Podcast
WB-40
Hosted by Matt Ballantine & Chris Weston · EN
Conversations on how technology is changing how we work with guests most weeks helping us to navigate.
16episodes
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(347) Luck
Apr 2900:57:45Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Matt and Nick meet Chengwei Liu, professor of strategy and behavioural science at Imperial College, London, to discuss the role of luck in decision making — and why we routinely underestimate it. Chengwei traces his own serendipitous path from consulting in Singapore to a PhD at Cambridge, and explains why so much of what gets credited to skill in business is really survivorship bias dressed up after the fact. The conversation gets into the case for random selection: when shortlisted candidates or options are genuinely close, drawing lots produces outcomes equivalent to deliberation while avoiding the bias and politics that creep in when committees feel obliged to justify a winner. Switzerland has been allocating research grants this way for over a decade, and the UK’s British Academy is now following. The discussion also picks up on the cultural and psychological complications — how randomness reads as fate or destiny in some cultures, why women may be more likely to internalise an unlucky outcome as personal failure, and whether modern corporate life can ever sit comfortably with “we rolled a dice” as a legitimate answer. Plus, a look ahead to Chengwei’s forthcoming book, Smart Contrarians: How to Think Differently About Thinking Differently. Transcript automatically generated by Descript Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 347 of WB 40, the increasingly erratic podcast. With me, Matt Ballantine, Nick Drage, and Chengwei Liu. Matt: Welcome back. We have been away for a few weeks. There was the Easter break and, uh, the usual weird way that everything seems to cease for a while because of a couple of days of bank holiday. And, uh, we are back again. And, um, just before we started recording, uh, Nick. Described himself as being the robin to my Batman, which now means all I’ve got is mental images of Nick wearing tights, which probably I don’t need. Nick, how has your last week or so been. Nick: Well, I mean, I’m instantly regretting that version and not knowing more about is the DC comics background? Is it, isn’t it? And so on there, there must been, must be a much more, less sixties robin. Than what came to our minds apart. The main thing in the previous week is attending Connections online, which is a, an online war gaming conference based in essentially eastern US time zones and just a chance to catch up with a lot of thinking, a lot of people. And they used the online version to really get into. Non-standard ideas such as how to model soft factors in war games, and LLMs of course featured quite heavily. So that was really good the previous week. How about you? Matt: So what have I been doing here the last week? Had a wonderful lunch with a fascinating academic last Monday. That was good. Hi Chen Way. And then Tuesday was the first run of random, the workshop in what I think is as close to being its final form as ever. It will ever get into a final form. So I had, despite the tube strikes in London, I had a dozen people join me at the Equal Experts offices in London. And we had. A really interesting evening for me to be able to try out some of the ideas of how to get people to explore the concepts and the ideas that we’ve got within the book that is coming out now. And we have a we have now a publication date, which is, or launch date, the 17th of June, which is extremely exciting. So that was good. I’ve had some time to be able to, just make some decisions as well. I was running with my foot in two camps at work for a while ’cause we’ve had a bit of a restructure and just because of the nature of the clients that I’ve got, I ended up in sort of two parts of it. And so last week I also took the executive decision to be able to say, I’m going to focus on one, not try to continue to be in both. And that’s really reduced my stress levels immeasurably. There’s something about, being able to, it’s not so much about resolving ambiguity as actually when you’ve got too many things that you could be doing and needing to be able to make a decision about being able to focus on things that you can manage to do and how being able to turn off the fomo, the fear of missing out, and instead be able to properly commit to doing a manageable set of things. I think that, that’s been a good learning. And then apart from that, obviously I’ve been obsessively watching marine tracking apps to be able to see where the boat on which the book is sitting. And I had a sort of nervous few days because. It’s been in the middle of the Indian Ocean and as a result there’s been no tracking updates. But it came back onto the the system again about 14 hours ago. So it’s just heading past Madagascar now, and it’s been a fascinating insight into what it actually means for goods to be manufactured in China, and then the route that they take to be able to make it. To the UK and you, this is stuff that we don’t think about and it’s been really interesting to be able to just see how this stuff sits together. So that’s been my week, I think. So with that welcome to the show Chengwei what’s your week been like other than a wonderful lunch with this strange man that you met on last Monday? Chengwei: Hello Matt and Nick thank you for having me. Yeah, my week was definitely great highlighted by the excellent lunch with you. We talk all ideas, right? And really glad to learn that your workshop went well because I have the pleasure of having you as my guest speaker for my MBA students at the Imperial College in a couple of months as well. And the rest of week I managed to finish the revision of my new book. Smart contrarians, how to think differently about thinking differently. So I’m really look forward to the next stage. That is the marketing stage of this book. Matt: So whereabouts are you now? Is everything is with publisher? Has it been printed yet or is it still at the place where it’s. Chengwei: No, it’s the handling editor at hover Business Review Press, which is our publisher. They sign it off. The editor and his boss sign it off, so it’s. Good from their perspective. But then the first stage in the production is there will be a copy editor go through the entire book, and then of course suggest questions and also some fact checking, right? So if we have any say missed and then they’ll point it out and we just verify everything it’s in the right place before they put it in print. Matt: It is interesting, isn’t it, when you actually get into the process of producing a book. I, for many years wondered why it took so long from somebody saying, I finished writing it to it actually being available. And then when you actually go through the process, you start to realize why. ’cause there’s an awful lot of work involved in producing a book. Chengwei: Absolutely that the divisional labor there is very interesting. I begin to learn about this as well, and there’s a meeting event with the market department of the Harvard Publishing. That’s a huge group actually in the US And yeah, they have their expertise and we just have this interesting. Serious about deciding the book cover. So basically the first cover that designers sent were really not so happy with it, but our headly editor said, okay, there’s not a thing he can really intervene too much. And, but we, he gave us. Some ideas about how to say nicely that we hate it and we did it. And then and of course we provided our view about what the cover should, like what is the concept, and of course, the taboo to say anything specific about design idea, because that’s their domain, right? We don’t want to invade their domain with the academic author. Author of the book we control or have the ownership of the ideas and the concept being written. But our design cover is their domain. We can provide ideas, suggestion, but they decide. So fortunately the second cover idea they send where. Reasonably happy. So that is another major achievement in the past week. Now, I think about it because initially when we received and we thought about the previous discussion with the editor, then we really worry if that is something we need to accept. We are not really, be comfortable with that. <p class="wp-block-...
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(346) Mental Fitness
Mar 2400:46:11Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Matt and Lisa meet Dan Bowsher to discuss Good Enough Chats, his podcast focused on men’s mental health through lived experience. Dan founded Good Enough Chats following his own experience of burnout, anxiety and depression, which left him feeling profoundly isolated. His podcast deliberately features ordinary men — not celebrities or experts — sharing unedited, unscripted accounts of their mental health journeys, structured around the same five questions in every episode. Dan explains the thinking behind keeping the format lo-fi and the conversations raw: he wants guests to feel they’re having a conversation with a mate, not appearing on a podcast. You can find Dan’s podcast at goodenoughchats.com. Full transcript generated by Descript: Matt: Hello, and welcome to episode 346 of WB 40. I’ve got no idea the timing intervals this show works on anymore, but this week it’s with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Dan Bowsher Lisa: Welcome back listeners. Nice to see you again, Matt. Thank you. Um. I mean, I only saw you on Thursday, which was probably my busiest day this last week. Um, but it feels like a, it’s been a while since I’ve been on the podcast, even though it’s only a couple of episodes ago. As you’ve alluded to in the intro, it’s a little bit wibbly wobbly time. Why me at the moment and what even is time? So, um, yeah, it’s been quite an interesting week or so. I think I’ve certainly noticed a shift in myself since the sun’s come back out again, and we’ve actually had some warmth. I realized I’m probably a complicated houseplant because the sun was shining. I’m in a much best I feel. I don’t know, I just feel like everything’s lifted a bit this last week or two. I’ve been back rowing. I went back to, um, I went swimming in the Charlton Lido and it felt a little bit like I was weirdly on holiday it, rather than not being in a webinar that I’d signed up to just to watch. And yeah, I had a. Really social day on Thursday. So I saw Matt and Susie, who’s a friend of the podcast at Paul Armstrong’s the new normal at disgusting the early breakfast session that started at eight in Old Street. Then went to work out of my friend Christine at c Rockstar’s office. Then I went to the Color Walk and actually while I was at the Color Walk, I bumped into someone from the rowing club and he was very confused to see me. Couldn’t place him either. I also saw a friend, other friend of the podcast and my sometimes collaborator Simon Thompson, who said he might swing by a spitalfields market, but we happened to also bump into each other without having prearranged a time or a place. We just met at exactly the point that we’ve never met each other at before. Then. So after the color walk, then came home, got my whiteboard out so that could take it along to the pub. Had my twice monthly, one of my twice monthly pub o’clock meetups in my local. And had a very long day and I did not leave the house on Friday. And then had a reasonably social weekend. And here we are. How has your week been, Matt? Matt: My week up until started to record this show, which, dear listener, it’s been an absolute disaster when all the technology goes wrong. My God, it goes wrong. Apart from that it’s been a a, a good week. We had a video sent through on Wednesday from China, from the people who are producing the book. And it is finished. It is now being shipped. We’ve got four to six weeks before it arrives in the UK to be able to be sold for money. Uh, available@securityglenbooks.com. So that’s very exciting though to see the finished product because it is, uh. A book that defies normal expectations of what a book is. We are pushing the boundaries of the book format. Uh, it’s not called the book though. What is it? No, it’s not called the book. It’s called Random, uh, how to Thrive In An Uncertain World by me and Nick, d dr. And, uh, it’s available from all good bookshops online that are called Security Blend Books. You can buy it other places, but we advise you to buy it from security blend books.com. It’s gonna get more and more tiresome. You realize another four to six weeks of this before I can let go of the sail shtick. Uh, apart from that, uh, we’ve been, actually, I’ll tell you the other thing I’ve been doing, which has been fascinating is using the clawed to be able to do visualization of qualitative information. I’ve got a client and there’s two parts to that client, but it’s public sector thing. So there’s a lot of the, the history of it’s in the public domain. I wanted a, a timeline to be able to help them understand what they might do next. ’cause I’m a, a big believer and if you don’t understand the history of, of where things have come from, it’s very difficult to predict a future that is in any way meaningful. And so, um, we did it and it’s amazing. Just put some. A little bit of structure in to, to say what it was I wanted, and it creates this interactive web timeline thing with clickable bits and all sorts. And the data, the, the thing that’s really interesting actually, the amount of wrong information that’s going into this sort of stuff. Now is getting less and less and less, and the ability to then start to think about, well, how might I visualize this stuff in, in a way that would’ve taken weeks of work previously? Um, and it’s not, it’s not perfect by any stretch, but it’s enabling, it’s back to the drum machine analogy, enabling me to do things that otherwise I’d just simply wouldn’t have done and nobody would’ve done. So that’s been quite interesting as well. So, um, yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a productive, a productive week. Guest this week. Dan. Welcome to the show. How’s your week been? Dan: Thank you very much for having me. It’s been a great week in no small part because I got to go to a gig that I’ve been looking forward to for absolutely months and months with a mate who I haven’t seen for about a year. And I’ve only seen this band with this mate every single time. Um, the band’s called Deus. They are a Belgian art rock slash alternative rock group, have been going since the mid nineties and the gig was at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and it was absolutely awesome. You go into these things fearing that they might be past it. It turns out they can absolutely knock it outta the park. Still Matt: WW worse than fearing that they might be past it. The worst stuff is no. Tonight we’re gonna just be playing new material. Dan: Oh yeah. Yeah, we, well, we knew that wasn’t gonna happen because they were playing their first album versus their second album. That’s, that’s the whole of this tour. So we knew that they weren’t gonna play any new stuff. So we were all right on that front. Um, but that, that was amazing. And then I guess the other thing, uh, of note was I started up this, uh, local marketing community, like this informal marketing meetup. And we get together every month. And last Friday, it was the most recent, one of those great chats, lovely coffee. And uh, yeah, looking forward to the pub version of that next month now. Matt: Excellent. That sounds also like a productive week. Well done everybody. Little round of applause. Um, uh, but we are going to talk this week about an initiative that you kicked off a while ago. Now Dan called Good Enough Chats. So I think we should probably crack on Lisa: , We are here to talk about your initiative talking about men’s mental health. Can you tell us a bit more about what it is and how you started it? Dan: Yeah, absolutely. So, to all intents and purposes, its current form is a podcast. It may, well, hopefully, well, I would love it to evolve into more things beyond that, but it’s a podcast, but it’s a podcast that is entirely focused on lived experience, uh, men’s lived experience with mental health. And it doesn’t feature experts. It’s al...
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(345) Data Maturity
Mar 1800:53:14Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Matt Ballantine and Julia Bellis meet Sian Basker, co-founder of Data Orchard, to discuss what data maturity actually means for organisations — and what a decade of benchmarking data reveals about who’s doing it well and why. Sian explains how Data Orchard‘s assessment tool, now used by nearly 20,000 people across 56 countries, measures organisations against seven dimensions — from the practicalities of data collection and tooling through to purpose, skills, culture and leadership. Crucially, the tool is designed to be completed by whole organisations rather than data specialists, on the basis that the people closest to the work are best placed to assess it. The conversation explores some striking findings from Data Orchard’s most recent annual report: that there’s no correlation between organisational size and data maturity; that Scotland’s public sector is outperforming the rest of the UK; and that only around 5% of organisations reach the top “mastering” level. The group also dig into the human side of data: siloes, the gap between what leaders need and what frontline staff experience, and why confident leaders are often the most important ingredient of all. Show transcript autogenerated by Descript: Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 345 of WB 40, the bus like podcast. You wait for ages and then all of them come along at the same time. This week with me, Matt Ballantine, Julia Bellis, and Sian Basker Bus. Like he says, it’s the 200th anniversary of the very first bus. I found that out today. That’s the sort of facts that you don’t get anywhere else other than WB 40. Welcome back to the show, Julia. How has your week been? Julia: Well, am I allowed to go back as far as International Women’s Day? Matt: You can, Julia: yes. That was quite an exciting thing that I did that I thought I could talk about that’s relevant. It seems to go from strength to strength year by year. And this year I went to two International Women’s Day events, so it’s pleasingly morphed from a day when women have to do loads of extra work to prepare stuff to a day when women get invited to go to really cool, fun things. And this year I went to an energy auditing lunch in Manchester, which was really interesting and it was the opportunity to really think carefully about what aspects of your work drain your energy and what aspects boost your energy. And then the homework, which I have not yet done, but must, is to go away and seek opportunities to incorporate all of the energy boosting stuff in. And they can be tiny little opportunities. You know, the difference is cumulative and as I, so I was very grateful actually. I thought that was a genuinely useful and fun way to spend a lunch time. Matt: That’s very good. I’m also slightly never seeing that. We’re working together quite a lot at the moment that I’m on one of those lists and that’d be quite. Julia: No interactions with you are always joyful. Matt: Oh, that’s very nice of you to say. Um, anything else that’s happened in the last week or is that has happened like, Julia: well, actually, I mean all about me was Mother’s Day at the weekend and so I seized the opportunity to compel my family members to join me on a mystery solving history walk around London. And it was so much fun actually. We did a, it was called the Holy Grail Walk, and we started in the Knights Templar Church around the inns of court. And we had to follow all of these cl clues and went around Lincoln in fields and just these really cool, beautiful, peaceful back streets of London. And had a marvelous time and ended up in the Chesa cheese Pub, which was good fun. How about you? What have you been up to? Matt: Uh, I have been doing relentless plugging of book work because we are getting closer and closer. Apparently the book has been printed. , When I last heard from the publisher it was being cut. They’re using special machines to cut the book, which is very exciting. , I was at the London Book Fair on Wednesday last week originally to see around it with my publisher, but he was ill, so I was there on my own and spent quite frankly, four hours wondering what on earth you’re supposed to do at the London Book Fair. It’s the busiest trade event I have. I’ve been to in forever, the whole of Olympia. And it was, I mean, there’s incredible energy there, but I felt like a massive outsider. But I did have one meeting lined up, which was with somebody who is potentially interested in representing us for international translation rights, which is very exciting. And I had a meeting with our publisher’s other half who joined, and she’s actually a, a translator professionally. So, um, she has a sort of vested interest in that and also obviously with her partner running a small publishing house. So that was very interesting on for, and Julia: you should enjoy this. This is the cue. Matt: The Well, yeah, the thing was at Olympia though, because, because basically it’s publishers selling to retailers and it’s publishers selling to rights holders. So actually authors don’t appear to be really be there other than sort of occasional intellectual candy for the stands. And you can’t buy a book there as well, which is a really bizarre thing. ’cause it’s, I mean, you can buy the rights to books, but you can’t actually go and buy a book. I have a thing. I know. Julia: You feel robbed. Matt: I know. If you’re Julia: going to the book fair. Matt: Yeah. Sorry. I No, no, no. And um, so the other thing was on Friday I got introduced to, um, a chap who is a professor at Imperial College, who’s an economist whose specialism is luck, which given the theme of the book about randomness is we had a related, fantastic conversation. And, um, there might be an opportunity for me to do some guest lectures at Imperial College. It should be quite fun. So that’s been good. There’s been lots of work stuff. And then, uh, we actually had 12 people four of us, and then. Eight other people that we really didn’t know at all come for lunch on Sunday. As part of my eldest getting ready for the Scout jamboree in 2027, we met the families of the other two kids who are going to the Scout Jamboree in Poland. It’s quite nerve wracking when you’ve got complete strength. It’s coming for, for lunch, but it was all great and they were ev all, everybody’s lovely. But, um, that was quite an odd way to spend Mother’s Day. Julia: I think that’s a brilliant comfort zone, expanding activity, you know, created by your children actually. Matt: Yes, and it was, it was, uh, it was a stretch, but it wasn’t as much of a stretch as Olympia, which was stretched too far possibly. So yeah, keeping in and outta comfort zones is an important thing. Anyway, so yes, that was, that was the, the sort of week that’s been. Um, Anne welcome back to the show. You were with us some years ago now, I think. Mm. Um, Sian: yeah. Matt: But, uh, what you’ve been up to? Well, I mean, if you wanna go through the entire last four years or something, that’s fine. But last week, Sian: last week, well actually I also was celebrating International Women’s Day last week. I celebrated it with my choir singing, protest songs on a beach in Pembrokeshire, which was a hoot. And I can’t, it’s quite a kind of, we’re sort of coming out of winter. I mean, I, I still, I, some people would say argue already in Spring, but I have spent quite a ...
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(344) Partnerships
Mar 1000:46:42Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Matt and the team meet Shaline Manhertz and Kristianah Fasunloye to discuss their business partnership, which began formally in 2018 when Shaline’s cancer diagnosis forced a pivot from individual business plans to joint working. The conversation explores how their partnership survived extraordinary pressure by rejecting the conventional 50/50 model in favour of an equitable approach where each partner gives 100% of whatever capacity they have at any given moment. The discussion examines their practical frameworks for sustaining partnerships: the “MAGIC” model (Make a decision, Attributes, Guidance systems, Intelligence gathering, Course correct) and the four Rs (roles, responsibilities, respect, resentment). They challenge typical business assumptions about productivity and efficiency, arguing that genuine curiosity about people—asking questions beyond task delivery—transforms supplier relationships into true partnerships. The conversation draws parallels with pair programming in technology, showing how collaborative approaches often outperform traditional resource allocation models, even when they appear counterintuitive to conventional management thinking. You can watch Shaline & Kris’s Ted Talk here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=1dJHi1s2WYs The show transcript – automatically generated by Descript. Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 344 of WB 40, the really quite erratic podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Shaline Manhertz, Kristiana Fasunloye, and Chris Weston. Yes. You heard, right? Yes. You don’t need to worry about Harry Styles releasing albums. No. Chris and Matt are back on the show together for the first time in New. Two years. I’m not sure that I can cope with this excitement. Chris, how are you dealing with it? Chris: Yeah, it’s alright. You know, we’ve had, uh, it’s two years. You say you don’t look, you don’t look any different. I think you look younger, Matt. I think that’s, you know, that’s maybe just having that extra, you know, pizazz of some different people to talk to. Is it reinvigorated you somewhat Matt: that or you really need to get to the optician soon? Chris: Well, maybe you’ve been dying your beard or something. Matt: Oh dear. Like, the passage of time is a strange thing when you get to a certain age, isn’t it? Is a whips past. Uh, we, we won’t dwell on the entire two years ’cause it’s, that’s two years worth. But, um, what have you been up to in the last week? Chris: Oh, I’m glad you hadn’t asked me what’s happened in the last two years? ’cause I can just about remember the last week. Uh, everything else is, is very much a blur. Um, wow, wow. It’s been very busy. Right. And, um, so. I guess the, the big things in the last week or so have been, so at Aztec we, we did our first big event, uh, on our own like, uh, so a big grownup company on Thursday, the something I think, I think it was the end of February, so it was back just every week ago. And that was really good because it was partly because it’s a good. Team. And it’s nice to see the marketing folk, you know, and put all the effort in to make something like that happen. It’s good to see lots of people, you know, lots of, um, you know, old friends, new friends, whatever turn up and actually for the content to be pretty good too. And that, you know, that’s always a bit of a, uh, a worry ’cause it can be a. Even with the best preparation, it can go a bit flat sometimes. Um, but we had, uh, Benedict Evan speaking, who’s a bit of a, a, a legend really, really articulate guy in terms of tech and a whole bunch of other people. Um, so yeah. Yeah, that was good fun. Really, really great. And then I’ve been working with a client the last few days well actually, yeah, for almost since, for the last three weeks really, but for this last week as well, working with a client who works in. In the kind of retail supply chain, which again, very interesting. You know, I know a lot more about lettuce and beet root than I knew a few weeks ago which wasn’t a high bar if I’m, if I’m honest. But it’s, you know, there we go. I’m, I’m, I’m more informed about the, uh, the supply chain pers of, uh. Fresh produce, but yeah. Yeah. All good. Matt. Can’t complain. It’s been busy. Busy, busy. How about you? Matt: I’ve been taking on a new client at work and a, a very well established client for us. Quite a big client in terms of, uh, the number of consultants. So to get my head around it, I’ve been meeting all of the consultants who’ve got working on it. And so over the last. Two and a half, three weeks. I’ve had something like 50, 55, half hour meetings with different people, which has been really wonderful, but quite tiring I think is the best way to describe it. I mean, some of my colleagues, especially people who are used to sort of sitting writing computer code, are kind of baffled by the idea that you could speak to that many people ever possibly. But. The, this is where my social science training comes in. ’cause basically I was taught how to do interviews and stuff. So therefore I kind of, I, I, I’m okay with it. And it’s been really interesting and trying to be able, when you’re involved in something new, trying to be able to triangulate some form of truth because there isn’t one. Truth, there are multiple truths and if you can get to speak to lots and lots of people, you can build up, I dunno, it’s a bit like, you know, there’s apps you can get where you can create 3D scans of things by going around with your phone and taking loads of pictures and loads of different angles. It’s a bit like that. Nobody Chris: knows about those things. About Matt: is it just me? Chris: People with too much time on their hands. Matt: Yeah. Okay. It’s me being geeky again, isn’t it? But uh, yeah, so that’s been taking up, quite a lot of my time in work and then out of work because, I dunno if I told you this, I’ve got a book coming out. See, I’ve got a book coming out. It’s very exciting. I have got a book coming out. I still don’t quite know what the release date is because there’s been so many comical, random issues with getting the book out. But, we are assured it’s now actually being printed and the publisher is, uh, is trying to now work out the logistics of getting two washing machine sized lumps of cardboard and, and paper from China via the Middle East. Yeah, have all else is going on straight of hall moves, right? They don’t have to go through the straight of hall moves. No, but they have to go the other side. So there’s still plenty of opportunity for more random delays. But anyway, because I’ve got the book coming out, I’ve been doing more experimenting with doing stuff to video now. I’m a purist when it comes to podcasts. Podcasts are audio only. If you put video on a podcast, it becomes a TV program. Okay. That’s, that’s my view. I, I will not be shaken on that, but I have started to get into the idea of like two, three minute, little videos. And so I’ve been writing some scripts about things that are about randomness which is what the book is about and things that are about randomness in sort of local areas. So I can go and do some little bits on location. So my son and I, my youngest and I went out at the weekend and we were in. Bushy Park. We started at the house where Alan Turing lived, and then we went to the National Physical Laboratory to tell the story of Donald Davis, who’s the man who partly created packet switch networks, which are the underpinnings of the internet. And everybody’s heard of Alan Turing, and there’s roads named after him and there’s blue plaques on houses. Nobody has heard of Donald Davies at all. And it’s a story about the randomness of what we remember and what gets told in history. So it...
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(343) Trust in AI
Feb 1100:43:33Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Matt and Nick meet Alexander Feick, Vice President of eSentire Labs, to discuss his book “On Trust and AI” and why organisations need fundamentally different approaches to govern AI systems. Alex explains that whilst traditional computers multiply human intent predictably, generative AI acts more like an autonomous agent capable of creating its own decisions—something between software and people that requires new thinking about trust and verification. Using the example of AI-generated legal briefs with fabricated citations, he demonstrates why hallucination isn’t just a model problem but an architectural failure: when systems lack transparency, explainability, and alignment, organisations cannot verify the outputs they’re trusting. Alex introduces the concept of a control plane—deterministic software and logging that wraps around AI models to verify outputs work-by-work. Instead of allowing AI to directly cite cases (which it could fabricate), the system only permits references to IDs in a verified database, creating verification breakpoints between untrustworthy model output and validated information. This shifts human work from production to verification, applying critical thinking and domain expertise to judge whether AI reasoning is sound. Alex argues that “when creation became free, trust became the product”—as AI makes generation near-costless, real value concentrates in verification systems. Organisations must ensure verification capacity scales with generation capacity, otherwise they risk producing “AI slop”: unverified outputs that erode trust and create liabilities rather than value. You can read Alex’s book here: https://www.esentire.com/on-trust-and-ai/ Show transcript – automatically generated by Descript – below. [00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 343 of WB 40, the sort of fortnightly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Nick Drage, and Alex Feick. [00:01:08] Welcome to the first. February edition of the show and the first show that I’ve actually been involved with. So the front of house I’ve obviously for all of them, I am doing my devious work in the background to be able to edit the things. But this is the first time I’ve been on the show, uh, in 2026. [00:01:29] And, um, I joined by co-host and also soon to be co-author Nick Drage. Nick, how the devil are you? [00:01:40] Nick: I’m alright actually. How are you? [00:01:43] Matt: I’m, yeah, I’m good. Having said that, I kept waking up in the middle of the night last night. I’ve got a little bit of a cold and as I woke up in the middle of the night, I thought to myself, I know what I can do. [00:01:54] I can, in my head, I can rehearse. The talk that I’m giving in a couple of nights time in Nottingham which is gonna be the first or big public talk about randomness, which is the thing you and I have written the book about. And so in my brain, in my half, half awake, half asleep brain, I started to do my presentation and by about, by about slide three, I’d fallen back asleep again. [00:02:19] And I don’t think this is really necessarily a good advert for the quality of the presentation I’m gonna be giving on Thursday, but you know. Apart from that, the reason why I kept working up as well though, is ’cause the night before I had the experience of what can only be described as the most tortuous user interface that there is on this planet, which is the, what happens when the backup battery in your smoke alarm decides that it’s not got enough power in it. [00:02:49] And what it does is it makes a cheer up, very loud noise, but it does it in such a way that there’s a kind of. Improbable gap between them. And if you’ve got as many of the things in, uh, your house as I have, it’s next to impossible to know which one it is. But it’s really annoying. So it keeps, ’cause it’s designed to be annoying and they always go off, there’s a physics thing behind this. [00:03:10] They always go off in the middle of the night because at the coldest point is the point where the batteries are least efficient, so therefore they will always be triggered. So two in the morning, I’m on a small step trying to not fall down 14 flights of stairs to be able to get the thing off. So just so apart from that, I’m fine. [00:03:30] Nick: I thought you were making that bit up, but that makes sense. It does, doesn’t it? About batteries? About And also, yes, the interface is, the interface to them is horrible. I think it’s fair to say friend of the podcast, Dave Gray, who we both know to varying degrees, uh, had one in his, I think his basement where he does his video calls, online meetings, and. [00:03:54] It was just, he didn’t know where it was in that huge, you know, sort the typical huge American basement. So we just all got used to it. There was just a beep sporadically in the video calls. He runs every week for something like three months and instead of one week, we all noticed, I think halfway through that it had gone and either, and I don’t think it replaced, but I think it was finally it’s died. [00:04:17] Now, you know, your basement might catch fire, but at least you can have decent video calls. [00:04:21] Matt: Uh, yeah. I, I, I need to look up at some point how many people are injured or killed through the process of having to replace batteries in the middle of the night. And then it’s the kind of having to shove screwdriver into the side of it. [00:04:34] And the one literally at the top 14 stairs, and the way the builders installed it was the way you have to push it. The direction of push is down the stairs, so on a tiny little stair Oh, [00:04:45] Nick: is the same. [00:04:46] Matt: Yeah. Hal. So anyway, I think what I’m completely, there’s, there’s [00:04:50] Nick: a, there’s a podcast in that, but not this [00:04:51] Matt: episode. [00:04:52] No, no, no, no. Absolutely. But all I’m concluding is I’m lucky to be alive and you’re lucky to have me here. There we go. Um, have you been up to anything other than risking life and death in the last few weeks, Nick? [00:05:02] Nick: Oh yeah. ’cause I just suddenly realized, oh yeah, it’s the bit where you asked what I’ve been doing. [00:05:06] Matt: Yes. [00:05:06] Nick: That’s great. So I grabbed my work calendar and kind of. And I hope this sounds cooler than it is kind of, I can’t tell you, but as much as I can say ’cause of like NDAs and so on, is fighting an a well-known online chat platform and losing, let’s just leave that there. Helping develop and. Plan and soon we’ll be running a multi-agency war game, multi-agency exercise, which has proven really challenging, but really interesting, especially for use of LLMs, which we might get onto later. [00:05:43] And just planning another exercise where. An industry is looking forward to what might happen politically in the UK in the next few years and is looking to plan ahead, which is really good to hear about, really interesting to be involved with. And, um, just an an interesting sort of business and research projects. [00:06:02] All the times I’ve popped into this podcast and see things about the way war, professional war games and exercises might go. It looks like it actually is going that way. Finally. [00:06:13] Matt: That’s good to hear. I was talking to some people at government department today in the current state of British politics. [00:06:17] They were wondering what would be happening in the next week, not necessarily the next, you know, couple of years. I think the short term thing has come back forward. It’s like 2018 all over again. [00:06:28] Nick: Well, I mean, we can’t, I haven’t looked to the news for like six hours, so we can’t comme...
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(342) Alignment
Jan 2700:44:19Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Lisa and Julia meet Emma Bruce, Software Engineering manager. The conversation explores the often-overlooked transition from individual contributor to engineering manager, examining why technical excellence doesn’t automatically translate to management success and what skills actually matter when leading teams. Emma discusses the historical lack of training for engineering managers and how the role has evolved into a more scientific one, with greater emphasis on metrics such as cycle time, throughput, and flow state. The discussion covers the challenge of aligning diverse stakeholders—from business objectives to compliance requirements—and the importance of consciously deciding what to deprioritise when focusing on specific KPIs, such as time to market. The conversation also touches on whether non-technical people can succeed as engineering managers, provided they partner effectively with strong technical leads. Show transcript automatically generated by Descript: Lisa: Welcome to episode 342 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Julia Bellis, and Emma Bruce. Julia: So it is great to be back here with you, Lisa. I think it’s been, well, this is certainly the first podcast that we have co-hosted in 2026. And to be honest. It was quite a way back, possibly in the summer 25 that we, um, did a double act. So it’s good to see you again. It’s been far too long. Lisa: It’s been ages, hasn’t it? It’s been, it feels like it’s been, last summer feels like a lifetime away and also feels like it wasn’t very long ago at all. But there’s been, I feel like there’s probably been quite a lot of things happening but. Bringing it back to slightly more recent times if we were gonna follow the format of the podcast, which also always is evolving. What have you been up to over the last week or so? Last fortnight ish, maybe, or since last summer. Julia: Wow. Um, let’s forget since last summer because I will just won’t stop talking. Possibly I have just come back from a really cool adventure. And, uh, I took Friday off work, got the train down to Pzi, and then spent three days walking from Pzi to Rye, which is, uh, a route called the 10 66 Country Walk. Lisa: That’s really far, isn’t it? How, what’s the distance on that? Julia: Yeah, it is really far. It’s very easy when you see it on a signpost and you go, oh, let’s do that. And then when you actually come to do it, it’s 60 kilometers. Day one we intended to walk 27 kilometers and we knew that was a big day because of various things happening and diversions and map reading fails. It ended up being 35 kilometers, which was painful. We sort of, uh. Battle is very beautiful. Very beautiful. You know, the Abby and the Castle and the church, we staggered into battle after dark and I have never ever been so happy. To see the pub where we were staying and stagger up the stairs in my backpack on and collapse into bed, actually. So yeah, it was a real adventure. Really good fun. So I’m glad I could come on the podcast and talk about it because I don’t often have such interesting weekends. Lisa: I’m getting horrible flashbacks. When I was in Central Ambulance as a teenager and we did a 75 mile walk around Surrey over five days. But we had a similar thing. The first day was the biggest day, but it ended up being a few miles longer than we were expecting. And it was just like, I mean, I was a, I was a teenager when it was hard enough, like I couldn’t imagine doing it now. So I’m in massive awe of you doing that. Julia: I am quite proud of myself actually. Yes, I made it and then, then the next two days you were saying how time walks. Distance warps when you’ve walked 30 K and you’ve still got five to go, that five feels incredibly long. But what about you Lisa? What have you been up to? I’ve Lisa: been entirely sedentary, certainly in comparison. I’ve been, well actually no that’s not true. The last fortnight. So since the last podcast, ’cause I was on the first one this year with Matt. Um, I had the color walk, although that’s not really a walk. It’s what? That, so the color walk is a thing that I do if I can make it work, allowing, it’s on the third Thursday of the month. And we go to old hospital fields market and meet up, and it’s on the flea market day and there’s between, normally between sort of 50 and 70 people wearing their most colorful outfits and all of your accessories. It’s like the opposite of what Chanel would say. It’s like before you leave the house, put more things on. Julia: Alright. Yeah, put everything on, but it is Lisa: more of a pose than a walk like I did. It did mean I left the house. But we don’t go much further than around the market. If we do any walking at all, we sort of meet up and chat and there’s a big group photo. But yeah, and I had a couple of events last week where I was at my desk, did a meet the author thing with my co-author and, um, the through, that’s Julia: exciting Lisa: talking about our book about accessible communications, which was nice. Um, it felt like the first joint thing me and Matisse have done for a while as well, so that was nice. I was sitting here at my desk, and then I also did a, it was a session called the Intranet Hot Seat, where I was interviewing Suzie Robinson from Clear Box, talking about the latest report that’s coming out. Oh, I think this Thursday now. It is Thursday. The T, no, Wednesday the 28th, I think. No. Yes. Anyway, at some point this week it’s coming out and it’s this massive tome comparing intranet products that sit on top of SharePoint or independent to SharePoint and communications platforms. And it’s something that I’ve been involved in over the last few years as an independent consultant. And we got to basically geek out about intranets. So that was also lovely in am midst actually doing some SharePoint stuff for a client. But Julia: yeah, I’m quite impressed at your ability to geek out over intranets actually. It’s quite Lisa: niche. There’s not that many of us do. Julia: We should find out more about that in future. How, how about you Emma? What have you been up to? Emma: Um. A couple of, couple of trips to the home counties over the last couple of weekends. One to Bahe to see my, my mom and sister. Another one to Redding this weekend just gone. And then, yeah, apart from that normal things during the week, but also I’ve been I sort of made the decision beginning of the year to, to look for another job. So I’ve been doing quite a bit of sort of research, trying to read up on, on various things and spending quite a lot of time kind of actually geeking out a geeking out a little bit more than normal even. Just just trying to get my, uh, get myself sort of back up to speed with some of the things I haven’t used for a little while. You know, in advance hopefully for finding a, finding another job. Julia: So this is really interesting actually. I think we could do a podcast on how to look for a job. After a number of years, or even dare I say, decades in your career, you know, it changes, doesn’t it? And then. You’re doing it in a new way that you’ve never done before. Emma: Yeah. And even the mechanism of actually looking so, going, I, I’m not a huge user of LinkedIn and every time I sort of log in, things have changed. First time coming across any kind of AI agent, doing a, you know, having a conversation with an AI agent not actually an interview. This was, um, a recruiter that uses AI to sort of screen people. Yeah. And things change every time. I, um, I, I look and as you say, yeah, it&...
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(341) Nomadic
Jan 1300:48:58Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Lisa Riemers and Chris Weston meet Sharon O’Dea to discuss digital nomadism and the evolution of remote work. Sharon shares insights from her decade-long journey as a digital nomad, including her recent seven-week stint in Japan, where she worked from locations ranging from traditional coworking spaces to foot spas in town squares. The conversation explores how digital nomadism has evolved from a niche lifestyle to a mainstream working pattern, examining both the opportunities it creates for geographical arbitrage and talent access, and the infrastructure challenges that remain. Sharon highlights how towns like Nagasaki are developing specific offerings for remote workers, creating ecosystems that blend professional development with cultural exchange, whilst also discussing how these same principles can benefit people who simply lack access to reliable transport or need flexible working arrangements for caring responsibilities. The discussion shifts to the practical realities of making remote work sustainable, particularly around the thorny issue of time zones and asynchronous collaboration. Whilst tools like Microsoft Teams and Zoom enabled widespread remote work during the pandemic, they’re still largely designed for synchronous presence rather than output-focused collaboration. Sharon argues that truly effective remote work requires moving away from managing presence towards measuring outcomes, breaking the connection between work, time and place. The hosts also explore the human side of remote work—the importance of intentional rituals and moments of connection that prevent teams from fracturing when they’re not physically together. The conversation concludes with a more cautionary note about ensuring remote work is designed for dignity and connection rather than creating new forms of digital exploitation. Transcript automatically generated by Descript. Lisa: Episode three 40 of the WB 40 Podcast with me, Lisa Riemers, Chris Weston and Sharon O’Dea. Chris: Oh, hello everybody and welcome to January, 2026, which is as I think Matt said in a LinkedIn post the other day. It’s the 11th calendar year of WB 40 which is a little bit, uh, scary, but we are, we have evolved. We’ve got, you know, he is, that’s not here. He’ll be, he’ll be. Pulling the levers later on. But, um, no. Today it’s, uh, myself and Lisa and Sharon oday and we’re gonna be talking about digital nomadism. And, um, but before we do that, we’re gonna talk a little bit about what we’ve been up to in the last few days, week. Uh, what whatever I think suits our purpose. Lisa, what have you been up to? Lisa: Well, it feels like 2026 has had a bit of a slow start for me. I’ve had a cold all year, which is fun. I did manage to get through most of Christmas, relatively healthy though. So we did have a really lovely run of it all. Had a lovely uneventful, festive period in the best way. Like everything ran quite smoothly and we saw friends and family and there weren’t any major dramas. So the last week or so have been kind of. Winding back up again into work mode and picking up with clients that I was speaking to in December, and some people are raring to go and other people are still trying to get back into things. So it feels like a slow start to the year for me. But lots of stuff going on. How about you, Chris? Chris: Funnily enough, I was with a colleague today. I was in Birmingham going to see somebody and we, we were walking through and I was saying that actually it feels like January has, has gone very, very quickly. And I think maybe that’s because I didn’t go back to work until like the fifth of Jan. So we’re, um, you know, we’re already a week in pretty much when you go back to work, but it’s nearly now the 12th. And I guess the, uh, impending deadlines that are happening this month and next month around various things at work mean that. It does seem like it’s the, the water’s draining away extremely quickly in terms of, uh, the time we have available. So it does seem to have gone quite quickly and I happen to be really busy. However, I haven’t had to go too many places. I’ve been out and about a little bit. So it’s been uh, head down planning, getting ready for what’s gonna happen in the rest of this year. So, uh, yeah, I can’t say that very much has happened. We had the snow last week, which, um. Which was extremely, uh, cold and, um, in my outside office here meant that I had to put the heating on about an hour before I wanted to come in here ’cause it was just too cold for my sensitive disposition. But other than that, yeah, I can’t complain. It’s been a decent start to the year. So, Sharon, welcome again, welcome back. Hey, after, uh, many years of, uh, A Gap, what were you doing this year, this week? Sharon: So actually I’ve been, we’ve been really busy. So, uh, the biggest thing is that we, me and my business partner, Jonathan and co-author, we sent in the final chapters and the last bit of the manuscript of our book. Uh, this is the first opportunity. Then officially I get to plug it. So, thank you. Should I, uh, it is out, it’s available on pre-order. Are you, what’s best? You’re not sure? I’ll say that again. Thank you. I’m really glad you asked. It’s called Digital Communications at Work and it is the book that I wish I’d had when I was in-house. It kind of walks you through the process of working out what your users need, what your organization needs, how to choose the right section of, uh, selection of platforms even, and configure them and manage them. For the long term. Uh, so it’s kind of about the infrastructure and plumbing of communications. But yes, Jonathan and I finished off the last sort of few edits and sent them in on Friday. So while everyone else was enjoying their mint supplies, I was hunched over my laptop at home. Editing and going over and over the same handful of edits. It’s really weird when you work in digital, you know, we always say like, done is better than perfect, but it’s not there, is it? It’s gotta be perfect. And it’s really counter-cultural. I dunno if you had it that experience, Lisa, but I’m like, oh, I could just change this bit over and over again. Lisa: Yeah. I mean book is the, the ultimate in waterfall launching. Sharon: Yeah. Lisa: It’s, you can iterate and do additional versions in the future, but each one takes, what, 18 months? So something like that. Yeah, it’s quite, quite the thing, and it’s. Sharon: It’s quite weird going, okay, what if everyone hates it or if they don’t agree with, anyway, so yeah, it was really weird letting go, like it was okay sending off one chapter at a time, but that’s what I’ve been up to. And then alongside that, there’s the day job, which has suddenly got really busy, like the end of last year was moderately quiet and now all of a sudden everyone’s raring to go, which is great. Uh, we’ve got some workshops coming up and I love doing that. That kind of just planning how we’re gonna get the best out of people in the room has been quite fun. So, yeah, it’s been, I can’t believe it’s the middle of January already. It feels like this month has gone super quickly already. Lisa: So, Chris, when’s your book coming out? Chris: Well, do you know what I’m thinking about that? I was, I was, I was thinking about it the other day actually. I’ve got, I’ve got the germ of an idea and. I’m not really the kind of person who thinks to himself I should write a book because I understand my own, uh, deficiencies in terms of, uh, ability to actually get on and do something like that for an extended period of time. But I thought my, I was just sitting there the other day and I was thinking, I was actually reading another book. I was reading a book called something like. Why is everything fucked? A book about hope by a guy called somebody Manson, mark Manson or something like that. And it was quite good ’cause it, it talked about the fact that you know, there’s a lot of like I would call standard, uh, psychology in it, but a lot of stuff about. About kind of narcissistic ways of thinking and why we,...
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(340) Time
Dec 900:55:32Tap to summarizeWhat if most organisational problems aren’t unique at all—and treating them as if they are is exactly what’s holding you back? Mark Earls joins Matt and Lisa to challenge how we think about innovation, time, and human behaviour in organisations. From why you should prototype multiple solutions before perfecting one, to the critical difference between product thinking (needing 1% of a market) and internal systems (requiring 100% adoption), this conversation offers practical alternatives to the endless search for “best practice” examples. Mark argues that recognising problems as belonging to familiar categories—and understanding humans as fundamentally social rather than individual—unlocks faster, more effective solutions than assuming every challenge is unprecedented genius-level work. This week’s trancript brought to you by Descript with associated errors… Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 340 of the WB 40 increasingly erratically produced podcast this week with me, Matt Ballantine, Lisa Riemers, and Mark Earls. Lisa: Hi everyone, and welcome back if you’re a returning listener and welcome if this is your first time. Very excited about today’s episode. There are a few things that Matt, [00:01:00] our guest mark this week and I have in common, and there’s. I think it’s been a long time coming. My, I hadn’t realized how massively overdue this episode is. But just in our little pre-chat it turns out that I’m much better than Matt at doing these things. And, um, so yeah. Matt, what have you been up to over the last week or so? Matt: Oh, the last week or so. It’s been 80 since I’ve been on here. Um, the last week has been, it’s quite a lot of book related stuff. So I, I’ve got the first physical prototype of the full book through from some printers. They’re not the, it’s not the printers we’ll use for the final version, but, um, so that’s quite good fun. I’ve launched what book? The, the random, the book, um, how to Survive in I can’t even remember what the subtitle is. It’s just random. That’s what it’s called. And uh, we’ve also launched as of [00:02:00] last Monday an, uh, a random, the advent calendar. So every other day there’s a new story about randomness related to the Christmas period. So, um, and I seem to be out unsettling certain people, including you by the sounds of it, Lisa, by un uh, unleashing the windows of the Advent calendar in random order. So today was Advent calendar window number two, even though it’s the fourth one, and that seems to be causing no end of challenge for people. Lisa: I just find it difficult when I’ve been conditioned to open things in an order over the, over the however many years I’ve been opening Advent calendars for. And I don’t if I’ve missed out a day, I dunno which ones today, I dunno. Which I, it’s hard enough knowing what day of the week it is now that alone understanding, oh no. It’s okay to unlock any of the windows that are open. Yes. I mean, that’s it. It’s breaking Matt: out of, of the kind of the structures that we are taught in. And, [00:03:00] and you know, being able to feel that that discomfort I think, which is, uh, quite entertaining. Uh, apart from that, last week was the. Annual WB 40 Christmas meal. I think it was 25 people out this year. A Spanish restaurant in Faringdon, which was great fun. Gotta to see lots of people. Gotta see Chris King, who made it down from Lee Ray, Chris King gotta see Dave Lloyd. He made it over from Wales. We got to see Sharon Oea. Gotta make it all the way from Amsterdam. We’ve gotta see Lee Cox. He made it all the way from deepest, darkest Kent. And some people, you know, there’s lots of other people as well. So that was about fabulous. Thank you to, um, cypher being the main organizer of that, and to you as well, Lisa. He did lots of work in the organizing of it, which was fantastic. And then it was our 17th wedding anniversary on Saturday. So we went out to this remarkable restaurant called Alba Dino in in Richmond. That’s Richmond Pond Thames rather than Richmond, north [00:04:00] Yorkshire. And it’s basically a restaurant where the meal is themed around a Sicilian wedding feast. You get what you’re given. It is usually six or seven courses and s and I just basically had far too much to eat, which was wonderful. So, um, that’s, it’s been an entertaining week. How about you? Lisa: So last weekend I did in my top, it’s my top two events of the year. The first of which was where I actually met Mark in person, where we went to the Speaky Summit in Bavaria, but equally as random and equally as difficult to get to from, from southeast London. I went to a thing called congregation in the tiny village of Kong in West Ireland, which I found out about by chance at the beginning of November, having a conversation with someone at the IRBC UK Conference in London. But [00:05:00] congregation, it’s an unconference that takes place over a weekend and you, to get your ticket, you write a blog post on a particular subject, and this year’s subject was chaos. It’s like, this is really in my wheelhouse. Um, and so I wrote my blog post. Also realized that my current client, who I’ve not met in person until this point, was gonna be there and is one of the sponsors, but completely unrelatedly to me finding out about it. So I basically went away with 97 strangers, someone I’ve been working with for a few months, someone I met three weeks ago, and the person who’s organizing it, who I’d emailed in advance, um, and we sat in different shops around the village. The f we were given like a you’d love this from a random point of view. I’d lanyards had like a bingo card on it in the morning where there are eight sessions throughout the day and four, there [00:06:00] are eight groups. Running at the same time throughout the day, and then four sessions and you get given a sticker as with your number on it. And then you work out where you are meant to be at the different sessions. ’cause you find your number on the card. And it was fabulous ’cause it meant that you all got sh you, you knew, you knew where you needed to go next and if you didn’t know, you could talk to someone and ask them. And we had long ranging conversations that covered topics from like really straightforward things to it’s just such a treat to be able to actually take a whole, a day and a half really. But having a whole day of just talking about the same subject and talking to people and bouncing ideas off each other. I feel like I came back like really restored and thinking about how, ’cause it’s so nice to actually be able to talk to humans who, and you can bounce off each other without that kind of. The brittleness that sometimes comes when you’re talking [00:07:00] online and tone doesn’t travel and then you don’t agree with someone and then you fall out with them when you’re in person and sitting around a table, you can actually continue that. And then we all went to the pub in the evening and continued the conversation. Uh, that was the main thing. I’ve also been doing a bunch of client work. Saw everyone at the WB 40 dinner, brought a bunch of intra nerds with me that were also coming to town for the day for an intranet conference from Interact. Um. Did an art challenge at the weekend. So it’s been quite a busy week. Matt: Sounds it. Yeah. You’re gonna need a, a bit of time off over Christmas to recover from all of that. Lisa: I hope so. I I do feel like I’m probably gonna get ill at some point in December ’cause I’ve seen so many people and there are so many bugs around, even though I’ve had my flu jab and I’ve been taking vitamins and trying to eat well. There’s a high prob there’s a high chance I’m gonna be struck down soon. But anyway, I’ve [00:08:00] talked a lot there. Mark. Hello? Hello? Hello? In England ish. You are? Yeah. You are. Religion? I am in England. England, yep. How are you doing? What have you been up to over the last week or so? Mark: So the last, last week or so has been, uh, dominated by my band’s annual Christmas charity gig which was the last Thursday, it seems like, both a year ago and only...
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(339) Surface Deep
Nov 2600:44:44Tap to summarizeOn this week’s show, Chris and Julia meet Claudia Plen McCormack and Mia Serra to discuss their newly formed leadership training company, Surface Deep, and their approach to “deep inclusive leadership.” Both late-diagnosed with ADHD, Claudia and Mia draw on their experiences of burnout and masking in corporate environments to help organizations move beyond superficial diversity initiatives and tick-box wellness programs. They introduce the distinction between “surface action”—where people mask their true selves and say the right things—and “deep action,” which embraces authenticity and vulnerability to build genuine psychological safety. The conversation explores how their methodology combines leadership theory with neuroscience and embodied movement practices to create real-time insights. Through simple but powerful movement exercises—like following and leading activities—participants discover their behavioral patterns and tendencies without needing to intellectualise everything. Claudia and Mia challenge the prevailing corporate culture where constant productivity leaves no room for reflection, and where wellbeing initiatives often backfire by missing what employees actually need. They argue that creating environments where people can truly be themselves doesn’t just improve wellbeing—it unlocks the productivity, creativity, and innovation that organisations desperately need, with research showing diverse teams are 60% more productive when they can work authentically. As burnout reaches crisis levels globally, they offer a different path forward: building psychological flexibility and safety into the very DNA of organisations. The full transcript, generated by Descript (so there are probably errors)…Chris: Hello and welcome to WB 40 Podcast, the weekly podcast with me, Julia Bellis, Claudie Plen McCormack, and Mia Serra. Everybody here we are again, WB40 and very good. It is to be here too. Julia, you’re gonna tell us what you’ve been up to this week, please? Julia: I recently got back from holiday and that was a bit of a shock I have to admit because being at work is very different being on holiday, but I think I’ve got used to the discipline and rigor and routine again now, so I’m feeling a bit more at ease with it, and I always look for an excuse to talk about tooting bet Lido on this podcast. And I did get the opportunity to go to the Lido at the weekend without instantly jumping into ice cold water. And I did a bit of a watercolor workshop, which was really fun actually. And I’m always a bit scared of painting ’cause I don’t know what I want to do. So it was quite nice to be with a group of people where it didn’t really matter and we could try out different ideas and things. So yeah, that was lovely. How about you, Chris? What have you been up to? Chris: Well, it’s been a, it’s been a busy week. I’ve been in London and I’ve been up and down the country. I think I went to Chester last week. That was that was a bit like a bit of a drive up to, up to the northwest, to the British Computer Society meeting up there where I was their guest, guest speaker. I’m assuming I got let down by a number of different people and therefore why was the last resort? And I’ve got a bit of a thing I’m talking about in the moment around software. You know, how BI versus Bill just changed and all of those kind of cool, cool things. So yeah, that was good fun. So yeah, it’s been a busy weekend. And then the weekend, it was my, my kids, they were twins. It was their, both their birthdays. ’cause that’s kind of traditionally how twins are. Unless you got right on the midnight, you know, you have one, one on each side. And also my wedding anniversary on the same day, which was you know, kind of coincidental. So that, and so. Very rarely do we get to do anything really. It’s always been the kids have, have dominated that day, but they’re getting old in now, so I can be a little bit less. Julia: So you have to share your wedding anniversary with your twin’s birthday? I Chris: do. I do. It’s like all eggs in my basket. I must never forget that day. Julia: Yeah, that is bad. Do Well, what Chris: can I say? I, you know. The gods with me. Julia: And what about, what about you, our guests? Claudia, what have you been up to in the last week? So I, Claudie: I have to say that I’m just really, really aware of the encroaching darkness at the moment. So what I’m finding is that every time I see a little bit of sunlight, like there’s been a couple of days with blue skies and I go running outside just get a little bit of nature. So walking in trees and. Julia: You know, brilliant tactic actually, and I think we should all try to copy at the moment. Grab the sunshine when you can. Mia: Absolutely. Julia: And how about you Mia? Mia: That’s true actually because I, on, on Saturday, I walk, I walk a lot with my dog. And I walked across the heath from Kenwood to Parliament Hill and they have a little farmer’s market there. And I go and buy tomatoes, really good tomatoes from the farmer’s market, from the isle of White. Highly recommended. And it’s just a really nice walk across the heath ’cause you just get to see exactly what’s going on with the leaves and the trees and where we are in the season and, and feel, you know, what the weather’s really like. And the dog just runs and runs and runs and runs. So it’s just really nice check in with nature and the weather and the same as Claud said, get a little bit of sun. So that’s really been lovely. Julia: The way to do that right now I think is early in the morning, isn’t it? There’s no light slot after work. Claudie: Definitely. Yeah. True. You can get yourself out there. That’s first thing. That’s the way to do it. Mia: Yeah. This’s. Quite late. Sunset. Actually, I have to wait for the sun to rise to walk the dog. So Julia: the image, the Mia: image Julia: popped into my head when you were talking about walking across Hamster Heath was the latest Bridget Janes movie. And she lives on the edge of hamster teeth, doesn’t she? And it features quite a lot. Mia: Yeah. Well, I didn’t see any park rangers, any Hanson Park rangers. None to be had on my way to Parliament Hill. What, next time? What a Chris: Well, Barry Norman, well done for bringing the film element into this. So thank you Julia. Let’s track on and we’ll talk about surface deep. Julia: Claudia m are here today. To talk about their recently formed leadership training company, I believe. Can you tell us a bit about what this company is and why you’ve decided to form it? Mia: Well, that’s a very good question. I think it’s, it’s something that came together very organically. We were brought together by a friend of mine who said, both of you’re talking very much about the same thing you should really meet. And, and we’ve found out that we’d had very similar experiences in the corporate world. And we’d got to a very similar point in sort of realizing that we were not working at our best in a, in a sort of average corporate environment with the kind of management and the kind of culture and the the the way things work. But we. We know and we were aware that a lot of people, for example, who are neurodiverse or are slightly different in o...
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(338) Sports Data
Oct 2800:48:25Tap to summarizeWhat happens when you bring together data geeks and sports enthusiasts? In this fascinating episode, Matt and Nick are joined by John Carney to explore the hidden world of sports analytics and the surprising role of randomness in athletic competition. John dives deep into the intersection of probability, statistics, and sports performance, revealing how data is transforming everything from penalty shootouts to player recruitment. The conversation ranges from the theatrical nature of sports as entertainment to the mathematical frameworks that help us understand (and predict) athletic outcomes. You can find out more about Field of Play here: https://www.fieldofplay.co.uk/ The Pydata London Conference here: https://pydata.org/london2025 And more about the PyData Manchester here: https://www.meetup.com/pydata-manchester/ Transcript auto-generated by Descript: [00:00:00] Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 338 of the WB 40 Podcast This week with me, Matt Ballantine, Nick Drage, and John Carney. [00:00:56] Well, welcome back to the reasonably, reasonably regularly on a fortnight basis. Podcast that is WB 40 now in, into our 10th year of putting this stuff together. Joining me hosting this week is my co-author, not only my co-host, but my co-author, Nick. I think this is the first time we’ve done the show together, where we have been the hosts. [00:01:18] You’ve, I think, interviewed me in the past, but this is the first hosting we’ve done together. That is a good point. Yes. Yes, it is. How very exciting. How have you been over the last week or so? [00:01:28] Nick: Alright. He says hastily, looking at what he’s done the last week. Thank, thank, thank God for calendars. I’ve been, and unfortunately the audience won’t see your response. [00:01:41] I’ve been teaching people about wardly mapping. I’ve been looking at writing. Interactive. Well, I’ve been looking at course at writing interactive cities in a language called Inc. Which is something I’ve played with before, and that looks really interesting, just a way to build small interactive demonstrations or games. [00:02:04] And then I was at a session at the weekend looking about building micro games, which are basically short, very short, very small war games , that take quite a while to design. But you can learn and play in like under half an hour, ideally like 20 minutes. If you wanna get a single point about an event rather than you play sort of the war for North Africa or something and understand it after months of replays, it’s like 20 minutes. [00:02:30] You get the rough idea of how something works. So, looking into, so did that really good session. I need to generate some, I need to write some now. [00:02:38] Matt: That sounds fun. How about [00:02:39] Nick: you? What about you in your last week? [00:02:40] Matt: Well, well, kind of related to that, I have started at last to read a book that I bought about a year ago which is, I can’t remember what the Intitle was, but it, it was originally the Oxford Book of Card games, and it’s not a book about sorry, the Oxford Book of Playing Cards. [00:02:55] I think it’s. It’s not about a book about rules of playing cards, it’s the history of playing cards and playing card games. And the reason I mention that is because one of the things that it says quite early on is one of the reasons why some people don’t like card games played with a 50 standard, 52 card deck is because the de cards themselves gives you no indication whatsoever of how the game is. [00:03:18] And so you have to learn the rules and the rules are completely independent. Whereas if you’re playing, I dunno, Scrabble or Ludo or whatever you, with the board and stuff, there’s, there’s information about what you’ve got to do and how it works right in front of you all the time. I also found out, which I didn’t realize, is that earlier versions of the game of chess were played for gambling and they involved dice and things like that as well, which is interesting ’cause we often, and I know we’ve been writing some stuff about how chess is very different to card games. [00:03:46] But actually they, they came from a similar route originally, so, so that’s the sort of stuff that I’ve been looking at in terms of reading. I have started my civic duty this week. I can say no more about it than that and we’ll see where that goes. And other than that, I’ve, I mean, yeah, mostly it’s been getting ready to have a break from work for a short period and then getting ready to go back to work in about a week and a half and. [00:04:12] Really getting into a new client. It’s been a very strange liminal few weeks where I’ve been sort of closing things down or putting things on pause and getting ready to start again. So, yeah. No, got it. That’s a bit odd. Anyway, joining us on the show this week John what have you been up to over the last week or so? [00:04:32] john: Hey it’s been a busy week, the past week. I ended up gonna gi at my best friend’s wedding, so I exchanged the grim and dark of Manchester, the bright sunny of gi which is lovely. It’s wonderful. See, my best friend get married, had a lovely wife, and. [00:05:04] On the flight home, I, I expect so I’m suffering at the moment, but been a lovely time. Was it warm? It was very warm. I’ve never been before, but very warm, very, very sunny. Not cloud in the sky. Very breezy at the same time. Very pleasant. I’ve never experienced that combination of 29 degrees Celsius and a nice core breeze at the same time. [00:05:24] Matt: Oh, that sounds, yeah, my wife was in Seville a couple of weeks ago, and so similar. I mean, that’s not that far away. No, no. Right. From [00:05:31] john: all aia, I believe. [00:05:32] Matt: Yeah. Yeah. So and, and is it the monkeys, apes something in Gibraltar? Yes. [00:05:38] john: Monkeys on the, on the on the Rock. Can’t say I. [00:05:42] Matt: Okay. That’s, that’s probably for the best. [00:05:44] So we are are going to be talking this week about. At least two of about the six and a half dozen conferences that you apparently do in your spare time. One of which is the thing that originally brought me to your door, which is a thing called Field of Play. So I think probably we should crack on. [00:06:02] john: Yeah, I do. [00:06:59] Matt: I am a big believer in. How serendipitous events happen and how you and I, John got put in contact is one of those. I was at a conference about three months ago and I bumped into somebody who I’ve known for many years but hadn’t seen in donkeys and certainly hadn’t chatted to for a long while, and Andy and I were chatting away and he told me about a new venture that he had which involved sports data. [00:07:26] He was being a bit cryptic about it ’cause it’s one of those stealth mode things, which I know that people mostly do because they haven’t quite worked out what the idea is yet. But and he he said about whether I knew anybody who knew anything about Sports Station, I had a think about it. I thought, well there’s somebody I know who used to work for England Wales Cricket Board, so I can put you in touch with him. [00:07:44] And there’s somebody I know who works at the football association I used to work with at Microsoft, so I can put you in touch with him and I’ll have a word around and see if anybody else knows anybody. And so I had a word around, and you and I are connected through both being an equal experts network. [00:07:59] We will not talk about equal experts tonight other than just to get that disclaimer outta the way. And somebody said, oh, you speak to John because he’s organized earlier this year, an entire conference about sports data. We exchanged a few messages an...
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