This week, a special crossover episode: Jimmy's Jobs of the Future meets What We Don't Know.

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What Washing Machines Teach Us About Leadership | Navjot Sooni & The Washing Machine Project

Nav describes being raised by his mother and sisters after his father died when he was eight, early leadership roles encouraged by his mother, and values of Sikh seva and Jugaad problem-solving.

After working at Dyson, he quit to work with Engineers Without Borders in India, where he met Divya, whose lack of electricity and running water inspired him to create a manual washing machine. The patented flat-pack Divya machine saves 75% of time and 50% of water, has impacted over 100,000 lives, won Time Invention of the Year, and is scaling with partners like Whirlpool and JCDecaux, aiming to reach 1 million people by 2030.

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Joe Garner (Ex-CEO Nationwide) on Leading Through Crisis, Values-Driven Culture & Sustainable Performance

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Women in tech, AI bias, gender inequality, and the future of work

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Ravi Gurumurthy on Leading Nesta: Missions, Policy, Experimentation, and Intrinsic Motivation

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Hetti Barkworth-Nanton on Humility, Purpose & Leading Through Trauma | What We Don’t Know (Eden Project)

She traces formative influences - rural upbringing, her father’s death, early lessons on commitment, and being “spark spotted” into senior roles at British Airways, including being the “Project God.”

Hetti describes the murder of her friend Jo Simpson, resulting trauma therapy, later breast cancer, and how these experiences drove her campaigning, founding the Joanna Simpson Foundation, and her leadership at Refuge amid controversy and difficult board decisions.

Key lessons: systems thinking, curiosity, resilience, boundaries, and humility.

Chapters

Credits:

Producer: Sunny Winter

Producer: Thuy Dong

Producer: Jimmy McLoughlin OBE

Have thoughts or questions? Email us at [email protected]

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Andy Haldane: Crisis, Opportunity & Rebuilding UK Skills | What We Don’t Know

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Lord John Browne on Engineering Thinking, Leading BP, Climate Risk, Negotiating Putin & Coming Out in Business | What We Don’t Know

Welcome to What We Don't Know with Matt Brittin & Hayaatun Sillem. 

Matt Brittin is the former President at Google EMEA. After 18 years at one of the world's biggest companies, he stepped down, took a gap year, and recently became the Director General of the BBC.

Dr. Hayaatun Sillem spent a few years leading the Royal Academy of Engineering and was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. 

This is the show about better leadership in a truly chaotic world. 

Across the series, episodes are joined a range of other leading figures, bringing different perspectives to each conversation.

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In this episode of What We Don’t Know, Hayaatun and Matt sit down with Lord John Browne.

He discusses how he describes himself as a businessman, author, and above all an engineer, explaining how engineering training shaped his systematic approach from writing to boardrooms and science. 

He reflects on childhood habits of dismantling clocks, the importance of proper tools, and his early life at King’s School Ely and Cambridge, influenced by a soldier father and a Holocaust-survivor mother who stressed self-sufficiency and looking forward. 

Browne recounts joining BP in 1966, learning about unions and refinery work, and formative engineering experience on Alaska’s North Slope, including early computer optimization work. He describes leadership lessons from Stanford Business School—purpose, inclusion, listening, and negotiation—and his path to becoming BP CEO in 1994, reorganizing BP around customer-oriented business units, and addressing climate risk through internal analysis, methane reduction, carbon pricing, and renewables.

He shares negotiation insights from dealings with leaders including Putin, Gaddafi, and others, then explains writing The Glass Closet after being outed in 2007 and arguing for workplace environments where people can be themselves, with safety and pragmatism. 

00:00 Intro

01:38 Taking Things Apart

02:50 Joining BP in 1966

03:15 School and Rowing Days

05:06 Parents and Upbringing

07:41 Lessons From His Mother

09:22 Early BP Apprenticeship

11:41 Alaska and First Big Break

15:10 Stanford and Learning Leadership

19:50 Becoming BP CEO

24:18 Rebuilding BP and Climate Wakeup

28:51 Oil And Climate Reality

29:44 Speaking Up On Climate

31:10 Negotiating With Putin

35:39 Hard Lessons In Dealmaking

37:19 Writing The Glass Closet

39:09 Being Outed As CEO

44:05 Inclusion With Pragmatism

45:48 Resilience And Reinvention

50:25 Optimism And Future Tech

52:44 Speed Round And Farewell

Credits:

Producer: Sunny Winter

Producer: Thuy Dong

Producer: Jimmy McLoughlin OBE

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Leading Through Uncertainty: Clarity, Vulnerability & Decision-Making in a Chaotic World | What We Don’t Know

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Awards, AI, Co-CEOs & Loyalty | What We Don't Know Watercooler

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