Original Thinking Podcast

In this episode, Felicity talks about the evolution of behavioural insights from a phrase coined by a small government team in 2010 to a policy approach that touches the lives of millions of people around the world. She also discusses her current areas of focus and where behavioural insights might be used in the next 10 years.

This event was facilitated by Liz Richardson, Professor of Public Administration at the University of Manchester.

This month we hear from Amna Abdullatif, councillor for Ardwick, Central Manchester.

Amna is a community psychologist who has worked in the voluntary sector for over 15 years, previously leading the work on children and young people for the national domestic abuse charity Women's Aid and currently as assistant director for youth empowerment at the Anne Frank Trust. 

She completed her masters in community psychology and has her thesis 'The voices of women in the Arab Spring' published in the Journal of Social Science Education. She has presented her studies and work internationally including in Palestine, Lebanon, Estonia & New Zealand. She has also had a chapter published in The Anthology of Silence which explores cultures of silence around abuse. 

She was elected as a local Councillor representing the ward of Ardwick in Central Manchester in 2019 as the first visibly Muslim and Arab heritage woman to be elected in Manchester. 

In the summer of 2021, alongside two friends she launched a viral campaign to ban racists from football which was signed by over 1.2 million people and made national and international press as The Three Hijabis. She is currently working to set this up as an organisation that tackles racism and provides the tools to challenge it in our work places and communities.

Hosted by MBA alumna Claire-Marie Boggiano, Lurig Change & Development.

Dr Mark Britnell, Vice Chair and Global Health Expert, KPMG UK, and award-winning author, delivers this year’s Teddy Chester lecture, Human: Solving the global workforce crisis in healthcare.

By 2030, the world will be short of 18 million health workers – a fifth of the total capacity to care. Mark draws on his work in 80 countries to offer solutions to this growing crisis and presents unique insights on what works, and what doesn’t.

Reframing the global workforce problem to one of health and national wealth, Mark invites us to refashion this wicked problem in new, adaptive ways in order to enhance productivity and prosperity. Harnessing technology, he asks us to reimagine new models of care and levels of workforce agility whilst always remembering that the kind heart of a human is the essence of care.

For 11 years, Mark was Global Head of Healthcare at KPMG International and Global Chair of Infrastructure, Government and Healthcare for 3 years. He is one of the foremost global experts on healthcare systems and has a pioneering and inspiring global vision for health in both the developed and developing world. Mark has dedicated his entire professional life to healthcare and has led organisations at local, regional, national and global levels –provider and payer, public and private. Over the past 11 years, he has worked in over 80 countries on circa. 345 occasions, gaining a unique first-hand experience.

This annual lecture marks the contribution of Teddy Chester, who was the first professor of social administration at the University of Manchester. From his appointment in the early 1950s, to his retirement in the 1970s he was an influential pioneer in management development, using evidence and research with policy makers, and working with clinical leaders. He was involved in founding and leading the NHS Graduate Training Scheme, and in founding Manchester Business School.

Mark will be joined by Charlotte Refsum, Global Healthcare Executive at KPMG, and the event will be facilitated by Naomi Chambers, Professor of Health Management at Alliance Manchester Business School.

This month we will hear from Jennie Johnson MBE, CEO and co-founder, My First Five Years Limited.

Authentically passionate about improved outcomes for every child, Jennie’s most recent eureka moment in January 2021 led her to founding My First Five Years Ltd, a ground-breaking App to support and empower parents and provide expert knowledge to guide their child(ren) through the unique journey of their first five years.

Formerly Founder and CEO of the multi-award winning Kids Allowed, Jennie is renowned for being down to earth and incredibly honest about the highs and lows of juggling motherhood and running award winning businesses. Awarded an MBE for services to Apprenticeships in 2016, she was the first female to be awarded CEO of the Year in 2017 and Businesswoman of the Year in 2019.

More details about My First Five Years can be found at https://www.mffy.com/

Hosted by MBA alumna Claire-Marie Boggiano, Lurig Change & Development.

This event will be hosted by Anthony Rafferty, Professor of Employment Studies and Managing Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance MBS.

The people management case for workplace equality, diversity and inclusion is often made in terms of ethical or social responsibility reasons, or the benefits to the bottom line of a ‘business case.’ In this Original Thinking lecture, Anthony will examine evidence for an argument traversing both perspectives: That workplace discrimination leads to an under-utilisation of skill and human potential that can be harmful to the individual, society but also business performance and productivity.

Evidence will be presented from across 30 European countries showing that people who report workplace discrimination across a range of protected characteristics (sex, age, ethnicity, religion, disability or sexual orientation) are more likely to report having skills that they do not fully utilise in their job. For some, discrimination also appears to be linked to under-skilling or inadequate training. Potential explanations will also be discussed, with specific attention given to how discrimination may affect the quality of line manager relationships. Anthony will also consider implications for leadership and broader people management practice.

This event will be facilitated by Professor Jill Rubery, Executive Director of the Work and Equalities Institute at Alliance Manchester Business School

This month we will hear from Kathleen Harrison, Associate Director, Jacobs. With over 20 years’ experience in the construction industry, Kathleen is an Associate Director with Jacobs working as a Framework Manager delivering projects for a local authority in North West England. Having worked in a male dominated environment for her entire career, she is passionate about promoting gender equality, inclusion and STEM, and over the last 5 years she has become an advocate for positive mental health in the workplace.

Hosted by MBA alumna Claire-Marie Boggiano, Lurig Change & Development.

This episode will be hosted by Julia Handl, Professor in Decision Sciences at Alliance MBS. Her expertise lies in the areas of optimisation, data-mining and machine learning and she has a keen interest in the development and use of these techniques in challenging application areas.

We all face and make decisions on an ongoing basis, whether at work or in our private lives. The vast majority of these decisions involve trade-offs between multiple criteria, be it healthiness versus taste in our choice of breakfast cereal, cost versus energy efficiency in our choice of a new household utility, or risk versus expected return in our selection of a financial portfolio. Typically, there is considerable conflict between these criteria and, in the presence of such conflict, a single optimal solution may not exist. Taking a sound decision will then require the exploration of a set of alternative trade-offs, and the incorporation of additional preference information.

The same types of trade-offs exist in machine learning applications, where our models frequently have to strike a compromise between a variety of conflicting criteria. In this presentation, Julia will discuss the various origins of these criteria in a machine learning context. Using a number of examples from her own research, she will then highlight how multicriterion optimisation can support us in exploring a range of alternative trade-off solutions for machine learning problems, supporting the analyst in identifying their preferred model.

The response and recovery to COVID-19 has been a whole-of-society effort where every community has played a crucial role. To maintain this outpouring of goodwill, local government and voluntary organisations have been discussing how to renew their efforts on community resilience to ensure that a positive legacy of the pandemic is a more cohesive, risk-aware, and prepared society that can work with local government to enhance its own local resilience.

In the UK, this ambition was galvanised by the government’s recent Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy which outlined ambitions on ‘whole-of-society resilience’ and which encouraged an integrated approach to building national resilience.

In response, a National Consortium for Societal Resilience [UK+], abbreviated to NCSR+, has now been initiated by Professor Duncan Shaw from Alliance Manchester Business School and Ben Axelsen from the Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum to pursue the ambition of whole-of-society resilience outlined in the Integrated Review. Membership of the consortium includes almost all local authorities in the UK along with key resilience partners.

To mark its official launch - which was held on the same day as the UN’s International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction - this special panel debate discusses the reasons behind the launch and hear from members on why it is such an important initiative and what they hope to achieve.

Panellists:

Professor Duncan Shaw, Alliance Manchester Business School

Ben Axelsen, Co-Chair of NCSR+, Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum, England

Joan McCaffrey, Local Government Civil Contingencies, Northern Ireland

Kevin Murphy, The Office of the Committee for Home Affairs, States of Guernsey

Ellie Greenwood, Senior Adviser, Local Government Association

Clare Rudall, Business in The Community Wales

Marie Hayes, British Red Cross, Scotland Director

The UK has a profound problem of regional disparities in productivity performance, with second tier cities that underperform compared to expectations based on their size, and deindustrialised towns and urban areas that have failed to find productive new economic roles. The distribution of research and development investment in the UK – especially in the public sector – is also highly skewed to the prosperous Greater South East.

 At this Vital Topics event, Richard A.L. Jones, Vice-President for Regional Innovation and Civic Engagement, University of Manchester, will discuss the evidence - and the uncertainties – relating to the link between R&D and productivity at a subnational level, and outline the institutional landscape that has led to the UK’s current, highly unbalanced, regional distribution of R&D. He will consider some of the uses and pitfalls of using innovation policy as an instrument of regional economic development.

He will go on to reflect on recent policy development in the UK, as the current Government’s “levelling up” slogan is turned into concrete policy. We have seen the idea of “place” become a new theme in the Innovation Strategy, and a transition from an “Industrial Strategy” driven by the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to a HM Treasury driven “Plan for Growth”. We now await the imminent arrival of a Levelling Up White Paper, driven by a joint No 10/ Cabinet Office unit.

Finally, Richard will consider how best devolved nations, regions and cities in the UK should respond to this agenda, and discuss the role of GM’s new initiative, Innovation Greater Manchester.

This event will be facilitated by Elvira Uyarra, Professor of Innovation Studies at Alliance Manchester Business School.

Sponsored by DWF and Capita, Vital Topics is Alliance MBS' series of prestigious business lectures, bringing powerful ideas and original thinking to audiences from the Manchester city-region and beyond.

Vital Topics is sponsored by DWF and Capita.

This episode is hosted by Bart van Ark, Professor of Productivity Studies & Director of the Productivity Institute at Alliance MBS, a UK-wide organisation which aims to lay the foundations for an era of sustained and inclusive productivity growth by bringing together academic research, policy studies and business engagement.

After several decades of work on productivity issues, Bart will take the audience of this lecture on a tour through “global productivity land”. He will assess what he has learned about the drivers of and barriers to productivity, and what he thinks we still need to discover.

He will place today’s productivity puzzles in the western world in a long-term and international comparative perspective, presenting evidence and narratives for the three countries he has worked in particular - the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States. Beyond that the productivity experiences of the European Union and Asia will feature in the background.

He addresses the role of technology, innovation, skills, policy and institutions, but also looks at the key challenges for the productivity agenda of the future, namely climate change and the distributional effects of productivity.

This event is facilitated by Professor Ken McPhail, Deputy Head and Director of Research at Alliance Manchester Business School.