Taylor Jones · Founder and CEO, Whiteboard.is | Taylor Jones, Founder and CEO of Whiteboard.is, has stunningly simple advice on how anyone can develop their capacity for visionary leadership through practice and intentionality.

What makes a leader visionary? How is visionary-ness developed and what does it look like in practice?

While the concept behind these questions seems nebulous, we’re talking today with someone who has concrete answers based on interactions with dozens of modern visionaries. Taylor Jones, Founder and CEO of Whiteboard.is, has stunningly simple advice on how anyone can develop their capacity for visionary leadership through practice and intentionality.

Whiteboard is a creative agency helping visionaries build a brighter future, in many cases through harnessing the internet for good—an intrinsically for-good concept. The formula they’ve perfected over a decade has resulted in a ripple of positivity turning into a wave of change.

Listen in to hear stories of visionary leaders, cautionary tales of ripple effects gone wrong, and the surprising books that have inspired leaders like Taylor and Justin.

Are you a visionary leader in the for-good space who wants to connect with your visionary peers? Apply to join Camp Redwood, a curated gathering for social impact founders and CEOs to focus on long-term thinking, innovation, and enduring growth.

Want more advice from Taylor? Peruse Whiteboard's book, Agency. 

I think wisdom has to step in and say, I don't allow myself to make assumptions. Wisdom says I don't rely on assumptions. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to track this thing all the way to the end, because you may get to the you may have this risky, imaginative thing that needs to be tried. And you might ask yourself, you might get to the end of it and realize, like, you know what if if we try this, the opportunity is infinite, but the risk is actually pretty low and it's a known quantity, so it's worth it. But if you don't get to quantifying the risk in some way, you never take that step

Hello and welcome to this episode of Nonstop Nonprofit!

What makes a leader visionary? How is visionary-ness developed and what does it look like in practice?

While the concept behind these questions seems nebulous, we’re talking today with someone who has concrete answers based on interactions with dozens of modern visionaries. Taylor Jones, Founder and CEO of Whiteboard.is, has stunningly simple advice on how anyone can develop their capacity for visionary leadership through practice and intentionality.

Whiteboard is a creative agency helping visionaries build a brighter future, in many cases through harnessing the internet for good—an intrinsically for-good concept. The formula they’ve perfected over a decade has resulted in a ripple of positivity turning into a wave of change.

Listen in to hear stories of visionary leaders, cautionary tales of ripple effects gone wrong, and the surprising books that have inspired leaders like Taylor.

Justin Wheeler Taylor, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing, Justin?

Taylor Jones I'm doing great. Thanks for the invitation. It's an honor to be here. And, it's been a busy day, but a good day. So happy to take a break and have a good conversation with you.

Justin Wheeler Yeah, we were we were just talking before, we started recording. Taylor is a pilot and was flying a small plane, which is, you know, you don't hear that as, you don't hear that very often anymore these days. How long have you been flying?

Taylor Jones Thank. Well, thanks for bringing that up. There's a joke in the, the pilot world that. How do you know if a pilot? How do you know if a person is a pilot? Don't worry. They'll tell you. So you just outed me on that? I appreciate it. I've been flying airplanes about nine years.

Justin Wheeler Nine years? Okay. Yeah. Was it now? Was it out of necessity because of the. And we're going to get to white board here in a second. Yeah. My whiteboard being you know in between two two places is it was it necessity or was it more of a passion.

Taylor Jones So not in the beginning. In the beginning I had always want to fly airplanes since I was a kid. And we had gone through a particularly challenging work season back in 2015, 16. And one day my wife says, before we had kids, my wife was like, hey, you've always wanted to fly. You should go fly an airplane. Why don't we see if you can do one of those, like discovery flights? So this is on a Saturday morning. So I was in the airplane by 1 p.m. that day when she gave me permission, I was like, I'm ready, let's go. And so I started training and that was just going to do for fun. I did that for about two years, and then we had our first daughter, and I kind of hung it up for a while, and then we moved to a different city from where our main offices for family reasons. So then it became a little bit more of a necessity because I wanted to not be gone from the house as much. And so that's kind of what prompted me to pick it back up. And now I, I spent a good deal of time in the air.

Justin Wheeler Awesome. Well, Taylor, tell us, I'd love to before we jump into today's conversation. For those those listening, Taylor is the co-founder and CEO of creative agency called, whiteboard. How would you would you define as a creative agency? Marketing agency? What?

Taylor Jones Yes. You're asking the second question. We tried to figure out for 15 years, which was how do we describe what we do? We are a digitally focused creative agency. That's been our heartbeat from the beginning. But our passion has always been serving visionary leaders. And so we're sort of a whatever you need to drive redemptive or, purposeful mission forward in the world. That's what our agency brings to the table. So we're mostly a creative agency, but there are a few other things that we do that may not be typical in that space.

Justin Wheeler And you work. And I think that's like a really good point of clarification as you work with like, you know, you don't say you work with non-profits or for profits, you work with visionary leaders because visionary leaders can work in either one of these, sort of, you know, buckets of, of types of businesses. And so maybe talk a little bit about unpack that a little bit more like what what makes a leader visionary? Who are the types of leaders that you generally, try to or want to work with at whiteboard?

Taylor Jones So we say that a visionary leader is a person who plans the future with wisdom and imagination. So you have two sides of the coin the wisdom that comes from experience and knowledge, and the imagination that comes from creative intuition. And our hypothesis at whiteboard is that in order for the world to build towards a brighter future, we need the world to be full of visionaries, people with imagination and wisdom that plan the future. And so our alignment, what we, the kind of people that we want to work with as an agency first, we don't pick industry niches. We we care about the actual leader that we work with. We're not as concerned about the size or reach of a brand, right? We do a ton of branding and a ton of amazing brand strategy work. Our team is phenomenal, but the focus of the work is really finding visionary leaders. Sometimes those exist in organizations, sometimes they're an enterprise scale organization, sometimes they're in a local business. But that's what we care about. That's how we orient ourselves as agents and as an agency in our work.

Justin Wheeler Very cool. And you guys work, I mean, you know, across sort of the spectrum, just looking at some of your, your clients, you know, organizations, companies like Ted, which mean think anyone who gets on a Ted stage dream client. Exactly. Yeah. That's that's amazing client. And then, you know, going to a company like chick fil A, and so, like, how do you define maybe in a more corporate setting, right. Let's say maybe take Chick-Fil-A as, as an example, not not trying to pick on Chick-Fil-A, but how do you find a visionary leaders when in in like corporations that have, you know, lots of structure? Is it just sort of like the nature of, of like you said, like the actual person and getting to know the person, or is there a bigger goal at play when you're working with a company like, like a Chick-Fil-A or, you know, someone of that size?

Taylor Jones That's a great question. You know, we have we have done this work long enough now that it doesn't take too long to figure out the visionaries from the non visionaries. And we worked with plenty of enterprise teams where one of the, you know, executives or leaders is a visionary person. Again they're bringing imagination and wisdom into the conversation. So typically you find people on one side of that or the other, right. They're the wisdom person. They're bringing that knowledge and experience with that very little imagination or, you know, highly artistic imagination with very little practical wisdom that comes with it. So what we're looking for is that person who brings both of those things into. A table or two. The conversation. And that happens in enterprises like you're talking about in major corporations, right. We've, tell you a story. We worked with, a large fortune, level enterprise where the leader that invited us into the conversation had spent her life advocating she was not from the US, was working for a US based company, but had a global footprint and had spent her life and legacy in that company, building a technology center in a part of Europe that had no meaningful technology jobs. And her work there was leveraging that companies, you know, services and skills and products in the world to transform the economy of a place that she cared a lot about by creating economic impact. So her work led to the facilitation of tens of thousands of jobs in this place and, you know, world life changing income opportunities for people who didn't have that before. And so that's a a type of visionary leader in a larger enterprise setting. But their work is not just trying to advance strictly, stakeholder stockholder value, which is important, but also to leverage the the scale or momentum of that organization to see meaningful intent in the world.

Justin Wheeler In, in your work with, with visionary leaders, both in the for profit and nonprofit space, are there any insights that you've gleaned or anything that you've observed when specifically working with visionaries in the nonprofit space? Is there anything different, anything more challenging that you've observed over time working with visionaries in nonprofits?

Taylor Jones Yeah, the the for profit world brings a natural, practical like practicality of mindset, right? Because when you're building a for profit, there are investors somewhere who expect some type of return. Right? There's an expectation on profitability, at least in theory, from the organization. In the nonprofit space, you don't have that natural practicality that's always holding you accountable. So what happens in nonprofit world is there can be a sense that there's a higher freedom to be philanthropic and purpose centric, but without the accountability that comes from the grounding of a profitable entity, that has to also reconcile its missional intent with, shareholder return. In other words, the company at least we we say a lot that, you know, there is no mission without margin that applies. It's obviously applied in the for profit world, because if you're not making money at some point, there's no resources to to invest in the meaningful parts of your work. But the nonprofit sector really struggles with that. And a lot of visionary leaders on that space, you know, they never build a sustainable mindset into their nonprofit, which then doesn't make its way into any of the nonprofits core areas of functionality. And so they struggle perpetually to keep the funding alive, to keep the momentum alive, to keep people engaged because they're not leveraging an investor mindset, which is a critical, I think, distinction between the two.

Justin Wheeler Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Something that, you, whiteboard talks about quite a bit is this, like idea that when the internet, is, is harnessed for good, it has unparalleled, you know, positive. It could change culture. It can change things in in pretty big, big ways. What is the connection between the visionary leader and leveraging the internet for good? How do those, like, have those intertwine?

Taylor Jones So when we talk about leveraging the internet, the internet is the most powerful force of cultural influence in human history. And when we engage or leverage this, you know, global connectivity, what happens is if we do something that's sort of marginally good, it can get amplified. So our small act of goodness can become a large wave of goodness. But the same thing happens on the negative side of the spectrum, right? One little sort of not necessarily bad action can scale into something bigger, right? We can take Facebook as a question. For anyone who's watched The Social Network, right. The origins of the Facebook story may not have been dark and difficult and destructive. They may not have intended to create an epidemic of anxiety. And I'm not entirely blaming one social network platform for that. But certainly there has been a lot of research to come out that shows the negative side effects of this ecosystem. The guy that, you know, invented the like button, basically formerly publicly regretted it later because of how much pressure it put on people. So the internet is this it's a magnifier of of effect. And the other thing that the internet does is it compresses relationship. So it magnifies effect and it compresses relationship. Because if you and I are sitting in person and we're having a conversation where we're, you know, whatever, hanging out, the depth of that relationship, the awareness of that relationship is much different than if I'm watching, you know, a prerecorded reel somebody published about something going on in their life. So leveraging the internet for good can be one of the most powerful ways to facilitate positive change. But it requires a great deal of care and nuance. And at whiteboard we we have a this idea of going from dark to light that we want to facilitate. We want to find visionary. Who are trying to do this kind of work. And we imagine a world where peace replaces anxiety, where curiosity replaces cynicism, where creativity replaces consumerism, where authenticity replaces vanity, where empathy replaces bias, where intention replaces distraction, or community replaces isolation, generosity replaces greed. Intimacy replaces exploitation. Roundtables replace rants. Unity replaces polarization, hope replaces depression, truth replaces lies, and ultimately life replaces death. And so what we are trying to facilitate on the internet. We're trying to help people who are leveraging it, because you can't have any influence today if you're not leveraging the internet in some capacity. And we want to help them stay on the rails of those types of transformation in their work, whether it's the organ, the brand itself that's doing the work in the world, or that person's influence within the organization. Yeah, both of those things are obviously desirable.

Justin Wheeler Is there? And this is kind of a on the spot question. And so you, you know, might want to think about this, but is there like a brand or a visionary that comes to mind that sort of embodies a lot of what you had just described, especially like those the words kind of replacing like the positive and replacing sort of the negative. Is there someone or something that you look to that's been inspiration, or maybe it's a project you've, you know, you've personally worked on?

Taylor Jones Totally. Yeah. There's a few that come to mind. I mentioned a few minutes ago the project that we did with the global enterprise and the executive who was facilitating a radical economic transformation, really, for the place where she grew up, which is an incredibly powerful story that's in the, in the for profit side. And then other things come to mind. Lyla. Nicole, wait with, Justice Defense Fund that we've had the pleasure of working with, who's been taking down the Mafia, really? Of sexual exploitation in the world is just unbelievable. The work that she is doing in that area of really life replacing death, I mean, and and that whole situation, there's Brett Hagler with news story, which Justin, I know you know, Brett we worked with recently and their work of transforming, homeownership and giving that power. I mean, so much of our work sits at this purposeful intersection. Yeah. And that's how we filter our work, right? People ask us, well, how do you choose your clients? Well,Fwe're trying to find people that are advocating for these transformations. And we generally have the, latitude, if you will, to pick our clients based on those criteria. So we got we got a lot of those stories. Yeah.

Justin Wheeler No. That's good. When you're walking through some of the explanation, kind of like the why of a whiteboard, if you will, a digital community came to mind and it's an older one. Humans of New York. Right. And you think of, of this, like, movement that really, like, tried really hard to get the world to understand what it's like to be someone that's not you or looks different than you. And they broke down all sorts of stereotypes I remember for a while. And I say it's older because I think there's, you know, new sort of like movements and, influencers to kind of come after that. But it was an interesting, movement for a while. That really kind of helped bring light into areas and stereotypes that normally you would think, or just had a preconceived idea or notion around. And so when, when whiteboard engages with a client, how much the work is focused on creating that sort of digital community, leveraging the internet versus the other services that you provide is something that's at the core of your guys's work, or is it dependent on the type of organization or individual you work with?

Taylor Jones Yeah, we say a lot that the web is the backbone. Almost any creative work you do, whether it's campaign centric, it's organizational, will always intersect with with the web in some form or fashion. So the web is really the the great equalizer of sorts. It's where all the other work that you do is made real. It's also the most malleable canvas where you can try things with little cost, both literally and metaphorically. So, you know, most things come back through the internet, which is why it's such a powerful force of cultural change. Now, the how we do it depends a lot on the organization and the context of what they're bringing to the table and the outcome that they're trying to achieve. And, you know, are we trying to build a movement like you're saying? Are we trying to facilitate some type of engagement or transaction or, you know, donation relationship? Are we trying to to just build awareness around an issue? It depends a lot on the specific outcome that's being sought. And we have sort of different programs for those different, types of outcomes. But generally the web is is engaged in some form or fashion in all of this.

Justin Wheeler Got it. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, one thing. I probably should have asked this as a follow up earlier, but and so kind of going back and forth here, but when you were talking about a visionary, you talked about sort of like the characteristics of wisdom and curiosity, imagine imagination and imagination, right? From your perspective, what's a harder one to learn or to like knowledge to acquire? Or maybe that's not the best way to ask it from your perspective, working with visionaries across the spectrum, kind of curious what your what your thoughts is like. You'd rather have someone that. That's dial has the ax dialed in, but needs a little more work here. Kind of curious in perspective there.

Taylor Jones You know, if I had to choose, I would probably say that the wisdom attribute is more difficult to learn. It takes reps, right. And that doesn't necessarily just translate to time on the calendar, because some people put their mind and energy into getting a lot of reps faster to a higher diversity of experiences and perspectives that build that wisdom. I think it also requires an intentional pursuit, like you can learn a lot and not gain any wisdom. You only gain wisdom if you're trying to be wiser. It's not typically there's an application there. I also think imagination takes reps, takes perspective. Some people think they're more they're born with more imagination than others. But I also find that it's pretty influenced by the number of reps that a person has in their experiences in life. There's usually a correlation between a person that has a higher number of diverse experiences, and having more wisdom, and the potential for more imagination. The other thing I might say about imagination is I think imagination requires a sense of permission that not everyone feels, whether that's because they've been told by somebody in their life that had influence over them that they shouldn't be imaginative or they shouldn't think. And so they're looking for the permission to kind of break that lid off or something else has influenced them. I think everybody has the capacity for both.

Justin Wheeler Yeah.

Taylor Jones I don't think that either of these things are something a person is naturally born with or without. I think it is something very much that can be fully acquired as a person. They both take reps. Maybe wisdom's a little bit more difficult because I think it does take more time, but maybe we don't have a good answer on that. Maybe we should go figure one out. It's better.

Justin Wheeler Question. No, but I think, I mean, you know, like imagination. I think a lot of people assume you have to be creative or you have to be a creative to have imagination or that imagination is meant for childhood. And as you get older and grow up and become a professional, imagination isn't a quality that you're gonna put on your resume for, for instant. So when you think about imagination, how do you quantify it? What does it mean to you tailor as a leader, working with other leaders? When you identify imagination.

Taylor Jones How quantify it? That's a great question. Let me answer the question maybe differently than what you asked, but we'll see if we come back around to it. If you are struggling with imagination, you need to go read some children's books. So children's books. Are you talking about the mind of a child? Children have imagination because they've not been told. Your ideas are stupid. Right. As we get older in adults and we get told no, no, no more and more and more, we get told our ideas are dumb, we start to believe that becomes like an identity thing. And so for a kid, your identity is to be imaginative. I don't think adults have any less imaginative capacity than a child. I think that society tells us that we shouldn't have that. And there's a great book that Eric and I read really early on in the white board, you know, life cycle called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance and a bunch of other big hits. And, in this book, he unpacks the idea of resistance. He talks about sort of the plight of an artist. It's a phenomenal little book, if you have any. If you're a leadership, if you are a creative person of any, you don't have to be a leader, a creative leader. But if you're in leadership or you're creative or any person that works in that space, I highly recommend it. And he talks about this idea of resistance, that resistance, when you find the thing that you're meant to do, that you're wired to do, that you've been put on this earth to do however you want to look at it and you really start living in it. Almost always, the first thing that starts to happen is all the people that are around you that you know and care about, that have not found their thing, start to resist you, because we're all essentially on this journey of trying to find the thing that gives us purpose and meaning and fulfillment and calling. If you want to say that in our work. And for those who haven't found it, they're looking for it. And there's a sort of innate, almost jealousy or envy that crops up that makes us want to put down other people that have. Right. This happens a lot between parents and children, well-meaning parents whose kids have ideas that may be outside the norm of their family trajectory. So in a posture of wisdom, a parent's trying to say, hey, you know, don't think too big kid, because, like, I want you to be realistic here. And we have to ask ourselves, is that prudent? You know, if that's a true imaginative thing that's coming out? And so I have found coming back to the working with imaginative leaders, that there are a lot of leaders in the world that have way more capacity for imagination than they allow themselves to believe they do, because somebody has taken that permission away from them. And so they're caught in this circle of sameness and imagination just takes the courage to believe that something could be different for no other reason than because you're believing that it could be different and that you're going to go put yourself to it. And we have this long running joke. Not really a joke, actually a whiteboard. Just say yes and make it up as you go. And when I say that to people, especially in our culture, they really freak out, like, wait, you want me to just say we can do this and not know that we can't actually. Kind of. Yeah. I want you to believe in yourself. I want you to believe that you're going to be committed to seeing this thing through. But if we only ever do the things we know how to do. We're never making anything new in the world. We're not making any progress. If the world's just the same thing over and over and over and over and over, we don't need to critique culture or cancel culture or condemn it. We need to create it. So if you want to change culture, create culture. Think Andy Crouch coined that phrase. But you know, the best way to change culture is to create more of right. And that requires imagination and a little wisdom… to counterbalance.

Justin Wheeler Yeah.

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Justin Wheeler You know, it's going back to one of the first things you said on this, point specifically. You need to read it. You need to read more children's books. It's that one is I have actually had a child children's book tattooed on my arms, The Giving Tree.

Taylor Jones Incredible. I love it.

Justin Wheeler Yeah. And second, actually, it's what inspired me to finally take a shot on. Sorry, my own business Funraise here. Was actually reading children's books to my kids. And there's this one book on on what to do with an idea. That's what the book is called.

Taylor Jones I have 50 of those on my shelf at the office. I give them away to new clients.

Justin Wheeler Oh, amazing.

Taylor Jones I'm completely tracking that.

Justin Wheeler Yeah. So that's the book. That is the book that finally nudges me to to start my business. And I totally agree that imagination is something that we all have the capacity and ability to harness. What's keeping us from. I think pushing the boundaries on this is our own resilience towards failure, our own resilience, towards being being told we can't do something or that's outside of the rules or, you know, fill in the blank with all the the things that people and culture tell us why we can or can't do certain things. And that book, interesting enough, was the book that inspired me. And so I, I loved I love just that, that's quite just simple but profound sort of statement of go read some children's books because it's it's in line with your sort of it removes limitations. Right. And I think to be imaginative, you have to think about the impossible. Quite often.

Taylor Jones There's a, there's another book. It talks about the diminished imagination that happens in the adult mind over time, where as an adult we start, you know, the biggest ideas we can come up for are hoping for a bigger house or a fancy boat or, you know, these things that are really very materialistic versus hoping for truly meaningful change in the world, like the innocent mind of a child. So we'll we'll share that. Oh, it's called Todd, an awesome book. That's it's the I knew I'd have it. I knew I'd have it before the thing ended. It's called an awesome book. So maybe we put that in the show notes or whatever you guys do. Yeah, and I have smaller kids. So on this children's book thing, we read a ton to our kids. Can't. I can't recommend that highly enough. I got a seven year old that now reads chapter books on her own. Like it's a phenomenal thing. We just started reading early, but as an adult, it'll bring you back to that. Yeah. When you're sitting with your kid or any kid, you don't. You know, if you don't have kids, go to the local school. They're always hunting for people to come read schools, are read books at a kids in the libraries and things like that, and volunteer. And it'll bring you back around to those imaginative things that maybe you lost through your life.

Justin Wheeler Yeah, it's super interesting. We'll definitely get that in the show notes. You know, I'm going back to this sort of balance between wisdom and imagination, because I think it's such a fine balance. And sometimes you can a mistake, I don't know, fear or lack of resilience for lack of better words, for wisdom, because sometimes, you know, wisdom can, can tell you not to take that shot or not to do that thing because you have no business doing it. And so how do you sort of balance the two when at sometimes wisdom could feel like it's preventing you from acting on your imagination?

Taylor Jones So on the wisdom side, I think the first question to ask and something I love to ask my team, I love to ask our clients, is when they start down that train, when the practical mindset kicks in, you know, and they're like, what if this doesn't work? And like, what if it doesn't work? Let's let's actually quantify what if it doesn't work? What is it? Okay. What if this other element doesn't work? What does that what you know, what if this what if this person actually gets upset? And what I find in nearly every case is that the fears are overstated or irrational, and nobody wants to be told that their fears are overstated or irrational. But as humans, we're sort of wired for self-preservation, right? And so on the wisdom side, we can mistake wisdom first, like saying no, we can think we're being wise, but in fact we're being cowardly. Those are not the same thing. Yeah, wisdom breeds courage. It doesn't breed cowards. And so the process of wisdom is actually being willing to take that what if scenario all the way through to its end. Like what if this happens? Right. And so in some cases we need to go look at some statistics. You know what if this happens this is terrifying. Well, has it happened before. You know we are having this conversation in our office. So give the director example. Somebody was there was somebody on our team that was just really frightened. Like their their creativity was sort of paralyzed. And come to find out like they, they thought their job was on the line. And so we're, we're sort of unpacking this and trying to figure out what's going on. And I asked this person, like, do you know of anyone at our company's history in over 15 years that has ever been? Fired for for doing what you're talking about. Well, no. Well, why do you think you'd be the first one like this has happened a lot of times. Right. But but the the wisdom needs to kick in to say, like, you know what? I should try this because clearly there's not a history of there being a penalty around this and that, you know, that's pretty close to home. But I think wisdom has to step in and say, I don't allow myself to make assumptions. Wisdom says I don't rely on assumptions. I'm going to figure this out. I'm going to track this thing all the way to the end, because you may get to the you may have this risky, imaginative thing that needs to be tried. And you might ask yourself, you might get to the end of it and realize, like, you know what if if we try this, the opportunity is infinite, but the risk is actually pretty low and it's a known quantity, so it's worth it. But if you don't get to quantifying the risk in some way, you never take that step. I think it's Jeff Bezos that said, somewhere he can make a decision on 60% of the amount of information that most people required to make a decision. And the reason for this is, and I'm paraphrasing pretty heavily, is he requires that people on his team, when they come with an idea to come with the way they're going to know when the idea has not worked, that he cares more about being able to know fast when something isn't working, than being able to have any confidence that it's actually going to work. Because if he can trust that the team knows when the thing is not working and to stop investing in it, he doesn't have to worry about the the sort of black hole of risk that can enter into the conversation. I think that's what wisdom is about. Yeah, it's about carrying that knowledge all the way through to break your fears.

Justin Wheeler Hey, it's an interesting paradigm shift in when when thinking about like, like, you know, execution at an operational level, right? When when you're launching something new, whether it's a program in a nonprofit or a campaign for, you know, an influence, whatever it is you tend to, you tend to think of like the end result as here the we know this worked if x, y, and z happened. But what you know, in your example, it's kind of like the opposite is we know that this didn't work. If if these things are happening often we look we focus on sort of like the positive KPIs, not the negative KPIs to measure if something is working. And that's an interesting sort of mindset paradigm to think about when, when executing, you know, across certain functions. Yeah. You earlier in the in the interview, you had a great quote, and it was something along the lines of like, you gain wisdom only by trying to be wiser and like, how do you get wiser? What is it? Or what does it mean to be trying to be wiser? Is it like an application, like you're trying to learn something? Is it? Yeah. Fill in the blanks that for me?

Taylor Jones You know, I think wisdom, there are a lot of people in the world that know a lot of things, but they have no idea how to apply them to anything in life that's useful. That's not wisdom, right? That's just knowledge. And wisdom is the pursuit of knowledge to be applied in your own leadership and decision making? Maybe that's the way that I would paraphrase it, right? It starts to develop a an instinct for what is good or what is bad, or what has a likelihood of leading to success or likelihood of not leading to success. And I think it requires a diverse set of inputs. You don't get wiser by only reading things that reaffirm your stance or position. You also don't get wiser by only reading things that are antagonistic to your viewpoint. You get wiser by by engaging, listening to, reading a wide set of things or a broad set of things, and intending to apply them to your thinking. Right? It's an active learning journey. It doesn't always mean that it's a strictly about whatever you're working on right now. I like to do a lot of, autobiographies or like historical fiction reading because it kind of ties my need to read a story with my need to want to learn something. I think there's a lot of good classical fiction that teaches a lot of good leadership that can be applied. Right? So not a real story, but something happened in this story. Classics like the Lord of the rings, where things happen in the story that pass wisdom into you. Right? You're not going to encounter Mordor in your life, ever. It's not going to happen because it's not real. But you might have a metaphorical one of those. And so the inputs into wisdom, I think they have to be broad and diverse and intentional. That's not just learning for the sake of learning, but it's it learning because you want to be able to bring a sense of of leadership instinct and or wisdom instinct into what you do makes sense.

Justin Wheeler Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. With a couple of minutes that we do have left, I'd love to talk a little bit more about whiteboard. And in terms of it not, but not like what is it that you do, which we have a good understanding of that. And people can easily click on your link in the show notes. But what I would love to hear from you as, as a business leader and and someone working with exceptional people across the spectrum is how do you, can like how do you approach building your business, each and every year? What are what are like any practical steps you can you can share with, you know, and I think that the application here is for our audience, our nonprofit executives were looking to build their organizations who are looking to inspire their team to go after what may seem like an impossible mission. How do. You kind of orient yourself as a leader in this social impact space, to empower your team to keep building and to keep tackling just the hard, hard issues that that we are faced with today.

Taylor Jones That's a great question. This may seem more scripted than intentional, but hang with me. So it takes two. It takes two roles to bring positive change into the world. So we talked about the visionary leader, right person who thinks about and plans the future with imagination and wisdom. But the second role is the agent. The agent is a person who by definition, works on behalf of someone or something else. So it's a posture of submitting yourself and your intent and your skills and your time and your energy to advancing the will of someone or something else. So everyone has visionary capacity, but we don't spend every moment of our lives being the visionary. Sometimes we got to be the agent in the work. And so at whiteboard, that's what we are by identity. We are an agency, and we're an agency at a time where the idea of personal agency has really risen, right? We've taken yet another concept that means work on behalf of others, and now made it about ourselves, because we operate in a culture where we are the center of our culture. And so for over 15 years, Eric and I've been talking about it, unpacking this concept that our work is not just to try to be the world's best design agency or creative agency or web agency or, you know, software agency or whatever, but to be agents. So that's the first question we ask ourselves all the time, right? We're checking in. How do we do that? And the reason this may feel scripted is we actually wrote a book about this.

Justin Wheeler Oh, look at that.

Taylor Jones That just released. It's called agency. You can get to that agency book.com. You didn't know that was coming. But here we are. And in the book we unpack these tensions that happen when we posture ourselves as agents. And so our strategic planning process at whiteboard is always coming back around to these questions as individuals, as an organization. In the book, we unpack these two sets of tensions that happen in agency work, which is the tension of balancing mission and purpose with mastery. So that's like, what what skills do I or we bring to the table to actually make a difference in this thing? Because we got to put our time in either advancing the mission or preparing, advancing our own skills to contribute to the mission. And frequently there's a tension there. Where where does the time go? Okay. Then the other tension is advocating for others or advocating for self, right? We know that self-care is really important. We know that I have to sustain myself in order to be able to be helpful and productive and all those things, but there's this tension there. How much of the time or energy goes to making sure that I'm okay and sustained and have the wants fulfilled in my life, that I need to keep me motivated versus actually advocating specifically for others. And so really, agency is about these two sets of intersecting tensions, and it's about keeping them in balance all the time. So in a world at once, every draft to be up and to the right, infinite scale, infinite growth, you know, what's your multiplier? How are you going to scale? The work of being an agent is not about scale. It's about keeping these things in tension. And so for us, that's the onus of our strategic planning as an organization. And when we're trying to figure out. So for Eric and I as the excuse me, the visionary leaders of our organization, we need our people to be agents of that vision. We also have to be agents of that. So a lot of our planning practicalities come out of this sort of rubric that we've written for ourselves, which is where the book came from. We were trying to figure out a way to express this mindset in view. And so that's where the book comes around. I never wanted to write a book, so it's always a little frightening for me to say it, but there's more of that in the book, if you'd like, check it out of the agency. Bbc.com. I mean, that's sort of where we start. And then, you know, we're practically speaking, we're a service business. So we we generate our revenue and our funding by providing services to clients. So there's some practicalities that come with that and some growth expectations that come with that. And we're on a pathway aiming to be an employee owned company. Lots of inputs you know, into the strategic planning piece. And I'm happy to unpack that you know, more in detail, especially with other, agency leaders and owners out there who are in a similar boat. We love to just, you know, connect and share ideas and stories, and we're pretty open. But, can get a little lonely out there in this world, as it can for all leaders, nonprofit leaders included. But one of the things we love most is just spending time together with people and sorting these things out. So that's an open invitation for anyone that's listening to just reach out and, you know, we'll we'll do our best to connect and whatever ideas we have, you can have and hopefully reciprocally, we can we can share.

Justin Wheeler Awesome. Well, Taylor, thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the podcast this afternoon. Really appreciate it. We'll make sure to link, the, agency book, in the show notes here as well for listeners. Sounds like a fascinating read I'm looking for to get my hands on it personally, but I just. Yeah. Thank you again for for joining and I appreciate it and look forward to continuing, to, to work with you and the whiteboard team on some cool things here in the future.

Taylor Jones Well, Justin, thanks again for the invitation. It's been an honor. And thanks for to all the listeners for tuning in. And of course, if we can ever, help you with anything, we're here for it. Thank you.

Justin Wheeler Thanks. Awesome. Thanks.

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