There’s more to strategy than having a shelf full of binders labeled “Strategy [Insert Year].” That’s what this week’s guest, Matt Homann from Filament, tells us. Matt’s influence in the legal market goes back a couple of decades, and he’s been a voice in the blogging sphere for a number of years. At Filament, he works with legal, as well as other industries (like the St. Louis Cardinals) to help leaders better relate and guide their organizations. As he puts it, “we help smart people think together better.” Matt believes that the way we tell our stories will help people join in on the overall efforts and strategies of the organization. It’s easy to tell our stories to like-minded people, but we also have to tell (and sell) our story to those who are opposed to the strategies. More importantly, we have to reach those in the middle, who could go either way. If you convince that 50-80% of people willing to join you if you give them the right motivation, it can change the entire momentum of your organization’s efforts. (5:25 Mark)
Links to Topics Covered:
Monday Morning Meeting Newsletter
Unreasonable Request Post (and Poster)
Idea Quarantine
Powerpoint Bingo
Information Inspirations
We flip this week’s episode and try something new. Our information inspirations segment will come after the interview. Let us know (@gebauerm or @glambert or call 713-487-7270) and let us know if you like or hate this new setup.
Why isn’t data privacy a bigger deal?
There’s a great episode of Make Me Smart which discusses Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That section is responsible for the social media and overall Internet that we have today. What caught Greg’s ear on this show was that co-host, Molly Wood, went on an absolute rant about how private and government entities are still not taking our privacy data as seriously as they should. Just this week there was a breach at US Customs where facial recognition data was hacked. With things like DNA databases, and other personal data out there in unsecured databases, and with penalties being relatively light, Molly was not a happy camper. (36:32 Mark)
Are states stepping up for consumer information?
Marlene points out that while California’s Consumer Privacy Act starts in 2020, Nevada has leaped ahead with their own privacy laws. Even New York is looking to join the list of states requiring more protection of consumer data. Is the path to protection going to be through individual state laws? (38:26 Mark)
Marlene contributes to Casetext’s special report
Casetext has released a new special report called “Evaluating and Adopting Legal Technology in 2019.” Our very own Marlene Gebauer is a contributor to the report. You can download it for free. (39:30 Mark)
Follow your passions
While being a legal information professional might be Greg and Marlene’s professional passion, librarians might find that there are other ways to make a living that fits there own passions. Lynn Hickernell is such a person who left librarianship behind to become a singer/songwriter. She tours the country, has CDs and music videos, and even a podcast which focuses in on music for children. It’s great to talk with people who have found their passion and even may re-inspire you to remember why you love what you are doing as well. (40:37 Mark)
Interview Transcript
Greg: Joining us today is Matt Homann, who is the founder and CEO of Filament out of St Louis, which I know Matt is preparing for a Game Seven this week between the Blues and the Bruins. So good luck to the Blues there Matt.
Matt: Thank you.
Greg: Matt and I go way back to the old days when he was with the LexThink. And of course, we kind of known each other through our blogging and tweeting over the years. So Matt, welcome to The Deacon Review.
Speaker 2: I am happy to be here.
Speaker 1: It’s not a secret to our listeners that my mom doesn’t understand what I do. So how do you describe what it is? You and the folks do there at Filament?
Speaker 2: So we help smart people think together better. We do meetings, conferences, retreats, off sites and what’s interesting about our business model and it’s you pretty unique is that when people come to us, although we do go on the road, we don’t let people rent our space. We’ve got a 20,000 square feet innovation space in downtown St Louis, and they’ve got to buy the entire meeting from us. So we not only host their meetings, we design, we facilitate. I have an artist who draws live in every session. We ban power point. We’re really trying to give them a better meeting, whether they would title it a conference, an offsite strategy session, a process designed Sprint or any one of a mix of those things. We do it all is a turnkey offering here at Filament, and we allow them to focus on solving problems versus presenting things.
Greg: What type of businesses use your service?
Speaker 2: It’s been actually the best part about this business is as you know, and I’m sure we’ll get into it. I am a recovering lawyer, and it’s been a lot of my time, really, beginning this career doing work with lawyers. But here we get to work with some of our city’s best non-profits. We get to do some really cool work with some of our biggest companies here in town, and then we also get to play with some fun things that we could do ourselves to. The Cardinals are a customer of ours, for example, but then Purina is a really big customer. Emerson, Ameren, our public utility, But then we’re going to stuff with United Way because we have space, it even changes the capacity to deliver services of what otherwise be cost prohibitive for nonprofits. We’re doing stuff, a lot of stuff in equity and social justice, and it’s been a really neat kind of run. When you look at our breath of clients, they’re all over the board.
Marlene: So, Matt, I noticed you recently tweeted about storytelling when it came to things like new projects, initiatives or ideas.
- The story for those who will probably love what we’re doing.
- The story for those who will likely hate it, and
- The story for those who don’t care either way.
You mentioned specifically to focus on those who don’t care either way. Why is that?
Matt: I think that we get so focused on. It’s easy to tell the stories to people who love what we’re doing, who are like us, and then we think, Oh, then we’ve also got to tell the story to the objectors that people who are going to hate it, try and get them on board. But there’s this big middle, right, whether it’s 70% 80% 50% who get ignored, and when you think about change management, and I would love to talk about that a bit as well, we spend all of our time focusing on either end of the spectrum, but we don’t focus on the middle. And so how do you get someone who might be inclined to perhaps go either way to give him the push you want to give them? And so those stories of I know it’s you kind of hate our technology is example, but you’re okay with it would kind of like something better. Let’s have a better story about that versus selling all the super cool bells and whistles or trying to convince someone that why they need to change their entire workflow or the way that they think about things.
Marlene: Yes, So it’s sort of like, you know, you’re getting the people in the in the thick of the curve. So you know, you have the 20% of people who will adopt things right away, and then the 20% who will never do it. You’re looking for that meet in the middle, right?
Matt: Right. And it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to tell the other stories as well, but we tend to build maybe one or two. You know the stories, stories telling such an interesting thing for me. Because if you think about the oldest story, maybe the second oldest story, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl reunited and live happily ever after. That story is an 800 page Russian novel. It is a 22 minutes sitcom, or it’s the 15 second interlude in Ms Pac Man, right? It’s the exact same story. And so even if the story is the same, the attention your audience has to pay the medium in which they’ll consume it become really, really crucial. And then to add to that the traditional. And I think this is a managing partner problem. We certainly see it with CEOs we work with, the “I’ve told my group of people once and expect a complete 100% transmission of that perfect message throughout the entire organization with no loss of fidelity and within five minutes.” And so the storytelling becomes so crucial because you’ve got to think about all those things and then figure out ways to tell the stories over and over.
Marlene: It’s great. I just think about Picard, you know, “Make it so.”
Matt: I think that’s right. At some point, you might be able to get two layers down where they are making it so and then you get the person, “Like, why the hell are we making it so?”
Marlene: Wait, I don’t understand. Back in February, you posted 10 rules of legal innovation which, you know, isn’t that big of a deal. We have a lot of people post these sorts of things all the time. What was interesting was that this was actually a reprint of the same set of rules that you published in 2008. Does this mean you were ahead of the game in 2008? Or that the legal industry is still not innovating efficiently?
Matt: Yeah, I’d like to say yes to both, because back in 2008, and I know Greg can remember this because that was when we were both in the thick of early legal blogging, there was a lot of reaction to it, all right. There was a lot of people who were saying, Oh, this is great. I totally agree. We’re ready to innovate. But the problem, and I found this to my detriment over the years is that it’s great to be ahead of the curve, but it is not profitable unless you can find other people who are willing to pay for the privilege of joining you there. And so this really cool idea of here’s what we should think about, is nothing unless you can figure out what levers to pull and find people who will help you pull them to get people to where they need to be. There’s a great quote. It talks about the where the future is. William Gibson, I think the science fiction author, right, “The future is already here it’s just unevenly distributed.” And that’s totally true. And all the futures that law firms in particular are talking about are futures their customers have been thinking about implemented, engaging with and in some cases even discarding, three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago. So being an innovative lawyer or ahead of the curve and legal is a pretty, pretty gentle curve in a pretty low bar. Yeah, no comment from the peanut gallery… you’re both nodding and like…
Marlene: Yeah, yeah, it’s like no argument here. So, Matt, you admit that you suffer from idea surplus disorder. Is this like the Buddhist Monkey Mind, where your mind is very restless, with “go” button is constantly on. Do you consider it a good or bad thing? And how do you manage it?
Matt: It’s both, and it is good and it’s challenging. I think one of the when I talk about ideas surplus disorder It was originally coined as my synonym for the shiny shiny syndrome, the “oh squirrel” sort of thing that many of us have. But I think that it is profoundly a slightly different thing in that there are some people who can’t get past, and this is the Monkey Mind, who can’t get past all the distractions of the presence to focus on the future, to do things that move their career forward, to make their families better, to stop procrastinating. For me, the idea surplus disorder is a similar affliction in that I keep thinking of things that are really great ideas that might need that implementation time, or that the world might not be ready for, or at least not willing to pay for. The way that I’ve managed. It is, first of all, just kind of step One is admit that you have a problem. “My name’s Matt Homann I have Ideas Surplus Disorder”, right? But the second things is that, and this is something again I reposed to just recently on our Filament Blog, though I had written it 10 years ago or so for the Non-Billable Hour was something that I was using in my practice about quarantining your best ideas. So if you have that great idea, set it aside for a little bit whether you want to use a form, whether I always use my secretary’s tickler file the “everyday” and then the “12 months of the year” and I would have an idea and I would say, “Hey, bring this back to me in 60 or 90 days” and the truth will be one of two things would happen. I would either have moved on from it, and it wouldn’t be as fresh and amazing as I originally thought, which is a perfect outcome. It’s like, Oh, I don’t need to do that anymore, But the second thing is that sometimes that would come back to me over and over again in my head. I’d wake up at night thinking about it, and that was a signal to start working on it sooner. But that being able to just know that you’ve got plenty of things to do and there’s very few ideas, I don’t mean this in a super negative way, but especially in legal, that can wait there. There’s not a whole lot of Oh my goodness, I’ve just figured out a brand new compensation scheme for law firms that removes all of the challenges around collaboration, sharing clients, adoption of technology, productivity. I’ve had that idea, as of many others, every year for the last 25. And the industry still not ready for it. So being able to put a pause on ideas is a chance for you to say, Hey, let me come back to a fairly short amount of time. But it also gives me the permission to go back to the things that are most important to work on right now.
Greg: Yeah, and that kind of reminds me of what you said earlier. What Marlene was referencing was get that middle piece of the group of people that either don’t or do care, it can go either way. I heard someone on another podcast, I think it was Tom Bruce. It talked about there’s a lot of bones in the technology graveyard of ideas that were ahead of their time. And I think that’s kind of the same thing. You gotta do what the market is ready to move on. So, yeah, that’s a good way to put it.
Matt: I think if I can just tie those two things together. One thing that is the coolest part about our work is that we have so many people from different industries coming and giving us their meetings. And so they give us way more permission to try things in real time with them than we might otherwise. Especially we’re going on site. And so one thing that we’ve really started to focus in on over the last six months or so I’ve been introducing with our clients is how do we bridge that storytelling with a new idea? How do we get those two things to fit together? And so instead of change management where you end up with people after an initiative or product is built or initiative launch, then they spool up, say now, Let’s convince everybody to do this right? The ship has sailed. That’s all done. Now just use this crappy product that we’ve built for you. We’ve been using this term change advocacy teams. Build the team at the very beginning whose job isn’t to influence the product, necessarily. They’re not designers. They’re not coders. They’re not technologist. But there’s people, there are teams, whose job it is to in parallel, build better stories for what that change needs to be finding the advocates and of smoothing over some of the bumps with the detractors and building those stories for different levels in an organization. And so that changed advocacy model. And that’s why we called the CHAT team CHange Advocacy Team, because it’s really hard to say Change advocacy over and over and over again, is you build that CHAT team and you start to have some of these conversations about change at the beginning and through the middle of a project, not just at the end, and that’s a way to kind of smooth over some of those innovation hurdles you have in many organizations.
Marlene: Yeah, because it’s interesting because you get, you know, you get the feedback right up front and during the process, and you can you can basically be agile and make changes as you’re going through the process rather than wait till the end. When you’re doing this role out and then you hear all the feedback, it’s like, Oh, now it’s too late, right?
Matt: That’s right. There’s an old Mitch Hedberg joke. The lake comedian. He’s who say, “I don’t have a girlfriend, but I do have someone who’d be really upset if she were to hear me say that right now.” We tell that joke all the time, not because of the boyfriend girlfriend dynamic, but because there are people in your organization who don’t need to be involved in a project that we really upset if they knew that they weren’t. And so trying to find some of them and give them a place to do, to engage, to do work, to think about things is a really help. And we know that when we ask people about that, like you should be here and I sure, that joke, oh, “Greg should come” versus maybe it had been left them off the invite list
Marlene: Yeah, it’s a really good point because, you know, often we hear that attorneys feel like that this adoption of new technology and change, you know, this is being done to them. This is a real opportunity to bring people into the room and make them feel included,
Matt: Right, and the problem you’re asking them to solve is a hard one. We were doing a law firm retreat a couple months ago for a firm in the South. And the older gentleman he looked and sounded like Wilford Brimley, partner who may have needed to retire 20 years ago. But he was still great at what he did. Love the work. I love the challenge. The people in the firm loved him. But we were talking about some of these talent challenges, especially among younger lawyers, retention of women, people of color, etcetera. And he kind of rolled his eyes and just said, “This stuff is just really hard. I’m gonna be retiring soon. I should leave this for the younger lawyers, right? The managing partner and so on and so forth.” And I said to him, I said, you know, when is the last time a client is coming to your office with a really novel, hard legal problem, and you said “No, I’m out. It’s too hard for me.” And it was at that moment where he started to realize that Oh my God, I love solving harder problems. This is just one that might not get build every six minutes of my day. But engaging lawyers and telling them that these are hard problems to solve, they’re all in they just don’t get enough opportunity and enough permission to engage with non billable problem solving in a very consistent way.
Greg: That gives me some ideas when I get somebody that says, “Well, I’m too close to retirement to start this project,” and I should just ask him, “All right, so what’s the cut off age? Should we just cut everyone that’s over 65 out of the process?” Or was what’s the cut off?
Matt: Right? And you should ask them, “how many of your clients are you turning away because you’re too close to retirement to do their work?”
Marlene: Yeah. ask him that, Greg. And tell me how that goes
Greg: I’ll be asking on the inside.
Matt: Give them a little tiny clip of this podcast. And, yeah, just listen to that for those that tell me what you think
Marlene: Matt, obviously you have a lot of experience in this space. What are some of the common limitations in creative thinking that you’ve come across when dealing with executives? We have a running joke here that, you know you can’t change the mind of a millionaire. So how do you get stakeholders to change their perspective?
Matt: Well, there’s some flipping that you’ve got to make it their idea right, which is partially true. A lot of our work when we do stuff, whether it’s firm retreats, whether it’s executive meetings off sites, et cetera, is that we put people in small groups, and so we use and it seems simple. We use worksheets and other tools and activities and exercises so they’re in smaller groups, and they have a chance to surface ideas individually and what that does in some cases, it removes the impediment to decision making from all but one group. And so is people come back you start to see a bit Mohr cohesion than you might if everyone’s in the classic U shaped boardroom tables, and the CEO just won’t stop talking. But another thing that we’ve seen is that most of time this is one of the challenges when leaders lead their own meetings is they can’t play. The role they need to play is the disinterested facilitator. But then when they if they do that and they’re good at it, they’re depriving the room of their insight. And the room, then, is like, “Well, when is when is Wendy going to talk?” All right, She’s too busy worrying about us going to bathroom and getting all the voices on the table. A third thing is that people don’t understand the purpose of their meetings. All right, is this meeting to decide something? Is it to get input on something? Is it to think about something? Is it to generate ideas? And so there’s all kinds of meeting misbehaviors that happened because everyone walks into the room thinking the day’s about something different,
Marlene: and whose responsibility is that?
Matt: It should be the leadership team, right? Not just the leader. And that’s one of things we try to help our customers with is you know, you only know what you know, But we are what we bring in the Mitch Hedberg girlfriend sort of con person to those conversations as well and say, You know, what are we trying to accomplish? And we spend the very beginning of our meeting scene if we’re aligned on our purpose and if we’re not, we reset. But it’s hard because you just assume everyone knows what you know, because the only head you’ve ever been in is your own. One other thing that is really hard, and this isn’t just leaders, it’s everyone is, we tend to underestimate the novelty of her own ideas. So an idea that comes naturally to you, you assume it comes naturally to everyone else. And if your organization isn’t already doing that, you assume someone else has thought about it, decided against it because it wasn’t worth pursuing. Yet the only person who has had that set of ideas and experiences in your life is you. So your idea could be completely no. And so we asked a lot about what is a small I innovation. What are simple things? We can try, what our experiments we might do versus what is our next initiative. What is the “Binder of strategy” need to look like? That gathers dust for the next five years until he rinse and repeat and do it again. And it is…
Marlene: I love “The Binder of Strategy…”
Matt: I almost want to have one behind me on my shelf here in my office. It just says “Binder of Strategy”, because we focus on these five year plans, and it’s a box to check. It has nothing to do with reality versus how do we think about making teams more agile, experiment, engaged, try little things, make little bets and then build their process into how do we do that again and again and again and again.
Greg: I like the one part where you talked about you think people share your ideas and your experiences when again you’re the only person that’s had those ideas and experiences. Can we talk about working humbly versus working in an ego driven manner, or where it’s hyper competitive and what the impacts are of that?
Matt: It’s such a good question because it’s it doesn’t it doesn’t come naturally to many people, right? You either think your ideas are great or you think they’re terrible. There’s very few people who live in the middle of that, and so it’s a stretch in towards the middle for nearly everybody. One of things that we try to do with our customers, especially when they’re here, is to point out from time to time when they and we’ll never say you’re not acting humble. But there’s lots of conversation in this group of most of its coming from you. Another question we ask is, you know, “everyone brings an elephant the room, which one did you bring with you today?” It’s so hard, especially when so much of a lawyer’s identity… I know that not everyone who’s listening to this is or is an attorney or works with attorneys… But so much of their identity is tied to measurements that are not connected with how good they are at what they do. And so you find. I think a lot of lawyers have a really interesting sense of themselves because they’re good at what they’re measured at. And they’ve been told that that makes them a good lawyer or a good manager or a good boss. Or because they’re good at what they manage because of what they’re measured at, They don’t spend any time trying to get better at other things. So how to live more humbly. How to be present in the moment. How to listen. How to give feedback. All of those sorts of things, are skills that, because they’re rarely measured on the compensation review at the end of the year, get built on, supported, taught or corrected. So I don’t have a great answer to your question, but it’s tough, especially in this world, because it’s such a hard place to be for many because they’re not asked to be there.
Greg: I was going to say that I’m a little depressed after the answer.
Matt: But the best firms focus on this right because they know that, especially when you think about talent. And I don’t see too many firms measuring the cost of losing talents or not getting them in the first place. But it’s hundreds of thousands of dollars per miss right? Someone who comes in for a couple of years. And so we think about why should we spend time learning how to give and receive feedback right? And the measurement is if I’ve got 1,000 lawyers and I’ve got to give them an hour of training, which isn’t enough on feedback, and they’re building $1,000 an hour. How does that even make sense financially for us? Because you’re not tracking and measuring, because we’re going to lose 50 fewer lawyers over the next three years. Because we’re going to build a place where people want to work, where we’re going to think about the ways that we deliver work. We pay attention, to otherwise marginalized populations. We think about equity, diversity and inclusion and everything we do. And we think diversity, I believe, is fundamentally a talent strategy and inclusion is a culture strategy, and we assigned people with power to engage with us. But it’s hard work again. It gets to the point I made with Wilford Brimley, it’s super hard work to do this stuff well. And you’re coming at it from scratch in most cases, because firms haven’t built that into their culture, their training models, etcetera. So I didn’t I didn’t make you happier, Greg, But at least there are some people out there doing it well.
Greg: No, no…
Marlene: This isn’t about making Greg happy.
Greg: It never is… All right. Hey, Matt. I wanted to go back and talk about storytelling. What is the benefit of learning how to tell a story?
Matt: I mean, I think that from the beginning of time people have communicated, shared, learned, grown to engage with one another through telling stories. And so it is something that is at once both fundamentally part of our brains and the way that we engage with the outside world. But it’s also something that feels like it should be natural, and I don’t need to learn it. One of things that we find, and this gets to all of these challenges, is that our brains can’t help but fill in the blanks between the beginning of the story and the end of the story, right? If I say this happens and then over here this happens, our brains automatically fill in the blanks. And if we’re a pessimist, if we’re in a bad mood, if we’re angry, that story that we tell ourselves and share with others is a horror story is at best a farce dripping with sarcasm and so on and so forth. It’s all and there’s not a ton of people like “this happen and this happen and so it’s all going to be great,” right? We all worked with a couple of those people, right? So part of the story telling isn’t just learning how to tell a story. It’s how to tell the stories more often. It’s how to go from here to here with the story here and here and here and here. To eliminate many of those gaps that otherwise people fill in themselves, or at least narrow that. And so when we think about stories, it’s not just being good at telling stories, because lawyers think they are a lot and many of them are incredible at it. But it’s understanding what story to tell, to whom I need to tell it, how often I need to tell it and how and what the first sentence of every chapter is versus the “It was the best of times, and the worst of times” and then the end. That’s what we didn’t do.
Greg: So tell us about one of the learning sessions that you do there at Filament where you talk about making an unreasonable request. It kind of reminds me of there’s a Ted talk out there from, and I think it’s a Jia Jiang, where he would ask strangers for things for every day for 100 days so that he could learn to take rejection. I don’t know if you’ve seen that,
Matt: I have.
Greg: Tell us about what you do when you make an unreasonable request.
Matt: I have a friend who and she told the story years ago and it was really profound to me. She makes an unreasonable request five days a week – it could be a friend, a colleague, a family member, a complete stranger – and the way that she phrases it, and we’ve now nuanced this a bit too fit for our work, nut, you know, Greg, I have an unreasonable request for you. I’m asking you not because I think you’ll say yes. In fact, I totally expect you to say no. I’m asking just so I get better at asking for things. And if you have an unreasonable request for me, I’ll probably say no, too. It’s so by giving it that sort of framing, you’ve given people a story you’ve given them permission to say no. And really, the purpose of unreasonable requests isn’t to get more things. It’s just to get better at asking for things and to learn. I think from a human nature standpoint that people are willing to help. We tend to judge the likelihood of someone saying yes to us through the lens of how hard it would be to do ourselves. And we also often fear the idea that now if they give us something that would be world changing for us, we have to give them something of equal value in return. And we can’t. Because we don’t think we can give them anything that is, that is of comparable value. And so we’ll do in our meetings at the end of retreats, this idea of everyone makes unreasonable request and also makes an extraordinary offer. And the extraordinary offer is here something I’m willing to do for this room, disconnected with my request, and what will happen nearly always is half of those unreasonable requests, someone will say, “I can help you with that” or “I’ll do that for you”, or “let me introduce you to someone who can” and so on. and so forth. And the extraordinary offers make people cry They’re like, Oh, my goodness, this person is willing to do this for me. I would have never even thought to ask. And so using that framework is a really powerful away to quite frankly, understand what people are willing to do for you, and to revisit the lens of things that you are willing to do for others as well.
Greg: Well, I tell people I work with that. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. Hey, one of the other thing she do is this thing called the “Newsletter Monday Morning Meeting.” What is that about?
Matt: It is where my itch that I now I’m able to scratch that used to that used to be blogging. So I still consume ton of blog’s. I read a lot of books. I don’t listen to podcasts as much as I want to, just because my commute is fairly short. But this idea that Monday morning meeting for us is how do I share some of those really cool things we found. So every Monday, we’re now 25 or 30 weeks in a row on this, it feels like. I send a newsletter out as a little bit of Filament news. It’s not very preachy or sales-ie, though a lot of people who get in are customers or who have been here. We’re now starting to share a tool we use this week. I just shared this idea of the five futures, which is a strategy planning exercise, that we use. I sent pdfs of the exercise, a little bit of description, how it works and then just kind of the cool things I found in the past week. So they tend to be around organizations, around meetings, how to collaborate better those sorts of things. But it has been a really fun exercise to do because I now know that it makes me share more and write more than I had been. And it is the exact same thing that my old blog, The Non-Billable Hour was. People say wow man, how do you write all this blog? I’m like most of my blogging, is a sentence of “Wow, this is something I found cool”, a paragraph or two completely with attribution, quoted from someone else, and then a final sentence of “And here’s how you might use this if you’re a lawyer” and that’s it. So this is a similar version of that. But I’m surprised at how impactful has been to others because I think again, the brain I’m in is my own. I go “everybody looks at this stuff and sees this stuff” and the truth of it is if it is not shareable on Facebook, people generally won’t see it, so we try to fill in those gaps.
Greg: There was another thing that I saw where you talk about a “Thinking day.” What is a thinking day?
Matt: I don’t know about it. I like I don’t know where it was. Still, we experiment with everything here. So, we’re looking at two version of one is just to take a day where you don’t beat yourself up for not doing work. It’s a chance to be out and whether it’s walking through the park or going to a museum or just sit in your office and not sitting in front of a computer screen just to think about some things from time to time. It’s even better if you have a kind of a propelling question, even if it just sits with you all day and you’re not actively trying to answer it. How might we do X, Y or Z? But the other thing that we’ve been really trying to work on here at Filament, is that when we have open days, we’d love for people to come work with us. So part of our thinking, they were calling it Filament Fridays, and it’s not going to be every Friday. I love alliteration if you can’t tell, right, It’s not going to be every Friday, but when we’ve got an open gap on the calendar, we’ll throw the newsletter. And people want to work with us. We’ve got a really cool space here. They could hang out, and the only thing we asked them to give in exchange is an hour or so of their day, to pitch what they’re working on, to offer help to others. So it’s a little bit of a co working with a purpose, but not something that we would do… we don’t want to be a co working space, but there’s not a lot of community around people working on new ideas. So how do we effectuate that and give something back, especially working in some nonprofits who might be doing cool things that they like a little bit of insight on sounds.
Greg: Sounds like a lot of fun. And I liked the alliteration as well. Well, Matt, I appreciate you taking the time to talk with us today. This has been very insightful.
Marlene: Matt. Thank you very much.
Matt: I totally enjoyed it. I’m glad we finally got together on this.
Greg: All right. Well, good luck to the Blues.
Speaker 2: Let’s go Blues! Play, Gloria.