Creating Communities of Trust with Lord Jim Knight
+ Notes
Lord Jim Knight, former MP and ex CEdO of TES shares warts-and-all stories from a colourful, change-making career: from salesman, through politician to business leader. He has sold to roofers from the top of ladders, convinced a Catholic Cardinal on the merits of Sexual Relationship Education and delivered the first ever crowd-sourced speech in the House of Lords .
He shares how his experience has showed that success comes from starting where people are. and from involving customers at all stages of development. He talks about the power of feeling empowered and explains what to do - and what not to do - to build strong communities for success.
+ Transcript
Welcome to Humans Leading Humans towards a Future of Work that Works for People : A smorgasbord of snackable stories to help you be a more effective leader.
KATZ:Oh my God, I am so excited to welcome you to the very first episode of my weekly podcast. Humans Leading Humans. So if you work inside a large organisation, whether that be a company or an NGO or government, and you sometimes feel like you are sinking into a quagmire. This is my gift to you.
Today I will be talking to my first guest the wonderful Lord Jim Knight, a former MP and ex CEdO of TES. He will share some warts and all stories about stakeholder engagement, the power of persuasion and what it means to have an empowering leader. We will talk about the first ever, in the world, crowd-sourced speech in the House of Lords, selling to roofers from the top of the ladder and persuading a Catholic, Cardinal about the merits of sex education.
Over the coming weeks I'm going to be talking to people like Vint Cerf, who is an SVP of Google - oh, and the chap who invented the internet and the COO of Burning Man, those are stories, you definitely do not want to miss. Believe me.
But first I need to explain the why, what and how this podcast will over the coming months, become your go to snackable audio fuel kit, filled with the tools and inspiration you need to shine as an imaginal leader.
You can find out what Imaginal Leadershipmeans, at www.wearebeep.com.
So what our why? I’ve spent 20 years of my work life supporting leaders in all sorts of big complex organisations through transformation. And believe you me, its tough, Whether it be leaders in global financial companies or a pharmaceutical companies or if they're in a Global Strategy Consultancy or a tech company. the UN, Universities, Governments: leaders at all levels in all sorts of organisations face the very same challenges - believe me on this, and driving change is tough.
All of those organisations know that they will be more successful if they are more agile, they are more customer-centric they are more engaged; such fabulous and fabulously overused words. But to get there. And here's the rub, people at all levels must unlearn deeply ingrained assumptions, attitudes, behaviours, and embed new ones.
And everyone is so busy. They're all so busy being busy. They’re fed up of change. They're already struggling to keep up so the last thing they need is more new fangled stuff. Behavioural science has proved that human beings are hard wired to resist having changed done to them. We are programmed at the deepest levels to hold on fiercely to the status quo. BUT -and this is the key - humans are more open to change, when they're in environments based on certain conditions.
In my humble opinion, a leaders, only job is to create environments in which humans thrive.
I've consolidated 20 years of knowledge into one simple memorable framework. I call it the CREATE Framework™ to help leaders stay focused on what good REALLY looks like. It gives them a North Star.
Unfortunately, knowledge, and statistics do not change mindsets and behaviours. We have got, acres of knowledge and information and research, and strategies. We all know what we should be doing. The big question is, how do we convert that knowledge and ambition into action.
Now I am a techno utopian and I am a firm believer that technology holds the key to many of worlds biggest problems. Including making the workplace more human and therefore more successful.
But I do not believe that technology is the key. Technology is not a solution. It is only an enabler. The reason I did a master's degree in storytelling, instead of an MBA is very clear. Human brains, react differently to stories than they do to stats.By hearing other people's stories. We feel the hero's journey. We share good snackable stories in a way that we do not share stats.
So that's what this podcast is about, I feel genuinely blessed that over 20 years of supporting people-powered transformation, I have met some incredible leaders, some incredible people. I feel so lucky to have learned from their passion, dedication, experience and braveness.
So, this podcast will be packed with a growing compendium of real warts and all stories from some of the world's most successful bravest leaders in the world, to show how leading like a human works.
Every week, I'll ask a senior leader from all sorts of complex organisations to share three, just three, warts and all stories of how leaving like a human, actually works, drives impact: using the CREATE framework as an anchor. And I know that you like me are busy we all are so my challenge to my guests, is to share their three stories in just 15 minutes. I hope you enjoy the journey. I know, I am
From next week onwards, I will include three of the stories that most resonated with me from my clubhouse room: HUMANS LEADING HUMANS so please come join us if you think your story could help other leaders to become more. Well, imaginal
And now the moment you've all been waiting for Lord Jim Knight.
So Jim Knight I am so excited that you're my first interviewee for Humans Leading Humans I can't even tell you, this is perfect. Do you want to tell everybody who's listening how we met in the first place.
JIM: Thank you for asking me to be your first guest, I’m equally excited. We first met in the bizarre surroundings of the House of Lords, where I just come away from a debate that was instigated by Martha Lane Fox to celebrate an anniversary of the worldwide web. And it felt like everyone wanted to speak and so there was a limit to how long each one of us could speak. I think the time limit was two minutes. So I decided that I was going to not say anything that I’d prepared to say about the World Wide Web, but the most interesting thing I could do was to just put a call out to my social media to Twitter and Facebook and so on, to ask them what I should say in my two minutes. I knitted together all of our various comments and thoughts into a two minute speech, which was probably the first crowdsourced speech in the House of Lords. It felt a really appropriate way to celebrate the anniversary of the World Wide Web.
KATZ: Indeed. I was just completely blown away by it. It was, you know, and I think this is going to be a theme that runs through this interview. It was brave. And it felt, human.
So, Jim Knight, one of the things I found out about you since we met, is that you have done, bits of lots of different things and they all flow in together to make you who you are. So do you want to explain what you've done, not who you are
JIM: So I am roughly on my fifth career. From university I found a theatre company, and became a theatre promoter in my 20s, I then decided there really I'll be better off in politics, but in order to get there I ended up working for 10 years publishing telephone directories and selling telephone directory advertising which was interesting. I learnt a lot, to be fair about dealing with rejection and communicating with all sorts of different people,. I had to sell advertising from on top of a ladder on roofs to roofers chasing plumbers down country lanes in solicitors offices, in dentist's offices, just selling to anyone and everyone and taking everyone at their own level. And that was really really good learning for them my career and politics were having been Mayor of Truro in Somerset and really loving the power of local government.
I then was elected as a member of parliament in 2001. I was made a Minister by Tony Blair after the 2005 election. I did five years including three schools minister here as an environment minister the final year in Gordon Brown's cabinet as Employment Minister. And then, when electoral gravity caught up in 2010. I was made a member of the House of Lords and went into commercial career, principally working for a company called TES -once known as the times education supplement - a massive teacher services company. And now I've just finished at TES and am now into a freelance career, providing advice and consultancy around, technology, education, a little bit of medical. And I'm Chairing a charity called the Center for Accelerating Social Technology which is doing some remarkable work in building the digital capacity of the charitable sector of the UK.
KATZ: Wow, what a journey. What a journey. So- I sent you over the CREATE framework, and said, “have a look at this” - and what's most important in this podcast for me : there’s lots of people talking about the theory of what good work looks like of what good leadership looks like. I think people have had enough of theory. People need to know about real lived experience because driving change is hard. And by hearing other people's stories, I think it's gonna be really helpful for leaders who are struggling, or indeed people who might want to be a leader at some point in their career. So I asked you to think about three stories looking at the Create framework. What came to you.**
JIM* Well, certainly I've got stories from my time in Government, and then CAST- the Center for Accelerated Social Technology, I think is a really good story in its own right and there are also reflections from my time commercially at TES which I will also talk about. I fundamentally agree with you that people are interested in the theory. They’re interested in the analysis of what's not working around how we do business, how we function in society. and you know the pandemic, This probably will be a big inflection point, a bit like the Second World War was a big inflection point where lots of things changed thereafter. And, and I hope so.
But people are hungry, not just for the analysis of what was wrong, but they're really hungry for what's it going to look like, what does the sustainable future of good business and good work look like and to capture those stories is a really good thing that you're doing. Would you like me to start with one of those stories
KATZ : I would love you to. The other thing that I think it's really important for people who are listening, and probably for us actually, is to move the story from Head to Heart. So while you're telling your stories, can you talk about the reality. Because we always tell the story after we've done something . “oh yeah well I was going to do this and this happened and it was terribly successful.“ Well, that's not really how things work. So if you could talk about how it felt to go through the experiences, I'd be really grateful.
JIM: I’d start with a survey that the UK Youth Parliament did with young people in 2006/7. So quite a long time ago, and they wanted to find out about their experience of Sexual Relationship Education in schools. What they got back was an overwhelming message: the biggest response they’d ever had from young people to this survey. Overwhelmingly, they were being told that the quality was really poor. That the concern was that that related to the high rates of unwanted teenage pregnancy, of the high rates of sexually transmitted infections and so on.
Of course I'll, I'll see them, and they told me the story and I went to see my boss for sector State Ed Balls and said, “I think we need to do something. We need to respond to what the Youth Parliament is asking - which is for compulsory sex relationship education because at the time it was really random as to whether or not you've got any. All the law required was that you were told the biology of reproduction. That was it. There’ was nothing about relationships, nothing about sexuality, nothing about contraception, abortion is a whole raft of things that young people were hungry, to be told about and not left to home or school to maybe saying something. And ED, being an empowering leader said, I agree with you but it's going to be really hard. You have to get the faith groups on site, and some of them are going to be really unhappy about their schools talking about homosexuality and abortion and contraception.
And he said: My advice for you is to, co chair with a member of the Youth Parliament and the leader of a college or a school, a task force, a group that will bring in all the faith groups and representatives of faith groups and others, including again young people and work out whether or not you can build consensus to make this happen and then we can do it.
And that's what we did, and what was brilliant about his advice, was that by putting a young person in the chair and bringing some other young people into the room, it kept everybody else honest. it meant that the voice that started this conversation, the young people themselves, and their lived experience of inadequate education in this particular sphere was being heard consistently, and we were being challenged consistently, and the doubters were being challenged by those young people. That created the energy and the momentum to make something happen. And in the end, we did get consensus I did manage with them to negotiate with some of those faith groups that were reluctant, that we should have compulsory sexual relations education, and whilst that particular attempt was stalled by the 2010 election that is now something that is happening, and coming into schools this September and that's really interesting.
KATZ : So some of the leaders who are listening to this might think, oh I can switch off now because that's about politics,. But we were talking earlier about fact that actually that experience is absolutely pivotally important to any leader who happens to be able to any sector
JIM: if I was running, let's say, a high street bank. I mean even now I think Santander just announced that they are closing another bunch of physical branches. If I was running on a high street bank and I was thinking about the need to close some of those branches to try and move more people online to lower the transaction costs, ease the flows of doing all of that. I could just make that decision, and just get all of my people, to implement it and make it work.
But we know from experience. Banks doing that they get big. Initial uptake, but actually getting the adoption all along the adoption curve is really hard. It's really slow. And my challenge to anyone in those leadership positions would be how much time did you spend in the bank branches, observing your customers, not your staff, observing your customers and what they were, how they were using the branches and talking to them and finding people just like them that you know, so that you can understand their fears of the technology, how you are going to replace what they wanted the branches for, and really get inside the user experience, so that those would be the most reluctant to switch over and could in the end cause you the most problem if you could solve the problems for that. The everything else would be a dream, and it's, you know, in that case, it's not about the technology as much as it's about the behavioural mindset.
KATZ : Yeah, I mean, it's never about the technology. That’s one of the things that I always say technology is not a solution. It's certainly an enabler, so if you're not aware of what that person wants to do. The technology is completely wasted. So the question that might be pinging front of mind to some of the people who are listening to this story might say, Well, yeah, But how did you persuade, as an example for Catholic Church, sex education.
How on earth did you persuade somebody to do that because there isn't one person who's listening to this who isn't thinking: ’m not going to implement that change, because I'll never be able to persuade the person that I need to persuade. It’s too complex.
JIM: Yeah and I did have an awkward phone call with Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, in the middle of all of that, which I got the impression he wasn't that keen on having the call but he felt he ought to, and I had to try and land him and his support, Because I known from a previous episode to do with faith admissions when Alan Johnson was Secretary of State, how dangerous it is to have Catholic priests preach against you on a Sunday, and how many MPs, then will come and give you a really hard time about the political bomb that you've dropped.
So I had to get a card on one side and we had a slightly awkward stilted conversation but in the end I was able to find in the current Cardinal ,Vincent Nichols, who at the time had responsibility for education service, and an ally - someone who understood only to well, that young people in Catholic schools didn't understand and have just been knowledge about our contraception and abortion and sexuality, then they didn't have the context for the Church's teaching. And they were also highly vulnerable
Because it's not like Catholic schools are immune from sexually transmitted infections or unwanted pregnancy and we know that. So he got it. And he became a really important ally. That would be another bit of advice I guess Katz, and I say this to school leaders when they're thinking about how to work with parents . I say: How much time do you spend in the playground at drop off and pick up time, observing who the influential parents are at school gate - that the others are wanting to come and talk to - and find those allies for change, or they might not be allies - but they're the influences, and get them in the right place, and then the change will happen for you.
KATZ : 100% And that's exactly, obviously that's exactly what beep is about. If you don't find the change agents. If you don't bring the change agents together to actually be part of that program of change, you're never going to win. Okay brilliant first story.
I suppose the question would be, what made you so brave? I mean that's a big deal. What made you go. I know this is going to be complex, but I'm going to do it anyway, because that's not necessarily the way that many politicians would work.
JIM: You have to feel secure and trusted enough to be brave, and I was lucky in that context that we'd recently moved from Tony's leadership in Number 10 to Gordons, and what that meant was the government effectively moved from being pretty bipolar where in order to get anything done as a department, you had to get sign off from both number 10 and number 11 from both Tony and Gordon. That made it slightly bipolar and dysfunctional there were strengths to it but there were big weaknesses to ambition,
When Gordon took over it became a more focused government, and I was working for Ed Balls, who is highly trusted by Gordon, and he trusted me - so I had a sense of "anything is possible”. And if some young people come into my office and tell me that we needed to do this thing - and I agree that actually it's really significant and important that we do- and we could do it. We just had to find the right process to get rid of the barriers and we did, and it was, it was great. It's very exciting. Yeah, the only time I ever got a standing ovation in a speech that I ever made was a speech to members of the Subject Association for Personal Social and Health Education. When I announced that we were going to implement compulsory sex relationship education and in the middle of my speech they all stood up and cheered and it was a beautiful moment.
KATZ : That's the thing if you hadn't gone through that process. if you hadn't have had a leader who trusted you to get on with it, who gave you the autonomy, you would have never got to the place where you had that moment. I've been there as well where you think oh my god, we're never gonna get there it's really hard and then you are and you wouldn’t change it for the world. Story number one was awesome. Story number two?
JIM: I would go to the present day for number two, which is what we're doing at CAST by the wonderful Dan Sutch. We're only five years old, as an organization, and I was there at the beginning of the time chairing the Nominet Trust. We decided to grant aid this new thing, because we could see a gap in the charitable sector, where there was very little digital activity and great potential for some important change, yes some efficiency but it's the digital mindset that we're most interested in, in the leaders of the charitable sector. And by that I mean a mindset which gets much closer to the user journey into the user experience - and tries to create a beautiful frictionless experience. And that felt like a great prize, and there was no one really doing it so we started CAST. What’s happened in five years is it's now grown to be a multimillion pound enterprise largely channeling, government and money from philanthropy, but also building capacity in the sector through developing people and creating community. If I had an addition to your CREATE framework and see in the beginning I would add community because if you in any organization, or any networked organization. If you're creating community. You're creating reciprocal trust.
And that is one of your words and T. And that's hugely powerful, because that's a creative energy, that allows you to drive change because you've created reciprocity, and trust within your community of people. And that allows kind of anything to happen So what cast is do is, you know where there isn't capacity, it will, will fill the gap, but in filling the gap is trying to create the capacity so CAST can walk away and go and fill a gap somewhere else.
And it's just doing a stunning job and during the pandemic, when the whole sector suddenly realised there had to go on a journey very quickly to go digital, CAST was there- happily with government wanting to spend a lot of money very quickly to help the sector go on that journey. We were there as the catalyst, we started something called catalyst in order to be able to do that, and again hugely rewarding and exciting, but driven by a handful of people creating community, essentially, that was the power, it wasn't the money, it was the people
KATZ: Which of course is what drives everyone is that sense of, is as you say it's about relationships and that's the other thing that you're saying that I should add to the CREATE framework is relationships. Agreed. It's interesting that you're saying that yes charities are renowned for being somewhat lower down the maturity the digital maturity map then say corporates, but from my understanding, quite often when you talk to people inside large organisations they talk a lot about digital. They talk a lot about digital behaviours, they talk a lot about agility. But how do you embed the mindsets and the behaviour shift and that's a whole different thing. That can only happen when you've got trust real relationships, autonomy, all of the things you've just talked about.
JIM: I think we just lived through a moment where people have been forced to change, and where that's gone really well. It's because you've got those ingredients. You’ve got that sense of trust and people you can lean. You know you're outside your comfort zone, but you know you're in a trusted environment where there's a virtual hug around every corner.
If you are going outside your comfort zone and you feel really exposed, and highly accountable and no one is watching your back. And no one's there to just say, Hang on. Have you thought about that, and just calling out when you're about to make a stupid mistake. Then, then it's been a very, very difficult time for those people.
KATZ: Yeah, and I think you know it's it's worth remembering that humans are tribal, and therefore you need to be a tribe. You need to know if anything goes wrong, you can watch each other's backs, because it's good for the good of all right. One more story left. 15 minutes wasn't enough this is what we learned, everything can be better, always.
JIM : I'm also going to talk about a wonderful program called Home Access, which we did in government, which we got half a million kids online by working together with industry and with government and with school leaders. But actually I think I'll go to something which is perhaps partially successful, which is what I was doing at TES where we were managing our resources platform because that is in a commercial setting.
TES resources has got 13.5 million registered users who are mostly teachers. It has well over a million downloads of user generated content every day. It’s sort of successful in terms of a number of different metrics. And it was the one where previous owners of the company really wanted to monetise that and built a marketplace for it. That worked insofar as that it covers its own costs but it didn't work in terms of generating lots and lots of profit and revenue.
I think part of the problem was, it was imposing a business model on a community of teachers that they weren't really ready for, possibly never would be ready for, because this was a huge community of teachers, who were used to share and stuff for nothing.
Some of them that were complaining to us that they weren't allowed to charge and that they were putting effort in and why shouldn't they be able to charge. So we said yeah if you want to charge you can charge. And then the impression was had that that's what we wanted because we wanted to make money. And there was truth in that impression because in the end the algorithm was tweaked so that the stuff that people saw was the paid content, even though the vast majority of the content was free. But we were being driven by commercial considerations - we weren't being driven by the user consideration enough.
When I took over managing it we reset that. And we've shifted the algorithm now so that it's much more balanced. And remarkably, the search is now designed to give people what they're looking for rather than what we want them to find! And it's more, more successful. It sounds obvious, but we had a community that we weren't trusting with out motivation. We had a community that we were trying to move to where we wanted them to be commercially. I think it's important to celebrate your failures as well as the successes. And so I would say these principles are worth using to reflect back on what hasn't worked, as well as what has worked and so that's why I would end with that story which is, you know, teachers. I think it's the greatest profession in the world - what they're trying to do and the struggles I've been through in the last year. We should have been much more in their mindset.l TES is now back in the right place with resources in terms of that, but it was a bit of a journey.
KATZ: Okay, thank you so much, that's just been such a lot in a very short amount of time.. It's really interesting what you were just saying about TES: Do you think if you'd have followed the beep way: if you'd have found the internal influencers, co created with them, move forward with them, from scratch. Do you think you would have managed to move things forward quicker and better?
JIM: Yes, I think that we could have then, instead of saying: “Okay, we've got loads of resources, how can we monetise them.” We could have said: “We’ve got a great community thanks to resources, how can we monetise the community. And then we would have worked out by engaging properly with teachers and with the changemakers within the teacher community where their pain points were, and solving those problems for them. And that's how we were monetized and we could have done really well at that. We were in the perfect position to do that.
KATZ: And that's the easiest mistake to make, isn't it, forget that it's all about them. It's not about us. Start there. Okay so the last thing before we leave, I've got to thank you. This has been so much fun. Not surprisingly, so much fun.
So what should we call it, Why should we, what's the key takeaway for anybody who's about to listen to this, which then I'll call this particular episode of humans leading humans
JIM: In my head is about creating communities of trust.
KATZ: Beautiful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I'll see you again soon.
Now I seriously believe that everything can be better. Always. so I'm always open to suggestions for improvements. What could I do better? Who do you think should join my list of imaginal guests?
I really really hope to meet you there, so put it in your calendar. Next week I will be talking to Carol Layzell, who is a Senior Director of Customer Experience at Salesforce, but most importantly she is an amazing woman who is most definitely an imaginal Leader. I for one cannot wait to find out which three snackable story she chooses to tell.
You have been listening to Humans Leading Humans : towards a future of work that works for people. This podcast is brought to you in partnership with the marketing society, and PS. If you're a senior marketing leader, and you're not already a member you should totally become part of that tribe! And a massive thanks to SuperTerranea for the magical sting of stings.
Thank you so much for listening. Be inspired. Be imaginal. Be more human, and see you next week.
beep embeds cultural and operational transformation by shifting mindsets and behaviours. The CREATE Framework™ aggregates 20 years of experience to help leaders succeed. Go to beep to find out more
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