[00:00:05] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Two questions set at the heart of every successful business. How do you build a culture where people tell the truth, and how do you turn customers into loyal, consistent leads? In this week’s episode, Dominic Thurbon from Alchemy Labs first unpacks how disinformation creeps into workplaces and why honest cultures outperform. Then, serial entrepreneur Karl Schwantes joins me to explain how creating remarkable customer experiences can turn trust into lasting business growth. From SoundCartel, I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist, and this is Business Essentials.
Disinformation in workplaces/businesses
Our first guest is Dominic Thurbon, also known as Dom. He’s director at Alchemy Labs. He’s also author of To Be Honest, a new business and leadership book addressing the crisis caused by disinformation, its troubling impact, and what needs to change. The book examines why truth is not just a nice to have, but the foundation of healthy businesses. When people hear the term disinformation, they often think of politics or social media. So I kicked off the interview by asking, Dom, how does disinformation quietly show up inside ordinary workplaces?
[00:01:21] Dominic Thurbon: Conversations about misinformation, disinformation, fake news, alternative facts? They are everywhere. And it’s tempting to think, oh, that’s a news media thing. That’s a politics thing. That’s a social media thing. But as you say, the truth is it’s massively relevant to business leaders. It’s probably worth defining. There’s two slightly different things we talk about a lot here. So misinformation and disinformation, and they both show up slightly differently. But once you know what they are, they kind of smack you in the face. So misinformation is just simply wrong or false information. So if you’re doing a report for a client and you accidentally put wrong numbers in it. That’s how misinformation might show up inside your business. Happens every day. Happens to all of us. Often by accident. This information is deliberately wrong or false. Information spread with the intent to deceive. So if you’re listening to this and you do reports for a board or a CEO or a manager, if you cook the books and like fill it with deliberately wrong information, that’s disinformation. So once you know that, I think it kind of makes sense how they show up quietly inside ordinary workplaces. But the one that I think we don’t notice a lot is when it shows up for really good, noble reasons. So the quietest way it shows up is in our failure to have hard or unpleasant conversations because we care. So when someone comes to us and says, how did I do? Or they do a presentation for you and they say, what did you think was that good? Or they present a document or a pitch deck. And they say like, can I have some feedback on this? And what you really think is this isn’t very good, but what you say is, yeah, that’s great. And we do it because we care about the person. We don’t want to have an unpleasant conversation, but that’s actually disinformation. It’s knowingly putting out something false into the world for great reasons, but in ways that create real harm. So sometimes it shows up deliberately, sometimes it shows up accidentally, sometimes it shows up incredibly quietly for very noble reasons.
[00:03:25] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Now, you’ve spoken about how truth is not just a nice to have, but a crucial foundation of healthy businesses. Can you explain to me why that’s the case?
[00:03:35] Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, it’s an incredibly crucial foundation. You know, the numbers on that are astounding businesses with an honest culture. So that’s where people tell the truth. Enjoy up to 20% performance premiums over businesses that don’t, and businesses with strong what they call integrity management systems. So that’s basically like actual processes that encourage people to be honest. Enjoy up to a 40% premium. And so you’re absolutely right. It’s not just a nice to have. It drives the engine of profit and performance inside a business. The final answer to why that’s the case is at risk of sounding trife. It’s because real world problems require real world solutions. So if you’re running a business, there are objective facts about that business that exist outside your preference and opinion. Your product works or it doesn’t. Your team performs or they don’t. You successfully adopt AI or you don’t. You hit your numbers or you fail to hit your numbers. We live in a world of facts that exist objectively and outside our personal preferences and proclivities and opinions. And so if we can’t grapple with the facts about business, then we are, by definition, doing business in some form of a fantasy land. So when you look at issues that are facing businesses today, how do we innovate? Like if you’re listening to this podcast. These will all be issues you’re facing right now in your business. How do we innovate? How do we adapt to disruptive new technologies? How do I keep up with my customers rising expectations? These are deeply practical challenges rooted in the real world. And that means as hard as it is to say this, there are actually right and wrong answers to those questions. And so in that universe, truth is the most important and powerful tool we’ve got for grappling with the objective facts about business to make sure that our solutions, our ideas, our products, our services actually work to deliver value.
[00:05:28] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: So many business leaders say that they want honesty in their business, but employees still hesitate to speak up. In those cases, what might leaders unintentionally be doing that discourages truth telling in the company culture?
[00:05:41] Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, I feel like this question is the middle of the bullseye, right? I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met a CEO or a leader who doesn’t say that they want honesty. In fact, I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t say that they want honesty. And it might surprise you, or I suspect probably won’t actually surprise anyone, that one of the most consistent findings in social science research around the world, across cultures, is that people say one of the most important things in the world is truth and honesty. Everyone says they want it. In fact, more than two thirds of companies have the word integrity or honesty in their value statements. But less than 20% of staff trust that their leaders are telling the truth. And the evidence shows that almost all of us, the same ones of us, the same people who are saying how important honesty is. Evidence shows that all of us lie almost every day. In fact, 60% of people. This is pretty wild. 60% of people lie multiple times every hour. It’s crazy right? We’ve got these two things going on where all of us say, yeah, yeah, yeah. Honestly, it’s the most important thing in the world. And leaders say, yeah, I want my people to be honest. But then when you look at our behavior, no one behaves honestly all the time, right? Basically no one. And so that question you asked, which is what are we doing unintentionally that is discouraging? The actual telling of truth is a really important question.
[00:07:02] Dominic Thurbon: And I think it’s the simple answer to the question is, we fail to tell the truth, even though we say it’s important because it’s scary, right? We’re worried that we’ll upset people that will hurt people, that it might cause us personal harm or risk. And when you look at black box recordings from flight decks of doomed aircraft, right? So this is what pilots are saying to each other before the plane goes down. What those recordings reveal is that often junior pilots won’t speak up and tell hard truths to captains hard truths, by the way, like, mate, we’re going down. Like they won’t speak up and say hard truths to captains because the power dynamic inside the cockpit is such that it’s too scared to tell the truth. So let me just be clear about that. People would rather fly into a mountain than speak up when it’s hard. And so I think the thing leaders unintentionally do is they make it scary for people by creating the sense that there’ll be consequences for telling the truth. And really, that’s often just in the way they react when people come to them to tell the truth. How we react is this doctor Emily Heath is a neuroscientist, says every interaction teaches people how to behave. And I think as leaders, we need to understand the way we react when someone comes to us with something truthful. That moment is teaching them how to act in future. And so the way we respond in those moments becomes incredibly important.
[00:08:34] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Now, I want to talk a bit more about the idea of practical honesty, which your book focuses on a bit, and dig deeper into how can business owners encourage hard conversations without creating defensiveness or tension.
[00:08:46] Dominic Thurbon: Yeah. I mean, that is kind of the ultimate question of how do you actually do it? I think if you were listening to this interview and you’re a manager or a leader, a CEO, a business owner, this is a bit that’s most important, right? Because as we say, we know our actions teach people how to behave. So I think there are two things business owners and leaders can do to encourage hard conversations. So the first thing is very simple, which is never, ever shoot the messenger. A few months ago, President Trump got numbers he didn’t like from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you remember this, Erica McIntyre presented numbers to the president that said the jobs market was suffering that he wanted, and his response was to fire her. He literally shot the messenger. Good luck ever getting the next head of Bureau of Labor Statistics, to tell you the truth again. So first thing, never shoot the messenger. The second thing is go first. Go first with a truth about Yourself. So I don’t want to take too long to explain this, but there’s a subtle thing that’s really important here. There are three very distinctive types of truth inside a business is what I call the truth, right? So this is the truths we talk about that are sort of in scare quotes out there, right? We might say, oh, our competitors are doing X, Y, and Z.
[00:10:05] Dominic Thurbon: Oh, the regulator is doing this. Oh, sales people do X, Y, z. It’s true that we say about the world outside of ourselves. The second type of truth is what I call we truth, right? So this is when we’re talking to members of our in-group about our in-group. This is how we as a company talk about ourselves. It’s like when I was a partner at EY, we did Australia’s largest and most comprehensive public culture review, right where we publish. We did a big review of our own culture, and we published it and told the whole world about it. It was an incredible act of truth telling. That’s how we truth, right? Talking about us as a business. But the third and most important type of truth is my truth, right? So having truthful and honest conversations about me, myself, what is my impact on the world? What is my behavior? What is my practice? And as leaders, I think we spend too much time talking about them and too much time talking about we and not enough time talking honestly about me. So the best tool to encourage people to have hard conversations is for leaders to go first with honest, truthful conversations about themselves. Basically role modeling it for other people. There’s an incredible examples of that going around.
[00:11:16] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Just to sidestep a little bit, I want to talk about, I suppose one benefit of having honest conversations. How can hard and honest conversations at work help drive innovation specifically?
[00:11:28] Dominic Thurbon: Yeah, this is one of the greatest benefits of honest cultures. We know that research evidence is very, very clear, and I suspect listeners would know it from their own experience as well, that honest and robust conversations not only support innovation, they’re critical to innovation. And that’s because the federal government. But innovation is basically a process of failure management, right? If you’re attempting to do something new, let’s say you’re bringing a new service to market. Mathematically, wrong answers to the question outnumber right answers to the question basically by infinity, right? There are an infinite number of ways to get things wrong, and often only a couple to get them right. And what that means is most innovation fails, right? And so if we have to be in a situation, if we want to be an innovative team where we can say, no, that doesn’t work, or you know what? We thought this was a good idea. We’ve given it a crack. It’s not a good idea or we need to fix this idea. And so if we’re in a team where we can’t have these psychological safety, as I know you guys talked about on a recent episode, if we aren’t in a team with the psychological safety to say, you know what? There is such a thing as a bad idea. There is such a thing as a wrong answer, and that’s one of them. Then we’re going to at least slow down the innovation process and often take it entirely. Which is why if you look at, say, software engineering, the data link very, very clearly that the most innovative teams are also the most honest teams, which is kind of how that link works.
[00:13:09] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: All right. Final question for you, Dom. With generative AI and algorithmic media flooding us with information these days, how do business leaders now need to think differently about trust and judgment than perhaps they once did?
[00:13:21] Dominic Thurbon: This is a big question. It’s probably my favorite question, and I think it’s one of the most important ones. And here, business really collides with society. I think I know this is a business podcast, but I think it would be remiss not to at least note very briefly that AI generated content and algorithmically moderated misinformation. Disinformation is one of the most urgent pressing problems facing the world. Let me just give you a very, very quick, practical example of that. Take something that all of us will have been talking about and grappling with. The numbers. Make it clear that this will either be first party for everyone or something with only 1 or 2 degrees of separation. Take something like ADHD diagnosis, right? So this is a really important mental health issue. We’re experiencing a massive spike in ADHD diagnosis. A lot of that is really important. This is people who have been previously undiagnosed now getting treatment. Over the last ten years, ADHD has risen to be the world’s most common mental health condition. It’s got 450% in the last ten years. So here’s three incredibly important facts that really speak to this question of how leaders grapple with trust and judgment. The fact, number one, ADHD content has been shared more than 6 billion times on TikTok. It’s just an observable fact. Fact number two. Studies have found that less than 50% of ADHD content on TikTok is accurate, right? So that is aligns with clinical evidence.
[00:14:43] Dominic Thurbon: More than half of it is inaccurate misinformation. And three, the third fact is that viewing TikTok content on ADHD has been shown to drive people to self-diagnosis. So whilst a lot of what’s going on in the ADHD space is incredibly important, the facts are also clear that misinformation content is driving a lot of people to treating a condition they don’t have, not everyone, but a lot of people. And that’s really bad. And so that’s just a social example of one of the problems of AI and algorithm. So put that in a business context for very simple things leaders need to do to think differently about trust and judgment. Number one, view it as your personal responsibility. If Deloitte had to pay back more than 100 grand to the government because they submitted a report full of AI hallucinations. Leaders are putting pressure on teams to use AI. And there are even some leaders saying, I’ve told my team, if you’re not using AI, you’re not doing your job properly. But the greatest of respect. That’s deeply irresponsible leadership. And it will inevitably lead to things like the Deloitte example. We have to view accuracy of content as opposed to our responsibility to we’ve got to think before we share.
[00:15:48] Dominic Thurbon: Are you one of the 3 billion false shares of ADHD misinformation? We’re all complicit if we’re retweeting, reposting, resharing stuff. So two think four share. Three gotta remember, trust arrives on a snail and leaves on a horse. You only get one chance at trust. And when it’s lost, it’s lost forever. The fastest way to lose trust is lie. And so we’ve got to kind of grapple with putting trust at the top of our decision making hierarchy. And four is very simple, which is don’t fully outsource content creation to AI. Like if you’re a business leader, it’s so easy. It’s so fast, it looks so compelling to just give AI responsibility for your content. It’s good to remember that the thing LLMs are good at is sounding right. Right. They’re not good at being right. They’re good at sounding right. But you can’t sound right your way to solving your business problems. You’ve got to be right. So users and assist find ways to integrate it, but don’t outsource everything to it. If we can do those four things, take personal responsibility. Think before you share. Understand that trust arrives in a snail and leaves on a horse and not outsource all of our content creation fully to AI. I think leaders can really grapple with trust and judgment in a generative AI world.
[00:16:55] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: That was Dominic Thurbon, author and director at Alchemy Labs.
Creating remarkable experiences that build trust with clients
Turning now to building trust with customers. Serial entrepreneur Karl Schwantes is founder of Reputable. He joins me in this conversation to explain how to create remarkable client experiences that build trust and also earn better online reviews. Karl is fond of the word remarkable, so I started by asking him what the word means to him in the context of a service or product business.
[00:17:28] Karl Schwantes: I love the word remarkable. Now, I don’t know where you’re listening to this, but as a Brisbane boy, we have this thing once a year called the Ekka. It’s the big grand show. And for me, you’ve got these like Showbags, which had a whole heap of junk in it. But when you’re seven years old, it seems really, really important. And my favourite showbag was always the magic showbag. There is an element of magic that comes when you create remarkable experiences. So the client is experiencing something and they leave your premises thinking that they’ve been part of something special, but they don’t understand the the little steps that have happened and the training with the team. So for example, like when I’m in at Xenox, I’ve trained all of my team. If any one of the team hears the word, do you know what your finger size is? They immediately pick up the ring sizing kit and they will just bring it as if by magic to the salesperson’s right shoulder. And from the client’s perspective, it’s. It’s as if this ring sizing kit just magically appeared. And how remarkable is that? It’s like that’s where the magic and remarkable to me, it’s kind of like a blend between the two, but it’s that creates that sense of wonder that the client just has no idea how it happens. But they just are totally impressed that this is something beyond what they could have expected.
[00:18:44] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Carl, what are the subtle but impactful touch points that most businesses overlook that can dramatically elevate client trust?
[00:18:51] Karl Schwantes: Okay, so the industry average, depending on your industry, will say that most businesses need about 17 touchpoints for a client to be able to convert into a sale. The reality is, is when you start to go down the rabbit hole of focusing on improving your client journey experience, that can actually reduce to like 5 to 7. And there are all the little things, like, for example, I spoke in a previous podcast with you about experience silos and looking at each individual part. One of the most forgotten experiences that most businesses leave out is what is the leaving experience look like? No one really thinks about, well, how can I make the leaving experience be so remarkable that it’s so easy for the client to return. That they feel really welcomed. And for us, it’s kind of like I remember standing at a restaurant where they said instead of like, wait here to be seated. It was like, wait here to be served. And it was like, how you language everything that you do. So in those experience silos, I choreograph the language around it. And we want people to feel like they’ve come home and it’s like, welcome back. And it doesn’t matter for us whether you’ve got three grand to spend or 100 grand, it doesn’t matter. We treat every client the same. And if Qantas ever wanted to tap me on the shoulder and say, could you come and help me? I would say to them, do what Singapore Airlines does, which means treat your economy class clients like your business class. Just treat everybody the same with humanity and looking to make it a remarkable experience for them.
[00:20:16] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: When a business delivers an exceptional experience, how does that influence the kind of reviews they earn and ultimately their reputation online?
[00:20:25] Karl Schwantes: When a business goes above and beyond what a client thought was possible. There are many different mistakes that they make. Number one, sometimes they just don’t ask. They think that the hard work that they do should speak for itself, and that the client will leave a review unprompted. I can tell you now, it just doesn’t happen that way. Clients would love to review your business. You just have to ask. So that’s number one. The second mistake that they make is they don’t understand the concept of the happiness window. They’re doing the right thing, but potentially doing it at the wrong time. So you need to look at your client journey experience and find out, well, when is the perfect opportunity to ask for a client review? So one of my clients was a, and this sounds really quite morbid, but they’re a pet crematorium. And one of the things that they found out was, was they worked with the vet. And two weeks after the pet had died, they sent like a little card with the paw print that they’d taken impression of to say, hey, we’re thinking of you and we’ve done this. But it was two weeks after the event, not at the time the transaction happened. And then they got lots of reviews from that. So you need to look at your client experience and go, when is the happiest time to ask for a client experience?
[00:21:32] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: Now I want to talk about AI because AI has changed the way people can search for businesses online. So how do you show up as the most trusted business in this new world of AI search?
[00:21:43] Karl Schwantes: So it’s really moved from like about 5 or 7 years ago, the common search term was plumbers near me. Okay, because Google knows that you want a plumber near you. Now the common phrase is business name, and then the word reviews. If Bezos from Amazon is doing something, you should be paying attention. And what they realized was that people were going through a process of almost review fatigue. You know, there’s 200 reviews. How do I know which one of the 2000 are the right ones? They brought out this like almost a shopping assistant called Rufus. And what Rufus does is it analyzes all the reviews and it says, this product is great for this, this, and this. But a number of clients have complained about their return policy. And so where AI search is going now is, is that there’s absolutely nowhere to hide. You might have great Google reviews, but bad Facebook. What the AI search will do now is it’ll pull in absolutely everything. And the two main ones that most business owners are just completely neglecting is Reddit and Glassdoor. So they might say you’ve got a great product or service, but your employees are complaining about, you know, it’s a toxic culture. Now, as a client, I probably don’t want to go there. So there are two elements that business owners that are listening to this podcast should really kind of be focusing on, how do I become the business of choice, but also the employer of choice? Because when you become the employer of choice, you not only attract key talent, but you actually have to pay them less because they want to work for your company.
[00:23:10] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: All right. Final question for you, Kyle. What is one simple change any business can make this week to improve client trust and loyalty?
[00:23:18] Karl Schwantes: I will come at that from a slightly different angle. Like number one is of course in your team meetings. Now, I don’t know whether many businesses have weekly team meetings, but one of the recommendations I give to my clients is that talking about Google reviews should be an agenda item on your weekly meeting. Like, what do you want? Do you want to have ten reviews this week? Ten this month, ten this year, whatever that is. But if it’s not on the agenda, if it’s not in the frontal part of your team’s mind, they’re not going to be asking for it. So set an intention, like, let’s say we’re just started now, this is the 4th of February, by December this year Christmas, how many Google reviews do I want to have? Then break that down by quarter. Break it down by week, break it down by individual team member, and then set that as a goal. And then allow your team who are your front line, like they’re the front line. They’re the ones that I love to empower my team with boundaries. So I say to my team at Xennox Diamonds, you can do anything that you want to surprise and delight a client up to the value of $100. So flowers, lunch, car park, whatever that is. Okay. The whole concept of surprise and delight will be for another podcast, but you allow the people at the front line to do whatever it takes to make sure that the client experience is as remarkable as possible.
[00:24:35] Host – Grace Jennings-Edquist: That was serial entrepreneur Karl Schwantes. Thanks for joining us for this week’s episode. Follow Business Essentials Podcast across social media and head to www.BusinessEssentialsPodcast.au for more. Business Essentials is a SoundCartel podcast. Producers are Nick Schildberger, Nicole Goodman and myself. Technical production is by Pete Letts. I’m Grace Jennings-Edquist thanks for listening. We’ll bring you more business essentials next week.
