Philip Weiss' Hyperthinking Framework: Adapting Businesses to Change with ZN Consulting

It has four dimensions, hyper learning, hyper shifting, hyper linking, and hyper acting. And the idea is that these are kind of a way to remember four very important concepts that I think we need to carry with us for a.

Hi Philip welcome to the show.

Glad to be here.

So this is an exciting day for me. Today we're gonna be talking about a framework that you have developed, a framework called Hyper thinking. And this is a framework that has helped hundreds of thousands, I think literally, that you have a course that has 120,000 students in it and has also helped, massive corporations adapt to the rapid change in digital and kind of the and the postmodern era that we're in now. Things are changing so quickly. And this is a framework on how you can adapt. Can you give us a little background on it, maybe a little bit of a definition of what is hyper thinking?

Yeah. So, hyper thinking as you said, is a framework, to be able to adapt to this age of the internet, age of constant change. And I would say that the origin of this, which, you know, goes back almost two decades now, was I was working on digital projects, internet communication projects with, with large corporations and a team. And the key issue was, you know, how do you bring these completely new tools, this new environment, to people who are working in a pretty kind of conservative framework? And so one of my my ideas was, well, let's kind of put together the mental model that I think will will help them to get through that change. At the same time, one of my ideas was, how do we create, again, the mental model that we haven't been taught at school, at university and that I think needed to be defined. So so that was the origin story.

I can safely say in my education, I think how to adapt to change was not anything in any courses whatsoever, nor was like the idea that things would change so quickly, that that was a reality that we would be living in, where tools and techniques and processes change at times almost daily.

And if you want, I can give you a little overview of the framework. Yes. So, so very simply it has four dimensions, hyper learning, hyper shifting, hyper linking and hyper acting. And the idea is that these are kind of a way to remember for very important concepts that I think we need to carry with us. So hyper learning, I think this is something that's now quite recognized, which is just becoming a self learner and making self-learning part of our daily habits, you know, and it's basically the idea that what we learn again at school or university or in a formal setting isn't enough. What we need to do is to be learning every single day to create a learning routine through listening to podcasts, doing online courses, reading books, and trying to structure that learning process. And so you're kind of in this perpetual student mindset, and you're looking at different tools to learn whatever suits you the best, whether it's online courses or whether it's, you know, the deep reading of books and mixing all the different tools that are amazing, that we have available to us today. So that I think is the first, probably most important step. And, you know, a lot of the listeners of this podcast and other podcasts are trying to be in that learning framework, which, by the way, you know, in some industries, people think, okay, I have studied my technical expertise and I'm good with it. And now I just practice my work. So I think it's kind of breaking away from that, saying that you need to be learning all the time. And another aspect of hyper learning is that you also need to learn to improve your mind, your creativity. And that's another idea that I think school kind of destroys in people, which is creativity is a skill that can be taught and learned, and by learning how to use tools and applying them, you can become more creative. And creativity is really important today. So using tools like Mind mapping, lateral thinking, thinking, hats, design thinking, all these are little tools that you can use to build your creativity muscles. So that's the hyper learning bucket. Then we have the hyper shifting, bucket, which for me is philosophically very interesting. I studied, philosophy, politics and economics, but philosophy was one of my favorite, parts of that. And, this is about shifting your perceptual framework, shifting paradigms. And I think now a lot of people are using the word mental model, which I like. But when I wrote the book Paradigm Shifting was the kind of big framework. And I had actually read, you know, the origin story of paradigm shifting, which is The Theory of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, who's actually wrote about what is a paradigm shift inside science. So how you shift from one way of seeing the world to a new one. And what I was trying to express through hyper shifting is that we need to have kind of flexible, perceptual, goggles or glasses, and we should be able to shift from one way of seeing the world to another one and not become attached to the way we see the world, because we think, oh, yeah, this works for me. This is the truth. No, you know, sometimes it changes. In fact, it changes almost all the time. So you need to put your ego aside and say, what is that I'm observing that can help me to better understand the world. And in technology, as you know, you know, everything changes all the time. And everything you had built like a year ago, six months ago, ten years ago, suddenly has to be thrown into question. And a lot of people attached their perception to their ego. So if they're criticized and this happens in politics, religion, but also in technology, you kind of see it as a personal attack. So you need to be able to say, no, this is a model I use, and I want to shift, from a model to another and create new models to better understand the world in front of us. The third dimension is hyper linking, and that's simply, you know, we live in a digital world that the architecture of that is the internet and the hyper link which connects all this different, all these information networks. And so we need to understand how can we leverage that, how can we connect to people through social media, through hyperlinks, by connecting to people. We're talking from, you know, to different continents. How do we make those connections, leverage them and are able to do amazing things by simply understanding the very fabric that we operate in and then understanding that we're part of networks, we're part of sometimes hundreds of networks. You know, you're part of a club, you have a friends group, you have your followers, you have different associations you're a member of. And if you can leverage those online, you can have, a lot of impact. So that's hyper linking. And finally, hyper acting, which is not, attention deficit disorder. It's my own, you know.

Does it help though? Because that's what I have.

Well, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, have I would say that there's this, this mixed blessing. So the idea was, you know, all these ideas are great, but if you don't put them in practice, they're completely useless. So you need to put things into action, and you need to do that at a pretty intense pace. And if you do that, you're going to fail a lot. And I think that's the core entrepreneurial lesson, is that you need trial and error to learn. And by the way, in the corporate world, in the political world, this is a scary idea. So we need to bring this idea okay. How can you try different things fail on a sustainable scale, and then use that failure to learn and then build that up into, you know, your life. And I think as an entrepreneur you also know, you know, we fail a lot. I get it wrong a lot of the time. And I have to kind of recognize that and then learn from it and then develop the next iteration. So that is the core of the concept.

So would it be fair to say that the first three are kind of, maybe habits that should be developed on a almost daily basis so that you're prepared for four, you're prepared for the action. Would that be a fair way to look at it?

Yeah. I think that the fourth one is that, I mean, all these ideas mean nothing if you don't put them out in the real world. So that was what I was driving at. And then as I was developing, you know, the concept was evolved over the last two decades. It fits with agile. You know, I think it's very much applying an agile framework to everything you do, which I think, by the way, is quite interesting, quite difficult. You know, I think people like to say that they want to do that, but then applying it with a method is quite difficult. Agility means, okay, I'm going to apply things and then I'm going to see what's working, not working. Then I'm going to reassess and redo it. But indeed you need that application. But if you go back to the hyper shifting, you know, sometimes if you're applying a lot of pressure, a lot of energy in the wrong space, you're kind of wasting a huge amount of energy. So you need to kind of say, okay, am I operating in the right paradigm? Am I, you know, heading in the right direction because I can run like hell in the wrong direction, fall off a cliff. So I need to be thinking about where I am, whether that energy in that focus is in the right space. So I need to kind of mix between my framework and its practical application. And I kind of go back between the two.

So I guess also then this framework is really kind of concept or niche agnostic. You know, it doesn't matter what you're doing because everybody's outcome is going to be a little bit different, you know, depending on what their niches or what they're working on. Essentially their application of this isn't going to come out with like the same kind of methodology for how to solve a problem. It's just going to give them a way to find a methodology to solve a problem. Would that be fair?

Yeah. And I think you know, the question that I believe everybody should be asking themselves is what is the framework, the thinking framework that is best for me, you know, and a lot of the time, because we're taught a certain way to think, we don't do that. So we just inherit whatever, school, or certain things inflicted on us. And what I believe is that, no, you should be creating your own kind of framework. That is my attempt, if you want. So here are the things that I think makes sense. And I think you can take that, and you can start tweaking it and adapting it. You know, like the mental model toolkit that Charlie Munger talks about, in some of his work.

How do you know when you're ready to act? How do you know that you've done the work to get in there and then hyper act, is there like a way you can feel confident that you've done enough?

Are you talking about, from an entrepreneurial perspective or?

Any perspective and any context?

Well, you know, I think there, you know, I would strongly recommend to have a bias for action. I think that, you know, an idea doesn't really help much if it's not put out there in the real world. And I think, you know, for entrepreneurs and for people in large organizations, the question is, how quickly can you test your idea? How quickly can you start prototyping? You know, if you're applying design thinking, how quickly can you go out there and just see what customers are saying about your idea? I think if you're doing a B testing, you have different ways. So for me, the interesting thing is to have this idea that you're testing. So you're a scientist. And I think in marketing and entrepreneurship, I like this idea of saying, look, you're an experimenter, you're trying a scientific theory. You're thinking, hey, I think maybe this will work. Maybe there's a big market for this product. So let's put it out there and see. And then we conduct the experiment, and we don't get too emotionally attached to the outcome because we don't know what it's going to be. And then we learn from that experiment. So I think the key thing in a sense is like if you say, look, if the scientist cannot experiment, they're never going to know whether that scientific theory is true or not. So we should be experimenting pretty much all the time with our projects. And in the digital world, the great thing is that you can do low cost experiments. So I think that's where any business should be, a series of experiments that you're constantly testing and trying to refine, and then changing your mental models based on the data that you get from the experiments you're conducting.

You mentioned, failure and kind of being open to failure or needing failure in a way. I, this is a concept that comes up a lot about that. We as entrepreneurs, we can all attest to our failures. But I wonder, do we give the wrong idea to somebody that's brand new, they're right out of school, or they're right in school and they're and they're gonna get into this like that. You must fail, you know, in the sense that could we say that like, in a sense that we almost encourage them to fail when maybe we could say it's a byproduct of what happens, but maybe not necessarily what fits the model perfectly. You know what I mean?

Yeah. No, no, that's a great point. And, you know, in Brussels, where I live and in Europe, there's a concept, you know, there is a taboo around failure that's, I think, even more pronounced, especially in the US and other countries. So people don't like to fail. And as our education system, our school tells us that, you know, if you don't get a certain grade, you're kind of a failure. And the more you know, exams you fail, the worse you are perceived by society. So here you're kind of branded an idiot, and there's a number attached to it, which I think is a catastrophe for an entrepreneur. So I don't think we should go into the opposite, which is maybe, I don't know, failure porn or whatever, you know, the kind of hustler, story which which I

A lot of that.

Yeah. And you can, you can go into the other extreme. I think that's not great. But we need to flip the idea that failing is, is, is this horrible thing which, by the way, a lot of people still believe, but it doesn't mean, of course, you're trying to fail. And actually very interesting. You ask the question, my son has just gone off with some friends to do a startup. And, you know, I fully expect to fail a couple of times along the way. But I want these to be good. Fail. I mean, the first, you know, they just all finished university, bright kids, great ideas, but, you know, they're not going to build an app that's going to get a million users in five minutes. I mean, they're going to try something is probably not going to work. Then they're going to do a second iteration than a third one, and then they're going to start seeing things and then one of them will get traction. So I think it's the framework like, yes, okay. You have to have all these micro failures that will be used as learning. And from that learning you then get something that starts to work. And I think that's what we need to do. You know, the honest thing is, of course, you can't glorify failure. I think this is a terrible thing about the way the media portrays entrepreneurs is going through this massive catastrophe. And then, you know, big success comes the next day. As you know, it doesn't work that way. You get things, they start working. And then, by the way, I think when you're on top of the world and things are great, that's when you tend to screw up. I mean, you know, like the overconfidence bit is when you go like, okay, now let's, let's, let's buy the big building, let's make the big expansion. So I think what we need to do is to be smart about how we fail. And how we turn failure into learning very quickly, and how we can manage the failure. I mean, it's like it should be survivable failure not, you know, failures that bring down your entire house and make you bankrupt.

No, I think that's the perfect point, that it's kind of a form of risk mitigation, like set yourself up, hoping for success, preparing to fail. But that failure isn't going to ruin everything because you've mitigated the risk so that it's not going to end the entire enterprise shifting to corporate. And you mentioned some things in corporates. I think this is extremely applicable, especially within digital marketing, within any kind of marketing framework where you're kind of doing kind of testing and iterative testing. But when you take this concept into corporations, do you corporations are famous for not changing. You know, they're like they kind of they have their corporate culture and their corporate culture is this. And they've got their brand and they've got their, you know, all this all of a sudden place drive issues with buy in from corporate, structures from C-level, if you will, that okay, we like this idea, but they don't really then they don't really want to accept it. Like they may be conceptually understand it, but you won't get any buy in from them. Do you ever want any problems with that?

Yeah. So I mean, the way I introduced hyper thinking to the corporate world was a device to help me with another problem. So, you know, the company I started 25 years ago, so ZN and we do digital communication. So in 98, digital communication was a very murky concept. We were a couple of years away from the big explosion of the dotcom bust. And a lot of my clients were extremely skeptical about the internet. They had read a couple of articles. They thought, yeah, this, this sounds cool, but like, what the hell do we do? And so what I thought, you know, as the years went by, is, they need a framework. And in fact, corporates love a good framework. So if you say to them, don't worry, you don't have to do crazy innovative things which are uncertain and define I'm going to give you a method and they're going to be some steps. And so that they like and you know you have this. If I work by the way with Toyota for many, many years, they have Kaizen, they have Genki Gameboys. So they have a corporate methodology that then allows you to put things. And by the way, the Toyota methodology is a surprisingly, deep one that's very effective when you can get it back into the project. And so my idea was, look, if I give them a framework instead of saying, hey, we're going to do a digital campaign and we're going to do these things that you've never done before, where they went like, oh my God, this sounds scary. I don't think it's going to work. We shouldn't do it. No, no, we're going to have a framework in which we're going to approach launching this web page, this online campaign, etc. and that involves, you know, learning, shifting paradigm linking and all that. So, so it's basically a way to allow people to go through change by giving them a mindset and then a process. And I think that's what actually facilitates larger corporates to say, okay, you've given me something that perhaps a lot of entrepreneurs feel intuitively, you know, this is the framework is, I think, something that would resonate with a lot of entrepreneurs, and people in kind of fast changing tech environments and in the TEDx world as well. And so basically, in a corporate world, it's like, okay, you've given me something that I can use. So that's where I think it's useful.

Okay. All right. So now we're at the part of the show where we're going to play the game. What do you say to the Queen? I'm going to give you a scenario, and you're going to tell me what you say. Do you understand the rules of the game?

You're going to have to clarify, but let's go for it.

All right. I know that you received a Young Achievers Award from Her Majesty the Queen of Belgium. When you receive an award like that, what do you say to the Queen?

Yeah, okay. Very good. So just just fact checking. This was the Queen of England.

Queen of England? Excuse me.

Yes. That's right. Yes. And it was in Buckingham Palace. So, not the Belgium Queen.

Sorry my apologies, my apologies.

No worries.

I'm going to fire my researchers for that.

So basically, the award I got was for setting up a student radio station in Oxford. This was the first student radio station in the UK with a full FM license, which will surprise some American listeners because they've had these kind of radios. But in the UK was very restricted. There were legal problems. It was basically inside buildings. We wanted to do a big, FM station. So we built it. We raised money. We had to get a license. It was a hugely charging project. Took a couple of years. We were successful. And as a result of that, we were invited, myself and my co-founder, to get this award from the Queen. I have to say that, I got to kind of, you know, wave at the Queen, or she waves because that's the way things were. But I did have a five minute conversation with King Charles, so, yeah. And he was an extremely nice person just asking, you know, what are you guys doing? And that was a quick conversation. So that was my experience of Buckingham Palace and British royalty.

Do you still have the award?

Yeah. Well, it's basically like, I have the invite and it's a kind of, honorific title, that kind of thing. So, there wasn't an Oscar for it, but, the experience was fantastic.

That's great. Now, I know, you just recently came back from the EU influencer event. I think this is the eighth annual, and this is an event that kind of goes through, shaping the conversation and policy in the EU in reference to influencers and communication that happens via influencers and that sort of thing. How did the conference go?

It was really, really interesting. Took place on Friday in the afternoon. We had a mix of people. We have some corporates from some of the biggest companies in the world. We have policy makers, people who are writing the legislation on, you know, digital, the Digital Single Act, GDPR, these are the people who write those bills that might shape, you know, the way digital companies operate. And we had three topics. One was about the content that is going to kind of drive the future conversation. So what formats do you use? You know, what is a TikTok video, Instagram, podcasting? And the second one was about, you know, the impact that social media is having on democracy. Big question. You know, is it destroying trust in democracy? Could it be used in a constructive way? And the final topic was about AI and future trends. So how do communicators use these new tools, to basically prepare themselves for 2025? And I have to say, the discussion around social media and democracy was extremely interesting because of the ban. We had, in Brazil of X, people were discussing whether such a ban was likely in Europe, which the answer was no. But people are very unhappy with the direction that X has taken in the bubble and in the EU bubble, where basically it is still the default place for political conversation, you know, so people announced big stories, journalists are still there. So it's still the main driver, but it's moved into a space that people are less and less comfortable with. They don't feel the moderation is happening. They don't feel that there is a kind of neutral platform, you know, they feel is very much the vision of, a single man applied to the channel and coincidentally, right in the middle of that conversation, our account got temporarily suspended and then reinstated. So we still don't know the mystery of why that happened. But it was an exciting conversation. And, yeah, so we tried to analyze what's happening next. And I think the big takeaway is that we're still facing a massively uncertain 2025 in terms of channels. We just do not know where X is going to land. There are alternative threads blue sky, Mastodon, the Fetty verse, which has not yet gained critical mass. LinkedIn is growing really as a networking tool and as an increasingly important place. And TikTok and Instagram are there, but they're not really mainstream yet. So basically, you need to have your head everywhere, and you need to keep jumping from one channel to the other to figure out where your community might be and how you can do that, most effectively.

And I mean, you can see how hyper thinking fits right into that with being, the ability to adapt and adjust and also be open because, you know, in six months from now, there might be another platform that pops up and it's easy to say like, oh, I'm a LinkedIn person, or I'm only in Facebook, or I only do this or that when there are other opportunities that are surely going to arise. In 2020, your company, ZM, led a campaign to revive tourism in Europe after the pandemic. Kind of a two part question. One is how do you get that gig? Does it mean that you're just gonna, like, get us to that end? And then the second part is like, can you share some of the strategies and maybe how, hyper thinking kind of, benefited you in, in creating those strategies?

Yeah. So obviously, you know, you can imagine this was the Covid period where effectively, you know, tourism had been suspended temporarily. People just couldn't travel. And, you know, the future was extremely uncertain. We had done in Brussels, you have a tender process for commission projects. So you have to fill in a very large document and a pretty cumbersome competitive process. We had done that. And so we were kind of in the system. We had gotten that contract. It was a three year framework contract. And, you know, at that point, the discussion was, what the hell do we do now? You know, what do we communicate? And the answer was, you know, we need to connect people to tourism in a different way. We need to reintroduce tourism. And obviously, you know, for now, this certainly can't be traditional tourism. But in the long term, the commission believes that, you know, people need to think about traveling in a different way. You might have heard some of the issues that people have around overtourism and certain places where just too many people come. So the idea was like, how can you tell people that there's a lot more to discover in Europe than just the big, you know, Paris and Rome and the cities that everybody goes to? So, and that's why the campaign was around the theme of, you know, Europe invites the curious, to discover the places that were not the ones you heard about. So that the content was basically tried to think about all the things you don't do as a tourist, discover new places, don't go to the main things, don't go at the time everybody else goes and don't do the things that everybody else does. So the idea was like, how can you have alternative tourism? We also had to shoot a video of someone traveling, and this was a lot of fun because we couldn't travel. So we actually had we had to we created, a kind of we had a backpack and a jacket that we kind of bought, you know, I don't know, 10 or 15 times, send it around to different places and had the same basic profile shot from the back going into different places in order to give the idea that it was a continuous story, with 5 or 6 different teams actually, doing the shoot of each different fragment of the video because you had to go around Europe. So that was the most logistically insane bit we had done, because every single shoot was just challenging because in addition to all the Covid, permissions you needed. And then another element that we introduced was, let's try to get the story shared by the audience. And this was something we learned from an earlier campaign we did, which is actually one of, my, my favorite campaign. It's called discover EU. So this was a campaign we did, with Manfred Weber, who's the, president of the European, EP. So the main party in, in Europe. And this was to give a free Interrail ticket to all Europeans at 18 years old. And the idea was, you know, by having this experience of traveling around Europe, you discover what Europe really is about. And so we asked people to share, to show their support for this campaign. Take a picture of what you think in Europe means something to you, whether it's a lake around you, your house, a pub or something. So this was about discovering Europe and then share it and tell people why they should come and then get your friends to vote for you. So you can imagine the impact in terms of driving engagement, driving interest in the campaign. So we applied similar lessons to this campaign by asking people to share their stories of where you should visit. So that was a second element. And then we had influencers, Instagram and TikTok, who were themselves traveling and again, sharing a different perspective. On Europe, we had somebody doing the Grand Tour, which is a traditional trip that the Brits used to do 100 years ago when they would kind of graduate and then travel, run for it for a year or two around Europe. The new version of this, we had an Instagram influencer who got millions of views. This got picked up in the media. So that was a fantastic campaign. Very challenging. And indeed, for every obstacle, you're trying to shift the frame and say, how can I turn that into something creatively interesting?

I love it, I do love the thought process of what we can't send the same actor around, but we can send the same clothes.

Yeah. I mean, I can tell you just even their tracking. Where the hell is the backpack? You know, we were shooting tomorrow. You need the kit. So that was.

That's great. That's a well, though. This has been awesome. I really appreciate your time. If somebody wants to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

I mean, they can check our socials. So on exit the device. I'm on LinkedIn, the device, and you can check our website ZNconsulting.com. You can email me it fill at set and I'll be and basically, always happy to have a conversation. And to see, you know, where these new trends are taking us and how we can take these ideas to our clients and, and make a difference.

That's awesome. Well, thanks again so much and thanks everyone for listening to Hack to the Future. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much.