Clare Muscutt talking with Gavin James about CX & using our intuition to help make better decisions.
Episode #011 Show Notes.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Hi Gavin.
Gavin James:
Hey, good morning.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
How are you?
Gavin James:
I’m fabulous, how are you?
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Fantastic to hear and thank you so much to all the listeners. So, Gavin, let’s get straight in there shall we?
Gavin James:
Sure.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Great, so I don’t know if you remember but when we met during lockdown it was just at the time around George Floyd’s murder and the world was going crazy and you and I connected over the sense of the social injustice and also the need for connection, right?
Gavin James:
Sure.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
I think I just would really love to kind of go back to where we left that conversation; where we started talking about for us personally we had the shared experience of our greatest lessons coming not from the awesome times when we were really successful but actually through some of the difficulties, if that’s okay with you?
Gavin James:
Absolutely.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
I love your mantra of ‘putting a lot of love in and wanting a lot of love back’ and I think that topic would be a really great starting point for today, so let’s go – but before we begin actually I’m sure the listeners are all wondering… I doubt they’ve met a girl called Gavin either and I never had, please do tell what is the story behind your name, Gavin?
Gavin James:
Well I can thank my warrior mum – she grew up with a Scottish grandmother and kind of learned to love everything about Celtic history and Gavin is a famous Celtic warrior; I think he was one of the Knights of the Round Table. She had always said “I knew you’d be a special baby, you have to have a special name and I’m gonna give you a warrior name, I know you’re gonna live up to it,” so I hope I have!
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Wow, that’s so cool. And did you grow up getting asked that question constantly, ‘why are you called Gavin’?
Gavin James:
Most people would say “That’s a boy’s name!” you know? And that was always kind of frustrating, but I don’t think I ever confused anyone in person – there could be lots of times in a working environment that you only deal with people on email, right? Then I’d show up in their office and they’d say “And you are” – I’m Gavin!
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yeah, I have to say I think that would’ve fooled me! I would’ve made the assumption that Gavin was probably gonna be a boy. So, I know you’ve got a really inspiring career story – you started out at Microsoft, you started your own tech company and eventually struck out on your own as a consultant. How exactly did that path evolve and what did you learn about yourself along the way?
Gavin James:
Well it actually started a lot of years, probably twenty years even before Microsoft doing a lot of different things in the earliest days of tech which kind of dates me – and then dropping out of that I learned a lot about running small businesses and decided to launch a children’s clothing company. When I was working for a tech start-up that went under I’d always been involved in the design side of the house in addition to the writing side, then I had this children’s clothing company for four years and that taught me very quickly that this is not about designing this cute thing - which we also learned that in CX too – it is about marketing and project management and you have to get that right and sometimes you have to just learn what you learn along the way and try to fight the good fight, right? So after killing myself doing that for four years I decided I wanted to go back into tech but at that point the internet was just getting started and I knew that I couldn’t just do writing; it would have to be really creative, so I taught myself everything about web design and graphic tools as they became available and all that stuff. That was how I started working with a tech startup that was going web animation at the very, very beginning of this, then they were bought by Microsoft and that’s how I got to Microsoft.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Oh right!
Gavin James:
So then I went to Microsoft and I had a couple of careers there: At first mostly on the writing side of the house where I managed all the user assistance for a software product, and even then I was starting to see like you can’t just be focussed on the technology, you have to be focussed on the user. I was responsible for making sure people could figure out how to learn and use this stuff and I could basically run with the developers and say “This is gonna be too much words for me to talk about it to explain it and too hard for anyone to learn it, that means we’re gonna have to adjust to make it more useable,” well, useability was kind of the problem child back then. This is the earliest days when it was never even called customer experience, you know? It was really trying to fight that good fight and after a while I left that group and decided I wanted to work on the design side of the house and with information design, how can we make it easier for people to use and learn these things by making information – just really understanding how people take in information, how they’re emotionally feeling about things when they’re going through a learning process which happens every day in CX now, right? So I did a lot of research to build out a bunch of innovative ideas and my boss at the time had been at the company for twenty years and she said “Hey, present this out to a bunch of leadership,” so I did and everyone kinda had glazed over eyes and I talked to my boss after that and she said “You know this is really cool, but it’s about five years ahead of its time, nobody’s ready for it yet,” and I thought “You know what? I know this is important and I know it’s gonna be a thing, and that is where I’m headed,” and twenty years later, you know, being empathetic customer experience is what everybody’s talking about, right? So that’s kind of what started me on this path, there was also a lot of negative dramas that happened being in an environment where it’s really about ego and empire building which I’m sure a lot of us – particularly women – in CX have encountered, right? So that was kind of one of the things that’s pinged my mantra but then right after that I went and helped launch a tech start-up and we’re all killing ourselves 7 days a week and everything but then, eventually, the CEO and founder kind of gets a Napoleon complex and doesn’t wanna listen to anybody when we’re saying “Hey, this is unusable, we’re never gonna be able to sell this, it’s great technology but it’s too complicated,” wouldn’t listen to anybody, basically I get scapegoated, you know, saying there must be something wrong, I’m not training well enough or I’m not marketing it well enough or whatever. It’s somehow my fault, it’s not the software’s fault. So I decided you know what? Screw that. I’m gonna go and do my own thing because I know that I’m not making this up, I’m not dreaming this and so when I left there that was kinda where I decided you know what, I did put a lot of love in and I want a lot of love back. I have brought a lot to the table: A lot of value, a lot of good experience, and there were people around me that agreed with me but clearly I was working in an environment with people that just didn’t honour that and I’m sure that a lot of people but especially women, yourself included, has encountered that – right? So when I set that mantra I decided that has to be the true north on my compass and it’s not just – it’s how I get treated, it’s the kind of clients I attract, it’s the kind of work I get to do, it’s how I get compensated, it’s that I don’t have to chase clients to pay the bill, that they’re gonna be fine paying me - as a consultant that’s mission critical, right? So that’s kind of brought me full circle to a lot of the consulting that I do today and fortunately setting that mantra has served me well because now it’s been fifteen years and it’s always worked for me.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
So much that resonated with me in what you talked about then. I guess it’s really cool to meet somebody that was there at the beginning, at the birth of some of these technologies that have shaped the world as they are today and I can imagine being told – I’ve been told myself – “You’re way before your time,” with some of my CX thinking, I can imagine what that must’ve been like for you before CX was even a thing saying “If you can unite product design and coding and user ability (as it was called then) together we could make something that will sell, Mr CEO,” and then being kind of minimised by that person must’ve been really difficult at that time for a number of reasons, but also because there was nobody else out there I guess with the same point of view as you whereas now there’s loads of us that talk about CX, right? And we can share those frustrations with each other, but I can imagine at the time that must’ve been really difficult for you. So you said there I think just maybe to kind of clarify that is that since you discovered your own true north and you let it guide you what that’s attracted is great energy and the right people that you wanna work with but it’s also prevented a lot of negative stuff like for example people not paying you or not being kind in terms of their terms, is that right?
Gavin James:
Well yes and it doesn’t mean that I was immune, right? I definitely had some really challenging times and one of the other lessons that I had learned was really paying close attention to how people communicate in their earliest communications. When you first start dealing with someone and I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say I think women are a little bit better with the intuition side of the house so we detect that a little bit better, but we’re also trying to be nice, peacekeepers, get along, do all that stuff, we let a lot of things slide, right? But in those earliest communications I learned to really pay attention because if there was something off, if you felt that they weren’t very considerate, they were flaky or they were condescending, whatever it was they were showing you what it’s gonna be like to work with them or to deal with them, and that was always right. On a few occasions though there was an exception where I met a lot of people that I call Shapeshifters and that was people that are really super nice to your face but they’re trying to get something for nothing; they’re trying to get a lot of your good will out of you but then all of a sudden they’re not really coming through with paying you or whatever - and I’m sure a lot of entrepreneurs encounter this, and the trick is to recognise it very early on. That was another painful lesson because I’d realise “Okay, I know my worth, I’ve gotta know my worth and not be giving away something for nothing,” unless I’m knowingly going in to do a pro bono thing to help someone, right? And that’s, you know, again as an entrepreneur in particular but as a woman in business you have to learn not to... I hate to say ‘be a victim’ but not to let your generous spirit and your good nature and your sense of wanting to keep the peace with everybody overtake what’s really a better sound business decision which is recognising when your intuition says something’s off here, this is not healthy for me and not healthy for my business so I’m not gonna go down that road.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yeah, it’s definitely something that you get wise to through painful experience. I don’t know if you saw the post that I shared on LinkedIn earlier this week about someone doing exactly that to me in my first year in business: They convinced me to work without a Purchase Order on a project that was worth £8,000 and then about week four started sexually harassing me, started sending me naughty messages and stuff. When I told him to stop they pulled the plug, took the work I’d done and didn’t give me a cent, not a penny, but because I didn’t have any contracts in place I didn’t have a leg to stand on. That taught me a hell of a lot about protecting yourself with clear contracts and boundaries but also there were loads of red flags right from the start with the guy and I just ignored them, I could see the prize of the money and I just ignored the warning signs because I was so keen to get the work. Never again will I ever!
Gavin James:
Right, it’s too big of a price to pay! I mean some of my biggest life lessons at this point in my life, I’m twenty years older than you and I still am seeing the price I’ve paid for not listening to my intuition. It wasn’t that I didn’t see it – a lot of people say “Oh wow, I didn’t even know it was coming!” – no, that’s not it, I saw it, I knew but either I let other things outweigh it or maybe I thought ‘Oh well, I can handle it,’ but your intuition never lies and that’s just one of those things that comes up even in business with clients. There was definitely times where intuition also is a valuable gift, a value you’re bringing to the table with the client because sometimes I think I’m spending more time talking clients out of something than into it because maybe they think “Hey we heard about X and we think we really need to do this,” but then you wanna talk with them and say - and even in CX you say - “In theory that’s a fantastic road to take,” right? But this is what it’s gonna involve. Do you really have the time and resources to make this happen because if you don’t then you may be doing your business a disservice because you may not be able to show up in a way that’s gonna be meaningful for customers and that will end up making you look worse.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
I get you. So thinking about your journey to where you are now and making those difficult decisions, listening to your intuition, that kind of thing: I’d read in the chapter that you wrote for a book about the point in your life where you decided to end your marriage and return to San Francisco. What made you decide to put yourself first in that scenario? Because I think for a lot of women the prospect of walking away from that amount of security and settlement with another human – I know the conversations I have is that’s a very frightening prospect even if it’s the right thing to do. What was that like for you?
Gavin James:
I think for me what comes to mind is there’s a line in one of my favourite movies Out Of Africa and at one point she’s trying to kind of coax him into her desire for a marriage and he’s a very free spirit and he says “I don’t wanna wake up one day and find I’m at the end of someone else’s life,” and I really came to that point of seeing there’s that point where, especially as women, there’s a very slippery slope between giving of ourselves without giving up ourselves and I definitely had crossed over that boundary too much for myself where I’m feeling like I’m living this other person’s life, I’m helping him solve all of his problems and running my own show and I sort of felt like okay, I’ve paid my dues, I’ve done this long enough, I don’t think this needs to be my job for the next fifty years, right? I wanna have a different kind of life I wanna be living and this is not it. We had talked about moving back to California for a long time just be somewhere warm (we were living in Seattle and it was pretty miserable there) but he kept prolonging it, prolonging it, prolonging it and I just knew that when I got back into California that I was happy here – I was never happy up there. And I could see that I was probably never going to be happy in that situation and there’s a point where as you say you finally decide it’s great to love other people but sometimes you have to love yourself just a little bit more and you have to choose yourself. And that idea that I don’t wanna end up being at the end of someone else’s life is a scary thought, you know? And ironically in my next relationship I got into it kind of started out to be the love of my life and amazing and then I ended up again in a situation that was probably the final karmic lesson that I would ever have to learn – if I had to go through that to learn the karmic lesson and never repeat it in this lifetime or any other, I’ve done it!
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Those karmic lessons, I’m so familiar with them because you end up being in that position of pain again and going “Oh shit, that’s the same lesson that I learned from that situation,” or with that guy or whatever. I’m the same, the toughest lessons I don’t learn easily and sometimes it’s a repeating pattern that I end up there again just make doubly sure that the universe is letting me know that I’ve learned it. So, you’re not alone, sometimes it definitely takes us more than one go round!
Gavin James:
Yeah and I think that, speaking back to the boundaries, I learned so much in the aftermath of that. I didn’t expect to be having that conversation here but it’s relevant to even the work situation where we hear a lot about people saying “Set healthy boundaries,” and yet when you step back you think “What does that really mean?” a lot of us don’t even really know what that means and until you actually – then I came across some resources where I really learned some new things about this variety, all this different range of types of boundaries and as a woman who is a coach for specific reasons, people going through particular hard times with particularly challenging emotional disorders (which I realise that’s what my partner had been) when you start seeing these seven different kinds of boundaries and this is what it looks like when those get tread on and you start seeing all these different things and you’re thinking “Wow, here’s all these different arenas in my life where I didn’t even think of them as boundaries,” you’re just navigating and trying to get along and be nice and whatever but when you start seeing that even things like time; when someone’s really invading on your sense of time or they won’t honour how you need to work, how you need to accomplish things even though they want to but they don’t let you do it – a lot of little things when you start learning how boundaries work all of a sudden it just flips a switch and you can see life very differently and you can see your work very differently and then you start seeing how boundaries play a role with your projects, how you manage your own time, how you deal with people, how you communicate… I started looking at it even from a customer experience perspective and see how are businesses really respecting what a customer, what a person as a normal human being, as a consumer out there living life, they’ve got all these emotional considerations only now maybe in the past couple of years are we hearing that really talked about in CX, right? I even remember trying to write blogs maybe four or five years ago and people I worked with would be saying “Well I get it but it’s too touchy-feely,” and now I can post those and people are all over it! So it’s really an interesting time in history in business and especially Covid has had that impact where now the idea is you have to be much more empathetic in your communications and in the kind of experiences you deliver. That is just monster now, right? Whereas before it was barely a thing, four years ago.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yeah, I guess it’s still not that well understood so perhaps it still seems like a panacea where you have to conquer in terms of CX and more broadly business how empathy, I think it’s been said for a long time, is the key to everything in CX, but we still can’t quite put our finger on how it works. Just to reflect on a couple of points that you said there around boundaries, taking us right back to the start of the conversation: When you feel a sense of a red flag going up or your intuition sparks that is usually when somebody is crossing one of your boundaries, isn’t it, or if they’ve done or said something that really triggers a value of yours. And you’re like me, you’re driven by your true north, your own set of purpose and values are so clear to you you only want to work with the four people who share that sense of values and boundaries. I just have to ask kind of a final question really because I don’t know how as a woman of such strong principles right now it must be hard living in Trump’s America and with the elections coming up soon… I hope you don’t mind me treading into that space but I’m curious having not been in the States for a while – how is that going? For someone who wants to spread love and being faced with so much hate, how are you coping with that?
Gavin James:
There’s a lot I could say about it that I won’t, but let’s say that for the past four years it’s been very painful, very embarrassing, very frustrating to be an American and being a woman in America, but the flip side is it makes me that much more determined having had a narcissistic partner and really learning a lot about narcissistic abuse it’s that much more difficult for me to see what Trump’s doing to our country because I still think that’s what he gets away with and a big part of it-
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Basically, a narcissist is President.
Gavin James:
Yeah! And it’s very frustrating. But I also learned the only way you ever deal with them, the only way to conquer them is you ignore them. It’s the only thing, it cuts off their life’s blood basically. It doesn’t mean that I won’t read the news, I do, but I won’t watch anything about him, I don’t engage in anything political about him, I’m really not gonna put any energy into that and instead I’m gonna focus on what I can change, which is me and how I deal with the world, putting my energy into bringing my best game to my work and my best game to my personal life and looking at how I wanna live my life. Often I’ve put off doing a lot of overseas travel – I wanted to live and work overseas for a long time and I’ve put that off usually because of relationships and then I was really gonna kick it up a notch being single again, then Covid happened!
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Oh yes, because we’d started talking about it didn’t we when we had our Zoom call, I’d been doing my Digital Nomad thing for the last couple of years and now landlocked in England but you’ve got the same dream, too, haven’t you?
Gavin James:
Absolutely, and living with this particular President, even if he wasn’t President I would still want it, but more than ever you kinda wish that you could be living in the outback of Australia or something - as far away from him as possible!
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yeah, I get you, I get you. So unfortunately, that’s all we’ve got time for today but if you were to give some closing advice to the women in CX out there what would be your key messages for them?
Gavin James:
Well it would probably circle back to a lot of what we’ve talked about here which is never stop fighting the good fight. If your intuition says this is the right thing for the customer and you’re working with businesses who, you know, they’re very close to the business, these are good people that have good intentions but they’re usually too close to the business to see it from a customer’s perspective. Your goal, your role is to always think like a customer and bring that to the table, keep bringing that to the forefront so people really can have an intimate understanding – an empathetic understanding – of what it means to be the customer for that business and what it’s really gonna take to make that an experience and to remember that people are having an experience whether you like it or not, it’s gonna be good, bad or indifferent and if it’s bad then you’re gonna lose them. If it’s indifferent then you’re wide open to being swallowed up by competition so it’s only if it’s good to exceptional are you gonna keep customers, and if you keep reminding your clients of that and using your intuition about what you know ia the right thing for customers I think maybe you have a chance to move the needle because you can help them figure out how to work internally to make those little shoots because a lot of the time it’s internal culture that’s just not there yet and every little bit helps.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
Yep, I agree, that’s awesome! Okay well thanks ever so much for being on the show, I hope things cool down in San Francisco and I really hope that you don’t get any more wildfires.
Gavin James:
Thank you so much, I super appreciate you allowing me to contribute here, it’s an awesome thing that you’re doing here to get women’s voices out there in CX.
Clare Muscutt- Host:
It’s been amazing to have you. And I’d just like to say thank you to all the listeners, please do join us again next week and thank you so much to our producer Joakim and our sponsors Effectly. I’ll see you all soon, bye for now, bye Gavin!