What David Miliband & The Nudge Unit Taught Me About Leadership | Ravi Gurumurthy, Nesta CEO

0:00Hi everyone, I'm Hayaatun. And I'm Jimmy. And welcome to What We Don't Know, all about better leadership in a crazy, uncertain world. How are you doing, Jimmy? I'm very well, thanks. How are you, Hayaatun? Yeah, I'm good, thank you. Looking forward to another partnership co-hosting gig. Yes, I'm looking forward to it as well. It seems like our episode with Sharon Wright went down really well. Absolutely. And we'll see if we're going to still be as polite and nice to each other this time round. Whether there'll be a bit more spike. There's going to be some argy-bargy, do you think? Maybe. We'll do our best to keep the professional.

0:35Exactly. But there is something on creative tension and so on. We've been talking about it in a bit in the office this week, about you do at times, having friction and conflict at work is not always a bad thing. In fact, it's a big red flag, really, isn't it? If you are always relentlessly nice to everybody. I mean, okay, obviously, kind, compassionate. But if you have a dynamic in your top team where everybody is just constantly pleasant. Exactly. That might not be a good sign. Okay, well, we have a really, really interesting guest today. I'm very excited about this. So we're looking forward to interviewing Ravaguramurthy, who we both know, I think, yes.

1:13Yeah. And we're going to be exploring what it's like to lead an organisation that is trying to solve these really big, hairy challenges that affect all of society. But, of course, they're challenges that are hard to solve and that we don't really know the answers to. So what in practice is that like and how do you turn bold ideas into practical progress at ground level? So what we know about Ravi Gurumurthy is that he's the CEO of Nesta, which is sometimes called the UK's Innovation Foundation. And Ravi leads work there to try and help corral innovation and insights to enable us to tackle these shared challenges like the future of skills and education and health, climate and energy policy.

2:04And he also, as part of his role at Nesta, leads the behavioural insights team, which was, of course, famously known as the Nudge Unit. And I feel I should hand over to you because I'm going to say the words number 10 here. Yes. So tell us why the Nudge Unit is something that became well known. Well, the Nudge Unit was a unit in Downing Street, which was all about kind of behavioral economics, which only sort of got popular, popularized sort of in the late noughties, really, about how we could make small changes to people in the way that they would interact with the world and society that would have outsized impacts.

2:41So one of the great examples of this is the sort of 5P charge for a carrier bag, etc. And just how that completely changed everyone's behaviour by quite a small kind of financial disincentive, as it were. So, yeah, it was fascinating. Well, we've got, I'm sure, lots of questions to ask him about what we can learn from behavioural insights when it comes to leadership. But also worth knowing that Ravi worked very closely in government and with some very influential people. so one of those being David Miliband so he was an advisor and I think a speech writer to David Miliband back in probably the early 2000s he was involved in the creation of the Every Child Matters and the Children Act in 2004 and also the world's first legally binding climate legislation which is kind of pretty impressive and I can't resist pointing out that not only did he work closely with David Miliband but he's now the senior independent director non-impedal non - he's now the senior now I'll do that again I've got my words all modeled up I also have to point out that Ravi is now the lead non-executive director at DESNES the department for energy security and net zero where of course he's working very closely with Ed Miliband I think we might have a bit of a brother's theme going on through this episode and he's also a non-exec director at NHS England so he has a ringside seat to some very very interesting and important and challenging environments.

4:11Very long-term base right as well. Yeah absolutely so we're gonna have loads to talk about what are you looking forward to asking Ravi about? Well I think he's got such a kind of like archetypal successful CV when you sort of look at it and it will be it'd be interesting to see the challenges that he's wrestled with and how he'd be thinking about it through starting his career today as well I think would be interesting given that he looks at all these long term issues and so on. I also very much enjoyed reading the Nesta report from 2017 this morning on future employment and what that, what some of that got right and what some of it not so right.

4:50Overall it was pretty good actually I have to say but and so that will be, it'll be interesting to discuss that. What about you? Well I mean you're showing off at how prepared you are I mean I see him now exactly I can see you you've raised the bar well I have also done my research but I also know Ravi a bit from just working in the same world I guess and what's very interesting about Ravi is he hasn't gone on record much talking about himself so I'm really looking forward to understanding a bit more about him the person behind the sort of the leader that's a public face and understanding more of how he got there and what he finds difficult and easy and what he's learned along the way.

5:36He's trying to provide leadership in a really important space, but one that is not easy to kind of nail down in terms of metrics and, you know, be able to evidence your success. It's kind of, as you say, it's very long term, thorny, complicated. So probing that a bit more with him, I think, will be interesting. Yeah. Well, let's get into it. Can't wait. Ravi, thank you so much for joining us today. We're really, really delighted to be sitting here with you and looking forward to learning more about you. We like to start by giving our audience a bit of a feel for what our guests actually do all day.

6:08So can you tell us what being the CEO of Nesta actually involves? Well, my kids are 10 and 6. Every six months they say to me, what do you actually do, Dad? Because my friends are asking me and I just can't really explain it. So let me have a go. So I run Nesta. Nesta is a group of behavioural scientists, data scientists, designers. And we have these three massive missions. So we went to missions before the government were into them. You were there first. Before they were fashionable and now even after they're not fashionable. And they are real moonshot missions. So can you halve obesity? Can we get to net zero homes?

6:45Can we eradicate the gap between kids on free school meals and the average at age five? Those are our three missions. And we typically do three things to try and get there. One is we run lots of experiments with organizations. so with asda or starbucks or uh gregs on tackling obesity we then um build companies so we've been creating a sort of agentic ai company around shopping for instance um and then we try and reverse reverse engineer policy from that practical experience so we call it innovation partnering venture building and system shaping so we're going to definitely want to talk a bit more about the policy side of it but let's bring to life even more for people who aren't familiar with this world what do you do all day i mainly look at the liverpool website to check for transfer gossip but um what do i do all day um well also i've got these i've got quite a lot of other roles just just throw them into the mix come on let's get it all out on the table nester is a group of organizations we've got nester the charity that does all those three missions we've then got this team called challenge works which runs these big mega challenge prizes so we've got one at the moment on motor neurone disease.

7:55And then we've got something called the Behavioural Insights Team, which is now a global consultancy doing trials in human behaviour in India, in America, in Singapore, France, etc. And so all of those are three are part of the Nesta Group. And then I also am the lead non-executive director at the Energy and Net Zero Department with Ed Miliband. And I'm on the NHS Inc. board. So not much happening, really. I can't stand why you spend so much time checking the football results. So I mainly sit there with my EA going, oh God, I think we need to move this around. Sounds familiar. Okay, so let's go back in time now.

8:31I would like to know a bit more about your background and how it's influenced the leader that you've become. And is it fair to say you're not the only high flyer in your family? Yeah, I'm actually the black sheep of the family. So yeah, my brother and sister are both TV presenters, krishna on channel 4 and gita on uh bbc um but we actually i mean we grew up in in burnley um and my dad was a doctor my mom tried to be a doctor and then the rigid division of labor in the 1960s meant she sort of didn't quite manage to finish um medical school um and to be honest all three of us would have been doctors i think because my dad was just hell-bent on us becoming doctors um and my sister my brother my brother actually i think changed all of our lives in some ways because he was 18 years old he was about to go to guys andst thomas's he had a place at medical school and uh in the summer holidays just beforehand we all went on a family holiday he was like nurse of that i'm 18 and he went off and did two weeks work experience in in glasgow and it just happened in those two weeks he was doing work experience at the bbc a presenter on a show left and they said do you want a screen test to be a tv presenter on something called open to question and we got back from our holiday and my brother said to my dad dad i'm not going to be a doctor because i've become a tv presenter in the last two weeks and um and that was that story i mean yeah wow so i mean so both my sister and my brother ended up going to tv and i think it did change how i saw uh what was possible because you know it's like when you're when you're really young, it's quite hard to not know, particularly if you've got a doctor father who just says, be a doctor or an accountant or a lawyer.

10:15And you don't really have any other horizons other than that. But I think what Christian did, did make me think, well, I think I could do anything. And you rebelled. Rebelled, yes. I mean, my dad got increasingly desperate. So my dad, I'm the youngest of the three. And I can still remember, I'd done my A-levels. And at that time, I got into Oxford to do history. And my dad said, look, it's not too late. I'll give you my new car I used to look quite like cars I'll give you my new car if you go and do a pre-medical year and go to medical school You've got to admire his perseverance I'm trying to persuade your son off doing history at Oxford as well The funny thing the reason though none of us ended up doing medicine was my dad was always much more interested in literature and philosophy and history and politics and actually what happened was I went off to Oxford My dad then applied to do an English degree at Oxford.

11:08And he then started an English degree and used to come down. He used to finish, do a half day on Wednesday and drive down for a tutorial. So we actually, yeah, we did it the other way around. Oh, my gosh, that is a fantastic story. I'm so glad I asked. Well, thank you for sharing that, Ravi. So you were obviously, you know, a high achieving family in the various domains that you decided to pursue. what do you think of as your first experience of leadership can you remember a time when you thought oh you know I quite enjoy this responsibility or some little glimmer of what was to come in adolescence or well you tell us I mean you know if it's when you were in the scouts when you were seven that's also fine to be honest I think as a child particularly being the youngest I don't think I ever felt like I was in any position of leadership as a child I was I was always very um rebellious and that i didn't i never i never wanted to accept the status quo i always wanted to challenge authority i mean i guess one example was i was i was very political as like a 10 year old um weirdly because my brother is sort of seven and nine years older than me so i trickled some of that political interest trickled down and i was um discussing nuclear deterrence with my colleague.

12:27I did not match up to this level of maturity as a 10 year old. So I was I think I was explaining why we needed we didn't need Trident. We could just stick with stick with Polaris. And the teacher noticed I was talking at the back of the class and went, look, Guramurthy, do you want to teach this lesson? And I went, yeah, right. So I then started talking about why we didn't need a nuclear deterrent. um so um yes i think that was my earliest form of leadership but in general i'd more say that i never felt um i never felt i could fit in very easily and i think that's partly because of race and the sort of racism growing up in northern england in the 1980s and also just because um you know i think by by nature i was reasonably rebellious and wanted to challenge stuff.

13:19But that was that was my character growing up. That is an absolutely fascinating story. I love that you thought you didn't have any examples of leadership and then you come up with that. Amazing. So take us from there to, you know, moving into actual leadership roles. What was your journey and how did you how did you get to the point where you knew you wanted to, in a professional sense, become a leader? yeah I think that I didn't think very much about it I was just very very driven by a sort of burning sense of injustice and I want to try and tackle poverty and social exclusion and I ended up having quite a sort of precocious career in the early 20s I left university went and worked at a think tank called demos ended up co-writing something on neats on young people not in education employment and training and the government at the time the social exclusion unit were doing a big piece of work on that so I ended up being seconded or actually going into government in the late 90s and I worked with a brilliant woman called Moira Wallace who you might remember her but she was somebody who wasn't very typical of many civil servants in that she wasn't sat there thinking about how do I please xyz stakeholders she had a sort of burning sense of How do we solve the problem and do the right thing?

14:37And I ended up sort of being promoted quite quickly. I was a sort of senior civil servant when I was 24. So I ended up leading a team before I even knew, hadn't even reflected on the idea of leadership. I was just trying to solve a problem. And I think the first time when I felt a sense of responsibility as a leader was leading the response to the inquiry into the Victoria Climbier death. and this ended up being a big a huge reorganization of social services and the Children Act and that's something called Every Child Matters which I which I led and that felt for the first time like this was very very high stakes I really wasn't prepared at all for it in terms of how to lead teams I was just doing it very intuitively without even really reflecting very much on how you lead.

15:27So did you then more proactively or formally start to try to develop your leadership skills or have you essentially used this kind of sense of being propelled by a mission to just figure out how to how to corral people and provide leadership in a practical sense? I think I think I've been on a journey shall we say in that the first my first reaction to I can remember going on this high potential training scheme that the civil service put on and I thought oh my god this is such a waste of time what am I doing here this is management jargon I could write this in three seconds it was really it was annoying um redesign the leadership course redesign the leadership course but you know a classic sort of arrogant young person and you then start to realize no there's a lot of subtlety this there's there's huge it's really valuable reflecting on how you come across and how you lead and how you motivate people and I think it was a journey from initial sort of scepticism.

16:24I tend to, I think I learned from partly just reading a lot, so reading lots of Harvard Business Review articles, but also just from people. So people like Moira, David Miliband, Jeff Mulgan. You might need to just tell the audience who they are. I mean, I think many of them will recognise those names. They were all people I worked quite closely with and ended up being sort of mentor figures. So Jeff Mulgan was actually my predecessor at Nesta, but he was also previously the head of the Number 10 Policy Unit and founded Demos. And I was familiar with his work when I was literally a child reading a magazine called Marxism Today.

17:02And it was it was it was I ended up being his intern when I was at age 19 and just being able to work with somebody he'd looked up to as a child and then ending up working with him more closely. He ended up being quite an influential figure in how I thought about things. um obviously people probably know david milliband i worked with him for a long long time in government and also in new york at the international rescue committee and again he's somebody who um is very inspiring and energizing and i've learned a huge amount about how to how to lead from from from him so i think the role models you have and the and the mentors that mentorship they give you as well as the more formal stuff i think it's been very important brilliant I think that's a natural opportunity for you to come in Jimmy definitely do you think the civil service uniquely empowers people in their 20s to have quite high stakes leadership roles like it's one of the things that I reflect on in my time in number 10 where you had you know private secretaries to the prime minister sort of you know three or four years out of university incredibly impressive people but I don't think you would get that in many corporate and private sector places quite as much i think that's a really good point i think particularly at the center of government so if you're in the treasury or number 10 or the cabinet office um you can be in your mid-20s and be incredibly influential because you're you're sort of in charge of a whole domain of air of a sector whereas actually in the education department that issue of education has been split up into lots and lots of things and therefore your 25 year old is maybe responsible for something more discreet but I do think um it makes it great fun to be a 25 year old in the treasury number 10 whether it's the right way of governing um is another another matter um and how do you think about the sort of the the policy making process and how it's kind of changed in the time that you've been there because as well now you are dealing with you know health and energy issues which are going to last decades and how do you think about those in terms of leadership when you're trying to tackle something that's 20 30 years in the future well i think most most departments don't actually think in terms of 20 30 years in the future the one exception is probably energy where um there has historically been a uh a need to look through to 2050 so i was involved in creating the climate change act back in 2006 with David Miliband.

19:30And as a result, when I then spent some time in the department some years afterwards, we were always trying to think, what are the different scenarios to get to net zero? How can you hedge for different ones being true? What are the no regret actions? And it was a long-term strategy. That is very, very rare. Most departments, and I think even more so now, are operating under very, very short-term horizons. And the political instability in the last decade has made that much, much worse. Do you think it's changed given the amount of data and technology that we have? How has that influenced the sort of policymaking process?

20:11Has it made us better, Edith? Well, I'm not sure that it's really made things better because I don't think departments are using that potential in the way that they could. So let me give you an example. we've got something at Nesta called Policy Atlas, where it allows you to systematically scour for the best policies around the world and categorise them in terms of their cost, their evidence quality, their impact. And that should be a way of making sure that no policy makers are incredibly parochial. They're always looking abroad. But if you ask, if you went to most departments and say, which is the country that has really nailed this, it's surprising how little good information you get when you ask that question.

20:57So I think the second thing is that data sometimes isn't set up in a way that allows it to be interrogated as well as it could be. So data linkage, we've made quite a lot of progress in the last decade, but it should have been way faster. We should be able to link data routinely and yield much more interesting insights. My favourite one is we sometimes look at why is it that one local authority has completely eradicated the gap between school, children who leave schools with not school ready versus those that do. So Hackney and Newham basically completely transformed their early years outcomes.

21:36But we don't really understand why, because we don't collect any information really on what they do, how much money they spent. so we're left admiring difference rather than learning from what's driving it as the engineer do you have questions on the data well i think it's really interesting isn't it because in theory you did the work of the behavioral insights team and nesta and so many organizations in the third sector and in academia and the think tanks and you feel that that combined with data and technology ought to have made us kind of smarter in policy terms. But it doesn't feel like that's really the data experience.

22:17And I mean, there's a kind of lack of curiosity question. There's the, do we have the right people with the right expertise to support the non-experts in the policy process, the kind of attachment to generalists and the low, what I would call technological digital capital amongst politicians i mean where where do you think the biggest opportunities are for us to make more progress it's a time when there's a lot of i would say cynicism about government yeah so from the policy perspective where where is the headroom for us to or how do we unlock the headroom that's there well that's a big question so i think i mean you like big questions it's your job i know i could probably spend about 20 minutes on this one.

23:03I think the one bit of progress we have made in the last 10-15 years is rigorous trials of what works. So if I think back to 20 years ago, we'd probably come up with a policy idea and there'd be a crap evaluation of it that didn't really tell you whether there was any causal link between what you did and the outcome. Because now we have the same kind of evidence that you have with drug trials in social policy. So we've just done a trial on whether you can reduce social media use amongst 13 to 15 year olds. And we never used to do rigorous evaluation of that sort of stuff. That's where I think data has made a big difference.

23:41But if you think about the policymaking process as a whole, I think one problem is that back in the early 2000s, you might spend six or nine months really thinking about an issue, analysing it deeply, talking to lots of experts, modeling it in a very interesting way. And you have the time to generate big long term ideas. I just noticed today people are operating on a give me something next week. And the patience to go and ask what is actually the cause of the problem? What's the binding constraint isn't really there. But I think there's another bigger question, which is almost the limits of policy.

24:20Often, we don't, let's take NEATS, the number of people who are not in education employment training, which is higher than it was before. I don't think having a review where you ponder it will make that much of a difference. I think what you sometimes do is just need to do lots and lots of experimentation. You need to say, this is a mission. We're going to do lots of trials. When we find things that work, we're going to try and rapidly scale it. So it's a much closer link between delivery and policy, rather than this idea of we'll sit in a a room and come up with some great thoughts and then we'll just roll this out i don't think it works that way i prefer to think of it more like a you know practice first and and design the policy out of that practical experimentation rapid prototyping in policy context yeah because a million people in the days of 24 now meets i mean it's a massive concern right it's huge and in some ways it's a it's a potential harbinger of something much worse because although every economist always talks about how AI, how any technological change will also generate new jobs.

25:24I don't know about you, but I'm very nervous that the sort of scale and pace of the job destruction that might happen might knock out the whole career ladder, particularly for young people. So I think it's bad now, but it could get a hell of a lot worse. How do you think as well AI will impact policymaking? We've talked about how tech and data in some ways can complicate it, but also aid it. one of my worries is you know the amount of consultation responses that civil servants are going to get to is just going to be you know you're going to be weighing buildings down with it it's going to be enormous how do you think ai will impact policy making so i focus on more of the optimistic side probably than the you're absolutely right the risk is that we'll just be bombarded with crap um but i'll give you you know one or two examples we've been working with um Electric Twin, Ben Warner's organisation, on synthetic data.

26:20So to give you an example, we're working on something to do with how can you electrify homes? How can you get batteries and solar and EVs deployed? And normally, you might do a survey to understand what the consumers want, and that's it. You've just got one set of 15 questions. With synthetic data, you can embed those questions in a tool and continue to ask loads and loads of questions of it as you do the policymaking process. So for instance, if you want to check whether a consumer is more likely to respond to cash back or an interest-free loan or a big discount on their EV, you can do that throughout the whole process.

27:03I think what's good about that is you're often trying to narrow down options when you're doing policy. You've got lots of ideas and this can give you a way of narrowing down the option set before you test them rigorously because obviously testing is great but you can only test a few you can't test a whole set of them so that's I think a good example where synthetic data will will make allow us to make contact with reality throughout the process in a in a richer way I think the the one concern I've got is that it might make us less likely to go and talk to real people. And I think some of the best ideas come from that slightly more anthropological approach where you're working with people.

27:46One of the first things I was involved in was there were 10 groups of 10 young people that we followed for about a year. And these were people who were in foyers or homeless or on the margins. And it's very interesting that when you spend that amount of time with somebody, you do develop a trusting relationship and someone opens up and you learn a lot more than from sort of surveys and just the synthetic data that we were talking about. So, yeah, I'm generally optimistic that it can help, but obviously some risks. So I'm going to pick up on this theme of experimentation that you've referred to a number of times.

28:22It's kind of at the heart of what Nessa does as well. And of course, experimentation means that not everything's going to work. so I'm interested in learning about how you deal with failure as a as a as a leader as an individual um can you give us an example of when things haven't gone to plan for you personally um yeah I'm just interested to know a bit more about your experience in that regard um well let me give you an example of a big failure and where an institution responded really really well first because it's safer than personal failure if we're gonna get there i'll get there in the end um but i thought it was quite instructive so when i worked at the international rescue committee yeah we did this massive trial in congo called the tungani project which was a multi-million pound trial into community-based reconstruction development and uh we did a randomized control trial and it had no effect yeah um and we were kind of very nervous as an organization thinking how will um how will difid respond and actually difid responded fantastically well they were very keen to promote the findings um because they recognized that this was a program that was getting funded many many times over in other countries and this was valuable learning for the sector i thought was very enlightened i can't remember many other donors who would have thought in that that way um so i'd like to think that that's how i respond personally um i think where it's i mean this is not necessarily a failure that that springs to mind but the one that immediately sprung to mind was when i was doing the every child matters green paper i was um i remember i had shingles at the time and i was working at my desk and up popped a uh document and it was a letter from David Blunkett yeah and it was a the letter was had been sent around the whole of Whitehall it seemed calling for me to be sacked personally oh by name and I was like you know when you're sat there you feel like the screener just punched you in the face because I thought I couldn't believe what I was yeah I was reading and it was because he caught wind that I was planning a machinery of government change to try and move various things out of the home office which he was in into into education which was true um but it was it was my job is what i was asked to do um and i can still remember that feeling where of of have i have i fucked up and then i managed to keep my job just about but it was uh quite a chastening experience um so it was not quite a failure but more threat of failure yeah yeah and i mean just generally in leadership now there is so much uncertainty and ambiguity and it's kind of tension that leaders have to process on behalf of the organization is that something that you've thought about is it something that you find comfortable have you learned anything about how to how to manage that that others might find useful um i can remember i was once in a i was once in a meeting um in a whitehall department when i was working for david milliband and he was complaining that we didn't have enough free thinking people in the organization and he just turned and said, what we need is more people like Ravi who've got a careless disregard for their future in this organization.

31:39And I was like, hang on a minute, what he didn't know was actually in an interview process for a promotion at that time and I'm thinking, please don't say that. But I think there is something about I think if you sit there worrying about how you will survive in an organization you will not do the right thing for it so it's quite important to have a little bit of disregard and do do the right thing rather than the easy thing because i think there's lots of examples of people to be honest taking the easy way out rather than taking risk i see that a lot in in in whitehall yeah we can probably all think of people sorry do you want to come well it was just one of my favorite memories of number 10 about three weeks after you know some when i was in the pub with some friends and they were like is there a lot of cleverest person in the room syndrome there?

32:31How are you coping? And I was like, no, there wasn't much of that, but there was a lot of, you know, let's cover our arse on this and let me find the problem with that mentality. And there always ends up being a reason not to do something. And it's just sort of that crippling nature of it. I mean, I do feel like organisations these days feel much more ungovernable. so I'm a big Liverpool fan when I think about Arne Slott who's the Liverpool manager a year ago he was lifting the Premier League trophy within six months or so are we going to get rid of him even Keir Starmer even three months after he'd won by the time of that Labour Party conference everyone was depressed his pole ratings were tumbling it just feels like leaders everywhere face a much more ungovernable situation and that feels unique.

33:27Yeah, so you've got this kind of acceleration of the time one that you're allowed to evolve over as a leader. So in that context, then, how in practice can organisations create cultures where actually you do genuinely embrace learning from failure as much as you do celebrating success? Because really, all the work that you've talked about requires organisations to do that. it's quite hard in practice it is it is hard um i mean i think some organizations literally celebrate failure so they they recognize that as an individual or as a team it's quite hard to um advertise it or live with it unless you almost correct it and literally have rituals and and thanks um i'm i'm struck coming back to the uk the contrast obviously between the uk and the us on this front in that we are just much, much more punishing of people who've had a bad moment in their CV or a startup that's failed.

34:27I think that is changing, I think, but it's a slower cultural change than is desirable. But I do think these small signals that you can give as a leader, like those rituals, can make a disproportionate difference. Yeah. and you can guarantee if you're not doing that, that you will not get people on board with the idea that it's good to fess up to things not going wrong. We're planning something called Bring Out Your Dead, where we're actually going to make it quite colourful. Celebrate those failures and what you learn. One thing we do is this thing called crash testing, where we'll try and kill an idea as fast as possible through prototyping.

35:11yeah and again it's just making it a little bit more playful so that the crash is not um undesirable or unexpected it's actually something that's been designed to do that can you get an example yeah well one of them we did i remember we did one around um what we often might do is take like seven ideas on how to accelerate heat pump uptake and different people will go off and run at them and you know we'll prune them as you go along so one of them for instance was salary sacrifice schemes for heat pumps which i was particularly invested in and um and that kind of died a death very very quickly but i think it just inverted the way normally a person who's running at that and their project gets killed they they're still sat there trying to sort of keep the zombie idea going whereas i think just framing it as crash testing made it a bit easier to to let go of it Yeah, I think that's a great, that's a great practical way to encourage people to see this as part of the creative process.

36:12OK, well, lots of what we could talk about there, but actually I want to throw in some other questions for you, Abby. So I was thinking when I was going to interview, one of the things that springs to mind when I think about you as a leader is a thought leader. so the phrase is like it's very jargony isn't it but I guess it means that people think of you as a significant source of interesting ideas and insights and I'm curious to know as a CEO how you balance the kind of ideas and insights side of being a CEO with the doing and delivering side of being a CEO because the CEO job has got a huge stretch to it and you have to actually invest a lot of time in being full of ideas and insights in knowing your brief and being across these quite disparate policy areas how does that split out in your mind um i think it's something i grapple with a lot because it feels very tangible to me to be working with my exact teams on ideas that we're trying to make happen in the real world whether it's a trial on social media or a prize on motor neurone disease those are things that will make a difference in the world whereas actually writing or appearing on podcasts can feel indulgent it can feel self-promotional the thing that I get most value out of is sometimes actually is writing because that's how sometimes you think and I've noticed in my career when I'm not spending enough time doing the writing and talking, you can go a bit stale.

37:47So I spent quite a lot of time with David Miliband writing speeches, and we used it as a way of he and I to think what's the next agenda for the Foreign Office. And it was only through the action, active writing and talking to people and researching that you moved things on and you moved yourself your own thinking along. But it's just easily gets squeezed out as a CEO and you try and protect it where you can Substack's been a help, but I've been off Substack for about six months. I've not kept up my fortnightly thing. Yeah, fortnightly, that's quite the drumbeat, isn't it? I mean, I totally agree with you.