WB-40

I don’t really know what to say about this one other than this is it. After 10 years, 1 day and 351 episodes, this is the last one.

Thank you to everyone who has been involved; our interviewees, our hosts, the folk who have been involved in the Signal groups (which will continue past the end of the show), and all of our supporters over the last decade. Thank you.

New adventures beckon. And, as ever, something interesting might happen.

Matt x

Ever organised an event and just assumed “accessible” meant a ramp at the front door? This week on WB40, Michelle O’Connor — co-founder of the Access Given conference — explains why that’s nowhere near enough, and what actually changes when you design an event around access needs from the start rather than bolting them on afterwards. Lighting, seating width, catering layout, sensory rooms, joining instructions that don’t leave people dreading the unknown — the detail is granular, and most of it costs nothing to fix once someone tells you it’s a problem.

With neurodivergence estimated at over half the tech workforce and disclosure rates nowhere close, this is a conversation about who gets left out of rooms, meetings, and conferences without anyone quite noticing. Well worth a listen if you’ve ever run an event, chaired a meeting, or designed a process for “everyone.”

Find out more about Access Given on their website, their LinkedIn page, and their YouTube channel.

Full Transcript of the show, automatically generated by Descript:

Lisa: Welcome to episode 350 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Matt Ballantine, and Michelle O’Connor.

Matt: 350 feels like it should be like significant, but as far as I can work out, it’s only significant in the way. It’s half a 700, but it’s still quite a, a landmark number. So welcome to the 350th episode of WB 40. It’s a lot better than it used to be, although slightly less frequent and certainly much less predictable, which I think is a good thing.

We haven’t had a show for over a month because we had actually a number lined up, but because of various things, including a detached retina and , like ridiculous heats like it’s the planet Mercury in London and other things. We haven’t been able to do any shows for about a month. But we’re back.

And then we’re gonna take a long break for the summer ’cause that’s how we roll on WB 40. Lisa, pleasure to be with you again. How has your week been?

Lisa: Nice to see you. It feels like it’s been a long time. And I was trying to think, you know, the, I always find with these things it’s like, what did I do last week?

I’m not like you where I write a week note that says all of the things that I’ve done this week and, and publish it to people. And whilst I might work out loud on a project and do that internally, it’s not something I ever got into the habit of actually posting out to the internet. But, so over the last week or so, I, I did a talk at a local school talking to some small groups of year tens about my wibbly wobbly career, which was fun.

Actually ended up being, I think there were four of us in the room who all did different aspects of communications. And it was quite interesting talking to the teacher that had brought us in. ’cause one of the people was like, shouldn’t we all be a bit more different? It’s like, but yeah, the thing is, it’s nice to have jobs that people won’t have heard of.

And actually, given the nature of the background of where you got there, people were, they’re really achievable. And it’s like, oh, I love that. And then I thought to myself, maybe I should have done something that needed six years and a, a a a year in, uh, doing some kind of practical work. But, you know,

Matt: can I say, Lisa, can I say this with all, you know, the with love and intent, but the idea of you concentrating on something for six years plus a year?

Sorry.

Lisa: Well, you say that, you know, it’s, it’s nearly nine years since I’ve been freelance, which is the longest I’ve done anything. I know,

Matt: but that’s not like doing the same thing every day, is it?

Lisa: It’s not. I do like the fact that it is doing different things and I don’t wanna jinx it. But one of the other things I’ve done this week actually on that matter is had a conversation with an organisation about doing an interim role and actually sort of going back in house, but on an interim basis, which would be a bit different.

Matt: Interesting.

Lisa: It sounds like it might be quite a challenging environment and yet it’s also sounds like a really interesting opportunity. So I’ve got another chat about that tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to finding out a bit more. I’ve also been, we’re back on the SharePoint bandwagon, not bandwagon, but we’re back doing SharePoint work.

Matt: How,

Lisa: just when I think of Escape, SharePoint comes back and I mean, I’m, I’m grateful for the work in some ways and in other ways it feels like a never ending treadmill of share pointing. So that’s fun. And yeah, that’s, I feel like there was something else. Oh, yes. I went to a really interesting session on accessibility, but specifically around epilepsy, uh, at the HSBC building in Canary Wharf last Monday.

And there’s a lovely bit of research looking at how organisations can be more epilepsy friendly in their communications and in how their offices are set up. And it was a really interesting panel discussion and there was a lovely case study of somebody who, found out that she had epilepsy as a teenager and she was actually there on stage being an advocate, and she’s still only 19 or 20.

And she was remarkably articulate and it was a really interesting conversation. And I think it’s something that I didn’t know. I, I don’t know all the, I didn’t know as much of the detail about it, but there was lot, there’s lots more to unpack and I need to do a bit more reading of that report. But yeah.

How about you, Matt? What have you been up to?

Matt: Well, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the show, so I have published a book since I was last on, so I’ve kind of got this split identity at the moment, which by day I continued to do my work as an engagement manager. Managing engagements. We’ve got some interesting things going on.

Obviously today as we’re recording this on the 20th of July, if you have, uh, teams who are working in the public sector, there’s a certain sense of all bets are off. Who’s gonna be the new boss as they, uh, announce new members of the cabinet, like it’s some sort of football squad. So that’s, that’s interesting.

We had a big away event, uh, last week where, uh, some of us went up to a hotel just outside Wakefield with a, a building with a moat that was quite entertaining. And uh, so that’s the sort of day job stuff continues chugging away. And then conversations about keynote speeches and how we’re going to try to be able to get copies of the book into people with influences hands, which is an experiment that Nick and I are, are running at the moment.

And then there’s occasionally these two worlds crossover. So I’ve got one public sector client who have asked if I can run a, an event around randomness and serendipity and luck and what that means for thinking about ai for about a hundred of their digital leaders in September, which would be quite good fun, I think.

So I’ve been embarking on that as well, uh, alongside all of that. Uh, school finished on Friday, so I’ve got two teenagers now loafing around the house rather than just one, ’cause the other one finished GCSEs and June has been doing absolutely nothing since. But from lounging around, it’s mostly jealousy.

And uh, at the weekend we went up to Herefordshire and I think it’s Staffordshire, but uh, to Ludlow. And we went to, it’s the second year we’ve done it. They have a concert in the, in the Keep of Ludlow Castle. And so we got to see, uh, Blancmange who were really, they only had one song, let’s be frank.

You had, uh, mark Mond, uh, what a diva, amazing performance. And then the headline out with the Human League. And, um, whilst Phil Oakey does look a little bit like that bad character from that film with Ben Stiller about the models, I can’t even remember the film’s name. Um, Zoolander. Zoolander, that’s it.

So that you know the bad character in Zoolander. He, he’s got this strange goatee beard thing that makes him look a little bit like a, and, and he’s, he’s, he’s got an eccentric dress sense as Mr. Oakey Oakley. But it was very good. So that was good. It’s also not often these days I get to go to a gig where I feel like I’ve lowered the average age of the room.

So, uh, that’s good fun. So yeah, all that sort of stuff. And then this is the last week and then we’re off on holiday for a couple of weeks. So a chance to be able to kick back, relax. That’s the other thing I’ve been doing. Oh yes. The other thing I wrote about it actually on the line this morning, which is I’ve got back into using a fountain pen and a notebook, which has been very enjoyable because it’s helping me to realise how much I’ve missed by not taking notes because of the way in which it helps me think about things and remember things.

But then being able to scan pages from the notebook straight into LLM of your choice for it to be able to make notes on your notes, which is really interesting. And that’s kind of thinking about how you can use some of this technology in ways that you couldn’t do before. Which I don’t think there’s enough of, at the moment, I think we’re spending too much time focusing on how we might use these things to efficiency drive stuff rather than do new and novel activities.

So, so yes, that’s been my week or so.

Lisa: How about you, Michelle? What have you been up to recently?

Michelle: Most recently I was in Rome which was hotter than hell. And it was

Matt: ironic

Michelle: with the bat in there, it was 40 degrees. But you

Matt: know,

Michelle: I know I couldn’t go over that side though. I have tattoos. They don’t like that. It was 40 degrees, uh, two of the days that we were there.

And for context, I am a golf and my partner’s a ginger. So like that weather not conducive to our beings. But it was really good to get away. It, I was thinking as you were talking about like the way in which people use technology to kind of think about things differently and, and, and engage with the world differently.

We went to a coffee shop, uh, and it was a very hipster coffee shop. ’cause I was in desperate need of a flat white that wasn’t just a shot of espresso, that was ili. So there was two women who didn’t speak Italian or English and they had a translate app on their phone. So they asked the waitress a question on the phone and then showed her the screen where it translated it and then asked her to respond and did it that way.

And I thought that was a really interesting use of an AI that’s been around for a long, long time. And I was thinking about how much the world must open up to people by using these kind of tools, because then I took a photo, I took a photo of a photo in one of the galleries that we were in to try and escape the, the heat.

And I noticed that when I took the photo on my phone, that there was detail that I couldn’t see in the picture in the room. I think it was a combination of my height in comparison to where the painting was on the wall along with a glare. And then I noticed as soon when I looked at it on my phone that I had missed out on so much detail about just that.

And, and I wouldn’t have noticed it if I hadn’t had taken a picture, but I just took a picture of it. ’cause I was like, oh, that’s a, that’s a cool thing. Um, what else have I been doing

Matt: that that particularly is a, is a, you, you get another example of that, which is middle aged people who are too vain to get reading glasses yet.

And they use their phone to zoom in on menus in dark restaurants because they can’t read a thing. It’s the same principle.

Michelle: Yeah. Or the iPad photo. That’s, that’s a favourite. ’cause they can see it bigger. Um, yeah. I what else have we been doing? We’ve been chipping away at a couple of things for access given in the background.

So we’ve got

Lisa: what’s access given Michelle.

Michelle: Oh, funny you should ask. Access Given is a one day accessible digital accessibility conference. Uh, it takes place in Newcastle ine once a year at the moment. Our last event was in May. Yes. Uh, and that’s where I met Lisa for the first time. Uh, and that was great ’cause Lisa spoke at it with Matisse.

Um, so in an attempt to try and keep that moving and ticking on, we are currently, I like to say sch, but realistically it’s just planning, long term strategizing, if we wanna use that term. Things to do throughout the year before the next event, which will be in April, 2027. So we’ve got, I think while I was away I saw Ellen, my co-founder, uh, was chipping away at emails, planning things.

So we’ve got something that we’ll have lined up in September and another thing in November. But I dunno the details yet because I wasn’t in those calls because I was in Rome burning. But those were the things that I was doing recently ish. I dunno what I’ve got coming up next.

Lisa: We can get to that later.

It’s all good.

Michelle: Yeah.

Lisa: Shall we get on with it then?

Matt: I think so.

Lisa: So, Michelle, you mentioned the, uh, so talking about access given, and it’s an accessible conference about accessibility, which sounds like, it sounds a bit total logical, but I think my experience of it having first come last year as an attendee, it blew me away. All the kind of care and attention that you and Ellen put in to actually creating a really accessible and inclusive day, as well as the subject matter being about accessibility.

Could you explain a little bit more about how it came about and the sort of thought processes and what you’ve learned in terms of actually putting on accessible events for people? It’s quite a broad question, but I just find it fascinating because having gone to a lot of events over the last few months, I’ve noticed some people doing some things really well.

I’ve seen other things where the setup just doesn’t seem to be conducive to anyone actually learning or hearing anything. Tell us, tell us more about the day. How did you, how did it come about and what do you do to make it accessible in itself?

Michelle: Yeah. I think initially it came about because Ellen and I had attended a conference that claimed to be fully accessible and inclusive.

And when we went, we found that to be absolutely not the case. The venue was wheelchair accessible. Great. I’ll just continue. Um, the venue was wheelchair accessible. But that isn’t where accessibility starts and ends as far as we’re concerned. That’s kind of a basic thing, and that is often just a venue having a service.

Right. So Ellen and I thought, okay, in the Northeast there’s a huge gap in people’s ability to access digital products and services through lack of knowledge or lack of infrastructure. What, but we also wanted to create a place for those people to feel welcomed and included. So we set out to create an event that was accessible from the ground up where accessibility was a given and it didn’t have to be granted or accommodated, hence the name access given.

So the first thing we did, obviously, was to seek a venue that was accessible. So we found the catalyst, which was built I think in collaboration with the National Institute for Ageing. So a lot of the features of that building are accessible for people with I think particularly dementia. So there’s a lot of soft furnishings.

The, the whole space is obviously wheelchair accessible as well. And then we went into the main theatre room and we found that that was actually ideal because not only was it a fully accessible space, but the aisles for attendees, the seats were double wide. So people could go and sit down and if somebody wanted to get up, they weren’t tripping over feet, they could just casually walk across.

There were fans under every seat, which is really helpful if it’s hot or if somebody’s just feeling hot. And then each seat also had a charger built in and we could control the lighting in that room, which was really important to us as well. So that was kind of the first step. And then we thought, okay, well what else?

That’s fine. These are inbuilt into the venue. What can we offer? What can we do that goes above this? Last year, we kept it really simple. We had four speakers. That was it. So there were no overlapping talks at all. And there were four one hour-ish kind of slots. And then we had longer breaks. Um, we also had captions inbuilt live captioning for every talk.

And that was kind of the first step that we did. And then another thing that we really, really, really wanted was to have a sensory room. Predominantly these events are extremely overwhelming. They’re incredibly, they can be incredibly challenging for anyone with sensory processing difficulties or disorders.

So, uh, we were building it kind of from a neurodivergent perspective. Ellen and I are both neurodivergent, so we kind of thought, what do we need if we’re going to an event that’s a full day? Uh, and it was somewhere to decompress on a shorter day and no kind of decision paralysis to get in the way. So that’s why we didn’t have any overlapping speakers.

That was our first year. It was great. It went well. We had a couple of teething problems as you do. ’cause we’re not event organisers, right? It’s just the two of us kind of trundling along, hoping for the best. The event this year that Lisa spoke at was bigger, but it was scaled up in a sustainable way because ultimately it’s still Ellen and I, but we roped in the help of some of our friends to act as Wayfinders throughout the day.

And we acted on the feedback that we had gotten from the previous year. So we implemented a couple of changes. One of the things that we did was that we shortened the main talks, um, and kept them more succinct. We also then added lightning talks and a panel so that people could kind of, if they were, if they, if their attention span, for example, is literally 10 minutes, they can learn something in a lightning talk, take that away and move on.

Um, and another main piece of feedback we got from last year was the layout of where we had the lunch offering and what was available. So in our first year we had catering similar to this year, but it was kind of laid out in quite a narrow space. So we had a couple of wheelchair users who found it quite difficult to navigate in and outta that space when it was busy.

So this year we asked for that to be completely moved. And then another thing that we were asked is that quite a lot of our attendees are neurodivergent as well, and they struggled with having a packed lunch provided in a bag because they couldn’t see what was in there and they might have, you know, food issues.

They don’t, you know, particular tastes or textures, things like that, that go beyond dietary or allergy requirements. So this year we made sure that we had a larger space that people could navigate around in wheelchairs and that the food was on show still obviously packaged and, and, and, and safe, but people knew what they were getting rather than just taking a guess on a bag and then feeling awkward or uncomfortable to say, actually I can’t eat that because it will send me into a tizzy, which happens to me sometimes if it’s unexpected.

Um, so those types of things that we did, again, we had no overlapping speakers. A sensory room again. And then we also, one of the bug bears that we both have as freelancers is when you attend a conference that you’ve spent money on, sometimes hundreds of pounds, you’ve lost a day of billable work because you’re at this event, you might have travel costs as well, and you go and the person or people speaking at that conference are just in love with the sound of their own voice.

And they’re kind of just telling stories because they like to say that they’re cool and here’s what they’ve done. Obviously, as a copywriter and content designer, stories are really important, right? They’re, they’re what bring people together. And sometimes there is a place for that. But if you are a freelancer and you’re spending time and money and losing out on billable money, we wanted each and every one of our talks to give someone something tangible to take away that they could then apply to their own work.

Um, so we wanted to make sure that people who did come would learn from it and have something to like to take away from that, which I think also leads to it being more accessible because you’re learning something that you can take away. You’re getting something back. And then obviously while it is an in-person event, every talk has been recorded.

So we put them up online so that people who couldn’t attend for whatever reason, can still access those talks and learn. Because you can’t have you can’t have an accessible event that is, that’s bound to just in person really. I think if you want to share knowledge, it has to be free available. So those are, those are the things that we’ve done.

Um, we don’t do everything perfectly. We know that, oh, actually this is one thing that we get a lot of compliments on and it’s probably, I always forget about it. We had quite an in-depth accessibility guide that we created. So this is not just toilets are here, you’ll find lunch here. Here’s the ramp, here’s the hearing loops blah, blah, blah.

This was, uh, a step-by-step guide basically of what to expect on the day when you arrive at the venue. There were photos of us, there were photos of our speakers. Um, it went into a social story to say, when you arrive to the building, you’ll go in this entrance or this entrance, you will be asked for your name.

After that, you’ll write your name on a sticker or collect your lanyard. And then from there you’ll be given blah, blah, blah. Because we also found that attending these things. It’s quite scary, right? Because you, some people feel like they might not belong there or maybe they’re going on their own, they don’t know anyone.

It’s really intimidating to walk into a space, particularly a space, the size of the catalyst itself and think, oh no, like what do I do now? Do I need to find the QR code for the ticket that I bought? Like blah, blah, blah. So we wanted to create, we wanted to remove as many barriers as possible, and that’s where we came up with the idea of having the accessibility guide, which we sent out via email in advance with a link to it on our website.

And then we also had the physical guide itself printed for the day and on the back, lots and lots of space for notes because people like to take notes, as you mentioned earlier. Um, it helps them process information and sometimes it’s nice to just kind of mindlessly doodle as well. Um, so those are the things that we’ve done to make it an accessible conference for digital accessibility, all of the accessibility.

Matt: Do you, as you’ve been through all of that, do you sometimes wonder if. Trying to think of a way to put this, it would be, it’d been easier to start from scratch rather than trying to retrofit the traditional conference or event format.

Michelle: I think in some ways we kind of started from scratch because every conference I’ve ever, I’ve ever been to has been massive. Like a lot of co a lot of events, the size that we have wouldn’t necessarily call themselves a conference, particularly last year when we had four speakers and a day that started at 10 and finished at four and that was it.

That wouldn’t necessarily be a conference. That’s more of an away day type situation. Um, and that’s something, you know, it was basically for kind of one hour lunch and learns and it was great. But I think the other thing is we do know who we want to attend. So positioning it as, as a conference, but keeping it small-ish, I think was the best way to bridge that gap.

Initially we thought it would be a lot of freelancers coming, freelancers, contractors, people who were just kind of figuring out they wanted a day out. Our price point was a lot cheaper than other conferences and events of a similar kind of style. And that just wasn’t the case actually. We got mostly third sector people, massive groups of third sector attendees in both years.

So then we thought, okay, well actually positioning it as a conference is the way to go. Um, and we hope that then from that people will share the word, spread the word attend next year, and als ultimately take those learnings and apply it to their work in their organisations.

Lisa: And I think what I think is fascinating and being able to reflect.

So as you might know, wedge and I, so Wedge came along. We used to do a conference in London called Intranet. Now for intranet people, it was a similar size in terms of attendee numbers. But when I think about the last agenda we did, everything was lightning talks except for two 15 minute keynotes, maybe three keynotes.

So there was one, one first thing, one before lunch, and then maybe one after. But we had something like 20 speakers throughout the day and I dunno how I could cope with that. Now it’s a lot of people, firstly it’s a lot of organisation to get that many people lined up. And I do know that we had feedback on the, maybe the last one that we did that, you know, there wasn’t enough space to breathe everything.

There were nine minute talks. ’cause I think they previously tried, five minutes was too short, seven minutes is nearly there, but nine minutes is like a sweet spot. But if you’ve got sort of four, nine minute talks in a row, then that’s quite a lot to take on board and you need a bit of space to process.

And we did have breaks, but I think if I was like, I’m absolutely in awe of you both for putting this on and con, because I love going to events. I talk about it all the time. I find all of the logistics and the stress around running events. I had a, my Fitbit once told me, if you have more days like this, Lisa, you’ll die.

Like I, I carry quite a high level of stress when it comes to events if I’m in charge of it. So I’m so grateful and I, and it’s so interesting hearing you talk about all of this and the kind of thought processes behind it because some of it’s stuff I just genuinely didn’t know about before. And I think what I think is interesting as well, so when we were researching for the book and talking about it since that neurodiversity thing, really important for people in business and technology, there was a statistic that I read recently, which is something like 53% of people who work in technology either identify as or have been diagnosed as neurodivergent.

That’s like over half. And that’s the people that have acknowledged it. Like I talk to so many of my friends, I’m like, are you sure you are not? You know, we travel in Pax but I think compared to the number of people who are actually disclosed at, who have disclosed that to their employer, it’s something like 3%.

Like there’s a massive disparity between the two numbers. But I think, you know, maybe not everybody needs this, but making accessible spaces makes it, it does make it easier for everyone to process and to actually learn from what’s going on. And when I think about how that might apply, so I’ve been doing some training recently and thinking about how to deliver training in a way that works for neurodivergent folks.

And thinking about the, the feedback that people had ’cause they’re for another client, well, in fact, you know, how do you feel when you get invited to a daylong away day and there’s no agenda, like, or this is the objective, but you’ll find out when you get there. You know, being able to share that accessibility guide, what to expect beforehand.

I think sometimes facilitators are afraid to say that in too much detail because people, if people know what it is, they’re gonna say, well I’m definitely not going, I’m not interested. Whereas actually not giving that information upfront means that it’s putting the onus on individuals to dread it ’cause they don’t know.

And the unknown is often worse than actually knowing what’s happening. And I think, yeah, so it just made me think about how, how good are we at doing, joining instructions for meetings and training sessions and actually workshops and helping people come. And is that something that you found in your work?

Is there, are there things that you think that, how this translates into the sort of like day to day business?

Michelle: So, I mean, access given is also like a passion project of us. So like we both have day jobs and I am a contracting content designer for the regulated industries. So a lot of the organisations that I work for don’t apply any of these things to anything that they do.

Like I will be sent a, a meeting. There was one, there was one organisation I worked in, I can’t name names obviously. But they would send these like mass emails saying mandatory attendance has to be, you know, every day, every week an hour at like a 4:00 PM on a Thursday or a Friday, right? Which is like the worst time nobody’s gonna attend.

Like nobody’s brain is in a position no matter what they have going on to think and focus at that time later on in the week. And I remember thinking how mandatory is it if there’s 150 people on that call that I’ve never worked with and that aren’t in my team and I am supposed, and I met, have to go because I may or may not be asked in the final five minutes of that meeting what I was up to the previous week.

And that used to always fill me with quite a lot of anxiety, right? So I, I thrive in chaotic environments, right? It’s, it’s my, it’s my vibe. I don’t mind a bit of chaos, but I hate waiting. So you can guess what flavour neurodivergent I am. So I would, it would come to like the time of the meeting and I would sign in and I would sit there and I’d have my camera off, my microphone off because I would, I was really, really, really struggling to concentrate and waiting for my name and I was looking at my Garmin.

’cause I also like a bit of data and I was looking at my Garmin and my stress level would be extremely high during that time because I wasn’t sure if I was going to be asked to speak or not. And if I was going to be asked to speak, I would have to then remember what I had done and look back at notes that I had taken because they also wouldn’t ask for your agenda.

Like they wouldn’t ask for anything written in advance. And anything that was spoken was just kind of sent out as a copilot note afterwards. So that, which never picked up my accent properly. ’cause I’m a Dublin nerd, you know, and all this kind of stuff. And I think simply saying, sending an email to say, this week we are going to ask this person from this team, this person, from this team and this person, from this team, what they’ve been up to, um.

In advance if you haven’t progressed anything. Uh, and we can’t help, don’t bother attending ’cause your status will remain as is, right? Because everything was logged, obviously. And I just think those simple things can really, really matter. And while I thrive in a chaotic environment. That isn’t chaos even.

It’s just this weird kind of liminal space that is neither focus or not. It’s kind of like nobody knew what was happening at any time. And it’s a small, like, you know, you, yourself and Matisse were talking about like how people work, right? What’s the best way to meet people, to reach people? How do you get them to engage?

Not that way, you know, that is not a way to engage people. Um, and that’s probably a whole other conversation, but that is one thing that is definitely not neurodivergent friendly.

Matt: There. There’s something though I think about intentionality on this and something I’ve done a fair bit in the last few years is design structures where it isn’t known what will be talked about.

And that’s a very deliberate thing to enable the conversations to happen rather than people falling into habits of what they say is what they always say. And there’s a risk with, you know, form formulating meetings, particularly when nobody’s engaged because everybody knows what’s gonna happen. And so you just get the same ritual, almost word for word repeating week after week after week.

But when I’m doing that, I’m doing it very intentionally. I’m doing it with a lot of structure around it. And I could understand that for some people that might be unsettling. But I also know from when I started in my mid thirties, I spent a couple of years doing management training and a dear friend of mine she she looked to me in horror when I told her what the job was about to do.

And she then explained that when she goes to training events, she just sits in terror waiting to be picked out to be asked to contribute. And she cannot stand that. And I learned from that, that I ne whenever I’m facilitating, I’ll never just pick on somebody. If I need to be able to get some in input from somebody because I need their input, then I, I will help them be able to, um, uh, to contribute.

But I’m not just gonna pick people at random ’cause they’re looking a bit quiet. ’cause people have different styles and people, whether it’s neuro divergence or just learning style or whatever else. But there’s this, this balance between everything being to too planned and then intentional ambiguity and intentional chaos.

And then what I think mostly happens, which is nobody’s got any time to plan for anything properly. And actually what’s going on in a lot of these cases isn’t, it’s an intentional thing that’s been, it’s just nobody’s got any time to do anything properly these days. ’cause they’re also maxed out in meetings where nobody’s had any time to do anything properly to prepare for that one either.

And it’s then just this law of diminishing returns as you go through. And that’s slightly different from events as opposed to the kind of the rituals that we have in organisations. Going back to the events side, do you think that there’s something systemic within the industry? So how, how much was it a challenge of being able to, to change how it was that things like your venue do things or the facilities that your venue has versus what was in your control as a, as a, as an organiser.

Michelle: That’s where your research comes in. Incredibly important. I think. So. I live in Edinburgh, Lin lives in Newcastle. First of all, we knew that we couldn’t have an event, inaccessible event in Edinburgh. Uh, a lot of the buildings are inaccessible. It’s a really old, hilly cobbled issue. Not great for people with mobility issues.

It’s also cost prohibitive for a lot of people. Like the cost of a hotel in Edinburgh midweek off season. Even at that, you’re talking 150, 200 plus pounds. It’s pretty on par with a hotel in London. Right? That’s something that we didn’t want. We, Ellen had been to the, to events in the Catalyst before, so she said, look, I think this is a great idea.

It’s close to the central stations, about 10 minute walk ish uphill though, which is kind of annoying, but at least it’s downhill on the way back. And she said, look, I’ve been there. I find I found it really welcoming. The staff were great. I think they’ll be really you know, on boards with this.

And I said, cool, let’s go for it. We visited them a good few times before our first event to kind of talk about what we needed. People had started to buy tickets by that point, and we had asked them to say if there was anything in particular that they would need. Most of it was kind of stuff that we thought would, you know, should be there anyway.

So it’s like seating, captions, all that kind of stuff. The only, so like when we had our event this year, as I said, we changed where we had the catering and how that was done. That was really, really easy to do. Like, a lot of the things that really make a difference to people are small, right? Like we, we knew that we couldn’t have the catering in that place, right?

So we said to the venue, we can’t have it there. We needed to, we needed to go somewhere else. They were like, absolutely a hundred percent understand that feedback. We kind of thought that at the time, but there wasn’t enough time to move it, you know, ’cause it had all been set up, blah, blah, blah. I was like, okay.

This year we had it in a totally, like, we had rented another space in that venue this year as well. So we did have more space, but then we were like, okay, we also want tables and chairs for people to sit at, but not be, you know, in the middle of the communal area, all this kind of thing. They said, grand, absolutely.

I said, can we change the lighting? Can we put the noise levels down? Can we have, you know, the sensory room upstairs, tucked away, slows, blah, blah, blah. Everything that we requested, that was in our control. Was easily done. But I think a lot of people might be afraid to ask a venue or might not know that they can ask a venue to do things.

And at the end of the day, a venue is a space, right? It’s a physical space. It has its own facilities, it has toilets, it has steps, it has ramps, it has lifts, whatever. Those are the things that you need to research first of all, right? So is there a ramp? Is it permanent? Does it need to be? Is it temporary and needs to be taken out?

What are, what’s the toilet situation? Is there hygiene room? Is there, you know, what’s going on there? Are there gender neutral toilets, blah, blah, blah. All these types of things. Those are the things that you can con that you can’t change fundamentally within a building. Like they exist or they don’t, but you have to research it and you have to visit a venue, because I know I’m in the midst of planning a wedding as well, and I know from visiting venues, right?

If they know that, if they think that they’re gonna get a couple hundred quid or a couple of thousand pounds off you, they’re gonna say that they can do everything and anything, right? Because they want to do it. So you kind of have to be a little bit like, okay, well I’m just gonna go to an event or like, not mention that you’re interested, but just be kind of slightly curious about it.

And then you’ll see what the venue is actually capable of. The staff and the catalyst have been amazing to us every single time. Any issue that we’ve had sorted immediately. Anything that we’ve asked, they’ve helped with, they’ve put us in touch with, uh, suppliers, all these types of things, and they’re learning from it as well, because they said ever since that we mentioned that the catering in the main lobby was inaccessible to people in wheelchairs or wheelchair users.

They haven’t put it there since. They know that that’s not a good place to have it. So they’ve looked at other places to do it. They’ve also since asked the caterer to maybe think about not delivering everything in a brown paper bag so that people can see what’s in it if they’re, you know, so it’s these types of things that it’s, we feel that you can’t have an accessible event without sharing the knowledge with the people who run the spaces, right?

So we would, we shared all our feedback. Anything that we, that we even heard anecdotally, they were listening to conversations that were happening, all these types of things. And we were saying, look, the lighting, the sound, all these things, these are small things that matter that we can control to a certain extent and other things we can’t.

And that’s where. You have control, you share your feedback, you make the small changes you, and more importantly, you ask people for their feedback on what they need from your event. ’cause we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t have made change the changes that we made if we hadn’t asked.

Lisa: Yeah, I think that’s really important is getting that feedback, acting on it, finding the right people that are open to it, and obviously finding the right venue.

And I mean, I think about some of the venues I’ve been to recently, and they should be doing this better. Like the people organising the event should have spotted stuff there. There’s so many people involved. But like, so when I went to, um, a conference in Canada recently, so all of the IABC world conferences are massive.

There’s like a thousand-ish people that go to them. They’re enormous. They’re the biggest events I’ve been to and they’re at these massive hotels that can, can actually accommodate that. But the AV setup was absolute dog shit in some of the rooms, like they’ve got this big meeting room and so there’s meet, there’s rooms inside the building that don’t have windows.

So the lighting in the, at least the screen, you can see it. There’s these rooms that were on the side and for some unknown reason, they thought it was a good idea to put the big screens in the window and have the speaker standing in the dark corner. So there was direct sunlight on the screen. And the screen itself wasn’t brilliant as well.

You know, there’s so many good screens you can get now. And just the, the layout in the room was backwards. Like you couldn’t see the screen. Like, I’m still ama I’m constantly amazed. And this is something that I always worked with clients for a lot and talk to anybody about that will listen, make your presentations easier to read, stop cramming them with lots of writing.

I went to another event recently where the speakers had a little monitor that to read their screens like, and they’re like, I can’t read that. It’s like, well maybe there’s a bit too much information ’cause you wrote these slides and if you can’t read it to be able to read it out to the audience, I don’t know what you are thinking

Matt: about it.

This used to be bad, but I think that the move to teams and Zoom and meet has made this worse because we are really used now to presenting where everybody can see the screen right in front of them. And then you go to events and you realise that people have completely lost, you know, the, the, what was it, the t-shirt rule, if, if you couldn’t read it on a t-shirt, you won’t be able to read it on a screen and that kind of thing.

You just see it, it’s so much worse again after it started to get a bit better.

Lisa: Yeah, and I think being really clear to speakers what the shape of the room is gonna be. Like. I was doing, I did some work for a client recently where I basically, I think I fixed a thousand PowerPoint slides. I didn’t realise PowerPoint was gonna be my life this year as well.

But you know, these are, these are gonna be delivered in rooms of really modern buildings, but they’re quite long and they don’t have the side monitors halfway down, so the people at the back just aren’t gonna be able to see it. And I think, you know, partly there’s an issue though with the layouts of the rooms that people are choosing.

But I think if you’re really clear with your speakers up front and maybe show a photo of what the room looks like so that they can actually picture like, what does it look like from the back of the room? It can help people. Like I, when I did a talk last year in London, I’m still, I still think it was one of the best presentations I’d ever done because I just come off the back of Marcus’s Speaky Summit and I, they didn’t really get any good professional pictures of me.

And I was the last, ’cause I was the last speaker of the day, but one of my friends who was in the back row at the event took photos and I could read my slides from her photos from the back of a dark room. So I was like, okay, that’s good. I manage that. At least I’m, at least I’m practising what I preach.

Matt: I do wonder though, if you think about how most events are exclusive, not in a good way, therefore, you probably don’t find the, uh, today’s events.

There are many cases of any sort of volume of people who have issues around accessibility and therefore they aren’t getting the feedback. So therefore, nobody ever. Does anything about it, and it’s not until you test. I, I dunno, is that where, where this is problematic within the industry at the moment, that just because it’s, it’s reinforcing itself at the moment for the fact that, I mean if you look at London venues, anything that’s cheap is gonna be a knack atole theatre, which is inaccessible from the start.

Lisa: Listeners, Michelle and I were just shaking our heads furiously while Matt was saying that.

Matt: Explain why.

Lisa: No, I, sorry to jump in. I know this is really a Michelle question, but So you are right Matt. A lot of the time people don’t necessarily know better and they don’t give the venues feedback. And I know over the last few years in particular, it’s been really hard to run physical events.

You know, they dropped off the cliff in 2020. We’re starting to see people coming back to it, but we’re not talking about edge cases here. The problem is a lot of people have been excluded from going to these events because historically they’ve been so inaccessible. So you are right.

Matt: Well that, that was my point, that because it’s been inaccessible, therefore there there’s no feedback because people are being locked out because they can’t get to these events because they’re rerun in inaccessible way.

Lisa: Okay,

Michelle: but okay, I get that. But I think there’s a co there’s a couple of things that you can do to mitigate that. So one of the things is highlight how it’s accessible. So that was the first thing we did. We mentioned how it’s accessible. We had captions, sensory room, no breaks, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?

The venue itself is accessible. Another thing that you could do is speak to people that you know who would want to go or have gone to events who may have access needs and ask them, oh, I saw that you went to this event. How was that? One thing as well that we got feedback on this year is that we had our keynote speaker carry on lightly is a wheelchair user.

When people, when other wheelchair users saw that we had a speaker who was a wheelchair user. We saw a massive uptick in wheelchair users attending this year. I think like. It’s still, you know, people who are wheelchair users may or may not have other disabilities that might prohibit them from going to a day long event or, or, or going to an event like that.

But we did notice a huge increase. Now, we didn’t, we didn’t choose Carrie Ann as a token wheelchair user as a speaker. We just thought that what she was doing was great, and therefore we wanted her on our stage similar to every speaker that we approached or who applied. We wanted them to share their knowledge and their story with our attendees.

And last year, uh, we had Holly Chuuk and Helen Tson from RNIB, like a power duo. I think. You know, and Holly is a blind content creator, so many people thought about how to make their content content accessible to people with visual impairments. After that, it’s about making sure that you approach the people that you want to talk about a specific topic, include them, and then market them as part of that.

And then if you notice that somebody can’t navigate around a venue or doesn’t know where things are, or isn’t sure about excess needs or doesn’t know if they have, if they can bring a carer or whatever, just say it, be explicit. Say, here’s what the venue offers, here’s what we can try to do. Ask them if there’s anything that outside of that that they might have.

But then it also ties back to something that Carrie Ann said in her talk, which is nothing is ever fully accessible. There’s no such thing as fully accessible, which made Ellen and I shake because we thought that we had said that term and they were like, we never say that. Um, because not only, like somebody’s needs might be different in the morning to in the evening as they’re, as they get tired throughout the day.

Like, I know that I’m bad in the morning, but okay in the evening, so what I might need from an event or a meeting or whatever in the morning is very different to what I’d need in an evening. And I, and you know, so it’s things like that.

Lisa: I think just, um, touching on the volume thing or the numbers thing as well.

Mm-hmm. I know one of the things that we often come up against, you know, it’s seen that this is only a minority problem, this is somebody else’s thing. You know, most of my people don’t have these needs I’d know about, wouldn’t I? But so from a neurodivergence point of view, it’s over half of people in tech.

Michelle: Yeah.

Lisa: Across the UK it’s one in four people have a significant disability. Now, according to the Office of National, the, one of the, the big surveys one in 10 people are dyslexic. One in 12 men and one in 200 women are colorblind. So if you’re relying on colour to tell a story or that’s gonna be a problem for people.

Matt: Mm-hmm.

Lisa: Um, these aren’t, when you add them up, you might find that one person actually is the kind of, like you said, they might have overlapping needs. They might be one person that’s in all of this. But actually there’s also still a lot of stigma around this. So people think, oh, it’s just me. It’s just my personal need, not it’s my right to access this information.

Mm-hmm. Like when I think I, I was talking to somebody recently who was saying, well, I just, I couldn’t really use the software, but I thought it was just me in my eyes and I didn’t wanna raise it because I didn’t wanna be difficult. But they were one of the senior leadership team, and once they’d raised it, suddenly it was a priority to fix it.

It’s a, it’s a complicated thing and it’s easy to laugh it off or say, well, no, that’s not true. But I think there are so many, there’s so many overlapping challenges here. And like when we, even the place we stayed in, in Bulgaria last year, the hotel was an enlisted part of town, should have had to build like an entire extra tower to be able to put in a lift.

Like it just wasn’t, it genuinely wasn’t feasible. Like they weren’t able to build any kind of lift internally in this, in this very small building. But there are venues that are much better than others. And I think there’s also a growing bank of information about the accessibility of venues as well. Is was that app, is it accessibly?

There’s a, there is an app that you can use to see how accessible venues are. Although when I was looking for our book launch, there were very few venues in the area I was looking for. And I dunno how much of that’s just a data collection issue or just how bad East London is. ’cause there’s a lot of, a lot of venues that just have a little step to get into the pub.

Oh, it’s just a little step, but you can’t wheel over a step. Yeah, there’s lots of things that we can, I think there’s this thing about knowing the questions to ask, being open to asking them and doing your research. Like you were saying, Michelle, like, I think that’s really important. And I think a lot of people just haven’t considered it.

It’s not necessarily that they’re scared or they just haven’t thought about it because it’s not something that’s been on their radar.

Michelle: Mm-hmm. And I do think it is slightly compounded by people being able to work remotely. I think remote working is amazing because it makes, you know, careers a lot more accessible to people, but it also means that organisations don’t necessarily have to think about accessibility because the reasonable adjustment is that that person will work from their home where they have their own needs laid out.

So it’s a bit of a, I think as event organisers, it is our duty to do what we can to cater to as many access needs as possible, knowing that there’s no such thing as fully accessible, but trying to mitigate some of the things that we’ve seen. Like it’s just a little step, no, it’s a step. Get a ramp or, you know, find somewhere different or be very explicit about that because if you, the, the venue that we had our after party in had a temporary ramp and we knew that we had wheelchair users attending.

So we were very, very, very. Strong that we needed that ramp there all the time for that event. And we sent somebody ahead to make sure that the ramp was out before everybody else arrived, and that the venue left it out because why would they remove it and then create another obstacle for a wheelchair user to have to find somebody to get the ramp out because they wanted to leave when somebody who didn’t have mobility issues could just leave.

So it it, it’s your duty to do what you can to mitigate these quote unquote small issues. Um, and sometimes it’s as simple as just saying, Hey, can you do this? And more often than not, the answer’s gonna be, oh yeah, we just didn’t think about it.

Matt: Lots of work to be done. And I think, again, with a lot of conversations that we’ve had around accessibility over the last few years on this show, a lot of it is just a lack of awareness. So hopefully by getting this out there and you listening to this, we’ve increased awareness a bit, which is good, and then something needs to be done.

This brings us to the last part of the show, the bit where we ask what’s happening in the week ahead, Michelle, what’s happening in the week ahead?

Michelle: Uh, getting ready for the festival season in Edinburgh, bracing myself.

Matt: How is

Michelle: it to crowds? Well, it’s normally, I love it, right? I think Edinburgh gets really, really, really terrible winters.

It’s, they seem to be like seven months long. So I really like the festival season. I love how vibrant the city is. I love seeing weird and wonderful fringe shows, but navigating the city is difficult. And at the moment, the main street that all the buses and trams go down is completely closed because there was a building fire.

Um, so I’m currently trying to figure out the little sneaky ways that I can get around the city if these things, don’t reopen. Um, and then maybe I will try and write a newsletter for access given on our mailing list that we sometimes forget about because we also don’t want to spam people.

Matt: We’ll put a link on the show notes for where people can go to be not spammed.

Michelle: I can, I can send them to this podcast now. There’s content

Matt: there. Yes. Excellent. Um, as a sort of mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. There we go. Lisa, how about you? What have you got in the next seven days or further?

Lisa: Further? Uh, so I am looking forward to going along to a friend of the podcast, Sharon oday and Digital Jonathan’s book party on Wednesday in Shor Ditch.

Be interesting to see what the venue’s like there. I’ve got a couple of conversations about work related things sort of linked to Edinburgh. I’ve got a work in progress show that I’m going to at my local pub on Thursday. There’s a comedy night that we go to often and this July, every Thursday they’ve had comedians doing practise runs of the Edinburgh shows.

So I’m looking forward to that. And yeah, and I think one of the things over the summer that I’m looking forward to actually might even be, there might be another episode before we get there, but in a couple of months time, I’m gonna be going to the R and IB headquarters. There’s an accessibility in publishing conference happening in September and it’s at the RNIB building, which is also my old office building.

So many, many moons ago before we moved into a shiny, when I was still in house and we moved into a shiny purpose-built office, we were in this old building. But it sounds like what they’ve done is made their entire office space one of the most accessible office spaces, certainly in London, if not in the country.

And I can’t wait to actually see what that feels like in person. So I’m really looking forward to that too. How about you, Matt?

Matt: Well, it’s the last few days before we go off for a bit of a break for the summer. So it’s the kind of tidying of the decks and making sure that I’ve got stuff sorted out for me to go away for two weeks with the sort of basic idea that I’ve got some sort of importance in the world.

And if I’m not there, then it matters, but of course the reality is it won’t matter. So, um, it’s just to make myself feel better really. Uh, and then, uh, we’ll be back in towards the end of the, well no, beginning of the second week in August and then stuff ahead. There’s quite a lot of stuff coming up. I’m not quite sure what stuff will be but um, I’ll be dealing with stuff of varying proportions and various, various topic areas, so that’d be good.

Lisa: Did

Matt: you say

Lisa: where is you’re off to?

Matt: No, I didn’t. We’re going to the Black Forest in South West Germany, so we’re going to drive over a couple of days down there. And then my parents are coming out to meet us from the most bizarre airport in Europe, I believe, because it’s, um, Basel months, no Mulhouse and uh, a Fryberg.

So it’s an airport for three cities, each of which are in different countries. The airport itself sits in France and God knows what that would’ve been like before Sheen, but imagine it’s a little bit easier now, especially if you’ve got an Irish passport like I have. Yay me. So yeah, but it should be good.

Get to see a bit of scenery uh, take in local foods, see some mountains. That’d be lovely. So there we go. So with that, that’s it for WB 40. As I say, it’s been a bit, it’s sort of interrupted over the last few months because it’s become a little bit more sporadic, but I think that actually that leads to a more pleasurable experience for everybody because it means you never quite know if there’s a new show this week.

So there’s that sort of intriguing surprise. We’ve got loads of guests lined up already for starting recording again in September, so there’s plenty of, uh, plenty of WB 40 to come talking to people about, uh, gender and ai. We’re gonna be talking to somebody about I can’t even remember this. There’s at least three or four in the, in the can as it were already.

So we look forward to that. Lisa, as ever, absolutely delights to, to work with you.

Lisa: Likewise.

Matt: And Michelle, thank you again so much for coming onto the show this week. We’ll have all your details on the, well, not all your details, you know, pertinent details resulting in how people can contact you about what you do.

I won’t put your house address or anything like, that’d be weird. Anyway, thanks for joining.

Michelle: Thanks for the chat. It was great.

Matt: And we will be back in September.

Michelle: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the [email protected] and on all good podcasting platforms.

​

On this week’s show, Julia and Nick meet Matthew Knight to discuss freelancing, community-building and the shifting economics of self-employed work. Matthew, self-employed since the age of 15, runs several communities supporting freelancers, with particular focus on mental health, strategy professionals and those new to self-employment. The conversation explores how the freelance market has evolved from trust-based networks through commoditised digital platforms and back towards private, trust-based pools, raising questions about inclusion and access along the way.

The discussion turns to pricing and value, touching on research into how women price their work, the limitations of day-rate models, and the case for value-based pricing as alternatives to charging for time. Matthew makes the case that self-employment requires deliberately designing your work rather than following generic guidance, while acknowledging that the freedom to say no to work is a privilege not available to everyone. The episode also covers what makes communities sustainable versus audiences, and the leadership and culture-setting required to hold a community together past its first eighteen months.

Show transcript generated by Squadcast:

Julia: ​Welcome to episode 349 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Julia Bellis, Nick Drage, and our guest this week, Matthew Knight. So Nick, why don’t you kick off by telling us what you’ve been up to in the last week.

Nick: Right, as should be mentioned in the show notes and something I’ll only be discussing briefly the main event from my last week has been attending my father’s funeral with, with all the, all the, all the connotations of that. Definitely not the subject of this podcast, but gives me an excuse to say to remind people out there considering the amount of administration that’s now into my life as beneficiary and executor of the will make a will sort out power of attorney.

Make if you are while you’re making a will, make sure there’s an easily accessible list of all your service providers and their contact details and their names. Like who does the electricity, who does the gas, who provide to the internet, all that kind of thing makes such a difference and is something that thankfully my father did.

That is the end of like the public service announcement for the podcast, but that’s, it’s really made me realise that and it’s a grim subject that people put off. So hopefully listen to this. People will make a note. Yes, I will get round to doing that at some point. But that’s, that’s taken up a lot of my previous week and a lot of my, for want of a better phrase, a lot of my brain space, but moving on to hopefully happier things or this could be like a horrible coincidence.

How about you, Julia? What have you been doing the previous week?

Julia: Well, well, but before we talk about me, I was just gonna say, it sounds like a tough lesson to learn that you’ve got to deal with all of this admin when you are reeling from dealing with death as well. So thank you very much for sharing that.

Nick: Thank you.

Julia: I have, I have had a happier week, actually. It was my company conference from Monday to Wednesday. And when I joined my company, which is coming up to 10 years ago, the annual conference was a sort of large room in a classy pub with a guest speaker and some lightning talks, and now it is a three day extravaganza in county hall. And we had a scavenger hunt, which was the first time ever, which was absolutely brilliant. I haven’t done a scavenger hunt since I was about 25, and I remember really enjoying that one. And the energy levels after the first day, which was quite exhausting, were fairly low. And I, I’d say we all sort of left the venue in our teens. Most people were kind of looking forward to getting to the pub and within 20 minutes we’d all perked up massively and got incredibly competitive and it was really good fun.

And we had a time limit. We had to get to the pub by seven 30 and it was addictive. You just wanted to tick off more challenges. And my team walked into the pub, which was in a maiden lane at 7 28 and the whole ops team was sitting outside the front of the pub and cheered as we came in and totally recommend it. Brilliant.

Nick: that’s wonderful. As regulators will know, I’m an advocate for games in business context especially something like that. So the second public service announcement of this episode, I think is just play more games with your work colleagues. Well, and what a, that’s great. Thank you for sharing that.

Julia: Do you know, that is such a brilliant segue because I think Matthew is brilliant at playing games. But before we talk about that, tell us what you’ve been up to in the last week.

Matthew: You know what? I had to actually look at my calendar because my, my memory these days is shot. So I struggle to remember what I have for breakfast this, this morning. But last week was quite an IRL week. I had a number of coffees and chats with some members of a community, which I run, which was great.

And a couple of face-to-face meetings with some potential clients and also reading a whole load of new laws, which are passing through the House of Lords at the moment, which is has seemed to have become a recent nerdy, I’m not gonna say passion, interest of mine.

Julia: You know, I think this kicks in sometime in the middle of your fourth decade. I’m, I’m very what did I find? The, the house of the people where it shares that have been discussed in Parliament, how it was voted on in Parliament, and then how it was voted on, on this website. And I’ll have to, and it is very interesting actually, to see does Parliament really represent the people, or at least the people who self-select and go onto this website, the nerdy people in their forties who are very interested in this stuff.

Matthew: It is interesting. I think we know relatively little, unless you work in that sort of space, how laws come to pass, how arduous and, and lengthy the process is, and who is ultimately involved in informing how they are written, what they include, what they exclude, who doesn’t get a say and how sometimes brilliant work hidden people in hidden departments and, and rooms in Westminster and otherwise how brilliant and hardworking they are. And it’s only at the last minute that actually some of that work gets thrown out or ripped up and, and how frustrating it must be for many people work in that, that part of things, but I’m finding it. Yeah, I’m I’m very honoured that you said my mid forties. I’m definitely approaching my late forties, but yeah, it has become a recent nerdy interest.

Julia: So I was very interested, Matthew, when you mentioned meeting members of your communities for coffee frequent host of this podcast, Matt Ballantine, is known for his coffee chats and meeting people for coffee. And I just wondered if you could tell us a bit more about that and how that came to be a feature your community.

Matthew: Which part? Coffee community meeting, there’s, there’s lots of things there. I, I run a number of community projects supporting fellow freelancers. I’ve been self-employed since I was 15, which is two or three years now. and for the last 10 years or so, I’ve run a number of projects supporting fellow freelancers.

A large one focuses on the mental health of the self-employed, so our unique experiences, the gaps and challenges in support that we face and the influences on our wellbeing. I run another one, which is primarily for strategy individ individuals, so people who work in marketing, brand and innovation and digital. Another space purely for the self-employed or on a another community for, for those who are just starting out as freelancing. And the majority of these spaces are digital mostly because it’s a lot easier to have conversations with people who are all over the world, you know, distributed across the country if you’re in a Slack channel on a, on a kind of WhatsApp group. But I have made myself a, a commitment this year to get out of the house more often. And.

Julia: about mental health. I think that’s really important, isn’t it?

Matthew: It’s crucial, absolutely crucial. Not just the vitamin D but actually seeing other people as well. And I’ve been actively trying to see at least one person from our various communities a week, and it’s been wonderful.

We had a lovely walk and talk with, with a guy called Rob who runs a another community. And I sat down with another member of our community to chat about the work that he’s doing at the moment. And if nothing else, it is lovely to just have a bit of a nata, which is an, an output. You’re not having to think about what the client needs or, you know, there doesn’t need to be an agenda or there doesn’t need to be kind of an action point. Just have a bit of space where actually you can just be yourself and have an open, rambling, tangential conversation for a little while.

Julia: So I had so many questions from your that first, that first intro. Can you tell us, am I allowed to ask, how did you come to be self-employed at 15 is that even possible now? Can.

Matthew: How did I become self-employed? I taught myself how to code when I was 14, a very, very earliest days of the web. And I started writing letters to EMI records and the BB, C and said, Hey, I’ve learned this thing called the web. Can I do for you? rather leveraging child labour laws.

A number of companies said, yes, of course. So cut my teeth in the earliest days. Building websites for people. And yeah.

Julia: me of that Kaitlyn Moran story. You know, the columnist on the Times she turned up at NME wearing a top hat and a velvet jacket or something,

Matthew: Yep.

Julia: herself a job as a columnist

Matthew: I, I didn’t turn up physically. I faxed them,

Julia: Yeah.

Matthew: which is obviously, you know, I, I wish a fax machine would come back. I do love the tangibility of it. But yeah, back then you could just I, I seem to remember telling people the story. This is probably not at all qualifiable, but I was probably one of only 30 or 40 people in the UK who knew what HTML was at the time. because I would just lock myself in my bedroom and teach myself these things. And I guess the difference was that I just went out there and told people I was better at it than probably I was. But you know, if you can deliver a bit of HTML and it worked and it did. So yeah, from 15 onwards I’ve never really kind of looked back, moved through various different types of roles from technology into innovation, into creativity, into strategy. And it’s probably in my blood. ’cause my dad was a freelance journalist. He worked for the BBC for many years. So growing up I never knew any other way of working. That was, that was his way of working. You know, journalism is still kind of primarily self-employed. but fast forward to today and yeah, have, have been self-employed in lots of different forms and kind of ways. But still doing it for.

Julia: So after that, like portfolio of careers, you know, coding, design strategy, et cetera, it sounded to me like you spend a decent chunk of your time on your communities now.

Matthew: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s the thing that really motivates me and, and I keep returning to, I have a very short attention span. I get distracted and bimble off onto other things very, very quickly. But this, this area of work around supporting freelancers in, in identifying and trying to close the gaps in where freelancers have support is something that I’ve, I can’t leave.

I’ve tried a couple of times and I, and I keep coming back to it selfishly because I need a community of people around me. I need that support. You know, I need to understand these things about running a business, and if I can’t find the information, I go and try and find it and then share it with others. But also because we are seeing more and more people step into self-employment now, either through choice or because they’ve been pushed into it or found themselves through things like redundancy, or perhaps they’re a, they’re a carer, or perhaps they’re neurodivergent, you know, lots of reasons why people are in self-employment and in, in lots of ways, I think it’s getting harder and harder to find really good, useful support and resources out there.

Julia: Right. harder and harder to find the resources, and that’s where you step in and fill in that gap. What about the opportunities for freelancers? What’s your take on the trajectory of where they’re going?

Matthew: Very good question. I think it depends on which sector you are in, because to say freelancer is like to say, woman, you know, there’s, there’s no one definition of what this means. It really depends on so many different contexts. It’s a, a best, it’s a diaspora. certain sectors like film and tv for instance, the majority of the workforce is self-employed, freelance, you know, kind of 70% plus. In the creative industries, it’s around 30, 35%, which is kind of two or three times higher than the, the national average of self-employment. And in those sectors where it is a dominant model, then there’s a lot more competition. And more competition means that it has an impact on day rates. Your ability to find the work, I would say lots of it is about who, you know, what not what rather than what, you know.

So it’s a lot of kind of friends introducing and making recommendations. There’s lots of kind of networking that’s, that’s required. So it can be incredibly hard to break into and, and do effectively. And I think in the next couple of years, there’s a, there’s a brilliant theory by this guy called rich who runs Gigged which is a kind of online fluid kind of talent platform. And he has this, this idea that the, the workforce is gonna be 40, 40, 20, 40% perm, fluid, contracting, freelance, whatever you wanna call it, and 20% AgTech. And whatever you think the numbers are going to be, I think the model is absolutely right that we will have these hybrid teams. And in my industry, in the kind of creative sector, we already seeing the numbers of perm headcounts, reducing associates being brought in to build that network. as a result, I think more and more people are being pushed into self-employment and it’s creating a, a, a noisy marketplace. And I don’t think the system has caught up with how you find people, how you bring them in, how you engage and retain them, or how those individuals are supported when it comes to stuff like mental health or pensions or health insurance or education and training.

There’s a whole load of systemic design gaps, which are just haven’t been resolved yet. And I think we really need to move faster on, on that side of things.

Julia: Do you know, this is so interesting because about five years ago I was doing a piece of work and I wish I’d spoken to you then. Looking specifically at film crews and how they worked and they did all their interactions and all their job opportunities came via WhatsApp. So it was in Incre it was pretty much a hundred percent who you knew and who you’d, and we were looking at ways to sort of democratise that and make it more accessible to people knew.

Matthew: I think it’s a really interesting journey that we’ve been on in how you find people to build your team. Let’s go back a hundred years because some industries have been like this. You know, the Hollywood model is over a century old. It was all about trusts. We didn’t have WhatsApp, but it was, it was all about who you knew, who you’d worked with previously, recommendations, word of mouth.

It was all built upon trust. So incredibly hard to get into if you didn’t know somebody, you know, could have been a boys club in a lot of sectors. And, you know, we see the kind of equity gaps still in many industries. As a result of that, came along and I think changed that radically. So if you didn’t know somebody network previously, you would’ve gone to a recruit and they had a network, but it was still that kind of in club. And then platforms like Uno, Juno, and, and online systems where actually they had a marketplace, you know, big volume of freelancers uploaded a profile, and then clients could find those individuals through search and kind of taxonomy as opposed to who they knew. Created arguably the democratisation of that industry that, oh, okay, now I can, I can stand up there.

If I’ve got a good profile, somebody can find me. I think what actually happened was a sort of ification of talent where actually, if you’ve got a thousand people, you can just swipe, swipe, swipe, hire somebody, bring them into the project. You don’t need to look after them well, or treat them fairly because the next time you can just swipe, swipe, swipe, and find the next person again. What we’re seeing now though, is again.

Julia: trust model.

Matthew: to the trust all about speed and commodity. Yeah. And what’s happened now is we’re swinging back to trust again. So rather than these big open platforms, we are shifting back to private pools where an organisation has its trusted people who it knows who it’s worked with before. And again, getting into those pools is incredibly hard. And it yeah, begs lots of questions around things like inclusion and kind of diversity of, of talent and background and things like pay gaps. There’s a whole load of real issues around if you’ve got a small pool, what does that mean? Even things like price, fist think and, and kind of cartels and, you know, those sorts of things are, are issues which some organisations have been slapped with.

Some trade bodies have been told that they can’t give their members pricing guidance because that could be collusion really interesting. But yeah, we’ve, we’ve swung back to trust, which is a good thing, but we haven’t fixed for inclusivity.

Julia: It brings a, a different set of problems, doesn’t it? it’s interesting you talk about wage gaps

because I was, I, my sort of first 10 years of my career I was a PERM employee then I was freelance. I was an associate with EE for six or seven years and always been rubbish as a permie at asking for a pay rise as a freelancer, found it so much easier

Matthew: Did you? That’s interesting.

Julia: about day rates. I felt like I was more distanced from the work or something like that.

Matthew: That is interesting. I think.

Julia: not common or.

Matthew: I think the, the, I think the English are uniquely awkward when it comes to talking about money, right?

Julia: Yeah.

Matthew: and there is a real lack of transparency around things like day rates and how much you should be charging. what is super interesting is there was a piece of research that came out year by the Wilder Collective who looked at women and pricing how they found this theme of internalised misogyny through how they price, and.

Julia: As in they were routinely paying women less than they’re paying men for the same job.

Matthew: No, as in women were routinely undercharging

Julia: Oh.

Matthew: and reducing what they would be charging for others because they felt perhaps they weren’t good enough or that they’re, that this certain level was a certain kind of value or others seemed to be positioned as better themselves. So there were pegging and comparing themselves. So I think the pricing challenge is, is interesting, is in that we hold ourselves back as much as the market does a lot of times. but then you also have kind of supply and demand kind of dynamics. So if there’s a hundred people in a room, there’s a bit of a race to the bottom, and how do you tackle that things?

But interesting that you say that you found it easier when you’re self-employed. A lot of freelancers don’t get an annual performance review don’t have a promotion path. And it falls upon us to say, oh, actually I need to make sure I’m upping my rates next year, or kind of factoring in cost of living allowance.

So there are some really great data sources actually, like major players and Uno, Juno, do annual research in the creative industries on, on what people are charging. Major players did a brilliant piece of work this year to look at pay differences around things like ethnicity and gender. And there is some surprising outcomes there that sometimes it is higher than, than it would be in employment comparatively in terms of the gaps. yeah, I think it’s really variable. There’s no, there’s no kind of one common issue. I think the, the interesting thing at the moment is day rates versus value pricing. And how or whether the, you know, kind of industry starts shifting away from charging for time because what does time mean anymore when you can get AI to do a job for you in, in 30 minutes is time a good proxy for value? So I, I think we’ll start to see even that shifting as well.

Yeah, that’s very interesting, isn’t it? And I can imagine there’s a even greater hurdle in the mind of freelancers to say something like, I can do some work that’s going to increase your profit margins by N 0.3%. Therefore I need to be paid by a percentage of that. I dunno.

Yeah,

Julia: that’s.

Matthew: it’s, there are, there are indices that work like that. You know, kind of sales commission based or kind of uplift based. So I think that’s one of the most exciting things about employment at work at the moment, is that bets are off. You know, the, there is no new wand, new model. In the future, there are gonna be so many different ways of how we work, how we define work, how we define relationships in work, how those contracts have factored, how pricing is factored. and right now I think we’re in a position where you can almost design how you want to work, how you want those engagements to work and go, well, this is, this is our model, this is how we do it and experiment. Because, know, if you’re not experimenting and trying things out right now, there is no better time or necessary time to be trying new things.

Julia: So is that the sort of conversation that you have with one of your freelancers in your community? Because it sounded incredibly empowering actually, to invite someone to set their boundaries and think about the ideal way that they’d like to

Nick: Can I just jump in? Just jump in as a freelancer, especially a, a freelancer who hasn’t marketed or defined himself as well as he should have, so I’m like, what I’m worth depends on context and even what does that, that was what, thankfully this is audio only, but otherwise, you know, I’m like nodding and smiling along to this because on the one hand that’s petrifying as in like, rather than aiming for like a standard day rate or whatever, it’s what could I be worth?

But also there’s so many ideas off the, off the back of that, for example, like charging by time to me doesn’t make sense in all sorts of ways. So like if I, so if I work twice as slowly and take twice as long, you’ll pay me twice as much. And even

Matthew: Yeah.

Nick: even if I won’t ethically do that, like

Matthew: Yeah, it

Nick: yeah, I like I that my sort of mindset will be if I, if I do this quickly, I’m actually giving myself less money and therefore looking maybe like an idiot in front of someone who’s paying me and all the issues around that.

Whereas as you say, things like value-based pricing feels huge, but also just how would you define value between you and a customer? Also going back to your I relate your film industry analogies, but of course the film industry, maybe I have to say allegedly, allegedly is notorious for we will pay actors so many percentage points of the profit that the movie makes and then one half of the company pays the other half of the company, $400 million for marketing and oh, this billion dollar movie didn’t actually technically make a profit, so we won’t give you any extra money.

Do you think that’s something freelance that’s sort of part, not wishing to bring down your great ideas, but is that part of the new exciting world freelancers have got to look forward to is, is contracts being figured out on the fly and an opportunity for their hiring organisations to be more and more deceptive or malicious in the way contracts are formed?

Matthew: I think there’s a difference between experimenting and trying new things out and trying to figure it out on every single project. And this is one of the things which we try and encourage all of the people that I work with, is to look at what your own needs and preferences and motivations are and what your own boundaries are and how you work best sets and baselines.

And that covers things like, you know, what hours do you work as much as how much do you need to make different people might prefer just the idea of you pay for my time, I do eight hours and then I’ll leave and I can switch off. And that’s absolutely fine. Where somebody else might want to be in there for an hour and charge a hundred thousand pounds for it because they’ve got 30 plus years of experience that, you know, the old adage of I know exactly where to hit the hammer. There is no one size that fits everybody. And this is one of the things that I get really frustrated with a lot of guidance from gurus and experts is, is the presenting the model as if this is the only way that it works. This is what you must or should do. And the reality is that we need to take more active design over how we want to

Nick: Yeah.

Matthew: That also has to factor in. The reality is it isn’t just you, you are working with others, you’re working as part of a team or with a client. So it’s always gonna be a bit, a bit of a Nokia negotiation. Where I think it needs to change right now though, is that all of those bets are off. And if you are just using the same model that everybody else does, if you are not open to going into a conversation that does talk about perhaps having some skin in the game or equity or a, a kind of a risk reward model, then you are not gonna be differentiated.

And it is only a kind of commoditized race to the bottom. So I think people who are building businesses that are not just time for cash, but that they are creating value, they’re building those relationships and doing it in a really interesting way that is a, is a kind of peer to peer partnership model as opposed to a kind of supply demand model. I think those are the ones who grow and develop and do it more sustainably. you aren’t just the uber kind of model of is there a ride or not.

Nick: That’s sorry. I mean, just that’s so inspiring from a work design point of view and a life design point of view without, like, there are bits that hap that won’t make the edit or we’ve discussed when there’s not been recording about side paths we won’t discuss in this podcast. And to jump on one of my favourite hobby horses for like 20 seconds is just the as as we discussed before we started recording.

It’s like the, the, we’ve always done it that way, kind of thinking with regard to work and working hours and working relationships. And also I’ve been hearing for years about how everything’s going to change and been waiting. But considering your experience in this area, it really does feel that it is about time where people can redesign the way they earn money rather than either, as you say, slavishly, following a single guru and wondering why it doesn’t work.

Or just doing standard five days a week, nine to five, I pay you for I am paid for spending so much time either thinking about this or appearing to think about this. Whereas there’s, there’s so much more that we’re all capable of.

Matthew: I think what you lose when you step out of employment is structure. And when you’re in employment, you are given that structure, you know, working hours. A team rules, processes that has positives, like it also comes with support and development and regularity of salary. But it comes with constraints as well.

And that’s ultimately the trade off. When you step into self-employment, you have no structure, you have no systems, and you’ve got two routes. You can either step into that and those systems are imposed upon you by your clients. You follow their contracting processes by the market, by following their date rates and systems. you can take consideration and say, well, what do I want to do? How do I want to work and design how you work? Just because you want it to work in a certain way doesn’t mean that that is going to happen. There’s no amount of manifestation that is going to suddenly kind of magically make all of these jobs pop out of the work.

So it is always a negotiation. It is always a kind of overlap between those two things. ultimately we have the ability to say no to those systems which you are not willing to work within. And you can say yes to those ones, which you want to move forward with. able to say no is a massive position of privilege because not everybody can afford to

Nick: Yeah, absolutely.

Matthew: is, that is a reality of work. And I think that is one of my frustrations with the, the narrative around freelancing and freedom because it is only freedom if you have, if you can afford to turn down work until it’s something that you want to do. And that is not true for the majority of people. But even within that, you can set your own boundaries in terms of working practises and habits and what baseline you are not willing to go below and how you engage with those clients and customers.

There’s a huge amount of control and autonomy even within that because the law requires it of you for tax reasons in a lot of instances. And if you don’t do that, that’s when it, that’s when you get into problems. That’s when you have mental health challenges. That’s when kind of your day rates do slip down.

So it is on our plate to do that. And if you don’t grab it and design, then that’s when it falls into being unsustainable leads to things like burnout or your, your day rates slide backwards.

Julia: When I was a freelancer, I liked the clarity of that choice. do I believe in this piece of work enough to think can contribute to its success for whatever the proposed day rate is. And I had a mortgage to pay, you

Matthew: Yeah.

Julia: or, or am I willing to take the risk? And, and that was very helpful and I think that led to good behaviours on my part.

I was very invested in the piece of work a success.

Matthew: Yeah, I think there’s a huge amount of pride in the majority of self-employed folk that I know are not doing it ’cause of the myth of like pulling a fast one from a tax perspective or wanting to work four hours a week from a beach somewhere, income or whatever that means, they work in this way for those who have chosen to do it because they’re really passionate about their craft and they want to focus on their craft. And perhaps they were frustrated in the previous role ’cause of the politics and all the nonsense that went with it and they just want to get back to doing what they’re brilliant at. The irony that you don’t just have one boss anymore. You have five or six bosses because you’ve got all the different clients that you’re working with. So, and actually, you know, you’ve got so many other things that you probably didn’t do before, like dealing with contracts and chasing late payments and all that kind of the, the, the kind of nonsense around the, the kind of core craft. But I, I still believe that that core passion and motivation shines through the majority of people that I know in their work and they want to do a good job. is a, an emotional driver. The commercial driver is that if they don’t do a good job, they’re not gonna get rehired. So they will also put in that work to make sure that it goes into their portfolio, that they get the next gig from that same client, that their reputation is maintained. that causes some tensions a lot of time because people will self-employed would generally put in more hours on average per day than an employee. they’re more effective and productive. But they will take far less time off. They take off less sick time ’cause they work through ’cause we don’t have sick pay. so there are also these risks which come with unsustainably working in that way. I, I think the motivation and the drive to do a good job comes from both the kind of head, heart, and wallet.

Julia: I have been wanting to ask you, Matthew, if you can share some tips on how to build and manage and maintain these communities. ’cause I think it is a very specific skill that needs thought and effort. And I’ve attempted to do things like this, I feel like my tens have been a bit amateur and maybe this is my chance to learn from a pro.

Matthew: Do you think it went wrong, Julia?

Julia: Well, when you talked about online interactions, I think we had insufficient face-to-face meetups and creating space for that. Like you said, nata interactions that are not focused on achieving an outcome,

Matthew: Interesting.

Julia: which I really enjoy, but I think I could be better at creating space for them.

Nick: Can I, I’m gonna rudely jump in before the guest, but just, I’ve done a lot of thinking about communities recently, and I, I realise how rude this is, but as the third public service announcement of the episode is, is communities having a point which is by the way, is a member of, at least a couple of Matthews communities, is that reason to exist rather than you just get people together and you think, well, the magic will happen is that leadership is absolutely key.

I realise, I realise quite how rude that was, and I hope I haven’t stolen your thunder. Give us more detail on that, please, Matthew, on how to do that.

Matthew: not, not rude at all. And actually is a perfect example of what a good community looks like, that it is not the Matthew Knight community. My definition of of communities, because I think it’s an overused and abused word in recent years, and, and for lots of people, they actually mean audience. And an audience is top down.

It’s somebody at the, the top of the pyramid speaking to the masses. Whereas a community is horizontal. It’s about peers supporting each other and that any point anyone can raise their hand and spark an initiative or make a suggestion or start a conversation or respond to others, that doesn’t mean it’s lawless.

And I think that’s where good community care and kind of curation is where those rules are held by the person who found founded it or a kind of small group of people who, who set the behaviours and the tone and the rules of the space. And that when you enter that space, you understand what those rules and morays are and you have social contracting.

And I think to your point, Nick. It is not necessarily about, it has a purpose, but it, you are really clear on what happens in that space and those, that

Nick: Yeah.

Matthew: rules, even if the purpose of that space is to talk about absolutely nothing whatsoever and just bimble on that is fine. Providing that you want to stand, this is the space to do that. And in another community it might be, there is no bin link here. It is only about networking and selling and whatever it might be. the, the communities of, of which I am a member rather than a host, there is always that really understanding of what the rules and the culture of that space is. Those are all established communities I think starting a community is incredibly hard. ’cause you have this spike of excitement when you kind of go, Hey, come over here. So what’s happening? Oid kind of new thing. And people rush in and then maintaining that energy to keep people saying how they’re doing, checking in that organic kind of bottom up engagement that can take 18 months, two years to get to the point where then it’s everybody else leading those conversations as opposed to the person who’s created it. And that is a lot of energy to be holding a space for people to be encouraging, to be supporting, to kind of nudge the energy continually. And I think that’s why a lot of them really struggle after that kind of first, you know, 18, 18 months. Because if the reward isn’t there immediately for the person who wants something out of it, like, oh, but I wanna make some cash out of it, or I want to be seen as a, you know, kind of a thought leader or something, you know, what they’re trying to take out of the community, it doesn’t necessarily work.

Well. I, none of the communities which I’ve started, have ever had a clear purpose when they started. They’ve always been spaces, serendipitous places where I’ve invited people in. what has always been true is within maybe six months of those people being there, I’ve then said, right now I understand why we are here.

The people who have stuck around, the people who are continuing to talk, this is what we want to focus on. And then you can start to establish that kind of culture and it grows. But it, it’s hard work. It’s a full-time job, I think in a, in a lot of instances.

Julia: There. Do you think those rules and morays and culture is something that emerges? It’s not something that you can set.

Matthew: I think that culture is culture. You know, any organisational culture project where they’re like, oh, we, we need to define our culture. You don’t define a culture, you articulate it, then you can set what you want it to be and nudge it in the direction of that. But, but an organisational culture is what it is. when you are managing a community, your role there is, if there are things which are against the culture which you want to have in place, you try and nip the negative behaviours in the bud. You very clearly call them out, say, oh, this is not how we behave here, or This is why we prefer you set habits and cadences and you kind of, you lead by example as much as possible and then others follow. and you will always have people who don’t follow and want to work in a different way. And sometimes you get, get conflicts in that situation and you have to make a decision like, do I wanna shut those other kinds of behaviours down or are we a space that supports subcultures within that space? So it’s a constant kind of navigating that kind of grey line of, of where you do want to draw black and white boundaries and things and where you want to allow others to kind of shape it. And it really varies. Like some communities I know like really, really locked down in terms of what they do want and will accept and others are completely open and they, they’re very different vibes. And I like being in different types of communities for different fields. So I don’t think there’s any one answer. The, the sustainability of a community really though is like whether it passes that tipping point and it isn’t just a single person having to maintain the energy all the time and that the body of people are, are giving as much as they are taking.

Julia: Do you think you’ve got better with practise at holding that space while everyone’s still working out what’s going on?

Matthew: I think I, in some ways, I think I’ve got worse at it because feel like I overthink when I see things now and I can almost extrapolate, well, if this goes in that direction, what does that mean? So maybe sometimes I over of correct for things, especially in those early days. Yeah, exactly. And I think I’m, I’m a big fan of, of just letting things unfold and, and see what happens.

In a lot of ways it’s like being a parent, and I know this is ridiculous analogy, but I think, you know, sometimes you need to let the toddler fall over and and realise that if they pick up the knife and stab the sister, that’s not gonna end well. but you’ve gotta work out where that line is. And, and if you don’t allow some of those kind of messy middle bits to happen then you’re gonna shut down a whole load of amazing things that could happen. but as you know, parenting is a constant state of anxiety and you are never happy and they won’t be happy with you until they leave home and come back in their thirties. so perhaps, yeah, I dunno. Ask me again In another 30 years.

Julia: ​Brilliant lessons shared. Matthew and I will watch this space in 30 years time and find out what you’ve learned in the next 30 years. However, from 30 years in the future to the next seven days in the future. What are you all up to next week? And I’ll start with you, Nick.

Nick: Right. So I, I mean, back to how I started, sort of death administration and working through all that as you, and there’s a may, maybe, maybe there’s an episode in that in some point. So partly working through that, partly having taken a couple of weeks, sort of downtime, get in touch with a lot more people, of course.

And just as I sort of shout out to everyone else who will be going through this annually, ’cause Father’s Day is coming up with those scheduled reminders of people no longer here that affect so many of us going through that. But also, I mean, just getting on with lots of interesting new things. I’ve just been looking at my calendar.

I’ve seen how many people I’m catching up with, how many conversations I’m having. So looking forward to that actually is maybe is my main thing next week as well as, you know, all the admin that needs doing. How about you, Julia?

Matthew: Well, with my work at the moment, I’m doing this sort of round robin of meetings in loads of different offices around London. And recently I was in an office very, very close to Dr. Johnson’s house and that has been on my to-do list to visit ever since I moved to London in the year 2000. and we finished the meeting at four and Dr.

Johnson’s house shut at five. So I zoomed in and had a brilliant hour there. The guy on the desk was telling me how the best experience of his life ever was when they had a string quartet playing in the house and it’s all made of wood. it was like being inside a wooden musical instrument ’cause the sound was reverberating around the wood and I was really

Nick: Wow.

Julia: I had missed this. then internet surfaced this advert to me for baroque string quartet at Dennis Eva’s house, which is the house of a Hugin o weaver in East London, which has also been on my London to-do list forever, and I’ve never got around to it. So I booked tickets for that and we are going to that next weekend. So, I’m really excited about hearing some baroque music inside a wooden box.

Nick: Excellent.

Julia: I think that is my highlight of the week coming up. What about you, Matthew?

Matthew: Well, my daughter starts her mock GCSE exams this week.

Julia: Oh.

Matthew: and that’s about a week and a half, two weeks of, intensity for her. It is definitely reminding me that if you were to sat me down and do A-G-C-S-E of any subject, I would fail it. All things have changed. All maths have changed, all geography has changed.

I dunno what the teaching them now, but I dunno any of it. So I think the next week will mostly be trying to make sure that she is not too intensely revising until two o’clock in the morning, and then celebrating on the Friday once she has finished.

Julia: Less her. That is lovely. Yes. Good luck to all of you and I admire your aims there.

On this week’s show, Nick and Julia meet Phil Clark to discuss the surprisingly complex world of technology procurement, and why it’s a profession almost nobody plans to enter but many find genuinely engaging once they do.

Phil walks through procurement’s longstanding branding problem and CIPS’s efforts to fix it, including the QCD (Quality, Cost, Delivery) triangle game his branch developed for school careers fairs, complete with chocolate-coin incentives. Beyond pitching the career to twelve-year-olds, the discussion gets into the realities behind recent headlines: the scramble to buy 7,000 laptops in the first week of COVID, the Suez Canal blockage as a real-world stress test, and why “cheapest wins” is the wrong mental model for anything more sophisticated than paperclips. Procurement, Phil argues, is the mirror image of sales — the same skillset facing the opposite direction — but with arguably greater bottom-line impact.

The richer territory is forward-looking. Phil explores how procurement teams are starting to grapple with AI contracts: what happens when an AI bot replaces a thousand jobs, and how you contract for the ethics of training data. He looks at Y2Q and the need to bake quantum-safe expectations into multi-year deals, and reflects on the catch-22 of preventive work — good procurement means bad things don’t happen, which makes the value invisible. The throughline is that procurement is genuinely strategic work for people who enjoy complexity, relationships, and thinking several moves ahead.

Show transcript auto-generated by Descript

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Nick: Hello and welcome to episode 348 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, your host, Nick Drage, host Julia Bellis, and our of guest, Phil Clark.

So first of all, Julia, what have you been doing over the last week?

Julia: Do you know? I always know you’re going to ask me that question and then I struggle to think of interesting things that I’ve been doing. But actually I have had an interesting week. I went up to Durham for work to run a few workshops and my main job actually was doing the icebreaker. historically I’ve been rubbish at icebreakers, but I’m getting a bit braver now and I’m taking risks and I’m doing silly things. And I got the team to do a one word each story, so give them a problem to solve. Everybody says a word. Let’s see what happens. And the best one was, the problem I posed was how might we make more friends? And they came up with on the spot, should dribble less, which I thought, nailed it. You got the brief there, absolutely sorted. And then I came back from Durham and promptly caught a terrible cold. So you can probably hear me being a bit huskier and croaker than usual.

Nick: Extra as SMR for our listeners.

Julia: There we go. What about you, Nick? What have you been up to?

Nick: First of all, impressed at taking on icebreakers everybody’s nervous and some icebreakers can be just so cringeworthy, it can set a bad tone for an entire workshop. But doing something like that and also expecting people to be like, who show made slightly, whose line is it anyway, kind of level of improvisation, but if everybody’s doing it that just sounds really fun and a way to get everybody to get over themselves and talk to each other.

For me, I, yeah. I also, yeah, know this question’s coming, written things down. The honest answer is cutting down some unruly bushes in my garden, small garden, which makes me realise I want to live in a forest and just how to make that happen. Just, yeah.

Julia: Do you know, in my experience, every woman hits mid forties and wants to live in a forest so you can join all the women who’ve had that

Nick: It’s, I like I’m just ignoring a guest and trying not to derail the conversation, but there’s something to that idea. Now you’ve really got me thinking about that. I shall, I should just put star next to my notes and we’ll see if we can do a separate episode on that. We’ll.

Phil: keen to explore this. Want to live in a forest thing though, ’cause that, that, so you enjoyed cutting down the bushes, is what you’re saying?

Nick: Not really, but they weren’t one of the trees, wasn’t that health one of the trees or bush or whatever. I don’t understand biology at all. I just enjoy being around it.

Is, was a bit dead. Like you could literally pull the tree apart. I mean by tree, something that’s three, four metres high at most. But because it’s nature and it doesn’t obey like the borders of the property or fences, they had to come down. Otherwise it was, I need to remember every couple of weeks to stop that blocking.

For example, one of my neighbours, it blocks the sun, which isn’t fair with summer coming up. So I didn’t really enjoy taking ’em down what it needed to do. But I like that idea of being in nature partly for the choir, partly just ’cause the way nature works is really interesting. And so seeing it firsthand can is really interesting.

If it’s your own, then you can study it and play with it. Like cutting these bushes back before I was really interested in how they fought back and which, what grew back where, all that kind of thing. So that’s one thing I’ve done. Also moved from one ISP to another, like a good or bad habit.

I’ve been self-hosting some online services, some at home for, geez, 25 years and just doing that and the way the internet has developed is something I just loads of thoughts off that. And that’s something else I’ve been doing. And also, as we discussed before we started recording I should be running a business.

Lots of half thought conversations about that, including I might become a part-time Viking sage, which is both really interesting suits, my beard. But also if you look up Viking Sages and I researched it for two minutes, they usually end up beheaded according to the mythology and the history. So I’m, I’m not, I’m considering the position at the moment.

So that’s what I’ve been doing over the last week.

Julia: Fighting and poetry are the strengths of the Vikings, so if you’re up for those things, I think you should go

Nick: Oh no. Horribly. I’m up for, I’m up for instructing how other people should fight and being unimpressed by poetry mostly, if I’m absolutely honest. So it seems that profession’s looking less and less likely by the minute

Julia: I think we should ask our guest what he’s been up to this week.

Nick: I think. I think we should, and I think, I don’t, we’ve either set the bar really high or really low. I’m not sure.

Phil: Over the last week I’ve done a bit of work stuff. Boring, went and talked about that, but a friend of mine does ultra marathons and so I was crewing for my mate as he ran up Snowden with 2000 other people

Nick: Oh, nice.

Phil: which was horrendous ’cause the weather was awful and of people got quite cold and wet and yucky and it was all a bit dangerous, but, so yeah, that’s my thing.

But it sounds great. My job was really driving him to the start line and sitting in a coffee shop for about 10 hours, eating cake and then picking him up at the end, which I’m perfectly happy with. And the Wales one wasn’t so good, but he does these quite frequently. So the next one in the summer is in the Pyrenees.

And then in September we’re going to niece twice. So yeah get a friend who does ultra trail marathons. You don’t have to worry about cutting bushes back.

Julia: are a good friend. Actually, I

Phil: it’s not that hard, honestly. It’s great fun.

Julia: I bet you he was delighted to see you in a warm, dry car

Phil: Yes.

Julia: end.

Phil: Put.

Nick: Brilliant Ray. Thank you everyone. That’s just the introduction done with. Now we’ll get on with the show.

, In the last podcast, I was silent for the first 20 minutes I was scribbling down side paths and ignoring them. But foolishly WB 40 of left me in charge, which means we’re gonna, we’re gonna go down most of them. But Phil, your background I, how did you get into procurement? How did that start?

Phil: So I, as most people in procurement could say I fell into procurement. In reality so my background, I’ve been in it 30 years. I worked for IB and Accenture, some big companies, mostly on the sort of supplier side. And then about 15 years ago realised that actually the fun bit is not necessarily in my perspective, the technical stuff, it’s more how you use technology in the business.

And so I decided a bit of a career change was required and I moved into being on the sort of client side, the buyer side of technology and helping them develop business cases and the commercials around why you would buy a piece of technology. So that was my first foray into procurement.

But I’ll be honest with you, 15 years ago, I didn’t even know it was called procurement. I was just fancied getting onto a buy side and working on the projects to see how it all worked. But my background was always quite commercially focused. So that’s where I went. And then over that 15 year period, I realised it was called procurement.

I developed my commercial skills, got into quite a lot of detail around some of the specifics of technology that you don’t really think about unless you’re in procurement. So on the tech side of things like licencing, ip, data privacy, those sorts of things that you need to write into a contract.

Developed some skills around that. And then because I was self-employed or had my own limited company, I decided it would be a good thing to join local networks of people. And the most relevant one was the Chartered Institute of Procurement Supply, sips, CIPS. And so got checked to some of those guys and that’s where it led into a more formal procurement role.

That all makes sense, that follow through. Okay.

Nick: Yeah, that’s really good and just. Interesting that you say that everybody in procurement falls into it. Like nobody. Men in the best way. Nobody grows up and thinks I don’t wanna be an astronaut, I don’t wanna be a train driver, I wanna buy things for companies. But also, and this is only an audio podcast, so we couldn’t see Julia’s micro expression there. And men in the best way. Procurement doesn’t seem that interesting until you get into it and suddenly you realise how complex it is and how many different parties and organisations there are involved. I assume that’s the case, is once you start learning about it, you’re like, oh, there’s so much more to this than like shopping on an, a sort of corporate Amazon for my company.

It’s like you started please continue to explain. You said about the legal side, the IP side, the licencing side, the ongoing cost side,

Julia: I

Nick: how.

Julia: when you said legal, I thought GDPR and that alone is a massive, chunk of information to understand and

Phil: and it is interesting ’cause procurement and it is exactly the point. You’re just making procurement’s got a bit of a bad brand. And the Chartered Institute procure sips, I’m gonna call ’em sips ’cause it’s too long to say SIPS are trying to fix that problem. So the reason why I got involved and the reason why I stayed involved is ’cause actually we’re all in agreement.

There’s a better way of articulating what procurement is. SIPS as an entity. Being a Chartered Institute is actually all about driving best practise for procurement and supply across all industries. And obviously you can buy all sorts of stuff. So in my world, I’m very focused on technology procurement, but they look at all sorts of aspects of procurement, but they do formal training courses and if you’re a procurement person, you’ll end up with a sips after your name in some way, shape, or form.

And so they, it’s in their interest to fix that branding problem. And the reason why you guys invited me onto this podcast was to talk about a game that, that we jointly developed because part of the role of the SIPS branch and its volunteers, the function is to engage with young people, school leavers or people still at school to help them wake up in the morning and think I wanna work in procurement and not be an astronaut or a hairdresser and those sorts of things.

And so we had to develop an approach to try and fix that problem. But it’s interesting, we’re fix, we’re trying to fix the problem at 12-year-old level, but here we all are, not presuming any ages, later on in life still trying to work out what procurement is between us all. And not many people know about it, but I’m absolutely passionate about it.

It’s a great job and you do all sorts of really interesting things as part of it. So yeah, far away on questions on procurement. I can talk about it for hours.

Julia: you know, you are selling it to me. I’m sitting here thinking, oh, maybe this is a career change I should consider.

Phil: should be. Everyone. I mean, little things like last couple of years been really interesting from a procurement perspective, tech procurement to one side. I think procurement really came to the fore because you remember a few years ago, some very nice man drove his boat into the side of the sewers canal and everything ground to a halt, and then all of a sudden you couldn’t get any goods from far-flung places to our shops and all those things.

Procurement had to unpick all that on behalf of the business they were operating in. And that’s just one aspect, the logistics side of things. It’s just one aspect of procurement that people just take for granted. But if you’re a procurement professional, you have to think about how to navigate some of those things what the contractual implications are.

So there’s a lot to it other than just buying stuff, which is what people think it is.

Julia: So this event that was beyond the control of most companies put them in a position where they were unable to meet their contractual obligations. Wow.

Phil: Oh, and it depends what’s in their contract. So a lot of conversation at the moment about the travel industry and what force majeure means in the context of people not getting aeroplane fuel so they can, you know, whether they can claim on their insurance. All those things you need to be aware of and be able to navigate as a procurement professional.

Another great example that’s technology related, which is one that I’m speaking from personal experience. When COVID hit, you know, a few days after it was announced, you know, we all gotta work from home. Literally every technology procurement person in the world was trying to buy laptops. And I was working for a large utilities company at the moment,

Julia: Yeah.

Phil: Sorry, at the time.

And I was instructed within a week to go and buy 7,000 laptops in a highly constrained market where, you know, clearly you just need to get it, otherwise quite a lot of back office functions will fall apart. And so the skill of a procurement person in that regard is maintaining relationships with suppliers, being able to secure supply, navigating still not getting ripped off on the price, making sure they’re all good quality, all those sort of things procurement people need to deal with that you just, again, just take for granted things are gonna turn up.

It’s a great, honestly, yeah. Do it change your profession now. It’s a great place to work.

Julia: So, so let’s talk about the skills that you need. ’cause when you were talking about your laptop mission, I was thinking, are you under pressure to negotiate on price? And then you talk more about relationships and supply. And so how much of it is about negotiation?

Phil: So traditionally it was very much, procurement has always been seen as you get the cheapest thing. Yeah.

And I think certainly in a lot of the commodity type procurement categories, not necessarily technology. You know, being able to negotiate a decent price is a really big part of the role. But one of my sort of specialist fields is large IT services contracts are outsourcing and those sort of things.

And whereas price is really interesting, it actually isn’t the main driver. Most of the time you want to, you’re willing to pay a little bit more for something that works. And so understanding what you’re buying, building relationships and trust with suppliers, making sure that all of their commitments are recorded in contract so you don’t fall out over it.

But being able to take a bit of a leap of faith where you need to, all those things are part of the skillset that you need as a procurement professional. It’s not just about looking at three prices and picking the lowest one you need to be a good procurement professional. You need to know a lot more about that.

But it’s cool. And and the nice thing about it is if you think it’s the opposite side of the coin to a sales person and everyone sees salespeople as relationships and, you know, driving profitability, et cetera for their respective organisations, it’s all the same skills in procurement just facing the other way.

Julia: you are spending your company’s money rather than

Phil: and

Julia: something.

Phil: the other thing that I’m, I brought you, I’m off now. You’re not gonna stop me. This is a three hour podcast you’re gonna get. So, so one of my frustrations is if you’re in it specifically, it sales guys get paid very well for, you know, especially in the software side of things. And they sell a hundred pounds of software and the profitability on that is probably, eh, let’s say 40%.

So, so they’ve made 40 quid out of a hundred quid for the piece of software they’ve sold. Great. Well done salespeople. And they get paid a fortune for that. Procurement people don’t get paid as well as salespeople. Some people do, but you know, in the main if they take, you know, a hundred pound software cost and don’t buy it because you don’t actually need it, they’ve saved, they’ve added a hundred pounds directly to the bottom line of that company.

So the value of procurement is significantly more as a procurement professional, in my view, than a salesperson. And I’m now gonna get a lot of hate from salespeople, but it tangibly, you can measure it. Sold. Are you guys signing up yet?

Nick: I’m struck by at least two things.

Phil: I.

Nick: first of all that point, especially that you can buy the right, you can, sorry, you can buy the wrong thing, then leads to all sorts of follow on issues. So not, so making that choice, not buying something and being someone who knows the products well enough and has built the relationships strong enough that you can maybe find that out when another procurement person wouldn’t, because you know, the sales person well enough that they’ll be honest with you and go, I don’t need you to make my monthly target or whatever. Don’t get this. You don’t need it. And it’s not, it shouldn’t be at version one yet. That’s just what we were told to do. You know, although that kind of inside knowledge will save companies much, which is so important and deserves salesperson, like rep levels of compensation. But just also it feels like a game that from my sort of history of serious game design, certain situations and how complex they are and you’re like, I want this feels like something people should play. I know this sounds like a horrible lead into the next subject to conversation, which we’ll see if we go to, but like quite genuinely, when you say it’s it’s this factor, this factor, this factor, rather than it’s just one. It’s who can sell the cheapest? It’s also about relationship building.

Also. There’s multiple parties involved immediately. go to that’s something people should game how complex it is. And also that’s a game in that how interesting. That’s something you experiment with. That’s something you learn about, that’s something you get a about from repeated play.

Like a really good game. Like say something like chess as opposed to tic tac toe. Like to explain the obvious to both you and the listeners that, you know, as in chess is still being analysed after how many hundred or thousand years. Because it’s so complex because it’s so interesting.

The same way something like procurement rather than can I how cheaply can I get this from whoever and how can I just rotate between suppliers to keep getting the cheapest deal each time and not be concerned about all the other add-ons or follow up issues or technical support that’s needed or whatever. It just, there’s such complexity to that. It does strike me as such a area. Which brings me onto the third thought I had while you were talking was someone like you is the best advert for this. I don’t mean to take away from your game, which we haven’t even discussed yet, but showing oh, did, no, this is really interesting.

I’m really into my work rather than trudge through something for eight hours a day, so I’ve got a roof over my head that strikes me as a that’s the best advert for a profession.

Phil: And I mean, it’s interesting. No, yeah, you’re, I mean I love it and I know that will come across hopefully, I think the point you made about the game, and obviously, you know we started talking because of the announcement about the SIPS game that we spoke about. The difficulty you’ve got is the game gets more complex as you, as your career progresses.

And what we tried to do from a SIPS perspective is get people to understand the basics. And so the finishing off the sort of story around the SIPS piece and part of their mission is to bring people into the profession. We were I carry with the intro that we did about 20 minutes ago but hopefully it’ll make sense.

So, so you know, I joined the local SIPS branch and met loads of other procurement people and we all got on famously and there’re a nice bunch of guys and that all really worked well. And that helped me understand procurement and the different types of procurement. ’cause I was only really focused on technology, but one guy buys fire engines for living.

Another guy buys the lights for air fields, people buy equipment for gnats down the road. Been sw so, so there’s all sorts of people buying all sorts of crazy stuff. Anyway, so we as a branch volunteer at local careers fairs because sips want us to bring people through the profession and that’s a good thing to do.

And the first one we went to was in a big guild hall. I lived down near Portsmouth, so it was in Portsmouth. And we all turned up, well, three or four of us turned up in our suits with our boots on, you know, with a table in front of us and some leaflets and, and it said, come and work in procurement behind us.

And that was sort of it. And we turned up at this careers fair. And next to us you’ve got BAE systems, a big local defence organisation you’re probably aware of. They have, they’ve got a missile on their table. And then you’ve got another company next to Ms I, this

Nick: Wow.

Phil: they’ve got buns and burners, you’ve got the Army and they’re all trying on different uniforms.

And we’re trying to explain to 12-year-old people. Procurement’s a really good thing to go into and they’re just all over the place not wanting to come to our table. And it was a massive fail. Yeah. First effort, massive fail. So we took it away and decided that, oh, you know, as a 12-year-old person, what would you be interested in?

You’ve gotta get, well, two things really. They like playing games. So to your point, Nick, you know, that’s a good way of attracting the audience, but just having a game or getting to engage with a game is gonna be quite difficult to do. So we need to make it worth a while. And being procurement, people who do negotiate occasionally, we made it worth a while by having a massive pile of chocolate coins.

Yeah. So we developed a game where they won chocolate coins, but the whole point of this is to try and get ’em away from even everyone thinking, you know, procurement’s all about cost. So the game that we developed in procurement, there’s a really well known tool which people use, which is called the QCD triangle, quality, cost, delivery.

And so the idea is you find a balance of quality, cost, and delivery. And so you, it’s a three pointed thing, obviously triangle and so if you can get in the middle of the QCD triangle, you have got yourself to position, we’ve got a balanced deal because you would be willing to pay a little bit more for something of better quality or a little bit more for something of, you know, that gets delivered a bit quicker.

And so we developed a whole story, if you like, of engaging with these kids to try and get them to understand that don’t just focus on the price of something, focus on the other aspects. And when they get to the end of realising they actually do this in their day-to-day lives when they’re buying a piece of clothing or a mobile phone, then they could be procurement people.

And actually it’s quite good fun to negotiate with some of these bits where it got really interesting, you know, so we play the game and they throw some dice and if they get the same number on the dice, they get some chocolate coins, all very interesting. But where it got interesting was a lot of the kids, and bear in mind these are probably 12 to 14-year-old kids at careers fairs.

You start a conversation around, you know, asking questions about what’s important to you when you’re buying your mobile phone. That’s normally the best way to, ’cause they’ve all got mobile phones, so most 80, 90% of the price, does it have the right data as it can take the right photos? All the sort of stuff you’d expect them to say.

Some of them pick up on the fact that delivery is important, you know, when it turns up are very few of them, more of them actually turn around and say, where’s it sourced from? You know, what, is it a, is it an ethical thing? Quite a lot, but considering sustainability and actually a lot of the stuff that is part of procurement, but I would consider in a game more advanced and there’s no way you can factor that into your QCD triangle.

We’ve got kids now are coming through who are actually starting to think about some of the more complex environmental considerations of procurement without even being prompted, which is actually quite reassuring. And then in my world, especially with the AI side of things, if you forget about QCD, things like ethics and all those sort of things are part of procurement as well.

So if you’re looking to buy an AI service, how that responds to certain situations based on the way it’s been trained and how you put that in the contract and how you make sure you are not buying something that’s gonna be blatantly racist or something horrendous like that. You know, all those things are part of a procurement process in my view.

And so you need kids to understand, not just it’s cheap, but also the ramifications of what you’re doing with that thing are this, and therefore they need to think about that as well. It’s a fantastically interesting field.

Julia: Did your years on the other side you cut out a significant chunk of the learning curve, what did it not help you cut out? What did you still have to learn?

Phil: I, being on the other side, the dark side, the sales side clearly got a very good view of the technology and the operational implications of it. So I went through all the geekery and then I did a lot of services stuff. So having a basic understanding of ITIL and those sorts of things how a managed service works.

Those things are very interesting or very useful. Understanding the profitability that a company makes when they do different services is also quite key and the supply chain within it. So most technology buyers, if you just fall into procurement and not been through the industry, wouldn’t understand that most things are bought from a reseller who buys it from a distributor, who buys it from a vendor, and all those sorts of backend margins and all that sort of thing.

So all that stuff was incredibly useful. ’cause when you’re on the other side, you can play tunes on that to an extent. The bit that I probably didn’t have a very good understanding of when I moved into procurement was how complicated it was to navigate stakeholders. And although I’ve been on the technology side and you know, on the sales side for quite a while, really understanding how or who in an organisation and a business is accountable and responsible for what that technology does, and therefore they are responsible for the buying decision effectively is a real skillset because you just assume if you’re in the sales side, you’re dealing with procurement and they’re the ones who sign the checks.

They’re the ones who sign the contract, therefore, they’re the really important ones. Not at all. You know, the people you want to get involved with are the people who have to make the technology work in their operational unit to deliver an outcome for the business. And that understanding how to find that stakeholder is quite a complex thing to do.

It’s cool.

Nick: I’m gonna jump in right there. Just because of having been worked in cybersecurity on the technical side and having been sold, and again, with we are not, we are officially and formally not denigrating salespeople or their profession, but is that big chasm at times, not always, certainly not always the case, but at times between what’s sold and then what the poor technical people are like, this is what I actually have to do.

So, and almost the sales people are like you push the technical people and they always come through more or less, so why not sell more than they think they can do? there’s that whole issue. Yet from the procurement side, sounds much friendlier because you have to, because procurement doesn’t buy things just for itself, stating the obvious. It has to have a good relationship and understanding of what its internal customers do. Otherwise, the whole process falls apart. And in a way that’s more damaging inside an organisation than a salesperson overselling a technical capability. If you over, if you, I dunno how to put it under purchase service or product, then someone’s left with something that only fulfils half the criteria. That’s just done a difficult ongoing mess that you have to avoid as soon as possible in the hu the whole process.

Phil: Exactly that. And, you know, you very quickly get into dispute if the procurement person hasn’t done a good job of marrying up what the sales person’s desperately trying to sell them to hit their target versus what the people on the other side of the fence the buyers really need. And that gets even more complex when you get into things like cloud and consumption metrics, because nine times outta 10, your salesperson wants you to commit to a bazillion dollars of stuff a month.

And the stakeholder has only got two pound 50. And it’s navigating the, finding the appropriate compromise to keep the salespeople interested, but making sure the business stakeholder doesn’t overcommit based on some promises made by a salesperson down the pub. So it, all these things a procurement person sticks themselves in the middle of all these difficult conversations to avoid the horrible myth that is some sort of contractual dispute later, which ’cause that’s never a good thing.

Nick: It just sounds like a real like I say, this sounds, it sounds like a really interesting game. Like you think of, you think like the military has a big thing of recruiting gamers because they’re very twitchy in the game in sense of the word, and they’ve got quick reactions and they I mean, it has been, I think, proven that gamers can imagine more points within a 3D space at the same time, or can deal with more things happening within a 3D space, which is a point, things like your fighter pilot just because from a relatively early age they’ve played a lot or too much of those kind of games and have just taught themselves to imagine that same way that, taxi driver’s brains change slightly because of what they’ve emphasised.

But also there’s so, you know, games are so wide, there’s so many games, there’s so many interpersonal or social You think of everything from role playing games, the kind of social deduction games people play, which, you know, up to a point, not wishing to compare to like the traitors or something like that but it’s, it’s that kind of thing of I need to figure people out and I need to figure out this really complex situation. So many people do that for fun. Why not it and get paid for it?

Phil: Completely that, and it’s, I think it’s probably a bit more, the reactions piece is not so relevant, but the strategy of a Dungeons and Dragons or a risk type game where, you know, you’re putting in place a five year contract for an outsource, all very interesting, you know, what you want on day one, but in two years time you probably don’t.

And

Julia: that’s,

Phil: over that five years, you could get someone elected to office in the US that could fundamentally change the geopolitical landscape of the supplier that is providing you the services for that. And all those things are part of the consideration of procurement. You need to be a strategist.

You need to understand exactly what you are buying and why you’re buying it and what it’s gonna change in the business context and the political context and the economic context and the social context, all those things. So it would be a great game. I’m not sure how long it would take to develop or you certainly couldn’t put it on a Snakes and Ladders type board.

Julia: it seems to me like yet you have to think about anything and everything that could possibly go wrong and

Phil: Yeah,

Julia: some sort of mitigating strategy.

Phil: exactly. That.

Julia: And do you have standard out the box mitigations or do you have to think creatively for every big deal that you do?

Phil: The, there’s so all procurement, so this whole, the value of sips. So SIPS have got a bunch of tools and they’re fairly commonly known tools that allow you to assess. The political and social environment around certain procurements and they apply to no matter what you’re buying, they apply generically to those things.

There’s other sort of academic tools like something called the IC matrix, which allows you to assess who’s got the power in a particular negotiation. So, you know, all those sorts of things. So you can apply generic principles and generic best practise buying principles to some of those situations. But the re reality is that’s quite academic and theoretical.

You do just need to spend a lot of time with the people buying the thing and make sure they articulate what could go wrong from their perspective. You need to layer on over and above their perspective what the business strategy is. So, you know, what are we likely to sell part of the company in three years time?

Do we need a break clause in three years? Then you take it to a slightly more broader political landscape at the moment. Very relevant. Just make sure that you’re not nailing yourself into a position where you can’t do something about it if the massive landscape changes and there’s really nothing you can do.

So it is, there are tools that are available. They’re very academic and very theoretical, and the trick is to apply those tools and other sort of best practise to what you are actually specifically buying. You know, if you’re buying a commodity, like paperclips, everyone use that, you know, you don’t really care about that sort of stuff,

Julia: Yeah.

Phil: you’re outsourcing your call centre to another continent and then you end up, or that country gets invaded, you know, you need to think about what the recovery strategy is.

All that stuff is quite, it’s cool. It’s really cool. Not for the fainthearted sometimes.

Julia: Yes, I believe you. I mean, even the paperclip scenario, you can envisage things that would happen that would destroy your need for paperclips and you’ve gone out and bought 10 million of them

and,

Phil: Yeah.

And also the, part of the sort of sips concept is obviously the supply chain, you know, so buying paperclips is all very interesting, but paperclips come from manufacturers of paperclips, but they have to buy stuff. They have to buy steel or whatever the paperclips are made out of, you know, that steel has to be shipped from somewhere.

All those things. If your paperclips are critical to your business process, you don’t just look at the paperclip provider. You need to think about all the risks of the downstream supply chain and make sure you’ve mitigated all of those. So, and in technology, especially if you think of, not predicting political events, you’re buying something from Amazon Web Services, you’ve got yourself a server to a large extent, it’s their problem to deliver you that service.

Yeah. But if they put you in an availability zone that has some sort of geopolitical problem, that’s a thing. If they’re entirely dependent on for capacity products that are coming from politically charged areas of Asia. That’s a thing. So all these sorts of things you just need to try and predict, you know, should we be bulk buying things that are likely to be coming outta Taiwan at the moment because something might happen in the next few years.

All that stuff is, this feels very doom and gloom. I’ve headed off into a dark place. But as a procurement professional, if you don’t understand what you’re buying, some of those more complicated downstream supply chain things are quite difficult to navigate.

Julia: That is something that struck me earlier, actually. A sort of natural pessimism could be a real benefit in this role

Phil: Yeah.

Julia: you want to envisage those disaster scenarios and mitigate for them upfront.

Phil: But si similarly, you know, you can have, it’s useful to be optimistic too, you know, so a lot of the more progressive contracts you put in place as a procurement person has some really good gain sharing. So if a supplier over delivers on a project

Julia: Yeah.

Phil: and it gives you a massive benefit as a business, you should probably try and find a way of sharing that with the supplier.

’cause it’s good for them and good for us. So you it’s not just all pessimism it’s actually thinking through the impact of an envir of a situation on the business and how that plays into your buying.

Julia: And then that’s incentives, isn’t it?

Phil: Yeah,

Julia: respond to incentives. You can incentivize good outcomes and

Phil: exactly that. So it’s fascinating. I could go on, I’m not gonna go on for hours, but it could go, I could go on for hours. It’s a it interesting field and the whole purpose of the original conversation, how do you get a 12-year-old to understand the basics to such an extent they want to explore it further such that you then get them into a position where they start looking at the more implica interesting things like ethical buying, sustainability, et cetera.

So proper supply chain analysis.

Julia: You know, just to take the conversation upper level, massively, the number of 12 year olds who love going shopping, and this is professional shopping, isn’t it?

Phil: Yeah. When you turn around to a 12-year-old and say, I spend x million quid on computers last week, and there are a particular, particular gender of a particular interest, they love it. And actually, you know, outside of technology, obviously the fashion buyers are really big things.

I know this is terribly stereotypical, but a 12-year-old is still a thing. You know, a lot of the ladies who turn up, the young ladies who turn up to these careers fairs really wanna get into fashion, haven’t really got the creative brain to do the design side of things, but could still get involved in buying a product that they love and all the international travel that comes with that.

So most of ’em are made abroad so, you know, go and visit different suppliers. So it’s actually, you can sell the job to people based on their interests. ’cause it is generally a avail, generally interesting to most 12 year olds if you can spin it in the right way. But it generally as positives.

Nick: Also, it’s the world they’re in, isn’t it? As much as I, no, not having any children myself, but that the complex complexity of purchasing decisions and the freedom to make them at that age and how important they are and all the different factors involved, feels like they are prepared for this kind of environment and they understand the issues.

And like you said, it’s great to hear from you both. Going back to your example is that you looked around at the other table and said, our method isn’t working. Let’s try something new. It is always good to hear from just anyone in any field now, rather than, ah, the young people didn’t understand.

It’s no, we need to sell this. But also with that in the attracting. There it is that you learn from them in that you were, and also it’s without, again, being too doom and glue. It’s nice to hear someone pleasantly surprised by people younger than them just being like these people have grown up in a much more complex environment than we have had to deal with procurement decisions that affect what they’re able to do and maybe their future opportunities while being bombarded with all sorts of things from the internet is what it’s, is.

Great to hear you I discussed that general situation then it’s they’re, they would really, they’re not only they’re trained for a career in procurement, they would enjoy it too. Is, I’m struck at the intellectual challenge of this. The thing, one of the notes I was scribbling down was there’s the idea of skill matching multiplayer games, usually the kind of first person shooters and so on in that you don’t go up against people too good, otherwise you just spend most of your time res spawning after you’ve died. And it’s no fun, but it’s, if you get better, then you go up against better players and a really good online game and a really good system will get more complex and more difficult as you get better at it. So you’re always just outside of your comfort zone and learning. And while we’re trying not to overtly be just an adver, a podcast advertising the procurement career for this episode that this career sounds like it skill matches you as a person.

Like maybe you find your level and that’s it. But if you’re like I know much more about how this works now and I’ve built all these relationships and I’ve got this experience in the industry, I need to find a harder challenge. career actually provides that for you in that there are opportunities out there to progress rather than I get this now I need to find a different career or I need to just put up with it for however many more years.

It sounds like a really interesting career from that point of view, like a really good game in that it matches your ability.

Phil: Yeah it is, it’s a, you’re right, it shouldn’t be a podcast about driving people towards procurement, but fundamentally I love it. And I think it’s a real, it is got a really broad appeal and it, but it’s as good as you engage it. There are quite a lot of procurement people who just buy stuff, and that’s okay.

That’s what they do. But the career path within procurement is you start off just buying one thing. You then buy a whole category of things, then you buy, not the, not that, lots of categories of things. Then you go up the ladder to buying more and more things. So, you know, a traditional chief procurement officer in a business usually isn’t a board level position.

It’s on the, it’s in the finance function, but it’s still, you know, quite influential. And, one of my. Clients, managers a budget of 11 billion quid, you know, that’s, it’s about 50% of the revenues that they work for. And he has to have oversight of all the different things from x million pounds on paperclips to x billion pounds on facilities that they require to deliver the offices that all the people working.

So it is, you know, you’ve got a really good career path. And it’s quite interesting if you like you can go in any direction. I’ve chosen to go down the technology route primarily because I’ve got a real interest in the sort of technology aspect and how that applies to businesses. And where my sort of 10 to 15 year journey went is learned a bit about procurement.

And now I’m trying to get myself in a position where I understand enough about the technology commercial detail to be able to apply it to any situation. And I think by the nature of the way I’ve gone about my career, I’m actually dealing on more and more complex things, which is the ultimate game for me.

The way my head works chuck me into a really difficult, horrible relationship problem. Or you go and buy some really complicated IT services for a 10 year outsource agreement, that’s my bag. ’cause you have to think about everything. And like you say, it’s in my head, it’s a game.

Julia: I was gonna say technology procurement is relationship heavy, isn’t it?

Phil: Yeah.

Julia: people and outcomes that may or may not be clear upfront.

Phil: Especially in the services field

Julia: Yeah.

Phil: you know, if you just, if you are just buying laptops, I’m not degrading people who just buy laptops. But that’s quite straightforward. It’s a commodity to a large extent, but it, its if you’re buying an outcome, so, you know, a lot of the services, a lot of software these days, SaaS, a lot of the AI related services are all actually supporting a business process.

It’s a lot more complicated. You need a better relationship with your supplier.

Nick: So you I dunno how to put this. You’ve, I was gonna say a tendency towards the horrible in that

Phil: Complex, I’d say complex Nick.

Nick: Let’s say complex, I’ve got a mental image of the running towards the fire. It’s like everybody’s going, no that looks a bit hot. Let’s go away, get away from it.

You’re like, oh, that looks like that needs dealing with. So you were saying earlier that you’ll concentrate more in the AI area now. Is that correct? And is it, because AI seems to be the most difficult thing to figure out with regards to procurement. ’cause just the whole sector is a mess in all sorts of ways.

Phil: I don’t think, I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t say I’m not exclusively on AI stuff. I’ve done a lot of AI things. People, well, procurement professionals haven’t bought a lot of ai. So a lot of the implications of AI are. Fairly new. And if you are a consultant like me, have thought about this sort of stuff a little bit in advance of maybe your business as usual procurement people.

You get involved in those sorts of projects. The thing about AI that’s different to all of the other procurements is it has a really broad set of ramifications that do pop up in commercial terms. So last year I was chatting to someone about and it was a bit of a sort of profound legal implication if you buy a piece of AI that replaces a bunch of jobs.

Yeah. What’s the employment law implication of that? How do you navigate the complexity or mitigate the complexity of this AI bot has replaced a thousand people doing this thing. Yeah, it was a hypothetical discussion and no client has ever been in that position at the moment, but they’re the sort of things that people need to think about that’s quite an extreme view.

The other thing is things like ethical, I mentioned ethical debates. My favourite example is self-driving, car driving down the road. It’s got to, you know, a 2-year-old child runs out in front of the self-driving car and it’s got to work out what it does. Run over the 2-year-old or run over the old lady that sat at the bus stop and, you know, how has the AI been trained to decide what it’s gonna do.

Those sorts of ethical debates are things that will have ramifications on the way you buy things. ’cause you need to understand some of the cultural and ethical and moral approaches to the companies you’re buying from. So all that’s really advanced stuff. And so when we’re now we’re starting to embrace AI a little bit more readily and get a bit more serious about it rather than just being a bit of co-pilot on the side.

Those things are things we need to put into contracts and those things are things that procurement people need to get their head round and so yeah, that’s probably the cutting edge of where it’s all heading from an, from a procurement perspective,

Julia: That’s the next step.

Phil: that’s the next step. And I haven’t quite worked out what quantum means yet in my head.

I think Quantum’s just a big computer, but actually, you know, some of the implications quantum could have around cracking cyber or breaking down encryption or those sorts of things. That’s the step after the next step. It.

Nick: That’s just a quantum. Yes. The whole sort of looking at AI and just to get, again, you use words like could, rather than words like Will when you were describing quantum, so cutting edge and it seems to be so up in the air and especially from a procurement person’s point of view, differentiating between truth and marketing. See like even more difficult than usual for something like that when you’re discussing a relatively hypothetical service because it’s all developing so quickly.

Phil: But from a, so let’s say, you know, as a cyber person, Nick, you’ll understand this. If you’re buying a security operations centre that’s gonna look after your business for the next five years and Y two Q is likely to be, you know, in the next two to five years, how do you make sure that your SOC is using cyber safe equipment to support?

So you’ve, we, I’ve gotta think about that Quantum stuff and all those sorts of things. You’ve gotta be aware of the implications of it. So although it’s occurred and a hypothetical, you’ve gotta mitigate for the risk. It’s cool.

Nick: It is, and I’ve just learned what Y two Q is, which especially from like seconds of research while you were talking, I noticed immediately is described as it’s to explain to listeners who don’t have ex aren’t gonna look this up right now. It’s Y 2K except for quantum, except it’s not like Y 2K because there’s estimations of when it will be, when quantum means that existing encryption can be broken rather than you’ve got a date to work through, work to. So that’s.

Julia: That’s a, an explanation worth giving us, Nick. Actually, I had got to, it’s something similar to I 2K in

Phil: Yeah.

Nick: The no that’s how thank you for this discussion and showing us how interesting this field is and also how difficult, just things like, there’s this massive technological change come in soon, but soon-ish. Not immediately, but you need to be ready. But you dunno by when. So it’s a deadline under discussion whilst, which, you know, according to literally my only internet search what, five years away? More or less. But you are negotiating. You could be negotiating contracts that are 10 years long where this may happen, may not happen. Just the difficulty of doing that and like you said, how important procurement people are who see that coming and problems in advance.

I’m struck by my history in cybersecurity, my advocation for war gaming through situations as in, nothing’s gone wrong yet, but let’s do something before it goes wrong. To stop it going wrong is such a difficult sell. Is it the same in procurement as in you make good decisions that stop bad things happening so nothing bad happens. So people don’t see the value in what you do because everything’s just normal. If you do a really good job.

Phil: Yeah,

Julia: the catch 22? Yeah.

Nick: Yeah, and I mean, we might have to delete this from the procurement career selling podcast actually saying, no, people won’t, bel people won’t appreciate you for your entire career. Or am I getting it wrong?

Phil: No you’re spot on. I think the interesting factor is you cannot predict everything that’s gonna go wrong so that the balance is fix as many things as you can in advance and be really good at dealing with them when they do go wrong. Like you say, nice man driving his boat to the side of the sewers canal, that’s a problem that procurement people need to get used to.

You can’t really govern for that. You can put it in a contract to say, if there’s a supply chain problem and you can’t deliver it, to me there’s a penalty, interesting. But actually getting a few hundred quid from a supplier is not as useful as getting the actual product you need to run your business.

So a good procurement person has got a contract that says, give us a few hundred quid because you can’t get your product, but also knows three other suppliers that actually can deliver the product quickly when you need it. And so that’s where procurement’s value comes in, play in both games.

Nick: . Thank you for such an interesting conversation that didn’t go where I expected it to and revealed a lot more about your industry, which which is useful to know. Thank you so much for that. So having sold us on the procurement career, what else are you doing in the week ahead, Phil?

Phil: I’ve just got a new job, so actually most of next week is trying to work out how all that works, which is quite interesting. So I’m moving to a company called Baringa. We’re a management consultant and they are working on, we’re working together on trying to drive a broad IT commercial management proposition.

So my main focus for the next week or so is trying to meet loads of new people and understand where I fit into the world. Outside of that, not much interesting, boring family stuff.

Nick: That sounds really interested also Julia, how about you? What are you doing for the next week?

Julia: For the whole month of May, my company does a walkathon to raise money for charity. So several thousand people are trying to walk as far as possible, and some people are absolutely heroic, can walk hundreds of thousands of steps every week. I’m trying to hit my 10,000 steps a day and I’m so far being reasonably successful on that. So I’m doing lots of walking. And then my very good friend who lives in Malaysia over in London for the weekend, so I’m gonna spend some time with her, which I’m looking forward to. And how about you, Nick? What are you up to?

Nick: So I’m starting I’m starting something called Pro that’s part of something called Project Odysseus, which is not related to film and not arguably not related to the Greek myth actually. It’s just the projects get names after letter, the alphabet, so you know, which order they came in. And just about marketing myself as a freelancer, because I struggle with that as I don’t obviously fit into a box.

And a lot of the people I know struggle with it as well. And the sort of standard marketing thing of find someone with a problem, solve the problem, sell it over and over again. So that’s one thing I’m doing is start, is very much working in public, trying to get my head around that figure out what I’m doing wrong and also can I advise other people on it.

Also, I’m managing a online meeting that’s came after a recent workshop about using LLMs in serious games, which was really informative about where they work and where they really don’t, where they’re terrible. So that brought out a lot of experience. We learned a lot of people we know had used them much more than we expected.

So an online kind of games development group I belong to are discussing that more. So I’m seeing what comes out of that and what ideas people get excited about in the seminar. So that’s something I’m particularly looking forward to over the next week.

Phil:  Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the [email protected] and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show, Matt and Nick meet Chengwei Liu, professor of strategy and behavioural science at Imperial College, London, to discuss the role of luck in decision making — and why we routinely underestimate it.

Chengwei traces his own serendipitous path from consulting in Singapore to a PhD at Cambridge, and explains why so much of what gets credited to skill in business is really survivorship bias dressed up after the fact. The conversation gets into the case for random selection: when shortlisted candidates or options are genuinely close, drawing lots produces outcomes equivalent to deliberation while avoiding the bias and politics that creep in when committees feel obliged to justify a winner. Switzerland has been allocating research grants this way for over a decade, and the UK’s British Academy is now following.

The discussion also picks up on the cultural and psychological complications — how randomness reads as fate or destiny in some cultures, why women may be more likely to internalise an unlucky outcome as personal failure, and whether modern corporate life can ever sit comfortably with “we rolled a dice” as a legitimate answer. Plus, a look ahead to Chengwei’s forthcoming book, Smart Contrarians: How to Think Differently About Thinking Differently.

Transcript automatically generated by Descript

Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 347 of WB 40, the increasingly erratic podcast. With me, Matt Ballantine, Nick Drage, and Chengwei Liu.

Matt: Welcome back. We have been away for a few weeks. There was the Easter break and, uh, the usual weird way that everything seems to cease for a while because of a couple of days of bank holiday. And, uh, we are back again. And, um, just before we started recording, uh, Nick. Described himself as being the robin to my Batman, which now means all I’ve got is mental images of Nick wearing tights, which probably I don’t need.

Nick, how has your last week or so been.

Nick: Well, I mean, I’m instantly regretting that version and not knowing more about is the DC comics background? Is it, isn’t it? And so on there, there must been, must be a much more, less sixties robin. Than what came to our minds apart. The main thing in the previous week is attending Connections online, which is a, an online war gaming conference based in essentially eastern US time zones and just a chance to catch up with a lot of thinking, a lot of people.

And they used the online version to really get into. Non-standard ideas such as how to model soft factors in war games, and LLMs of course featured quite heavily. So that was really good the previous week. How about you?

Matt: So what have I been doing here the last week? Had a wonderful lunch with a fascinating academic last Monday. That was good. Hi Chen Way. And then Tuesday was the first run of random, the workshop in what I think is as close to being its final form as ever. It will ever get into a final form.

So I had, despite the tube strikes in London, I had a dozen people join me at the Equal Experts offices in London. And we had. A really interesting evening for me to be able to try out some of the ideas of how to get people to explore the concepts and the ideas that we’ve got within the book that is coming out now.

And we have a we have now a publication date, which is, or launch date, the 17th of June, which is extremely exciting. So that was good. I’ve had some time to be able to, just make some decisions as well. I was running with my foot in two camps at work for a while ’cause we’ve had a bit of a restructure and just because of the nature of the clients that I’ve got, I ended up in sort of two parts of it.

And so last week I also took the executive decision to be able to say, I’m going to focus on one, not try to continue to be in both. And that’s really reduced my stress levels immeasurably. There’s something about, being able to, it’s not so much about resolving ambiguity as actually when you’ve got too many things that you could be doing and needing to be able to make a decision about being able to focus on things that you can manage to do and how being able to turn off the fomo, the fear of missing out, and instead be able to properly commit to doing a manageable set of things.

I think that, that’s been a good learning. And then apart from that, obviously I’ve been obsessively watching marine tracking apps to be able to see where the boat on which the book is sitting. And I had a sort of nervous few days because. It’s been in the middle of the Indian Ocean and as a result there’s been no tracking updates.

But it came back onto the the system again about 14 hours ago. So it’s just heading past Madagascar now, and it’s been a fascinating insight into what it actually means for goods to be manufactured in China, and then the route that they take to be able to make it. To the UK and you, this is stuff that we don’t think about and it’s been really interesting to be able to just see how this stuff sits together.

So that’s been my week, I think. So with that welcome to the show Chengwei what’s your week been like other than a wonderful lunch with this strange man that you met on last Monday?

Chengwei: Hello Matt and Nick thank you for having me. Yeah, my week was definitely great highlighted by the excellent lunch with you. We talk all ideas, right? And really glad to learn that your workshop went well because I have the pleasure of having you as my guest speaker for my MBA students at the Imperial College in a couple of months as well.

And the rest of week I managed to finish the revision of my new book. Smart contrarians, how to think differently about thinking differently. So I’m really look forward to the next stage. That is the marketing stage of this book.

Matt: So whereabouts are you now? Is everything is with publisher? Has it been printed yet or is it still at the place where it’s.

Chengwei: No, it’s the handling editor at hover Business Review Press, which is our publisher. They sign it off. The editor and his boss sign it off, so it’s. Good from their perspective. But then the first stage in the production is there will be a copy editor go through the entire book, and then of course suggest questions and also some fact checking, right?

So if we have any say missed and then they’ll point it out and we just verify everything it’s in the right place before they put it in print.

Matt: It is interesting, isn’t it, when you actually get into the process of producing a book. I, for many years wondered why it took so long from somebody saying, I finished writing it to it actually being available. And then when you actually go through the process, you start to realize why. ’cause there’s an awful lot of work involved in producing a book.

Chengwei: Absolutely that the divisional labor there is very interesting. I begin to learn about this as well, and there’s a meeting event with the market department of the Harvard Publishing. That’s a huge group actually in the US And yeah, they have their expertise and we just have this interesting.

Serious about deciding the book cover. So basically the first cover that designers sent were really not so happy with it, but our headly editor said, okay, there’s not a thing he can really intervene too much. And, but we, he gave us. Some ideas about how to say nicely that we hate it and we did it.

And then and of course we provided our view about what the cover should, like what is the concept, and of course, the taboo to say anything specific about design idea, because that’s their domain, right? We don’t want to invade their domain with the academic author. Author of the book we control or have the ownership of the ideas and the concept being written.

But our design cover is their domain. We can provide ideas, suggestion, but they decide. So fortunately the second cover idea they send where. Reasonably happy. So that is another major achievement in the past week. Now, I think about it because initially when we received and we thought about the previous discussion with the editor, then we really worry if that is something we need to accept.

We are not really, be comfortable with that.

Matt: It’s interesting for you as somebody who has studied a lot about decision making, a aesthetic decisions like that is something, is that something that you approach differently from, I dunno, more, more rational things? ’cause it is, that’s all, there’s an awful lot about gut feel and about things that are quite intangible with something like, I like a book cover or not.

Chengwei: Yes, exactly. That’s very interesting. I think it’s a contrast between the art designer. In the email she sent, she actually provide a lot of rational justification why the first cover design was the brilliant idea and saying that the huge contrast in terms of color and the ice, the idea she used was.

The ice like all closed and one kind of open, that is a contrarian idea, right? When the i where the crowd is not thinking or is just a blind, then you have the idea. But the I idea is a little bit too ag, so we don’t like it. But the way she frame it is that based on her experience about the market and how your book will appear on the bookshelf in the airport bookstore, for example, that really.

There now, then attract attention. And that’s what you need, right? Occupying the attention. And in contract, usually we’re more comfortable. My call and I, we teach decision making, so we’re comfortable in the domain. We are, like, I just talked to Nick about, we teach business strategy, merger acquisition, right?

So all this kind of thing. In those domain, we can be very rational and to reduce this overconfidence whatsoever. But in the publishing world, we are really the inexperienced one. We don’t know what to things, so we can only rely on our gut feeling about, okay, it looks. Not right to us and we want to push back, but probably she’s right about something.

And eventually, of course, the second design have, still have the idea but also remove the eyes and use some other things, some other symbol. So we’re happy with that. But one of the thing of course I use is not that feeling, but my wife’s got feeling. She feel very happy with the second design. Then that’s all I need.

Then it can go for it. I can, we can go for it.

Matt: That’s brilliant. We’re gonna be talking a lot more about questions of decision making of. Luck, serendipity, and some of the stuff around contrarians as well over the rest of this show. So I think we should probably crack on.

The reason you and I have been, have got to know each other a bit recently, Chengwei, is because we’ve got a a mutual contact mark and mark said that I needed to meet you because I don’t think it, it quite described this, but basically there’s this professor of Luck that I know. And so it sounded like a fascinating thing to talk to you about.

And it, it has. Proven so, but let’s, if we could start by just exploring that a bit, a little bit, because some of your academic work, which is big, serious economics, social psychology, behavioral science, those kind of areas but you have looked at the role that luck has to play within the realm of decision making.

So what drew you to that in the first place?

Chengwei: Yeah. Yeah, that’s the brilliant randomness, right? The journey is actually pretty serendipitous. How I enter this research topic and all how I met our mutual contact mark, it’s all about luck ’cause you are in my after my brief introduction of my intellectual journey. So I was a consultant.

I, I’m from Taiwan originally. When I graduated, I found a job as a consultant in Singapore. And then saw the experience I had really make me wonder. And of course, I was trained as an economist. I tried to do all this rational analysis, very formal analysis, recommending like the optimal pricing strategy, optimal strategy in general to our clients.

Of course I was a junior, so I did most of the analysis, the hard work, and then the senior partner tried to sell all these ideas to the client, right? And sometimes I observe. And the client actually did not follow what we recommended, even with all this kind of backing with the data and a analytics.

But they still perform very well to our surprise, or to their own surprise as well. And sometimes they follow our recommendation, but the performance entirely shocking, shockingly bad. So that made me wonder, okay, so there may be a little bit of what the rational decision making analysis can do, right?

So you can make. The best possible decision in terms of decision making process, but still it’s a terrible outcome and vice versa because of all this lack of foresight, lack of unpredic lack of predictability. So that kind of motivate me to think about this. Wow. Isn’t anyone in the world studying this perspective of business strategy back then?

And then I met a professor at National University of Singapore, who’s from Taiwan as well. He’s my mentor and he introduced me to. His classmate when he studied his PhD in the uk and then was and then this professor was at Cambridge. He wrote a brilliant article in a very good journal in our field called CH Choice and Ineffability in Strategy.

So that’s actually a very interesting philosophical take of business strategy that you will not anticipate. But that’s so essential if you think about it, because that’s, that’s related to the philosophical debate about the scope of free will, right? So it’s, everything is predetermined, is everything inevitable?

Actually, the strategizing we talk about, just like a self construction is not really any scope for decision making, right? But then in, in that article, he carefully argue and carefully develop argument. Yes, a lot of things are predetermined due to past dependency. But still there’s some scope for strategizing for serendipity because it’s not entirely determining.

It’s a little bit random operating there. So I was fascinated by this idea. Then I quit my consultanting job and joined a PhD without realizing actually you’ll have no income for the next five years. And so that was a little bit shocking. I was very lucky in the sense that because I followed my wife to some extent, I wanted to do a PhD in the us.

I always wanted. But this topic choice and the location choice in the uk, actually, I follow my wife. She got a. A master degree in Finance first in, in, in the uk, in London actually. And then to everyone’s surprise, she found a job just during the financial crisis, a very good job. And then, okay then it’s almost impossible to move to the us.

I find a job there. So I just follow her and come to the UK and did my PhD in Cambridge Whisk. The supervision of that particular professor, my kind of mentors classmate the professor I met in Singapore. So that is the serendipitous part, right? So I could not have predicted any of that.

But then it happened so. However, then I became the black sheet in Cambridge or in the business school because my advisor the supervisor in Cambridge, he’s a hardcore ethnographer. He really did this very in-depth case study and follow the subject he studied, organization, he studied in a very qualitative way.

Of course I tried that a little bit from the beginning. I did I follow many of the successful entrepreneurs and manager in the Cambridge ecosystem and something in London, and I document many fascinating story, but then to publish or write out my dissertation the very usual feedback I got is that okay?

You get another fascinating story. But so what? Because most of the story I heard is that, okay, so entrepreneur or engineer in Cambridge are work on something very nice and had some pattern but don’t know how to commercialize until he or she met business Angel in one of the networking event.

And they did not plan to go, but just happened to drag by a friend and met this life-changing person, become a business partner. So the structure, all the story look very much like that. There were some story, or sorry, some research in sociology. Or network science already did about that. The strengths of weak ties, for example.

You need to engage some of this less frequently contacted people, friends or the acquaintance of your acquaintance so that they don’t have this overlap information or they have this non-overlapping expertise, right? That’s more likely to get lucky from that perspective. But then in terms of PhD dissertation, that is not good enough.

There’s no new theoretical breakthrough. So that’s why I changed my course during my second year with the blessing of my supervisor. So I’m really grateful to his. Like mentorship, gimme the intellectual freedom because I entirely changed the methodology and the focus, and I become the computational researcher.

So I basically use model to formalize. When the outcome is more likely to be a matter of randomness induced by kind of randomness and how interact with the environment instead of the skill or the effort of the individuals or the organization. And then also use experiment to test when people can systematically.

Mistake, love for skill, like overestimating all these outcomes or successes to the person involved instead of the situation they’re in, then that’s it. That is the beginning of my kind of academic career. I was very fortunate to publish a few paper at the beginning of my career.

Kind of set the foundation of the next 15 years of my career. So most all my research can be tracked to this idea about mistaking love for skill. And what can you do about that?

Matt: And in terms of the kind of overall headlines of what you found through that work is it possible to put proportions onto how often it is that really you, if not everything is to do with luck? There’s obviously, hard work, skill, talent, and luck all combine, but.

When people talk about being self-made, for example, I saw a thing on LinkedIn. A few Forbes seemed to be just churning out lots and lots of top one hundreds and top twenties of all sorts of things you couldn’t imagine. One of them is the top 100 self-made people. And if you were to look at the list of self-made, obviously they don’t mean self-made.

They mean have been able to be able to use the work of others to be able to be successful. But. Are any of these people immune to it having been a lucky break somewhere along the line?

Chengwei: Yeah, absolutely. In my own book about luck actually there’s a chapter about how to quantify luck and that’s exactly solving this very important question, right? Of course, that is not the that is not the math that can really give you a very clear percentage for individual event.

Or individual success, whether how much is the can be attributed to skill and effort, how much to being at the right place at the right time, but in a domain like all the musicians that who, who are on the Billboard a hundred list or, industry, we can have some idea about how much log involves in a particular performance range.

So if I take one step back, I think the main takeaway from my exercise about this quantifying luck is that the more successful an individual firm is, the more the role the more important the role of luck is particularly for the exceptional. Exceptionally successful. You talk about the top 100 self-made people, they’re much more likely than the, I would call the second best, the successful, but not exceptionally successful people there.

The circumstances play in the former’s role is, much greater. So let me give you one example and also to illustrate this methodology I created. So the three best sellers in management is in search of excellence that published in the eighties last century. And then there was a book called Good to Great.

By co. There’s a, oh, at some point oversell even the Bible in the us. Very popular. And then he had a sequel called Built To Last as well. So these are the three best seller and the methodology this author use our very straightforward and really talk to our gut feeling they collected the most successful firms or entrepreneurs during their time.

And study what they did. All this firm and the individuals. And then the common feature or the common practices, they just frame them as the best practices. So if you follow this best practices, presumably you can move from good to great deal to last then become excellent. So this is a formula of this best salary management, right?

And that’s how they just sell millions of copy. One analysis I did is I analyzed what happened to those firms after the book was published, and now you can probably see where this is going, right? One third of the firm among the three books about 50 firms being featured, one third amount them when bankrupted within five years of the publication of the book and the rest.

Underperform, even like index fund, like s and p 500, like every performance for large cooperation in the us, right? So what happened after this exceptional success is regression to the mink. Not just huge or regression to the ME because every performance regression to the ME because performance is a combination of skill and some random component, right?

So high performance, or probably a high dose of skill and strategy, good strategy, but also high dose of luck. And by definition, luck is not persistent. So very high performance is going to be followed by. Less high performance in the future, regressing downward to the me, but if you focus on the most exceptional success, they can regress to the ME so much.

Then the second best, for example, if you analyze in an industry or context together. Then you can have this inverted U-shaped pattern. So higher performance indicate higher skill or higher future performance, but up to a certain point. Then you have this negative correlation for the top. So the most exceptional, like musician, I study most exceptional ferns.

I study. Their performers are not that persistent, just like the the 50 organization feature in this best seller. So they just when bankrupted underperforming, they cannot really build to less right. But no one checked that. That is the bias comes in. People just attracted to this exceptional success and wanted to learn from them so that it can be equally successful.

And forgetting that well, luck is not replicable by definition, so what’s most likely to happen is disappointment.

Matt: It’s a fascinating. Quite deep psychological need, isn’t it, to be able to spot winners. There was a few years ago the dunno how you’d describe him these days. Darren Brown has been a stage hypnotist, a magician, all sorts of things. He did a program which was somebody being offered a bet on horse races and over the course of the show she was given tips.

Which won and won over seven or eight races, and then it got to the eighth race and she was offered the chance to be able to place a bet. On this last race. But then at that point, if I remember it rightly, he then revealed how this had been achieved and the way it’d been achieved as he started.

I can’t remember hundreds of people who’d been offered bets at the first stage, and then somewhat less and somewhat less, which of course meant all the magic went out. Any good magic trick actually, when you find out how it’s done it, it makes it. Usually quite dull. But that, that for me, really stuck with us is this idea of the survivorship bias, the, just looking at the ones that are successful and then thinking that we can draw from those.

But it, it does seem to be quite a, um, a deep rooted, it’s more than almost a bias, it feels like it’s almost like a societal need. We have to be able to look at winners to find out what is their secret.

Chengwei: Yeah, absolutely. I think your statement is definitely true. It’s consistent with my experience in the sense that I don’t teach these ideas about luck and the implication to the MBA students, less and less, but I teach that to exactly MBAs or undergraduate. And the reason is the following because.

This survivorship bias of course it’s a bias, but all the success stories drawn from this bio sample, they can have this motivational effect, right? That’s why all these kids, we give them all this autobiography of the heroes and heroing in history that try to motivate them, that if you. Try your best.

You could aspire to these role models, but of course, according to my research program, I would suggest Napoleon, all these people, they have great achievement, but there’s a lot of randomness be beyond the effect, beyond their control, foresight, also contributing to their great achievement, right?

But this autobiography or whatever did not really talk that much about that. So that’s a misleading account to the kids. But it’s also have a evolutionary functional, adaptive function. Because if you tell the other story yeah, all this a hero, they’re just lucky. And then the kids will lose all the motivation, right?

Why not? They just don’t study at all. Just waiting for the social security to save them. Then our society collapse. So I think yes, there’s a very viable account to believe that. All the survivorship bias. They stay in the human cognition for adaptive reason. However, in the past 300 years, the evolution of technology, the pace is so fast, it’s outpaced how our cognition can evolve, right?

So there’s a lot of mismatch. All this billionaire, and now we’re talking about trillionaires. There’s a lot of factor about luck playing their success and learning from them. Just going to lead to disappointment no matter how much you can copy their practices. You can’t copy their log. So that’s become a more detrimental way to learn them.

Then back to my teaching practice. The full-time ba that is an interesting group of students. They’re excellent, actually because they all many of them, I know we’re in top investment banker investment banking firms or top consultancy firms, and that’s what allow them to enter top MBA program, a master business administration program.

But they also suggest that they are at the point of their career that their confidence is probably higher on average to their competence. So this is a source of confident overconfidence, right? They really believe they have the full control of their destiny. They can achieve everything. So this idea about the more successful you are the less you should attribute your success to to yourself, but to other things, they don’t feel comfortable about that.

And that reflected in my teaching ratings. So when I try very hard to convince them with evidence models, empirical data. They push back even more. Probably not in the class because I pretty confident my evidence is convincing. But of course, teaching school got punished because of that.

However, for the exactly, MBA student usually 15 years or older than this full-time B student, usually EMBA are being there late forties or even fifties. They have seen enough in their career people can have this lucky success. They don’t deserve or very good people, they can suffer from some bad luck and never recover from that.

They sing enough and appreciate. Yeah, this is a probably very realistic account and more constructive if you really want to learn properly from your experience and others lessons. Yeah, I teach this idea in my even EMBA and exec education. Usually they’re much more better received than the younger, but equally excellent student.

But they’re just in their different time of their career, they cannot really absorb this idea in a constructive way.

Nick: Does that make so I’ve been listening intently, scribbling down questions and scribbling them out as you’ve answered them. Like one of my one of my questions was gonna be how many people hate you? ’cause this is I think Matt made a really good point about how what you’re saying is a fundamental challenge.

To what people believe, and I would go as far as to call it a dangerous idea in that so much of your success in the future or the success of people who maybe you look up to or you want to imitate is down to luck, always down to things like be in San Francisco 20 years ago is the, is like the big tip and you can’t do that.

But is that self-belief? Like table stakes to then being able to be lucky and even if one of your more mature students pays attention to what you’ve said, that they need to ignore what you are saying about luck and over believe the influence they have in order to open themselves up to luck.

Chengwei: Yeah, absolutely. Nick, I think this very profound questions you asked, right? Probably I can have two answers. The first one is that, yes I do believe if I want to be a good competent intellectual, I do need to have some enemies. And I really opposing my ideas Arch enemy. But interestingly I think we’re in a generation with huge social inequality.

So my account coincide the time that more and more people appreciate that. Probably not for the evidence reason. They just found this the wealthiest people. They’re not necessarily envious, but they sometimes just feel this richest people. They do not deserve all the wealth. And my research happened to support or provide some evidence.

Yes, that’s probably the case. So they may like my research program for kind of a slightly different reason, but I think my, my account. Probably will attract some eyebrow raising from the richest and most successful people, right? I’m not invited to sitting in any board of this large corporation.

I’m actually advised several startups. Not exceptionally successful yet but not all this large corporation, the big 500 for example. But that’s just anecdotal. Account. But I do think that we are in an unfortunate time that increasing equality in many of the developed. A developed country actually make this account actually popular or being talk about or slightly become more, more mainstream to some people because in my field, actually there’s a special issue in one of the top journal just talk about this role of luck in a very explicit way 20 years ago, no one.

Kind of talk about this. Actually, when I share my idea or my dissertation topic on lot people will say, wow, why do you destroy your career? You’re not going anywhere. Particularly the business school, right? Business school. We’re talking about capability. We’re talking about developing superior skill and decision making, and then you talk about the opposite.

Then of course, people got confused. And that, like I mentioned, the second book is about contrarian, right? I guess I’m a kind of a contrarian mindset from the very beginning when everyone in my PhD cohort study XI want to study Y. It turns out to be the topic of luck. And the second question, I think it’s actually a very consistent to what I told the EMB student or the senior student, because in my research program I actually say there’s a lot of conventional wisdom about luck.

I fully agree. Chances, favor the prepare mind. If you work harder, you get luckier. I fully agree with them as long as you’re talking about like a normal range of performance, right? If you teach a undergraduate student or a master level student in their twenties, of course there’s a lot of things we can teach them to avoid making more mistakes and pick up some of the good practices to improve their performances.

But. For the most extreme performance the top level performance, there’s no rule to become the richest from good to great. The role of being at the right place at the right time is much more important than skill and effort. However, that’s consistent with what NICU said. Like the EMBA student, they’re successful enough.

They’re probably already from poor to good. They’re good enough, but whether they can move from good to great. They need to be more humble and open up their network, for example. And all the serendipity research applies, right? So they cannot really have full control of their whether they’ll get lucky or not, but there some systematic where they can increase the chance of having that particularly there already in a position, fortunately not position in their career.

To connect it to the right people or have the right resources when the opportunity emerge. So I think to them the research finding I presented actually the resonate even more because of that.

Nick: With that situation is that just having very quickly looked at literally a paragraph summary of your ideas around being a smart contrarian, is that where that comes in? As in, if you’ve. Got lucky to get to a position, as you say, at a good level, to get to a great level. You can take advantage of that luck and actually be more intentional about how you use ideas, how you realize.

As much as it, as painful as it might be, that luck got you too good. And you need, you can rely on more thoughtful methods to get to. Great. Is that where your interest in being a smart contrarian came from?

Chengwei: Yeah, again, that’s an interesting question, so I’ll probably have two answers to that again first of course, yes, that’s right. If you are lucky enough to be successful enough, then this is the story about the rich guy richer, the poor got poorer, right? If you are already in that position, getting lucky actually become easier because like I said, if you’re luck, if you are successful enough, then good ideas come to you.

Good people are more likely to working for you or your organization. Everything become easier. That is just like a reinforcing mechanism, right? So yeah, so the already successful people, if they get luckier and have more opportunity open door to them, that is actually not very surprising, particularly in a highly unequal society.

Then all this opportunity concentrating on fewer people, right? If you think about the AI development, that’s the thing, right? Normal people cannot even invest in this company. But when it’s a. The big five, they just keep throwing billions and billions of money in this organization. Based on the trajectory, they’re just going to dominate all this wealth, even in a more concentrated way than what happened in the past 20 years.

Yeah. So unfortunately that’s the one aspect. Then the other is why I studied this smart contrarian actually that the initial story was my very d desperate move to my very low rating for the full-time ba because. When I teach this idea, I mentioned they didn’t like it, but I still need to teach this course.

And one of the thing I told them then is that, okay, so you have learned these ideas, but people outside this room, they haven’t this knowledge as symmetry. Now you can do something about it to translate the biases of others into your own advantage or profitability. So that is the origin. I how do I link to the lock research program to being a contrarian.

So let me give you a specific example. So how to win a Fair Lottery game. So whenever I ask this question to my MBA students they’ll come out with all sort of answer, and one of the very popular one is that why not buy all the tickets? But then I challenge them, what is the expected payoff?

Then they realize, remember the economics 1 0 1, the lesson, right? The expected payoff. Actually it’s zero if it’s a fair lottery. Of course there’s a implementation hurdle, right? You may not be able to really buy all the tickets and all the mistake, all the oversight may lead to huge losses. And also the organization probably has on charity purposes.

So the expected pay of actually is negative. So if the game you’re playing, the expected payoff is negative, you should not play, you should walk away. So that is, of course, that’s the decision making code. That is a very important lesson to be learned, right? Uh. Understand what is the game you’re playing?

Is that the right game? It’s the wrong game. You just walk away. You don’t engage. So the question I then ask them is that if you have to play a fail out your game, is there any strategy. To win or enhance your expected payoff, then usually they get puzzled. Then I gave them my hint. So if you have to play this fair lottery game, which we already clarify, this is the unfair one to you, but you have to play, always pick numbers greater than 31. And 31, of course, that many student then realize it’s probably related to birth date, right? So it turns out this is backed by data. So the Fair Lottery game in this case, take a typical lottery is one to 48. So the. Probability of each number being picked is equal, uniformly distributed, but the way people choose among this 48 number are equal.

The distribution, actually this asymmetrical, if you study the data, then one of the data studies from the Dutch data, how people choose the lottery number. Then one to 31, the bar are much higher than 32 to 48. The reason now is not too difficult to imagine, right? Because a lot of people believing that choosing the number, the birthday of their own or their relevant one, are more likely to get them luckier, more likely to be chosen.

But that is not the case because this is a fair lottery. And in most countries, lottery is indeed fair. It’s if you study the lottery number, uh, being chosen is indeed uniformly distributed. But then it suggests that arbitrage opportunity. Let me make it very clear. If you choose number greater than 31, you will not be more likely to win.

But if you’re lucky enough to win, you share the price with fewer others. That’s how can enhance the expected payoff. And that’s really capture the main idea of my new book. And of course, using the example, this is about the superstition about luck or this full by randomness, right? So if your rivals, competitors, people out there have some biases.

They don’t get it. They flow by randomness. Using their knowledge, you can translate their biases into your own advantage. Just like the lottery example, I’m not encouraging gambling, but I found this is a very quick example. Can help idea to understand how to be a smart contrarian, if to choose the right moment, and also backed by data and evidence about doing things differently can help you.

Matt: That’s really interesting. And of course there are so many of these biases that affect into questions around things like probability. Doing a short video recently about the gambler’s fallacy and the idea that the, it’s, it is the misrepresentation in our brains about how randomness works. If you’ve got something like a dye.

Being thrown that the last throw has no impact on the next throw. But our brains go, oh, but you’ve thrown three one. So a fourth one is just impossible, isn’t it? And tho those kind of biases alongside things like cultural factors like birthdays is yeah. Really interesting from all of this work.

When we come back to the idea of being able to make. Decisions on a day-to-day basis in a working environment, or I guess even outside of work, but particularly in a working environment. Are there other sort of generalized ideas that you have to be able to help people acknowledge the randomness factors and the luck factors that are at play within how things actually pan out?

Chengwei: , I think sometimes to improve decision making had this decision flow chart and checklist actually that’s a very effective way to eliminate this randomness, right?

Because there’s a lot of evidence, as we saw in my research, also showed that. We can, our decision making is really inconsistent. It’s not because our decision are inherently biased, just because we are human beings. A lot of situational factors irrelevant to our focal decision can influence our input in in a almost a neural level.

And we don’t recognize that. So that is the randomness comes in your decision making, polluted your decision making process, and the simplest way to, to avoid that is to have a checklist or have a decision flow chart. And you just follow that decision flow chart whenever you need to make this important decision.

Or a checklist, like a, for the doctor, they have the checklist for the procedure. That’s not for the doctor. Only for the nurses. For all the staff involved, or for the pilot before they take off or land. Because if you don’t have that. Then you can make this a small error and they can cascade in a complex system lead to major disaster.

But if you have that and follow this default decision flow chart or checklist very carefully, then the outcome can have a kind of baseline performance. So I think that would be one of the way one of the approach. I highly recommend if you are in a domain that like the randomness deviation in general is.

Bad, then I think it’s really useful to have that. But it’s really context dependent, right? Because some of the fields like creativity. Creative worker or professional actually deviation can be considered positive. So you don’t want to have all this idea that just like replicating the past, right?

You want to deviate from that in a more constructive way. Randomness, deviation, and some people call serendipity because of course serendipity is again, survivorship bias, right? It’s randomness, but having to be associated with some positive outcome. You want that in some domain.

Like a musician or a creative industry. So then you don’t want to have this decision flow chart or checklist can eliminate all this randomness, right? So you actually want to create encourage people to think more wildly. I think your book then the structure and the design capture that, right?

You have the random flow or the combination, all these different cards. Then people are more likely to come out with their own way of interpretation and they’re usually very good. So that’s how I think about that. And sometimes in another device I wrote about is that we should allow randomness to actively play in our important decision making as well.

So I recommend to my recruitment committee that after short shortlisting the candidates for like a faculty. Like a three to five, right? We probably short I mean there’s a lot of candidate, but after a three rounds of shortlist, we probably have three candidates. In the last round, and I recommend, oh, in that stage, we should probably just use deciding which to hire by lottery rowing, a dye, or just like a spreadsheet, random number generator, right?

Who to hire then of call. The idea was a veto. Even they see the reason because in many organization we do believe this rationalization is so important. We need to deliberate. We need to find why one candidate is much better than the other two. Or not much better than the other two. And we can justify that decision.

But what I observe in a lot of research, in organization behavior supported that well, when the differences among the shortlist candidates or if you think about technology choices the final set of the technology when the difference is very small. Then you still try to deliberate which one is better.

What happened is that there’s more pathway to introduce bias in this decision. The unconscious bias or whatever, or politics comes in. And randomness, of course, cannot guarantee you find the best possible candidate among three or the best technology among all the short listed one, right? But they can sanitize a lot of bias in politics also.

Or more, obviously save a lot of time. You don’t need to join all this meeting and people just talk and talk and actually do not contribute anything meaningful to the final decision. So I really think randomization. We should copy the Greeks, ancient Greeks and ancient Italians and to use this randomization in modern society, more particularly at the final stage of the decision making.

Wham. Choice said the differences among them are very small. Then deciding by lottery actually can lead to better outcome in a more efficient way.

Nick: it’s been like 40 minutes, so I like to think we know each other well, so I’ll say this slowly as best as I can. Where does your confidence to take on something that’s so essential to the way people think? Where does that confidence come from? Because what you’ve just said is when the decision feels the most important, when you’re down to the final three and the final three candidates, and it’s such an important position, you’ve got the best of the best.

So what we’re going to do is rather than say an interview table of seven important people whose time is really valuable, and they’ll wanna say something they’ll wanna ask their pet question is, save all that time, roll a dice. It’s that one, three to four. It’s that one. Five to six. It’s that one is, you are absolutely right, but I can almost feel the force of human nature that you are.

Up against, and I’m genuinely impressed and I’ve got some kind of, king canoe mental image of that. Never watched it. Game of Thrones of the single guy pulls out his sword as you’ve literally got a screen of calvary towards him and you’re like, no, this is right. Just roll a dice.

Pick one. Let’s take six months to find out who’s the best. Where does that confidence come from in your manner or background? And how much effort do you have to spend to keep it going?

Chengwei: Yeah. I wouldn’t say I’m very confident in implementing that. I’m confident in that REN selection can lead to equivalent outcome. To deliberation because I can provide mathematical proof because the model is very simple. If you have the candidate pools and just apply the same criteria that the higher performer, they stay in the system basically promoted in and out kind of system, right then you can prove at the end of the selection when you have a few amount, all the candidate consider the difference is amount them, is timing.

Whenever that condition is fulfilled, then ance selection, actually they have no downside of doing that. But then all the decision making approach can have a lot of downside relative to ance selection, particularly when you introduce the po potential of the Hama. So if the research committee or the selection committee, you can randomly model several background and then more likely to choose the people more similar to them.

That it actually creates some downside, right? And then read selection won’t have that. So that’s almost a mathematical proof that under many normally occurring situation, incorporation in selection, read selection actually can be better off because they avoid this predictable downside of a homophily and political.

Aspect, but I’m very underconfident in implementing that. To some extent, I plan the enlightenment because why the ancient Greek can do that because they don’t see, they don’t follow any rationale. I mentioned when they use election, they actually. Friendly, more a divine will, right? So that is chosen by the God and as God will and everyone will accept it.

But after enlightenment, this rationalization the rational decision making. Take a very central role. You need to justify everything you decided. Reason and randomness is opposite to that. There’s no reason. And that is so incompatible with the corporate rationale or decision making in modern world.

That’s why in the internal implementation there’s so much pushback. People feel uncomfortable. So some of the suggestion I did to this, almost like playful, is that for the exact education, they’re the CEO or the board member, right? So I said to them, if you do believe what I said. Implement that in private, do not share the idea or the practice that, okay the chosen executive actually said, selected by lottery.

Then no one will listen to this leader. Or a lot of people will have a lot of doubts, right? So why this guy or lady was chosen? Just not any justification. Just because they’re more they’re luckier than others. That is not defendable when enough people still have this bias in favor of rationalization.

So yeah, I’m confident in the intellectual foundation why this is. Good enough for a lot of decisions, but also in the social aspect or behavior aspect of implementing that in practice. I’m not so confident, but speak of that today. I’m not preparing for research grant proposal and really pleased to learn that what happened in the Switzerland now happening in the UK as well.

There’s a British Academy a grant application. They say very explicitly. Following, almost like my recommendation. They will evaluate each proposal with on the meritocracy, but then for the second stage, for all the proposal that passed that stage, they’ll do the redness selection. So they’ll only give money to the lucky one.

And of course they’ll tell everyone this is what happened. But interestingly, in Switzerland, they already demonstrated because they implement that 10, 15 years ago, that they track the productivity of this lucky team and unlucky things. Basically, there’s no difference. So for the proposal for the research team, they already produced good enough proposals.

Then their long-term output is equivalent of course one of the conditions that those unlucky, one, they need to keep trying, right? They need to apply for other grant also, like render selection. If you have large enough sample size, eventually it doesn’t matter. So yeah, that’s another supporting evidence that well, yes, random selection can be useful for modern society.

At least save a lot of time for this very long and unproductive meetings.

Nick: It’s that aspect, it’s the saving time plus. If you didn’t get through, it’s not that you were worse or that the interviewer or the person reading your application didn’t like you, or you weren’t the same background as them by chance, and it’s that you were unlucky, except luck isn’t really a thing that attaches itself to people.

So you’re not unlucky. It’s just random. Try again with a different grant funder or whatever. Feels like such an obviously. Good idea. And also I’m sat here looking at both of you. I dunno if Matt wants to include this in the recording of just like the, some kind of secret company that comes up with justifications for just randomly picking things and okay, it seems like your company will use, we’ll use something religious. We’ll use serendipity that fits in with your culture, and it’s chosen randomly, but it’s god’s will that this person’s the CEO for someone else. We’ll just take them on holiday for a while and really, but really we’ll just pick one and it’ll be half as much as your people actually interviewing them.

It feels good way of saving so much resource, and it feels relatively obvious once you think about the system, but also I can imagine having this conversation like 20 years from now lamenting that the situation is still the same as it is

Matt: one could argue that we have these companies already and they’re called things like Garner.

Nick: Wow, that’s a, Chang Ray’s Next grant application should be for studying something like that, which will generate him even better enemies than got so far.

Chengwei: yes. I love that. And there can be, company being said, the governor is the increasing example. But I do have a caveat for that because some of my PhD student actually wrote a proposal, theoretically haven’t tested, but it’s really believable if we take like the gender and racial bias. In that because me, looking at this grant proposal and this randomness involved, I don’t care.

I just finish that and submit. But there’s a lot of research suggest that like a female, they’re more likely to be terd by this type of situation or after they’re being selected or not selected. Even the the mechanism is not. Within there it is not meritocracy or in this case, luck, right?

They’re less likely to try again because they’re more likely to attribute this failure to themselves. Even you tell them the mechanism is bad luck. So yes, this can create some unfortunate kind of a gender imbalance or kind of large and large this gender imbalance. The proposal I gave, of course it’s defendable from certain perspective, but a lot of the new ones, what is a long-term impact for different people, different demographic profile that is still unknown.

So that is a nuance to, to this. But the idea about setting out a firm just like a, calling this random device to. Like we have the latest LM model to make the best decision for you, whereas it’s really just a lottery at home that may fool a lot of people. Yes, exactly.

Nick: Oh, I should stress to the listeners at home or jogging or whatever. I just held up a DA single dice, which yeah that, that’s a sort of backend process to selecting the best. But that’s a great point.

The cultural connotations of that are huge and would vary a lot from. People like us, especially something I hadn’t thought of, especially by gender, is feeling that it’s somehow attached to you when it will literally be a random number coming out of a hopefully random computer. That means someone didn’t get a position or didn’t get a grant.

Speaker 25: Yeah, just one more thought on that from Taiwan, right? The cultural differences. You mentioned Nick, that play a huge role, right? Because luck is not neutral. In, in, in some culture in Taiwan, people will consider, again, destiny fate. So if you’re not chosen, even we know it’s just like a dice, a random device, right?

But a lot of people will interpret that very differently. That’s why the long-term consequential readiness selection, actually there’s a lot of things we don’t know yet.

Matt: A fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us this week, Chengwei, um, although I do feel that the three of us might have quite a lot of kind of common vested interest in these subjects. I don’t know, um, what have you got, uh, coming up in the week ahead?

Chengwei: Yeah, I’m, uh, very excited. Uh, I’ll be in the us I’m invited to give two talks, one in MIT. Uh, and the other in the Dartmouth, uh, college Boston. In Boston. So I really look forward to, um, the, this visit and meet, uh, some of my old friend there and also, um, wow. Uh, very sharp and critical researcher. They’re known for that.

They, they try to destroy you in the seminars, but I look forward to the challenge.

Matt: That sounds slightly scary, but I hope you have a fantastic time. Um, Nick, how about you? What have you got for the, uh, the next seven days?

Nick: I think. Try as, um, cliche. Does it sound trying to be lucky? Like just, I was just looking at my schedule and just having various online meetings with people and trying to increase my luck surface area, which is another. I think we sort of, I think, skirted around but didn’t get into it. That is, um, just talking to people who, who I like and get on with, but, or who also might be useful and thinking about how to make that happen is my next week.

How about you, Matt?

Matt: I will be going for a farewell dinner tomorrow night for one of my colleagues who’s going to be leaving. Uh. Equal experts in a couple of months time, but because summer and stuff we we’re having a, a farewell dinner quite soon. Uh, other than that, um, and other than tracking the ongoing process progress, sorry, of the OOCL.

Peu, uh, which is the, the boat on which the book is sitting. I think I might have become a bit obsessed. Uh, I am, um, I’ve actually got like just bits. It’s one of those weeks ahead where it’s just bits, but then we’ve got a long weekend and so probably the long weekend will mostly be about geeing up eldest as he gets ready for.

The, um, the sheer madness of GCSE exams. He had his first one today, but it really starts in earnest in about three weeks time. And so getting him ready for that. So that’d be fun. That’d be the first of four years back to back of doing school exams by proxy. I can’t wait. I enjoyed them so much when I did them.

Um, so with that, I think we’re about at time. Um, Chengwei once again, thank you so much for joining us on the show this week.

Thank you.

And we will be back at some point after the, the bank holiday break. It will either be the week after or the week after that. I’m trying to line up a guest at the moment. And so, uh, we will continue sporadic and somewhat random timing of output because that’s the way we like it here on WB

40.

Chengwei: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the [email protected] and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show, Matt and Lisa meet Dan Bowsher to discuss Good Enough Chats, his podcast focused on men’s mental health through lived experience.

Dan founded Good Enough Chats following his own experience of burnout, anxiety and depression, which left him feeling profoundly isolated. His podcast deliberately features ordinary men — not celebrities or experts — sharing unedited, unscripted accounts of their mental health journeys, structured around the same five questions in every episode. Dan explains the thinking behind keeping the format lo-fi and the conversations raw: he wants guests to feel they’re having a conversation with a mate, not appearing on a podcast.

You can find Dan’s podcast at goodenoughchats.com.

Full transcript generated by Descript:

Matt: Hello, and welcome to episode 346 of WB 40. I’ve got no idea the timing intervals this show works on anymore, but this week it’s with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Dan Bowsher

Lisa: Welcome back listeners. Nice to see you again, Matt. Thank you. Um. I mean, I only saw you on Thursday, which was probably my busiest day this last week.

Um, but it feels like a, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the podcast, even though it’s only a couple of episodes ago. As you’ve alluded to in the intro, it’s a little bit wibbly wobbly time. Why me at the moment and what even is time? So, um, yeah, it’s been quite an interesting week or so. I think I’ve certainly noticed a shift in myself since the sun’s come back out again, and we’ve actually had some warmth.

I realized I’m probably a complicated houseplant because the sun was shining. I’m in a much best I feel. I don’t know, I just feel like everything’s lifted a bit this last week or two. I’ve been back rowing. I went back to, um, I went swimming in the Charlton Lido and it felt a little bit like I was weirdly on holiday it, rather than not being in a webinar that I’d signed up to just to watch.

And yeah, I had a. Really social day on Thursday. So I saw Matt and Susie, who’s a friend of the podcast at Paul Armstrong’s the new normal at disgusting the early breakfast session that started at eight in Old Street. Then went to work out of my friend Christine at c Rockstar’s office. Then I went to the Color Walk and actually while I was at the Color Walk, I bumped into someone from the rowing club and he was very confused to see me.

Couldn’t place him either. I also saw a friend, other friend of the podcast and my sometimes collaborator Simon Thompson, who said he might swing by a spitalfields market, but we happened to also bump into each other without having prearranged a time or a place. We just met at exactly the point that we’ve never met each other at before.

Then. So after the color walk, then came home, got my whiteboard out so that could take it along to the pub. Had my twice monthly, one of my twice monthly pub o’clock meetups in my local. And had a very long day and I did not leave the house on Friday. And then had a reasonably social weekend. And here we are.

How has your week been, Matt?

Matt: My week up until started to record this show, which, dear listener, it’s been an absolute disaster when all the technology goes wrong. My God, it goes wrong. Apart from that it’s been a a, a good week. We had a video sent through on Wednesday from China, from the people who are producing the book.

And it is finished. It is now being shipped. We’ve got four to six weeks before it arrives in the UK to be able to be sold for money. Uh, [email protected]. So that’s very exciting though to see the finished product because it is, uh. A book that defies normal expectations of what a book is.

We are pushing the boundaries of the book format. Uh, it’s not called the book though. What is it? No, it’s not called the book. It’s called Random, uh, how to Thrive In An Uncertain World by me and Nick, d dr. And, uh, it’s available from all good bookshops online that are called Security Blend Books. You can buy it other places, but we advise you to buy it from security blend books.com.

It’s gonna get more and more tiresome. You realize another four to six weeks of this before I can let go of the sail shtick. Uh, apart from that, uh, we’ve been, actually, I’ll tell you the other thing I’ve been doing, which has been fascinating is using the clawed to be able to do visualization of qualitative information.

I’ve got a client and there’s two parts to that client, but it’s public sector thing. So there’s a lot of the, the history of it’s in the public domain. I wanted a, a timeline to be able to help them understand what they might do next. ’cause I’m a, a big believer and if you don’t understand the history of, of where things have come from, it’s very difficult to predict a future that is in any way meaningful.

And so, um, we did it and it’s amazing. Just put some. A little bit of structure in to, to say what it was I wanted, and it creates this interactive web timeline thing with clickable bits and all sorts. And the data, the, the thing that’s really interesting actually, the amount of wrong information that’s going into this sort of stuff.

Now is getting less and less and less, and the ability to then start to think about, well, how might I visualize this stuff in, in a way that would’ve taken weeks of work previously? Um, and it’s not, it’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s enabling, it’s back to the drum machine analogy, enabling me to do things that otherwise I’d just simply wouldn’t have done and nobody would’ve done.

So that’s been quite interesting as well. So, um, yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a productive, a productive week. Guest this week. Dan. Welcome to the show. How’s your week been?

Dan: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a great week in no small part because I got to go to a gig that I’ve been looking forward to for absolutely months and months with a mate who I haven’t seen for about a year.

And I’ve only seen this band with this mate every single time. Um, the band’s called Deus. They are a Belgian art rock slash alternative rock group, have been going since the mid nineties and the gig was at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and it was absolutely awesome. You go into these things fearing that they might be past it.

It turns out they can absolutely knock it outta the park. Still

Matt: WW worse than fearing that they might be past it. The worst stuff is no. Tonight we’re gonna just be playing new material.

Dan: Oh yeah. Yeah, we, well, we knew that wasn’t gonna happen because they were playing their first album versus their second album.

That’s, that’s the whole of this tour. So we knew that they weren’t gonna play any new stuff. So we were all right on that front. Um, but that, that was amazing. And then I guess the other thing, uh, of note was I started up this, uh, local marketing community, like this informal marketing meetup. And we get together every month.

And last Friday, it was the most recent, one of those great chats, lovely coffee. And uh, yeah, looking forward to the pub version of that next month now.

Matt: Excellent. That sounds also like a productive week. Well done everybody. Little round of applause. Um, uh, but we are going to talk this week about an initiative that you kicked off a while ago.

Now Dan called Good Enough Chats. So I think we should probably crack on

Lisa: , We are here to talk about your initiative talking about men’s mental health. Can you tell us a bit more about what it is and how you started it?

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So, to all intents and purposes, its current form is a podcast. It may, well, hopefully, well, I would love it to evolve into more things beyond that, but it’s a podcast, but it’s a podcast that is entirely focused on lived experience, uh, men’s lived experience with mental health. And it doesn’t feature experts.

It’s all focused on. The story of guys who have come forward to share what they’ve been through so that somebody else can hear it and hopefully take some positive steps to help themselves because is, you’ll be well aware that the, the crisis in men’s mental health in particular at the moment is extreme.

And the way I’m looking at this is if by. Creating a platform for men to talk about what they’ve been through. It can encourage, like one guy per episode to go and speak to somebody and get help. Then it’s, it’s a, a pursuit that’s worth carrying out in terms of, I guess the origin stories of it. So back in 2017, um, I went through I guess.

I, I hesitate to probably my lowest point in my own mental health experience. Um, I was in a corporate environment at the time and I went through burnout, anxiety, depression, ended up being signed off work for three months. Um, and a big part of that was because I felt like it was just me that was going through it.

So there was a sense of isolation around it. I made a decision at one point to answer the question, how are you doing? Completely, honestly, to people regardless of whether or not they were ready for what I was gonna tell them. But in doing that, I immediately noticed that the, the whole dynamic of the conversation changed.

They’d say things like, oh, my other half’s going through something like that, or, I’ve been through something like that, and all of a sudden. You, you, you feel this, this sort of weight lifted off your shoulders because you realize it’s not just you, um, that’s going through it. So I, at that point in time, I sort of resolved that when I was ready to start doing it, I wanted to do something that was gonna help someone like me in that position to not necessarily feel or, or, or go as far down that particular rabbit hole.

I’d gone because they know that they’re not on their own. And, and it’s really that straightforward. The whole concept is someone comes on, we go through the same five questions in every episode. It’s all about their learned experience. There’s nothing they can say that’s wrong because it’s all, what’s happened to them.

It’s completely unedited. Because what, what, is there any such thing as the perfect answer in those circumstances? I don’t think so. And. The idea is to basically keep building this bank of these conversations so that each one of those episodes is there when someone needs to hear it. So it’s not a, I’m not expecting each episode to drive linear growth.

I wanna build the resource that people can tap into as when they need to.

Matt: I’m interested to how you have found people, found men to talk because there is, for all the fact that mental health is a lot more discussed these days. You know, we, if we think in the generations before my grandfather’s generation, there seem to have been. Collective posttraumatic stress from the war.

Their father’s had post-traumatic stress in the war before. My father’s generation, I mean, my dad’s a psychologist, but bless him, he’d never really talk about emotions. Certainly not his own. Uh, very occasionally he does, but it’s very rare. We’re at a point where I think that for. People born in the seventies, eighties, even into the nineties, there’s a little bit more acceptance, but there’s still an awful lot of pressure put on men to fulfill a set of stereotypes that most of us aren’t, and even more of us would really struggle to be able to meet at any point.

And one of those is for God sake, don’t talk about your feelings, man. So how, how have you managed to lu people into this? ’cause it’s, for all of them, positive talk, there is these days it’s still somewhat, you know, norm busting

Dan: the, I guess the way it, it’s starting to build my mentor, right? So when I started I would put a blanket invitation out there on social media, which obviously wouldn’t travel very far.

In the hope that it would land in front of one person that would say, I’ll do it. Because I, I knew it was, I knew it was a good idea, but obviously it is contingent upon people coming forward and being willing to talk. And if they don’t come forward, I can’t record any episode. Right. And the way I got around that in the first instance was I recorded sparsely and I released them very sparingly as well because there just wasn’t a bank of them.

I think it was after I got through the second series, the guests that had been on started to recommend to their friends that they should come on. And what initially, if you look at the first sort of six episodes, I would say that five of the six first episodes where people either I knew already or lived quite close to me, and by the time I’ve got to the third episode, I’m interviewing people who are in.

New Zealand people who are, um, the US people who are in Sweden, like one of, I, I don’t know if the episode will happen but somebody who I’ve been introduced to through somebody who was a guest is a Zambian diplomat, a former Zambian diplomat. They, they might be coming on it next. So I think once you show enough people that it is a thing.

It seems to start building a bit of momentum, a bit of a life of its own. I, I don’t wanna give you the impression this is traveling to like tens of thousands of people each time. It’s not, it’s, it’s traveling a very short distance into a few, few people, but it is resonating deeply when it reaches the kind of people that it’s intended for

Matt: and.

And social proof, I guess, is part of that, isn’t it? That if there are people already doing it, then it becomes more acceptable for others to do it.

Dan: Yeah, absolutely.

Lisa: What was it that prompted you to finally do the episode yourself and be the person that’s interviewed? Because it took a little while for you to get to that point.

Dan: Yeah. So part of my journey. Is I, I discovered through my burnout and through therapy, I discovered that I’m a clinical perfectionist who also has low self-esteem. So that would effectively caused me to become inert. I would overthink things. I wouldn’t start doing things because I’d be thinking, well, I won’t be brilliant at it.

So what’s the point in even starting, um. Part of my, I guess my recovery journey is I can now say I’m a recovering clinical perfectionist. Who can get to a point where he has enough conversations with himself and with people around him to go, actually just do it. It’ll be fine. I also, I didn’t want.

Any of the episodes to feel like they were about me because they’re not, I’m, I’m creating a platform. It’s the person that’s coming on that’s telling their story. That’s what the episode is about. So it took me quite a long time to feel just okay with the idea of me being the focus of an episode. Even though ironically I don’t have any concerns about sharing my story and my experiences, I just didn’t want the show that I developed to be about me.

And eventually I, I had enough of the guys who’d come on to an e to do their own episode who said, when are you gonna do yours? I thought, yeah, yeah. Okay. I, I sort of owe it to you guys. Now you’ve done it. Now I owe you, I owe you this. And I just, I pulled on my big boy pants and went for it.

Lisa: How have you felt since that?

Did you have any, has it sparked being on it? Has it sparked any conversations or feelings since then? What impact has it had on you since doing the episode?

Dan: The funny thing is that I’ve been very open about my experiences. I’ve told close friends and family. Sort of the detail and the depths of, of how I was feeling and what I’d gone through, but the amount of them that heard the episode and then came to me and said, oh, I didn’t realize any of that. I didn’t realize that’s what had actually happened.

It blew me away. I mean, it was all incredibly positively received, and that seems to be. The, the sort of the rule from this, for every guest that’s been on, they’ve had some amazing feedback, so like really powerful feedback from friends and family that have heard them talking about this stuff. But it, it, I guess if anything, it heightened my awareness to the fact that you really do have to keep repeating these things and it, it might feel uncomfortable for me to say it again and again and again because, you know, to my earlier point, it’s not about me, it’s about the other people’s story.

But you really do need to keep reminding people. You need to sort of champion the idea of talking about these things yourself and your own experience and be willing to do that if you wanted to get any cut through. And for it to have it resonate with people. It also wasn’t such a big deal, you know, after I’d done it, it was nowhere near as big a deal as I’ve made it up to be.

But that’s part of the clinical perfectionism journey.

Matt: I wonder as well, um. In all of this there, if we think about how we, we regard health and and healthcare, we have a tendency, I don’t think this is a unique to Britain thing, to think about health and healthcare being something that you consult when you are ill and that there are some people who take an active role in their physical health to prevent.

Illness and, and ill health. I can see you’ve got a number of running numbers in the, uh, the backdrop behind you. So it sounds, or it looks like you are one of those people who does work to be able to keep themselves kind of physically fit as a way to avoid being unwell. But the idea of you work until you break and then you get fixed.

Which comes from physical health, I think has also become a fairly large part of ideas around mental health. And I think what my, my experience in the last few years where I’ve had at least three midlife crises now, and they’ve been at varying levels of severity. None of them super, super terribly bad, but at points where I felt incredibly low about stuff and what I’ve come to realize is that that’s too, well, it’s not too late at that point, but that, that’s, that’s like only going to the doctor when you’re on crutches and actually being able to do work to be able to maintain good mental health is similar to doing work to be able to maintain good physical health.

But the whole thing is still so stigmatized and, and even the language. We talk about a, a therapy and therapist, not a term that would be more associated with good health. That still for me sounds like language that is about fixing bad stuff. And I dunno how, how it’s, if it’s even possible to break through some of those misconceptions because I think it’s much deeper than mental health.

But there is definitely, for me, a thing about being able to frame this as the maintenance of good health, not just fixing bad.

Dan: There’s, um, someone I’ve been speaking to is a guy called Ben Akers, who’s the founder of Talk Club. I, if you’re familiar with Talk Club charity, it’s, they do some amazing work talking clubs for, for men.

And he. Uses the term mental fitness, and I think that is you, you naturally say mental health, but actually what you mean is mental fitness. Mental health is, to your point, it’s when you’ve got a problem. Mental fitness is the preventative measures that you take. And again, you, if you’ve been through some of these challenges and you’ve had that chance to talk to a therapist.

And to reflect and to learn about why those things happened. That’s when you become aware of the things that keep you on an even keel. And that’s when you start to take those proactive steps, you know? So, so I, it’s only through going through the experience that I and many other people realize that it’s not about running further or faster, it’s just running.

That’s good for me. Right. If I am reading a book before I go to bed every night, that’s a sign that I’m in a good shape good frame of mind. If I wake up in the morning and I feel energized, that’s an indicator that I’ve had decent sleep. So what have I done the night before to make sure that I have good sleep as opposed to staying up late on the phone, maybe having two glasses of wine that I didn’t need to have.

All of those kind of things by becoming aware of. What the, the habits are, I guess, that you can form the small habits that you can form that will contribute to your mental fitness. It shifts the whole conversation and, and my, I guess my working theory with the show is I’m not an expert and I’m not offering advice, and the guys that are coming on to tell their stories are sharing their experiences.

They are not offering their advice. Right. But my theory is if you think of this as a funnel and at the bottom of the funnel, you’ve got a guy called Jeff who’s worked out exactly what the support he needs, and he’s actively engaging with that in the funnel. You’ve got charities, professionals, gps, medication, all of these options.

But what you don’t have before you get into that funnel right at the top is just the idea that a bloke saying I could do with a chat. Is just normal. And that’s, that’s the space that I think if we can influence that positively by a percentage point or two, then the amount of people that don’t need to go into that funnel in the first place because they’ve normalized just talking openly about what they’re feeling and what they’re experiencing.

That’s a huge net gain. I mean, obviously the guys that are coming onto the show. They, they come from all kinds of different backgrounds. Their experiences are, are wildly different. And for some people who are suffering with bipolar disorder, that that conversation is gonna help, but it’s not gonna stop ’em from needing more support necessarily.

Or guys who are dealing with issues around neurodiversity or childhood trauma, you know that that’s. That requires professional help and intervention, but I think we need to spend much more time and effort just normalizing that idea that a guy can sit down in front of his mate over a cup of coffee or talk to a colleague and just say, I don’t need you to fix anything, but could you just listen to me for a couple of minutes because there’s a thing that’s on my mind, and that’s it.

That’s all you’re asking them to do. But as men, we do love to rush and to intervene before the people have had a chance to actually articulate what’s in their head.

Lisa: You’ve also just reminded me of almost the opposite thing, where I remember years ago going to the pub with a bunch of male friends who I went to school with but hadn’t seen since primary school, basically.

And what I was amazed about as someone who. Does talk about things and is used to chatting about life, the universe and everything to people and trying to encourage that around me. People were sitting there in silence, just drinking their pints. They wasn’t even like, they weren’t even talking about the football or any of the conversations that they got onto.

Eventually everyone just sat there quietly staring at their drinks, just kind of on one. One hand, it was really nice that people felt like they could just sit quietly and be with each other. And on the other hand, it did feel like there were like things that needed to be said, and no one really felt that comfortable saying it.

I. I think that I love what you’re doing with this and actually starting those conversations. And I know that there’s lots of things that, like you mentioned, some of these organizations, um, I’ve got friends who have been involved with, like, there’s a, is there a proper blokes club as well in London where men meet up and go for a walk together and chat about their feelings as they go for a walk or just walk together And eventually they might talk, but it’s a case of meeting up, going for a walk.

And I just think it’s brilliant to be, do to, to be actually helping facilitate this because it’s really needed.

Dan: It is. And I think to, to, I think the point you just made there, it’s almost the, the onus is on, is honest us to create the space for somebody to talk if they want to, and, uh. Those walking, um, groups, I’ve, I’ve seen a couple of those.

They’re great, but you don’t know how far you’re gonna need to walk with somebody before they’re willing to open up. And actually, sometimes people might turn up and say absolutely nothing for three or four weeks on the trot. And then the fifth week is the one where they go, I feel like I can talk now.

I feel like I’m, I can get this off my chest. So it’s, it’s, um. There’s, there’s patience that needs to be involved in this as well when it actually comes to somebody being ready and willing to open up about this stuff. Obviously, when I’m recording this slightly different ball game, the person’s already decided that it’s, they’re ready to come and talk, but some of them have, some of them are people who have publicly talked about this.

It’s their experiences on a stage. Some people have literally never spoken to anybody publicly about it before and they, they’ve come forward to decide to do that on the podcast and that’s a, an enormous privilege, but also feels like quite a lot of responsibility to make sure that they are, they feel psychologically secure and they’re okay once they’ve had the conversation as well.

’cause that matters just as much.

Matt: Do. Do you find that the men you’ve spoken to have the vocabulary to describe their emotions? ’cause one of the things that I’ve learned a lot in the last 20, 24 months is how difficult I found it to be able to actually articulate feelings. Also understand things like it’s possible to hold almost diametrically opposed feeling simultaneously.

It is perfectly possible to feel happiness and sadness at the same time, and having always been a little bit conflict because I’d never really ever investigated any of this stuff before.

Dan: I think the guys, the guys that have come forward.

They’re self-selecting. So there there’s a readiness and an innate sort of readiness for themselves to come forward and talk about it. So there have been some people who’ve come on who have been through therapy a bit, some who’ve done extensive therapy, and some guys who haven’t done it at all. But they’re all, they’re all finding their voice around this, and they, the guests often say that the experience is cathartic for them.

And I think it, it’s a, I guess what we end up with is a snapshot of how that person’s feeling at that particular moment in time. And I’ve been inviting all of the guys who recorded, like a year or so ago to go back and listen. To what they said, because I think that’s a really important sort of benchmark for them to realize how far they’ve come in the, in the subsequent year.

But I, I, I think one of the other reasons why it’s important I don’t edit it is precisely because if you can’t find the right words and you do stumble across your answers to, to the questions, I want people to know that that’s okay as well. There is no perfect answer to this. You know, it’s, it’s how you feel and it’s how you are explaining it.

And the fact that people are coming forward to do that on a public platform is so valuable to people in ways that we may never know. So, so yeah, it, it varies wildly, but they’re, they’re all, they’re all trying, and I think that’s the thing that is most important.

Matt: And we talked a bit before we started recording about some of the the principles in which you’re looking to be able to build this and the sorts of, and it sounds like you’ve got like a little tiny veto list of, of potentially not guests.

Tell us a bit about that.

Dan: Yeah, so, hmm. And I just wanna stress that nothing, nothing that I’m saying here is denigrating any other effort that people are putting into trying to encourage men to talk about their mental health. But I realized when, whenever I see a famous person, a celebrity, talking about their experiences of mental health, I’m immediately putting a barrier up and it’s.

It’s judgy. I know, but I’m thinking in part, but you’ve got the resources to do stuff that most people do not have to help themselves. That’s not to say that, you know, money is gonna fix absolutely everything, but if you are, if you are a wealthy public figure, there are resources that you can call on that Dave at the desk next door and not call on.

So I took a decision very early on that. I was gonna focus exclusively on regular relatable guys. And actually I’ve been thinking a lot more about that recently and I’m wondering if the way that I might try to leverage some celebrity exposure is by telling people that they can’t come on it. But I’d really love them to tell their audiences that they should listen to it.

Um, because that’s more sort of true to form. It’s about. So I said earlier about the kind of unedited conversation. It’s very deliberate. It’s lo-fi as well. So just as I’m talking to you today, I don’t have an external mic. I don’t have a 4K camera. This is my laptop mic, my laptop camera, because I want the person on the other end to feel like they’re on the level with me.

Like, it’s not like I don’t want ’em to feel like they’re suddenly on a podcast. Because that’s gonna intimidate some people and make the conversation feel more awkward. Right. I have an intro chat with them before we book the recording, but I tell them in that intro chat that I don’t want to know anything about their story until we hit record.

And the reason I do that is because

I want. The reaction to be as close to how somebody that they know might react if they’d had a couple of pints in the pub and they just said, there’s something I wanna talk to you about. So it’s a natural reaction. I have found out that guests are gay by doing this. I have found out that guests have suffered from child loss.

I’ve found out that guests were literally. On a bridge about to throw themselves in front of a train as a result of that. So what you are getting when you hear that is the raw story from them and a completely natural reaction to it. Because again, I don’t know how I would react if a mate told me that they were going through something like that, but I think it’s important that people hear that there isn’t a perfect response.

To those as well as a perfect way to describe them. So it can be, it can be raw, be really raw, uh, and surprising. But it’s my belief that that makes the final conversation more useful to the kind of person that needs to hear it.

Matt: It feels almost, I can exercise almost in like social anthropology rather than a podcast.

It the, that,

Lisa: that’s what a sociologist would say now.

Matt: Well, no, an anthropologist would say that. A sociologist would say it is a sociology. It’s, but I, I, I mean that in a a really positive way. It’s not about having a format and I mean the limited to extent to which we pretend to be some sort of media thing with a format and, you know.

Whatever. But you’re not doing that. What you’re doing is you’re trying to be able to find a structure in which to collect voices. And that I think is very powerful actually.

Dan: Yeah.

Matt: And it happens to be that you’re then publishing them rather than analyzing them in private and writing a thesis about it.

But

Dan: yeah, and I’m, I’m very, I’m very careful around how I describe the process to. The guests and the audiences were recording it because I’m not a therapist. Some, some of the guests come off the conversation saying that there was a therapeutic benefit to it, but that’s, that’s like the power of talking, right?

That’s, that’s not a me thing. But I, I, I think you are right in that I, I passionately believe that having a, creating a platform like this is really important. It needs to exist in the world because I haven’t personally come across something similar that isn’t about celebrities or that isn’t hosted by a psychologist, for example.

And I think that there is a, a huge amount of

latent value. To the people that need to hear it in lived experiences that I would love to see more being done to harness the power of I know there’s, there’s loads of research groups that are looking into men’s mental health moment that the lived experience advocates are becoming more visible. And I think that’s really important.

But I also think it’s, and again, this is not to denigrate battle. Know if, if you’re in a corporate environment and they say, oh, we’ve got a guest speaker in. And the guest speaker comes in and they tell you some incredibly stirring story about, you know, they’re rowing across an Atlantic on a, in a two-man crew, or how they’ve overcome adversity.

And it’s, it’s, it’s powerful ’cause it’s a great story, but it’s, it’s at the extremes, right? And the vast majority of challenges that. People face with their mental health, especially men, because they aren’t talking about it as much as they need to. It happens in that gray area in the middle, and, and this could be stuff that’s just sort of bubbling away just under the surface for years and years and years, until it gets to a point where it’s suddenly escalates that person because it’s, they’ve not talked about it and they’ve not sought to help themselves.

Lisa: So you said you are not an expert, um, but there is something in having had this conversation so many times with people and learning as you go and, and you’ve, you’ve kept to, it sounds like you’ve kept to the same sort of format as you’ve gone through it, but. Things that I’ve heard you say tonight. I think, um, you know, there’s no right answer, uh, or no right way to answer questions and there’s no right way to respond.

Have you got any other tips for people who might be trying to have this conversation or want to have the con, want their friend to have the conversation with them? Any ways to kind of get it going or to Yeah. Any tips really,

Dan: I think the. The most useful thing that you can do for your friends, your brother, uncle, dad, son,

is be patient and let them know that you are there. Show them that it’s okay even if they’re not ready. The other part of the patience piece I’ve, I’ve sort of alluded to earlier, but it is

as men, we do tend to rush in with a solution when actually what we need to do is just shut up for a bit longer because they probably haven’t finished speaking yet. That’s hard because there’s a, there’s a part of that which is about being uncomfortable with the silence as well. Um, sometimes that doesn’t work particularly well for the person that might want to talk as much as the person that might want to, to be talked to.

But I would say that the most important thing is yeah, exercising patience and resisting that urge to just jump in and try and fix it because. I’m sorry. You can’t, that’s not how it works. Um, but actually just showing that you are there, checking in with your mates. I, I’ve made, that’s, that’s a big thing that I’ve done actually since I started recording this.

I’ve noticed that I have started just randomly drop notes to mates just to see how they’re doing. No other agenda other than letting them know. That there’s, that somebody somewhere has thought about them. ’cause you just don’t know how that’s gonna land with someone either. Um, and that’s almost become not like a structured habit, but it has become quite habitual for me to do that.

So yeah, be patient. Don’t try to feel the silence. And if you’re thinking about your mate, your dad, your son, your uncle. Just drop on the message. Just say how you doing? That simple,

Matt: Thank you Dan. Powerful ideas. Where can people find out more?

Dan: They can go to good enough chats.com. They can look for the pods. It’s on Spotify, apple Podcast. It’s on YouTube. Good enough chats, or one word. Search for that. Um, and they can find me on LinkedIn as well because I’m pretty active there. And actually a surprising number of the people who have.

Come forward to be. Guests on the show have come through LinkedIn connections as well. So I dunno if we can drop a, a link to my profile.

Matt: Yeah, they’ll all be on the show notes. So if you want to find out more, you can find them there. Uh, this is the bit where we talk about the week ahead. Uh, so have you got anything particularly, uh, enlightening or exciting in the week ahead?

Now?

Dan: I’ve, I’ve got. Something that’s way too exciting happening this weekend. But if I don’t sound excited, it’s because I’m not ready for it. I’m running the Sheffield half marathon on Sunday, and uh, the plan was starting from December. I was going to be upping my training and I was gonna be fit as a fiddle.

Two rounds of illness, a foot injury, and appalling weather have somewhat screwed me over on this one. So I, uh, yeah, I’m going, I’m going to Sheffield with no small amount of trepidation. However, because of good enough chats, I now know a load of people in the Sheffield area. So actually I’m gonna go and meet a load of people for the first time in real life who have been on the show.

Who I’ve never met in person. And I’ve built the whole weekend around making sure that I can catch up with as many of those people as possible. So even if Sunday hurts like hell Friday, Saturday, and Monday are going to have a nice counterbalance to that.

Matt: Amazing. Lisa, how about you? What’s your weak head looking like?

Lisa: Well, I’m partly jealous of you going up to Sheffield, but not of the run. Um, if you can make it go to the Rutland arms, it’s a glorious pub in Sheffield. It’s got a great selection of beers, decent grab as well. Um, and just a really nice vibe. And also, um, the Hot Hideout is a lovely little indie beer place run by someone called Jules who.

One of my favorite days in lockdown. If you could have any. I had a genuinely fun Saturday because she organized an online birthday party for her pub, and we did a yoga class in the morning. Then we had a, a virtual tour, like with their phones taking us around St. Miles. The desert Brewery got to actually see inside the hoppers and things.

Then we did a beer tasting and she’d sent us out packs of beers, including one from that brewery. Then we had Pete Brown talking about the marketing of Beer, and he’d written a book about it and he did a book talk. And then we had a pub quiz and it was just like a glorious, like I was sitting at home, but.

And she did the Indie Street feast, I think it’s called, that I went to a couple of weeks ago when I was up in Darbyshire. We made it over to Sheffield. So I love Sheffield. Do enjoy it. I’m not going to Sheffield this week. I, I am doing a talk at my, another local school, which I’ve not been to yet about my wibbly wobbly career.

Still trying to wrap up some work bits. Um, and yeah, I got my dad’s birthday this weekend, so I need to think about how to bring something for that. ’cause our oven’s not working. Um, yeah, that’s my week really. How about you, Matt?

Matt: I, uh, will be going to the queue. Half marathon on, uh, uh, Q Run Fest. I will be handling bags.

That’s what I do at, uh, running events. So I handle bags. I’m very good at it. Uh, it’s much easier than that. Running malarkey. I might get a blister too, but we’ll see. Uh, so that’ll be SAS and Sunday on the week ahead. Well, the main things are I’ve got a very last minute. Booking to do a talk about randomness on Tuesday night, tomorrow night as as we record now which can be five minutes long.

I might be able to stretch to 10, but five minutes. That’s an interesting discipline, creating a five minute talk. So I’m quite looking forward to that. I’ve created special dice, which should be fun. We’ll see how that goes. And on Thursday, we have a co-working day for. The government client that I’m working with at the moment.

And so I’ll get to see lots of people in person, but I’ve also taken the opportunity to create a short workshop about influence, which would be interesting ’cause this taps into stuff that I haven’t done for years, but, um, used to. To the Teach and Coach around. So, I think I’ve got eight or nine people signed up for it and, uh, getting people along for that and getting them talking about how they might think about their influence and how they might apply influence in different work situations.

So that’d be good fun. Apart from that, it’s getting ready for Easter. Kids broke up on Friday. So madness lies. ’cause after Easter comes GCSEs and I cannot wait. He says lying. Um, so that’d be good. Anyway that’s a run of three shows in a row, which is quite remarkable ’cause we used to do that every week, all year.

And I dunno how I kept up that mate that. Workload, quite frankly. We’ll be away for a few weeks now because we’ve got Easter coming up, so the show will be back at some point in April. I know already that lined up. I have a professor of economics whose specialism is luck. I wonder why I’m talking to a professor of economics.

His specialism is luck. What could possibly have drawn me to him? Well, we had to wait and see. Thank you, Dan, for joining us. It’s been a wonderfully enlightening conversation this evening.

Dan: Thank you for having me

Matt: and Lisa as ever, a delight to co-host with you.

Lisa: Likewise.

Matt: And, uh, we will be back at wherever a point it is that we can be bothered to do another one of the things that we call the WB 40 Podcast.

Until then, bye-bye.

Dan: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the [email protected] and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show, Matt Ballantine and Julia Bellis meet Sian Basker, co-founder of Data Orchard, to discuss what data maturity actually means for organisations — and what a decade of benchmarking data reveals about who’s doing it well and why.

Sian explains how Data Orchard‘s assessment tool, now used by nearly 20,000 people across 56 countries, measures organisations against seven dimensions — from the practicalities of data collection and tooling through to purpose, skills, culture and leadership. Crucially, the tool is designed to be completed by whole organisations rather than data specialists, on the basis that the people closest to the work are best placed to assess it. The conversation explores some striking findings from Data Orchard’s most recent annual report: that there’s no correlation between organisational size and data maturity; that Scotland’s public sector is outperforming the rest of the UK; and that only around 5% of organisations reach the top “mastering” level. The group also dig into the human side of data: siloes, the gap between what leaders need and what frontline staff experience, and why confident leaders are often the most important ingredient of all.

Show transcript autogenerated by Descript:

Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 345 of WB 40, the bus like podcast. You wait for ages and then all of them come along at the same time. This week with me, Matt Ballantine, Julia Bellis, and Sian Basker

Bus. Like he says, it’s the 200th anniversary of the very first bus. I found that out today. That’s the sort of facts that you don’t get anywhere else other than WB 40. Welcome back to the show, Julia. How has your week been?

Julia: Well, am I allowed to go back as far as International Women’s Day?

Matt: You can,

Julia: yes.

That was quite an exciting thing that I did that I thought I could talk about that’s relevant. It seems to go from strength to strength year by year. And this year I went to two International Women’s Day events, so it’s pleasingly morphed from a day when women have to do loads of extra work to prepare stuff to a day when women get invited to go to really cool, fun things.

And this year I went to an energy auditing lunch in Manchester, which was really interesting and it was the opportunity to really think carefully about what aspects of your work drain your energy and what aspects boost your energy. And then the homework, which I have not yet done, but must, is to go away and seek opportunities to incorporate all of the energy boosting stuff in.

And they can be tiny little opportunities. You know, the difference is cumulative and as I, so I was very grateful actually. I thought that was a genuinely useful and fun way to spend a lunch time.

Matt: That’s very good. I’m also slightly never seeing that. We’re working together quite a lot at the moment that I’m on one of those lists and that’d be quite.

Julia: No interactions with you are always joyful.

Matt: Oh, that’s very nice of you to say. Um, anything else that’s happened in the last week or is that has happened like,

Julia: well, actually, I mean all about me was Mother’s Day at the weekend and so I seized the opportunity to compel my family members to join me on a mystery solving history walk around London.

And it was so much fun actually. We did a, it was called the Holy Grail Walk, and we started in the Knights Templar Church around the inns of court. And we had to follow all of these cl clues and went around Lincoln in fields and just these really cool, beautiful, peaceful back streets of London. And had a marvelous time and ended up in the Chesa cheese Pub, which was good fun.

How about you? What have you been up to?

Matt: Uh, I have been doing relentless plugging of book work because we are getting closer and closer. Apparently the book has been printed. , When I last heard from the publisher it was being cut. They’re using special machines to cut the book, which is very exciting.

, I was at the London Book Fair on Wednesday last week originally to see around it with my publisher, but he was ill, so I was there on my own and spent quite frankly, four hours wondering what on earth you’re supposed to do at the London Book Fair. It’s the busiest trade event I have. I’ve been to in forever, the whole of Olympia.

And it was, I mean, there’s incredible energy there, but I felt like a massive outsider. But I did have one meeting lined up, which was with somebody who is potentially interested in representing us for international translation rights, which is very exciting. And I had a meeting with our publisher’s other half who joined, and she’s actually a, a translator professionally.

So, um, she has a sort of vested interest in that and also obviously with her partner running a small publishing house. So that was very interesting on for, and

Julia: you should enjoy this. This is the cue.

Matt: The Well, yeah, the thing was at Olympia though, because, because basically it’s publishers selling to retailers and it’s publishers selling to rights holders.

So actually authors don’t appear to be really be there other than sort of occasional intellectual candy for the stands. And you can’t buy a book there as well, which is a really bizarre thing. ’cause it’s, I mean, you can buy the rights to books, but you can’t actually go and buy a book. I have a thing.

I know.

Julia: You feel robbed.

Matt: I know. If you’re

Julia: going to the book fair.

Matt: Yeah. Sorry. I No, no, no. And um, so the other thing was on Friday I got introduced to, um, a chap who is a professor at Imperial College, who’s an economist whose specialism is luck, which given the theme of the book about randomness is we had a related, fantastic conversation.

And, um, there might be an opportunity for me to do some guest lectures at Imperial College. It should be quite fun. So that’s been good. There’s been lots of work stuff. And then, uh, we actually had 12 people four of us, and then. Eight other people that we really didn’t know at all come for lunch on Sunday.

As part of my eldest getting ready for the Scout jamboree in 2027, we met the families of the other two kids who are going to the Scout Jamboree in Poland. It’s quite nerve wracking when you’ve got complete strength. It’s coming for, for lunch, but it was all great and they were ev all, everybody’s lovely.

But, um, that was quite an odd way to spend Mother’s Day.

Julia: I think that’s a brilliant comfort zone, expanding activity, you know, created by your children actually.

Matt: Yes, and it was, it was, uh, it was a stretch, but it wasn’t as much of a stretch as Olympia, which was stretched too far possibly. So yeah, keeping in and outta comfort zones is an important thing.

Anyway, so yes, that was, that was the, the sort of week that’s been. Um, Anne welcome back to the show. You were with us some years ago now, I think. Mm. Um,

Sian: yeah.

Matt: But, uh, what you’ve been up to? Well, I mean, if you wanna go through the entire last four years or something, that’s fine. But last week,

Sian: last week, well actually I also was celebrating International Women’s Day last week.

I celebrated it with my choir singing, protest songs on a beach in Pembrokeshire, which was a hoot. And I can’t, it’s quite a kind of, we’re sort of coming out of winter. I mean, I, I still, I, some people would say argue already in Spring, but I have spent quite a lot of time feeling like I’m only just edging out of winter into spring.

And so it’s sort of cooking up a little bit. And we’ve had we’ve had our Data Folk club this week, data Orchards, data Folk Club, where we get lots and lots of people in the nonprofit sector together for a free hour. Once a month. Some of it’s just like every, every third one’s like coffee. Uh, this, this week’s one was on data culture.

Um, we’ve been talking to the Canadians and we’re, uh, we’ve got some exciting All of

Matt: them.

Sian: Yes. The Canadian partners, the ca Canadian Data maturity people. Ah, okay. Yeah. Um, are, uh, they’re flying the flag over there. Uh, so we’re working with them a bit this week. Uh, the other thing that was really significant was, it was pie day.

It was actually pie day on Saturday. Yes. But because because it was a work day. We celebrated on Friday, so Friday people had to make pies. The, the link there. I can see you frowning.

Matt: No, I, I know. This is the, this is the, the lack of adherence to international standards for date formats that you’re going on about here, isn’t it?

Sian: It really is. But we have got some US people on our team, and there are lots of people that in solidarity for the, for what’s going on in their country. We, we are not gonna be too. Precious because we also haven’t got our own date format, plane pie day. I think even if we switched to a different calendar system, I think we’d struggle.

So anyway, yes. For a bit of fun. Can we two extra months? Yeah. Yeah. I made a, I made a frenchie panty pie with a pie sign on it, pie symbol on it. And, um, other people use their own creative approaches as well.

Julia: Amazing. I think

Sian: you win pie day half down. Actually, I didn’t, uh, I didn’t do anything quite as educational or challenging as either of you.

For Mother’s Day, I just allowed my children to cook me delicious brunch and smoothies and kind of, indulge me with s spas and then I watched little women. Nothing wrong with any of that. No. Fantastic.

Matt: Side note to my, to my children who I know occasionally. Now listen to this show, Oscar Milo, if you’re listening, that’s how you do it.

Alright, next year, take notes.

Sian: Chocolate Foot Spa.

Matt: Oh, it was a, it was a, it was a drawn out experience for those two this year, but there we go. Right, we are here to talk data. We are here to talk data maturity. We are here to talk about the state of data maturity. So I think we should probably crack on.

So back in November of 2025, that distant past before 2026 started there was a report that Data Orchard, which is the company that you co-founded, cn. Published, which was one of a, a number that you’ve done now annually, looking at the state of data and the state of data maturity within organizations that you both work with and also who have used the, the data maturity assessment tool that, um, you’ve, you’ve been working on for many years as well.

And you did a good presentation about it, which is why I suggested you do be a guest on the, and then Christmas and New Year and stuff. But we’re gonna sort of talk about that over the course of the show, but I think it’s probably a good starting point for us to just think about what, what data maturity is.

’cause it’s a term that’s banded around a fair bit, either because it’s needed or because it’s absent mostly. But you’ve done quite a lot of work to be able to help, uh, codify it into a series of. I guess dimensions. And so for, for you and for the work that you do with your clients, what, what is it we’re talking about when it comes to whether you are mature or not in the data?

Sian: Well, I suppose, uh, I mean on, on the quick realms of definitions, when we are talking about data, we’re like talking about all of the data an organization collects and users, uh, we have a pretty holistic definition of that. And when we talk about data maturity, we’re talking about an organization’s journey towards improvement and increased capability in using data.

And we’ve, we’ve been researching it really, we started back in 2015 kind of wondering how, how would, how could you measure and compare how well an organization is doing with another organization and what are the important factors that you should consider? And we went and looked at as many. Really different diverse organizations as we could, like big international ones, tiny local ones in transport, housing, like as, as diverse as we could.

And we identified seven. We got it down to like seven key areas. And, um, one of them is quite obvious, like the practicalities, like the data itself and the tools that you’re using to collect it and store it and manage and analyze and report it. Another dimension of it is about purpose. And so, you know, what are you using the data?

Do, are you, you know, how are you using it to drive your, um, your services or, or your outward facing engagement with whatever client sector you’re, you’re working with? How are you using it to strengthen your core capabilities as an organization and your internal capabilities? And then. The, the, the key bit was about people.

So the leadership, the culture, and the skills were the other three themes. And, and actually without people, none of the other stuff works at all. So, um, so those were the kind of the seven key themes that we, uh, defined. You know, we had lots of thinking, you know, in the early days, uh, when we kicked off, it was around the time of GDPR and the New Data Protection Act, and we resisted some people’s suggestion that we should go down that route as a, as a specific key thing.

And instead what we did was we embedded quite a lot around security and governance into those existing themes. So those, you know, probably about 20% of our assessment covers data governance and data security. And it’s embedded in culture and skills and tools and of course the data, but it doesn’t necessarily touch on the purpose aspects of things.

Julia: I bet you I, like many of our listeners right now, I’m doing this mental evaluation of everywhere I’ve worked over the years and trying to tie up where it fits with, uh, what you’re talking about on your framework. And one observation that I can make from my experience is that culture around data, I’ve been working in tech for about 20 years is completely different now to what it was 20 years ago.

Have, have you found that, that there is more respect for being able to handle data responsibly?

Sian: Mm, I think so. I think so. I think it’s be, I think it’s because it’s everybody’s job. It’s so, integral to just about every aspect of, I mean, in our personal lives as well. I mean, you know, we’ve, on all of our apps and everything we do, data’s very much more in our lives and more, more accessible than it ever was.

I mean, it used to be so horrible to, to collect and, you know, extract and get anything interesting or beauti or beautiful out of it. I mean, I’d say data visualization has been, uh, transformational in terms of the appetite and interest that people have in data. ’cause nobody’s gonna read a spreadsheet.

Well, very few people gonna have a spreadsheet.

Matt: There are some people who like that there are, but um, yes, and I said I, I, interesting though, Julie. So the, the last role that I had before I started my current job when I landed at the organization, my observation there, this is back in 2019, my observation there was that data was regarded as simply the stuff that sat in systems.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Matt: So there was a, there was a an awareness of the fact that data was a thing, but there, there wasn’t anything that was, that it had a life and could be abstracted outside of the systems in which it sat. And as a result of that, there was massive inconsistency in the way in which data was represented from system to system.

And data integration was a complete nightmare because although. Sort of first step had, had been taken in terms of the recognition of what this stuff was about the next level up. They, they’d not made that exist. That step at all didn’t

Julia: really exist. No, this is what I was thinking at the start of my career.

Every idiot, junior developer, of which I was one, had full production access, you know, full sequel ability to drop tables, you name it, everything. Anybody could do all of that because data wasn’t valued in the same way that code was. Um, and now I think data is valued so much more. I mean, obviously it’s the most valuable asset for an organization, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Matt: So, so, um, that’s the, the, the structure in which you’re working. How do you then go about actually. Understanding where an organization sits. ’cause it’s one thing to have a set of measuring tools, but how do you go in and Yeah, actually measure it

Julia: well and make it beautiful and make it beautiful as well?

Sian: Well, we have worked, I can talk about the beautiful, in our latest iteration of our tools, but I mean the, how I think is probably one of the things that was most unique about our tool in that we realized very early on, it’s entirely possible for a group of experts to go into an organization and do an external assessment of them.

But it’s very time consuming. It’s very expensive and you won’t get round to ev you know, certainly in large organizations you’re not gonna get round to talk to everyone about it. And and so what we felt was more useful is actually the people in the organization are, are the best people. They understand the context, they under the understand the work.

They’re the best people to answer the assessment rather than us. I mean, you know, we could do it, but take us a very long time given the millions of businesses and companies around. So we designed it really as a tool for whole organizations to take and complete. I think certainly in in smaller organizations, organizations with less than 250 staff, we get a huge response rate.

Some of them get a hundred percent response rate and they get, and the way that we do it is we do it as a live event. And so we launch it, we introduce what we mean by data, by data and data maturity, and then we get everyone to take the assessment at the same time, drop the link in. They all get their own personal report on how they scored the organization, and all of their data goes into a whole organization report.

The bit that’s more fun is the qualitative discussions that follow immediately after. So the tool itself is about engaging people and educating people, and they get a sense of what good and great looks like. But the, the main thing is it gets ’em thinking about what are the problems and challenges we have in our organization?

What ideas have we got for getting better and that, you know, so we can do it in an hour and a half workshop and get like, you know, a hundred people in the organization as a kickoff to have those conversations and really mix ’em up. You know, we’ve got CEOs talking to, to drivers and trades people. We’ve got like, you know, the head of finance talking to the creatives.

We’ve got, you know, and, and, and that diverse that, just getting that conversation going about how even people see data, what they, how they’re using it in their jobs, what challenges they see. Is a really crucial part and being one of the great successes of our approach is about, and then we get as many other people to take the assessment after that.

So, it’s, it’s a, it’s a really collective everyone job to assess the data maturity.

Matt: That’s really interesting is the sociotechnical thinking stuff that I’ve become a bit obsessed with that was kind of fashionable ish, sixties and seventies, and they’re kind of dropped out of fashion entirely.

But within those ideas with works of people at Albert Churns who was at the Tavistock Institute, I think it was one of the, one of the principles that churns talks about was, I can’t remember the exact language he used, but essentially it was, give data to people who can act upon it. And that within the last 30 years of data warehousing and uh, kind of the ability to be able to retrieve data within organizations, an awful lot of it has been focused on management information, giving information to people who manage, not giving, people who do things, information on which they can act better.

And a lot of that I think then stems from those methods of being able to try to work out what maturity looks like, which is what do you send in a bunch of crack data experts and they go and assess it and they start by talking to the managers and then they have a look at some systems and they give a report and they never actually talk to the people who might actually be able to do something useful with the

Sian: dates.

Well, I think, I mean everybody, I mean I think a key thing is about getting different perspectives. So one of the things that’s very common is the sort of internal benchmarking where you are captur. Like how different teams perhaps see data maturity across an organization. How people at different levels of seniority see data.

For a lot of people who are working frontline actually data’s working quite well for them, is what we’re seeing in a lot of organizations. You know, from an operational point of view, it’s doing fine. Meanwhile, you might have a, a senior team who’s going, it’s just not doing it for me. I’m not getting the value that I need.

And it’s those conversations about different perspectives, uh, within an organization that are the most exciting. And we’ve had, um, like in, in Scotland, we’ve been working with public sector. We’ve just finished our sixth cohort of organizations who are taking the assessment at the same time. And they’ve been quite interesting because they’ve used persona types about like, what kind of persona do you have?

Is it, you know, are you a sort of data collector processor? Are you an analyst? Are you an IT person? Are you a strategy? Are you a policy person? And one of their personas is, I don’t believe I use data in my job. And we’ve gone, wow, I think it’s maximum like 2%, maybe 3% of respondents said that they didn’t think they used data in their job.

And it was quite an early on question in the assessment. And then right at the end of the question, at, so they go through the whole assessment, uh, and right at the end we ask them how much of their job, how much of their time in their job is spent working with data. And those people, on average, say they spend 20% of their time working with data by the end of the assessment.

So

Julia: the. The ones who say they don’t use data at all. Yeah. I

Sian: don’t, I don’t believe

Julia: you use data

Sian: in my job at the end of the assessment,

Julia: then learn through the course of the assessment that actually they do spend a day a week on data. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That’s fantastic.

Matt: I’m reminded a bit of a survey that I ran in an organization once, which was about collaboration, and I had about 10% of people saying they didn’t collaborate with anybody.

And I thought, why are you, why are you here? Exactly. It was quite terrifying. And then you could see who they were and think, oh no, you might be right. Do, do you find that the, the organizational structures have an impact on the ability for organizations to use data effectively? Do we silo around data in similar ways that we silo around processes or other sorts of interaction?

Definitely

Sian: and I think, in larger organizations well combination of larger organizations and kind of very, what’s the word? It does kind of depend a bit on the context in which organizations work. So organizations that have, do one thing basically and are very systematized about it it’s kind of easier because everybody can get behind that in organizations that have got really, really diverse products and services and operate in lots of different places with lots of different kinds of customers or clients or whatever you want to call it, service users.

It gets really complex and, and, and certainly you do get those kind of functional kind of differences where, and, and it’s sometimes, exacerbated by the tools that they use that have been kind of developed and customized for specific kinds of functions and roles. And so you can end up with very siloed, working both kind of people, cultural, structural, and technological.

Speaker 4: Mm.

Julia: I’ve got, you know, examples of data appearing to tell an impossible story until you dig into it and understand the context. The famous example is the Amy Edmonds son. The teams in hospitals that have the best outcomes, reported the most mistakes. And that is where the data doesn’t seem to match reality until you dig into it and you understand it’s ’cause they’re talking about the mistakes not hiding them.

And, and I’ve, I’ve had many examples in my career of. People trying to manipulate data or, you know, the data is accurate, but it’s somehow you, you, you do need to understand the human interactions and what is going on behind the data before it makes sense.

Sian: Mm. And I that’s, well, I love Amy Sen. We talk about her a lot in our data culture chorus.

Um, and yeah, I, I think that whole the calling it out and the, and the conversation and the confidence of people to be able to ask about data and explore data and understand the nuance of it, the complexity of it, the lack of certainty in it.

Julia: Yes. Or, or the, you know, the certainty is there. The data is unemotional, isn’t it?

But humans have emotions around the data.

Matt: But, but there’s also a, it’s a, a ties to a thing. I’ve been working on some of the book publicity recently, a story about, um, general Eisenhower making the decision to launch the D-Day, uh, landings on the 6th of June in 1944. And they depended on, you know, there’s a whole load of planning behind it all.

150,000 troops, thousands of boats and airplanes, and they needed the tides to be right, which are obviously very predictable. The right level of moonlight so people could see what they were doing, which is predictable to a level, but depends on the third factor, which is the weather. And the weather, even today, down to more than about 48 hours.

Is essentially a chaotic system that you don’t really know and being able to make decisions in the context of the known and the knowable, but also being able to understand the stuff that you can’t know. And funnily, there was a, a, I dunno if you saw the news story last week, I think it was, which was about theme park operators, the, the biggest theme park operator in the UK complaining about the use by the BBC of long range weather forecasts because it directly impacts their bookings.

But if you’ve not really got accurate weather forecasting for more than about two days, that’s a real problem. ’cause if, if next Saturday is currently forecast to rain, I’ll be getting less bookings at the moment if I’m running a theme park, because people are looking at the thing going, there’s no point in going on Saturday, is there ’cause it’s gonna rain.

And so the reliance on data and the impact of data and the way in which it shapes behaviors and now you’ve got this, you know, theme park operator saying, don’t publish that because it’s not good enough. And it’s having a d you know, a devastating impact on our bookings.

Julia: There’s a financial product you can buy, isn’t there a weather bond or something?

And you have some businesses that do well when it rains and others that do badly when it rains. And it’s all about transfers of cash so that you can cover yourself. If you’re a theme park that needs sunshine, then you, you get some cash flow from Oh,

Matt: interesting.

Julia: Yeah, a different, I can’t remember what it’s called, a weather bond or something like that.

Matt: So you have been doing this surveying, um, this assessment tool for, well, some years now. 11 years, 10 years?

Sian: Well, we started the research in 2015, but we launched the tool in 2019. Okay. So that’s what, six

Matt: years? Seven years? Seven. Seven years. Seven years. Time flies. I know. And you now are able to start to be able to gain insight across multiple organizations, and that was the report that you published back in November.

So some headlines, first of all, about what, what was the, the November’s report telling us?

Sian: Well, I suppose the first thing I should say is it’s the first report that we have done where we included the commercial sector. So we had actually had the, originally the tool was designed for the non-profit sector.

And predominantly that excluded initially the public sector, but we quite quickly found that we had public sector users, we had people from commercial organizations using it. And so in 2021, we actually adapted it to make it completely sector agnostic. But because our work is primarily aimed at the nonprofit sector, we only ever really reported on the nonprofit sector.

And then over time we go, actually we’ve got quite a lot of growing data on commercial organizations and we were getting more and more, interest in sales of these, uh, assessments to commercial organizations. So, that was the first time that we aided three sectors, private sector, public sector, and not-for-profit sector.

And it was also the first time we’d done com done global. I mean, I feel a little bit I mean it has been used by people in 56 countries I think now. Most of them are UK so our dominant market by a long way is the uk. So I would feel more confident talking about the uk, but I did notice that other benchmarking data maturity people were claiming global.

And I was thinking, well, I think we’ve got quite a lot of global data actually. So we’ll do a global. Cross sector report. Um, so we just start to compare, you know, how different is it and are there, you know, and I know over a long time it’s, um, it’s been quite interesting to watch the, the trends in different sectors and to kind of get, be able to get, because we’ve got more data.

I think we’ve had now it’s almost 20,000 people who have used the assessment. And we are quite picky about the validation and the, and the benchmarking. So we only include definite registered organizations, at least for the uk. So we do check them off against the company’s house and against charity commission registers.

And yeah, so. Yeah, I think we, we were kind of curious to look a little bit more into what kinds of organizations. We’ve always asked a question, are bigger organizations better? And I think there’s quite a lot of myth that are out there around some views on what kinds of organizations are great data organizations.

Julia: Well, okay. Can I dive in with an assumption and then you can maybe disprove it or dig into it. So when you said that bigger organizations are better, I thought bigger organizations have more access to more data and there is something good about quality, about quantity. Is that true or I completely wrong?

Sian: Well, uh, we have seen no evidence. Ever. It was the first thing we looked at. We just thought, well, bigger organizations are banned to have massive data teams and, and they’ll be really on it. And so their organizations will be brilliant at this stuff. And we have never, and we do it every, every year we do analysis.

We’ve never found any correlation between data maturity and size of the organization. We’ve looked at it by age, you know, is it like old organizations? Is it new organizations? We haven’t found any evidence that size is a factor in data maturity.

Julia: Say size does not matter when it comes to data maturity.

Mm-hmm. Wow. You know, first surprise.

Matt: So is public sector or not-for-profit better than commercial?

Sian: Well. It’s very, they’re very close. So if you, if we, I mean we score them on a five stage journey from like unaware through to, um, emerging learning, developing and mastering. Only about 5% of organizations are at the mastering level.

So it’s like one in 20 organizations are in the mastering stage. The majority are in that learning, early developing stages, and it’s very similar. So on a, on a scale of north to five, we’ve got the commercial sector, global commercial sector, and non-profit, not-for-profit sector are both 2.8 and the public sector’s a bit ahead at three.

But there are nuances within, within sectors and yeah, sub sectors is more, more of an interesting place to look and geographies seems to be an interesting place to look.

Julia: Oh,

Matt: so UK geography, uh, which of which of the areas of the uk, the devolved

Sian: nation,

Matt: Scotland doing

Sian: absolutely brilliant. Scotland’s doing great. The, the devolved nations are doing be doing better overall. Um, the areas which were doing less well, were like east of England, I think it was east of England and the East Midlands were doing less well.

London and the middle.

So when you look at Subsectors, and we’ve seen this across all sectors actually, that there are some types of industry that are more data-driven industries, inherently more data-driven.

If you’re a regulator, if you are in finance, do do really well because it’s inherently a very quantitative insurance, finance, insurance, if you’re an insurer. See it gonna be, um, we see it in the, in the nonprofit sector. We see it a lot in like obviously research organizations. But you’d hope they were really good, wouldn’t you?

Matt: So you’ve got these exemplars of good organizations. You’ve got an ability for people to be able to benchmark. You’ve build up a whole load of data around how they able are, are able to be able to benchmark themselves and um, and and improve. As a result, you’re now starting to be able to offer them services, them being your clients, offer them services where they can actually start to build capability.

So it’s not selling data warehouses that you’re doing more skills and capabilities to help people do it better.

Sian: Yeah, I mean there, there are lots of great organizations that already sell data warehouses, actually. So, I think the world is fine for a lot of that technology thing, and I think a lot of the tech skills are, there’s amazing training and opportunity to learn if you wanna learn coding and engineering and data architecture, all of that plenty of it is really well covered.

What we realized was that there was a real gap for leaders, for CEOs of organizations who have got this mixture of a tremendous opportunity, always been told about the amazing opportunity around data, while still also carrying really alarming risks. You know this so and so as a, as a leader in your portfolio of skills and responsibilities, this whole data thing has crept up over the last, you know, particularly over the last decade.

And, and I think it’s quite scary. It’s quite uncomfortable ter territory for a lot of CEOs. And they’re having to make, when they’re thinking about the future of their organizations, they’re having to think about that, you know, those assets and that opportunity, but also they’re having to think about their workforce and like, what kind of skills and roles and responsibilities do they need?

And many of them just aren’t that familiar with it and are, you know, it’s just like, oh my gosh, what, what do I do? So we’ve been working at like, what’s. And of course lots of, lots of people really hate data as well. Lots of CEOs really hate it, you know, especially if it’s the kind of thing that, you know, they have to keep reporting to regulators and they have to you know, uh, maybe they have to report on their contracts or certainly in the nonprofit sector, there’s lots of reporting to funders and commissioners and so it’s, it’s not all that popular as a, as a topic as well.

So what we’ve been working at is we’re like, what is the least amount of time that could be the most fun and interesting and engaging and effective for leaders to build up their confidence to lead in data in their organizations? So we’ve got it down to our five week course, and, uh, we run them. Both as open courses and in-house courses, and we’ve done courses with networks of organizations that are operating in the same field.

And I think that peer bit is really interesting. So we’ve, we’ve had the joy of working with the law centers, networks across the UK and the wildlife trusts across the uk where, you know, you’ve got like a dozen leaders from organizations are working in quite similar contexts. Mm-hmm. So there’s quite a lot of peer learning in that journey, and they cover those seven themes.

You know, we cover the purpose bit to begin with. Uh, we talk about the practicalities of the tools and the data and data quality and data assets. We talk about skills, we talk about leadership you know, board responsibilities, that sort of thing. Uh, and of course we talk about culture, which of course is actually the key to it all.

So, yeah, I think that, that kind of group of leaders what we’ve, the feedback we’re getting now, so we started these courses in 2023 and we’ve been following up with people who did the course to find out, have you been able to affect change in your organization? Where have you got to? And it’s been really encouraging hearing the, the stories on what these organizations have, have gone on to do and what those people as individuals, you know, they’re saying things like, oh, I feel so much more confident talking to technology companies.

Like, I know what I’m talking about. Um, or I know what questions to ask. And you know, a lot of them have made changes and are doing really, uh, innovative stuff like in Scotland that they’ve been doing Scottish Citizens Advice. Scotland have been doing a lot of work around AI and fuel poverty, for example.

And it’s that sort of confidence to, to understand the whole big picture about it and then kind of be pragmatic about your next steps, because you’re not gonna be able to change anything. You’re not gonna be change everything at the same time and you, you, and it’s probably not gonna be very quick.

So taking kind of baby steps, uh, has been really effective. So that’s how, yeah, that’s been our Data for Leaders course.

Matt: Interesting that idea of learning from peers as well from my work doing management leadership development in, gosh, nearly 20 years ago now, which is terrifying. But I always used to find that open courses was so much more interesting than single organization courses because it was, it was a combination of things.

It was first having a broader pool of stories to draw from. The second thing was that you didn’t have any of the internal hierarchy and power struggles or the, you know, that the normal arguments. That would emerge in within any organization. And the final thing is actually just the, the reassurance for people.

It’s not just you.

Sian: Yeah. Yeah. And we hear that a lot actually. Yeah. We hear from people who sort of say, well, we talk about the roles of responsibilities. People going, God, no wonder I’ve been carrying all this myself. I’ve got like, you know, 20 jobs I’m doing. No wonder, I feel so stressed. And so it does open up that kind of collective understanding about roles and responsibilities and what, you know, who needs to be involved.

And sharing and working it

Julia: out or making it up, which lots of these people are doing. Yeah. You can just imagine the pressure, the relief to learn about this.

Sian: Yeah. I mean I do, I’m really curious, I dunno what your experience is of working with organizations of what, what the ratio of data people to everybody else is in an organization.

But I mean, I find it really to be really diverse. So if you’ve got, like, if you work in a 10 person organization and you’ve got one data person and you’ve got a 10% ratio compared to, I meet people all the time who have like started in one job, it’s morphed into another job. Now they’re head of data, they’ve got 200 staff and, and nobody else on the data team, you know?

Yeah. So, uh, yeah, it’s

Julia: interesting. Think demand. What do you think demand frequently outstrips capacity. For data, and then you get demand from people who aren’t experts. So you’re generating lots of data that actually can’t be useful because there is such a skill in knowing which questions to what are the right questions to ask.

Um, and you need proper trained data professionals to help you with that.

Matt: Yeah. I think as well the, the silo problem you’ve got people who don’t understand how data operates. You’ve got people who understand data within their context, but can’t appreciate the data, doesn’t span out of context unless it’s designed to do so.

And then you’ve got people who understand the bigger context version of it, which is that you need, you know, I mean, in, in old money you need things like corporate data models for any of this sort of stuff to fit together. The people in that latter category are very few and far between. Mm-hmm. And actually, of all the organizations I’ve worked in over a 32 year career the only place I thought really had it nailed for a while was the BBC when I was there in the mid nineties to the mid two thousands.

And the, the very specific reason for that was that they had a corporate data model called the Single Media Exchange Format Smith. And it was developed for a very, very simple reason. It’s because the metadata that was coming out of early digital equipment from Sony, from Panasonic and from Canon was completely proprietary.

And so they needed an intermediary middle layer. Hmm. Which enabled them to translate the metadata from system to system to system. And they had no control over the, the source systems for this. And that was the reason. In hindsight, I think that SM was good when it was, but then people started to extend it too far and they started to build systems based on that as a physical model rather than as a conceptual idea.

And then it all fell apart ’cause it all got far too complicated. But that was a, you know, very clear reason they had why they needed to do this back in the, I mean, that, that project started I think early nineties. Ever since then, even, you know, when I worked for Reuters, their data management was appalling, even though they were essentially a data company as 20 odd years ago.

And in comparison to Bebe, it was so, naive in their approach. So. I, you know, I think it’s the, the, the people who can manage it from the perspective of seeing across the whole piece.

Sian: Mm.

Matt: And that’s why it’s so important that people like CEOs have appreciation of this stuff, I think.

Sian: Yeah. Yeah. I agree.

And I think it, it’s also about being able to I suppose to create simplicity out of all that complexity and what, what I do see in a lot of those really mature organizations, is the stage mean we’ve, I’ve seen organizations do this where they’re culling the data. Like no, I mean, like, there’s danger.

I’ve read your Hedges piece Matt, so don’t, don’t kill everything. But like, actually a stripping back of like, what’s the most important and most valuable and, and a, and a focus and a clarity about what’s the, what’s the most. Important and valuable and useful and meaningful data that we should get, and what can we let go?

Because there’s a, there’s always a trade off there between the extractive nature of collecting the data and what actually becomes useful in the end. And that balance needs to be struck, stuck.

Julia: Yeah. I’ve been in the experience where tech teams get very keen on collecting loads of data and it’s just overwhelming.

And you, it’s very hard to know what it’s telling you. Um, and that’s where the skill is, knowing which to ask. Yeah.

Sian: And,

Julia: and leaders actually

Sian: mostly designer, ask really good questions. I think that’s I’ve just been, uh, talking to lots of CEOs in the, um, AVO network, the Association of Chief Executives of voluntary Organizations about ai and, um, it’s really.

It is really reassuring actually, that these are very intelligent, thoughtful people who have you know, a good balance of curiosity and caution and uh, are very thoughtful about all kinds of technology and all kinds of applications of data.

Julia: So now is the. Of WB 40 that I always find the most challenging, and that is where we think about what’s coming up in the week ahead. So Anne, what have you got planned for the next week? This is the look at your diary. Look on my diary.

Sian: Well, this week I have got in a week, well, a week today I’ve got a VO fest.

So I am going to be in London with lots of other CEOs, uh, working in the voluntary sector. And I absolutely love it. It’s a real it’s a really rare occasion actually to talk to other leaders about all kinds of things. We’ve also got our kicking off with our Canadian partners, so for the first time we’re going.

Multilingual, we are going to be developing the French Canadian version of the data maturity assessment. So that is super exciting. We’ve been wanting to go international. I mean, I said we would go global before, but we’ve wanted to go multilingual for some years. So, for a while we thought it was Welsh.

That would be first, but it turns out it was gonna be French Canadian. Um, so that’s, uh, that’s super exciting. And what else are we doing this week? I should have,

Julia: I’m jealous. I’m jealous of your

Sian: multi

Julia: opportunity.

Sian: Yeah. Well we’ve, we’ve had a lot of interest. We had actually, we had a lot of interest from South Americans, so there was the, the Spanish thing.

I mean,

Julia: you don’t, you don’t have to have more than three interesting things coming up. So I think you’ve

Sian: already

Julia: met,

Sian: if not exceeded

Julia: the crater.

Sian: Yes, I think I have. Oh, and Scottish government. We we’re, we’re going to be looking at our seventh cohort of organizations in Scotland, uh, in the public sector, taking a data maturity assessment.

So yeah.

Julia: Busy week. That’s, that sounds fantastic. I’ve been looking for opportunities to use French at work ev forever, and you’ve come along and you’ve got one, so I’m very envious. Matt, what about you? Have you got as many exciting things coming up as Anne

Matt: and, and possibly not, and, you know, exciting as a very subjective concept, isn’t it?

Uh, I’m going to be going to a. An event organized for suppliers from one of the major government departments tomorrow afternoon which will be, I’m coming

Julia: with you, in fact.

Matt: Yes, that will be, there’s a number of ways that could be interesting, so we’ll wait and see.

Julia: Yeah.

Matt: On Thursday there is, um, another one of the TBD Paul Armstrong’s breakfast events happening in London, and the guest speaker this month is a guy called Near Isle.

Who I know from a book he wrote about probably 15 years ago, called Hooked, which was about how to design software to be he denies, I’ve had discussions with him on Twitter about this. He, he denies, uh, it being addictive, but to my mind, if you’re gonna call something hooked and you’re talking about design principles, it’s kind of, uh, addictive design principles.

He’s gonna be talking about his new book, which I know nothing about, but I’m interested to hear. And there is a little bit of me thinking that maybe that N’S work was far too successful last time because an awful lot of organizations did follow the ways in which he thought about designing habitual patterns, uh, in a way that maybe has not benefited mankind.

Humanly human. Yeah. And then apart from that, I’m gonna be finding opportunities to be able to record more short videos to publicize. Did I mention I’ve got a book coming out to publicize my book? So the event that we’re going tomorrow is at the Royal. Institution. And I’ve been, um, digging into that.

And so I think I might be doing a short video before, uh, that session starts to talk about how the randomness of how Michael Faraday, one of the most prolific scientists of the, the, the 19th century became a prolific scientist based on the fact he randomly got some tickets to go to see another, I can’t remember the name of the, uh, the scientist he went to go and see.

But there was somebody who used to do talks at the Royal Institute and um, Faroh got some tickets randomly ’cause he worked as an apprentice Bookbinder until he found science. So, uh, Davey was the name of the, uh, the scientist that you went to see. So, um, bit of that I think. Um, how about you, Julia? What have you got in the week ahead?

Julia: Bli me? Well, so one of the things that I learned boosts my energy. Is going to new places. So I am looking forward to going to the royal institution with you tomorrow, and I’m also looking forward to some co-working days that we’ve got coming up next week in various different locations. I dunno how much energy boosting I’m gonna get out of traveling across London on a tube strike day, but I will do my best.

I’ll let you know actually if it ends up being an energy boost or an energy suck. Ah,

Matt: yes, the tube strikes. Uh, anyway, that’s it for this episode of the very pleasing 345th episode of WB 40. Um, cn thank you so much for coming and joining us again on the show.

Sian: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been lovely to, to meet you, Julia, and uh, lovely to see you again, that thank you.

And,

Matt: uh, thank you Julia for your, um, wonderful co-hosting. Yes.

Julia: It’s always a pleasure. Thank you.

Matt: And we will be back again next week. There’s three in a row unless something untoward happens, which is always a possibility. Uh, next week we’re gonna be meeting with a chap called Dan Bocher, and we’re gonna be talking about his initiative to be able to help men talk about men’s mental health.

So a complete change is seen. That’s what we do on WB 40. You see, it’s all about what you need to know to manage technology, and surprisingly, that’s often not about the technology. Until then, Anne, thank you Julia. Thank you. And we’ll be back next week.

Sian: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the [email protected] and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show, Matt and the team meet Shaline Manhertz and Kristianah Fasunloye to discuss their business partnership, which began formally in 2018 when Shaline’s cancer diagnosis forced a pivot from individual business plans to joint working. The conversation explores how their partnership survived extraordinary pressure by rejecting the conventional 50/50 model in favour of an equitable approach where each partner gives 100% of whatever capacity they have at any given moment.

The discussion examines their practical frameworks for sustaining partnerships: the “MAGIC” model (Make a decision, Attributes, Guidance systems, Intelligence gathering, Course correct) and the four Rs (roles, responsibilities, respect, resentment). They challenge typical business assumptions about productivity and efficiency, arguing that genuine curiosity about people—asking questions beyond task delivery—transforms supplier relationships into true partnerships. The conversation draws parallels with pair programming in technology, showing how collaborative approaches often outperform traditional resource allocation models, even when they appear counterintuitive to conventional management thinking.

You can watch Shaline & Kris’s Ted Talk here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1dJHi1s2WYs

The show transcript – automatically generated by Descript.

Matt:  Hello and welcome to episode 344 of WB 40, the really quite erratic podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Shaline Manhertz, Kristiana Fasunloye, and Chris Weston.

Yes. You heard, right? Yes. You don’t need to worry about Harry Styles releasing albums. No. Chris and Matt are back on the show together for the first time in New. Two years. I’m not sure that I can cope with this excitement. Chris, how are you dealing with it?

Chris: Yeah, it’s alright. You know, we’ve had, uh, it’s two years.

You say you don’t look, you don’t look any different. I think you look younger, Matt. I think that’s, you know, that’s maybe just having that extra, you know, pizazz of some different people to talk to. Is it reinvigorated you somewhat

Matt: that or you really need to get to the optician soon?

Chris: Well, maybe you’ve been dying your beard or something.

Matt: Oh dear. Like, the passage of time is a strange thing when you get to a certain age, isn’t it? Is a whips past. Uh, we, we won’t dwell on the entire two years ’cause it’s, that’s two years worth. But, um, what have you been up to in the last week?

Chris: Oh, I’m glad you hadn’t asked me what’s happened in the last two years?

’cause I can just about remember the last week. Uh, everything else is, is very much a blur. Um, wow, wow. It’s been very busy. Right. And, um, so. I guess the, the big things in the last week or so have been, so at Aztec we, we did our first big event, uh, on our own like, uh, so a big grownup company on Thursday, the something I think, I think it was the end of February, so it was back just every week ago.

And that was really good because it was partly because it’s a good. Team. And it’s nice to see the marketing folk, you know, and put all the effort in to make something like that happen. It’s good to see lots of people, you know, lots of, um, you know, old friends, new friends, whatever turn up and actually for the content to be pretty good too.

And that, you know, that’s always a bit of a, uh, a worry ’cause it can be a. Even with the best preparation, it can go a bit flat sometimes. Um, but we had, uh, Benedict Evan speaking, who’s a bit of a, a, a legend really, really articulate guy in terms of tech and a whole bunch of other people. Um, so yeah.

Yeah, that was good fun. Really, really great. And then I’ve been working with a client the last few days well actually, yeah, for almost since, for the last three weeks really, but for this last week as well, working with a client who works in. In the kind of retail supply chain, which again, very interesting.

You know, I know a lot more about lettuce and beet root than I knew a few weeks ago which wasn’t a high bar if I’m, if I’m honest. But it’s, you know, there we go. I’m, I’m, I’m more informed about the, uh, the supply chain pers of, uh. Fresh produce, but yeah. Yeah. All good. Matt. Can’t complain. It’s been busy.

Busy, busy. How about you?

Matt: I’ve been taking on a new client at work and a, a very well established client for us. Quite a big client in terms of, uh, the number of consultants. So to get my head around it, I’ve been meeting all of the consultants who’ve got working on it. And so over the last. Two and a half, three weeks.

I’ve had something like 50, 55, half hour meetings with different people, which has been really wonderful, but quite tiring I think is the best way to describe it. I mean, some of my colleagues, especially people who are used to sort of sitting writing computer code, are kind of baffled by the idea that you could speak to that many people ever possibly.

But. The, this is where my social science training comes in. ’cause basically I was taught how to do interviews and stuff. So therefore I kind of, I, I, I’m okay with it. And it’s been really interesting and trying to be able, when you’re involved in something new, trying to be able to triangulate some form of truth because there isn’t one.

Truth, there are multiple truths and if you can get to speak to lots and lots of people, you can build up, I dunno, it’s a bit like, you know, there’s apps you can get where you can create 3D scans of things by going around with your phone and taking loads of pictures and loads of different angles. It’s a bit like that.

Nobody

Chris: knows about those things. About

Matt: is it just me?

Chris: People with too much time on their hands.

Matt: Yeah. Okay. It’s me being geeky again, isn’t it? But uh, yeah, so that’s been taking up, quite a lot of my time in work and then out of work because, I dunno if I told you this, I’ve got a book coming out.

See, I’ve got a book coming out. It’s very exciting. I have got a book coming out. I still don’t quite know what the release date is because there’s been so many comical, random issues with getting the book out. But, we are assured it’s now actually being printed and the publisher is, uh, is trying to now work out the logistics of getting two washing machine sized lumps of cardboard and, and paper from China via the Middle East.

Yeah, have all else is going on straight of hall moves, right? They don’t have to go through the straight of hall moves. No, but they have to go the other side. So there’s still plenty of opportunity for more random delays. But anyway, because I’ve got the book coming out, I’ve been doing more experimenting with doing stuff to video now.

I’m a purist when it comes to podcasts. Podcasts are audio only. If you put video on a podcast, it becomes a TV program. Okay. That’s, that’s my view. I, I will not be shaken on that, but I have started to get into the idea of like two, three minute, little videos. And so I’ve been writing some scripts about things that are about randomness which is what the book is about and things that are about randomness in sort of local areas.

So I can go and do some little bits on location. So my son and I, my youngest and I went out at the weekend and we were in. Bushy Park. We started at the house where Alan Turing lived, and then we went to the National Physical Laboratory to tell the story of Donald Davis, who’s the man who partly created packet switch networks, which are the underpinnings of the internet.

And everybody’s heard of Alan Turing, and there’s roads named after him and there’s blue plaques on houses. Nobody has heard of Donald Davies at all. And it’s a story about the randomness of what we remember and what gets told in history. So it’s a kind of interesting story. Got back, terrible mic quality.

Oh, it was awful. And then I realized I kept calling him Ronald Davies throughout the thing rather than Donald Davies. I, you need to learn through making mistakes. I made an awful lot of mistakes doing that, but I’m, we’re, we’re,

Chris: yeah. He must have ended up pretty rich though. Old Ronald or

Matt: Donald? Donald.

Donald Davies. No. He worked, he made

Chris: a packet.

Matt: Oh, no. That’s appalling. So

Chris: you’ve missed that.

Matt: Yeah, I have missed so much. I’ve missed that so much. I’ll keep telling myself so much. So anyway, more short form video coming out. I did one today about how interesting uh, boarding passes are. Because that’s how I work.

There’s a whole three minute video about the history of boarding.

Chris: Three minutes. Three

Matt: minutes. I, I surprise myself sometimes. Anyway, I think it’s time to, have we still got guests? Have they not got bored? You want walked away from Think they’re still here. I think they’re still here. I, it’s a wonderful for us to be back together and we also have two guests rather than one.

So, um, let’s start with you, Shaline. What’s been up in your world in the last week?

Shaline: Well, it’s completely different from yours. That’s specific, definite.

Matt: You’ve not been doing videos about, uh, the importance of boarding passes?

Shaline: No, no, no. Not not this week. Maybe next week I’ll look into it. Yeah. No. Well, we basically been working, I’m, I’m gonna talk about some of the work that I’ve been doing by myself.

So I’ve basically been working on an event that’s pulling together the culmination of, of. About 13 years work of a local community and, um, trying to navigate the politics of the committee. So that’s been very interesting. It’s, yeah, very, very interesting. Very interesting and tiring. And Paul Christiana’s had me downloading and complaining all week.

So it, it culminates on this Saturday and I can’t wait

Matt: in.

Shaline: It’s gonna be very exciting.

Matt: Interesting. Is such a wonderfully multipurpose adjective, isn’t it? It’s got so much bread. It’s wonderful.

Shaline: Yeah.

And when I’m not do doing that, I’ve done a bit of tap dancing just to do something completely different and keep myself a little bit fit because, uh.

Try and keep healthy,

Matt: you know? Yeah. So is this a, a new thing, tap dancing or you’re an experienced tapist or

Shaline: Oh yes. Very experienced. Very experienced. Yeah. No, I used to do it when I was younger like a lot younger, like about 10.

Matt: Okay.

Shaline: And then I’ve. Done it a little bit on and off. And then last year I did went back and did a whole like, six weeks course on just dance generally and performed at a theater.

Did two shows, which I really enjoyed. And so I’m trying to just do it, even if I can’t do it consistently, just do it every now and again just to keep myself fit.

Matt: Nice. And um, Christiana, how are you and what’s your week been like?

Kris: My week’s not been bad actually. I’ve been speaking to my mentees, so I mentor the moment three young people who are basically at the start of their careers all in kind of marketing, comms, pr and it’s quite interesting ’cause I really wish I had that support when I was their age.

You imagine being like 20, 24, 25. And having someone who’s got like 20 plus years experience, being able to shine a light on what you need to do, what you haven’t asked and what you haven’t thought about. I mean, we would’ve gone so far, like if we could have tapped into all of that knowledge. So, and I think what’s quite interesting is people don’t ask enough questions.

They really don’t ask enough. They’re not curious enough. I would say I had a really interesting conversation with one of my mentees last week. And they brought in a specialist company in the organization he works in to review some of the work that they’ve done and how do they engage with people that are either disabled or have a neurodivergence.

And I’m like, well, what have you done before? Oh, I dunno. I’m like, well, maybe that’s where you should start. So Jimmy, you need some kind of baseline. What have you done before to figure out how you can move forward? And then as always I’m one of two sets of twins. One of my sisters is, um, house hunting.

So the in-person and virtual house visits has been a thing. Wow.

Matt: Sorry, just to play that back, you’re one of two sets of twins?

Kris: I am one of two sets of twins. I have a twin brother. I have younger identical twin sisters.

Matt: Wow. Your parents. Wow.

Kris: They think we’re fabulous.

Matt: They can’t have any memory for the time that the, the, the two sets of twins were both small.

That’s Wow. They

Kris: weren’t both small. One was 14 and one was North.

Matt: Oh, okay. Okay. That’s, they’s got plenty child to recover from it then. Amazing. Yes. I’ve got, we, our kids are 13 months apart and that was as closest we got to twins, but it was fairly close to. Being twins and, um, you’ve got twins, haven’t you, Chris?

Chris: Indeed, indeed. Boy and a girl, but we did certainly didn’t, uh, go for another helping at 14 years later, to be fair.

Kris: So, who’s the oldest? The girl or the boy?

Chris: The girl is the oldest boy. A number of minutes, which I cannot remember anymore, but she knows she’s the oldest.

Kris: I’m not the eldest. By a number of minutes.

Chris: I mean, it’s amazing how much it matters. ‘Cause it’s, it’s not something I think about saw, but Oh, yes. It’s very important to the individuals.

Kris: Yes.

Matt: Are you an oldest child though, Chris?

Kris: Yeah, I’m

Matt: one of the eldes. Oh, you, no, no. Yeah. Other crew. Yeah. Okay. This is gonna get confusing.

Chris: We’ll figure it out.

That’ll be fine. I’m pretty sure that, uh, we’ll, we’ll know by context who you’re talking to.

Matt: Now I went to see the comedian Olo Hanlon last night. And one of the things in his set was about order of children, ’cause he’s a third child and basically an awful lot of his set was about how difficult it is to be a third child because basically you’re just forgotten by the rest of them.

And all that thing about sequencing of when they come out and when there’s a bit of distance between the age, you kind of, yeah. Okay. But it still sounds like it’s important when even when you’re twins, whether your first out or second out.

Kris: I think it’s more important to my twin brother than it is to me.

I think also, ’cause he’s the only boy, so he, you know, the only boy and the oldest. So,

Matt: yeah. That’s, um, fascinating. Anyway we are not here to talk about twins or siblings. Uh, we are here to talk about partnerships. So I think we should probably crack on and then I’ll press the stop.

One of the conversations we’ve got going at work at the moment is what it is to be. A partner as opposed to merely a supplier. Partner’s an interesting term, uh, for our organization. Actually also because John Lewis is one of our biggest clients, and so partner for John Lewis, which is a partnership, actually has a whole load of other meanings, which makes it very confusing sometimes, but.

The difference between being seen by your client or customer as a partner and being seen by your client or or customer as a just a supplier can be quite profound. And even more so if you think you are one thing and they think you are another, you can have massive disconnects as a result of that. Now I met you two at an event at the beginning of the year and saw you talking about community and, and partnership.

And I thought it’d be interesting to be able to dig a bit more into those themes because they’re things that we often hear spoken about, but don’t often go beneath the surface of the words. And you’ve done a lot of thinking about what goes on beneath the surface of the words. Maybe as a good starting point though, is.

To talk a little bit about your professional partnership and some of the events that led to you thinking more about all of this and what it means.

Shaline: Well, we’ve been known each other and been working with each other since 2008, which is quite, quite a long time. Nearly 20 years, in a couple of years. And I think from the very outset, we always. So I worked in marketing, Christiana worked in press, and from the outset of that, we always tend to work together in, you know, something’s happening within the council and we’re working together to provide some kind of communication solution.

And that always seemed to be quite different from our other counterparts in the teams. And I think that way of working. Just kind of grew and grew and grew and then we, you know, between the two of us we’re like, oh yeah, I’d like to start a business At some point Chris is like, oh, I’d like to start a business at some point.

And then we were speaking about that.

Kris: We used to have Breakfast Club, so we would, we would come in to work and we’d have like breakfast together. ’cause we do like eight or like six or half, six. We’d come and we’d have like, she doesn’t eat yogurt, but we’d have yogurt, croissants, coffee, fresh food and that.

And that was our brainstorming time. And we’d be like, okay, so where are we in developing? And at this point it was individual businesses. It wasn’t a partnership business. And so Shaline would have her own and I would have my own. And we would sit and discuss and where are we with our business planning and have we thought about the model and services and the pricing and the clients.

And so this went on for years. We incorporated our businesses. And had breakfast club, had lunch club. Were testing like the offer, you know, delivering services, getting paid, commissioned, both while still being fully employed.

Shaline: And then 2017 hit and I was very ill. Basically I went into work one day and then never went back. That was probably in the November. And then by the December I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer. And so at that time I wasn’t in the communications team. I was in a different team, which is a business development team.

It was. It didn’t really work in a partnership or team-like manner. It was very individual, very competitive. Quite different from the comms team. Obviously quite different from when I was working with Chris as well. And, uh, very stressful. So it got to the point where obviously I, it was quite clear I wouldn’t be going back to work for some time and I was like, oh God, what does this mean for me?

And you know, and then Chris said to me, what do you need? In order to be able to, you know, just be happy, be comfortable, and not be worried about work. I said, I just need to pay my mortgage. Lo and behold, two weeks later, Chris comes back and says, I’ve got us a contract.

Kris: And I,

Shaline: so no. Good.

Kris: Well, I think the thing is we had spent a lot of time before Shaline got ill.

I mean, you know, I met Shaline in 2008. And she’d been in the comms team, been seconded out to the comms team, you know, come back to the comms team, progressed up the comms team, I’d been, you know, promoted as well. So we spent a lot of time getting to know each other as people, and also what did we stand for as people, like what really were our values?

Or, or our hard lines. And so when she became ill. You know, this was my friend as well at this time. She wasn’t just a colleague, she was also my friend. And so it was like, what do you need? Okay, you need to be able to say, oh fine, let’s do that. So there wasn’t much thinking that went into it. We had lots of people that we were talking to about what kind of support would they need.

We’ve been testing and trialing this and I was like, okay, so I just need to convert these into a paying client. I’m gonna do that. And I remember having a whole conversation with Shaline about, oh, I don’t like the idea of selling. She’s like, it’s not selling. Just see it as a conversation and you’re telling them what you already do and what I do.

And I thought, okay, I can do that. And so off I went and had loads of conversations and then came back and she said two weeks later, said, yeah, I’ve got us our first contract that will enable you to pay our Mor your mortgage, and we will figure out a way to deliver that with you not being well and you still working full time.

And so we did.

Shaline: Because the, the thing is I didn’t know when, what that would mean for me. I didn’t know will I be ever going back to work? What will day the days look like? But I just knew, and Chris clearly knew I couldn’t have gone back to be working in the way I was working. You know, it was very, very stressful. Very long days.

And also, you know, when you are ill like that, you have to just focus on yourself. There’s not much else you can do, but focus on yourself so that you can shunt back into good health. And having the support, knowing that actually somebody is there supporting me whilst I’m, I’m focused on my health. But also being able to tap in and do some work was, you know.

I, it’s very difficult even to explain even now, like it however very many years on a, the gratitude, but also the relief. You know, the relief of just thinking there’s somebody there that’s in interested and supportive of me as well, and we are working together. I don’t, you know. Even. Yeah, I still don’t have words as you can see.

Chris: That’s interesting though. So I, I think what I’m just, just to pick up on that, when we talk about partnerships, the thing that means partnerships to me in many ways is sustainability, right? So is this something that’s self-sustaining or is, is one party. Benefiting more or is it going to get out of, out of control?

So when you’re actually looking after each other, whether it’s business partnerships, you know, whether it’s supplier, customer relationships, but essentially if you are trying, if you’re always trying to maximize the value you get at you have of the other person, it’s not going to be sustained. You’ve got to be aware of each other’s, uh, needs in that sense so that you can.

But make sure they’re there tomorrow to do the thing they do. And you can do the thing you do. Um, and that sounds exact, like exactly what you’ve been doing.

Kris: I think because we have similar but different skill sets. So we’d always imagined that we were gonna go into business on our own. And then, you know, Shaline got ill and it was like, okay, well we need to pivot.

And I think at that point we made a decision that we were forming a partnership. We always knew we would work together. We didn’t realize that we would be working in partnership together until Shaline got ill. And because we are similar but different, we bring different skill sets. So, you know, there were points when Shaline would have chemo and, and that would be Wednesday afternoons.

So Wednesday afternoons we would manage everything to make sure we didn’t have meetings. Or if needed be, I could pick up those meetings. ’cause in the early days I was still employed as well as trying to run a business with Shaline. And so we were looking at how could we deliver everything on the days that she would be well enough to be involved.

And also I think Shaline was more worried about her not showing up than I was ever worried about her not showing up.

Shaline: I, I think it’s always, you know, it is, it is. It’s fantastic when you have support, but I’m somebody I’ve never been comfortable with allowing other people just to do what I probably think is my responsibility. And so it’s all about, for me, it was about, okay, I’m not feeling well today. Tomorrow I probably won’t feel too great, but Friday I’ll be fine.

And actually if I’ve had the steroids, I’ll be even, I’ll be on, on, on, you know, we’ll get even more maximization. Yeah. So. But just that, um, I suppose the feeling of not wanting to take advantage of somebody’s good nature. I mean, you know, she could find somebody else and do it. Maybe it would be easier. She wouldn’t have to be trying to do everything.

And as, as she said, she’s working and we’ve never been in jobs where, oh, it’s nine to five. She was in ru running a press office. So if you can imagine, you know, she’s crisis queen. Crisis don’t tend to happen between nine to five, they happen after five. You know, and still then be supporting doing this other role, making sure that we are, our partnership is held together.

’cause it, obviously, yeah, I’m there, but sometimes I’m not there. Sometimes I’m thinking I’m there and I’m not there. So

Matt: it is interesting the the expectations we put on ourselves and how much. I, this, this is one of my pet themes on this show over many years now, the, the things like the Protestant work ethic, which is a, a deeply set cultural set of values that we hold.

And for many of us, we don’t even understand where that comes from because the religious part of it for, you know, much of the population is completely gone. But the ideas of if you don’t work hard, you won’t go to heaven, is so deep rooted in. In so much of the culture in the UK so that there’s real guilt if you don’t feel that you’re pulling your weight.

Even if you’re in a position where you’ve got no way to be able to work effectively. I mean, so often you see people at, at, at a kind of less serious end of the spectrum turning up for work, even though they really shouldn’t. ’cause they’re pretty much useless ’cause they should be in bed getting over the flu or whatever it is they’ve got at the time.

So those, those kind of, personal pressures that we put on ourselves as the basis of stuff that is, is outside of our immediate lived experience, I think is really interesting. The, from what you learned through those experiences working, um, together, how have you now then turned that into something that you’re helping others with?

Kris: I think that’s a quite interesting question. I think we did a whole TED Talk on our partnership and

we had always had this kind of framework. I think we just hadn’t named it, and so. I’ll go through it. ’cause it’s really, we call it magic ’cause we like to think our partnership is magic. But it’s make a decision about the partnership you’re going into. What does that look like? What are the attributes that you need?

So are they complimentary? You can’t have two people with the same skills. ’cause two cooks in the kitchen. No front of house. This is from our TED Talk. Your guidance systems. So that is basically your values. How is that, you know, determining how your partnership moves forward, the intelligence gathering, how do you know whether things are working, whether they’re not working, and then they see the course correct.

What do you need to do if your guidance systems is off, your intelligence is showing you something, or you need to change a partnership? What, what, what does course correct? Do you fix it? Do you jump out of it? What does it look like? And I think in every partner that we work alongside, ’cause we see every business that we work with or every person as a partnership, we are a partnership.

You’ll be, you are becoming into a partnership with us. How do you understand what we are offering you? The skills that we bring to the table, what’s important to you and how we are going to continue to show you throughout the length of this. Partnership and when things aren’t working, how are we communicating with you that it’s not working?

And sometimes we’ve worked with, like, we work with two amazing female co-CEOs. They were absolutely fabulous and they were a job share at CEO level. And I think there needs to be more of that because people don’t understand that you get such a breadth of skills when you’ve got two people doing the same role.

You know, they managed to raise 1.7 million pounds in funding for their charity. They did a whole board restructure, brought in new trustees, absolutely amazing. So much respect for them. And what we did was look at their partnership and our partnership as well and how can we best support you and how can we challenge you in a way that you can deliver more for the um, organization that you are basically joint.

We call them joint chiefs.

Chris: Yeah. Do you know what about, about maybe back 2008 sort of time, but I remember I did some work with a.

Did it like a management buyout of a, of a technology company and, and they decided they were gonna be co-CEOs. And I said to them both. I said, look, this isn’t gonna work. Really. I don’t, you know, you, you need to figure out who is the person who’s going to be essentially be responsible anyway about about.

10 years later, they sold it for like loads of money and they’d both been CE through all that time. So it shows you how much I know, right? You can, it looks like you can have co-CEOs and you, you’ve had the same experience of seeing it in, in, in motion. Yeah. And, and what you, you’re right, it does bring a level of resilience and you know, as long as you’ve got that mutual respect, as long as you’ve, you know, again, you are working in partnership and you are interested in the others.

Ability to keep going, you know, then you can make it work.

Shaline: And I think, I think that neatly brings us onto the, for us, so, you know, for us defining the role. So as Chris was saying, I. Although we, we are very similar. We are also very different. We’ve been quite different, distinct viewpoints to things, and so people are like, oh, you’re both, you’re both in comms.

Yeah, we, you know, your marketing, your press isn’t more or less the same thing. Not really, no. And alongside it not being them being different disciplines, it’s also the viewpoint and how we approach things. So, you know, it’s almost, if you think about good cop, bad cop, we’re not really good cop, bad cop. We are more, Chris is more.

You know, forthright, very clear. I’m more journey taking. So generally you’ll find that people fall into one of two camps in terms of what they appreciate. And if you are speaking to a whole team, you know, you’re gonna capture the whole team because. One of them will appreciate the perspective that one of us has given.

And I think when you are solo working, you then have to work so much harder to understand actually how’s that person taking it in. Is that person a numbers person? Okay, I’ll go with the numbers as, but hang on a minute. This person needs more emotive words whilst, because there’s two of us. And we, you know, we’ve also done neurolinguistic practitioner work as well, so we kind of understand how people are thinking.

We’re able to bring all of that to how we work. And then what then sits under that is responsibilities. I mean, you know. There’s not one of us going to go off on holiday and not the other one doesn’t know what’s happening from day to day. We are spoke speaking to each other. Literally, we’re on the phone from about 10 all the way through till about eight some days, you know?

But what that means is we are always continuously talking. We are very open with each other, and I think in order to have respect for people, you have to, there has to be a level of openness that you’re comfortable with because otherwise. You are holding something back and I think that with us, we generally don’t hold much back and I think it being that comfortable to be with each other and understand that means that there is the respect there, there’s the understanding there.

You know, if someone’s going on a holiday, someone’s not gonna be around for whatever reason. It could be hospital visit, but equally it could be, you know, going to a ho a wedding in Greece. You know, it’s all about making sure that we’re. We are, we are clear about who’s responsible for what and how we are handing off.

You know, I think, I think it was Kev that said to us, we are the only, um, partnership that he knows that share an email inbox and have the same

Kris: calendar as well. A share

Shaline: calendar. Exactly. You know, that’s

Matt: interesting. This, this, uh, it, it reminds me of as well have you come across the concept of, um, pairing in computer programming.

Which is the idea, and it’s really counterintuitive to our established models of thinking about what productive looks like, rather than having one person working on one task, you have two people working on one task and they do it at the same time, and it’s not a, a job share. It’s they’re both doing the work.

And what that does is it enables those two people to be able to get through the work more quickly and with a higher level of quality because they’re constantly. Checking each other, suggesting when one gets stuck, the other one can pick up. And that works. Really, I mean, there’s a lot of evidence to show that that leads to much better and quicker results than having the work divvied up one person per task.

But it doesn’t sit nicely with the models that we have about what you should do with using of. People as resource in organizations. It looks like you haven’t maximized your utilization. All of these kind of mechanical terms that are used that are stemming from a world of management, which was about managing machines, not people.

And that, that it feels that, you know, whether it’s the a co CEO at the top of the organization or in a tech organization, the, you know, the pair programming at the Boston, there’s plenty of evidence to show this stuff works, but it feels like so counter-cultural. It feels so much against what it is that businesses should be doing.

Kris: I think many businesses need to feel that they need to manage by site to understand what their staff are doing, and they haven’t moved forward in their practices. You know, we talk about the rise of technology and ai and actually why shouldn’t working practices, you know, most people didn’t work from home before.

COVID, like COVID forced us as a society to look at how. People could work in different locations. Some people have gone back to work full time. Some people still work from home three, four days a week, uh, a week. So if we can dramatically change where we work and still deliver the same level of quality, shouldn’t we be looking at how we work as well?

And I think that hasn’t really seeped through because we always deliver quicker because there’s two of us, we would pick up different elements of the same project, but then. You know, you can never check your own work. So you’ve always got someone to check and proof and bounce an idea off. When you are, when the brain gets kind of stuck and you’re like, okay, brilliant, I needed to bounce.

I’ve got clarity, I can move forward. So I think management and basically organizations are playing catch up. ’cause the tech world is always far, far ahead. Always far ahead.

Chris: I think he’s so. Yeah, the, when you were talking earlier about when you used to go to work and you sit in and have your breakfast club, it reminded me of, actually, I’ve been thinking about this just last week, and I was thinking about the organization I’m working for now.

I’m thinking about the relationships. I was thinking about. Okay. I dunno that person very well. Well, I wonder why I haven’t got to know that person very well. And it’s because this organization’s completely remote really, we’re all, all over the place and therefore we’re not together very often.

Whereas in once Upon a time when I was younger, of course you’d be in the office and you’d be bumping into different people. And as you, you know, as you kind of said, you, you’d kind of, there would be people who were in early, there’d be people who might be in late, you know, the people who take their break at the same time or whatever it might be.

You would, you would, you would not just talk about the thing on the agenda or the reason you’ve had the team score. You would think you’d talk about other things and it would, and things would build from there. And I was thinking to myself about, really about how we make that work today. And we’ve talked about this like a hundred times on the podcast over the years, but I’m just wondering if you guys think that you.

A partnership like yours could have started if you had never worked together physically, if you’d just met online. Do you think that’s possible? Do you think it’s the, those sort of physical sort of connection moments in the having breakfast that that forged that ability to do it? Or do you think it’s possible to start without that kind of,

Shaline: I, I, what I would say is I think it, we started with a really solid base.

And because we started with a really solid base that supported that. Do I think you can start without that? Absolutely. I do think you can. I think it is, it goes down to what are your values and, and taking the time. I think. We’ve often, between us, we will meet people. A lot of our work’s been remote. We’ve been remote before.

COVID, you know, we, we were the first remote people really, that we probably even know, you know, working continuously, remotely, not just, oh, popping into the office now and again. And I think we’ve had to form relationships with people in environments we’ve never seen them before. Um, we don’t intend to see them either, and we’ve worked with them for over a year and being able to work in a partnership way.

They initially, you know, it’s, it’s never, it’s, it might not be a comfortable start because people are like, oh, you know, they’re not comfortable. They don’t know you, but it’s about really thinking about what, what’s important to this person. It goes back to, you know, really having an understanding and putting time into wanting to be interested in somebody outside of work.

Not just, okay, we’ve gotta get this done because that’s great, but if someone thinks that you are invested, and this is how we’ve both managed, I think we’ve got a very similar management style. We’ve both had like large teams. And when we’re, what’s sat beneath our management style is getting to know the person, getting to know what’s important to them, why are they working, what do they want to do in the future?

What’s happening in at home? Because those realistically are the nuts and bolts of starting to understand the person, starting to understand what their values are, starting to understand what’s important to them and why they’re showing up. And I think once you understand that, then a, a partnership can grow and that can grow in any kind of environment, but you have to put the work in

Kris: a hundred percent.

It goes back to the point earlier about not, people don’t ask enough questions, they’re not curious enough about other people. And as Shaline said, we have had clients we have never met. We’ve never met them. We’ve only ever spoken to them on a phone call or on a teams or a Zoom. And they will, they would have us back in a heartbeat.

But that is the effort that we’ve put into building that relationship with them. You know, even though we’ve never had a face-to-face meeting,

Matt: I wonder if one of the challenges for. People in organizations today isn’t the lack of being in the same physical space. It’s that the, the relentless grind of teams meetings, everything is task focused.

You go in and each half hour segment that is back to back for eight hours or whatever madness that it is, that so many people are having to endure now, there’s no point at which you can have the, the breakfast conversation, which is off topic, which is is about what you saw on TV last night or what you’ve got coming up at the weekend or because everybody’s just focused on task, focus on task, focus on task.

And so we did a a show a couple of years ago with. A philosopher called Alice Sherwood and she she wrote a book about authenticity, what it is to be authentic. But we talked on the show about what does in real life mean. And so, you know, when Chris, you say, I’ve, I’ve never met these clients. We have met them because what we’re doing now, we’re talking through the magic of this amazing technology that we have that enables us to be able to talk in real time and see each other.

That’s as real life as. Meeting in person. It is, it’s the conversations that you’re having the show, the chance to be curious. And

Shaline: it’s funny because if you think about it, we used to have pen pals. Remember you’d make a pen pal, you’d never see that person. You might not ever meet them. Or you might meet them like 10 years later, two years later, and you’d have an affinity that would outs span that, that.

Quite easily. So we, we, we are capable of doing it. It’s like we’ve just forgotten. We’ve completely forgotten and we haven’t given ourselves the space because there’s no space. So there’s no space. So there’s no questions. Okay, we, we are here, let’s get on with it. You know, I mean, we’ve what run workshops where we start off by talking just about random things.

You know, what, what did you do last week? Yeah. You know, just what did you, what’s the last thing that you watched on television? Just to get that kind of break, that kind of understanding of we are only here to do work and I think if you, if you’ve got a supplier kind of relationship going on, that’s because there’s been no interest.

On either side, probably of anything else apart from, you know, delivery. But when you are actually curious and interested in somebody, you get far, much. Richer relationship. And I think for us, we enjoy the richness of relationships that we create. So we go out of our way to do that. It’s like when I think back, I used to work at the Department for Work and Pensions back in the day.

And I remember there was one guy, we were based in work, white Hold. He was in Leeds and everyone was like, oh, he’s a nightmare. He’s a nightmare. Don’t like working with him. I’m like, well, I can’t work like that. I don’t like working with people that it’s not fun to work with. And I remember thinking, he’s gonna be my best friend.

So that’s, that’s literally, I think we both go into to relationships. Not wanting a best friend, but go. Going to think actually, if we want to make this interaction comfortable for not just me, but for the other person, what needs to happen, oh, what that might need to happen might be, I need to ask, oh, how was your weekend?

And actually be interested, not just want to say, yeah, it was fine, and move on. Actually building bonds, and I think when you build the bonds, you get so much, you get a rich relationship. But also the somebody will go to here and back 15 times if you ask them if you’ve built that relationship. If you haven’t built the relationship, you might have to ask them 15 times to do one thing.

Speaker 5: That feels like a perfect place to stop.

Chris: Well, that was fascinating and I think. There’s at least, uh, four more podcasts in that we, we barely scratched the surface. It was fascinating to listen to you ladies, thank you. And, um, I think we’d need to look into the future now because this is what we do traditionally at this point, Matt, we find out what we’re gonna be up to.

What are you doing, Matt? What’s the future hold for?

Matt: Uh, the future holds for me. Have I mentioned, I’ve got a book coming out. A book? A book?

Chris: Never.

Matt: Yeah. Uh, security blend book. I thought Nick Strange’s got a book coming out as well. Has got, I don’t hear so much from him. No, I know. But, um, he has got a book coming out.

So I will be going with my publisher. James, um, I’m just holding up a little tiny version of my book that isn that isn’t that cute. That’s our business cards for going to, um, they, I’ll stick a photo of that on the, on the show notes. We are going to the the London Book Fair at Olympia on Wednesday, and I’m going to take the prototype version of the book ’cause it is a hefty tome.

Before. The, the, the, the actual printed versions of it arriving in a few weeks time. Um, it’s not

Chris: minimum viable book.

Matt: It isn’t much. No, it, it is, it is definitely not minimum viable book. It’s maximum viable book. And I’ve got a couple of meetings with people lined up who have people I know. And then I’m just gonna sort of go with James around and see if anybody is interested in it as a concept.

And I dunno what I’m gonna get from it ’cause it’s, it’s definitely one of those, something interesting might happen. Theory, things where if I go to the London Book Fair, taking my book with me, something interesting might happen. So that’s, that’s the main thing I’ve got coming up.

Chris: Excellent. So who should we pick?

Let’s go pick Chris, what’s your next few days? Hold? Well,

Kris: I’m having a chat with the former Olympian about a book. Oh about wins be featured in said book. So she reached out today actually was Shaline that she reached out. So that’s one of the things I will be doing. I can’t tell you the details of the book because I don’t know anything about the book yet.

So that’s hence the chat about the book. And then also having lunch with one of our partners that we work with just to talk about how. Uh, all things are going. They’re very happy. So we’re, we’re happy that they’re happy. And then obviously it’s Mother’s Day coming up on Sunday, so you know, the two sets of twins will be showing mother lots of love because without her, there is no us, as I like to say.

Chris: Quite right, too. Quite right, too. How about you, Shaline?

Shaline: Well, the event is on Saay, so I’ll be very happy once it’s finished. Very excited for that. Um, I’m sure it’ll be a fabulous occasion, so I’m looking forward to that. I’ve also got some birthday celebrations coming up. It’s my partner’s birthday.

It’s one of my best friend’s birthdays and it is also my son’s birthday this month, so got lots celebrating to do. So really looking forward to that. And kind of work wise, I’ve got a meeting with the chair of the NHS Tru Barts Health Trust, um, because I’m on the cancer board there. So I’m actually getting to meet the chair to put forward some of my patient safety partner, uh, recommendations because I I attend the boards every other month, so, yeah.

Chris: Well, this week, well, work-wise, it’s, it’s continues to be busy. I’m still work doing my, uh, client work and prepping for, so next week I’m off to Liverpool. It’s not somewhere I go very often, but it, uh, Liverpool, that’s where I’m heading for a conference called UCI a or it’s a group called UCI and it’s their conference and basically it’s a higher education technology.

Bash where we, you know, meeting lots of, um, again, we, we, we work for quite a few higher education establishments and in my travels around, I’ve met quite a lot of the CIOs and people like that from higher education institutions. So it’s, again, it’s another nice opportunity to bump into a few, um, old friends and, and meet some more and.

Uh, it is a really fascinating sector, right, because they’ve had a lot of problems, a lot of shocks in terms of student numbers, foreign students, the whole Brexit issue, Erasmus and, and of course they all expanded enormously in, uh, you know, 20 years ago. And, and they’re counting the cost. So it’s a, there’s a, it’s a, it’s a sector, which is really important.

Which is, you know, it’s got some, got its challenges, not that there’s not ways random, but it’s just, it’s interesting to see how you can help people sort of n navigate that. But again, can you help ’em work together? Can you help ’em find common things? So yeah, that’s a, that’s a nice event and I’m looking forward to that.

I,

Matt: fantastic. Well that brings us to the end of. The first show that Chris and I have done for the last two years, and, uh, amazing show, thinking about partnership. So, um, Shaline Chris, thank you so much for joining us this week.

Shaline: Yes. Thank you very much.

Matt: Uh, next week we’ve got another show, having not had a show for a few weeks, uh, there is a show next week, uh, we are going to be rejoined by, uh, the wonderful Anne Basca who runs a company called Data Orchard.

And we’re gonna be talking about their. Annual state of data maturity survey that we’re doing, which they’ve now got something like 20,000 different organizations have submitted information about how mature they are on the data front. Uh, it was published a few months ago. Ian’s gonna come in to talk about that.

It’s fascinating ’cause I’ve seen the report and there’s some really interesting insight into their I mean the overall picture is. Not many organizations are very data mature, but we will dig into that next week. So, hope you have a wonderful week and we will be back next week. I.

Kris: Thank you for listening to WB 40.

Shaline: You can find us on the [email protected]

Kris: and on all good

Shaline: podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show, Matt and Nick meet Alexander Feick, Vice President of eSentire Labs, to discuss his book “On Trust and AI” and why organisations need fundamentally different approaches to govern AI systems. Alex explains that whilst traditional computers multiply human intent predictably, generative AI acts more like an autonomous agent capable of creating its own decisions—something between software and people that requires new thinking about trust and verification. Using the example of AI-generated legal briefs with fabricated citations, he demonstrates why hallucination isn’t just a model problem but an architectural failure: when systems lack transparency, explainability, and alignment, organisations cannot verify the outputs they’re trusting.

Alex introduces the concept of a control plane—deterministic software and logging that wraps around AI models to verify outputs work-by-work. Instead of allowing AI to directly cite cases (which it could fabricate), the system only permits references to IDs in a verified database, creating verification breakpoints between untrustworthy model output and validated information. This shifts human work from production to verification, applying critical thinking and domain expertise to judge whether AI reasoning is sound. Alex argues that “when creation became free, trust became the product”—as AI makes generation near-costless, real value concentrates in verification systems. Organisations must ensure verification capacity scales with generation capacity, otherwise they risk producing “AI slop”: unverified outputs that erode trust and create liabilities rather than value.

You can read Alex’s book here: https://www.esentire.com/on-trust-and-ai/

Show transcript – automatically generated by Descript – below.

[00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 343 of WB 40, the sort of fortnightly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Nick Drage, and Alex Feick.

[00:01:08] Welcome to the first. February edition of the show and the first show that I’ve actually been involved with. So the front of house I’ve obviously for all of them, I am doing my devious work in the background to be able to edit the things. But this is the first time I’ve been on the show, uh, in 2026.

[00:01:29] And, um, I joined by co-host and also soon to be co-author Nick Drage. Nick, how the devil are you?

[00:01:40] Nick: I’m alright actually. How are you?

[00:01:43] Matt: I’m, yeah, I’m good. Having said that, I kept waking up in the middle of the night last night. I’ve got a little bit of a cold and as I woke up in the middle of the night, I thought to myself, I know what I can do.

[00:01:54] I can, in my head, I can rehearse. The talk that I’m giving in a couple of nights time in Nottingham which is gonna be the first or big public talk about randomness, which is the thing you and I have written the book about. And so in my brain, in my half, half awake, half asleep brain, I started to do my presentation and by about, by about slide three, I’d fallen back asleep again.

[00:02:19] And I don’t think this is really necessarily a good advert for the quality of the presentation I’m gonna be giving on Thursday, but you know. Apart from that, the reason why I kept working up as well though, is ’cause the night before I had the experience of what can only be described as the most tortuous user interface that there is on this planet, which is the, what happens when the backup battery in your smoke alarm decides that it’s not got enough power in it.

[00:02:49] And what it does is it makes a cheer up, very loud noise, but it does it in such a way that there’s a kind of. Improbable gap between them. And if you’ve got as many of the things in, uh, your house as I have, it’s next to impossible to know which one it is. But it’s really annoying. So it keeps, ’cause it’s designed to be annoying and they always go off, there’s a physics thing behind this.

[00:03:10] They always go off in the middle of the night because at the coldest point is the point where the batteries are least efficient, so therefore they will always be triggered. So two in the morning, I’m on a small step trying to not fall down 14 flights of stairs to be able to get the thing off. So just so apart from that, I’m fine.

[00:03:30] Nick: I thought you were making that bit up, but that makes sense. It does, doesn’t it? About batteries? About And also, yes, the interface is, the interface to them is horrible. I think it’s fair to say friend of the podcast, Dave Gray, who we both know to varying degrees, uh, had one in his, I think his basement where he does his video calls, online meetings, and.

[00:03:54] It was just, he didn’t know where it was in that huge, you know, sort the typical huge American basement. So we just all got used to it. There was just a beep sporadically in the video calls. He runs every week for something like three months and instead of one week, we all noticed, I think halfway through that it had gone and either, and I don’t think it replaced, but I think it was finally it’s died.

[00:04:17] Now, you know, your basement might catch fire, but at least you can have decent video calls.

[00:04:21] Matt: Uh, yeah. I, I, I need to look up at some point how many people are injured or killed through the process of having to replace batteries in the middle of the night. And then it’s the kind of having to shove screwdriver into the side of it.

[00:04:34] And the one literally at the top 14 stairs, and the way the builders installed it was the way you have to push it. The direction of push is down the stairs, so on a tiny little stair Oh,

[00:04:45] Nick: is the same.

[00:04:46] Matt: Yeah. Hal. So anyway, I think what I’m completely, there’s, there’s

[00:04:50] Nick: a, there’s a podcast in that, but not this

[00:04:51] Matt: episode.

[00:04:52] No, no, no, no. Absolutely. But all I’m concluding is I’m lucky to be alive and you’re lucky to have me here. There we go. Um, have you been up to anything other than risking life and death in the last few weeks, Nick?

[00:05:02] Nick: Oh yeah. ’cause I just suddenly realized, oh yeah, it’s the bit where you asked what I’ve been doing.

[00:05:06] Matt: Yes.

[00:05:06] Nick: That’s great. So I grabbed my work calendar and kind of. And I hope this sounds cooler than it is kind of, I can’t tell you, but as much as I can say ’cause of like NDAs and so on, is fighting an a well-known online chat platform and losing, let’s just leave that there. Helping develop and. Plan and soon we’ll be running a multi-agency war game, multi-agency exercise, which has proven really challenging, but really interesting, especially for use of LLMs, which we might get onto later.

[00:05:43] And just planning another exercise where. An industry is looking forward to what might happen politically in the UK in the next few years and is looking to plan ahead, which is really good to hear about, really interesting to be involved with. And, um, just an an interesting sort of business and research projects.

[00:06:02] All the times I’ve popped into this podcast and see things about the way war, professional war games and exercises might go. It looks like it actually is going that way. Finally.

[00:06:13] Matt: That’s good to hear. I was talking to some people at government department today in the current state of British politics.

[00:06:17] They were wondering what would be happening in the next week, not necessarily the next, you know, couple of years. I think the short term thing has come back forward. It’s like 2018 all over again.

[00:06:28] Nick: Well, I mean, we can’t, I haven’t looked to the news for like six hours, so we can’t comment. Even though you are led it this quickly and get it out in a couple of days, we, you know, we could be completely out of date,

[00:06:38] Matt: who knows?

[00:06:38] Nick: But anyway, anyway, so that’s, that’s, that’s where we are.

[00:06:41] Matt: Excellent. Alex, welcome to the show. Thank you for, uh, for joining us. Uh, uh, how’s the political state of, uh, ’cause you’re in, in Waterloo in, um, Canada. Are you in a state of relative calm? Is it total turmoil?

[00:06:55] Alex: Uh, there’s, there’s been a lot of commentary since Kearney did his, uh, his big speech which everybody of course followed domestically at home.

[00:07:02] But, uh, other than that not too much, I would say

[00:07:05] Matt: relatively calm. So

[00:07:06] Alex: we’re all kind of wondering to see what the follow out of that is gonna be.

[00:07:09] Matt: Yeah, it’s, um, it’s terrible when you have a quite volatile neighbor. I think that’s the best way to be able to puss it. Um, have you been up to anything interesting in the last week or so?

[00:07:21] Alex: Last week or so I mean, I’ve been just getting final stuff, uh, for the print copy of, of my book to come out. And, uh, I’ve been working on, uh, AI driven malware, reversing a little bit, exploring that. A few other things just with, uh, some of the soc flows and, and research arrangements coming through for work.

[00:07:38] So it’s, it’s an interesting time at work right now, that’s for sure.

[00:07:42] Matt: Very good, but you haven’t been having to battle things in the middle of the night that might have caused me a certain death.

[00:07:48] Alex: No, not so much. We had, uh, a bunch of coyotes and foxes around our house, uh, the other night that woke us all up with, uh, they were playing out in our yard.

[00:07:56] So that was interesting. But, uh, no, no smoke alarms. I did actually have my life, uh, saved by one of those, uh, a couple years ago though, like our carbon monoxide detector went off ’cause our furnace was backing. Uh. Carbon monoxide into the house. So,

[00:08:10] Matt: see, this is the story I need to be able to motivate me to change the batteries in these things.

[00:08:14] So thank you. That’s good.

[00:08:15] Alex: Yeah, it, it, it absolutely did save my life just a couple of years ago. So they, they, they do work and, uh. I’m very thankful that we had them installed with batteries and we didn’t leave them run for three months and then die. So

[00:08:27] Matt: Well that idea of staying with that, but I guess you do just phase this stuff out after a while anyway.

[00:08:32] We, we used to live on the flight path to Heathrow and it’s incredible actually how much noise and disturbance you can just zone out. In your life. But, um, there we go. Anyway, you mentioned your book. We are going to be talking about that and we are going to be talking about AI and trust and governance.

[00:08:49] So I think we should probably crack on.

[00:09:48] Nick: Okay, Alex. And we’re both old enough that we’ve seen tech technological changes and they’ve, they’ve become relatively familiar in their lifetimes. But what is it about? Generative AI or LMS or whatever definition you want to use, what about it? What is it about them that makes them different and require the kind of thinking that your book contains?

[00:10:14] Alex: I mean, if, if, if I think about it getting back to first principles, I guess it’s, if we look at what computers have been able to do so far, it’s all been essentially multiplying the intent of a person in a predictable, deterministic way. When you look at what some of the new generative capabilities are doing, they’re actually capable of creating decisions, right?

[00:10:35] Like you can argue whether or not you know, they truly have intent from a philosophical perspective, but from an actual business and trust perspective, you have to consider them agents that can invent their own workflows, come up with their own decisions. And so, they allow you to do a lot of things that previously were impossible within software, um, that used to have to be done by people.

[00:10:55] And so if you think about them from a trust perspective, you have to think about them both in terms of the software being capable of running at speed and scale. And also in terms of them being somewhat like people and that you actually have to look at the decisions that they’re making and what they’re actually deciding to do as being something that you have to secure on each individual call, because you can’t predict what they’re going to do with perfect accuracy under all data conditions.

[00:11:22] So it’s, I think for those two reasons at the, at the very lowest level, I’d say that’s, that’s kind of why you need to think about them differently from a security perspective, because they’re not really. The old computers of before, and they’re not really the same as people. There’s something that’s a blending of both qualities and you kind of have to think about that differently if you’re gonna secure it properly.

[00:11:41] Nick: Yeah, that’s an excellent point. Like the old problem with computers was that they will do exactly what you tell them, you know, regardless of whether it’s what you meant, what you type into the command line or whatever is what they’ll do or what files they’ll delete and so on. Whereas you say I really like the way you put that in, that they’re not.

[00:12:00] What we’re used to from computers, but also, and I think that point, the second point is key, is that they’re also not people. They’re this different third thing that we, as you might tell by how slowly I’m talking, like we struggle to find the right words and language to describe them. Um, so your, you’ve got a book that’s proposing solutions.

[00:12:25] What makes your work. Unique or noteworthy among so many people getting into this area right now.

[00:12:34] Alex: So probably the. I, I was trying to write a book that fit the need for business leaders to sort of understand what they could do with ai and help them understand sort of like the conceptual reasons why it was different and what they had to think about from a security perspective.

[00:12:50] Sort of from an approach of, of really like enterprise design and business first, and, and not really delving into the weeds. I think there’s a lot of like, really in the weeds technical books about the how. I think that there’s a lot of existential books that are like philosophy or, or, or sort of thinking about where this might take us, but there’s not a lot about how to practically lead a business through adopting AI in a way that’s safe for today.

[00:13:14] From, from sort of like a people and process perspective, and that’s really the core of what the book is about. It’s not so much about, you know, the, the technical specifications of, of models and, how, how you actually implement nist. It sort of talks about business architectures and how you can actually think through those problems as somebody who’s not necessarily in the weeds as a deep technologist.

[00:13:35] Nick: Yeah, it seems really, and I, I shouldn’t sound as surprised as I am. From skimming through it in preparation for this, it seems really practical, which as you say, is what a lot of authors have avoided because I think it’s easier to be hand waving and philosophical. But it’s easy just to quote, I mean kind of stat blocks about the technology that’s out there, which is always out of date by the time the authors put that together, whereas your seems more like a guide.

[00:14:08] Aimed at people who know enough to understand the, the content of the book. But, um, what’s your plan with regard to keeping it up to date in such a fast moving field? Is it, uh, well, rather than guessing, I’ll let you explain what’s the plan? What, when, as we were saying about British politics earlier, you know, as soon as you turn your head and look at something else, potentially you’re out of date.

[00:14:32] Alex: Yeah, so I do a, a, a couple of things. One, I’ve got some companion resources that are published on my website. So like, if you want to like, explore how the book intersects with something like nist ai, RMF I’ve put together something that analyzes the text and sort of, connects it. Um, I’ve tried to do the text as an AI agent as well as as a book.

[00:14:50] So I have sort of like an evolving set of commentary that’s that’s kind of coming on around. The, the topic online. But I think the other thing is when I was writing the book, I was really trying to go down to what are sort of the fundamental things that you need to understand about building a secure system around the ai.

[00:15:09] And I think that’s gonna remain relevant regardless of how things go with ai. Because at the end of the day, I think we’re always gonna have the question of well, what do we do with models that are both incredibly useful? But also something that we don’t feel comfortable trusting directly.

[00:15:22] How do we actually guarantee that? And so I’m not talking about technical specifics, I’m talking about patterns that you can use in order to build that up. And I think they’ll remain practical for quite a while. I think that, that we might scale back their use, but I think that the patterns for how we actually achieve transparency, explainability, and alignment, they’re gonna remain the same whether we’re talking about auditing a small sample or whether we’re talking about having to apply them every single time to critical decisions and they’re worth thinking through.

[00:15:51] Matt: There’s an example that you give in the book of, a legal brief being produced as part of a lawyer team and generative AI tools are used and it creates a very impressive, very detailed, very referenced output, but the citations are basically made up. Um, and you describe that as being. And you talked a moment there about it being architectural problems.

[00:16:22] You know it’s gone wrong because AI hallucinates, but architecturally what, what’s going wrong in an example like that?

[00:16:29] Alex: So I think those are, are a couple of failures there, right? So, in that sort of situation, if you think about a lawyer who’s asking it to generate a brief, if you’re not architecting your system right, there’s no transparency into what the AI was actually pulling and, and referencing.

[00:16:45] There’s no explainability about how it’s actually like justifying each individual thing that it’s reasoning about and using. And so it’s really, really difficult to answer the question about whether or not the system’s actually aligned with what it is. That you wanted to produce. And I think there’s a new type of knowledge work that’s emerging, which is around figuring out how do you make the cost of verifying something much cheaper than the cost to produce it by hand the first time yourself.

[00:17:12] Because AI can produce almost anything that you’re after, but if you can’t verify it, you can’t trust it. And we keep seeing these examples hitting the media. Like I was actually surprised I wrote the first, the boardroom pilot state study that I opened the book with was something where, um, that hadn’t happened when I started writing the book.

[00:17:30] And then by the time that I got to the point where I was releasing the first versions of the book, it had happened several times and had made media headlines around. So I actually got to quote it and cited in there, and it was much stronger. But I see those sorts of things happening all sorts of times in the businesses because.

[00:17:45] A lot of businesses mistake what it is that you mean by transparency and explainability, and they think that means that the AI should explain itself or that you should have transparency into the thinking process of the ai, and that’s not really it. What you want is transparency into what the AI actually looked at and did you want an audit record of the artifacts that it’s actually interacting with?

[00:18:07] And when you’re talking about explainability, you actually want to be able to review the reasons that it’s attaching for each decision that it’s making. And then decide if they’re actually worth following along with or not. It doesn’t matter what the model’s thinking internally. It matters what it’s touching and how it’s justifying what it’s touching and if that’s actually in alignment with what you’re after.

[00:18:26] Matt: Uh, and that feels like it’s quite a distance from what our expectations. It’s come back to your point about how, systems used to be predictable and so. Interestingly, on the one hand, we’ve got a whole bunch of assumption that has built up in culture of organizations around management and technology, which is whatever the computer says will be, right?

[00:18:46] And the only reason it won’t be right is because of either bad data or bad coding, but not because it, there’s a mistake. The stuff that comes out of LLMs by Design doesn’t fit that model because it’s predictive. So therefore it just, it’s just a completely different sort of information that’s coming out.

[00:19:06] The other bit’s interesting that I think that and this is something I’ve been observing for years now because it brings outputs that are almost humanistic in their approach. They’re producing pros, they’re producing long form text, which is something we. Or, or images. And those are things that we just simply haven’t expected computers to be able to do for many years.

[00:19:28] We also anthropomorphize them as well. So on the one hand, a computer should provide right answers, and on the other hand it should be seen as being human because it looks like a human, the kind of deep cultural level. There’s a lot of stuff that we’ve gotta unpick in organizations to be able to dispel both of those.

[00:19:47] I think.

[00:19:48] Alex: A hundred percent. And it also has societal ramifications because it’s, uh, you know, when, when computers can generate those sorts of things. And we previously thought that they could only be produced by people. We attach a level of trust to the things that are that type of content, and we haven’t yet learned as a society how we’re going to be able to trust those types of content.

[00:20:10] Now that they can be cheaply and easily mass produced by computer systems.

[00:20:15] Matt: And those, those trust things keep getting pushed a bit as well. So, I’ve recently got a new phone, one of the new pixel the Google ones and it’s got a hundred times Zoom on it. Now, the a hundred times Zoom is mostly software.

[00:20:30] It’s not through. Physics. ’cause I mean, the phone would be enormous if it could have that sort of size of Zoom on it. And so it takes a photo and then it uses ai and it’s, it’s transparent in saying it’s using ai, but it’s using generative tools to be able to make a fairly blurry pixelated image into something that isn’t blurry and pixelated.

[00:20:50] And it’s not reality.

[00:20:52] Alex: Nope. It’s, it’s, it’s entirely generated. And how do you. How do you handle that when, you know all of the media that you are looking at could be generated that way? You don’t know. And I think this is something that businesses really need to adjust to. I’ve I’ve, I have a whole section on that because I, I really believe that the value in most of the things that we are looking at nowadays is what is actually verifiable.

[00:21:19] And what we’re asking enterprises and businesses to do for us is to take something that we could probably generate for ourselves off of chat, GPT or, or Claude or some other tool, and make sure that it’s something that we can actually trust. And so if the businesses don’t get the trust portion right, then why is it that I wouldn’t just generate whatever they’re producing and selling me off of chat, GPT or, or Claude or, or one of the others?

[00:21:46] Matt: So. Think of that from a, a business rather than a technological perspective. You’ve talked about these sort of three pillars of transparency, explainability, and alignment. How does how does a leader in an organization even big begin to approach this though? ’cause this isn’t about, and again, this sort of, the established models are, we invest in some machines.

[00:22:12] We, we still think of technology as being mechanistic, even if it’s now producing cultural artifacts, whatever else. So what, what are the things that need to be done to be able to start making a shift in an organization so it can even begin to start to be able to deal with these things in a different way?

[00:22:33] Alex: So if I go back to that example that you were raising earlier with the legal brief I mean, at the end of the day we can all go. Read the contracts and make, come to our own conclusions about whatever it is that that was in them. But we could not get it right. And we could also, uh, go to chat GPT and we could ask it for a case brief and it could not get it right.

[00:22:53] So when we’re going to the lawyer, what we’re really going for is we want the lawyer to be basically saying, yeah, that this is solid. I’ve, I’ve reviewed this. You can take this to a judge. They’re not gonna, throw you out of court with it. And so in order to do that, I think what you actually have to do is think about how you can.

[00:23:10] How you can tell somebody. That this is without using an appeal to authority, that this is something that they can actually trust. And to do that, I think what you actually have to do is you have to show the reasoning process. And because that’s a new type of work that we haven’t done before, most businesses haven’t actually thought through what the software to support that would be.

[00:23:28] But I actually think it for almost every knowledge work. Job type that you have out there, you actually have to think about building a new system of software that’s optimized around that work that is now unique that only humans can do, that multiplies the value of the AI outputs that your business can generate.

[00:23:45] So in the case of the legal brief, you might want a system that actually takes the AI generated case and, you know, compares it to, to good law and jeopardizes all of the notes so that the legal reviewer can actually take a look and see. Where the AI is getting its cases, where it’s getting its reasoning, and then because they’re lawyers and they understand all of that stuff, they in, in the right ui, they can very quickly see if, if the draft is actually something that would pass muster in front of a, a judge or not.

[00:24:13] But if you’re just going straight to the model and you’re asking it to. You’re not using pointers to a database, you’re not thinking about the system of work to actually verify the output. You just get three pages of text. And the fastest way that you would be able to actually verify that as as, as a lawyer is basically go repeat the whole process of generating the case brief.

[00:24:31] And that’s the trap that so many businesses are running into is they think that, you know, they’ve got an AI that generates the case brief, therefore they must be almost there. And really that’s the first 10% of the trip. The next 90% is figuring out how you’re actually gonna be able to stand behind that and do that in a way that isn’t gonna cost you more than just doing it by hand in the first place.

[00:24:51] Nick: Isn’t I dunno how else to put this. Isn’t that horrible? I’ve not been involved directly and it’s much more. Matt and Chris’s area and the other co-hosts and our audience. But so what you’re saying is we don’t need sort of more investment or arguments about resource allocation. This is like a change in thinking and a change in processes, which is traditionally the absolute worst kind of thing to have to do within an organization.

[00:25:19] But this technology makes that essential. I think from sort of my general analysis, and especially from what you’ve said is a, there’s just a fundamentally different meta approach if that’s not too pretentious, but meta approach to how to make this work. Am I understanding that correctly and should we be optimistic or pessimistic about the ability of organizations to do that?

[00:25:46] Alex: I think it’s, it’s gonna leave a lot of organizations flat-footed and unable to shift. It’s gonna be really, really challenging for a lot of the established players. I do really believe that it is a fundamental shift of that magnitude, though. I think it’s, it’s it’s actually fundamentally changing.

[00:26:01] The boundaries around what’s possible to do with software, right? Conventional software gets you so far and this new type of software takes you through things that previously you could only do with people and every enterprise that you can sort of point to today that works in knowledge work is predicated around the computers, do everything the computers can, and then the people do what the computers can’t.

[00:26:23] And the way that I would look at it is, it’s sort of like the transition that accounting houses faced when we developed. PCs and, and modern spreadsheets. Previously, people operated with ledgers and you would employ an entire floor of accountants to add numbers together in order to audit books.

[00:26:38] And if you can’t adapt to the emergence of, spreadsheets and, and, and computing technology, I don’t think that you can still get by with the old processes and in the same way. I think that that’s, that’s a similar degree of disruption that we’re actually facing when AI’s hit businesses. It’s very hard to think through how the human roles have to change.

[00:26:58] It’s very hard to get it right. But everybody out there is, is sort of experimenting with this and, in, in a free market sort of situation, somebody will get it right and when they do, they’re going to disrupt your business. And that’s something that I think everybody’s sort of struggling with right now.

[00:27:13] Matt: I wonder if it’s actually even further than the, you know, the shift from accountancy on paper to accountancy in Lotus 1, 2, 3, and, and Excel? Uh, I was chatting to somebody recently that the evolution of power in manufacturing initially there was no power and everything was hand built. And then we had things like horses and then people started to realize that if you found a source of power, you could attach things to it.

[00:27:41] So, uh, rivers providing water power, and then you’d have these very complicated power distribution systems, which were involving pulley and axles and wheels and cogs and steam engines worked on that same principle with rubber belts and, and all of that meant that actually where the work happened was where the tools were and.

[00:28:08] Yeah, that meant that you would have factories where the distribution of labor was split by the type of task. So there’d be a drilling room and a sanding room. I don’t know anything about these things, but you, you know, the, the, you’d have a room full of the same machine, and then you would bring the product to the machine room to be able to have whatever it needed to happen next.

[00:28:27] Happened to it, then electricity came along and still the distribution of power was working on the same principle until people started to realize that gave you much more flexibility. ’cause you didn’t have the constraints of whirring axles and stuff. And then barring the fact that the Venetians got there in the 14 hundreds first when they’re building ships.

[00:28:49] But you had the production line model and at that point then you’ve kind of brought the machines to. The the product rather than the product of the machines. And that fundamentally with what Ford and Taylor did in the early 19 hundreds, that fundamentally changed the nature of machine work in an auto factory or in a carriage factory or whatever else.

[00:29:12] And then further, you know, automation and, and, but the, where we are at the moment. Is that we’re not even beginning to think about how the, the nature of the work needs to change to be able to take advantage of these new technologies because we’re so early into it, realistically with, with LLMs.

[00:29:33] But the, the, the changes that may well come outta that will be deeply profound because it will be that actually entire, entire ways of working will change, but probably not now or in the next couple of years. ’cause that’s what a change takes. 20, 30 years perhaps. And if you look at how we use, business technology, I’ve been working for 30 something years.

[00:29:56] When I started work in, uh, the early nineties, we had network file stores. We didn’t have the internet, the network file store model of how we share information within organizations. Even though it’s now all on cloud-based systems, if people use ’em at the Microsoft platform, it hasn’t really changed very much.

[00:30:12] Since the days of NT servers and Novo NetWare it takes a long while for that kind of human behavior change and, and organizational behavior change to catch up with the opportunities that technologies have got.

[00:30:27] Alex: I think to some extent That’s right. I actually think that AI is a little bit different in that though, because the thing that it’s actually optimizing is the type of mental work for actually enacting that type of change, and so.

[00:30:41] If you know what you’re doing and you wanna plan out a project for how you’re gonna change something. So like one of the things that we’re doing in, in my own organization is, um, we’re trying to think about how do we adapt security operations center processes and previously that would involve like, you know, getting interviews, figuring out what the processes look like, doing cognitive task analysis work to split all that stuff apart, redesigning the processes.

[00:31:04] You would be talking about you know. Armies of people coming in to try and take a look at that. We’re actually able to use AI within that process and now we can literally just have an interview with somebody over the phone and at the end of the interview, AI will generate for us a complete.

[00:31:21] A flow diagram of what that process actually looks like and allow us to actually like, review it and discuss it. And I’ve led sort of like some of those enterprise change processes before. And I would say that it’s, it’s easily possible right now to compress, six weeks of work into a 30 minute interview with some of the, the tooling outputs that you can actually get with this because you literally, you just have to verify that you’re getting it right.

[00:31:46] And the AI can do everything from listening to your conversation, to transcribing it into well-written notes, to transforming it into a project roadmap plan, giving you a process description, recommending how the software could look, and you need to verify every stage of it. But once you’ve actually got that, you can accelerate your way through some of those changes so much faster than you ever could before.

[00:32:08] Matt: And I guess that also those kind of planning processes. There probably isn’t a right answer. And so if you can accelerate yourself to a point when you can start actually doing the work to see what works and what doesn’t, you cut out a whole load of not only time consuming work, but also work that actually is just polishing the problem rather than actually trying to work out what to do next.

[00:32:36] Alex: Yes. Very much so, and you can do rapid implementations of prototypes in 30 minutes. Whereas previously, if you wanted to implement a prototype for something, you might finish up your call, talk about it for a few days, get a plan together for what you were gonna do, then go off to a small dev team spend two weeks coming up with a pilot.

[00:32:54] Now it’s interview. AI coding assistance quick review of the production code, test it in the POC sandbox, and you can be looking at, a new way of doing things in the span of an afternoon.

[00:33:10] I don’t think most of society is ready for it. I think the primary thing that’s gonna slow us down is cultural inertia. But the startups especially have enormous advantages on their side when they’re approaching this. And I see a lot of. Like little companies that, you know, may entirely fail, but there’s a lot of them that are out there and they’re all trying new things.

[00:33:28] So I think there’s, there’s definitely going to be a lot of disruption in a lot of spaces as a result of this over the coming few years.

[00:33:37] Matt: You also talk in the book about the idea of, uh, the control plane. Um, and essentially, I guess to an extent, kind of observability about this stuff and what, what’s going on.

[00:33:51] Can you just unpack that a bit?

[00:33:54] Alex: Yeah, so essentially what I think the limit is around ai and I spend a couple of chapters in the book sort of discussing threats and break points. But ultimately what I get down to the core thesis of the book is, look, you just can’t trust a model. Um, we’re not at a point where we can trust a model yet.

[00:34:09] We might never be at a point where we can fully trust a model, but that doesn’t mean it can’t do useful work for you. And so the control plane is the idea that in order to actually get value out of a model, what you need is a system of deterministic software and logging around what the model is actually producing for you.

[00:34:27] So that work product by work product, you’re capable of actually understanding what is what is this AI decision gonna drive? What is that AI decision gonna drive? And, that’s essentially what the, what the control plane is for all of that. So if you think about in the legal circumstance, you constrain it so that when the model is generating its output, it has access to a database of case law.

[00:34:50] And it can’t actually directly cite cases. What it can do is it can look up that database of case law and it can cite goid. And when it cites a goid into the response the software that is gonna be used by your legal reviewers will substitute that goid for the actual looked up case. So they know at that point that there’s a break point.

[00:35:10] They’ve gone from something that is untrustworthy, that the model could have hallucinated and made up to something that is absolutely 100% verified by software to be real. And that system of injecting those break points into the out point, or sorry, into the output, is what I would consider to be the control plane for the model and everything is, is, is how do you build that in a way that that scales,

[00:35:35] Nick: that just sounds really clever. Like, I’d like to say something more. Uh, I see Matt smiling. I’d like to say something deeper and more insightful, but just that. That way of working and that new way of working. And especially in that particular example you cite, I assume that means that someone over a, an overworked human can’t just say, well, that’s probably right.

[00:36:01] These are usually right. I’ll just pass that along the process. It’s like, no, I have to look this up to, to make it make sense to other humans. So you are, you’re forcing people to do that kind of work and it sounds relatively. Interesting. Rather than you’re just checking like the output of a machine. It’s more analytical than that.

[00:36:21] So you, you still

[00:36:23] Alex: have, I think, I think it’s not even that the person has to do it. Right. Like the, the control plane could do it for the person and it could actually tell the ai. Okay. The, the case that you cited for me, right? You gave me a goid for a case, and I went to go look up that goid and it didn’t exist.

[00:36:39] Fail. That model output gets rejected and the model has to generate a new one until it gets one that actually passes all the original checks. What the human’s doing is actually more valuable. The human’s gonna look at it and they’re gonna go, I know that case is real because the deterministic software told me it was real.

[00:36:54] The model is saying that that case can be used in this part like this. And if they’ve got all the, the stuff that they trust beside them, they can look at it and they can actually reason about what the AI is saying there. And they’re providing that judgment as a lawyer, as somebody who actually has the technical expertise in the domain to understand that argument and just weigh in on it.

[00:37:16] Yeah. That’s plausible or no, that, that, that, that wouldn’t make sense. That case doesn’t support that argument that you’re making. But it gets back to that core critical thinking skill. And I think essentially if we think about what people will need to be doing in order to be valuable in the modern knowledge economy, it’s not gonna be just producing rote task outputs anymore.

[00:37:35] It’s gonna be applying critical thinking skills to something that they’ve actually, gone and gotten the critic credentials to be able to say that they’re an expert in that field and they can work with it.

[00:37:44] Matt: There is though a, a school of thought that. Proposes that. The problem with that though is that how do you get the next generation of lawyers or other knowledge workers trained?

[00:37:54] Because actually the, the drudgy grunt work that is done by junior people, whilst not very high value, gives people the exposure to just the material, the content, the ways of thinking that through repetition eventually gets them to be the sort of person who could make the judgment of calls that you’re talking about.

[00:38:15] How do you, well, how do we break against that argument because it’s quite compelling.

[00:38:21] Alex: I have thought about that from a systems perspective. And the way that I would look at that is that if you build your control plane properly the human’s job is to verify. What, like the AI is actually producing the cases that are unknown.

[00:38:35] How do you keep the human sharp? How do you train the human? You would present them with cases where you know what the right answer is, but the human doesn’t because they haven’t seen that particular example before. And you would see if they actually get the right answer when you know it. So say you’ve got 10 lawyers.

[00:38:50] Three of them are senior and seven of them are junior and they’re all reviewing cases. The cases that come in that, that get the highest scrutiny, get a senior reviewing all of the arguments, who has the highest rated accuracy rating across everything? But juniors could be contributing to some of that work and, you know, for less risky decisions.

[00:39:11] And you could classify that in your control plane as to which decisions would go where you could shunt some of those cases to juniors. And you could also use the same system that you’re using for verifying. To train people on the skills that they will need to verify the more sensitive edge cases. And essentially, if you, if you think about it as, as sort of like a dial, that you could flip it, it’s like, you know the highest risk decisions that need to get verified by the most skilled professionals.

[00:39:35] Go to your most expensive, most senior people, and then the ones which are, lower risk decisions. You can shunt to some juniors and maybe you can do two or three juniors instead of a senior in a certain circumstance if, if there’s an enormous pay gap between them. But I definitely think that there are systems of essentially throttling the severity of the work.

[00:39:54] To, or sort of r routing, it rather not throttling it to the right person so that the highest risk decisions end up with the most senior people. And the interesting thing about that is that the whole system builds up training examples that you can use. And maybe it, it becomes a situation where we send some of those off to universities and we say, yeah, you’re training to become a lawyer.

[00:40:14] Here’s the system of verification that the, that the lawyers are using. Here’s some of the, the sensitive, decisions that could have gone either way. And you can get yourself comfortable with that. With a system of working.

[00:40:26] Matt: Interesting. Other than obviously get a hold of your book, which we’ll put links to on the, uh, the show notes.

[00:40:33] If somebody wanted to be able to start to think about the better management of trust within ai, what would be the first thing that they should start to look at?

[00:40:50] Alex: It’s a tough question. If they’re not sure about the consequences, I would say go into the business processes. And whenever you’re looking at, if you’re a leader and somebody’s bringing an AI project in, the question that I would ask is not could AI get efficiency outta this thing?

[00:41:05] I would ask the question, what is the worst thing that could happen to you if the AI. Made the most egregiously wrong or bad decision at this stage of it. And build your system accordingly. Because if you can show your customers that when AI is acting in a bad way, when the model’s been poisoned, when it’s been prompt injected, or when it’s been data drifted away from where it should be, that even under all of those circumstances, you can still show them how it is that they’re getting something that’s worth paying for.

[00:41:37] Then you’ve got yourself something solid and I would, I would probably start there and everything else follows from that.

[00:41:47] Nick: That feels like.

[00:42:52] Matt: Fascinating. And as I said, we will put links to, there’s a free online version of the book as well as the physical version you’re having produced. Is that right?

[00:43:02] Alex: Yep. Uh, that’s, that’s right. So anybody can read it online if they want to or play with it as an AI agent.

[00:43:08] Matt: Brilliant. We will, um, stick the links to that on the show notes.

[00:43:11] Um, so that’s part of the show where we work out what is coming up in the future, but not too far into the future. ’cause who knows? The next week ahead, Alex, have you got anything exciting coming up for yourself?

[00:43:23] Alex: I guess I, I got a few things I wanna try and, uh, extend the number of crosswalks that I’ve got for the book before the physical copy comes out.

[00:43:30] And then I also have some stuff, uh, to do at work around, uh, pulling AI into some more processes and, and using it to build workflows faster. So looking forward to that as well.

[00:43:40] Matt: Excellent. Um, and how about you, Nick? What’s the weak head looking like for you?

[00:43:46] Nick: I’m intending to get some personal game development exercise development projects done to an extent where I can share them with people, but I have a worrying feeling.

[00:43:57] That’s what I said the last time I was co-hosting, which I think was last year. So, so, so let’s see how that goes.

[00:44:06] How about you, Matt?

[00:44:08] Matt: Uh, well, as I I think mentioned earlier in on Thursday I’m up in Nottingham at the University of Nottingham’s Innovation Center to give a talk about randomness, which is the thing that you, Nick and I have been working on for the last two years. So I have got a bag full of props.

[00:44:25] I’m taking a dice with me. The first part of the presentation will be like a normal presentation. The second part will be. Driven by what? Is, comes out with a throwing of a dye. And then the third part will be people being given parts of the book to be able to talk about in smaller groups. So it is, there’s lots of stuff that I have not done before, which makes it quite exciting.

[00:44:46] And then, uh, the week after, ’cause I won’t be done doing a show next week. I’m going to goway with some friends for our annual Christmas dinner, which is always slightly delayed because reasons. But, um, there’s six of us heading out to Claire Goway, which is a small town, about 10 miles outside of Goway City itself.

[00:45:07] And we will be enjoying, I mean, given that the UK has apparently had not a single day without rain since the beginning of the year. I thought I’d go and escape the weather by going to West Coast of Ireland. ’cause that’ll be dry madness.

[00:45:21] Nick: Best of luck.

[00:45:22] Matt: Thank you very much. Anyway Alex, thank you very much for joining us this week.

[00:45:26] Some really thought provoking stuff.

[00:45:28] Nick: Thank you,

[00:45:29] Matt: uh, Nick. Always a pleasure.

[00:45:31] Nick: Thank you.

[00:45:33] Matt: And we will be back in a couple of weeks time. We’re back on a better thing now, and I think we will be talking about partnerships with Shalene and Chris which is really interesting. Very different tack, much more about people than about technology, but that’s how we mix it up here on WB 40.

[00:45:51] So until then have a great fortnight and we’ll be back with you soon.

[00:47:04] Alex: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast.com and on all good podcasting platforms.

On this week’s show, Lisa and Julia meet Emma Bruce, Software Engineering manager. The conversation explores the often-overlooked transition from individual contributor to engineering manager, examining why technical excellence doesn’t automatically translate to management success and what skills actually matter when leading teams.

Emma discusses the historical lack of training for engineering managers and how the role has evolved into a more scientific one, with greater emphasis on metrics such as cycle time, throughput, and flow state. The discussion covers the challenge of aligning diverse stakeholders—from business objectives to compliance requirements—and the importance of consciously deciding what to deprioritise when focusing on specific KPIs, such as time to market. The conversation also touches on whether non-technical people can succeed as engineering managers, provided they partner effectively with strong technical leads.

Show transcript automatically generated by Descript:

Lisa: Welcome to episode 342 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Julia Bellis, and Emma Bruce.

Julia: So it is great to be back here with you, Lisa. I think it’s been, well, this is certainly the first podcast that we have co-hosted in 2026. And to be honest. It was quite a way back, possibly in the summer 25 that we, um, did a double act. So it’s good to see you again. It’s been far too long.

Lisa: It’s been ages, hasn’t it?

It’s been, it feels like it’s been, last summer feels like a lifetime away and also feels like it wasn’t very long ago at all. But there’s been, I feel like there’s probably been quite a lot of things happening but. Bringing it back to slightly more recent times if we were gonna follow the format of the podcast, which also always is evolving.

What have you been up to over the last week or so? Last fortnight ish, maybe, or since last summer.

Julia: Wow. Um, let’s forget since last summer because I will just won’t stop talking. Possibly I have just come back from a really cool adventure. And, uh, I took Friday off work, got the train down to Pzi, and then spent three days walking from Pzi to Rye, which is, uh, a route called the 10 66 Country Walk.

Lisa: That’s really far, isn’t it? How, what’s the distance on that?

Julia: Yeah, it is really far. It’s very easy when you see it on a signpost and you go, oh, let’s do that. And then when you actually come to do it, it’s 60 kilometers. Day one we intended to walk 27 kilometers and we knew that was a big day because of various things happening and diversions and map reading fails.

It ended up being 35 kilometers, which was painful. We sort of, uh. Battle is very beautiful. Very beautiful. You know, the Abby and the Castle and the church, we staggered into battle after dark and I have never ever been so happy. To see the pub where we were staying and stagger up the stairs in my backpack on and collapse into bed, actually.

So yeah, it was a real adventure. Really good fun. So I’m glad I could come on the podcast and talk about it because I don’t often have such interesting weekends.

Lisa: I’m getting horrible flashbacks. When I was in Central Ambulance as a teenager and we did a 75 mile walk around Surrey over five days. But we had a similar thing.

The first day was the biggest day, but it ended up being a few miles longer than we were expecting. And it was just like, I mean, I was a, I was a teenager when it was hard enough, like I couldn’t imagine doing it now. So I’m in massive awe of you doing that.

Julia: I am quite proud of myself actually. Yes, I made it and then, then the next two days you were saying how time walks.

Distance warps when you’ve walked 30 K and you’ve still got five to go, that five feels incredibly long. But what about you Lisa? What have you been up to? I’ve

Lisa: been entirely sedentary, certainly in comparison. I’ve been, well actually no that’s not true. The last fortnight. So since the last podcast, ’cause I was on the first one this year with Matt.

Um, I had the color walk, although that’s not really a walk. It’s what? That, so the color walk is a thing that I do if I can make it work, allowing, it’s on the third Thursday of the month. And we go to old hospital fields market and meet up, and it’s on the flea market day and there’s between, normally between sort of 50 and 70 people wearing their most colorful outfits and all of your accessories.

It’s like the opposite of what Chanel would say. It’s like before you leave the house, put more things on.

Julia: Alright. Yeah, put everything on, but it is

Lisa: more of a pose than a walk like I did. It did mean I left the house. But we don’t go much further than around the market. If we do any walking at all, we sort of meet up and chat and there’s a big group photo.

But yeah, and I had a couple of events last week where I was at my desk, did a meet the author thing with my co-author and, um, the through, that’s

Julia: exciting

Lisa: talking about our book about accessible communications, which was nice. Um, it felt like the first joint thing me and Matisse have done for a while as well, so that was nice.

I was sitting here at my desk, and then I also did a, it was a session called the Intranet Hot Seat, where I was interviewing Suzie Robinson from Clear Box, talking about the latest report that’s coming out. Oh, I think this Thursday now. It is Thursday. The T, no, Wednesday the 28th, I think. No. Yes. Anyway, at some point this week it’s coming out and it’s this massive tome comparing intranet products that sit on top of SharePoint or independent to SharePoint and communications platforms.

And it’s something that I’ve been involved in over the last few years as an independent consultant. And we got to basically geek out about intranets. So that was also lovely in am midst actually doing some SharePoint stuff for a client. But

Julia: yeah, I’m quite impressed at your ability to geek out over intranets actually.

It’s quite

Lisa: niche. There’s not that many of us do.

Julia: We should find out more about that in future. How, how about you Emma? What have you been up to?

Emma: Um. A couple of, couple of trips to the home counties over the last couple of weekends. One to Bahe to see my, my mom and sister. Another one to Redding this weekend just gone.

And then, yeah, apart from that normal things during the week, but also I’ve been I sort of made the decision beginning of the year to, to look for another job. So I’ve been doing quite a bit of sort of research, trying to read up on, on various things and spending quite a lot of time kind of actually geeking out a geeking out a little bit more than normal even.

Just just trying to get my, uh, get myself sort of back up to speed with some of the things I haven’t used for a little while. You know, in advance hopefully for finding a, finding another job.

Julia: So this is really interesting actually. I think we could do a podcast on how to look for a job.

After a number of years, or even dare I say, decades in your career, you know, it changes, doesn’t it? And then. You’re doing it in a new way that you’ve never done before.

Emma: Yeah. And even the mechanism of actually looking so, going, I, I’m not a huge user of LinkedIn and every time I sort of log in, things have changed.

First time coming across any kind of AI agent, doing a, you know, having a conversation with an AI agent not actually an interview. This was, um, a recruiter that uses AI to sort of screen people. Yeah. And things change every time. I, um, I, I look and as you say, yeah, it’s, I think there’s an art to becoming used to, you know, getting back into the job market again after a while.

Julia: I had a slight anxiety pang actually when you were talking about AI agents. Crikey.

Emma: Yeah. It’s, and, and so, um. I wasn’t really sure what to expect. And actually it was quite interesting ’cause I found myself having a fairly normal conversation with this, uh, with this ai. And yeah, what it produced at the end was a pretty decent summary of my career, what I’m looking for.

All of those kind of things. What I would say is that in, in that case, and there’s a few different companies doing it, in that case they’ve then kind of not done a very good job of finding any roles for me. So it was a bit, it was, uh, maybe not quite as effective as I’d hoped, but yeah, I think, you know, there’s a, there’s a direction of travel and then some people seem to be even using AI for interview rounds.

And I’m not, I’m not so sure about whether that’s. Something I would sign up for.

Julia: It doesn’t say much for cultural fit or anything like that, does it, skill screening you can kind of understand, but then the interview’s a chance to get to know somebody and if you’re gonna delegate that to a machine.

Yeah.

Emma: Yeah, I, I would agree. And actually, you know, my role, I do an awful lot of interviewing from the other side of the table effectively. And I think. Every minute that you spend in an interview with somebody has a chance to learn more about them. And if, if you are gonna try and delegate that off to a, to an ai, they’re gonna miss the nuance.

They’re gonna miss some of the detail of and, and maybe not. E you know, sometimes asking the right question opens the interview up entirely and you. You find out a whole load more about somebody you wouldn’t have heard. And I don’t think I would trust an AI to do all of that. And also, you know, as a candidate it sort of says the company can’t be bothered to you, you know, spend somebody’s time for an hour to interview you.

And, and that’s not a great experience either.

Julia: No, I can imagine. That’s not a great first impression. Is it? Anyway, this is fascinating. We should certainly do a, uh, podcast on recruitment techniques, I think. But that is not what we’re here to talk about today, I believe.

Lisa: It might touch on that, but I think we’ll be looking at how roles evolve, how the, the differences between working as Matt’s favorite term, an individual contributor.

Or a team member, I think, as he prefers it, versus becoming a more senior leader, particularly in the tech industry. Just before we do jump into it on first impressions, I know this is audio only, but I need to describe for listeners. So. Julia’s cat has been joining us and looking very interested in the conversation and in the background.

We can see Emma’s office and I can only see three monitors from here, and I think that’s what, less than half of what’s actually in there. Um.

Emma: Yeah, there’s nine.

Julia: That’s impressive. This could be a record actually. Yeah, I think that’s more than Nick Jones. I get

Emma: told off those are the ones that are plugged in.

There’s about four or five more on the floor.

Lisa: Yeah, I think that is more than Nick and I think I would love you and Nick to meet Emma because I think just looking at each other’s offices, there could be a whole, not necessarily an episode, but you’d certainly have an interesting conversation.

Julia: That is one of the things that appealed to me about a career in tech about 25 years ago, was the idea of having loads of screens with stuff on it, and no one knew what it meant except for me.

Emma: Yeah. A little bit like the matrix with all the sort of gibberish on the screen. I love that aesthetic. Yeah.

Julia: It’s very appealing, isn’t it? Yeah. To a, if you’re in the right frame of mind.

Lisa: Yeah. Alright, well, shall we get on with it then?

So. I’m very excited about this conversation today. I’ve known Emma for a few years now, and. I’ve mentioned before my pub meetup that I set up a few years ago. ’cause I was sick of sitting on my own at home after working from home all day, not leaving the house and thinking I’d just like to go to the pub with some people.

And so we are four years into that meetup now and one of the many spinoff conversations that we’ve had from that, and as my friend Emma is here as testament to that. We end up talking about life, the universe and everything, but particularly recently we’ve been talking about the challenges and the differences between working within a team, working as part of a senior leadership team.

What those challenges are, what the different skills are, how you end up sometimes with the wrong people ending up in post, and how do people learn about it. You know, some people, my preference as a freelancer is I’m very pleased not to have line management responsibility, and I’m very pleased not to have several lines of line manager, although managing myself, I’m a terrible boss.

So thinking about, I know Emma’s got this incredible background in some massive tech firms and medium sized tech firms and financial services, and you’ve seen all sorts of the industry and you’ve kind of probably techier than the average woman, would you say?

Emma: Yeah, I guess so, but it, it varies. There’s some, there’s some others that you know are absolutely in awe of their skills.

Lisa: Oh yes, but um, I’m always fascinated. So also I can’t, did we mention it in the preamble in the recording or not? But Emma also has her own GE counter, which sometimes comes out on the table in the pub, which is incredible ’cause we’ve found that some things are slightly more radioactive than others as well.

Julia: So that must be so fun in the pub. Like

Emma: it’s, I think people don’t expect that for good reason ’cause it’s a bit unusual. But then, you know, suddenly everyone wants to become a radiation safety officer and goes around the pub checking for hotspots and things. Yeah.

Julia: What did what? Brazil nuts are highly radioactive, aren’t they?

I have been led to believe.

Emma: Yeah. There’s, um, various things have more or less than others. Uh, bananas are radioactive. It’s not like, it doesn’t set the counter off immediately, but if you sit the counter next to a banana for an hour or so, you’ll detect Yeah. Some this potassium in there that’s radioactive.

Julia: So cool. Have you had anything surprising in a pub?

Emma: The one thing I’m a bit n nervous of is that sometimes people are radioactive. And actually that’s something I, I don’t want to sort of, because, because if they’ve had some kind of a medical intervention, there’s a few treatments that doctors use that actually make you radioactive for a day or so.

And the last thing I want is to actually sort of. You know, have the thing go off crazy because somebody’s been, uh, had a medical procedure that they don’t want to talk about. So I’m quite careful not to, unless I’m sure that the, the, that there’s no one in that situation. I try not to, get it out.

But sometimes walking down the street, yes, it will go off and it’s because I’ve just walked past somebody.

Lisa: And I’ve had some, one of those procedures in the past, I had, um, radioactive iodine, and I was told in my, you know, I had to avoid small children and pregnant women. I was like, what would happen if I chained myself to a school?

I was trained to be a teacher at the time and the doctor looked at me a bit bit. Bit bemused. Um, and he is like, oh, just get a slightly unnecessary x-ray. There’s nothing more than that. So, um, I was hoping that it’d be much more interesting than that was, but yeah.

Emma: Yeah, it’s like, it’s like getting a dentist x-ray.

It’s not dangerous, it’s just, it’s best to avoid radiation if you can. But it’s not a dangerous amount.

Julia: Do you know when I was very young, maybe, well, 12 or so, my grandma had all these old STR magazines from the early 19 hundreds and in one of those was an interview with Mary Curie. I hope I’ve got my dates right.

And it was of an era when, you know, they knew absolutely nothing about radio activity. And I, as a 12-year-old read it and was ho horrified that they were, carrying this highly radioactive stuff around someone in his breast pocket took it home as a souvenir and, um, yeah it, it was a really eye-opening read about how much we had advanced in the.

80 or 90 years that it elapsed. I, I’ve forgotten my Mary Curie timelines, I must admit.

Emma: It’s very interesting. She’s a hero of mine apart from anything else because, you know, absolutely brilliant women in science and there wasn’t a lot of them that got fame back in those days. Um, but yeah, you’re right. I mean, and a lot of what we know about radioactivity is because of.

Things that she did. And, but certainly we didn’t realize quite how dangerous it can be until, after she died. And unfortunately part of the reason she died early and her husband, if I remember correctly, also did, uh, was because of the exposure they had. And apparently Thomas Edison convinced himself that x-rays would improve his eyesight.

And so he would actually sit in front of a high power x-ray machine with the thing switched on. For way too long and it had the opposite effect of what he wanted, but you know, at the time they just didn’t know.

I feel like, oh

Lisa: my gosh.

Emma: We, we, we are going off on a tangent, and this is my fault.

Lisa: I’m very sorry. It’s not your fault at all. I took us entirely down this route. But, um, thinking back then to learnings in the modern workplace, modern being, whatever your definition of that is, but thinking about, so what’s your background, Emma?

What kind of work do you do?

Emma: Shall I talk about where I started or what I’m doing now or maybe a bit of both? Yeah, a bit of both. Okay. Um, so, um, I, I guess I, I didn’t train, I didn’t actually study computer science, but I was always really interested in, in computer science when I was a kid and any option, any opportunity I got, I studied physics.

Any opportunity I got to do some software engineering, I would, I would take, my first job out of university, I joined IBM as a as part of their graduate scheme. Absolutely amazing scheme with lots of incredible training. Also them pushing you towards some slightly obsolete technology. So I learned COBOL and even used for a while.

And then so, I worked as an engineer in a few different places. Then I think we’ll talk in a second about this sort of moving to management winding forward a little bit. My current role, um. Um, head of engineering, and I’ve been doing that for the last, uh, three roles that I’ve had. Generally now I’m managing managers as opposed to sort of directly managing engineers.

So, of course my role is, you know, I’m, I’m interacting with engineers all the time. I’m involved in decision making and, and things that they do. But for me now, it’s on a slightly sort of bigger scale. Current place I’m working nine teams that I manage with a variety of engineers from a variety different backgrounds.

So actually not just one type of technology, a quite a few different things all in the same area.

Lisa: I. Nine teams. I cannot, I cannot imagine managing nine people, let alone nine teams of people. And that’s quite, that must be quite a challenge in terms of. I dunno how much, how much of your day job is now technical Have you been, when was the last time you, I’m also not a co or an engineer, so I use, I tend to use words in a way that infuriates people to actually do it.

’cause I, I play fast and loose with the definitions, but yeah. When was the last time you got your hands on sort of techy stuff in your job?

Emma: In terms of actual coding, not in this job. My previous job, I, yes, I did do, I did do a bit partly because something came up that I. Used to you be an expert on technology, though, it’s, it’s interesting ’cause at the level that I’m at it’s usually now it’s more about we want to use a different technology or we want to standardize on something and being able to sort of evaluate like, I don’t know, maybe AWS versus Azure as a cloud provider.

There’s, you need to understand a little bit about the. Quite a lot about technical things to make those decisions. So, so my kind of involvement is more on that level now rather than actually coding by myself. But at home, yeah, I, I still do quite a bit.

Lisa: And did you say the other day that you’ve also been working on building your own LLM as part of that tinkering?

Emma: Yes. That’s one of the things I’ve been doing since Christmas, actually. Yeah. Uh, it’s. But I feel like I’ve been, I use AI in my role. I’ve been using it quite a bit in, in a variety of different ways, but I looked into it many years ago and haven’t really gone on, looked under the covers for a while, so I felt that, yeah, I, I need to understand more about this.

Uh, so yeah, I’m, I’m building something. It’s. Based on an early version of chat, GBT. And it run it’s, I’ve not finished it yet, but it will run locally on a laptop so you can actually kind of play around with it, see how it works, do different things, see what changes, that kind of stuff.

Julia: So does that mean you get to curate the sources that go into.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. So you can, so you can kind of feed it any source material you want. The limitation is that there’s a lot of compute, and I think we all know that that’s one of the things about AI that is somewhat controversial because there’s a lot of energy, a lot of water used. But if you’re running it locally, yes you can.

I think one of the things that, you know, for example, if you. Wanted to make something that is an expert in a particular area for your business. If you’ve got a lot of documentation about how things work, you can use that as a training material and it will start giving you half sensible answers, hopefully.

Julia: Have you seen, have you, have you got that? Feedback loop going yet, or

Emma: I’m not all the way to the end of it, so I haven’t, and, and I think it’s a great question because one of the things I was wanting to do was actually try and run it with some different source material, just see how good or how bad it actually works out to be.

As with all of these technologies, you need to do a huge amount of training to, to get good results. And I suspect that when I get to that point, probably. There, I won’t have enough material about the topic to be able to really train it properly. So it, you know, it may end up not doing all that well, but yeah, I’m fascinated.

I, I really want to get to the, to, to that point and figure out what, what happens.

Lisa: I would happily test with that, test that with you, because I did some work. Wibbly wobbly time. I mean, beginning of last year, I think for a company who had done pretty much that they’re a little bit ahead of you, they’d built on an old version of Chatt PT, they’d built an internal, lLM, forget the word they wanted to use for it. They were, they kept putting me up on my use of terminology, but actually I think, I think I was more accurate than they were at the time. So that was quite interesting. There was a, there was a real, I really appreciated that they were experimenting and trying stuff out, but.

Somebody at some point had put in, and I’m assuming it was part of some demo training stuff. Some like fake org charts. ’cause when I asked, I I, I wanted to understand what a good prompt would look like because they wanted to encourage employees to use it and test it out. And so I tried a few prompts that.

Seemed to be a, a good prompt. And one of them, when I asked, when I asked who the CEO of the company was, it said it was the deputy product manager. And doubled down when I asked and gave me a, a completely fabricated history, how long they’d been working in that role for what their previous job was there.

And it was fascinating how. Despite it having been trained on, and they’d gone through the whole rag process and upload and made all of these different profiles so that it would only look at certain information. I don’t know where it got poisoned, whether it was, but it was fascinating that it nev They never quite got it working while I was there.

They, it did some things. Pretty well. But if you asked it to do any kind of fact-based recall, it just made stuff up. It filled in the gaps and completely fabricated it.

Emma: It’s interesting because the way this works is the way you train language models is you give it an incomplete sentence and say there’s a missing word.

What do you think it is? And then you, you know, it will have a guess at what the word should have been. And then you run through that. Millions of times, and eventually it gets to the point where it can accurately guess. It uses the previous results to sort of figure out was I right, was I wrong? But actually part of the way they work is guessing things that’s built in.

So if you ask it something, it doesn’t know it, it will have a guess, and quite often it won’t get the right answer.

Lisa: I’m enjoying this and I realize that we’re sort of tangenting again. So thanks listeners. This is one of our conversations in the pub. Yeah. But yeah, so going back then to the kind of different skill sets that’s needed for managers in engineering teams or sit managers of engineering teams, if not in them, what observations have you got from.

By seeing yourself going through that process, but also seeing others around you. Yeah. Um, and I

Emma: think it’s before I even considered management and in fact I, I would class myself as a reluctant manager when I first started to do it. I really I wasn’t, it wasn’t something I volunteered for and part of the reason was because.

Back in those days being a, a, a, this dual track of careers for technologists where you can keep going as an ic, you can become more and more senior. The idea of having, you know, a principal or a distinguished engineer didn’t really exist. And so the way things worked in a lot of companies was you would get to a certain level.

Probably around senior engineer, maybe lead engineer today. And then if you wanted to go any further, you would have to convert to being a manager. And so there was almost this sort of roadblock in your career. And so before I even went through the process, I knew a lot of managers who had.

Done that previously and started managing, and they were great engineers, but they were pretty awful as managers. And so my experience of, of people being managers in engineering was there’s a load of people who are not very good at this, and I just kind of, assumed that’s what would happen to me if I ever considered it.

Um, so that actually put me off for a while. Then, as my career developed, I was given the opportunity and, and I, I only really wanted to try to do this if I was able to continue, with the engineering side of my job. So I, I kind of dual hatted for a while. I was managing a small team, but I was also an engineer.

And that went better than I thought it was going to. Uh, so. Uh, you know, I, I kind of developed onwards from there, but at the time there wasn’t really any any training on how to be a good manager. And that showed because there was a lots of people who weren’t good managers, as I say. So it did feel like it was kind of, I, I was about a bit in the dark about how to do things and I was having to sort of listen to people that I worked with, uh, and, and also people that had gone through the process before.

Lisa: And thinking about, you mentioned there wasn’t much training then. Is that something that you think’s developed more now? I know we had, we’ve certainly had people on the podcast and I know Michelle, it’s something that Michelle does to an extent as well as one of our co-hosts. So have you seen that change in the last several years?

Emma: The, it has changed. There is definitely more training available and there’s also more more introspection in management, in managers that people looking at what, what defines a good manager what do you look for? Um, so that happens more. I don’t think it’s done universally. I think there’s still pockets out there where people are they’re managers, but they’re not all that good at it.

So I, I, yeah, I don’t think it’s universal.

Julia: Well, it is such a different skill set, isn’t it? You know, to be a brilliant engineer, you are almost, um, relentlessly focused on elegant code. And to be a manager, you need a much wider lens, and you know that, or what am I trying to say? That sort of single focus.

Detracts from your ability to keep on top of everything that’s going on.

Emma: Yeah, absolutely. I think you have to be somewhat of a generalist as a manager. And yeah, as you say, a lot of engineers that they, they do like to focus on a single, single thing people skills. Um, as an engineer you can, you can get away without great people skills, though.

It’s the sort of thing that. It will trip you up eventually. But people skills, you know, there’s a lot more emphasis on people skills, of course, as a manager. And yeah, as you say, it’s a totally different type of role. And I think it, it’s always surprised me that there was this assumption that a good engineer would turn into a good engineering manager.

And I don’t think there’s any reason to think that’s true. But we still, back in those days, that’s what everybody did.

Lisa: Do you think there’s an opportunity career pathwise for non-technical folks to come in to be engineering managers then? Is that something you’ve seen? Does that work? Yes,

Emma: I have seen it.

And it does work. There is so just thinking about the sort of things that, that that an engineering manager does. So certainly the sort of the more pastoral care helping people with their career progression. That side of things, people can be amazing. If they even, without the technical background.

The area where people doing that can find it a little bit more difficult is where you as an engineering manager have to be able to look at what your team is doing from a technical perspective and say, does this. Does this make sense? Are we going off in the wrong direction? Some of it is somewhat formulaic.

So if there’s, for example, if you’ve got a strong technical strategy in your company are we following the tech strategy? Is, is kind of a yes no question and you can, you can sort of answer that, but other times there’s things come up which you need a certain amount of. Engineering knowledge to be able to have a good opinion on it.

But when I’ve seen people do this, they can be very successful if they are partnered up with maybe a strong lead engineer who, can bring that side of, uh, you know, bring that expertise to the table from their side.

Julia: Yeah. They need to be able to acknowledge what they don’t know and trust that somebody else does know it, don’t they?

Lisa: Gosh, you’ve just given me we, it is not quite the same, but thinking about when you get to, if you’ve ever worked or done a contract in the civil service, when different ministers come in and they’ve got ideas on how that department should be run and when you. If someone’s got quite a strong agenda, making sure that they’re able to actually listen to the civil servants who are advising them and trying to get that relationship.

I feel like that managing upwards thing is quite an important, I mean, it’s quite an important skill to have at any level, but when you get more senior, that managing the other way as well must be quite a. Challenge, I suppose.

Emma: Yeah, it, it, it is and I think it, and it depends on the people around you.

But yes, um, having, being able to influence in, in, all sorts of different directions influencing peers is also important because. Quite often, bigger pieces of work, you end up having to work with people from different areas, they may not, may not want to help you all that much.

So influencing them, influencing upwards in terms of direction of company direction, engineering direction. Are they. Paired up or are we kind of diverging? So yeah, the there’s quite a lot of different things you, you need to be able to do. And, and again, these aren’t necessarily the sorts of things that you would learn being an engineer,

Lisa: something that

we were. Considering the other day, and I know I did a brief stint as a product manager in the past, and I think that’s also your background, isn’t it, Julia?

Julia: Well, yeah. I switched from being a programmer. To a product manager. Were

Lisa: you a programmer as

Julia: well? Yeah. Yeah, I did vb, C plus Java, all that old school stuff.

No. COBOL though.

Lisa: You didn’t miss out, you. Something that I found quite interesting. So I went into product from being a non-tech. Like I’ve always been interested as a sideline as well in tinkering, but I’ve never really done code. I remember having one job where it said I had to write HTML and CSS for a web manager job, and I did a tiny bit of jenning up and the night before my interview.

And it’s clear that they just put it on the job description as a ’cause They didn’t know what they needed either. So that’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to tech. But I, what I found when I worked as a product owner is that I ended up basically managing Jira. Base, like all of the work I did was trying to push work through an approval process, prioritizing a Jira backlog, and then convince it, like listening to various stakeholders and making sure that what we were, what our team were doing.

Was the right thing and I found it internally du as someone who likes to do a bit of everything. It was in a massive organization and my role was very specific and precise. I had very clear boundaries of what I could and couldn’t do as part of my role because I was a tiny cog as part of a massive machine, and I feel like it’s a challenge.

In that organization, there was a bit of a challenge between what the product team were doing versus what the business needed versus what customers needed versus what financial compliance needed. How do you marry up those different challenges with stakeholders and get that balance? Yeah,

Emma: it’s so I think.

They used to be a sort of a non pretty unscientific. It was something that we didn’t, you know, it, it would, people would knew what we wanted to deliver, but actually it was a, a bit fuzzy the process to actually to actually deliver it. I think being an engineering manager has become a lot more scientific recently in that we kind of try to measure things more than we ever did before.

And so, you know, in terms of keeping, making sure that the engineers are doing what makes sense for the other stakeholders agreeing what kind of KPIs you want to, you want to go after. Making sure that, okay, if we, and a conversation I’ve had recently is around, maybe time to market is something you want to, you want to go after because from a business perspective, you can, there’s value that you can have if you are first to the market with a, a new product, for example. And then how, as an engineering manager, one of the things you need to do is say, well, okay, now I know that time to market is what we’re going to do, what we’re going after, and it’s the biggest value and biggest impact.

Um, how do I pivot the team? To do something that translates into a, an improvement in time to market. And but that process of agreeing, first of all, what is it we want to go after? And, and having everyone, all the stakeholders in the room, non-technical as, as much, a very important in this uh, and, and then, then the engineering team can kind of take some of that and, and run with it once, once you’ve got that agreement.

So I think. And then within engineering you would probably have other things that you watched because some of these things like time to market, it’s a lagging indicator. It takes a while to filter through. So you may say, well, I won’t know if I’m successful for three months. So perhaps, um, I would have other things that I look at in terms of measuring, measuring how much you know, the flow state of the engineers. There’s a few, a few things like cycle time throughput, how quickly people can get things into production or, or staging. So you might look at those and say, okay, if. If engineers are actually able to push changes through quickly and they’re not being blocked, then that will translate into a better better KPI outcome.

So I think another thing, yeah, that, that has changed since I started doing this as a manager is that we, we try to be more scientific than we were before, though there, there is still sometimes where it’s not as, maybe not as scientific and an analytical as it as it should be.

Lisa: Does that, I want to ask that question back to Julia as well. Does that echo your experience?

Julia: Yes, massively actually. I was thinking the joy of being a product manager with an engineering background is that you can work with developers to, build in where appropriate, depending on what the organization’s going for.

But just things like sustainability and not doing something crazy just because somebody powerful has asked for it, you know, you can form a useful coalition. And then the other interesting thing is. Knowing what your trade offs are, you know, if you’re going forward, time to market, to use them as example, you can consciously deprioritize other stuff and say, we are gonna do this as fast as possible and knowingly create a number of problems for ourselves, which we will fix once we’ve beaten all of the competition to get this to production.

And you can just, yeah, be a bit more strategic, but creating that alignment. Is not easy, especially in large organizations.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah it’s such an interesting conversation. When you try and create that alignment and having done it a few times, quite often people you’ll have maybe four or five people in the room and they’ll, there’ll be four or five different opinions.

But that says something in itself. It means that you are not aligned today, by the end of the process you need to be. So even just having that conversation does some good. You can see it might be that people from different parts of the business have different things that they think you should go after.

And I, I’m sure there’s good reasons for each. And actually sometimes it, it can be a very, it goes up to quite a senior level within a company to, to make the decision because it’s like, we are investing money here. What do we actually want to achieve as a company? But it’s an important conversation to have.

Lisa: Ooh. I feel like alignment might end up being the title for this episode. I feel like that’s one of the themes that’s sort of come out as we’ve been talking because actually getting everybody lined up, you know, it’s, there’s so many processes and different ways you can do it and different formulas that you could follow.

But yeah, ultimately it’s about getting everyone to agree. In the time you’ve got,

Julia: well, there is something about knowing what you’re going after and then you can stop trying to be all things to all people because you’ll never do anything. Well if you try to do everything and focus on what you really want to be the best at.

Emma: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, what you said a second ago, Julia, is, is so true that once you’ve got, once you’ve got the agreement of like, we, this is what we’re going after, some things will fall by the wayside because we don’t have an infinite amount of people and, and resources to to do everything.

And actually doing that consciously is so much better. So saying like, okay, we are not going to do projects X, Y, and Z or, or, or deliveries X, Y, and Z. And yeah, just be very transparent about that. It’s like that doesn’t get us to where we want to be by the end of the time period, so we’re not going to be doing them.

Julia: So the irony is a massive part of this job is communication and to resort to cliches. You know, the sort of people who, uh, start their career wanting to write code. It’s a great excuse to not have to communicate, isn’t it? You know, you, you communicate with a machine that does exactly what you tell it to do, um, and then suddenly people don’t do exactly what you tell ’em to do in the same way.

Emma: Yeah. Most of the time.

Julia: Yeah. And that’s a bit of a shock. Yeah.

Lisa: I feel like on that bombshell,

I always, always love these conversations, and I feel like it’s. If you’re still listening to us, thank you so much. You’ve basically been eavesdropping as if we’re in the rusty bucket in Elton. I’ve been very much enjoying this session. Speaking of pub meetups this week I have, we have a meetup on Thursday at the Green Goddess, uh, which is our first power o’clock of the year at the Green Goddess in SC three.

I’ve also got, an early morning workshop with pod friend Mark Earls on Wednesday. Talking about, actually, I’m not quite sure what it is about. It sounds really intriguing and getting together with some really interesting people. ’cause Mark knows some really interesting people. So I’ll be up early in, in East London for that on Wednesday.

I’ve got a couple of other things going on this week, wrapping up some more SharePoint stuff, talking to Matisse about some book things. But what are you up to this week, Julia?

Julia: In fact, I am now working more closely than ever with fellow WB 40 host Matt Ballantine. Ooh. So he is running a workshop on Thursday that I am attending where we are attempting to get some sort of alignment, some sort of strategy fits in quite nicely with what we’ve been talking about actually in the work that we are both doing as our day jobs.

So, um, I’m quite looking forward to that. Okay. That should be good fun.

Lisa: Recovering this weekend, not got another 50 kilometer walk planned.

Julia: No. I might attempt park run and my, I do like park run. I do park run quite often in the summer I speed up ’cause I go running in the evenings and then in the winter I never go running apart from on a Saturday morning park run.

So you can just see my times getting slower and slower and slow. So I’ll do a. Slow park run instead. And actually I do it with my friend Karen, who’s the one who provides the impetus and we sort of chat and jog as we go around. So that’s quite nice.

Lisa: Emma, what have you got coming up in the next week or so?

Emma: I’m looking forward to joining you at, uh, the pub o’clock meet on Thursday. That will be fun. Yay. I’ve got some holiday actually, I carried over from the end of last year. So I’ve got a few days and I think, um, I’m. Thinking I might take a, a last minute break and go somewhere. I haven’t decided where, probably not very far, but and

Julia: oh, good skills.

That’s exciting.

Emma: Yeah. A mystery holiday. Yes. I say probably not very far at all. Maybe somewhere in Kent. There’s some nice places to go out there. And yeah, hopefully make some more progress on this LLM that I’ve been writing that we were talking about earlier. And hopefully next time I.

I, uh, talk to you. I can tell you a bit more about how you train them and whether or not they hallucinate when you do.

Lisa: Oh, lovely. And if you’re gonna, if when you get there, write it up, we’ll happily share it as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely. I look forward to it. Yeah. Wonderful.

Great.

Emma: Thank you for listening To WB 40. You can find us on the [email protected] and an all good podcasting platforms.

Julia: So normally this would be the point where we, uh, give you a great hook to come back and listen to our next episode. However, we are not entirely clear who our next guests are gonna be. There you go. It’s a surprise. We’re just gonna invite you to come back to listen to episode 343 of WB 40.