In this episode of FP&A Unlocked, host Paul Barnhurst explores how systems thinking can improve financial planning, decision-making, and business performance. The conversation highlights why traditional planning processes often fail, how organizational behaviors influence outcomes, and why asking better questions helps finance teams become more effective strategic partners.
Daniel Bryan, Finance, Strategy & Analytics Leader at UBS, is a qualified accountant with approximately 20 years of experience in financial services, including FP&A, business partnering, and organizational transformation. Based in Switzerland, he specializes in systems thinking, data analytics, AI, and finance transformation. He shares insights on challenging assumptions, understanding different business perspectives, and developing planning processes that deliver meaningful business value.
Expect to Learn:
Why traditional financial planning processes often fail to deliver value.
How systems thinking helps finance teams solve complex business challenges.
Why asking better questions leads to better decisions.
How organizational behaviors and incentives influence planning outcomes.
Why AI requires clearly defined objectives and human judgment.
Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:
“You can't be great at FP&A if you're not involved in the conversation.” - Daniel Bryan
“It's enabling you to take a step back and find better answers by asking better questions.” - Daniel Bryan
Daniel emphasizes that effective FP&A goes beyond financial models and reports. By embracing systems thinking, asking better questions, and understanding different perspectives, finance professionals can improve decision-making, strengthen business partnerships, and deliver greater strategic value.
Follow Daniel:
Disclosure: Portions of this episode (such as the introduction or promotional segments) use AI-generated voice narration produced under human editorial review.
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For CPE credit, please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, answer a few questions, and earn your CPE certification. To earn education credits for the FPAC Certificate, take the quiz on Earmark and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.
In Today's Episode:
[00:00] Introduction
[03:41] What Great FP&A Looks Like
[06:20] Discovering Systems Thinking
[13:04] Understanding Systems Thinking
[18:36] Asking Better Questions
[27:02] AI, KPIs & Unintended Consequences
[29:41] Building Models That Meet Business Needs
[38:30] Systems Thinking & AI Adoption
[45:54] Personal Questions & Career Insights
[48:01] Daniel's Articles & Resources
Full Show Transcript:
Host: Paul Barnhurst (01:09):
Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of FP&A Unlocked where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy. And each week we bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FP&A in today's business world. Together, we'll uncover the strategies and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great ones, helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. Today's guest is Daniel Bryan. Dan, welcome to the show.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (01:47):
Hi, Paul. Thanks for the invite and having me on.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (01:50):
Yeah, really excited to have you. Glad you're able to join us today. So let me give a little bit of Dan's background and then we'll jump into our questions and what we're going to talk about. We're going to mostly cover systems thinking along with some FP&A questions, how it relates to FP&A. But before I get into that, let me just read a little bit about Daniel here. Daniel Bryan is a finance, strategy, and data leader with around 20 years' experience in financial services across roles spanning business partnering, FP&A, and organizational transformation. He's a qualified accountant. His interests have increasingly wandered beyond traditional finance into systems thinking, complexity science, information systems, organizational learning, agent-based modeling, and AI. He is particularly interested in how models, assumptions, and measures shape decision-making, which is something we're going to talk about, how organizations make sense of complexity and why apparently sensible interventions so often produce unexpected results, something I think we can all relate to.
(02:58):
Dan applies systems thinking ideas to real-world finance and management problems and recently wrote a series exploring systems thinking in FP&A. He's based in Switzerland. As he likes to say, he's a recovering Excel geek. I say I'm still an Excel geek, so we've got two things in common.
(03:20):
He's an undercover systems thinker and a pro dog walker. He can usually be found in a forest or halfway up a mountain recording audio notes and channeling his inner Dale Cooper. So nice. I love it. So welcome again. I always like to start every interview with this question. What does great FP&A look like?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (03:43):
Yeah. Well, again, thanks for having me on. I guess my views on that have changed over the years. If you'd asked me a while ago, I probably wouldn't say the same thing now, but first and foremost, I would say now you can't be great at FP&A if you're not involved in the conversation. What that means is basically having the right conversations with the right people in the company to influence it and to drive it. And I think that's not something that you probably think is a target you might have earlier in your career, but towards the end of it, you kind of realize that you need to earn that seat in the conversation. You need to be having credibility, trust, you need to speak the language of the business, but also speak to the finance language and probably more so these days IT as well.
(04:31):
So I would summarize it really is earning your seat in the conversation.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (04:35):
Well, for sure.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (04:36):
How you do that, that's obviously a big story. I wanted to just basically mention that what do you need to do to earn that seat? I think it's not something that comes automatically. You can be great at building models, you be great at creating workflow charts, et cetera. But unless you really understand what the business is doing really, really well, understanding what the management wants, not just their externally published KPIs or official targets, but really where they see value being created, what they can do about it. And the last thing I would say is really about the attitude as well. So really having a proactive kind of can-do, not saying no first, but rather bringing people on a journey with you. I think they're really, really important things to get that seat at the table.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (05:25):
No, I think you're right. I mean, obviously if we aren't communicating with the business and don't have a seat at the table, it's hard to have an impact.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (05:33):
Exactly. I think I've seen quite a few people who are very capable, competent, know their business, know their P&Ls, their balance sheets, et cetera. But they're just really operating more like a factory, churning out forecasts, doing it just to hit the target and then see what happens. Whereas when you get a little bit more advanced, you're actually wanting to know that what you're doing as an FP&A leader is actually being used and is useful and people are coming to you asking you, "Hey, can you quickly tell me what does this mean for my business?" Not just what's a P&L, but how would that shape our performance? What are our KPIs looking like, et cetera.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (06:13):
Fully agree with you there that we want all that. So I want to get into systems thinking and where I want to start is you've written several articles recently. I think you did a whole series on LinkedIn about systems thinking. So how did you become interested in this whole idea of systems thinking? How did that happen?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (06:28):
Kind of an accident, really. I didn't really set out looking for any more management theory, but I found myself over the years getting a bit more frustrated in some of my dealings with the work, et cetera, but also just seeing the increasing complexity of the world. And actually I was reading a book by a guy called Dan Davis called The Unaccountability Machine, which was really a book about how big organizations make bad decisions. And I knew him from his writings in the FT, so I picked up the book and then I would say I really had a bit of a mind shift. I won't give any spoilers about the book, but there's some really good analogies in natural cases where you think a company has organized its process a certain way and with all the right intentions, but then the outcome is really not what anyone wanted.
(07:19):
And this book led me towards some of these topics, including one called cybernetics, which honestly sounds a little bit more complicated than it really is, but eventually that led me down into the systems thinking hole that I've been living in for the past couple of years. And I took a course at university in the UK about it as well.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (07:37):
Oh, so you've gone really deep. It sounds like read several books, taken a course, written a number of articles on this topic. So you said what, a few years now? Is that kind of where you've been down the rabbit hole, so to speak?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (07:52):
Yeah, you imagine like a rabbit warren with one big long track down the middle and load the little offshoots the sides where you can get lost and go around in circles. But I think I've seen it, it sounds a bit strange to say it like this, but it's a change in the way that you're thinking and we can go into that. But it really is a fundamental change for me personally in my career. I look at things very differently now. Maybe that's also getting a little bit older helps, but it's definitely something that it's really changed the way I think.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (08:24):
And that's good. I think one book for me, you kind of mentioned that I haven't done much on the systems thinking, but one book that I really like that will often remind me how I should be thinking is growth mindset. There's a lot of them out there, different ways to help you do that. So I'm curious, for your situation as you got into systems thinking, what was the challenge that you were running into or what were you hoping to solve? You mentioned as you got into your career, a lot of things you saw where as you got further and further in, you're like, "Why is this always happening?" So just talk a little bit about the challenge or what you're hoping to solve by better understanding systems thinking.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (09:02):
Well, I was looking for answers to the questions that I was steadily building up. And actually one of the topics that was really challenging was the annual planning process. Every company seems to have, and you're either you know about it or you don't. Those that do know about it, I think they have a certain view. I once spoke to someone and they're like, "They're not a finance person." I said, "Well, most finance people think of the financial planning process as getting a tattoo." And the guy was, "I don't know what you're really talking about here." Well, we know it's going to hurt, yet we still do it. And that was a revelation, I think, just talking to
Host: Paul Barnhurst (09:44):
Colleagues
Guest: Daniel Bryan (09:44):
That it's something that people prepare for. They know it's going to hurt, but it's a necessary thing to do. But what I think frustrated me and a lot of other people is that getting a tattoos, I don't have any, but I presume it's a matter of hours, but it's there
Host: Paul Barnhurst (10:00):
Forever,
Guest: Daniel Bryan (10:00):
Permanent. The planning kind of the opposite way around. It takes ages to do months and months probably for some companies. And then as soon as it's out, it's out of date or it's not used or it's whatever. And that bothered me a little bit because I saw just the amount of effort that people go into to make plans, really trying their best, but the same issues kept popping up year after year. And of course in our more complex world, it doesn't get better because of that. And it frustrated me. So I found myself looking for answers. And I also kind of summarized the question I was asking is, being all very intelligent people, well-intentioned, why does it not get noticeably better? Marginally, it does. A new system here, a new checklist here, you see little things, but it eventually comes back into the cycle of unpleasantness and inefficiency, I felt.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (11:00):
And so I want to dig into that just a little bit there. We've all been there. I mean, I can remember a budget that wasn't finalized till May of the next year, and then we were way ahead of target that year. So in July, corporate decided to change everybody's budget without telling us how they did it and then expected us to answer all the questions. And I finally wrote one time on a commentary, "I don't even know what was used to come up with this number. I can't tell you what's caused the variance." I don't think they appreciated that one very much, but it was extremely frustrating. So I can totally relate to that. But what I'm curious is, was the frustration more around that you felt the process was inefficient, that as soon as we were done, it was useless, that nobody was getting value out of it?
(11:48):
What are maybe some of those frustrations for you that made you say, "This is broken or this doesn't seem right?"
Guest: Daniel Bryan (11:55):
I think, well, the basic principle was we keep trying harder and harder and it's not getting any better, so that doesn't make sense. But again, progressing through the years, you realize that what you're doing isn't really what you thought you were doing. You start to realize, or it might dawn on you that the purpose of the plan is not perhaps what you as a well-meaning finance person thought it was. And you see behaviors, you see different dynamics that are coming to play. And I really wondered why that is. If I talk to another finance person, they probably see it a similar way, what's the purpose of the plan? But I started digging deeper and realized that because of these differences, all these other impacts, all these other behaviors, whether they wanted or not, came to be. But it didn't really feel conscious. People don't feel conscious of it.
(12:52):
They're just going about their jobs doing the best that they can. But when you take a step back and you realize what's going on, you start to pick away at it and think, "Well, I'm sure there must be a better way of doing it."
Host: Paul Barnhurst (13:04):
Yeah, I think we all agree when you said there must be a better way of doing it. So I think we'll come back some more to plan, but what I want to kind of step back for a minute is I think most people probably don't really know what systems thinking is. When you hear it, you think of an academic term, a theoretical term. So what do you mean when you say systems thinking?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (13:29):
That's a great question. Not so easy to answer, unfortunately, but I'd give it a good go without losing people. I would say the following. When I first started looking at systems thinking, I was kind of expecting that it meant, as you said, methodologies, theories like management, Maslow's hierarchy of needs type things. But actually what it is, is a collection of people's thoughts grounded in some kind of theory, but really different perspectives of how to look at problems. And that sounds, again, 10,000 feet sort of thing. Originally, it started out as a kind of management science or something called operations research, like the 1950s and 1960s, and also another topic called system dynamics, really mathematically so-called hard systems, like how does this thing work? What are the interrelationships going on? How can we understand it? And over the years it became more, I would say softer. So dealt more with things like people, social challenge, learning, change, all these kind of things.
(14:40):
And so there's this great theoretical backbone to it. I'm not going to go down that route because it's pretty dense. Fantastic if you've got the time to study it, but dense. I think I would summarize it in a way, systems thinking gives you different number of lenses to look at a situation through various heuristics or frameworks or neat little tricks. Basically, you can prompt questions of a situation that perhaps you wouldn't have done otherwise or perhaps other people didn't really think about. And it allows you to, I would say, deconstruct more complicated situations. It's not going to help you decide which hammer to hammer a nail in or it's a little bit more perspective and taking it back to planning. I see lots of individual components and lots of people doing a great job in their little defined things, but overall the whole system isn't working as...
(15:43):
Or I have these outcomes which are not ideal. And why is that? So systems thinking gives you ways of asking questions and thinking about the situation differently with the intention of untangling things and really starts with yourself as well, dismantling any assumptions that you might have, that kind of thing.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (16:04):
So as they hear it, and you could tell me if I'm off base, but here's kind of what I'm hearing is systems thinking one is a way to look at a process, a thing kind of holistically, you're working to change your thinking and also being able to see it from others' perspectives with different frameworks because we've all seen it where 10 well-intentioned people get in a room, make a decision, and then they share it with everybody and the rest of the world's like, you're an idiot. How did you guys ever come up with that solution? What were you thinking? We've all seen it, whether it's politics, whether it's the plan, whatever it might be. So is that a kind of way to think of it as almost like helping you understand and deconstruct why so many good people have built what appears on the surface to be a reasonable process, but continually kind of leads to suboptimal decisions?
(16:57):
Is that one way to think of this?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (16:59):
Yeah, exactly right. There are different ways and perspectives that people change, different tools that they can use, but ultimately it comes down to there's a complex situation, so-called messy situations like planning or something even bigger like climate change, this kind of things where there are lots of ways to solve issues. There are lots of different perspectives, interrelationships, competing interests, this kind of thing. And success, it's not a binary outcome, it's a matter of opinion. And so when people are trying to get to grips with these situations, often people just go, "Oh, well, I think X answer." As you mentioned, they got in a room and decided this was the right thing to do. Again, it doesn't take a genius to realize that won't work all the time, maybe sometime. And then other situations, for example, where there are more than one way to do things, but people just aren't working together well, for example.
(18:05):
What systems thinking is doing is allowing you, instead of meeting the situation and either assuming you know the answer or boldly going forward with what you have, it's enabling you to take a step back and find better answers by asking better questions.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (18:23):
So I want to dig into that and then I'd love to get some examples of where you've used the systems thinking. We'll bring it back to planning. But the last thing you said there, an example is asking better questions to help you get better answers. So within systems thinking, is there frameworks for asking better questions or is it more just making you aware and then you need to figure out how you do that? Do you know what I'm saying?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (18:46):
It doesn't give you the answers for anything, but there's a lot of famous, well, probably not that famous theorists who've got different approaches. I think one thing that's really important is you've got this kind of theory about how people behave, how things work. But the other concept, which part of my studies was about how to bring that into practice. And so not just looking at a framework and saying, okay, apply this framework to this situation. Of course, it's not like a blueprint, let's say, and we can talk about them maybe more detail later, but they are someone's way of analyzing a situation, something more complicated than a SWOT analysis, but equally quite general in a sense that allows you to explore the situation. So I mean, we can talk about some of them later, but if I was to talk about how it happens in reality, how to use systems thinking, I would
Host: Paul Barnhurst (19:52):
Kind
Guest: Daniel Bryan (19:52):
Of say there would be three things, three practical ideas that people can do, and we can talk about each of them. One is look beyond the symptom that you're seeing. So what is the pain point that you see? What is the outcome that's not right? You need to look beyond that. It's not just a simple system isn't working because of X. In very few cases it might be, but in bigger complicated situations, it's not. The other one is look beyond process. So what is it that you think you are looking at? You probably automatically, your brain works automatically. It looks like a cat, therefore it's a cat, obviously, but some things don't have a name. We give them a name like a planning process, but what is that? And then the last thing I would say would look beyond the answer. So what that means is, and we can elaborate on this, is just because you think you have the answer, what matters more is how that's implemented and what that does to a system.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (20:55):
Yeah. It's funny when you said that last one, what that does to a system, it made me think of how often do we tell people this is the way we're going to do something and you don't get shared adoption because you're just telling them what to do versus letting the system come to the conclusion that that's the right way to do something. I know I've done it as a manager. I still remember one time telling someone, oh, you got to do it this way. And I could tell they were looking at me and they were pushing back and I said, okay, fine. At the end of the day, here's what the output needs to be. As long as you get to that, do it however you want. And I got the results. And so I don't know, that was the thought that came to mind as you said that.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (21:33):
That's absolutely one aspect of it. It's a very human thing when we talk about these topics. So in that case, you would tell your colleague, I recommend you do it like this because... And if you take a step back and ask yourself, why did I say that? That's because based on my previous experience, I've classified this kind of issue, whatever, that needs to be solved, and I believe that if I do this, I will get X result. Or if the person does this, they will get X result. And of course that's completely logical because it's based on your experience. But sometimes it's difficult thing is to be a bit humble about it and not always assume that you know everything, which I can tell you working in a financial services industry is pretty challenging at times because there's a lot of confident people around, but it's really like this discipline to, okay, you're not going to do that every day for every individual task, but if you find an issue that hasn't worked, something that hasn't worked, you shouldn't be afraid to challenge your assumptions around it.
(22:36):
And that's what kind of systems thinking and those three things I mentioned before kind of get towards.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (22:42):
FP&A guy here. I want to take a minute and share something I've been working on. I've spent several months adding new affiliate programs to my website, probably wondering why affiliate programs? Well, I can't train you on everything, but I can show you and give you trusted resources with exclusive FP&A guide discounts in many cases on my website. I have several of the top FP&A AI people in the world. I have the top certificate programs. I also have other programs like Excel, Power BI. I'm bringing you some of the top people that train in the world. There's Nicholas Boucher with exclusive discounts, David 14, I'm adding Carl Seidman with exclusive discount, the top programs, FPAC, FMI, and more. So go ahead and check it out on my website, sign up. And if you have a question on what program is right for you, go ahead and message me. I'll get back to you, LinkedIn, or you can email me. So go to https://www.thefpandaguy.com/ and check out my trusted list of resources for you to upskill yourself.. Yeah. So can you share an example where maybe it changed your thinking, improved a process, something in your job? And then I want to discuss how it relates to planning.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (24:06):
Well, they're both quite closely related because I've done a lot of work on planning. I guess I think there's a few or quite a few penny-drop moments, you say in English anyway, that it dawned on me that what I though I knew I didn't really know. So one of the things that helped there was when you see a symptom of an issue, for example, and I'll be precise about this, don't be afraid to dig in and challenge yourself. So often with just a work in general finance or FP&A stuff, if we take a planning as an example, we have created this new process, whatever, on paper, people are still building their spreadsheets. They're still ignoring your tool. They're still doing what they want. They're not following it. Usually you would say, "Well, that's probably because my process isn't perfect or not catering to their needs, but anyway, they need to follow it.
(25:02):
So I'm going to escalate, I'm going to talk to their boss, I'm going to make sure because we all need to work together and they're not." And I guess that will get you so far. But one of the questions I started to ask is, "Well, what is it that this well-meaning person, why do they behave that way? Why do they think what they're doing is not necessarily better, but why do they do it in the face of such logic?" And it's a bit uncomfortable to ask that question because it draws a bit of attention onto what you are doing itself, but asking more deeper questions about the motivations and asking what is it that they gain from this situation? Was it a risk that they're avoiding? It's not just a case that they prefer their spreadsheet to my new process, but is it linked somewhere to another associated process?
(25:57):
Is there another really, really good reason that they're just not really willing to talk about that means that they're not following my change basically? And being able to surface these questions carefully, subtly, that you can start to understand people's differing viewpoints is obviously quite difficult, but it's essential when you have really big challenges to solve where it needs people working together and being open to change, not just in words, but actually in actions. So that would be one kind of case where... I mean, what I think I used the spreadsheet as an example because we tried to once harmonize five processes into one and wondered why people weren't doing it. That was exactly the reason why, just because we didn't ask the right questions to start with.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (26:47):
Yeah, what you ended on there. We did not ask the right questions to start with. Done that so many times and honestly, and I'd love to get your thought. We're going to diverge here for a second, but I think we'll come to our last area a little around how does this all connect to AI. I was interviewing someone, they said, and they go, "Now it's more important than ever to be able to ask the right question because you can get answers from AI super quick. And if you're not asking the right question, the answer you're getting, you may go off and do, but you're not doing the right thing because you didn't ask the right question to start with." So I mean, I think it was always really important with humans, but I'd love any thoughts there. It feels like that asking the right question has become more important than ever, especially with AI.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (27:33):
Yeah, that's a good point. Actually, that was one of my first thoughts about AI as well, and I've been learning last year or so is it's fantastic optimizing challenges and answering super complicated math questions, you name it. But what's really the deciding factor is how you phrase the question or the challenge or how you set the reward. And it's like having a higher caliber rifle than you had before or something. It's just going to do a lot more damage if it's misdirected. And definitely that if I think many, many years ago, a good example would've been the account opening scandals at one of the US banks where they'd set a KPI to all their advisors need to open X number of new accounts and they found that they were opening accounts for people that didn't exist. This is a reason where the KPI kind of drives the behavior rather than rationality.
(28:37):
And the same I think will come from AI in that sense. If you set a reward that's narrow or that even you struggle to put the nuance into that reward, then you're going to have some trouble for sure.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (28:49):
And I think you shared a great example. Anyone in the US remembers that example. It's one of the reasons I stopped using that bank. So I know exactly what bank you're talking about. I remember all of that coming out. And it's interesting as you mentioned that we could spend a whole episode on incentive theory and how you incentivize people and getting them right. We all see it in finance and there's some tie into systems thinking and all that. And so that's where it kind of made me go is makes you think about that. But let's bring it back. I'm curious. I'm sure you've had plans where you feel like the plan looks great on paper or you've built a model. You go to the business and the business is looking at you kind of like, "What are you talking about?" There's that disconnect. I think everybody's experienced that.
(29:40):
So advice, what do we do in that situation? How do we bring systems thinking? What do you do now that you wouldn't have maybe done earlier in your career because of systems thinking in those situations?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (29:52):
It's a great question. And yes, I had quite a few moments early in my career when I'd stayed up all night making this beautiful Excel model. I showed it to the MD and then he's like, "Well, that's nice, but I'm not going to use that because it's not doing anything that I really need." So yeah, those few hours lost in my life to such things. But I think, at least for me personally, now if I put myself in that position again and someone asks me, "I would like this, this is my intention. I need a model to do this." I would really start asking, okay, the usual types of questions you would ask about business requirements. What do you use it for? When do you need it? What should it contain? That's all pretty simple, but it's more asking, okay, then what are you going to do with it?
(30:37):
And I think that was something I wouldn't have been confident enough to ask years ago. I take planning as an example because everybody does planning in some kind of way in their life, but why they do it and what's the purpose of it? You either take for granted, you don't really think about it at all, or you just think, well, yeah, I'm sure there's different reasons, but in the end you want something which is a representation of what could happen in the future. Scratching my head, wondering why are a certain area of people, why are they resisting this so much? What do they care about my change? I'm just changing a template or I'm putting an extra step in a process or something. What is it that's bothering them? And then there's a moment where one of the techniques in systems thinking is they have these great mapping techniques so you can dump your mind on a page and then talk to others and compare pages and this thing.
(31:38):
And I drew this big A3 picture. It was one of my assignments and it was an active scene from a war film or something, people coming in from the left, from the right, there was a central pot. And it was basically my depiction of what I was seeing as a kind of planning system, as if it was drawn not by a child, but to animate that somehow. And when I stood back, I thought, well, yeah, but that's because all these different issues or frictions are occurring because people just have a difference of opinion about what something is for. And it's not that it's hidden, but it's just not explicit and discussed. So the CFO asking for a forecast, it could be for many different reasons. He might want a best estimate for his next encounter with the CEO. He might want to start thinking about another, I wonder if I've got capacity for X or something.
(32:42):
Whereas you ask someone in the business, okay, we need to make a plan. And their immediate thought is, well, you're going to judge me on this plan. And maybe taking that step further, oh, by the way, I need a plan to judge my own business on too, and so on. So you start picking away and you realize that where the different viewpoints come from, again, it's not from a bad place, but they're just with a different starting assumption about what you're doing collectively. And when you start to realize that, which is again, super obvious when someone tells you, is that you start to ask the questions or think about solutions in a slightly more nuanced or better way. So how can these two systems, if you like, you've got your corporate planning, you've got your performance appraisal, you've got your in banks and you have lots of other technical regulator views, things like this.
(33:38):
How can they coexist? How can I structure what I'm doing to make them coexist and not just rub against each other and create friction?
Host: Paul Barnhurst (33:46):
FP&A guy here. We'll get back to the show in a minute. This section is unscripted. When I started my business, I had two main goals, to be trusted and for my content to come across as authentic and helpful. I've heard from many of you that I've accomplished those. Today, I have three goals, to be trusted, authentic, and have the best beard in finance. All right, enough with the jokes, enough with the fun. What I'm asking for is I'm asking for you to help me out. If you've enjoyed the show, if you've enjoyed an interview, if you found it helpful in your career, can you please leave a rating and review? That helps more people find the show, helps me grow the show, helps me grow my business. So I'd really appreciate it if you could take a moment and leave me a review. You can do it on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you listen, or you can go to my website, https://www.thefpandaguy.com/. That's F-P-A-N-D-A guy.com. Go ahead and go to Walla Love, go down to the bottom, and you can click to leave a testimonial. Thanks for doing that. Thanks for listening.
(34:39):
But it feels to me that so much of this is around learning to ask better questions, getting back to the source, trying to understand others' perspectives so you can design and build processes that are going to lead to better outcomes. Is that how you think about this or am I oversimplifying it?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (35:04):
I don't think you can simplify it enough. It sounds like a bit self-defeating, that one, but it's very true. To many it sounds a bit fluffy, I will say that. But as soon as you start doing things and seeing or that penny dropping for yourself, you really start to see the magic of just being able to think differently about the same old challenges. So I think your description was very, very well made.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (35:26):
Okay. And any last thoughts you want to share on systems thinking for our audience? Any advice for them that they should take away from this conversation?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (35:36):
Well, firstly, if these ideas spark your interest, there are lots of resources online. You can read about it, probably better people than I to explain it. I think to start to use it in your daily life, it's not like something you take out the box and start using it. It's just little experiments that you can do when you encounter a situation. So I'll probably go back to the three points I made earlier, which is, and anyone can do this tomorrow in their job or Monday even, what you are seeing, the pain or frustration of something is not just something that needs to be solved. So you look beyond that symptom and ask why is this person doing that? What makes it make sense for them? What is this information telling you? Look beyond the process and challenge the process as we just discussed. So the next time, again, the CFO asks, "Can I have a forecast?" I mean, sure you're going to ask what for?
(36:33):
That's probably natural. But perhaps if you're talking about with another colleague, ask them or ask multiple people, "What do you really think we are doing here? What's this for?" And maybe you'll be surprised with one of them that says, "Well, actually I see it more as like this." And that can tell you something. And then I think the last thing that we do is right before you send that email or suggest, "Oh, I think we should change the process to this," or maybe just stop and ask yourself, "And then what? What could happen or what would reasonable people think would happen if you make this change?" You might still make the change, but at least you start to think more systemically about change.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (37:21):
Thank you for that. Make some good points there. So obviously, I think it feels like the word of the decade, maybe the century is generative AI, AI, artificial intelligence, this whole transformation that we're seeing go on before our eyes. So how do you think about AI? Do you think there's a connection between AI and systems thinking? Because obviously AI is going to require change. So I'll just leave it to there and let you take that where you want.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (37:56):
Yeah. I mean, exactly topic of the day of the century, maybe even like all of us finance professionals, we're interested in multiple angles and I plan to write a little bit about this in the future, but just taking a step back and my natural systems thinking brain, if I have one yet, starts to ask questions, simple things, what's the purpose of what we are doing? Do we truly understand it? Which are kind of obvious, everybody asks that kind of thing. One of the points we mentioned earlier, which was quite an interesting one, is just how powerful, but then how dangerous it can be when we're letting AI agents or just ourselves fall into the trap of if we optimize this, we're going to get this outcome. And if we define things poorly, yes, you're not going to get... What that means is you just have to approach things with a little bit of, I think, humility and be very careful about how you define success.
(39:03):
Of course, KPIs are needed. We need to measure performance. I don't disagree, but we have to think carefully how we package that up for AI to go away and solve for us. The other thing which I have in mind is, and this is maybe slightly geeky, but it's in the way that AI is based off of digitized knowledge and information. So the machine can only read information that's been encoded in a certain way, and this is called compression. And eventually that's how large language models work where you are taking the whole of the internet and boiling it down into vectors, as they call them, of semantic meaning. And then we take that and we ask it questions and then we take the output and we double check what it says and that's all fine. But one of the dangers I think we have is that kind of data bit going in, that's for me our representation of reality.
(40:05):
It's not the truth, it's a map. So when we have these ready-made answers for us given on a plate, we kind of tend to trust it and in doing so, we trust that what went into it was correct as well or valid or helpful. So that's definitely a risk, I would say.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (40:26):
Yeah. I think we all saw it, especially early on, some of the biases that AI would have because all humans have bias. I mean, that's a fact. Now, some of us have more unconscious than conscious how much bias we have, that's all debatable, but we all have bias. So the information it's going to train on is going to have some bias and that's something you have to be careful for. So I think you make a great point there at the end about that and some great thoughts. So I appreciate you sharing some things in systems thinking. It's kind of been a different episode, so it's been fun to talk about a different topic. I want to transition. We have a couple standard sections we do at the end of the show. The first is what I call my FP&A section. I usually ask three questions, generally the same questions of most guests.
(41:13):
So the first one here is what is the number one technical skill that you believe FP&A professionals need to master today?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (41:22):
A very topical question. I'm very tempted to say AI or data literacy, that kind of thing, which is very, very, very true. But what I'd probably go for is data visualization. And why I say that is humans are quite, we're visual things, right? A person that can say something very concisely with one picture is infinitely more accepted than the person with a whole list of things. And often finance people are really, really good at the detail and the numbers, but not in the sharing of that information with others. And I think we've gotten better as a profession obviously over time and now there's lots of cool tips and things and tools to do that. But I think it's really, is it a technical skill? Yeah, I think so. Displaying the trend in a certain way to guide someone's inner thoughts rather than telling them what they see, I think that's a really, really powerful thing that is, for me, a technical skill.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (42:23):
Okay. Appreciate that. I like it. What about soft skill?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (42:27):
Well, if I can't say systems thinking, which obviously I want to say, I'll say something very close, which is I would say critical thinking and listening. So I think some of your guests before have spoken about critical thinking. I think one of the things I found from my studies was unpicking what I think and why I think people often take mental shortcuts when we're trying to do things fast. It's just how the brain works. But then we do things without really thinking about them using the active part of our brain. And I would say when you don't do that, you end up kind of running around trying to solve problems literally around the company. You are the fix it people generally in finance. So definitely having the ability to understand what really someone wants and thinks and the why is something which again, comes with age and experience.
(43:26):
But more so again, with the world of AI, you need to be giving people the opportunity to be challenged to make decisions like that, I think. So definitely that critical thinking and listening smoothens any kind of challenging business relationship or meeting or something like that. I definitely think so.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (43:47):
Yeah. So I think data visualization I've heard here and critical thinking. So appreciate both of those. The next one is just a fun question. If Excel removed one feature tomorrow, which feature would cause you the most panic?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (44:03):
Well, I mentioned earlier, or you mentioned, I'm a recovering Excel geek. It's been a while. When they first added the ribbon, I was not happy and then I managed to adapt. I think one of the things I couldn't live without would be keyboard shortcuts for a couple of reasons. One, just to get stuff done faster. And when I started out in my early days, I was amazed watching this guy sat next to me cutting, pasting, moving data. And now maybe it's a bit lost, I don't know, but definitely when someone sees you, "Oh wow, that happened fast." It's also like a badge of honor or a tool, especially for finance people. So I definitely would not be happy if they got rid of the shortcuts or changed.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:47):
So you're not going to be a Google Sheets or a Mac person anytime soon for Excel.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (44:51):
They got me while I was young.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (44:53):
Yeah, I hear you. That would be a tough one. All right. So this is our get to know you section. We just have a little fun and get to know about you a little better. So if you could travel anywhere in the world tomorrow, go on a vacation, where are you going?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (45:11):
Oh, lovely question again. And it's a Friday afternoon, so my mind's already thinking about the weekend. I don't think... When my wife and I got married over 10 years ago, we went on a honeymoon to run a tiny island near the Cook Islands in the Pacific. And there was a tiny little atoll that we stayed on. I would love to take my daughter back there. Now she's nine years old. She can swim pretty well and interested in snorkeling, so I'd love to take her back there and live our little Robinson Crusoe life in paradise, at least for a short while.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (45:44):
Got it. Love it. So you take her back there where you did your honeymoon. All right, next one. If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive in the world, who would you pick?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (45:56):
Oh, tough one. I would have maybe two ideas. Maybe I'll go with the firmer one. I'd pick the author, Michael Lewis. I'm not sure how many of your listeners might know him, but he's kind of a big deal in finance writing anyway. Written some really fantastic books that have shaped my... I think if you recall the film, The Big Short, that was based on his book.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (46:17):
Yes, I think so. Wolf of Wall Street. I think it was Big Short was him. Yeah, he was Big Short.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (46:21):
Big Short. Yeah. He did another one about the Sam Bankman-Fried. He's done loads of fantastic books, but he does podcasts as well. And so I've gotten to listen to some of his discussions. I just think he'd be a really good dinner guest. He'd tell me lots of cool stuff about people he'd met. And he's also from the south, like New Orleans around this way, I think. I'm sure he can cook and know something a bit about hospitality, so I'd probably pick him.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (46:50):
I think you might be one of the first guests to have brought in the cooking angle to who you selected, so I love that. That was fun. Yeah, I think he wrote Moneyball as well, if I remember right. Yeah. So he's written several books. So yeah, he'd be a fun one to get some of the behind the scenes type of stories and things from him because I would imagine he'd have a lot of great stories. So I like that answer. All right. Well, as we wrap up here, two things. One, you've written some articles on LinkedIn, right? So if people want to find those that you've written about systems thinking, are those just on LinkedIn? They just go find your profile or how can someone find those if they want to check any of those out?
Guest: Daniel Bryan (47:30):
Yeah, I mean, you can find me on LinkedIn. I post and comment a little bit these days. There you'll find links to that. I wrote a series of 10 articles about systems thinking in FP&A. There are audio recordings on there as well. Not me either, someone with a better voice than I have thanks to AI. And you can listen to those again, as I often do walking my dog. I listen to a lot of stuff. I'm going to be writing a little bit more as well on this AI systems thinking angle topic as well, so look out for that on my Substack as well.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (47:59):
So perfect. So you can follow Dan there. He has a Substack. You can find him on LinkedIn. You can see some links to those articles. So we'll let people put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes, put those links there so people can find that. But thank you so much for carving out an hour, especially on a Friday afternoon for you. I'm sure your mind's been wandering a little bit. It's like, okay, when I'm done, I get to go enjoy my weekend. So I hope you have a great one and I appreciate you coming on the show.
Guest: Daniel Bryan (48:30):
Great. Really a great time. Thanks a lot, Paul.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (48:32):
Thank you. That's it for today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A Guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP&A Guy, and I'll see you next time.