My Favourite Tip: Matt Jones - Design frameworks to foster better decision-making

Why would Four Pillars Gin turn down the opportunity to open another distillery? That’s an important question, because the answer isn’t necessarily obvious. After all, more must be better, right? 

That depends, and to avoid falling into a never-ending cycle of discussing what it depends on, Four Pillars co-founder Matt Jones and his team have developed a series of frameworks to aid their decision-making.

Opening another distillery might service some of some of the company’s goals, but is it the right decision for right now? What if instead, the better option is to open not a distillery, but to open a ‘home’, where the goal is not to further the craft of making gin, but to celebrate the craft of making cocktails? 

Whichever option ends up being better, Matt and his team are far more likely to choose wisely when they can consult a series of carefully designed decision-making frameworks. When you have many reasonable choices in front of you, the discussion then needs to be guided by a higher goal, and that’s exactly what these frameworks facilitate. 

Matt teaches you how to design your own decision-making frameworks, and shares the ones that have most helped Four Pillars.

Connect with Matt on Twitter or at the Four Pillars Gin website

You can find the full interview here: Four Pillars Gin Co-Founder Matt Jones wants you to obsess over aesthetics

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CREDITS

Produced by Inventium

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Why would Four Pillars Gin turn down the opportunity to
open another distillery. That's an important question because the answer
isn't necessarily obvious. After all, more must be better, right, Well,
that depends and to avoid falling into a never ending

(00:23):
cycle of discussing what it depends on, Four Pillars co
founder Matt Jones and his team have developed a series
of frameworks to aid their decision making. In this episode,
Matt takes me through how to design your own decision
making frameworks and he shares the ones that have helped
him most at Four Pillars. My name is doctor amanthe Immer.

(00:51):
I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science
consultancy Inventium, and this is how I work a show
about how to help you you do your best work.
On today's My Favorite Tip episode, we go back to
an interview from the past and I pick out my
favorite tip from the interview. In today's show, I speak
with Four Pillars co founder and brand director Matt Jones

(01:14):
about creating frameworks to help with better decision making, especially
when it comes to making creative decisions.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
I think in the heart of it, what we're talking
about is sort of the codification of instincts and making
sure that what you don't want to do is correct
frameworks that's so compelling that you can talk yourself into
bad decisions. But what you do want to do, I think,
is just capture what it is that is going to

(01:47):
make you successful and sometimes retrospectively, what has made you successful.
So frameworks that we've built at Four Pillars include the
four pillars of our purpose, something we don't talk about
really at all to our external customers, but we talk
about a lot internally. What are the reasons why we exist,

(02:08):
why we do these things, why we matter in the world.
And they are distilling cocktails modern Australia and community, and
we've got things to say about all of them. But
at the heart of it, they're these four pillars of
why we exist that we can come back to. And
so why that's helpful is it gives people a lens
that they can use to talk about their ideas. So

(02:31):
when they come to the table and say, have I've
got this great idea for a four Pillars home in Sydney,
and I don't think we need another distillery, but I've
looked at their purpose and I'm thinking about that second
pillar to elevate and celebrate the craft of the cocktail.
As much as the distillery is a wonderful place, the
distillery is really about the first pillar of our purpose
to elevate the craft of distilling Gin. What if we

(02:53):
built a home in Sydney that was all about pillar
number two, celebrating the craft of a great cocktail, and
then that gives them a language, It gives them something
to hang that idea from that then makes sense of
it in the business and allows us to explore it
more and give it a center of gravity, another structure
or another little list of four the four experienced principles,

(03:17):
which really are about how we want people to feel
about us. That we want people to experience four pillars
as the most delicious, most creative, most well designed and
just most fun brand in Gin. And so that relationship
between deliciousness and creativity and design and fun helps give

(03:41):
us guardrails. So as we're executing, if I go back
to the four pillars, the boratory in Sydney and Surrey Hills,
which is this beautiful space anchored around this incredible bar
where the bartender and the drink a sort of a
sitting across this blue juniper blue concrete bar all on
the same plane. It's almost like a beautiful sushi counter
in Tokyo, where you know, chef and dinery unified around

(04:03):
the space, except in this case it's the bartender and
the drinker. Now, the reality is as we executed that
we could have got too serious. You know, we worked
with this incredible interior architect called Yasmighanim and create this
great space, but we could have got too serious about
the architecture and the craft of drinks, making too invested

(04:24):
in the creativity and the design strands of our sort
of experience principles. So then you come back and you
pull back to you but is it going to be delicious?
Is it going to be fun? Are people going to
be relaxed enough to enjoy their drink and feel like
they're having a good time? And so what these frameworks do?
You know? Some give you language to talk about ideas
and how they fit within the business. Some give you

(04:46):
guardrails around design and making sure that you're striking that
right balance. You know, I try and make sure that
when we write marketing strategies or when we build our
growth strategies for a market like the UK, that it
comes down own to typically four key principles. I think
it's about giving people language that helps them to articulate

(05:09):
why they think things are right. What these frameworks should
not become is a way of bullying people into accepting
ideas that are fundamentally bad.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
If you enjoyed this extract of my chat with Matt,
you might want to go back and listen to the
full interview, which you can find a link for in
the show notes. If you're looking for more tips to
improve the way that you work, I write a short
fortnightly newsletter that contains three cool things that I've discovered
that helped me work better, ranging from software and gadgets

(05:43):
that I'm loving through to interesting research findings. You can
sign up for that at Howiwork dot com. That's how
I Work dot co. Thank you for sharing part of
your day with me by listening to How I Work.
If you're keen for more tips on how to work better,
connect with me via LinkedIn or Instagram. I'm very easy
to find. Just search for Amantha Imba. How I Work

(06:07):
was recorded on the traditional land of the Warrangeri people,
part of the Kulin Nation. I am so grateful for
being able to work and live on this beautiful land,
and I want to pay my respects to elders, past,
present and emerging. How I work is produced by Inventium
with production support from Dead Set Studios, and thank you
to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes

(06:29):
everything sound better than it would have otherwise