At the time, E.ON faced a number of challenges common to the energy industry, including criticism over poor service and rising prices. However, a new CEO intended to start again, and Vijay felt he had to make a difference, fast. And no external help was involved.

He did. It became one of the energy sector’s most successful customer transformations, taking E.ON from worst to first in customer satisfaction in just two years.

Q: Your career path has been a little unusual – moving between finance, customer operations, and now CCO roles. Can you tell us a little more about your background?

I’m a trained financial accountant but I'd describe myself as commercially and change-oriented rather than the traditional version. I started my career at Scottish & Newcastle, now part of Heineken, a really cool industry. I had a great time there and it gave me fantastic experience – the beer sector was going through a decline, people were moving from lager to wine or to AlcoPops, if older people remember them back in the ‘90s. So we had to transform the industry – reducing supply, rationalising breweries, consolidation, streamlining logistics. It was a very customer-facing business, as you can imagine. We were number one, market leader at the time, so we had to stay on top of game.

I then moved to KPMG Consulting. I’ve always been drawn to transformation challenges, energised by the question: how do we reset and drive performance?

Joining E.ON I moved from finance into customer transformation, then operations, supply chain, and now infrastructure. The common thread is always asking what does our market really need, and how do we deliver it better than anyone else?

Q: At E.ON you pioneered a dramatic shift to being customer-led. What prompted it, why was the reset needed?

We had a new CEO, Tony Cocker, who came from energy generation and had no energy retail experience whatsoever. This in many ways, was a strength. Tony was brilliant. He had a doctorate and was incredibly intelligent. He was also a strong introvert who really listened.

He told us his inbox was full of complaints. His elderly parents were telling him they couldn't understand their energy bills, and there was criticism from friends and family about confusing tariffs. Our data showed that we were the worst of the Big Six for customer satisfaction, and we had the highest churn rates.

Tony asked if I would be interested in being programme director for a reset. There was no design, no strategy, just him reeling off a tirade of customer frustration and asking how we could reset the organisation.

We didn't bring in consultants to give us theory. Instead, we went straight to the people closest to our customers – our frontline teams, the people taking the calls and working in customers' homes. Tony and I went on a roadshow, organising town halls with 50-70 people where we'd simply ask: "What's getting in the way of you doing a good job for customers? What's frustrating you?"

We adopted a ‘you said, we did’ approach, logging pain points and acting on them quickly. But we also did something quite brave – we set up customer immersion programmes. We invited customers who'd complained to evening meetings in neutral venues so they could share their stories.

These weren't polite focus groups. Customers shared very emotional, sometimes traumatic stories about the impacts on their lives – maybe getting a bill wrong, chasing debt that put them under stress, forcing difficult decisions. That got our people emotionally tuned in to the customer impact of our failures.

Q: You also established a customer council with high-profile external business leaders to help customer voices be heard. How did that work?

We set up this council alongside our UK board, with people like Allan Leighton, Paddy Tipping, one of Tony Blair’s colleagues, and Justine Roberts, who founded Mumsnet. We didn't pay them – they directed a donation to charity on their behalf. Their only job was to challenge us, to ask ‘are we making decisions that serve customers best?’

Allan would look at his father's eight-page energy bill and say, "It's electricity, right? Volume x price = a number in a box. Why is this eight pages long?" We'd say it's because of regulatory requirements, system limitations, it costs millions to change. He'd keep pushing: "No, you need to find a way."

Justine Roberts would say, "I'm a busy mum. Just tell me what the best deal is. I don't want to go around switching, just put the cheapest option in my face because I need to make my kids' dinner."

This constant challenge forced us to adopt three guiding principles: Are we making things simpler? Are we making things fairer? Are we being more transparent?

Q: How did you handle the business case discussions with finance?

Tony and I both had strong commercial and finance backgrounds which helped with decision ultimately made with Finance. The board took a more commercially orientated outlook.  For example, when everyone in the market was increasing prices, we froze prices to give customers reassurance. I knew we could hedge our volumes to eliminate risk, but it was still a bold move. I called the CFO on a weekend, and we went around the board on Sunday for a decision. Five out of six board members said no, too risky. Tony, ultimately showing his strength to re-shape the market and our reputation, backed the decision to freeze prices.

On Monday morning, I'd never seen E.ON so energised. There was this massive buzz because we were doing something different, bold, putting ourselves out there as a real leader.

Q: But how do you prove ROI on customer-focused investments when the metrics are often seen as 'softer'?

That was a challenge, and it required holding our nerve. We asked our marketing team each month about NPS performance, and it didn't move for 12-15 months. We started doubting ourselves, wondering if the reset programme was a waste of time.

But there's a lag effect. Eventually, it just rose and rose and rose. We went from sixth worst to having the best customer satisfaction in the industry within 2.5 years. Our churn became the lowest in the industry. That all flows into financials – you lose fewer customers, they're less confused about pricing and billing, so they're less likely to switch.

Organisations often want instant results, but customer transformation takes conviction and courage to stay the course when the immediate indicators haven't changed yet.

Q: What lessons have you taken from that experience that you still apply today?

Well firstly, organisations often overcomplicate things. The biggest and easiest thing you can do is spending more time with people closest to customers and markets. I was talking to the CEO of a high-street retailer last week, and 12 years later, he's doing something similar – going to frontline staff asking about their biggest pain points. A shoe salesperson saying, "I've got sizes 3-9, but most customers want 8 or 8.5, so why haven't I got those in stock?" It sounds obvious, but someone in procurement was buying what they thought was needed with no shopfloor experience.

Secondly, you need mechanisms that respond and act. People get frustrated if they keep raising issues and nothing happens. We had 97% internal awareness of our reset programme within six months across 8,000 people because I'd write updates every two weeks: "You said this, we've done that, we plan to do this."

Thirdly, anchor the customer voice in decision-making. After about a year, we introduced two frontline people to sit on the Customer board. When senior managers presented propositions, these people could say whether that actually matched what was happening on the phones or in customers' homes.

Q: Why do you think so many organisations struggle with being customer-led?

There are so many distractions now. Board conversations focus on managing financial performance in volatile markets, supply chain challenges, cost pressures. All of that takes you away from the core question: are customers buying from you and do they like what you do?

You rely on the rest of the organisation to make those customer decisions, but they're looking to leadership for guidance. If you're talking about supply chain or internal controls, they think that's what's important to you.

 Plus, if you're in a big company with shareholders reporting to capital markets wanting instant results, you have these constant short-term versus long-term pressures. The variables now are enormous - your direction might be the same, but the ability to maintain that focus becomes much harder.

 Q: Are there organisations you think are getting it right today?

That’s a difficult one. I often ask my teams: who do you enjoy buying from? Who do you want to do repeat business with? That's usually the best indicator.

Amazon and Apple get mentioned a lot, but I think there’s a lot to be said for companies like Next, who has survived 40 years in incredibly difficult retail circumstances. Or Zara, which has been strong at switching product and supply chain to meet customer needs very quickly.

I also think about smaller, purpose-driven companies. That personalisation and going the extra mile – like a wine retailer who recently refunded a bottle of wine I didn't like without being asked and then upgrading my order – those experiences make you think that you’re not just another statistic.

You've got to keep your eye focused on the customer, the market, the products, the proposition, the service quality. And you need to remain diligent about that focus. It's not easy in the current climate with so many competing demands. If you were an owner-founder of your business, you'd probably make these customer-first decisions naturally. Corporate structures create this need to see instant results, but customer transformation requires patience and conviction.

The most important people are those who serve your customers and are close to the market. Spend time with them, listen to what they're telling you, and then act on it. Everything else is just distraction from that fundamental truth.

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Vijay TankPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsJ LeeSun, 03 Aug 2025 15:08:00 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-tracy-abraham6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:67605096f0f12b2668f70935

Moving to challenger bank Monzo, she helped translate the vision of a group of customer-obsessed engineers into a brand that could get people excited about a pre-pay debit card. 

Now at Tesco Bank, she’s exploring a whole set of new opportunities to grow worthwhile financial relationships under new Barclays Bank Group ownership.  

Tracy has a long history of innovating, provoking, making trouble and inspiring change to give customers what they want, even if they didn’t know it was what they wanted.  

Q. Tell me a little about your background – what led you to where you are now?    

 Well, I have quite an unusual background because the first half of my career was in media and the second half has been in financial services, which isn't an obvious trajectory for most people! 

I wanted to work in TV. That was my passion. I swore I was never going to work in an office. I ended up getting a job with the Edinburgh TV Festival and then moved to Channel 4. There I realised that actually the business of television was really interesting, so I kind of got sucked in through that route. I started in PR and then moved into marketing. 

I could take you through a tedious story of all the different moves I made, but what's common through them all is being open minded about different things coming along and taking me in a different direction. And that often happened. I enjoy being in companies that are going through big changes and all that comes with it – and it’s served me well.  

Q. You’ve worked with organisations that were trying to do things differently. What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you and where has your love of it come from? 

Because of the timing of my career, digital transformation has been a huge part of what I’ve experienced. I’ve been part of it from the earliest days, from when Napster launched in 1999 and disrupted the music industry with big implications for where I was working in TV. 

Banking was much slower to change because they didn't need to. They had a monopoly, there wasn't a disruptor. But eventually, that has changed too.  

What’s pivotal is the realisation that we can't just carry on the way we always have. 

To me, that creates enormous opportunity. I believe in the idea of better. Some organisations have carried on with the status quo for a long time because they can. But you see a gradual erosion over time. You could just carry on like that, and nothing terrible would happen. Or you can come in and really disrupt, be the grit in the oyster and say good enough is no longer good enough because you're going to become steadily less relevant and slowly decline. Instead, you could reinvent what you do right now and surprise people. 

Q. If we look at some of those organisations which have been disruptive - Channel4, for example, was pushing the boundaries of what we see on TV and the launch of 4oD was way ahead of the game, how did this idea come about?  

 I had a number of different roles at Channel 4. It was so formative for me. They had this amazing set of values, which were honestly the best I've ever come across anywhere – to do it first, make trouble and inspire change. I can’t think of anything more inspiring than that – being given a licence to disrupt. 

It was the ethos of everyone at the channel, and I really do mean everybody, not just the commissioning editors, but people like the lawyers too. It was the whole mindset of the place, which is fantastically exciting and creative.  

I started off doing PR for some amazing programmes which really were big boundary-breaking shows, and this allowed us to innovate with our marketing and communications.  

When it came to video on demand, there was a pressing need. The music industry had just imploded. They hadn't addressed the emergence of Napster. Instead, they’d remained very much in a narrow mindset of labels competing against each other. They weren’t prepared to work together and didn’t understand how people wanted to consume music… and it went really badly wrong.  

So there was this burning platform. Channel 4 had to do something. This was coupled with technology coming to the point where broadband speeds were just about fast enough to allow streaming. But there were many different ways of delivering a streaming service, so there was quite a lot of debate about how Channel 4 was going to address it. Do you put your content on a third-party platform, or do you create your own? I was young and quite opinionated and believed that if you only put your content on other platforms, there was a very big long-term risk.  Channel 4 doesn’t actually own their content. By giving other platforms access to the best content, you would make them famous and there would be no long-term need for Channel 4 as an ‘editor of choice’.   

This proved to be true. We can now see the see the power of Netflix. They used to show only content they acquired from third parties, but they built an incredibly strong brand off the back of that.  So now they commission their own, they don't need a Channel 4 to do it for them.  

But of course, there was a big risk in building a technology platform. Who was Channel 4 to do that? It was a huge investment, and we didn’t have the experience or the core expertise. 

In fact, what happened was that we took a multi-pronged approach, putting some content on other channels over here, building a proprietary platform over there and building the brand. And this ultimately worked – 4oD has become a valuable property allowing Channel 4 to reach its audiences in ways it can control. 

Q. Channel 4 was set up with an innovative mindset, a set of unusual shared beliefs, which ran throughout the organisation, from finance to marketing to the commissioning editors. Do you think it helped that the organisation had this approach? 

Massively. It is something innate to Channel 4. It's a very unusual beast. Baked into it is this idea of providing an alternative, doing something different, challenging the status quo. So yes, I do think that the DNA of the organisation was that we have to innovate, to challenge, to do things differently. It was an organisation that attracted a certain type of person and this definitely helped the vision to come to life. 

Q. With Monzo, you helped change how the organisation built its offer, its experience and win customers as a result. How did this happen?  

The opportunity to do this was what attracted me. Monzo, or Mondo as it was at the time, was tiny. It was a company of 10-12 people who had just broken away from Starling and were rebuilding from the ground up.  

When I came across it, it felt like the most audacious thing. Lots of industries had been disrupted, but not banks. The idea that a start-up could conceive of disrupting the establishment, something so big, so regulated, and that touched so many people just felt like the most extraordinary ambition, almost like arrogance. The idea that a bunch of technologists could take that on felt incredible.  

What you had, and I still think this is a very rare thing today, was an organisation driven by engineers. Not by bankers or marketers.  

So many companies talk about being digital-first, and they have a digital team, whereas this isn't a digital team – it’s literally the nuts and bolts of the organisation. And they were very opinionated, extraordinarily creative technologists who had a vision for how things could be better.  

I was looking at the ideas the engineers had developed and asking ‘What's the killer experience or the killer moment? What's that thing that just will really click with customers?’  At the time, it was the Freeze Card. Nobody had done this before. It was visually such a powerful image.  

The founder, Tom, was leading how the company grew. He was very clear and was happy to be super niche in the beginning, to focus narrowly and make just this group deliriously excited and happy. He believed that they would bring other people in. It would flow from there. And that was indeed the case.  

We were inviting developers into the office, opening up the hood, running hackathons, getting them to come along and pick up their debit card, getting it trending on Twitter. Our crowdfunding raise wasn't about raising money. It was about creating fans who were really invested in our success. 
 
I didn't agree with everything they were doing and I was often proved wrong. If you take their brand at that time, from a design point of view you had this weird animated character, the logo was blue and red, the card was ‘hot coral’… but it was like when you look at Red Bull and you think these elements just don't add up together, but somehow it worked. It was about breaking the rules and it made for a kind of magical experience. 

Q. You mentioned the role that super fans played. How did having these genuine brand champions help? 

They 100% helped. From day one, long before the card even existed, we had people, customers, coming in every single day talking to us about their banking experience. Anyone and everyone within the organisation would sit down in half-hour slots every single day, to listen.  

I brought in a dedicated manager who was instrumental in creating that community. It was the most grassroots ground-up effort. The community and the whole trending on Twitter is really what drove the excitement around the brand.  

So yes, it was having advocates early on and knowing exactly what this audience is interested and engaged in. Ultimately, what they were excited about was the transparency and openness of an organisation in an industry that typically isn't transparent and open. This proved to be the way to unlock excitement and to widen our reach. 

Q. You’re now at Tesco Bank which was very recently acquired by Barclays. How will you bring your pioneering spirit and champion for customers within this set up? 

I think the opportunity for Barclays lies in a fantastically strong consumer brand that is very customer-focused. They're excited about our incredibly high NPS scores and want to understand the Tesco mindset around customers. This is the magic of what they've bought. It's not just a back book of products, it's Clubcard. It's what that means. So, I think there’s an opportunity over the longer term for Tesco Bank to be a disruptive engine within a larger organisation. 

Barclays wants to learn from Tesco Bank so there is a real opportunity for a group of us who've been in a medium-sized organisation with a certain ethos to use this power. We've been ahead of the curve in some areas, so we bring useful experiences. But we’re open and ready to learn too. 

Something that always stuck with me from my Monzo days was that when everyone was getting excited about the Freeze Card, Tom, the founder, said to us, make no mistake, it's not that people at the big banks haven't thought of this. There’s lots of incredibly bright people who work in those places who want to do great stuff, but their systems are preventing them from doing it quickly. We can't launch something exciting and then be static with it. We need to keep coming up with new things to stay ahead and build a following.  

He's right. There's no question that there are many incredibly smart people in large organisations who want to see change happen, but for whatever reason it is much harder.  

One of the biggest ways to achieve things in an environment like that is to have a single-mindedness. If you take COVID, everybody who's been in an organisation during that period looks back and says, gosh, wasn't that amazing? We all came together and pulled off something that nobody said was possible. Within a day everyone was working from home. This was because there genuinely was a single, burning, objective. 

I've seen this with the sale of Tesco Bank. There was this one thing to do with a specific deadline that we had to get over the line, and people have done an extraordinary amount to get us to this point. When the goal is clear, no matter the size of the organisation, you can make things happen. You just need to keep ruthlessly focused on a single objective. 

Q. Why do you think other organisations find it so hard to be customer-led? 

I've been in so many places where the strategy department says there's this area of business that's worth X million pounds, and if we get Y percent of it, we could be really successful, so we should be in that line of business. Then they tell people in the customer area to go away and justify the fact that customers want it. That is not customer-led.  

I have had to fight, sometimes really hard, to explain why some of these ideas are way off-brand, or not what customers actually want, and you're leading the witness in the way you're running customer listening. 

I think it's easy for organisations to start with a commercial mindset. Now, don't get me wrong, I have also been at organisations where the customer team says we're obsessed with the customer, and none of you commercial people understand what customer-centricity is. And the commercial people say well, none of you guys get that we've got to make money out of this. 

When I arrived at the bank, my team claimed to be customer obsessed but we had to evidence every day how commercial we were if we wanted the commercial teams to be equally customer-led. I don't think that being customer-focused means the money will automatically follow. That's too narrow minded. But if you start with a customer and their needs, you have a far better chance of selling something, launching something, creating something that people actually want. 

You have to listen to customers and understand what they’re saying. If you're not listening to them and just saying people trust this brand so surely we can stretch to this product, it won’t work.  

Q. Are there any organisations or examples that you really admire for being customer-led or that are pioneering within their sector?  

There is an organisation that has been absolutely amazing – Tony's Chocolonely. My husband's Dutch, so I've been familiar with Tony's for a long time, before they came to the UK. I'm absolutely obsessed with them, what they do, and the way they work.   

It was started by a TV producer who was making documentaries about forced labour involved in the production of cocoa. And he just felt he wasn't getting enough traction. So, he launched a chocolate brand.  

I mean, that’s incredible in itself. And he didn't just stick a Fair Trade stamp on it; he put that mission at the heart of the company. Perhaps most importantly he didn't create a super-worthy brand, he created an incredibly fun, dynamic brand that is quirky and alternative and that doesn't play by the rules. They're constantly innovating and doing unusual stuff, but at the same time there’s an underlying vision to change the world.  

I think that’s brilliant. It reminds me of a podcast from the guys who started Method cleaning products. They said that their starting point was environmentally friendly, organic and natural, but it wasn't enough just to do that because no one wants cleaning products that are just worthy. They have to be the most incredible cleaning products that also happen to be the best ones for the planet.  

This is what I feel about Tony's – it's great chocolate, it’s playful and there are so many brand triggers that support their mission – the design of their packaging, the design of the chocolate. As soon as you look into why the chocolate isn’t in neat squares – it represents inequality in the chocolate industry – the more you get into it, and the deeper the brand connects with you.  

I think they're a brilliant example of incredibly pioneering, thinking differently kind of organisation. 

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Tracy AbrahamPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsSerena LuffFri, 01 Aug 2025 16:50:00 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-chris-pitt6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:66422d19704f7753cb99787e

What attracted you to this role and what were your burning challenges when you first joined first direct (fd)? 

I’ve always been powered in my career by a desire to learn new stuff. I like to be faced by challenges I need to surmount. Being chief executive has that sense of totality – you're managing the service delivery, the commerciality, risk, but then you can actually do things like define the purpose and instil values that are attributable to the organisation and to the customers you serve.  

The burning challenge was one of growth. Really, first direct has been a brilliant customer service business ever since its inception. Famously launched at a minute past midnight on Sunday 1 October 1989, in a period when everybody banked in a branch and queued up at lunchtime to put a cheque in while getting a little bit of paper stamped. first direct broke the mould. 

It did it through customer service with 24/7/365 human-to-human UK-based call centres, setting new customer expectations and delivering on them, all of the time. It needed to be super brilliant because this was banking in a completely different way. You weren’t talking to someone behind a screen personally cashing your cheque, you’re talking to a, potentially uninterested, voice on the phone. So the customer service needed to be brilliant for the business to succeed and thrive. 

While fd lived up to its ground-breaking customer promise, it hadn’t delivered at the scale that its founding fathers and mothers set out to achieve.  

The challenge when I joined in September 2020 was to maintain the fantastic customer service but drive the growth. 2023 was the most successful commercial year fd has ever had – the highest number of customers recruited, and we maintained our position as the number one customer service brand in the UK, in any sector. We’ve also been recognised by Forrester Research as the best bank in Europe for customer service. 

And we’ve done all this without growing our costs. 

What did you do that unlocked these great results? 

The digitization of our processes and our front end has been the most material change – fd was the first internet bank and we were one of the first banks with a mobile app. This digitization has allowed us to grow at scale, meet the needs of the new customers we recruited as well as servicing our existing customer base. 

You can now open a current account with fd and have your card in your wallet within 8 minutes without having to phone the bank at all. New customers don’t engage over the phone, not because we don’t want them to, but because they don’t need to. And while 98% of all transactions are digital, we are still there for people when they need us – be that in a catastrophe or crisis or confusion. But to grow at scale, we disconnected the need for new customers to phone up. 

There has been a shift at fd towards a younger demographic. How did you manage this change and build belief that it was a good change to make? 

This role has allowed me to put purpose at the heart of fd. We’ve done a lot of research into what matters to younger customers. We recognise that this generation will be the first in the modern era to be poorer than their parents – implicitly unfair. 

We recognise that the housing market – a young person’s ability to get on the housing ladder, to have their own space – is much more compromised relative to previous generations. We have therefore put a challenge against this unfairness at the heart of what fd is about. It runs through our advertising, product design, charity partners, our connections, and the way we communicate and deliver our services.  

Now, nearly 50% of customers we recruit are under 35 years old. 

fd has also done a lot to help women in banking and has done some powerful work related to domestic violence. What has that entailed? 

All banks have a duty of care from a financial vulnerability perspective, and to be there when people’s circumstances change through illness, unemployment or for health reasons. But being part of a brilliant customer service organisation means you go above and beyond to support people. We have about 90 people in our customer care team, who support our more vulnerable customers every day. On top of this, we trained 40 Money Coaches to help people manage their money more effectively and provide support to those who need it.   

There are horrific stories of domestic violence and the influence of perpetrators on bank accounts. The ability to manage your own money is so important to your independence and to enabling you to escape. We had an example where one of our reps challenged existing processing procedure to help a woman who had been the victim of domestic violence for over 50 years. Our procedures allowed flexibility to a degree that allowed her to escape. This is what we want fd to be about. It shows that providing a financial service is not an end in itself – we’re there to support people’s lives.  

It’s not about loans, credit cards and mortgages, it’s about what the person needs and wants that allows them to live their life. 

What are the challenges that remain and what are the next steps for first direct? 

This is a great company with some great people, which has allowed us to unlock its potential. The challenges are always the three C’s: Commerciality, Customer and Control. 

No one will bank with you if their money isn’t safe in their current account. The rise in fraud is a massive issue. This is the modern version of safety. We need to continue to grow our customer base and we’re doing it by growing our support for our customers, earning their loyalty to an increasing degree. We launched free use of debit cards abroad, giving up some revenue to reward the loyalty of our existing customers, as well as engaging new customers. 

From a customer perspective, our industry has been massively challenged – in a good way – by the fintechs. We need to continue to meet the rising expectations of people, to allow them to do the things they now want to do when it comes to managing their banking. 

We need the journey and the products to be simpler and more intuitive. Someone opening an account in 8 minutes is encouraging. They don’t want to spend time form filling and repeating information. When they go through the journey, we need them to be able to self-serve, with data and information provided at the right time so it’s useful for that individual. And this needs to be done in a positive way, not in a way that feels scary or like Big Brother. 

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you and why do you think organisations find it so hard? 

Some companies find it hard because they get lost in themselves. They get lost in their own supply-side issues, hindered by metrics and divorced from what matters to the customers they’re serving. 

You need to talk to your customers, listen to what they’re saying, stay very, very connected. Every Monday night, I spend time calling customers who have had cause to complain or given first direct a low NPS score in a survey. It’s important to me to stay in touch with what is happening on the ground; and to hear directly from our customers what they think we can do better. Exposing yourself to your areas of weakness keeps you on your toes, it makes sure you get better all the time. 

One of our values is to make it better, not perfect. 

Are there any customer pioneer organisations that you particularly admire? 

I admire businesses that maintain their values. Patagonia is held up for calling out the environmental crisis back when it wasn’t trendy or ‘important’. It’s that consistency of values that runs through the organisation that appeals. 

I would answer it in terms of companies, or people, who get ahead of the question their customer has – the ones that have brought you a cup of tea before you asked, or picked up a napkin before it’s dropped. That is the sign of a fantastic business. I think it is a challenge to us all to make sure that we continue to think beyond ourselves, to deliver what matters to the people we are trying to serve. 

Q. Setting up Mumsnet, you weren’t changing an organisation, you were creating a new solution. What gave you the determination to take the leap, your version of what we call Burningness – the pain, fear or ambition behind what followed? 

When I went on my first family holiday, when my children were about nine-months old, I made some very, very poor choices – about where to go, what time zone, how far the flight was…And the resort, as it turned out, wasn’t at all family-friendly even though it was supposed to be. 

The other parents and I were sitting around the hotel pool thinking what a mistake we’d made. And I sort of had a lightbulb moment, we could use the internet to connect people who had already taken holidays with children. 

And of course, it’s not just about holidays. It’s about everything. We’re doing a job [being a parent] that none of us trained for.  

I came back from holiday and gave it a go. Luckily, I had a friend who could code and was able to get the bare bones of a website together. We didn’t initially have any plans to have a forum as part of the website, it was going to be reviews but Steve, who was coding the site, asked if we wanted a forum. I had an idea that this could be quite a good thing because then people could communicate with each other.  

Q. As a founder you still have doubts about whether an idea really can work, for customers initially and then in a way that’s sustainable as a business. What was the first Moment of Belief that gave you encouragement that it might succeed?  

It rapidly became clear that the forum was the thing, really. I started off by using it myself. I would ask lots of questions in the early days. I encouraged my friends who were pregnant to ask questions. I rushed to answer them and found that two other people had already answered. It was at that point that I thought it’s going to be all right. 

Once I knew there were more people than me asking and answering questions it picked up quite quickly, growing by word of mouth. Apart from getting a few pieces in the press, there was no marketing budget. 

Q. Chasing funding can move entrepreneurs to focus on the needs of investors. How did you maintain focus on your customers while also growing belief that Mumsnet could be sustainable as a business?  

We weren’t the owners with an idea. We were living it. We were on the site genuinely making friends with the people posting. And I think that meant it was much more authentic, it had a more authentic feel.  

The dot.com bubble had burst and people had started losing a bit of faith in the internet. At that time we were still on dial-ups and it was all quite a painful process. But the value of the forum for people using it became clear when we asked the community for money. People would send in cheques for £250 because they were finding the forum so useful. People would write and tell me how Mumsnet had been a lifesaver, sometimes in very practical ways. 

It is a genuine community, and they are genuine stakeholders – producing the content, shaping the business, guiding who we would advertise with and who we wouldn’t. There was a lot of intrinsic value but no real way of making any money until around 2006-2007 when people started getting excited about Web 2.0 and social media – engaging with people as opposed to broadcasting. 

Until that point, people were telling me it was never going to work but I was saying ‘yes, but look at how much people love it. It’s got to work, we’ve got to find a way.’ 

Q. How have you stayed connected to your audience now you have quite a large team of people managing Mumsnet and as your own children have grown up?  

We have a mission. We want to make parents’ lives easier. We believe that by allowing parents to connect, particularly mums, it makes their lives easier. And we don’t work with anyone (any commercial partners for example) who doesn’t make their lives easier. 

I think we’re lucky, we have a 24/7 focus group. If people are upset about anything we’re doing, they have a very easy route to tell us, and we will listen. 

There’s no point in doing something that people think is fake, that they don’t trust or is cheesy. That doesn’t serve the business well. We do tell advertisers if it isn’t going to work. This is why brands are on Mumsnet, because it is a trusted place.  

The community has on many occasions educated us too. We were doing a partnership with the Baby Show and it was our users who pointed out that Clarion Events that run the Baby Show also run arms fairs. And that didn’t feel in keeping with supporting parents, so we stopped doing it.  

What I’m trying to say, in a long-winded way, is that we try, and we listen. We admit our mistakes and we rely on the community to keep us honest. 

Q. As well as a desire to connect people and share knowledge, you had a desire to create a new culture where being a parent wasn’t something to hide. How has Mumsnet given power to mums' voices and the things that matter to them?  

I think it still has a long way to go. I still think people pigeonhole mums and think mums can be a little bit dull and insular. One of the things that I always find about Mumsnet is that it’s really funny. I think because none of us find our own mother funny, or very few of us do, we all have a kind of prejudice about the word ‘mum’. It’s the most common prejudice. But when you read Mumsnet you realise it’s genuinely funny. 

We raise women’s voices by providing a platform for them to connect. There are about 9 million people on Mumsnet. There’s a very wide range of opinion but what gets me is how witty it is. I think if we’ve done anything, we’ve raised the fact that women of this age don’t stop being women. They don’t stop being funny. If people realise this then I’m very happy, very happy to think we might have contributed a little to change how women are seen. But there’s still a lot more to do. 

Q. How do you stay alert to the ways parents solve the issues you’ve always helped them with, aware of the potential for new and better solutions to emerge that might take over from Mumsnet? 

Mumsnet is a platform and that platform is agnostic. We were a website for desktops when we started. We’ve changed as we know 89% of our users are now accessing on mobile. We’ve done podcasts and TV shows. We will be user-led and take Mumsnet to wherever it makes sense for it to go. 

You could argue, and I’ve had a lot of people say, it looks so old-fashioned. But you can’t argue with the numbers. We still get 50% of new mums coming onto Mumsnet to this day and that hasn’t really changed from when it started.  

Anonymity is really important. It allows mums to be themselves, to ask really honest questions. Talk about their mother-in-law. Talk about their partner. So I think being text-based is how people want it to be. I’m not wedded to it and I’m not saying it will be forever. If we end up living in a virtual reality world, we’ll need to have a Mumsnet meeting place, but I don’t see that.  

AI obviously brings a whole new different challenge. It is a fantastic tool that we can use to make the business more efficient but the human-ness of mums is what makes it special. So we’re going to work very hard to make sure the content on Mumsnet remains written by humans and not AI. 

Q. Why do you think organisations find it so hard to be, and to keep on being, customer-led?  

We happen to run a forum so it’s easy for us to stay in touch with the customer. We’ve always managed to be self-funding so don’t have this competing set of goals focused on meeting growth metrics. This has been a massive help in terms of being able to focus fully on what the customer wants and not what shareholders want. 

I had to do Radio 4’s Great Lives once and I did Bill Shankly, the Liverpool manager. He just wanted to make people happy and had a very strong sense that it was all about the fans, not about the owners. There’s a part of me that is naturally that way inclined – to engage, to listen. It does get harder because I’m not the target audience anymore. I need a lot of people of the right demographic to make sure I’m not missing anything. You have to work harder when you’re not the target audience. You have to make sure you’re not sticking to old ideas that worked in your day but aren’t appropriate anymore. You need to realise you’re no longer the expert in this but still stick true to the core values of listening and learning. 

Q. Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire as customer pioneers in other sectors?  

There are a few actually, though they are new entrants and have an advantage where their tech is so much better so they can be much more focused on the user experience. The first is Monzo. It doesn’t complicate things. I feel sorry for the incumbents, but you know, Monzo makes it a very simple experience and they have a very high level of trust amongst their consumers, most banks don’t. They’ve done amazingly really. But they did have the advantage of being a new entrant. 

It's similar for Octopus Energy. Based on having great tech, they’ve been able to find a voice, to keep things simple and to talk in an authentic way.  

An example of a long-established company that I think does well, I do have to declare an interest because I’m on the board, is Admiral Insurance. They will say they’re customer-led but actually what they really are is people-led.  

They have devolved a lot of autonomy to the front line and that’s how they’ve stayed customer-focused. They treat their staff amazingly well. 

The motto of the founder was ‘happy staff, happy customer’ and that’s how they do it. They are the only British company to have been in the Best Place to Work rankings for the last 25 years. It really works. It is a happy innovative environment because they’ve focused on the team. In many ways, it’s like a start-up just with 6,000 employees. 

Farmers have it hard. Under pressure from the weather, from pests and disease, from huge supermarkets, from subsidy reductions, from new environmental rules and costs… and it can be lonely work across long hours, weeks and years. 

Farmers can be hard to do business with too. Farms vary greatly in size and situation, farmers vary in mindset and approach. They need to think long-term about land, but short-term about making a living, as each year takes on a different shape.  

It matters too. We need them to secure good, affordable food for the nation while protecting nature and the countryside. 

Mark Aitchison set up Frontier Agriculture in 2005, it’s now a circa £2bn business. His approach to farmers, and the secret of his success, is the way they are genuinely customer, or farmer, led.  

The business is centred on crops, buying from farmers, and marketing and selling to crop processors, in ways that work well for the producers and, through quality and security of supply, for the users too. 

On top of that, they advise farmers on crop production, varieties to grow and how to do it well, increasingly a data-rich pursuit. Their culture is service-led and full of pride, from truck drivers to traders. 

Their latest initiative is an investment in a challenger bank for UK agriculture. Oxbury was set up in 2021 to provide the food and farming industries with the funding and support that they need, an agricultural fintech. Building on Frontier’s relationships with farmers, the bank became profitable just two years later. 

Earlier this year, Mark handed the Frontier Agriculture reins to Diana Overton as he moved to a Group Chair role.

Q: You've led Frontier Agriculture for an impressive 20 years. Could you share a bit about your background and what brought you to that point?  

Believe it or not, I'm a Scouser at heart, born and bred in Walton, Liverpool – a pretty vibrant, shall we say, urban area. My path to agriculture wasn't exactly traditional! I'm actually a biologist by training. I have a biology degree followed by a postgraduate qualification in agronomy and crop husbandry. So, at my core, I understand how things grow. I entered the industry in the mid-80s as an agronomist, working for a private firm in Lincolnshire, and honestly, I just loved it. 

I loved walking the fields, I loved growing crops and the closeness with farmers. And being close to it is an important part of being successful and advising farmers how to be successful.  

What makes farming fascinating is that it's biology, which means it's constantly changing. No season is the same. In most businesses, the environment becomes predictable, but in agriculture, it's very unpredictable. Understanding that and being able to respond to it is an important part of being successful in agriculture. 

Q: How did you move from being an agronomist to being in business? 

As I became a successful agronomist with lots of customers, I wanted to get into management. I eventually joined Cargill, who had bought Unilever's agricultural business in the UK. 

At the time, Cargill was a commodity trading company – very transactional, very intelligent, but very much a trader. I joined them as a service expert who'd been working closely with farmers, and suddenly I was in this commodity trading culture where it was all about transactions. I thought I'd made a big mistake, but decided to stay and see if I could change the environment. I wanted to prove to Cargill that being customer-focused and understanding customers' challenges would actually make the company more successful. 

Gradually I took over half the sales force, then the whole sales force, then became commercial director because it was performing better. Then one day they asked if I'd like to be managing director of the company. 

Q: Was there a defining moment that shaped your approach? 

I remember telling Cargill that agriculture is a people business, and they said, "The trouble with you, Mark, is you're just a romantic." I replied, "No, I'm not. I'm a biologist." 

The reason it's a people business is that every season, every farm, every field, every set of circumstances is different because it's biology, and it’s well-trained expert people with knowledge and wisdom that can make decisions that can eliminate biological variability. Understanding that we need to listen to our customers and recognise these differences is the secret to our success. 

I was educating Cargill that agriculture was a people business, and that your ability to be good with customers, understand them, listen to them, and be invaluable to them was fundamental to success in this industry. 

Q: What were some of the brave decisions you made along the way? 

I told Cargill we needed to do certain things if they wanted to go on a journey to make this the number one company in the industry. At that point, we had about 2% market share and were making no money. Today, we're the most profitable, most successful, largest, and most respected business in the industry with 25-30% market share, making £50 million (EBIT). 

One big step was acquiring Banks Agriculture in 2001. The brave decision was that I said to Cargill, "I'd like to go off balance sheet as a standalone limited company." I wanted our own assets, balance sheet, independent financing, systems, culture and HR policies so I could develop a business with the values I believed were important for connecting with farmers. 

My boss at Cargill said, "When you tell your parents you don't want to be with them, you better be successful because they're not going to like you if you don't succeed." It was a fair warning! 

The next brave move came after three successful years when we merged with Allied Grain, owned by Associated British Foods or ABF, in 2005 to create Frontier Agriculture. I became managing director reporting to joint owners Cargill and ABF. I held that position for 20 years until January 2025. 

Q: How has Frontier Agriculture grown over this time? 

When we started, Frontier had a turnover of £500 million, employed 500 people, and made £7 million operating profit. 

In 2025, Frontier turns over £1.75 billion, employs 1,100 people, and makes £50 million. So in that 20-year period, we've trebled the size of the company and increased profitability sevenfold. 

For me, it's all about the culture and values of the company and making the business really good with customers. Yes, there are clever commercial aspects – our balance sheet strength is phenomenal, and we agreed with shareholders not to pay dividends for the first 10 years to build up our financial capacity. But at the heart of the business has been our ability to connect well with our customers. 

Q: How would you describe the culture you've built? 

We created a set of values we refer to as "ICE": Integrity, Customer First and Expertise. Everyone in the company, whether they're lorry drivers, forklift operators, traders, salespeople, agronomists, or administrators – all 1,100 know these values. We have ICE awards to recognise them. 

By Integrity, we mean running a respect-based organisation where everyone is equally valued. When we say we're going to do something, we mean it. When we shake hands, it means something. We're decent, honest, trustworthy people in everything we do. 

Customer First means remembering we're fundamentally a service business. We don't have a lot of unique IP or manufacture many things. We're interpreters, service providers, logisticians, traders. We give advice to farmers on growing crops using our knowledge. 

If you're a service organisation, it's not about what you do, it's about how you do it. It's about behaviour, culture, values, and how you perform in front of the customer. That's what you're judged on and how you make your money. 

Q: How do you empower your people to deliver great customer service? 

We descend decision-making authority to the lowest point in the business. Many large companies keep big decisions high up in the organisation, but customers want decisions made quickly and in their interests. 

Giving authority to people who interface with customers allows them to deliver a great experience. If a customer asks when you're going to collect or deliver something, what the price is, or how many items are available, they don't want to hear "I'll get back to you." They want answers now. 

That takes courage – having the confidence to give people the authority to make decisions on behalf of the customer. If that authority is held up in the organisation, no one benefits. 

Q: The "E" in ICE stands for Expertise. How do you develop that? 

I learned a long time ago that you don't make money being next-year's expert. Being really good at what you do, not average, adding value, making a difference – these are very important. 

We're invested in our people. They're well-educated, well-trained and experienced. We give them the best products and services we can find. Frontier will acquire the best technology for its agronomists and crop nutrition experts. We'll get the best markets for grain and use our scale to secure exclusive marketing arrangements. 

For example, we're the exclusive supplier of wheat to Warburton's bread. If you like Warburton's bread, it's our wheat that goes into it. 

We also ensure our people have the right assets – all our trucks are new, our sites are professionally invested in and safe, with good equipment. If you say you want to be an expert organisation but give people rusty tools, forget it. You won't achieve it. 

Q: You've talked about Frontier being the UK's biggest agricultural business. How do you make sure you don't come across as remote or inflexible to your customers? 

One of the first things we did when we created Frontier was recognise that anyone who's number one or goes to number one, the customer almost always considers them to be remote, inflexible, and not listening. 

We needed to demonstrate to customers that they could have the power of this new organisation – financially strong, credible, with great services – but receive that through trusted, valuable relationships with individuals. 

So, we created the ‘Faces of Frontier’ initiative where our brand featured 30 people who worked in the business. Their faces were professionally photographed and put on our lorries, buildings, and adverts. We said, ‘Meet the people that make a difference.’ 

What we hadn't anticipated was the tremendous positive vibe this created within the company. People said the leadership of this business is so confident in our ability, they're prepared to make us the brand of the company. Everyone thought this is a place where you can be respected, with high standards. 

Over 20 years, we've featured more than 120 people as the faces of Frontier, and market research shows that farmers recognise Frontier as a people business. Our message has been you can get the power of this company through trusted relationships with people who listen to you. 

Q: That's a very human approach to business. Is that reflected in how you treat your employees as well? 

Absolutely. We're very decent with our people. We’ve supported our staff and we do things right. If you really want to be taken seriously, you need to behave in the way you want to be admired. If you say "these are our values," then you have to live them. The quickest way to get sacked in Frontier is behaving dishonestly or being unsafe. 

We recently had three drivers in Yorkshire who decided to stretch the rules relating to the loaded weight of thier lorries. They knew they were doing it, were told not to, but continued. We sacked all three of them – no messing about. We won't have people flagrantly disregarding safety rules or damaging our reputation. 

Frontier is a lovely company to deal with and well-respected by customers, but it's not soft and fluffy. You don't get the level of respect, success, and financial performance we've achieved without being fiercely committed to what you're doing. 

Q: You've recently handed over leadership after 20 years. How did you approach that transition? 

I've handed over to our previous Group Finance Director, Diana – which is interesting in this male-oriented industry. She's been working with me for ten years and was the other executive director on the main board. 

The board asked if we should look outside for someone to run the company. I said absolutely not. The only person who can run this company is someone who's been in it and understands the culture. 

After 20 years, I've handed over to someone who has been in the company for 10 years and understands the culture and how it works. I would never have handed it to someone from outside the industry because they would come in with their own version of Frontier. 

Diana's taking over, and I've moved into a Group Executive role. I'm still on the main board and helping her without interfering. She's running the senior leadership team while I'm chairing several of our subsidiary businesses. 

ABF, one of our shareholders, did a study on what they call "combination businesses" – organisations with different cultural models within one overarching structure. Frontier was a good example because we have both transactional trading relationships (buying grain) and high-value advisory relationships (agronomy). 

ABF discovered that these combination businesses tend to be more profitable because the complexity brings added value. One of their conclusions was that the worst thing you can do in a combination business is change the CEO every five years, which was their normal practice. 

The success of combination businesses is about understanding the subtleties of what makes them successful. When the CEO leaves, all those subtleties leave with them, destroying value in the company. 

That's why I appointed someone from within who understands the culture. She may not have farming or loads of sales experience, but she's intelligent, understands our culture, can learn, and can define her own way of operating while understanding what has made us successful. 

Q. You’ve also helped set up the first agricultural bank in over 100 years, how did this come about? 

It all started five years ago when a friend approached me with this brilliant idea. He said, "We'd like to set up the first agricultural bank in the UK for 100 years." The concept was all about agility, speed, and excellence with customers – everything the big corporate High Street banks weren't providing. 

These traditional banks have legacy systems, they're poor with customers, don't listen, don't ring you back. They're remote and entitled. Meanwhile, farmers aren't well understood by these corporate banks. I immediately thought, yeah, it's a great idea! I love it and it fits totally with my model and thinking on customer service. 

Q: How did you get the initial funding to start the bank? 

I went to my shareholders at Frontier and said I'd like us to invest in building the first agricultural bank in the UK for 100 years. Cargill told me, "We had a bank in Argentina and the farmers came and burnt the bank down and stole the safe. We're never going to do banking again." ABF said, "We're a grocery business, we own Primark and Twinings – we're not going to do financial services." 

I simply told them, "I would like to change your mind, I think it’s a great idea.” I stuck my neck out, which is something I'm quite used to doing. 

We managed to get the £9 million needed to start building the bank. Even then our CFO warned me, "If this fails, you realise it's going to be bad for you." I said, "Yeah, I think I do." 

Q: So how is Oxbury performing today? 

Five years later, Oxbury Bank has been the fastest to break even in the history of UK banking! It's turning over £2 billion, has 57,000 customers and employs 200 people. It'll make £12 million operating profit next year, and continues to grow. 

We've now raised £170 million, completely avoiding private equity – I don't like guys in shiny pinstripe suits because they're not interested in customers!  

Q: Beyond the financial success, what makes Oxbury special? 

Oxbury Bank is absolutely recognised for being brilliant with customers. We were talking the other day that the brand of the bank should be "we will always ring you back." 

Unlike other banks, we've got 15 area managers that go out on farms and meet farmers, talking to them about their businesses. Our digital systems, developed from scratch, are fantastic – you can bank on your phone or PC. It’s very easy to use and it's just beautiful. 

Farmers are loving it! They're borrowing money from us to buy new tractors, put up new buildings and repair their property. They're buying their crop inputs on a revolving credit facility. On the deposit side, Martin Lewis has been promoting our deposit accounts and bonds because they've been very competitive in the market. 

It's great for farming and great for our P&L – all because I recognised that the banking model needs a customer solution. Oxbury is a beautiful, software-enabled, digitally smart solution for banking, and it's succeeding tremendously well today because it's great to deal with. 

Q: Any final thoughts for business leaders looking to be more customer-led? 

The leader of the company has to be totally committed to the customer if you're going to create that culture and make it work. You can set any values you like, and they might appear customer-centric, but unless you're fierce about making them a reality on the ground, you won't be taken seriously. 

Frontier has gone from being insignificant to number one, and it's all about putting customers at the heart of everything we do. That's an incredible story of business transformation driven by customer focus and Diana will strengthen and develop this further because she understands our unique culture. 

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Mark AitchisonPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsJ LeeThu, 15 May 2025 14:31:34 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-richard-gomersall6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:6825f876be66767f209ce843

At Co-op Funeralcare he led the creation of a new category of product, Funeral Plans, an idea sparked by realising there were hidden unmet needs around funerals. Because dying is a taboo subject, most people wouldn’t talk about it, and then when someone dies, the people organising what happens are mainly concerned that they don’t get it wrong. So it doesn’t feel personal, like something that fully reflects the deceased. It can also cost quite a lot, and paying for it can become another burden on the people around the deceased. 

The ideal of a funeral plan was to allow individuals to start saving for their own funeral a long way ahead, taking the financial burden away from those who remain, AND allowing them to understand much more fully ways they can celebrate life and be commemorated or laid to rest afterwards. This might cost more but there’s time to pay for it and then confidence all round that this is what they would have wanted. The Funeralcare business benefits too, with cashflow coming in well ahead of funerals, commitment to go with them, and more being spent on it all when it happens as a premium service not a distress purchase. 

When Richard got involved in GreenAcres, it was a business losing money, owned by VCs more interested in KPIs and targets than the customer. But Richard wanted to make it better for customers at one of the most difficult times they’re likely to experience, as well as making it a successful commercial business model. He had the same insight brought with him from the Co-op, but now applied to a business much more directly involved, and with more types of customer to consider too – funeral directors as one. A programme of listening to find out what each of the groups of customers liked, disliked and really wanted led to a range of innovations and options, more competitive pricing, and comprehensive aftercare.  

And investors have been as pleased as customers, increasing turnover fivefold, from losing money to substantial profits. Numbers of services across their sites rose from 400 to nearly 3,000 a year, and with 100% Trust Pilot five-star ratings.  

Q. You’ve had a wonderfully varied career. Can you tell us a little about it?

Sure. People often remember me for my work in the funeral sector, but I’ve only spent about six years there in total! My background is actually broader – I’ve been in retail and service-led businesses for nearly 40 years. I started with Bass, the brewers, then moved to Magnet Kitchens after their buyout. I made myself redundant there, funnily enough, by recommending a change they followed through on!

From there, I joined Asda in the early ’90s when Archie Norman and Allan Leighton were transforming the business, a brilliant time to learn about being customer-led. Later, I worked at Mothercare, then spent eight years with the Co-op Group. I initially worked on sorting out banking and finance issues. I then went to the home store business and did the merger between the CRS and CWS to form the Co-operative Group. I was then asked to run both the farming and funeral businesses because they needed a fresh approach.

Since 2009, I’ve run my own advisory business, working across sectors – retail, financial services, furniture, and more – mainly in turnaround and board roles.

But… along the way, there was another stint of nearly four years running cemetery businesses first as chairman of Kemnal Park and then as CEO of the Greenacres Group, a broader funeral services and memorial park business.

Q. The common thread seems to be stepping into businesses that are stuck or struggling. What’s your approach in those situations?

I’ve always framed it as ‘turning vision into value’. Either organisations don’t have a clear vision, or they can’t execute the one they’ve got. I focus on what I call the ‘Three Cs’: Customers, Colleagues, and Cash – in that order.

What do customers really want? Not what you think they want, what they actually want. Then, how do you get colleagues aligned behind that? And lastly, what cash is available to enable that vision, or how do you free it up by focusing on the first two Cs?

If you align customers and colleagues well, cash tends to follow.

Q. It sounds obvious when you say it, but many organisations get stuck in strategy or structure. Why do you think that happens?

Sometimes we overcomplicate things. I often describe strategy as setting the destination – the top of the mountain. Then the question is, who’s on the expedition team, what’s in the rucksack and how are we going to get there?

And a lot of it is about clarity and communication. I love the idea that good internal marketing is about clarity, consistency, and connection. If people across the organisation don’t understand the ‘why’ in simple terms, they won’t deliver the ‘how’ effectively.

For example, at GreenAcres, we would hold park action review meetings every month and a standing item on the agenda was how have we met (exceeded) customer needs. The two main KPIs were grow market share by working closely with our partners and communicates and deliver excellent customer feedback because we have delivered what is important. We would communicate this every six months to the broader team through roadshows. We told them what was happening warts and all and asked for their ideas and suggestions to improve things – it worked we grew the business six-fold in 3 years.

Q. Let’s talk about your time turning around Co-operative Funeralcare, a fascinating and challenging environment.

Absolutely. At the time, we were a £200 million business with 600 locations and 3,500 colleagues. One of our biggest challenges was cultural – breaking down Victorian traditions that no longer served the customer.

So a quick story, I visited a funeral branch and asked the lady where the computer was because they were now doing the processing and invoicing at branch level, and she said, oh, it's in the cupboard. So I looked in the cupboard and the computer was still in the box! Six months after rollout, she hadn’t even plugged it in. That meant no invoices were being sent out, which isn’t just a financial issue, but a customer one as families weren’t getting closure. Colleagues were confused. Cash wasn’t coming in...

So how do you tackle that? You have to be bold in many ways. We had to unwind the new processes and rebuild them around what actually worked. Bring the processing back into hubs, put people in who know how to do it and let frontline colleagues focus on what we want them to do – caring for clients.

Q. And there was a lightbulb moment around customer feedback too, right?

Yes, the business claimed 98% customer satisfaction. I didn’t believe it. It wasn’t bad service, but 98%? That’s perfection. It turned out we were sending feedback forms the day after the funeral, along with the invoice. Of course, people were emotionally relieved it went smoothly, but they hadn’t had time to reflect.

When we followed up three to six months later through listening sessions, scores dropped to the 60%. The reason? People didn’t realise what was possible at the time. They were secretly disappointed – not angry, just unaware they had choices.

So, we re-engineered the arrangement process to offer real choice, even when people were grieving. And we empowered colleagues to say “yes” to customer requests – whatever they might be. “Can we drive past the football stadium?” Yes. “Can we bring them on a tractor?” Yes. Unless there’s a legal reason not to, the answer is yes.

Q. This was a huge cultural shift. How did you bring colleagues along?

Most of the frontline colleagues got it right away. The challenge was what I call the permafrost layer – middle management who were used to interpreting instructions conservatively, avoiding risk.

We broke through that by being persistent. We held a big conference, then regional roadshows – interactive sessions followed by informal chats over food. I’d hear directly from colleagues: “They won’t let us do this.” And I’d say, “Who is it who won’t let you? It’s just me and the ops director, we’re both here and we’re both saying yes.”

We followed up with videos and listening sessions. It wasn’t easy, but once you melt that permafrost, the change really starts to stick.

Q. You’ve worked with both large and small organisations. What’s different when it comes to becoming customer-led?

The biggest difference is speed. In a small business, you can sit down with the whole team every week. In a big business, communication takes time, repetition, and planning.

But the challenges are similar: misunderstanding what the customer really wants, fear of change, or getting pulled inward by investor or operational pressures.

The trick is staying outward-focused. Keep asking: Are we still solving a real customer problem? Are we listening?

Q. You now support the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses programme. What’s your role there?

I mentor a group of businesses through the programme’s 14-week growth journey. It’s very structured. It starts with vision, then understanding your customer, before moving into marketing, finance, ops, and people.

While I don’t push my Three Cs formally, they come up in conversation. And it’s clear the most successful participants are those who really get the customer insight piece and keep coming back to it throughout their growth planning.

Q. Why do you think being customer-led is so hard for many businesses?

Honestly? I find it baffling that more businesses don’t naturally work this way. But if I had to guess, it’s that internal pressures take over. There’s politics. There’s the pressure to cut costs, to please investors. People stop looking outwards.

Some organisations start customer-focused, then forget why they began. They don’t keep refreshing that understanding. They think they already know.

Q. Are there any organisations you admire that do get it right?

A few. Everyone mentions Apple or Disney, and rightly so. But I always liked Transport for London’s whiteboards. That’s customer empathy, every day, right where it matters.

Early EasyJet is another. They removed the frills, focused on pain points, and created something simple and valuable.

And then there’s Future Leaders, a charity I support. They help young people from underrepresented backgrounds access university and leadership pathways. It came from understanding the ‘customer’ - talented kids without role models. That insight shapes everything they do. It’s purpose-led and life-changing.

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Richard GomersallPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsJ LeeThu, 15 May 2025 14:21:12 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-terry-corby6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:6825f3925a14682d880a763c

Then they found a pioneering way to go to market. They looked for a big, broad issue that was interesting to business leaders across sectors and that no one else was talking about. They came upon ‘high performance’ in organisations and teams, an emerging field of learning. 

They studied it, understood what lay behind the headlines and how organisations all round the world compared. Gold dust. Now the client-facing Partners had insight into each client or potential client’s current position plus knowledge on how to do better – to stretch a lead, to go from middling to the leading pack, or to get away from the laggards. ‘High Performance, Delivered’ became the firm’s global tagline. And a new division, Accenture Learning, was born. 

Terry’s not stopped… His current work involves pioneering on behalf of small businesses who in this case need a behaviour change in a group of their customers – large corporations. He’s working to get them to be paid promptly by making the cost of not doing so clear – to those customers and to a wider audience. It’s in their interests – it harms them in the end, and it affects the nation as a whole too. 

Q: What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you and where does your desire to pioneer for customers come from? 

I've always been driven by trying to make positive change – people-driven change rather than organisation-driven change. Even before consulting, I was involved in significant initiatives like staging BT's first annual general meeting at the National Exhibition Centre, relaunching Midland Bank, publicising the Channel Tunnel breakthrough, and lobbying for the Sunday Trading Act. 

At American Express, I got involved in bringing marketing teams and IT teams together to find new products for customers. That led to things like the Blue Card. The organisation helping us was Andersen Consulting, and I could see that transformation was their business. I thought, "This is my home to do big change things in an organisation that specialises in transformation." So I joined Andersen Consulting, by accident, as with everything else in my career. 

Part of this ‘pioneering spirit’ comes from how I was brought up. My mother has a phrase, "right's right," which meant always try to do the right thing. Is it fair? Is it right? 

I also took an unconventional path. I went to a good school but wasn't a good student. I left at 16 after O-levels, didn't go to university, and went straight to London to become a runner at a production company. When I got to Andersen Consulting, my new boss asked what university I went to. When I said I didn't attend, he replied, "Oh my God, how did they let you in here?" From that point, I just wanted to prove people wrong – that you don't need a degree to be successful. 

That idea of being given an equal chance to succeed extends to how I think about customers. We are all customers in our daily lives. We experience frustrations with holiday bookings, travel companies, and other services. But somehow, we leave those frustrations at the door when we walk into our jobs. We forget that we're frustrated customers and then go invent things for other people without remembering our own experiences. 

Q: When you joined Accenture, you mentioned it was already a transformative business. Can you take us through the cultural transformation that occurred during your time there? 

I joined a business that had transformation in its roots. Andersen Consulting grew out of Arthur Andersen, an audit firm that wanted to develop a separate consulting arm. When I joined, the firm was ready for change but still had a culture from an era with partners from an audit firm background. It was facing a critical business challenge – it had spent years helping companies integrate their technologies so that auditors could make sense of the data. Once all the technology is plugged in and systems are working, what do you do next? 

My colleagues and I were evangelists for the human element of change. The people component was typically treated as least important, despite our belief that it should be first in line. After all, when transformations fail, it usually comes down to people.  

We asked ourselves – what if we could prove how important humans were to the whole process of change? So we proposed surveying 100 financially successful companies about their people management practices and comparing them to 100 companies that weren't doing well. 

The results showed that companies performing well financially were doing different things in managing and leading their people. We called this the ‘High Performance Workforce Study’. We tested this hypothesis with 1,000 more companies and got the same results. That's how our journey began – solving a people problem that blossomed into something much bigger.  

Looking at what successful companies were doing differently across functions like HR, finance and supply chain, we discovered an opportunity to create a powerful new narrative. So we flipped our perspective from horizontal to vertical. Instead of focusing as specialists on individual business functions, we started looking more broadly at entire industries. We asked: What makes one airline outperform another across all departments? What distinguishes high-performing banks from average ones? 

This approach transformed our client conversations. Rather than simply selling the latest HR or finance system, we could discuss what a truly successful airline or bank might look like if it optimized across multiple functional areas. 

The term ‘high performance’ resonated powerfully with clients, though we hadn't initially planned for it to become our positioning. Clients adopted our language and data to build investment cases within their organisations. There was also a personal appeal – executives discussing high-performance organisations were themselves perceived as high-performance leaders.  We had created terminology that was aspirational for both companies and individuals. Seeing this impact, we incorporated 'high performance' into our marketing and advertising campaigns. 

Our research showed clients valued our reliable delivery, so we combined this with our new focus on high performance. The phrase ‘high performance, delivered’ captured both our promise and our clients' aspirations, differentiating us in the marketplace at a time when we weren't yet universally seen as a high-performance company ourselves. 

Q: And how did you apply that learning inside Andersen to change how the company worked? 

We had four service areas – technology, strategy, process, and people change management, but were struggling to deliver them as a cohesive solution to clients. 

Clients would tell me, ‘I had no idea you did all these other things. I only get sold what the person across the table knows how to sell me’. 

This pointed to our internal problem. Our partners didn't really have capability in the other areas, so it's quite difficult to get them to cross-sell. The way the P&L was set up also worked against it – set up to reward partners selling the single solution they were responsible for – so there was a worry if a Partner was selling an HR solution, and the finance person came along that that Partner might ‘steal’ the revenue for a finance solution from the client.  

The shift in perspective, from internal to more outside-in, from organising horizontally by business function (HR, finance, supply chain) to look vertically by industry, wasn't easy. Our Partners needed training and confidence-building to transition from function-specific conversations to positioning themselves as industry experts. But the impact on sales figures and cross-selling was remarkable. 

To fully embed this approach, we made structural changes too. We shifted P&L responsibility from functional units to industry verticals, created a reward system that encouraged cross-selling, and aligned client feedback metrics with high performance solutions rather than individual functional areas. 

The result was a complete transformation in how we approached client challenges, and ultimately, in how we defined ourselves as a business. 

Q: How have you applied those experiences to your current work with small organisations through Good Business Pays? 

I founded this community interest campaign somewhat by accident. When COVID hit, much of the creative industry shut down – filming stopped, music festivals cancelled, theatres went dark. Since 97% of people in the creative industries are freelancers, many didn't get paid. It was a painful time with heartbreaking stories of people unable to pay bills or feed their children. 

I realised we needed to address the issue of late payments. I figured that despite all the laws and technology developed to help businesses pay faster, ultimately, it's always a human who decides whether to use those tools. What we needed was a hearts and minds campaign, not another technical solution. 

I started by building a coalition with organisations like the CBI, FSB, IoD, Chambers of Commerce, and 22 other industry and trade bodies to create a single voice on late payments.

We got support from big businesses to fund our work so we could provide everything free for small businesses. We built relationships with government departments across both Conservative and Labour administrations. 

In four years, we've got over 1,600 big companies to slash their payment terms from 100 days down to 10-12 days. Each of these companies has thousands of suppliers who themselves have thousands more suppliers. We've changed laws, enhanced the Small Business Commissioner's authority, and established a Fair Payment Code. 

Four years ago, no one in big business wanted to talk about late payments. Now, heads are nodding in big business and government, and they're making changes. Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the US want to implement similar initiatives. 

Q: Why do you think organisations find it so hard to be customer-led and think about their customers? 

I think it's a cultural thing. Trailfinders, the holiday company, is a great example of doing things well. They pay their suppliers in about 3-4 days, which is exceptionally fast for their industry. 

When I asked their CEO why they pay suppliers so quickly instead of holding onto cash, he explained that it creates a virtuous cycle. When Trailfinders customers arrive at hotels, they often receive perks like a complimentary bottle of wine or room upgrades. This happens because Trailfinders pays the hotels quickly, so the hotels take extra care of Trailfinders customers. When customers return home, they're loyal to Trailfinders because of these experiences, creating a halo effect for everyone involved. 

Another interesting aspect of Trailfinders' culture is that since their founding in 1979, they've maintained two separate bank accounts – a ‘customer bank account’ and a 'working capital bank account.’ When a customer books a holiday, their money goes into the customer account and isn't touched to pay wages or bills until the customer has returned home safely. This ensures every element of the customer's holiday is always protected – they won't face a situation like Thomas Cook where money is spent on operations and then the holiday isn't delivered. 

Being customer-led can also mean being a good corporate citizen by treating your suppliers fairly – because they're also your customers and people in your community. 

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Terry CorbyPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsJ LeeWed, 19 Feb 2025 14:44:35 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-tim-lee6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:67b5ed52c178736b65171369

During the early years of the business, they established their differentiated take on the offer. Then when Covid hit and demand skyrocketed, smart planning that had prioritised flexibility and customer-led thinking meant they could keep welcoming and serving every new customer.

Tim has had a long career in the food industry - from fish factories in Newcastle to Covent Garden and Spitalfield markets before long spells at Tesco and Marks & Spencer’s Food business,  where he led their strategy as they continued their impressive growth well beyond a niche.

Throughout his career, Tim has pioneered for customers in the UK and internationally. In this interview we look at how he has taken his in-depth knowledge of the food industry from the nation’s largest grocer and used it to help this ethical BCorp start-up become a pioneering part of a global multinational.

Q. The move from big multinational organisations to Mindful Chef, a small digital start-up, must have been a big shift. How did you steer through it and how did the focus on the customer compare?

My career had already started to migrate away from bricks and mortar into digital. So even when I was in the US with Tesco, starting up Fresh & Easy, I was helping to build their first digital loyalty card. And at M&S, I was running food online and exploring where next in terms of digital.

I got to know a lot of digital businesses at that stage, including Deliveroo in the early days before it expanded. I was doing a lot of work learning how digital works and how customers were migrating more towards an omnichannel experience.

Mindful Chef combined a pure digital approach with a focus on health which I felt was going to be a really big thing for customers. For me, it struck three chords – being focused on health, which is a big challenge, being a pioneer in digital, which is where customers were moving to, and being a values-based business.

Even when I started back in 2018, the three founders were already well advanced on becoming the first ever recipe box B-Corp, doing things like 1 feeds 2, so for every box sold, one meal is given to a child living in poverty.

As to the customer focus, it all comes down to leadership, whatever the size of organisation. If you’ve got the right leadership and focus, it doesn't matter if you're a small or large business. You need to be passionate about customers, and passionate about solving their problems. Are you constantly asking how your customers are? Are we looking after them? What are we doing for them? Do we think this is a great experience? How can we improve it?

Do you really want to be seen by customers as the best business? Are you assessing yourself against the metrics that matter or are you just looking at gross sales or the metrics of the business…because if so, the likelihood is that you're never going to be customer-focused.

I think we think we're pretty customer-focused. But even now, when we're close to it and have lots of information, we still have blind spots. It's inevitable.

Q. Mindful Chef is now part-owned by Nestlé. How has this changed the company’s focus and how have you kept the customer-pioneering spirit alive?

We've got a professional investor in Nestlé. They've allowed us to continue to be independent. We run the business. We're connected but not integrated, this meant we've been able to stay close to our customers.

One of the many benefits of being a digital business is that you get to know your customers very well – who they are, where they're from, how much they spend, how frequently they spend and so on.

We overlay this data with an annual survey and focus groups. In the first week that I joined, we had a focus group with our customers to learn what they thought and felt about us as a whole. We’re still doing it and this keeps us in touch.

We've developed what we call our customer promises. We call them Moments that Matter and they’re central to how we run the business. For example, within our Moments that Matter one metric is NPS. Our view is that if we get our five promises right – Easy to use, I can get what I order; The quality is incredible; The recipes are healthy and delicious; and I feel looked after – our NPS tends to go up. Not only that, but the business tends to improve sales, retention is better and so on.

We start each week with these Moments that Matter and their associated metrics. All our teams report their performance against them. It's very clear, and everyone knows what's important for our customers. They know what their job is, and they're empowered to solve the problems that arise.

It really helps bring customers right to the forefront. Nestlé has really enjoyed learning about it all too, because it isn’t something they do in their businesses.

We can be a force for good within a big organisation, and I feel like we’re better set up to make a difference by being proactive in a larger organisation because we can unlock benefits by using their strengths – their capital, their ability, their knowledge, their expanded capability, their reach beyond the UK.

Q. Do you think being a digitally-based organisation gives you an advantage over physical businesses in terms of being close to customers, or vice versa?

That’s a great question. Retailers like Tesco and M&S know their customers very well.  Nothing beats walking the stores, being with customers, talking to the teams on the shop floor, hearing their experiences about what's working for customers and what's not, being approached by customers in the aisles… You've got an instant barometer and sense-check on the business. This is a big strength.

The advantage of a pure digital organisation is that you have so much more information. You are aware of all the different touchpoints that your customers experience and you understand the customer journey better than in the physical world, partly because you see what they’re doing from the point they arrive, and, if you've got good analytics, you can act on it to get better and grow sales.

You know where they've come from, so you can be clear on your channel acquisition strategy. You know your attribution models. You can see where you are winning customers, and you can equally see where and why you're losing customers.

The data has a great richness in it, but it’s not like touching customers directly. Without meeting them face-to-face, you don't get the nuances of what really matters to them, and you don't necessarily sense the passion you feel if you're on a shop floor.

So, I think you need both. You need the digital to give you the power, and with the tools we have now with AI etc, there’s an incredible amount that you can churn out in terms of what customers are doing, why they're doing it and more. But you also need that nuance – the feeling and the emotion. Then you really understand.

In the early days we used to rely heavily on digital data and less on interviews. We did one customer interview session pretty soon after I arrived. We were telling them about how purpose-driven we were and the good stuff we do, but the customers didn’t know about any of this. The team was really surprised. Then the customers said well, we're not always on Facebook and Instagram, which is where most of your communication is.

That was one of our aha! moments. Customers wanted to learn about the businesses through physical things, not just online. So, rather than a recipe card, we decided to do a recipe booklet where we could showcase and explain, not just how delicious and healthy the recipes are, but the other things we do as a business.

Customers now tell us they sit and read the book, or it sits on their kitchen table. This was a huge opportunity, but we would never have discovered it through our digital insight. It just doesn’t bring these nuances to life.

Q. You’ve shown the power that surveying customers can have, but you can’t survey everyone. How do you decide who to survey?

We were told that you can’t do long surveys. Customers won’t have the attention, blah, blah, blah. Our survey takes around 10 minutes to complete, which is quite long, and we get a huge response rate, over 20%. We use this as a barometer of customer behaviour - what they’re doing and why.

For the more nuanced work, rather than focusing on all customers, we focus on our top customers. If you can understand who your best customers are and their motivations, and if you’re doing a great job for them, then the likelihood is you’ll be able to pull more customers up through the funnel to become best customers too.

We use tech to do this. All through the journey we signpost top customers. So even if they're new and they have this potential, we put a signpost on to say, ‘Ah, Justine's joined. She comes from a good postcode, she’s spent a lot of money’. That's a good indicator of whether she's likely to become a top customer. This is early prediction modelling, which is important in enabling the business to grow in a focused way, and allowing your resources to be well targeted.

Q. What does it mean to be a customer pioneer? Where did your desire come from?

I think deep down it comes from your values, wanting to help people. In a business sense, it's about solving their problems. For us, it's pretty emotional. We had a lady in one interview who told us about a recent traumatic experience. Her husband had an accident. He always used to cook so she hadn’t needed to. Then suddenly she had to cook for him and didn’t know how. We helped her by solving a massive problem.

I suppose you look for the drivers in terms of making people feel better. It’s our mission to make healthy eating easy. If you can find a mission, a way of genuinely creating value, then it's motivating.

So, for me it's about having a value-set focused around people and applying it to a business by saying, OK, well, how do you solve these problems? Then you've got something that's worth getting up in the morning for. It's not magic, but if you get things right for customers, funny enough, they come back to you and they spend more money with you.

It’s about really understanding your customers, working hard to find solutions which are not always obvious. You need to be super-objective, getting away from subjectivity so you’re sure you’re solving the right problems. The rest falls into place If you get it right.

Q. It all sounds very logical and obvious, so why do some companies find it so hard to be customer-led or to act in this way?

I think some people just aren't interested in being close to customers. They’re more interested in the organisation and building businesses. A lot forget they're out there to look after their customers and they forget they're trying to solve their problems. It's easy to get caught up in delivering for shareholders or for the board, and it’s easy to lose direction. This is totally understandable when you're under pressure performance-wise. Equally, if you're doing really well, I can see how you can come off the boil and forget to push and question.

Tesco was a great example of that. It was a fantastic leader, pioneering for customers with Clubcard and Tesco.com which started way back in the early days of the internet. They were real pioneers. Then as the business continued to grow and scale, it became less customer focused with leadership further away and with many other priorities. This was compounded by the change in leadership and the internal challenges the business faced

The reverse is also true. Stuart Machin at M&S is having a super positive effect, bringing the business back to thinking about what's important for customers.

You can lose it and then regain it.

It comes down to leadership – from the focus, through to the language and the priorities. If, as a leader, you’re not focused on customers, then your teams will never be.

Q. Who else do you admire in terms of being customer-led and putting their customers at the forefront?

There are a couple of examples. I wouldn't say I love but I do admire Amazon Prime and what Jeff Bezos has done. Focusing on making purchasing digitally simple and solving the problem of quick delivery. This is very smart customer-focused decision-making. You only have to look at people's purchasing habits, Amazon Prime is still way up there in terms of being a leader for customers and millions of us use it because it is such a problem-solver.

What I do love, though, is what Brian Chesky did at Airbnb and the story around how you create a 5-star experience. People forget, it was a really basic business which wasn't doing very well. And then they turned it around by saying, well, how would we make it amazing? Rockstars opening your taxi door, that kind of thing. That's being really pioneering. Thinking outside the box, being creative, thinking about what is really important for customers when they want to go away. That's why they're so successful – they rooted their offer in their customers’ ideal experience.

These are two quite different examples. One quite functional and one imaginative and they’re both in the DNA of how we all shop today.

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Tim Lee, Mindful Chef CEOPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsJ LeeTue, 19 Nov 2024 21:47:04 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-sarah-gillard6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:673d02aabddf365dfbbb9b7d

They honestly declared the origins of products before it was common practice and a legal requirement, they found ways of motivating colleagues, known as Partners, to be fully engaged as co-owners, interested in guiding customers to the right decisions for them ahead of an immediate sale, building lasting relationships, and they made the famous price promise to never be knowingly undersold. 

But in time, and under pressure from new competitors including those that were online only, offering the same or similar products easily and at lower prices, the business’s confidence and belief weakened and its direction became confused. 

Sarah Gillard had been with the business for some time and believed deeply in the value of these deeper beliefs applied to the current day. Alongside urgent work on new strategies to compete, she argued for a renewal of belief in why the business existed, something that surely needed to be central to any successful strategy. She led the work that resulted, as Director of Purpose and Special Projects, and through a clear, consultative process, developed renewed commitment to the idea that the Partnership exists for people – not just colleagues which is where the previous version had started, but also customers and others involved around them, and in supplying them, and in living alongside them – happier people leading to a happier business as part of a happier world.  

Sarah has since joined the charity Blueprint for Better Business as CEO, an organisation created from work that started in 2011 looking to put a more human sense of purpose at the heart of business, countering the assumptions that had grown that a business’s first motive was a financial responsibility to its owners. 

Q. Tell me a little about your background – what led you to where you are now?   

Well, going right back I did a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. However, I didn't want to be a philosopher or an economist or a politician so I took a temp job in retail and stayed for 25 years. On reflection, it wasn't a strategic decision but because I moved around organisations I was able to observe businesses and how they responded to the external context - how business thought about itself, how it treated people, how it thought of its customers, what success was, how it thought about its relationship with society and what it was actually trying to do in the world. 

I had experienced extremes in the retail industry. I began at the Arcadia group just before Philip Green bought it. An organisation with a proud history, that invested in people, in IT systems, in supplier relationships. It was the place that you went to for training because it was a Grand Dame of the High Street. 

When Philip Green bought it, it became very, very focused on short-term shareholder primacy - how much money can we make this year to maximise the dividend? This changed the whole culture. And I saw how this shift was showing up in business outcomes – the short-term looks really good because you're extracting all the value you can, including from customers. In the medium and long-term, I didn't think that was a good business strategy. But I was a philosophy graduate, so what did I know? Initially I thought well maybe this is just how business works, you have to have this very individualistic competitive extractive short-term maximising mindset because the context is so disruptive.  

What I learned during my degree finally kicked in and I began to get really curious, and it shifted my view of business, particularly retail. Instead of it being just about buying and selling stuff, I started to see it as something that was shaping how we live. 

I began thinking about whether the current paradigm of what drives business, or what has been driving it for the last 50 or 60 years, is leading to the right outcomes. And my conclusion, along with like you know, 7 billion other people, has been no, not really. 

Q. You worked for the John Lewis Partnership. What are the stories you hold most dear of the Partnership pioneering on behalf of the people it serves? 

Oh there’s lots of anecdotes. Around 2015 we commissioned an external agency to try and find the source of the magic for both John Lewis and Waitrose. But particularly John Lewis because people had a very strong emotional attachment to the brand that went beyond the products, beyond ‘I can get good stuff here’. It was a relationship and we wanted to understand what it was that created this strong emotional attachment to the brand. 

What they identified was that people had good experiences, and then something would trigger it into an extraordinary experience. You know, a pregnant woman coming into the store and being offered a seat, a glass of water and a Partner offering to get what she needed from the store. Or a Partner talking to a customer who has come in for say, a £1,000 camera. But after discussing the customer’s needs, they recommend a £200 camera.  

The focus was on customers.  

The John Lewis Partnership is the UK’s largest employee-owned organisation. It’s got a very different sense of what it's trying to do and how it how it does things. And that's what was triggering these deep personal relationships with the brand. We asked ‘well, how does that happen? How do we teach people how to do that? Do we teach Partners that you've got to constantly be going above and beyond?’ What we found was that people who wanted to work at the Partnership tended to be very driven by an honour to do the right thing, social connection and a feeling they were helping people.  

They were very people-oriented people and they were drawn to work in the organisation. 

I think over time this creates an environment where, if that's your inclination, you're going to thrive.    

I also found it absolutely fascinating that at a time when retail was very disrupted, the John Lewis Partnership had two things which everyone else was trying to invent. It had a purpose that went beyond just making money, a sort of societal purpose. And it had a culture where everybody who worked within it genuinely felt like they were owners, because they were owners of the company. And if you're an owner of the company, you think long-term, you think about fundamentals, you think about the foundations you're building and how you're planting seeds that you might not see the benefit of, but the generation after you will.  

It creates a very different environment for decision-making and for how people show up. This is very beneficial for long term business resilience. Retail continues to be a very challenging industry and John Lewis has had his own challenges but it does appear to be adapting and perhaps will be around long after many other brands. 

Q. What had the problem become by the time you started to work on reinvigorating it? 

I'd worked for years on the commercial side of the business in merchandising. When I joined the Partnership I became really interested in why it was different to all of the other businesses I worked in. I moved to the strategy department for a while thinking success must be about very clever strategy. And of course that's something to do with it, but I could see that clever strategy wasn't enough. Perhaps it was something to do with the culture that was critical to the implementation of the strategy?  

I then worked in the People space, studying the culture, leadership, operating model and governance. And I thought well, that's also really important for how this business shows up and how it makes decisions. But both strategy and culture to me appeared to arise from something else – an understanding that the business had about what it was and what it was trying to do in the world. However, I was also observing that as the partnership had scaled it was facing lots of competing pressures and that sense of purpose had become fractured.  

Everyone knew it was a purpose-led organisation, but there were 80,000 different versions of what the purpose was, which isn't that helpful because if purpose is going to create the internal energy and innovation that an organisation needs to flourish, it must provide direction and it must define success. It has to form and shape strategy and culture. If you've got 80,000 different versions of it, it's not going to.  

I'd had this epiphany… then COVID hit. For big retail organisations like the Partnership, this had a significant impact. The John Lewis stores were shut while the Waitrose stores had queues outside them, security guards on the toilet roll aisles and supply chain issues. I mean it was just absolute chaos! 

Everyone was working around the clock but what was interesting was that all the John Lewis Partners were on furlough on full pay in that beautiful spring weather that we had, yet each day 12,000 of them turned up to their local Waitrose stores to see how they could help. They weren't asked to. They weren't incentivised to. They weren't even recorded as doing so. It was just a natural desire to see how they could help. Not just help their colleagues, but how they could help the local community, how they could help vulnerable customers and how they could help suppliers. We all felt motivated to solve some of the challenges that you could see were emerging. We had people making decisions all over the place without waiting for permission. They had extraordinary autonomy and energy, which led to great innovation. 

So I began to pose questions – what's going on here? Is this telling us anything about the purpose of this organisation? I thought, to be honest, that most people would go, yeah, great question. But can we talk about that another day when we're not quite as overwhelmed? Actually people genuinely wanted to talk about it now because they could see Partners responding in ways that felt like this is us at our best. This is us genuinely powered by what can we do to help. We can contribute to some of the solutions beyond our normal circle of interest, way beyond what's the financial case for this and is there going to be a payback.  

People wanted to know if these actions were telling us something about the core of who we are. How do we make sure that we're able to articulate this core so when this crisis has passed we still had this sense of this is who we are – this is how we make decisions and this is what success looks like?  

We began the work on re-articulating the purpose of the organisation. The John Lewis Partnership has been going for over 100 years. Rather than inventing something new, or trying to create some modern whizzy statement, we were going back to why we were invented. How could we articulate this in terms that were relevant to the 21st century and how could we inspire people to continue to innovate and experiment in service of the reason that we were invented in the first place? 

It was fascinating and such a privilege to do it in an organisation like that because it's so unusual. But actually what we learnt is applicable to every organisation because businesses are people coming together to achieve something that they can't achieve on their own, whatever the ownership structure is.  

Q. How did you go about recreating shared belief in an outward-looking purpose? 

You need to create a more direct connection between the employee and the organisation. It needs to speak to a pride in what you're doing every day. You're not just selling stuff, you're trying to help people live the kind of lives they want to live. You're not just selling food in Waitrose, for example, you're helping supply chains and farmers create the best quality food with the best animal welfare standards and the best regenerative farming practices.  

Another example is a few years ago, the John Lewis Partnership had the last final salary scheme of any major retailer in the UK. It had become clear that this was going to create great difficulties for the business in the future – not for this generation of Partners, but for the next generation. There was a year-long consultation process where everyone received information about the various options and the John Lewis council with, I think, 58 democratically elected councilors, would decide whether the pension was going to change. 

After a year of talking to the Partners – and these are people on very low wages, including HGV drivers, warehouse workers, shop assistants – it came to the vote. Would this generation of partners basically reduce the size of their pension in order to allow the organisation to survive beyond their tenure? It was a unanimous vote – yes. 

That is such an interesting example of people recognising the value that the organisation has to society and they were prepared to sacrifice some of their own financial reward in return. 

If a business genuinely creates value for all stakeholders – its communities, suppliers, customers, employees – they’ll want it to continue beyond their own time.   

Q. You are committed to helping businesses ‘be more human’. As business’s relationships with customers evolve how can they balance the move to an increased digital or virtual presence with being human? 

That’s a really interesting question and one that many organisations are wrestling with. In an ideal world, the digital capabilities and AI and all the rest of it will serve to enhance the things that humans are best at - building connections and relationships, things that call for a level of understanding and empathy that is beyond words. 

In an ideal world, this is what would happen. However, the temptation is always to look at what’s measurable – number of transactions, average basket size, speed through checkout and a whole load of things which you start solving for maximum efficiency rather than necessarily maximum human connection or wellbeing or anything else that is much more difficult to measure but actually really important.   

Businesses have for a long time run themselves through things that are identifiable, measurable and quantifiable. You can set targets. You can understand the progress, and that's super useful particularly if you're trying to optimise for efficiency. But the future will look very different to the past. All the challenges, environmental and social, that we already face will get significantly worse. Businesses need to adapt, to become more flexible. 

They'll need to be more connected to the societies they serve, and this relies on people inside the organisation thinking that what they're doing is worthwhile, otherwise why would they bother to innovate or adapt?   

And for it to be worthwhile, it means genuinely serving society in some way or making life better. Some of that is measurable, but a lot will be down to people's sense of it being a worthwhile endeavour, what the value is that is being created and for whom? How is it helping us live better lives?  

The human aspect is going to be increasingly important. Efficiency used to be enough but in the future it will be efficiency plus humanity. Instead of seeing individuals in very one-dimensional roles – as investors or workers or customers or suppliers – we will need to shift to seeing us as humans who are citizens. 

Jon Alexander talks about this in his brilliant book, Citizens. If you think about somebody as a customer, you're thinking about what they want and how we serve them. What choice have they got? If you think about people as citizens, then you begin to think about what we are co-creating. How do we do this with you? How do we help people participate in whatever the future looks like? It’s a mindset shift. And that mindset shift is one of the things that the charity that I now work for, Blueprint for Better Business, helps people explore.  

It’s becoming strategically critical for businesses to think in a very different way – that people aren’t one-dimensional stakeholders, but as citizens living on this planet, living in communities. And communities and a planet that is shaped by the decisions that business makes.   

Q. How does being a purpose-led business help organisations pioneer for customers, or the people they serve? 

Blueprint was founded on two core beliefs, and neither are radical.  

The first idea is that a business is actually a group of people coming together to create value for society and that any financial returns are a consequence of doing that well – but they're not the goal. They're a necessary condition of the business being able to survive. The goal is some kind of societal value that the business creates. 

Pre-1970 that was often how business were thought of. Businesses were embedded in their communities, creating jobs and improving the community, and there was a sense of pride about it, the positive impacts that the business had within the community. 

The second idea is that people are human beings with inherent dignity and value. They’re not just assets or resources or liabilities that can be instrumentalised in service of financial goals. And when businesses start to see all the humans that the organisation interacts with, and accepts that they have inherent dignity and value, then the quality of the relationships the business creates becomes an inherent part of what it means to be a successful business.  

This creates more opportunity, more potential, more of a sense of possibility than thinking about business as a machine with inputs and outputs, with the highest priority outputs being a financial one. 

Q. Why do you think organisations find it so hard to be, and to keep on being, customer-led? 

Businesses have become very used to measuring. Everything that appears to matter is measured. However, some of the most important stuff is not measurable, so if you don't measure it, it becomes invisible even though it is critically important to the long-term success of the organisation.  

The second reason is the simplicity of the measurement model has so much tied up in it, including incentive schemes, remuneration schemes, targets, KPI’s, how people are seen rewarded, promoted. It becomes difficult to focus on all the other aspects that are important, like developing a culture where people feel that they can thrive, growing the next generation of leaders, developing the supply chain and the people in that supply chain, and the impacts on the environment that you might not be regulated on but that you care about. All these other things are critical to how people feel inside and outside about your organisation. It's easy to just ignore them. 

Just look at the pioneering stories from the brilliant group The Foundation has created – people who have kept hold of their sense of what's really important to them as a human, as a citizen.  

We need to think about what is important to other people. To gather different perspectives and genuinely find out from people themselves what they care about, what’s important to them and then think how do we solve those things?  

The British Academy and Colin Mayer came up with this phrase for the purpose of organisations: that they profitably solve the challenges of people and planet without profiting from creating them. I think that's a very natty definition.  

And the other one is the BSI has a standard of what purpose driven organisations are called – PAS808. And their definition of a purpose-led organisation is one that is pursuing its optimal strategic contribution to the long-term wellbeing of all people and planet.  

I think these definitions help ground the concept away from sort of fluffy ‘make the world a better place’ stuff to a much more targeted strategic ‘what's your contribution and how are you delivering it’ question. This helps inform strategy, shape culture, guide business decisions and define success.  

Q. Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire as customer pioneers in other sectors, with ‘customer’ defined broadly as the people an organisation serves? 

 I think the easy answer is all of the brilliant social enterprises out there who are very explicitly demonstrating this is why we're in business. They tend to be smaller. They tend to be very issue-specific and they tend to be very successful in saying if you're interested in this, join us, so the culture is very strong. What they do is centred around something that's tangibly helping.  

I think the area that we work in is harder – the big legacy organisations, often publicly listed, with investors looking for a return, often regulated, and who are trying to shift their organisation to be a purpose driven organisation.  

If you look on our website, you'll see case studies where organisations are trying various things and succeeding. I don't think there's any kind of slam dunk ‘this organisation nailed it’. It requires both a strategy and culture shift, and often a shift in the entire business model and product and proposition – how they're thinking about brands supply chains, procurement. It's a multi-year journey.   

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Sarah GillardPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsSerena LuffTue, 08 Oct 2024 10:11:18 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-lucy-stephens6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:67050546be5a3f64716e1115

Following time working in different sectors, she began to believe that giving children and young people a whole lot more freedom and control in what they did at school, might be a new and better way create the desire and motivation to learn. If the motivation was in place, performance in all sorts of ways would follow.

She didn’t just have the thought – she decided to establish a school, The New School in Croydon, to prove the point. She felt that unless she could demonstrate the ideas working in practice, creating what we call a great big Moment of Belief, she would never change the assumptions held by the establishment.

She’s four years in, well on the way, but still with much to do to change the world in the ways they aim to.

Q. What was it about teaching in mainstream schools that you felt could be done better? And what did you learn from spending time outside education that reinforced and built on those beliefs?

There wasn't time to let kids explore their interests. I felt like I was shoehorning kids through SATs papers. Education should be fun, and learning should be interesting. But it's death by worksheet. Even if you planned creative lessons, there wasn’t time to fully run them.

While there are some innovative schools, the ones I worked in weren’t meeting the needs of the children in the class and I really felt that it was at odds with child development and how children learn - through movement, through play, through interaction.

When I left education, I did a number of other things. Working with the Prince’s Trust made me realise that for young people who have been on the outskirts of the education system for so long, it was hard to reintegrate and then to get into finding a job or career interests because they had no idea what they were interested in anymore.

After retraining as a nutritional therapist and gaining a diploma in Psycho Neuroimmunology, I began to understand the interconnections between our nervous system, the immune system and our psyche. And it really hit home to me how similar the medical model is to education. You look at the liver, or the heart, or the brain and how they interconnect. In the same way, you can look at literacy or numeracy and how they interconnect. When you look at them in an interconnected way, you see the root causes of things. This really shaped my way of thinking about child development.

Q. How did the idea of The New School come together – and what was the trigger, your ‘Burningness’, to take the leap, with all the risks and pain that entailed?

Looking at where or how I was going to educate my own children made me deeply reflect on the education system for the first time. I was looking at lots of different schools and thinking: “where do I put my kids? What's developmentally appropriate?”

You can find lots of quite cool early years settings where they have a good understanding of child development, but it drops off a cliff a year later. Suddenly you go from, oh, this is amazing play-based learning to sitting at a desk going through phonic screening.

I spent a couple of years researching lots of different models of education; the Montessori's, Steiner, democratic schools and so on. I thought what do we want for children in the future? I want them to come out of education knowing who they are, having the skills to be able to articulate themselves in a group, to be able to manage conflict, to have that sense of agency to have interests and goals, and all the necessary executive function skills to action those goals.

The democratic school model really spoke to me. All democratic schools look very different, but the two pillars that stood out were young people having much more of a choice and much more of a voice.

Most alternative model education settings are vastly more child development-focused, but they're fee-paying, and I thought about the children in the very first class that I taught; they wouldn't be able to afford this. So, if I believe passionately that this is important for all young people, then how do I make it equitable? How do I make it free? And that is a huge, huge challenge. We are still working on our funding model so we can become more sustainable.

Q. What is the ultimate aim of The New School project?

Our theory of change is for young people to leave us at 16 with a strong sense of personal agency. By that we mean they've got goals and interests, but they've also got all the skills and competencies – social, emotional and academic – to action those goals.

We think of ourselves as an educational charity with a start-up R&D model. You can have passionate and creative head teachers in mainstream schools but you're still bound by structures that prevent you from being able to rip up the rule book or test things or try things.

We've got a lot of research behind us and we want to influence and shift the system, but it’s challenging. We would love for the system to adopt aspects of our model. We would love the system to learn and for us to share practice.

Our school is like an innovation lab; we are making education equitable for all young people, and executive function skills are the levellers. We’d like the tech or corporate world to use it to test ideas. We are working up an AI data methodology that will hopefully give us the outcome of learning to learn. If we can create a methodology that enables us to evaluate which of the young people are learning to learn and then understand what interventions impact that, that's something that's applicable and transferable.

You've got corporates or universities who are thinking: “Do I want a series of nines on a piece of paper, or do I want someone who’s got a really strong ability to learn?”

The future is going to be largely taken by robots. Children are going to have multiple careers. They need to be flexible. They need to be adaptable. They're going to have to shift skill sets into various different kinds of roles. So which student would you take?

I think that leverage from the corporate world and potentially also universities on schools will force practice to change. This is how we’re thinking about what we do and how we spread influence, flipping the challenge on its head.

Q. How is the New School different from other schools?

If you came to our school in the morning, it wouldn't look vastly different from a mainstream school. We're not an unschooling school. In the mornings, the children will be in their Maths lesson or their Literacy lesson. These are timetabled lessons. It's in the afternoon when they’ve got much more freedom to choose – perhaps to do a science project or go to forest school. They might go to bushcraft.

We’re building the skills of choice. While students don’t choose whether or not to do Maths or Literacy, we are building choices in how children learn. Because our classes are mixed ages, we are experimenting with pedagogical flexibility by running four Maths groups at a time with students choosing which group they join. If you need more practice with fractions, you join one group, but if you feel comfortable with that and need to move on to algebra, you join a different group.

We keep it open and fluid. Young people really learn their pitch point. They can move between groups during a lesson. They may think they don’t know fractions, so go with one group, then after a brief refresher, remember, and move on to another group.

Another thing that’s different is children and teachers coming together to share views and ideas in circles. What the children say can change what the school does. Their voices influence what we do; it isn’t tokenistic.

Q. How has the school and learning approach developed since it opened in 2020?

We're constantly evolving. We look at research and think, for example, how do you embed social and emotional learning? We also look at other models, such as how Montessori thinks about child-led learning or how Summerhill does opt-in.

We had some really challenging children when we first opened and we didn't have a strong enough provision for special educational needs or disabilities. That kind of took us by surprise, actually. You can be as prepared as you like, but until things come up, you don't realise you need a policy for it and some things we tried just didn’t work in our context.

Take break times. We initially thought we didn't need official break times. Our teachers can just be fluid with it – the children can go out for a break, and then they come back in, but teachers need a break. How does this fit in? So, do we all have to break at the same time? How do you get your group back in when they're playing with another group? Just simple things like that.

We’ve tried to be really free, then find we have to make it really rigid, then realise, actually, we don't need it quite that rigid. We're on the more radical side, then find that's not really working, so go a bit more towards what would seem mainstream and think either there's really a valid reason why it is done this way, or no, that really doesn't work. It's fluid, we have conversations and continually try out and learn.

This makes it a very exciting kind of place to work but it takes a certain personality, someone who is comfortable with change and being flexible.

Q. It is still very early days – how do you know whether The New School and the new model of learning is succeeding?

For us, it's being able to show that using this kind of model, we’ve been able to develop a broader skill set; we really understand ‘learning to learn’ – who are the young people who are learning to learn, and shaping that narrative with employers.

We've always been really keen to demonstrate our impact, and we know that being able to demonstrate our impact helps with our funding. We always thought that we were trying to demonstrate it to policymakers and the local authorities, which is true to an extent, but trying to get them to change practice based on it is the trickier thing.

So, we do a lot of research with different universities. We look at our reports and see this is working in the sense that young people have freedom and are building skills. We collect a lot of data internally, and we measure our four key outcomes: self-efficacy, self-esteem, educational engagement, and life satisfaction. This is how we’re quantitatively tracking ‘success’.

And I think anecdotally, it's having a school of children who are really happy to come here. Children who have hated mainstream schools and here, they are just like, oh, this is a relief. Or other children who have come from homeschooling and prefer it. It doesn't work for some young people and so they leave, which is also natural.

I suppose for me, success will be when we're financially sustainable. We've landed the approach with something or someone which has given us the funding to continue doing it. I had always hoped that that was going to be central government or local government but the reality right now is it's going to be something like a tech company or corporate.

Q. We see what you’re doing as pioneering on behalf of the people you, and schools in general, serve – people we refer to as ‘customers’. Who are your customers and what problems do they need to solve, or what outcomes do they each want?

I mean, we've got the standard problems of the education system, haven't we? We've got young people with additional needs not being met and finding school incredibly stressful. We've got plummeting attendance rates.

There are particular demographics that are really struggling in the current system - black boys, white boys, rural areas. We've got incredibly high levels of mental ill health in adolescence. We've got a teacher retention crisis and a recruitment crisis.

When you look at scores of kids with straight nines, and this may be a weird thing to say, but I worry – how do we know that we've got the other half of what they need?

I think there's a myriad of problems in education and I think we've got a rapidly changing world coming upon us, exponentially fast. We're at the advent of AI; are our young people ready for it? I don't know. I think that there are lots of problems for children and young people today.

If we broaden it out from children, we have a huge innovation crisis looming. There is no way with our public services to test and understand innovative solutions and scalability because we’re trying to fit solutions into older clunky systems and double down on old ways of doing things.

So how do we build the new models and understand and learn from them? The problem with any innovation is there are no funding mechanisms at the moment to understand and share this work. So how do we pioneer and change young people's experience when actually there's no way of funding this pioneering unless you take it private, and then you have cut out a huge subsection of your group whose experiences you are trying to change?

Q. What does this idea of pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do you think organisations find it so hard?

I think it always comes back down to structures. In education, it's the structures within the education system that make it inequitable. It takes a radical overhaul to change some of those things, and I think it's the same in business. You have a business that is structured with KPIs that are usually money-based, profit-driven. It’s a very input-output system. What can we put in here that will get the money out in the end?

For Education it’s what can we put into this child to get out the straight nines at the end? It’s just illogical when you apply it to children because they're not an input-output model. But it's also illogical when you apply it to customers because they're not an input-output model either. If you don't accommodate the nuance of being human in structures, then it makes it incredibly hard to see things through the eyes of the customer.

It shouldn't be radical to turn this around, but turning it on its head can feel a bit intimidating and a bit scary. We grow children through structures, and then we put them into workforces that are structured with everything hierarchical.

It's very hard to find the people who will innovate and flip that on the head. Everyone is always looking upwards for the answers. Unless we train our kids to look within, we're never going to get the workforce that can innovate and say we’re looking at this upside down, there's no point looking at the end profit if we haven't worked out what the customer is experiencing.

Q. Are there any Customer Pioneer organisations or individuals that you particularly admire, in any sector or part of the world?

What is often interesting is that it's the people who are less institutionalized, less drilled and less trained in particular models who are the ones that can think outside the box, who are able to say, “hold on, this isn't right. There must be a different solution. Let's try it and see what happens.”

Within The Foundation’s Mountaineer community, there’s David Magliano, who is brilliant. He thinks quite differently, and Handelsbanken, with Pernille Sahl Taylor, are revolutionising banking so it’s more democratic. Then there’s John and James Timpson, the way Timpson’s think about their model and the freedom that's given to ex-offenders to make decisions and make choices in how they serve the customer.

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]]>The Pioneer interview with... Lucy StephensPioneer ProjectPioneer InterviewsSerena LuffThu, 22 Aug 2024 10:07:54 +0000https://www.the-foundation.com/pioneer-interviews/the-pioneer-interview-with-david-magliano6086ada187edbc57124e8e23:6086aedb72bc541277871473:66c70c4765ff7f2caf2d8f29

Q. What challenges can people face in remaining customer-led as their career progresses?

Within advertising, it is clear who the target is and therefore it's much easier to have them front of mind. A lot of effort goes into understanding their needs, where those needs aren't being met today, what they think of the competition, where shortcomings are in the sector, and so on.

As you move up in your career – for me through commercial strategy to corporate strategy - you get further away from this core purpose. You become detached from understanding exactly what customers are thinking about. You become more preoccupied with other stakeholders – what are shareholders thinking? What are analysts thinking? What is determining movements in share price? What's going to affect six monthly or quarterly reporting cycles and so on. I think I have been lucky in that I've had a career that started in advertising, I think that's kept me little more rooted in what customers think.

Personally, I think there is no substitute for talking to your customers, but I have to say increasingly as you move up, you end up relying on aggregated data surveys and that's that never quite gives you the richness.

Q. You helped launch GO, British Airways’ answer to Ryanair and easyJet. Low-cost airlines aren’t known for having customers at the forefront, so how did you manage it?

Airlines were deregulated in 1997, with prices were no longer set by governments and this opened the door to low-cost airlines. Before this, airlines competed on the differential of service because the price was fixed.

Ryanair and easyJet entered the market and to distinguish themselves from the existing pack, they went right down the other end of the spectrum. They were able to charge low fares, but their challenge was helping people understand why the fares were so much lower. Removing free meals was a useful touchpoint. This isn’t the secret sauce of low-cost airlines, but it helped customers understand why the fares might be cheaper.

Customers weren’t just making a choice around price, we knew through our research that customer service was still an important differentiator. Ryanair and easyJet had done away with allocated seating. But the majority of passengers travelling in Europe are travelling as a family or as a couple. If you're travelling as more than one, then sitting together is a big deal. So we decided to adopt seat allocation.

I also spent quite a lot of time at Stansted and Luton watching what was happening with easyJet and Ryanair – watching the check-in lines, talking to the people who were checking in.

We knew our customers were spending money at the destination on nice hotels and the like, they just slightly resented spending their budget on getting there. But they didn’t want a horrible experience. We addressed that particular need.

We still flew from Stanstead and were able to adopt many of the low-cost signals, communicating it was a low-cost airline. But we adapted our offer to meet the needs of our customers.

Q. The London Olympic bid similarly took a different approach to convention, which was to focus on the location, and instead you chose to put the people the Olympics is really for at its heart. What made you take this path? 

Well, there was some faulty thinking here which we need to confess to! Up until 2012 the story for choosing a host city was very much based on the place. Would you have a good time there? Barcelona had made a very good case about how they'd use the Olympics to transform an area of the city that had been very rundown, which is what they did to great effect. And for quite a while, we were running a similar narrative about using the Olympics to transform the East End of London.

During the process you get lots of opportunities to talk either to the people that are going to vote or to the people around them. We realised weren't getting a lot of traction with that particular narrative and Paris was doing much better on that kind of joi de vivre and the fact that Paris would be a great city – which it would be!

So, I put some work into developing some alternative ways of framing the story. My thinking was that one of its main sources of revenue is TV rights. And as the audience for the Olympics was getting older and older and older, the value of those TV rights was diminishing. Younger people were watching football, basketball, American football, baseball and the big Olympic sports like swimming, track and field, the modern pentathlon were minority niches.

So I put together an argument which was to save the Olympics. To bequeath the Olympic movement a legacy, London would deliver a TV audience of young people.

I remember sitting down with Seb Coe on a Friday afternoon and talking him through this. He listened carefully and basically said, yeah, very good, David. But you've got it completely wrong!

The challenge facing the Olympic movement isn't that they don't have enough young people watching the Olympic sports. They don't have enough young people doing Olympic sports.

That was the ‘aha’ moment. We turned the pitch for London into not being about London, not even about the legacy that it will leave London in the rejuvenation of the East End. London's vision was about attracting young people into sport, and Olympic sport in particular. Our legacy was a legacy for the Olympic movement.

And to a large degree, the London Games did deliver on this idea of inspiring young people into being more active and into sport.

Q. With The Guardian the challenge was how to continue with a free-to-access model while finding ways to earn money from customers that they were happy to pay, to a degree that led back to profitability. How did that happen? 

The Guardian is owned by a Trust. At the time I joined it had been losing money for two decades. A few new approaches had been tried – moving to the slightly unusual Berliner format, then down to a standard tabloid format. And we looked at a membership scheme as a way of financing the paper.

I experienced another kind of ‘faulty thinking’ there.

There had been a philosophical decision not to charge people for reading The Guardian online. This was particularly novel at a time when newspapers were introducing paywalls. So we came up with this notion of membership with live events.

The faulty thinking was that we knew there were a group of readers who had an attachment to The Guardian that went beyond it simply being their source of news. We had a bunch of people who'd said to us they would be prepared to give us more and we believed if they were prepared to give us more, we needed to give them more. So we devised this programme of live events and talks as a way of providing a value exchange.

The thing that was going to underpin this was a physical member space. We actually took a lease on a building in Granary Square, Kings Cross in London to develop into a members club. We were going to have an auditorium, event spaces, restaurant and bar. While we prepared to get the building ready we launched the events programme to start building up momentum.

We learned lots of things, but the biggest was that most people actually didn't want to come to the events. They were physically inconvenient for many, many people.

When people did come to the events we would always ask ‘do you support The Guardian?’ Do you support their values?’ And so on. And everyone did. Everyone said they really supported the Guardian. But what they wanted to support was The Guardian's mission – independent journalism that isn't beholden to some kind of proprietor, journalism that has at its heart liberal progressive values

The value exchange was the fact that they feel like they're contributing to a social good.

So instead of focusing on the event programme, we turned to something much more like Wikipedia, a sort of philanthropic approach. We started including little asks at the end of articles. I remember the very first one which was about 4 words long – Please support The Guardian.

Then we did A/B testing – testing different messages, highlighting different words or sections, using different colours.

Over something like 13 or 14 months, as we changed the message, the average value we were getting from people who donated went up 100 times.

It has proved to be very successful. Now it has reached a point where reader revenue is greater than advertising revenue and The Guardian is showing a small profit for the first time in 20 years.

Q. What are the different challenges that you've encountered in trying to be customer led or encouraging others to be customer led?

Some organisations just don't get it. Where I am now, in the tech industry, I get exposed to quite a lot of product management, which is very close to being customer-led. I feel that this school of thought, that came out of software development, is actually helpful if you are trying to advocate for customer-led thinking. You can lean on and borrow from product management to talk to people in an organisation who get product management because it has a kind of legitimacy. And then you can use that to build an argument for being more customer-led.

Q. Which other companies do you think are pioneering really well for customers, or do you particularly admire for being customer led.

The category that has to be the most customer-led is comedy and comedians. It's well understood what the KPI is – it's laughter. You can measure it instantly and you can't fake it - you've either made the audience laugh or you haven't.

I'm not quite sure what the lessons are, but there is something so purely customer-led about it. You are there to serve that audience, to make them laugh. And it's really clear if you are doing it and if you're a good comedian or not. You get immediate feedback and can decide to act on it. If you don’t, people may not come back or recommend you. If you do, you can get the right output. I think that's a very pure form of being customer-led.

David spent six years researching what people do when they experience a fire, listening to the personal stories of those who had fires and other emergencies. Through this research, it became clear that the relationship between the Service and the public was distant at best and this gap was affecting the performance of the Service and wellbeing of the people it rescued. 

It is unusual to think of the Fire Service having customers or having a customer experience. How did people react to the change in language? 

For 20 years, I’d only been taught the scientific and technical side of my job. I’d never actually spoken to a member of the public meaningfully, never asked them about their experience or their priorities. We told them what we expected of them. 

When we started talking about customers, we started to create a sense of more of a relationship, something that flows both ways. There were a lot of objections to the term customer. Many people in the Service became quite defensive and there was a lot of resistance. It wasn’t a term you’d see in any documents, it wasn’t featured in any conversations. 

We spent time constantly asking if we don’t use ‘customer’ then what? How would you describe the people we are here to serve?  

It’s just a word, but it is a gateway to the kind of relationship we want to have and what we’re going to do. 

Some came on board straight away, saying yes, this makes perfect sense. That’s how I want my friends and family treated, it’s more than just putting a fire out. Others found an answer to something they knew was missing but were unsure what it was. And there was a third group who were very resistant. 

Changing the language is something that you can do tomorrow, you don’t have to wait for a new budget cycle or for funding to be approved. 

How did you develop and introduce this more human-centred approach? 

The initial stage was to do in-person interviews, to listen to people’s stories in their own words. When you hear these stories, you realise how much we missed and how many opportunities there were where we could have done that bit more. 

Just saving a life is a very low bar given how long we’ve had the Fire Service for and how much has been invested. This should be the minimum that was expected. It was almost like we had found a resting place – nobody’s going to get upset with us if we just do this. The Service had a halo effect – the public was so grateful because we had done something at the worst point in their lives. 

But rather than just focusing on saving lives, we needed to look at how we could make those lives we saved worth living. How could we limit the impact of the event and put people back in the condition they were in before the fire. 

For example, I co-wrote a report called ‘Saving Lives is Not Enough’ which examined the journey of burn survivors. We identified that for most people with burns, a key part of healing is being cooled by water within the first three hours. This makes a huge difference to the outcomes in most cases – from something that clears up in a few weeks to potentially an injury with lifelong scarring. [What makes the difference is ideally lukewarm or tepid water, applied freely for 20 minutes.] 

Mapping the experience through the services, we realised that people weren’t getting to the burns specialist until six to eight hours after the event. The Fire Service was concerned with getting the survivor to the ambulance because they deal with the people, we deal with the fire. This is what our training centred on – bringing a dummy out from a building, placing it on a salvage sheet with the first aid kit and moving on. However, the ambulance service doesn’t carry water and is often in a rush to get to hospital. At hospital the patient is then triaged. While the burn might not be life threatening, it can be life changing and we found the window where you can make a real difference was closing. 

Looking back down the process we realised how disconnected it was. The first point where there is water available is right at the beginning. Changing the process would lead to much better outcomes for people. 

This is the same for many organisations – a problem is approached in a functional not in a human way. 

What challenges did you face when introducing this more joined-up human-centred approach? 

The Fire & Rescue Service is a very traditional organisation, there is a lot of conformity and compliance. The way of doing things is hierarchal – we tell you what to do, you do it. But the public doesn’t always act in that way. Why? 

We started with the question of why people weren’t doing what we asked. Why, if we’ve told them what they should do, were they going back into their houses? We needed to understand this.  

When we started the research, there was no real expectation that it would lead to much more than a change in advice. But by talking to our customers, we found a real and fundamental disconnect.  

It was very challenging, especially discussing it within the Service. But someone once said to me that you sometimes need to rock the boat, to upset people to create change.  

I set up a group of advocates – a collection of people representing every department or every specialist functioning service. We spent six months working with customer experience experts to develop an outside-in mindset. For the next six months, I set the group the challenge of working out what this meant to them and their teams and how this thinking can be sustained. I was going to be leaving at some point, it couldn’t all rest on me. 

Rather than creating a whole new customer experience, we built the thinking into existing projects. One example was a review of the disciplinary procedures. In the Fire Service, this is kind of semi-military in how it works. It is fairly quick in itself, lasting just an hour, but it also takes some time before it happens. Meaning no matter how confidential it is, word gets out. For the person involved, it is really horrible. So, we started looking at the human dimension and changed it from a functional process to something more fundamental. 

By the time I left the Fire & Rescue Service, it was normal to talk about customers. It wasn’t a linear process and didn’t quite happen as you might expect. But it was great to be at the front end of disruption asking the questions, saying why is it this way? How else could it be? Why do we believe that? 

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? 

It’s not just customer initiatives, we need people to rethink how organisations can be more responsive in a very changeable world, so we don't just have great initiatives coming through then fading away. We need to understand how to sustain the ability to be customer-led, and employee-led.  

One of the challenges for most organisations is how to go from business as usual to a different working model without losing momentum or performance.  

I think what Timpson’s do is really clever and they’re doing it for the right reasons. If I'm not coming to work worrying about a whole load of other things, then when I arrive at work, that's my focus. [They give their people an amazing level of freedom and lots of support.] Timpson’s genuinely care about their employees and other people, but it’s also a very smart business move - to make sure that when I arrived at work, I'm focused on that, [trusted, motivated and helped to do better – and as a result I do my best for my customers, whatever that means]. 

I'm really encouraged by them. They see people not just an employee or a customer and understand what that means in a much more rounded sense. 

Are there any examples or organisation that you particularly admire who are doing something customer-led? 

I’ve mentioned Timpson’s and I think there are some great examples within the Customer Pioneer community that The Foundation set up and the work that people in it have done – first direct, Octopus Energy and so on, but I'm slightly reluctant to focus on one or two because I think we should be looking more broadly than we normally do. What we understand customer pioneering to look like may be much broader than we currently see, or certainly it may need to be broader as we look forward. 

We see a lot about human-centred design, human experience...but does your experience of life mean that you would have the same outlook as I do?  

And loyalty is something that I think of as a person-to-person scheme. I'm not sure many companies actually have loyalty schemes, I think they have frequent use or incentivised schemes. Loyalty has different connotations. 

We need to pause and just take stock of what customer pioneering really means – in the future as well as the best examples of where we are now. 

What was the ‘burningness’ you had to start Kiteline Health?

I was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer in 2015 at age 32. It was a massive shock to the system. I recovered but I was terrified at the time. I asked my oncologists what I could do to improve my chances and every time I asked their response was ‘nothing, there is nothing you can do’.

I was a bit surprised. On the one hand it’s a nice thing to hear, at least it wasn’t my fault! But my husband and mother-in-law started to do their own research and they found out there is actually so much you can do to influence your recovery and prevent reoccurrences. Mostly around diet but also a lot of stress reduction, exercise, building positive relationships in your life. All of this can positively impact your recovery.

So, for me that was really the genesis behind Kiteline Health. I was so frustrated that we not only had to go out and find this information ourselves, but it was also hard to get to the truth on so many different matters. You’d come across someone who ate kale all day long and they’re cured! It’s tempting to believe because all you want is a cure, something easy you can do to fix yourself. But so much information and advice isn’t evidence based, and what works for one person might not work for you.

I wanted evidence-based information to be more widely accessible to cancer patients, so I joined a startup accelerator to help find a co-founder and hone my idea. I went in with a problem: it is very hard for people with long-term health conditions to find the right information. Critically, it is even harder for them to change their behaviours. Over the course of the program the solution I came to was health coaching. Finding somebody to champion you, to identify the smallest steps you can take to adjust your lifestyle, and to give you a pat on the back when you’ve done it.

Originally, we designed it for people with lived experiences of cancer and tested the idea in a short pilot. However we ran into issues with the b2c market after we launched ads for the product on social media. We were getting high click-through rates to our website, but people kept hovering their mouse over ‘what is health coaching’ and no one converted to a free session.

The data led us to two conclusions. One, people didn't understand what health coaching actually was: the UK market was far behind an American market 10 years ahead. And two, people in the UK are less willing to pay for health interventions and services. They’re willing to pay for gym memberships and personal trainers, clearly things the NHS shouldn’t be covering. But this coaching tool fell under people’s perceptions of what the NHS should offer.

We had to pivot quickly to a b2b model. We realised business owners care about long-term health outcomes, about their employees living longer and healthier lives. So we started speaking to businesses about their employee wellbeing offering.

What were your breakthrough moments, your early Moments of Belief?

The first success happened when one of our health coaches invited us to meet her husband, the owner of a logistics company. It took just one day to convert our initial conversation into a signed contract. It was all because the business had one person in their senior team who had breast cancer, and he wanted to support that individual.

It was an important signal to us. The challenge was now how do you find businesses where there are senior people, with valuable members of staff who they want to look after?

At this stage we broadened our focus. The service was originally for people with lived experiences of cancer, but there aren’t many individuals at working age with cancer. We opened our offer up to long-term health conditions. We wanted the service to be flexible and work for people with different conditions in a genuine way

One of our greatest successes was signing a contract with John Lewis for a one-year pilot. They wanted us to deliver virtual group health coaching and develop a flagship product: an online course for line managers which teaches them how to manage their own and their team’s wellbeing. That was a big win for us.
Everything was going well with the pilot, and we started to build our product. But we quickly reached the point as a startup where we needed to fundraise. By that point we’d raised just under £370k from a mix of VCs and angel investors. We’d burned through our cash and were gearing up to raise more in a seed round with a target of £1-1.5 million.

Then the market completely shifted. The war in Ukraine started, the cost-of-living crisis hit and VCs issued warnings advising no investment for the next 18-24 months because the market was crashing. The advice was to cut your costs and ride out the storm.

Having cut staff and made some difficult decisions we launched our fundraiser a month after this message came out – we didn’t really have a choice. On the sales side, we had some big names in our pipeline that we’d been working on for 6-12 months, but they all came back and said ‘sorry, we’re not engaging any new suppliers’.

In the end, we ran out of cash, and we had to shut down.

What did you learn from this difficult experience?

As a first-time founder you learn so quickly, and you also learn a little bit of everything. If I were to do it again, I would be less frantic and recognise my main concerns as a CEO are product, sales and fundraising when you need to.

I would’ve focussed more on understanding product development, how to optimise performance and be user-centric and user-led, speaking more to customers about what they needed. It was one of the mistakes we made when we pivoted from B2C to B2B, we didn’t refresh our insight properly. We had some conversations, but the overwhelming pressure from our investors to sell, sell, sell, meant we didn’t give enough time to developing a strong proposition and customer profile.

When we were in the B2C market and supporting people affected by cancer, it was a niche market and we were a big fish in a small pond. When we moved over to B2B, we became a minnow in an ocean of employee and wellbeing benefit providers. HR and Wellbeing Managers get bombarded with hundreds of different start-ups offering different things.

So how do you cut through when you’re offering one slither of the pie? It was difficult to nail our USP and get the messaging across.

When people DID understand what we were offering, they got it straight away and were really excited by it which was encouraging. But it was a tough sell and a tough market.

How could you have stayed more outside-in?

When you’re an entrepreneur and founder of a small start-up there’s always a million things you could be doing. It’s easy to take a path of least resistance. It’s easier to get the small tasks done like the accounting or sorting emails, rather than focusing on the bigger picture, and the challenging questions around what our customers wanted.

We had grand plans to speak to customers regularly, but it fell down the list of priorities. When we tried to get customer feedback, we struggled to get responses. Especially when we started working with larger companies like John Lewis, we realised convincing people to give up their time to talk to you is really hard.

It was a scary ride full of so many ups and downs, a rollercoaster of emotions and mental health. But ultimately it was an amazing three years. I learned so much across many disciplines. In the end, we provided 1:1 support for 40-50 individuals and received positive feedback. I feel very proud that we were able to change those people’s lives for the better.

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

It means really understanding what customers want. Not just once, but how it changes over time, constantly keeping a pulse of how people are responding and how their needs, or your understanding of them, keep changing. It’s essential to help you stay ahead.

But it’s hard to find the time to prioritise it. In our case it was hard to find the people to talk to you, to understand how you incentivise it and how you make it an easy and regular thing for you and your business.

Are there any Customer Pioneer organisations that you particularly admire?

We switched our energy company from Bulb over to Octopus Energy. Recently they’ve been running energy saving sessions on certain days and times where the grid is in overdemand. You can sign up to these sessions and if you use less energy during this time they give you money back. It’s only £1 but it all counts, and it’s an interesting way to gamify energy consumption and work with your customers to help them save money.

In the start-up space Maven Clinic are interesting. They provide a one-stop shop for women in terms of everything they might need health-wise. Historically there’s so much gender inequality in health. There’s a really good book called Invisible Women about how everything has been designed from a man’s perspective – everything from surgeons’ tools to car seat belts. I think Maven Clinic is an interesting all round health proposition for women.

What was the Crouch End Project? What happened, and what was achieved?

In 2007, my local High Street was struggling with declining footfall, with the online shopping boom and changing customer expectations. It was clear to me that what was once central to the locality had lost its energy, and the community was in danger of losing something special. I was curious to understand what, if anything, could be done about it.

With no budget, experience or resources, I began by simply speaking to the local shop owners and business people to find out what they felt they could be. I began to realise that the first and biggest challenge in approaching this was a mindset one, not a marketing challenge as I had assumed. 

To keep their customers and get back to growing, they needed to think differently about who they were and what they could be. They needed to stop looking for others to blame, often the local authority, and concentrate on what they could do where they had influence. They could affect the service, the welcome they gave customers and the offer of personal attention. However, I could see that far more could be achieved by working together. 

We created a simple plan, re-thinking the idea of the local high street as an opportunity to do something for the community, not simply for people as customers. The shopkeepers got into action, creating an open evening in which they welcomed locals into shops for a drink and a chat, with local kids playing music and decorating shop windows, giving it all the sense of something special happening. We produced merchandise to sell in the evening to raise money, promote the project and reinforce the sense of place. It worked brilliantly.

So brilliantly that they wanted to do it again. This led to a succession of community events, which quickly built momentum, attracting interest from other organisations in the neighbourhood, including local schools, the local hospital, and the library. 

The project quickly became a trusted local brand, and when we eventually went online, we received an amazing response from the community. The interest we received from the community through the site illustrated a level of connectivity that amazed me and made me realise how much can be achieved with so little. 

It was less about selling and more about creating a sense of place and community, driven by the businesses and the community itself.  

The success of the project was due in part to the simple truth that no one wants to live in a ‘ghost town’, so any purposeful, considered initiative that added new energy and value would be welcomed. 

Before, there were fewer and fewer reasons to go to the High Street. Now, there was a different kind of engagement, and people went out of their way to support their local shops and businesses.

Within 18 months, the Crouch End Project had worked with over 100 local businesses and organisations, attracting attention from further afield. 

What were the projects that followed? What happened, and how was it different?

What followed was almost the complete opposite. It coincided with the global financial crisis and a growing realisation that town centres were actually quite important! Mary Portas had written a white paper on the future of our High Streets, and the government was taking notice, putting money behind town regeneration schemes. 

After the success of the Crouch End Project, I was asked by numerous local authorities to help them replicate its success in their town centres. 

Where the Crouch End Project had started with zero resources and by necessity had worked with existing resources, government-led initiatives began with a big budget, a gathering of experts around a table, and clear outcomes preordained. This left little time for discovery and proper engagement. The mindset was one of ‘experts coming in to do something, solve a problem’, disconnecting local people, especially business owners, from developing their sense of possibility and responsibility. 

The huge budgets necessitated ambitious targets, including reducing unemployment and vacancies in 18-month cycles. Being seen to achieve these targets became the chief focus, which meant often missing emerging opportunities and addressing hidden challenges.  

Most importantly, at the end of the planned work, there was a sense from the council that they’d ‘done the job’ and ‘ticked the box’. Although some of the work was a success, the top-down approach meant they failed to secure vital ground-up support and involvement from the people they needed most. My concern was that when the initiative finished, when the ‘circus left town’, what would the legacy be, and where would responsibility lie if the problem of decline still existed? 

They didn’t unlock the resources and opportunities, the energy and enthusiasm that was there if the approach had been different. 

Everyone wanted the same outcome, but the conventional top-down approach stifled potential and reinforced the sense that the responsibility and the solution lay outside the community instead of being a shared concern.

How have things developed since these early projects? What have you learned?  

Most of my learning came from the projects that followed the first one. I realised how powerful the approach to the Crouch End Project had been. I felt a profound frustration that huge reserves of skill, time, enthusiasm and opportunity were overlooked, and a vast amount of money was being spent without sustainable change or impact being achieved. 

I realised the problem was essentially the leadership approach: the ‘we’re in control’ mindset. To understand how this approach could be adopted by leaders in more conventional organisations and businesses, I undertook an MA in leadership.

To my delight, I discovered that this Crouch End approach was not unusual. There were leaders all over the world adopting a similar approach to a wide range of businesses, from corporations to communities, and experiencing outstanding success. Whilst a diverse group, I identified a common mindset that I later called ‘ The Scavenger Mindset’. A mindset that was marked by its resourceful, focused approach to making better use of existing resources and finding new levels of innovation in the process. 

The two types of Scavenger leaders faced different challenges. The ‘Scanners’ working in established hierarchical frameworks needed to change behaviours and mindsets and had to build confidence and capacity from within. 

The Scourers, who started with nothing, had the challenge of attracting support and retaining support without any of the usual enticements and demonstrated how when people feel properly valued, money is less important in motivation. 

Through this, I saw how much more people are capable of when leaders focus on creating conditions for a high-performance environment, conditions freely available to all and with the ability to build foundations for long-term growth and innovation. 

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

Customer pioneering means investing in building relationships that will stay with you over time - meeting not just short-term needs but interrogating long-term needs and opportunities beyond the boundaries of established expectations. Being actively engaged in learning, challenging assumptions and innovating whilst remembering that humans need to feel connected and valued, any organisation that can achieve that will have customers for life.  

The real risk in life is to stand still and become distracted by shiny technological red herrings. True pioneers understand the need to be crystal clear about their direction but are open to the route that gets them there, remembering that innovation is always born premature, so it needs time and space to work. 

Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire for doing something customer-led?

In December last year, my oven stopped working. I contacted the company I bought the kitchen from (Wren) to find the contact details for the oven manufacturer. They gave me the number and then called me back to ensure I had an appointment with the engineers. 

But the most incredible thing happened when they heard the engineer was booked in so close to Christmas Day. They called me back and said, ‘We cannot have you worrying about Christmas. We will send you a new oven, which will arrive on Saturday. Is that okay with you?’

The fact they went out of their way to make sure I was happy showed they cared about their relationships with their customers, and I was blown away by it. 

How was the initial challenge from the Glasgow Neonatal Unit understood? Where did it come from, and where did you get the initial breakthrough?

In 2016, we got an email from Dr Neil Patel, a Consultant Neonatologist based in the Glasgow Neonatal Unit. They were early adopters of Family Integrated Care, the philosophy of involving families in every step of a baby’s healthcare journey. This is based on the proven idea that communication between families and the unit leads to more effective care.
 
Neil had found vCreate online and thought we could help. One of the parents, a mechanic, had approached Neil and asked if he could have video updates of how his baby was doing, in the same way he sent videos of the car repairs to his customer. When Neil emailed us, we had a long chat, and it was really a case of “This is such a simple idea. Why isn’t anyone doing this already?”.

Executing it was more complicated. The sensitivity of these videos meant there were safety and privacy issues, with clear challenges of governance and appeasing all the relevant parties, including parents and the hospital staff. So we talked to the parents to understand their appetite for these videos and to the Neonatal staff to ensure it wouldn’t impact clinical duties.
 
As you’d expect, all the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
 
So we developed the Neonatal Diary system, allowing nurses to record videos of babies in their cots and share them with parents, building a private diary for that family of the baby’s progress. This included highlighting milestones that families often missed, such as the first time a baby opens its eyes or its first time off a ventilator. It enhances the bonding experience between the infant and their family whilst also improving the relationship between families and the clinical team.
 
In all, it took 9 months from our initial conversation with Neil, which included lots of testing of the platform, enhancements of security measures and consultations with all those involved before we eventually got sign-off to test the concept.

How has the solution been scaled, particularly as its success has been recognised by parents, medical teams, and hospitals?

The whole thing just exploded in popularity after the pilot. The other units in Glasgow quickly adopted it, and the BBC also ran coverage of it. But the success mainly stemmed from the fantastic team in Glasgow who relentlessly talked about the impact of the technology, including how collaboratively we had worked together and how we had overcome the seemingly impossible governance hurdles.

The popularity was hugely helped by the role of the parents, who were massively engaged with the service. We got amazing feedback from the start and built a real community around it. Over 30,000 people signed up for our newsletter, which led to parents going into units who didn’t have the video service to ask why not.

At that point, we decided as a business to turn it into our sole product. We devised a funding model, as we knew we couldn’t rely on funding purely from the NHS, and went down the route of charity sponsorship. We could put their logo on the platform, direct donations towards them, and give them ongoing impact through their funding. That became a real hit and helped grow the system. 
 
So, we had the product, the model to fund it, and all this incredible community support to help it grow. All that was left was to travel to all the neonatal units in the UK, from Aberdeen to Truro, show them the system and see if they were interested.

You then found another area to pioneer with this technology with epileptic patients. How did that come about?

Following the work with Neil and the team in Glasgow, they introduced us to Professor Sameer Zuberi, a Paediatric Neurologist also based in Glasgow.
 
It’s essential to see a seizure to inform the diagnosis of epilepsy and related conditions. However, this can often be difficult for families to catch in real-time, and when they are, it is difficult to share with medical teams to help inform a diagnosis. 
 
The system we created allowed families to send videos of child seizures so that clinicians can make a quick diagnosis, given that it’s much easier to do this from footage of the seizure as opposed to an explanation from parents. Doing so makes diagnosis faster, preventing unnecessary appointments and investigations and making the whole process much cheaper and more efficient.
 
The next exciting phase is to take this one step further by incorporating AI and machine learning to help triage these videos as soon as they are uploaded. This can then provide support to clinicians in making diagnoses by automatically flagging where more investigation might be needed, such as infantile spasms, which are hard to differentiate from typical baby movements but can lead to lifelong disability if not treated quickly.

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

I think organisations find it hard to balance the commercial entity with looking after their customers. For us, the parents were our customers (alongside the clinical team), and what we did was put them first by designing a system with them that was for them. They were always front of mind, and that is what true pioneering is.
 
It’s hard to keep persevering. We were dealing with lots of NHS trusts, who were often working in silos. There was no standardised process for each trust, so we had to continue trying to be as efficient as possible while staying true to addressing our customers’ needs. We had to go through some early pain and heavily refine our process before we got much better at working with different units. It was hard work, but we eventually got there. 

Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire for doing something customer-led?

I’ve worked closely with Microsoft for a long time. All our various systems actually work through them. Despite being such a huge organisation, they have a product and service that makes them easy to work with. In our case, they were so receptive to what we were trying to achieve and what technology we needed to make that happen. They offered us lots of tools to provide the platform we were trying to create quickly and efficiently. If it weren’t for them, we would’ve struggled to scale up in the way we have.

Who is Scania, and what is their background, broadly?

Scania has been around for over 100 years, designing and building trucks, and also wider engine and power solutions, including the machines that operate the drawbridge at London Bridge and the generators that power the Glastonbury festival.

They started in the car industry, but the business has since evolved. Its big breakthrough into the truck industry was in the 1970s when they designed the V8 truck that was much more powerful than others on the market. These trucks were true feats of engineering. Trucks have changed a lot since then, with the ones we are now making being much more automated, meaning most people can drive them.

Our trucks play a huge role in ensuring economies, particularly in Western Europe, don’t come to a standstill. The Department for Transport can even summon us if our service execution is too low because of the impact on the delivery of fuels.

What does it take to be customer-led in the truck business?

For Scania, it’s all about showing how customers get value out of a relationship with us and vice-versa. Our customers spend thousands of pounds personalising their trucks because they are hugely passionate and want to differentiate themselves.

If you go to our website, we talk about the ‘Scania way’, which outlines the equation that describes how our job as an organisation is to add value to customers. That’s what drives our revenues and is why we exist. We have made this formula very public, so it's all over our website, unlike other manufacturers who say that's their job internally but don’t broadcast it. We do this because we believe one of the greatest risks we have is taking the loyalty of our customers for granted or believing our own hype, which will mean we stop delivering for our customers.

We believe customers will only continue to buy from us if we provide them with value. We are in a relationships-driven business – and through our relationships with our customers, we understand their business and can solve their problems quickly and efficiently. This means they won't ever need to go anywhere else.

At Scania UK, how do people think about customers and what challenges have you tackled in a customer-led way?

At Scania, we are trusted advisors to our customers, not just salespeople who sell products. When we are talking with our customers, we have to support them to ensure they are getting the right product for them. Part of our ethos and product differentiation is something we call modular construction. In other words, the varied nature of trucking means that every truck we build is bespoke as we make them to the exact needs of how our customers will use them.

To build a truck in a bespoke way ends with the truck itself and begins with truly understanding what that truck will be used for. Our customers have hugely different usages for their trucks such that what we can build for them can be anything from 18 to 150 tonnes. The list of the specifications that make each truck unique is exhaustive, which means that to get it right, we must really understand each individual customer's needs. They are making a massive investment in our products, and there are huge risks of getting it wrong, both reputationally and financially, for us and them.

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

It’s easy to say 'listen to your customers' but if you genuinely believe it is important, as a senior leader, you will find time in your diary to get close to customers. I try to get out to our branches and customers in formal and informal settings as much as possible. For example, I do informal dinners where I will meet with a small group of customers with no purpose other than to have a conversation with them. I find that in just a few hours, I really get to understand their business and build that relationship. You also get to show your value to them in more ways than one. I've had two customers make a property deal at the table before.

Other organisations, particularly in the automotive industry, find it difficult to pioneer on behalf of customers because there is so much focus on simple business dynamics like optimising your cash that they end up ignoring their customers. That's because various pressures make it challenging to find the time and recognise the importance of listening to customers and making yourself available to them, which means you don't make changes to the business based on what they are saying. In our case, listening to customers in the way we do has allowed us to maintain all of the things that have made Scania great rather than just making short-lived internal optimisations.

Are there any examples of organisations that you particularly admire for doing something customer-led?

The first example was when I was in Disneyland in Florida with my family. We were perfectly happy waiting for our pre-booked pass to get on a particular ride when a Litter Picker asked if we wanted to go on another ride while we waited. They ushered us to the front of the line so we could experience another ride instead of just waiting. The level of empowerment for that person to create something magical for our family was incredible and the fact the rest of the staff supported it too was a great example of the power in getting it right when it comes to recruitment, training, attitude and behaviour of colleagues.

The other example is a favourite restaurant of mine in London. It’s not overly fancy, and my wife and I go once a year and have done so for the past seven years or so. But every time we go, they remember us. They have our favourite table ready, and they always give us a complimentary glass of something, even if someone new is waiting on us. I think it’s amazing to think how many people eat in that restaurant that they still remember us and take the time to personalise the experience. It means we always want to go back.

Tell us about your time at Halfords. How did you think about customers, and what challenges did you tackle in a customer-led way? 

Halfords was a successful business with a strong reputation for its own label and brand. When I joined, they provided car parts for customers much more affordably than garages. Back then, we had a real competitive advantage in our buying and branding and delivering great quality. But it was clear that while we were having great success, we would soon become much less relevant. Cars were getting more reliable and complicated to fit parts on, making it increasingly challenging to sell parts for people to do it themselves. They would go directly to a garage instead, but of course, service intervals were extending too.  

So, I faced a real challenge in convincing the exec team that a change was needed, even though we were being successful. To do that, I facilitated a discussion where the exec team listened to direct feedback from customers. It was so powerful that we introduced the “We’ll Fix It” service across our stores, which bundled labour and part costs into one product offering where we’d provide and fit the part there and then. For customers, this meant the high-quality and competitively priced parts they’ve always had without the need to go to a garage to get it fixed. It’s since been one of their most profitable services and is still going 20 years later!

What does it take to be customer-led in the NHS? Can you share some examples of pioneering customer work in the healthcare sector?

The NHS is a complex organisation. It is very fragmented. They are also one of few nationally branded services. However, in reality, their services are mostly delivered locally. 

When I started working there, I witnessed patient care pathways involving many different clinicians and therapists, all provided very separately from each other. The opportunity to become customer-focused in the NHS required thinking about the way members of the public consumed the service and how it was delivered.

An excellent example is the 111 system, which has evolved to become a well-run service despite its complexity in navigating patients to get help. As part of the evolution, it required teams to think of 111 not as a call centre and the conventional metrics associated with one but as the start of the patient journey directing them to the most appropriate service. To do that well, you need to understand who is calling to provide the best information and avoid repeat issues. 

The Dorset HealthCare Service, where I now work, does this really well. Dorset operates with many community hospitals, so they have much more control over their service. If you phone 111, and it doesn’t require you to go to a main hospital, they can look at all the appointments in the community hospitals to provide that service. It’s great because it gives patients a fast response, meaning you don’t have to unnecessarily go to an A&E and spend the 3 hours in a waiting room, clogging the system and making it slower for those who need it. 

Another great example is the “Steps to Wellbeing” programme, which simplifies access to talking therapies without needing a GP referral. It’s used a lot by students, who can self-refer themselves. They can then get sessions, which they can drop in and drop out of as and when they want to. It’s great because it moves away from a “doctor knows best” approach to putting patients at the centre of their own care, allowing them to access and talk about what they need and tailor it to their specific requirements without ever needing to see a doctor.

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do organisations find it so hard?

Pioneering on behalf of customers means genuinely listening and understanding their needs, not just hearing their words. I think organisations struggle with this because it represents a shift in power dynamics. It requires a change in mindset from “I know the answers” to “I know how to listen to people and creatively solve problems.” But the power shift also requires a change in skillset. The skill becomes being able to listen, gather perspectives from all those important voices (e.g. patients, caregivers, friends, healthcare professionals), make sense of it all, and co-create an excellent service off the back of it. You must have an open mindset, not be stuck on your own ideas, and take that real 360-degree approach.

Are there any customer pioneer organisations that you particularly admire?

There are two organisations that I particularly admire. The first is AO, the home appliance retailer. They know that when a washing machine stops working, it’s not something people want to spend much time thinking about. They just want it to work. They are so good at ensuring you have a new machine installed and working again within 24 hours. The service is just amazing. 

I also really like Laithwaite’s Wine. I’ve been their customer for a while, and they are so good at making you feel important. I’ll get a personal phone call from someone every so often to see how things are and if there is anything I want. Yes, I can do it online, but it’s like having a personal shopper. They know everything I’ve brought before, so I never have to explain it again. Their personalised marketing strikes a great balance of telling me something about a new wine I might like without feeling intrusive. It feels like they are sharing it because they know I’ll like it. 

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you?

Firstly, it’s about listening really hard to what customers tell you they really need and then challenging the status quo in the organisation to deliver that. It’s then about putting in place the systems needed to ensure that the voice of customers is at the heart of the business on an ongoing basis and not shirking from the responsibility to do the right thing for customers.

Finally, it’s about generating those real ‘moments of belief’ so that you can take colleagues on a journey with you, even those who say ‘we just can’t do that’.

How did you help M&S pioneer for customers?

In 2005, I became the first-ever Head of Customer Service for M&S, which was quite pioneering at the time. Before then, we’d had a Complaints Department, but we’d never had a whole customer strategy. The challenge was that, like many other organisations, M&S had structured its support mechanisms in an ‘inside out’ way, around functional divisions. Therefore, when customers encountered different parts of the brand, they got a very different experience and not one that necessarily aligned with our company mission.

So, I began by identifying what customers had told us they really wanted, which was friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable service. To then deliver on that meant reviewing our approach to recruitment to attract the right people; developing different support mechanisms to train, support and reward colleagues in ways that reinforced our mission; making sure that we had the right customer data and insights; and bringing colleagues along with me.

How did you bring senior colleagues along with you?

I have been very lucky to work with some amazing leaders and colleagues. But sometimes, it is not a question of ambition or desire. It’s that the structures, the operating model and the data are all engineered ‘inside out’. Colleagues might have the right intent, but their capabilities and skills are lacking.

You need to speak your colleagues’ language. When I started to be able to use data to point out that if we could get to the root cause of the customer complaints, stop the complaints in the first place and reduce failure demand, operating profits would significantly increase. Then I started to get people on board. Becoming customer-led was no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a commercial imperative.

I also realised that some barriers are more emotional than rational. It’s hard for some people to let go of bits of their portfolio. Perhaps there is also a bit of fear about what might come to light through the data or uneasiness among some senior colleagues about how to engage with customers on shop floors during immersions. It’s easy for me – perhaps because of my personality – but some people find this very stressful. What if they did not have the answer to a customer problem?

But over time, you get like-minded people around you. You have your ‘fire starters’ around the business that you can go and talk to.

In some cases, unfortunately, it takes a huge external event to force change. In housing, it took Grenfell to shake up the sector. Now, all housing associations are starting to understand that putting customers first may have prevented this tragedy from happening.

So, being customer-led sounds simple, but I think a lot of organisations don't do this because it is hard to get parts of the organisation redesigned and on your side. It takes a lot of sustained effort and energy.

How do you ensure that everyone buys into that vision?

In organisations, senior leaders and frontline colleagues often get a lot of attention. But middle management rarely gets the same positive treatment, so they can feel disengaged or unclear about why they are asked to implement changes.

At M&S, middle managers had a huge sphere of influence. They line-managed 92% of our employees. I wanted to engage them. So, for the first time, we took 3,500 middle managers out in groups and we talked to them about the organisation, about our customers, about the retail market, and about how important their role was. We also listened to them. For example, we learned a lot about how difficult it was for them to get pay progression. The results were phenomenal. They felt engaged. And you know what? The commercial results followed. It was kind of ‘pioneering from the middle’.  

How do you stay connected with what really matters to customers? 

Most large organisations have access to lots of customer data. At a board level, people tend to look at single figures, averages, traffic lights and so on, to track what is going well and what is not. But no customer is an ‘average’ customer. And if 90% are satisfied, you still need to find out what is going on with the 10% who aren’t.  For that, I implemented immersion events, going out, talking to customers in their homes or in their local stores, and keeping that going as a rhythm and routine.

In my Non-Executive roles, I encourage others to do the same. Spending time with customers in their own lives or accompanying them as they visit your stores helps ensure that you don’t just get feedback on specific product lines or communications but that you cover the wider customer experience.

What differences do you perceive between the retail, education and housing sectors?

I see more similarities than differences. My role as a NED is very much about getting organisations to think about their service users as customers. Instead of thinking that tenants or residents, for instance, are not customers because they don’t have a choice and cannot easily take their business elsewhere, I argue that we should think of our residents as customers. They might not have a choice about where they live, but understanding what it’s like when they arrive or what their journey is like as they are paying their rent or service charges, are all typical ‘customer’ questions. People might not choose their properties, but they do have a choice as to how they treat the property and how they behave in that community. Considering residents as customers encourages housing providers to treat people with greater respect and this leads to people being more considerate and engaged.  

What does pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you?

Our North Star at Young Enterprise is providing opportunities and support for young people. The chemistry between those two things creates a powerful vehicle to change young people’s futures.

Those opportunities and that support need to be relevant and need to be relatable. Support also needs to be fast. We’ve got all kinds of customers at Young Enterprise. First and foremost it’s young people, but also educators, whether they be teachers, youth workers or lecturers. We also have other stakeholders, which include our volunteers, partners and funders, as well as Young Enterprise alumni. They all have ever-changing needs, so we need to be really fleet-of-foot.

So being pioneering is about how we reach for our North Star within a very fast-paced changing world. One example is the need to respond to an increasingly cashless society, where young people are regularly targeted for scams. Financial education needs to be one step ahead. 

What do you think is the biggest challenge facing young people at the moment?

Post-pandemic we are seeing young people feeling that they're not necessarily prepared for the world of work. Employers are feeling the same. There are fewer opportunities available to young people and fewer environments where they can test their knowledge, skills and confidence in activities within a real-world setting. One of the biggest challenges is making those opportunities accessible for all young people, especially those with the greatest barriers to social mobility, because schools and teachers are very stretched at the moment.

At Young Enterprise we’re focused on increasing those opportunities – for example, by encouraging young people to set up and run their own Young Enterprise company. That helps them to really equip themselves and feel better prepared for the fast-paced world of work. This is about helping to create practical experiences that they can talk about in the future and bridge the skills they’re learning in school with the futures that they’re planning.

How do you stay connected to your customers?

We’re always asking young people and educators what they think of the programmes. We evaluate those using an NPS rating, alongside focus groups and a teacher’s advisory group who we consult to help us through issues we’re working on. We also work closely with our Young Enterprise alumni, especially in identifying the greatest barriers for them. More and more we’re hearing that the barriers are around a lack of opportunity and support beyond Young Enterprise. In response to that we’re working with partners who offer things like internships or networking opportunities beyond the programmes that we run.

What does it really take to be customer-led in your sector?

Firstly, it’s about listening and staying curious, being able to spot trends and then interrogate those trends further. Then, I think it’s about testing and learning and being able to adapt really quickly when something’s not working. Part of that is building a culture that enables you to test and learn without people feeling as if they can’t make mistakes.

A classic example of this would be during the pandemic. We were set to run 85 in-person events where young people would share their journey of setting up a business as part of our Company programme. The pandemic hit and we had to find a way for young people to still share their journeys and get the recognition they deserved. We had to rapidly pivot to deliver those events in the best possible way in a digital setting.

To test and learn successfully, you need to ensure that the customer is fully immersed in that experience and that they understand what you’re in pursuit of. In my experience, as long as the customer is understanding and is part of that testing and learning culture then they’re OK with it. It’s like co-creating a solution together.

How do you maintain the energy and enthusiasm when the going gets tough?

The first thing to understand is that you can't go against that tide if the energy is running low – it's pointless and it's unsustainable to push it – so you have to adapt to those energy flows.

Secondly, for me as a leader, it’s always important to have the ‘why’ of the organisation, that North Star, front and centre, to really help guide decision making.

Finally, it’s a mindset that pioneering is an infinite game. You’re never going to get to that end point and you need to live with that as a leader. It’s the spirit of continuous improvement – we need to stay curious and stay open in order to stay relevant to the young people and educators that we’re there to serve.

Are there any organisations that you particularly admire?

There’s an organisation called Youth Employment UK who are building youth employment spaces and really educating employers about what good youth employment looks like. They're constantly sampling young people to ensure that their needs are factored into employment offers. I think they're a fantastic organisation and the Chief Executive, Laura-Jane Rawlings, is a brilliant role model as a charity sector leader and somebody that I really admire.

What does being a customer pioneer mean to you?

Being customer-led comes quite naturally to me, but I wouldn’t describe myself as customer-centric. For me, it’s about being people-centric: growing up in Northern Ireland during a period of strife made me want to do the best for people, and especially the least powerful in society. At the start of my career, I worked for a company that was trying to reinvent actuarial work, harnessing new computer technology to make the experience better for clients. It worked, with the business growing from sixty employees to a large global company. We were pioneers, driven by a single belief: How do we deliver for clients and help them solve their problems, without creating new ones? If you do that well, then it provides the basis for a great business. 

What does it take to become and remain a customer pioneer?

What I’ve learned more recently after stints building businesses and now as a NED is that it’s difficult to deliver what you want to for customers if the system – whether the company or the ecosystem within which companies operate – doesn’t support what you’re trying to achieve. Many of our systems in the UK are currently failing - healthcare, energy and finance - so there’s plenty of work needed in these areas.

I think you also have to to really care about people. I worked with someone who used to own Pizza Express, and his behaviour really brought to life the giant gap between where the finance industry (in which I spend most my time) is versus the hospitality sector. When we ate there, he picked up on the little things, like the time it took for the pizza to arrive, how hot it was, did it have enough toppings or how long it took to get us the bill. Even though he no longer owned it, after we left he still called the area manager and reported on our experience. That passion for your customers’ experience is inspiring – and necessary, because it’s hard work to do. 

How do you ensure you have the right system in place to pioneer on behalf of customers?

Donella Meadows, doyenne of ‘systems thinking’ would say a system consists of three things: elements, linkages between elements, and purpose, being clear on the outcome the system is trying to achieve. This allows positive and negative feedback loops to develop, both of which can be helpful or damaging. For example, a positive loop is executive incentivisation: All companies believe their executives are above average and therefore pay them more than the average, which raises the average, and the pattern continues. Conversely, a negative loop is seen in drugs policy: reducing the supply on the street raises the price, which in turn causes more people to want to deal drugs, which increases supply.

How can organisations use systems thinking to their advantage?

If you understand the system, then you’re better placed to achieve your intended consequences rather than relying on decisions based on siloed thinking, potentially creating unhelpful unintended consequences. And if you build foresight into your system, then you’re less likely to succumb to emerging risks. These risks can often look like a ‘Black Swan’ once they’ve happened, but if you look at your system more widely, and understand the feedback loops, then you might see it coming. For example, you might not think that pubs are encroached upon by M&S food dine-in offer because the they exist in different industries and systems, but by looking more widely, you can see that they both fulfil the need to have food in the evening. 

And which organisation or industries do you think would benefit from this type of thinking?

The Pensions and Investments industry is a great example of where systems thinking could benefit customers. Many of the pension regulations we have derive from the Robert Maxwell defrauding case: funds are often managed based upon the risk to the fund – without sufficient consideration of the risk to the individual and of providing them with the best pension – and regulations are too often designed to prevent that failure rather than to optimize success for the customer.

Ironically, the Maxwell case wasn’t actually a system failure, yet the resulting regulations impacted the entire operation of the pensions system. These regulations now inhibit our ability to deliver the best pensions for customers, create group think, and lead to behaviours which can in turn lead to systemic failures. A study we did in 2017 determined that 3 million members of ‘defined benefit’ schemes had only a 50% likelihood of getting their pension paid in full. We need to do better for people.

Why isn’t systems thinking more widely adopted?

In China, systems thinking is more readily used, perhaps because of a lesser belief in the power of markets. We, on the other hand, believe that free markets are the best way to deliver for customers, but our markets aren’t as free as they are often imagined, as they are inevitably underpinned by regulation.

It's easy to be focused on your industry and regulations and therefore fail to capture wider thinking and disciplines. To be able to design or think about systems more widely, you need to see the world from a broad perspective. It doesn’t create headlines yet, but the fact that concerns over things like climate change are rising means that we will see more systems thinking, given the number of elements involved.