The Human Behind the Bio
In the other pages on the site, you can find out what value I add for clients. In this section, I offer some more personal insights into me, my thinking and influences.
Young twin daughters mean that demands on my time are dominated by den building, soccer and reading (in case their teacher sees this). However, I still manage intermittent cycling, kitesurfing, and yoga (badly – my wife tells me that’s not the point!) and took to sea swimming during lockdown.
My thinking tends to be hyper-rational (not my words!) and evidence-based, which can lead to reactions ranging from ‘very insightful’ to ‘pain in the butt.’ Psych profiles describe me as borderline extrovert / introvert and I have a reputation for unexpected (by others) displays of emotion during Love Actually.
I have a wide range of interests (which is a polite way of saying I have opinions on everything) including aviation, decision-making under ambiguity, complexity, data analytics and governance, from politics to Big Tech to organisational design to cryptocurrency. I am motivated by stretch experiences, difficult problems, working under pressure, making a difference and feeling part of something.
My professional passion is team and organisational effectiveness. I ask ‘why’ a lot (see above re ‘pain in butt’) and even though I have a normal human collection of unconscious biases, I believe strongly that the single biggest driver of high performance is objectivity, in both critical thinking and learning conversations. In dealing with ambiguity and complexity, a ‘superior understanding of reality’ is pivotal in acting more effectively. Unfortunately, objectivity requires a large dose of humility (you might be wrong!), for which I am yet to find any quick fix (Humility for Dummies?).
My dream role would be some sort of EVP of Human Performance, responsible not necessarily for what decisions are made, but how and why they are made, stress-testing assumptions, convictions and causality, and accelerating learning from experience.
Influences on my thinking are many and varied but I particularly like Chapter 9 of Learn or Die by Edward Hess (possibly the most insightful description of a high-performance organisation I have read) and Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project. If you like having Nobel prize winner, Daniel Kahneman’s, Thinking Fast and Slow on the bookshelf, but never got beyond page 50, then you should read Lewis’ biography of Kahneman and his collaborator, Amos Tversky. It’s much more digestible, and will give you enough insight to pretend you finished Kahneman’s book.