So there's about 55 different things we're scoring.

Some of the ones that, when they're really high, indicate a strong positive experience: Self-transcendence. When self-transcendence is high for an individual in their story or experience, or for a corporation or brand, it means people see themselves as part of something bigger and that the experience is helping them achieve that bigger thing.

James: 20:10 When you think about purpose, belonging - big macro ideas that lots of leaders talk about but it's hard to measure - one way you can measure that is: what's the level of self-transcendence in our culture? Do people really feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves?

Also, to what degree do they feel like they can achieve here? When we see achievement very high - if I were to paint a perfect emotional map, I'd say joy, trust, self-transcendence, achievement, and closeness would all be very high. In some places we see sympathy or empathy high, especially in community-facing organizations. In other places we see emotions that indicate this is a highly structured organization and they want to be.

James: 21:03 Part of the question is: what are you aspiring to be as a company or brand? Then these emotions can tell us: are you delivering that experience? Are your brand values and organizational values aligned in how your employees and customers experience them?

In some cases, if you're building an innovation team inside a large, established company, you might not want a team telling you that all their experiences are really high on structure and really low on curiosity, because you might not have the right environment for that kind of innovation. But if you had that innovation team and even if the organization as a whole was very high on structure, and you were saying "structure is not that important to them, curiosity and achievement are," then you'd say we're creating the experience we need for these team members to do the innovation work they need to do.

James: 22:17 That's how some of our customers actually use it. Sometimes it's a benchmark, sometimes it's almost a diagnostic. When you've done your employee engagement survey and see a problem, instead of just going to your senior team and saying "hey, everybody looks great except you, what's going on?" and then they go to their team saying "everybody looks great except for you, you're pulling my score down," and next thing you know there's some poor person sitting there like "I just answered a survey, I didn't realize it had all these stakes" - we encourage them: now's the time to lean in and ask why that's happening. Not where, not who, but why.

The why is often found by diving deep into those experiences and asking where are there hidden differences? We think everybody who works in this department or has this tenure is going to feel and think the same. They don't. They have different emotional motives or maybe some hidden uniqueness. We think this customer and this customer couldn't be any more alike because they buy different things in different ways, and then you realize their emotional drivers are the same.

Those are big opportunities. When you find those hidden commonalities and hidden differences, it really opens up possibilities for where you could go next - not just play at the margins but maybe find a really big nugget that could shift how you engage the organization or the customer.

Peter: 23:04 Do you go and ask people to tell their stories again over time to see how they evolve?

James: 23:10 We'd love to. We've done that a few times. That's still not something we're doing a lot of yet, but we have a few clients we've now done work with year over year. So you're starting to see some longitudinal measurement.

We did that in a healthcare setting once where an organization had, from the time we first worked with them, merged with another organization, brought in a new CEO, and basically introduced a whole new tech stack for patient engagement. Of course that had an impact on people, and that wouldn't have been hard to tell. But what they kept finding is "we think it's this and we fix that, no, people are still upset. We think it's this, we fix that, no, people are still upset."

James: 23:52 What they found is the people they'd hired to be front-facing patient engagement - for people going through discharge or who call a number for help refilling prescriptions or scheduling appointments - they're basically going into a call center. This company operated one of those call centers and their customers were hospital and healthcare systems.

The people they initially hired to do that work, without a lot of fancy tech, were so deeply and naturally empathetic that they formed bonds with these patients in a phone call. If that person ever called back, they knew to reroute them: "send that to so-and-so, she was talking to them yesterday, she can help them through it." They were really an extension of what we all want - that really care-based experience when navigating healthcare and health transitions.

James: 24:42 Well, they put in all this new tech and infrastructure, and the sentiment about their experiences was sharply lower. But also the closeness was lower, the feelings of love were lower, the feelings of self-transcendence were lower. Because these people who were natural empaths - like an empathy machine - were now being forced to almost distance themselves from the patient in these interactions. The tech that was supposed to make the experience better was actually making it worse, because the experience was meant to be as close as I could be to you through the phone.

James: 25:28 We showed that to them in the second round and before I could even finish the presentation, the chief people officer said "you just revealed what's happening in the company." I was like "I know that's what we do." They're like "no, no, no, that's the problem. That's what we're going through right now. People are upset, we thought we were making their lives better and they're talking about leaving. They're saying 'I didn't sign up to work for this. I signed up to be a caregiver, basically through the phone, through the web, and you're taking that away from me.'"

James: 26:01 You only get that kind of insight because of that before and after comparison. It's very gratifying because it tells us we can make a real impact, not only in the employee's life, but also in that patient or customer's life they're working with. We've done that in a few other places too, but that's definitely an area we want to work more closely in.

Dave: 26:01 That sounds like a very rewarding environment to learn from. I'm hoping the healthcare company was able to adjust some of the things they were doing to turn that around.

I'm going to ask a bit of an off-the-wall question - I have no idea but I'd love to know if you've had any experience in technology-driven companies where agile is being introduced, and whether you can speak about the impact of something like agile and DevOps and what it did in an organization.

James: 26:32 Yeah, we've worked with a couple - you wouldn't say large technology companies, but we've worked with a few smaller, not early-stage startups, but late-stage ones. They definitely follow that methodology and are proponents of Agile.

What I'd tell you is, even when we were hearing stories - we maybe weren't studying that experience in depth, but we were studying what's happening that's working well - when things are moving quickly and clearly and you're able to move from this piece of work to the next with clarity, we found that, just like every place else, leadership plays the biggest role. Leadership is the biggest driver of how well people experience those types of environments where you have that structured, tech-forward process and infrastructure.

James: 27:18 Leadership still matters. I think sometimes people think when you're moving in that really fast, really agile environment, that it's the process driving things. If we have a good process and everybody's on board with the process, we've got the right tools, then we can move really quickly. If you don't have the right leadership, it won't matter.

What we learn in those environments is still the role leaders play. Even if they're cut from the same cloth, even if they speak that language, even if they understand that methodology deeply, they can't assume that the basic human needs employees have - feeling on some level connected to their work, feeling like their work matters to them and that they're having meaning in their work - more and more employees are showing up to organizations with those as table stakes.

They may not look the same, they may not all be extroverts, they don't all want a ping pong table, they want different things. But what they really want is meaningful, valuable work and to be well compensated for it.

James: 28:11 Even in those environments where you've got that mindset or pressure, the leadership responsibility doesn't diminish. In fact, it might go up. We've found that in places with high-speed, high-output culture, leaders have to be able to keep up with that. They've got to adapt, they've got to adopt different tools and skill sets that enable them to really have their finger on the pulse of the culture, so they're not processing themselves to death in the wrong direction.

Dave: 28:37 It's fascinating what you're saying there, James. So many times with leadership - all the studies coming from agile tool vendors and transformational change - they all talk about the importance of leadership buy-in and leadership driving the change. What you're describing is because one of the things you often have with leaders is they begin feeling disconnected because they're somehow no longer involved in these key decision points, or at least they don't feel they're allowed in that context. What you're describing - and it's a really interesting takeaway - is the criticality of that role goes up, not down, in this process.

James: 29:25 They're not there just to be approvers, they play a role throughout. They're not there just to say "we're ready to ship our next release, here's the demo." They need to be engaged throughout the process, and it's not the same type of engagement as in an old-school traditional method, especially because Agile enables a more participatory, more democratic process to things. That is actually the pinch point. That's where leadership feels its stress.

They're used to - even if they don't think they are - leading in many cultures in a hierarchical way. When the hierarchy gets flattened and when process becomes much more important and tools become more important, that way of leadership - which was command and control - it's hard for them to lose that.

What you really have to understand is: what was it about that experience that made them feel useful and valued and necessary and helpful to the culture? How do you help them translate that into this new environment? Because more often than not, they have skills and capabilities that will transfer just like we would do with anybody else.

James: 30:38 One of the things I often share with our clients is: if you're going through change, you're going through change too. It's not that the organization's going through change and you're remaining static. You are going through change with them.

We often ask them to participate in these processes. You've got to share your stories because if you don't really connect for yourself to what your teams are feeling and experiencing, it's going to be hard for you to lead them through. But also it gives us a chance to figure out what's working and not working for you. When leaders do that, it requires a lot of vulnerability and trust and making them feel really comfortable getting vulnerable.

When they do, I mean, light bulbs go off over their heads. The things their teams have been trying to get them to hear for a year or two years or five years, they now realize immediately: "Oh, oh, oh, this is what this feels like." Then we can start to move them.

James: 31:18 One last thing I'll say on that: we were able to use these stories to map the actual employee or customer journey in a different way. We're working with a different organization right now, and what we realized is you've done all the right things from a change management and transformation standpoint. You've got the right tools, the right processes, and your team is still saying "we don't understand, we haven't heard, we don't know."

Well, they have heard, but they can't receive it. Why can't they receive it? Because they're afraid.

James: 31:41 What we really help them understand is what you're actually experiencing in your culture is a change journey that starts with anxiety, then goes to anticipation, then goes to achievement. Once we show that to them, they're like "I see this everywhere, I see this in myself." We said that's the best part about this. If you can relate to this, then you can be an authentic, vulnerable leader with your teams. They could say "James gets it, James is going through the same thing."

But then you can also say "James, here's how you can lead your team through this. Here's how you can get them from anxiety to anticipation. Here's how you get them from anticipation to achievement." When you put those types of emotionally-based stewardship leadership models in place and lay that over what is already maybe the right tools, the right tech, the right stack, now you've really supercharged the organization because you're speaking to both head and heart at the same time.

Peter: 32:30 Yeah, getting the leaders bought in and actually being not just part of the process, but really, "hey, I need to change too." That self-introspection piece is often one of the hardest parts.

James: 32:41 It's really hard, yeah, it's really hard, but it's so rewarding once you get them there.

Peter: 32:45 Yeah. Well, I think we're almost at time. I think we could probably carry on this conversation for quite some time, but I think at this point we like to wrap up. Any final thoughts you'd like to share with our listeners?

James: 33:10 I think what I would stress to folks is it does start exactly where you said - with a leader being willing to reflect and then engage. Those two things go hand in hand: reflect on my own experience as a leader and how might my experience be affecting others, and then engage them by asking them to share theirs with me. Role model the vulnerability that I want them to then demonstrate.

Once we start that process, the emotional side of change is now well underway. The other stuff is still going to take a lot of work, but I think we so often skip that really important part of what's the emotional process of this transformation. Because it's a change journey, and as humans we don't always like change. We need to be able to admit that to ourselves as leaders, acknowledge that in our teams, and then help them move forward.

Dave: 33:54 Yeah, I think there are a lot of little nuggets that have come through in the conversation. I really appreciated it and you can probably tell it's an area I think is so important and so underappreciated. I think the key thing that struck me - well two, I'm going to ruin Peter's day because I'm throwing two in here - but one is just the impact that Agile has and the importance of leadership. So many times it feels like we're disenfranchising leadership, and I think it's a really great message of how important their role is in a successful transformation into agile ways of work.

The second one is just the association of things like achievement and personal growth and the personal journey that people have within an organization and how that ties in with a culture which has high retention, high engagement. I think those are really leaving me with a bunch of questions going away and going "I wonder how well we do that within our own organization and I wonder what we're seeing in other organizations as well."

So Peter, I hope I've left you a few things behind.

Peter: 35:01 There must be something in all of that. It was a great conversation. So thank you, James. For me, I think there are many things you put out. I like the points around leadership - such a key point that often gets overlooked. But also just the entire piece you're doing there, capturing stories and drawing context from those and thinking about that as another point of visibility for the organization and the insights that can then give to leaders so they can start to think about their organizations in different ways. I think that's an incredibly valuable way of looking at things.

So with that, I think we can wrap up for today. Thank you, Dave, and thank you, James. This was a wonderful conversation.

James: 35:45 I appreciate it, you're welcome.

Dave: 35:47 Thanks a lot. Thanks again for joining us.

Peter: 35:49 Absolutely my pleasure. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.