#569 Why zero distance will make you better at your job

**Sarah** (0:00)
We probably haven't had a language for it before.

**Helen** (0:02)
Like our life priorities aren't always the same.

**Sarah** (0:07)
Zero distance is the belief that organisations are strongest when they erase the gap between leaders and teams, between brands and the people they serve. We were like, you can look at zero distance in a few different ways. The more feelings you have, the more likely you are to suppress, ignore, dismiss the feelings.

**Helen** (0:23)
I carry the weight of the feeling rather than do something with it, you know?

**Sarah** (0:30)
Express the feeling, share the feeling.

**Helen** (0:31)
I carry the weight of the distance.

**Sarah** (0:32)
And then what we get is the Helen, I'm fine robot.

**Helen** (0:35)
Do you know it?

**Sarah** (0:35)
I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine. We had it three times.

**Helen** (0:37)
Wait, fine, well I'm not fine, but it's fine. It's fine. Yeah, you did. I was like, I'm fine. I mean, I'm not fine, but it's fine.

**Sarah** (0:43)
If you're doing this as a team, right, you'd be like, right, well what will mean that we have zero distance from each other?

**Helen** (0:48)
Yeah.

**Sarah** (0:48)
What's on your worry list? You know what you were saying?

**Helen** (0:50)
Sometimes I don't know what's most important to you right now. What's happening outside of work that we don't know about? Hi, I'm Helen.

**Sarah** (1:00)
And I'm Sarah.

**Helen** (1:01)
And this is the Squiggly Careers podcast, a weekly show where we borrow some brilliance from things we're watching, reading, listening to, or events we're maybe attending.

**Sarah** (1:12)
Objects.

**Helen** (1:12)
Objects. Yeah, there's been many things since we made a bit of a change to Squiggly Careers podcast to do borrow brilliance. And we are living it. I'm finding it's like unlocking my curiosity. I'm quite excited about this conversation today, because since Sarah shared the idea with me, which I'll let her tell you about in a minute, it's just come up quite a lot. I feel like the relevance of this one, it keeps being dropped into conversations. I hope it's going to be a useful listen for everybody. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen or watch the podcast. That just means that you never miss an episode because it always goes like top of your list on those platforms. Also, it is worth going to our website because every one of our episodes has a pod sheet. It's like a one-page summary of the conversation, the ideas, all the links to learn from. And it's all on amazingif.com. If you just go to the podcast page, you'll see all of our podcasts there, all 500 and something. And the vast majority of those have got this one-pager. So it might help you to take what you are listening to in our conversation into some practical actions afterwards.

**Sarah** (2:10)
And this is one of our episodes that we're doing in partnership with Post-it. And I sort of don't want to spoil the surprise of how we're going to be using them today. But the topic really lends itself, I think, to a bit of visualizing, doing a bit of drawing as we go. So we'll come back to how we think they might be helpful. And so the idea we're going to be exploring today is something called Zero Distance. And Zero Distance was first introduced by a company called Haya, who I think are a Japanese company. And the idea of Zero Distance, and it does what it says on the tin, is making sure that between a business and a customer, you have Zero Distance. And so you're so close to your customer that you really understand them, and you're learning from them. And actually I went on their website to see how they described the philosophy. And they talk about this idea of relentless learning, which obviously really appealed to me. I was like, oh yeah, that sounds amazing.
And they talk about maintaining a startup mentality, adopting an agile approach, and obviously really listening as well. There's a big thing about listening. But where I'm actually borrowing brilliance from is I saw the marketing director of a brand called ElfSpeak, a lady called Corrie Marchisoto. And so we have got some Elf products. This is a great excuse for us to buy some Elf products. Which, looking at these beautiful products, look.
You know, I'm sure some people who do proper podcasting on YouTube are like, oh, is that because they're sponsored? We're like, no.

**Helen** (3:41)
No, no, we just want to buy some products.

**Sarah** (3:43)
I just thought it was a really good idea.

**Helen** (3:44)
Sarah said this morning, because we always plan, obviously, plan what we're going to record. Yes, it is. It is planned, everybody may not think it is, but we do plan it. She's like, I think it'd be good to have some Elf products. So Vivi, who works with the team, was then sent to go and get some products. And now we're going to steal them, because I'm very excited about using them.