Marc Tumson, Senior Process Improvement Architect at Atradius
Marc Tumson, thank you very much indeed for doing The Global Interview! Tell me a little bit about your career to-date, what you're involved in, and a little bit about yourself.
My background, in terms of education, is in political science as opposed to politics. A lot of statistics and proving theories and a little bit more scientific than just talking about the “political”. Like many people around me who finished political science, I didn't really have a notion of what it was I wanted to do with that when I finished university.
I ended up working in the technology space. What probably attracted me the most to was how much was just constantly changing. Combined with the fact that I was looking around myself at how people were working against all of these changes and things constantly evolving and I was just thinking a lot of how we're doing things isn't very logical. I moved within that sector a little bit.
“If I can prove something at the moment in time using statistics or mathematics or I'm very sure of my argument, it is not unique in terms of its truth.”
Marc Tumson
Marc Tumson, LinkedIn
When I was in my mid-20s, I joined a company which had started up in the US and were taking their first steps abroad with a small office in Dublin. I was the number three European employee in that company. It turned out to be an amazing opportunity. I think that was probably the best education that I had. I spent five years or so there, seeing it going from 14 people working in the stationery cupboards to having an established office where we have a lot of turnovers, but, and to work with some incredible people to go from the startup phase into an IPO situation.
However, at some point along that journey, I decided I wanted to have more balance in my life. I thought, again, it's incredible what I'm doing, but it's not sustainable for me to continue working 12 hours a day or 16 hours a day, 6 or 7 days a week sometimes because I love it and because I'm excited, and I'm enthusiastic about it, but other elements of my life were starting to suffer as a result.
I moved to Amsterdam nearly 11 years ago because it is a society which, while very hardworking, really also values leisure time and values that downtime because it's not just time for switching off, it's actually time for living. It’s also where a lot of interesting things can happen. When I moved here for that work-life balance, what I actually saw is that it's not like there needs to be a balance between the two: that one stops and the other starts, both are always going on together. That is something that really also brought me to where I am now.
Nearly a decade ago working for a (originally) Dutch-founded credit insurance company. The Netherlands, of course, is just the land of insurance and it's a rather a conservative company in a rather conservative industry. The company is truly international, but the original Dutch company was founded 95 years ago, so we've seen a few world wars and credit crises and a lot of other “events” in that time.
One of the things I really wanted at the time in my life was that stability. However, I was also brought in to help change things, to really look at how we are working end to end and how can we bring people together and understand what it is that we need to do? Rather than moving from one silo operating and another silo is taking different routes towards the same change, or a situation where the word comes down from above, and everybody has to interpret it their own way. The idea at the time of my coming on board was to actually try to go both top-down and bottom-up and bring everyone in the middle and ask what is it that we're actually trying to do here and how could we do it better?
As humans, we're very fixed into “oh we're doing it that way because we decided to do it that way” or “we've done it that way for the last year or two years (or whatever), and it's not broken”. I have always thought, “You’re right, it's not broken, but we can do better.” I've gone from the education of understanding statistics to how we can use statistics to prove certain points. That led me to where I am now: basically, I'm “Continuous Improvement Lead”.
Over time, the real value for me has become really helping people to go on a similar journey of constantly thinking, understanding and continuously looking at what I want in my life and how I am going to change things. There's no endpoint; it's just a constant evolution in thinking about what can I do better for me? “Better” can be defined through a number of ways, but I'd like to try to take that umbrella approach that says “we have to find what fits for everyone in the best way possible”.
I’m still, however, very much a product of my 1990-2000s western upbringing and education. That’s something I’m trying hard to unlearn.
What is that about your career that you enjoy/like and makes you feel that you're in that space now?
Helping people to change - how they work, how they think, how they feel - I think it's the most interesting part. Making that change mindset be there and take over and not to have that… complacency is probably too strong a word, but it's very easy when we're told: “your job is to come in and push the button and you push it whatever number of times a day. Then once the clock strikes 5:00 pm, you can stop pushing the button and go home.”.
I really want people to really think about it. “Why are you doing that?” Then really challenge them to say, “Okay, what would be better overall?” but also “What's better for me?”. I honestly think that given the changing professional landscape - especially technology and the interest in Universal Basic Income (UBI) concepts - that this is something everyone ought to be thinking about for themselves.
It seems that moving to Amsterdam catalysed a fundamental shift in the way that you're looking at things now. So what inspires or motivates you, helps you to make each day count?
That's a really good question. I think the short answer is that it has to be everything. I find it important to develop a sense of inspiration in the most ordinary things in life. I think what inspires me the most though, is the endless capacity that human beings have to surprise me. Just when you think you spot a pattern or a behaviour or that you understand something, or someone comes along and just completely undermines that understanding.
I think we've had a massive example of that when it comes to change and the mindset to change in recent months. Here was a lot of talk in the corporate world about how we need to work on changing our mindset, and it's difficult, and you need to make things stick, and it's hard, and things are constantly changing, and it's difficult to keep up. Then everyone went from working in offices in a manner that had been going on for between 40 to 60 years, to working from home and guess what? Nothing completely fell apart. Yes, it's tough. Yes, it's very challenging.
Certain business models of taking it harder than others but human beings adapted extremely quickly to the situation, and there was and is a lot of creativity that has and will come out of it. Amazing things happen in a pressure-cooker situation. I have the feeling that people have realized, “Hey, this is really quite broken. We need to do better” when it comes to how we work in offices. That surprised me - how quickly people adapted to the new reality.
I find the fact that I'm continuously surprised inspiring. I think the day I stopped being surprised, that's the day I really need to go and see a psychologist and say something's wrong with me.
Adding to what you said - vaccines aside. Do you think it's a change that will stick? Do you think it's a fundamental change going forward or do you think things will ultimately slowly creep back to the way they were?
I think we'll never go completely back to the way we were, but how big the impact will be and what that will look like for us as workers in this age, it's too hard to tell just yet. It's a combination of whether we decide to be passive about it or not. It's like any project that I've worked on. You can go in, and you can make an improvement with the team from how they were working for many years and everybody sees the benefit and everyone's very enthusiastic about it. You go back six months later, and you'll find that half the team is doing it the old way because you haven't taken the time and effort to make the change stick. That’s where things become messy because some people haven’t been given the correct incentive to change.
If there are things that we see and experience that we really want to keep the way they are now, we have to put the effort in to get the benefit back. The question is how much effort is enough, how much is too much for the benefit that will accrue? This question for me is more fundamental. What we have right now is a strategy, which was really a response to a situation.
It was reactive. If we're being proactive, we would ask ourselves not “what is our strategy?”, but “what do we want to achieve?” “What's our objective?” If we know our objective, we can define the goals that we need to set for ourselves to bring us closer to our objective. Then it's easier to define the strategies that we want to implement to get us there.
I think a lot of companies are very good at having strategies. They have a strategy for this, a strategy for that, but when you ask them what a particular strategy or project contributing towards is, a lot of people just put a really blank look on their face and say stuff like: "Oh! Maybe you didn't understand. We have this strategy..." They're not used to being challenged on that.
Do you feel there's a connection between that situation and how certain brands are reacting? Some are doing the same thing, not really seeing the opportunity. Have you any thoughts on that?
I think where brands - and the industries surrounding them - are struggling with the situation right now is they're having a lot of trouble with defining what it is that their customers really want now.
They're looking at all kinds of trends and data. If I look at a company like Blackstone for instance, they are massively investing in their real estate for last-mile logistics because of the boom of e-commerce, right? They have an incredible power behind them because of all of this real estate everywhere, and they can use that for distribution and logistics. But are they asking people, what do you really want?
We've been in a model now for a very long time of giving people things that they didn't know they wanted yet. Apple is a great example of that. We didn't know we wanted a phone that also played music and had a map at the beginning. Now, it's become so indispensable in our lives.
I think in terms of a lot of life experience, we've had this sort of freedom that many of us had to give up large parts of. Different countries and different societies, experience this differently – but ultimately, we went from being able to choose when we want to be out doing things to being shut inside for long periods of time. I think that made many of us realize how much we enjoy and should value certain activities and freedoms.
If we now take that level further and start asking people “what do you really want?”, I think a lot of people value the interaction that they have with other human beings in a public space. They want certain experiences, and the fact of the matter is they're not really able to do that at the moment. As a result, they're ordering online, watching online, meeting online. Equating that with “people want to be able to do more online consuming.” No, it's contextual to the situation right now.
I think brands should- depending on what their market space and what they're doing - really, really must stop looking at what's successful for others and start going back to basic market research and really asking people, understanding, “how is it that you live?”, and “what is it that you want?” Then brands can ask themselves “How can I do something that's a little bit different - or different enough - that you will choose me over another competitor?”
In my opinion, we are at a really important crossroads in this regard, because we're potentially moving more and more to a Philip K. Dick-Esque dystopian situation where we're just going to have a couple of mega-corporations, and they're going to be the ones deciding for us what we want and how much we are going to pay for it.
Have you got any hobbies, interests, or anything that you do that is really important to you outside of a work environment?
Oh, I've gone through different cycles of different hobbies over the time, but I think that maybe one of the things that I noticed for myself is I've always gravitated towards hobbies that also have that balance of allowing me to be the introvert that I am and also enjoy the company of others. I was just getting into bouldering as this second wave of Covid-19 began rearing its ugly head.
I really like the balance of how physically and mentally demanding it is trying to solve these vertical puzzles. You see someone who's doing a climb, and you're looking at them, and you think you understand. Then you get up there, you don't know what to do and you just can’t achieve it. It might take weeks and weeks to figure it out on your own. Plus you can go to the (climbing) gym and just put in an hour or two hours - put headphones on and not talk to anyone. You can have that great moment for yourself. Or you can also arrange to meet up with some friends - or just meet strangers there and talk to people while climbing and be very social.
That’s been an aspect of most hobbies I have had over the years. When I used to cycle a lot before I used to do a lot of solo cycling, but I also really enjoyed being able to go out on the weekend with a group, meeting people who I didn't know that well and spending several hours with them and having that social element as well.
Recently, I started learning how to throw ceramics. It’s something I have wanted to do for a really long time actually, but now that we are faced with spending more time at home, and the evenings begin to draw in early, it made sense for my partner and I to spend some time outside the apartment during the week, learning a new skill that would also enhance our home by having objects we had created ourselves. Elevating simple rituals like having your morning coffee or tea out of a vessel which you made with your own hands. I think it also makes you very aware of the beauty of everyday things.
My hobbies change according to my time and my abilities - I’m not getting any younger, but I think I'll always look for that mix of time for myself, getting away from work, getting away from my whole life or my normal circle of friends and, just being able to be inspired by little things and people who I know and people who I don't know…yet.
When it comes to your own life or your career is there a phrase, a quote or a saying that sort of sticks with you at all?
My favourite quote is one from Stephen Fry "Better sexy and racy than sexist and racist.". I think in my own line of work I try to make it as much as possible about people, but I'm still deep, I'm a statistician in many ways.
In that respect, the quote that actually guides me the most is from a Lebanese author who wrote in the 1920s called Kahlil Gibran. He wrote a book called, The Prophet. The premise of the book is that of a prophet who has been exiled to live in another land than where he's from and he has lived there for most of his life. He's loved and adored in his land of exile. Finally, though, he's allowed to go home. As he's on the shore leaving, all these people come to say goodbye to him, and he allows everyone to ask one question.
There is a line in one of the responses that have always stayed with me: "Say not 'I have found the truth' but rather 'I have found a truth.'".
That stuck with me. Even if I can prove something at a particular moment in time using statistics or mathematics, or even if I'm very sure of my argument, it is not unique in terms of its truth. What is true now may not be true a week from now, a month from now. That's part of the changes happening around us. Change happens in our work and our social life, in the wider world around us. Nowadays, the pace of change is so fast; we really do struggle to keep up. That's only human, and I think we need to be very forgiving ourselves for that. We also need to think about better ways to manage in that maelstrom of change. It's not about necessarily keeping up with it, but how do you go from surviving in it to thriving from it.
Tim Hartford had a really good article in the Financial Times weekend section recently, looking at how we use data and statistics. He cited that 100 years ago, we did not know what percentage of the population was unemployed. Now, it's one of those things that we really use as a key metric to understand what's happening in the world around us.
Yet, there's still so little understanding of how we gather information and how we think critically about it. Even so reflexivity itself also brings its own issues: that the moment that we start to also observe something, we change the nature of that thing. We begin to get into elements of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
To keep it simple, I really wish that more people understood about mathematics and statistics to understand how people are making the decisions around them and what it is that they're being fed.
In other words, more critically examining and thinking, “what am I being told here?” and “why am I being told this?” or, “why is that decision being made and on what basis?” I think during the recent pandemic, we saw some elements of that. We were just bombarded with numbers, and people were going about quoting these numbers. This fatality rate or that infection rate or “you need to look at the R-factor” and “you need to look at that graph”, or “you should be looking at the log scale”.
Do we really understand what it is we're being shown? Do we also understand where this data is coming from? One of the things that we seem to forget is that data itself is also subjective. If I ask you a question one day and I ask you the same question for six weeks, you'll probably give me the same answer. But if we leave a six weeks gap between asking the same question, we'll likely answer (slightly) differently.
For me, that's a driver. You see things, you listen to things, you listen to people, you try to understand. When you start looking at the data, you start to be able to challenge whether what it is that you understood is actually true or not.
For a statistician like you. The current political landscape whether the United Kingdom, Ireland, the EU Brexit, the US political landscape, the pandemic, is it rich pickings for a statistician?
The only other thing I'd rather be right now is a comedian! It is fascinating, but it's also, it's incredibly worrying how you see people being manipulated and how unaware people are even to the point that we have politicized data and facts so much.
When you think of your own life, what sticks out to some moment that you're most proud of?
I had a burnout a few years back. A fairly significant burnout. A lot of things changed in my life in a short amount of time, and I was completely overwhelmed. It opened up a Pandora's Box. I realized I needed help. Over time, I realized that probably a lot of people around me need help in some way or another.
Taking a conscious decision to really understand more about mental and emotional well-being, - I don’t know if “proud” is the right term - but that was a very good thing to do: talking about these things at work and with friends and, to start being very open about the fact that I'm seeing a therapist. People talk about mental health a lot, but actually, I think you can't separate mental and emotional well-being.
I am on this incredible journey where I'm realizing how much there is in my life that I need to unpack that I had just pushed away, and I saw the consequences that I was having in my life. Allowing myself to own the vulnerability to say “I don't know anymore. I'm out of my depth. I'm overwhelmed. I need help. I don't know how to do this any longer.” I think that, for me, is probably the moment that I'm most proud of for myself.
Thank you for sharing that, Marc. When you look back then what do you wish you'd have known when you started out?
I grew up as an only child and I think something that I really had to learn - and I only realized the real power of it in the last few years - is how important a skill, compassion and developing compassion is. You can learn any number of things. You can learn how to program. You can pick up a new language. You learn how to master a cuisine. You can go to the gym and make things a little bit tighter and a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller and what have you. You can do any number of things that are more or less challenging.
Above all of those, I think compassion for what other people are doing, for what they are going through, is the most rewarding. Compassion for me is a step beyond empathy. Empathy is solidarity with someone else because I understand what it is that they're going through because I've experienced something similar or the same myself. Compassion is looking out the window and seeing somebody you don’t know walking down the street from the supermarket and having compassion for them and their life, and what it is that they're going through. It is understanding that everyone's experience of the world is very unique, and even if you cannot relate from your own experience, it doesn’t prevent you from being compassionate towards others.
In that respect, no two people experience the world the same way. Having an open mind about that when dealing with others, I wish I had known how to do that better, earlier on.
Is there anybody in business, academic, or creative circles that you admire?
Honestly, the person who inspires me the most is my partner, Kamila. She is the person who really has helped me to develop that sense of compassion most. She has an open mind and an open heart and strives to be less judgmental. I think it's hard to have idols in a sense if you're really striving not to judge others or to really just to see the value in each person. She inspires me to try to live better each day. She’s my muse.
From a professional perspective, I don't have a Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or something that I look up to because I've never worked with them. It's been the people who I've actually worked with and encountered, little things that they've done that have made me think “wow, that's quite mind-blowing. That's really strong. That's really powerful”, and I've tried to take those lessons with me.
I've been very lucky to work with a number of great people that have left a sort of impression on me. Simon, you're one of the ones who did in my early career. I remember when I resigned from the position at the company where we worked together, you tried to keep me on board, but you saw that you couldn’t. What left an impression on my mind afterwards was knowing when to give up.
I also worked with a fantastic leader called James Taylor - not the musician, no relationship whatsoever. James was really great at being able to allow people to see the value in what they did. I think it was the first time that I saw somebody really living that thing of celebrating all the little success. It wasn't just an expectation that we do our jobs well. It wasn’t like “This was the goal that we needed to work towards and we got to that goal, so a job is done”. No. What I learned from James is that we should recognize all the little successes along the way and as a result, that there is no real failure but only an opportunity to learn. We celebrated the good days and the bad days.
Another former colleague, who's still one of my most valued friends, is Guro Bakkeng Bergan McCrea. I don't think I've ever worked with somebody directly who's been more inspiring because she knows how to actually get the best out of people. The ability to pinpoint what motivates an individual and use that as a way to incentivise them towards a common goal - I’ve never seen someone else do that. Working with her was working for myself while benefiting the team I was a part of as well.
The combination I think of: knowing, what the effort to put into a situation showing the value to each person and each individual of what it is that they're doing by understanding how to get the best out of them for themselves, those are… let's say things that have stuck with me.
The people who I've worked with have shown me that. I think there are elements of our characteristics or our behaviour whether it be in work or in our personal life that are sum of the parts of the different people they've encountered.
Do you think there are any brands, institutions or organisations that are really getting it right at the moment?
One area that struck me is food delivery companies. They were already doing well in recent years as consumers realised that they liked having more “on-demand”. I won't name the name of the companies because they're all a little bit different in different countries, but they're also all doing more or less the same thing: changing the dining experience in your home.
I was particularly impressed by some companies in China that responded to the COVID-19 outbreak while everyone was at home in Wuhan, Beijing and other cities. We read about the introduction of contactless delivery as a way to respond to customer concerns. Someone I know who was living in Beijing, also told me that they went even a step further. Everyone who handles your food, their name is on the receipt and or their body temperature had been taken at every stage and was printed there as well. They really responded to what it was that the customers wanted at that moment. They wanted to keep living and keep enjoying life, right? They wanted a sense of normality. They wanted to still have that enjoyment, that hedonism, especially as now they're trapped at home. So they facilitated that.
The customers also wanted a sense of safety or risk mitigation at least. They want to know you're doing this “right”, that you're doing this under the right conditions with the customer in mind; that we’re not going to take too big a risk here. These companies pivoted real quickly and they used their position to say, “Hey, you can continue having a nice time at home, and we can facilitate that.”.
I also saw a number of these companies starting to pivot into other things as well. I saw that one of the big home food delivery companies also had partnered up with a toilet paper company. They saw everybody's going crazy about toilet paper and they just said, we're also going to start delivering toilet paper at home with your Chinese takeaway. There's a comic element to that, but that's what people wanted at that moment, and they were able to tap into that. So yeah, I think food delivery.
When you dig deeper in that area though, it's such a universal thing, right? We all, everyone in the world: it’s one of the things we have in common right? We're all born, we're all going to pay taxes at some point and we're all going to die. One thing we're all going to do in between is we're all going to eat. It's such a universal thing: bringing people to the table. I think that's a really fascinating space and a growth space and how they're reimagining it all.
For example, if you order a burger in a restaurant, you have to cook that burger in a particular way so that it gets to the table and it's good - it's not sloppy and cold and whatever else. Well, the way you cook for a customer in a restaurant, you have to think of a whole new way of getting that food to a delivery customer because it's no longer the two minutes it takes the waiter to walk from kitchen to the table. It's 20 or 30 minutes to deliver. Observing how these companies are also responding to that challenge. I’m sure you're aware of this, but a lot of the time it's moving in the direction where instead of it being your favourite restaurant, you're actually ordering from a central kitchen somewhere else where they've taken those recipes, and they've taken those ingredients, and they've learned how to make those dishes that you love. They're also cooking for 20 different restaurants in that space, and they've learned to make it so that when it arrives at you 30 minutes away in your home so that it's the same when it arrives at you as to when it's two minutes away from the kitchen.
I think that's a real response now to this situation we find ourselves in. If we go to a situation of second or third lockdowns or cyclical patterns of this, I think that's an industry that's going to really give people what it is they want. I also think they could do a lot more in terms of their services, but also in terms of on-the-ground philanthropy to help people who are struggling.
Have you any thoughts on the future of social media?
I hear a refrain a lot recently and there must be some causal link with what's been happening in the world right now. I hear a lot of people saying they want to make the circle smaller but better; more quality. I think that it's about putting the social back into tech, maybe necessarily social media. If I look at some of the social media platforms which I use, I see more posts from brands and advertisers than I do from people I know or people who I have connected with over social media in different ways.
Bear in mind that this is coming from somebody who met their partner through Instagram originally, right? I have some better friends online than I do in real life because you can really cut through the b******t if you want. You can really get a feeling for how someone thinks and what their values are. However, we have to learn or be taught to consider how much on social media is truly just social as opposed to a way to push out a message - be personal, professional, political or other.
We've got to get back to bringing people more interaction as opposed to pushing out the article or headline that they’re reposting that, and it’s becoming a discussion forum for these sorts of things or a place for people or brands to push their products or so on. In short, influencers are ruining the internet.
I think people will want to go back to a more simple way of interacting with one another, finding each other, and connecting with each other. We talked about food delivery apps and the synergy there. I think one of the things that you see all of these apps for delivery people or drivers or whoever is “X” and that you can rate them based on various factors that you find important to you - within certain parameters of course!
That's part of the way that “social” is being reimagined in the digital-first era. That's putting social into the app. That's creating a connection between me and my delivery driver, John or Jane or José or whoever it is. However, I feel more and more that when I go into social media apps that I'm actually very alienated from people. I think you see how many people are, in their workspace, they're using the platform for collaboration and communication like Google Hangouts, Slack, Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
For a lot of people, that's the first time they've been using these applications in a working setting, a work environment. If they weren't doing so already, they're doing it more now as well with their friends via WhatsApp groups and so on. You begin to see that that's where the conversations happen.
I have a WhatsApp group with three friends of mine. I'm the only one who's met the other three. One of these guys is in Helsinki, one is in Dublin, and the other one is in London. I brought them together. It's all about music. We are more or less into the same types of music though we disagree around the edges sometimes, which is nice. I haven't looked into the group today and there are 146 messages unread by me in there - today alone! That tells you something about three people who've never met – that's how often they connect, and it's not only about just music anymore. It's about all sorts of things. I find it fascinating, how we all agree how much this WhatsApp group has added to the value of our lives by connecting like-minded individuals who also expand each other's horizons.
That's social! That's using tech to connect and be social with people who you might not otherwise bring together. That's amazing! That's creating a connection, not on the basis of location or education or background or anything but on really having a shared common interest and outlook on life - making that connection with one another on that basis. I fear the day that these gentlemen would ever have to meet, they're all going to be crushingly disappointed in one another; but that's a different story.
Do you think the webinars, online events, one-to-one discussions and discussion’s group are somehow becoming more meaningful? As many people are becoming manageable and really engaging in meaningful conversations.
Sometimes you can have better relationships online than you could do possibly in person. We're sort of at the infancy at that for lots of people, where maybe others who have been in the online space for a while have already found that. We had all these chat forums back in the day for all sorts of different topics. I've never been able to abandon Tumblr. I've had Tumblr for years. I'm fascinated by all of these subgroups and different scenes that are going on there.
One of the areas is fan fiction. You have all these people that are superfans of various things - mostly tv shows or books - and they get so into it that they develop their own stories, and they develop their own content and media and everything around it. I find that amazingly creative. You can see people coming together and connecting over shared interests stripping away all the other elements of themselves because of that one shared interest.
They can be fairly anonymous as well in that space and I think it's fascinating. I'm not a fan fiction guy myself but just watching from the outside, it reminds me of watching something that I see less and less of that we used to have in the real world. These various different groups and subgroups within society. When I was growing up in the '80s and '90s, I had the punks, the ravers, the skaters and the Goths and everything. Out there on the street now, I think that there's a lot more… it's a lot more hegemonic and a lot more beige – we've lost a little bit of diversity.
I think that there's more and more diversity online in terms of thought, opinion but also freedom to express yourself. I hope that brands or consumers or capitalism just leave that well and good enough alone because I think that we’re still in the infancy of it. I think that that's one of the great new worlds of how we interact with one another as human beings.
What's your platform of choice or what's the one that drags you in the most?
I think the one that drags me down the most, and what I've been constantly toying with just turning off is Facebook. I keep it there because as I live “abroad” and especially now, as it's very difficult to travel and see people, it’s become a way of staying in touch. I have a kind of a compact with my mother that I post on Facebook so that she knows what's going on in my life so that she and my dad can keep up with what's happening. So I try to make sure I do that.
I think that the problem with things like Facebook and Instagram and so on it's that everybody has learned now to be able to portray something. So when I met my friend, John, at lunch today. I'm like, "So how are you? I mean obviously, I can see what you've been up to. But how are you? How are you feeling?" You don't necessarily get that.
I come back to Tumblr quite a lot because there's a weird social element to it of people following each other and quietly liking what people are choosing to be their content on their blog. It is often basically a big mood board. There's not a lot of original content, to be honest. Somebody's posting something and then everyone re-blogging it and reusing it because they like it or it resonates with them.
There's also a lot that's happening there in terms of social movements. I learned a lot of reading and listening to the experiences, for example, of trans people and trans people of colour on Tumblr 10 years ago already. It would have been something that just wasn't hitting anywhere else in the media landscape that I was consuming. Several companies have tried to make sense of it, Yahoo most notably spent a lot of money on Tumblr and they've tried to find a way to get advertising in it and how to manage a lot of fake news and others have to try to find a space there, but no one can make sense of it.
For that reason, I keep coming back to it because I'm just fascinated by it. Also, because sometimes I'm just bored, and I don't know what to do with my hands – you can just mindlessly scroll - but it's not in the same way as Facebook where you're just getting messages of doom pumped at you every, well. How long does it take to scroll down a frame?
Looking at comments - the conversations and observing the online behaviours; there's an awful lot to learn over in social media instead of just posting, or blasting out. How do manage this type of engagement?
My partner and I have a great love of cinema. Normally, pre-Covid-19 times we used to go to the cinema twice a week or more sometimes. That's something we haven't done in six months, and we're hoping to get back at it for a Film Festival that's taking place in Amsterdam at the beginning of October. We consume a lot of film at home as well and we use an app called Letterboxd to keep track of the films we watch.
One of the things that we've taken to doing is once we have watched a film, is to start reading through the reviews that other people have left. It can start a conversation: observing the reviews that people leave or people choose to do so. Sometimes you can really question and despair for the intelligence of people, or just find some comedy or some mirth.
I remember there was one reviewer - we were obviously watching a lot of the same films as her. She was somewhere in East Asia, as far as I remember. I was fascinated by the fact that she would never really review the film but would just post up what it was she was wearing and when she was watching the film. It was a really weird thing, but I was completely drawn to it – “7:30 viewing, Rolex watch, Gucci handbag, Blahnik shoes” and that was it. There was nothing else.
We talked at the beginning about people surprising you. I would love to understand “why?” for that one.
Have you ever mentored anybody? Or have you had a mentor in the early stage of your career?
Well, I think that James and Guro who I mentioned earlier I think have been great mentors.
Have I ever mentored people? I would be really honoured if there were a few people that would say that I have, but I have never actively sought that out. However, I've always sought out to actually help establish and set up mentorship programs.
In the company where I worked after working with you Simon, we were all quite young. We were all hired to go higher in the company and we all were pretty good at our jobs and then found ourselves in that typical position that you do if you're good at something: you end up being made a manager. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a good manager. There were already a lot of training schemes but they were mostly skill schemes. Presentation skills and negotiation skills and all this stuff.
Myself, my colleague, Guro who I mentioned earlier and a few others of us, we got together in our lunch breaks and discussed how more people were going to come into this company, and more people were going to come behind us. What kind of mentorship program do we need here? We started identifying what we were good at and what we needed to improve at. We share knowledge and best practices. That was a great experience.
When I work with teams who are looking to improve business processes or a set of processes – I often observe that they’ve often been doing what they're doing for so long, that they’ve forgotten how difficult it is to start new in the company.
A lot of people who you don't know and you don't fully understand what all the people in their new company actually do. I think it took me three or four years to really understand the role of every different unit in the company that I work with now. Financial services can be incredibly complicated. It was a blind spot for me in my knowledge. That's one of the things that drew me to the job I have now: to understand the workings within financial services, of finance, of risk, of all of these things.
I have tried with varying degrees of success - with different teams having a period, at the beginning of somebody working, of work shadowing.
A lot of companies have starter packages and people get toured around the office or have induction days where they learn about how things work in the organisation. Instead look at the majority of the people that that person is going to work with and actually have them spend 50% of their time in the first week or two, sitting just observing what other people do.
You will gain so much more back in terms of productivity by doing that rather than throwing someone in on the first week and saying, "These are your team members and blah blah blah and then off you go. Here's the computer and a keyboard or monitor and keyboard, this is what you have to do and just go ahead,." because they will struggle to understand where they sit in the machinery for such a long time. Understanding your purpose in the machine is much more useful.
And I think a lot of employers that want to become employers of choice, the first thing that they want a person to know is what value they are adding to the whole process. Why are they an important cog in the machinery? They might be a very small cog, but they can actually point and say “this is the benefit that I bring to my colleagues and the company.”
Understanding that really well at the beginning, what role you play, what value you'll add and how you can help, having a sense for the different people themselves, their personalities, their drivers and getting to know people and how they work and what's hard, what they like about their work at a very early stage. That’s priceless.
I would say the first two weeks, 50% of an employee's time should just be spent in a roster of going and sitting with colleagues and observing people and having a set of questions to ask them about what they do.
What is your preferred way of networking? Are you enjoying this “new” way of networking? Do you think it's as effective, or not as much?
Absolutely. I actually love the way we're networking now. I think LinkedIn is an absolutely amazing tool and platform in that sense that you're able to keep that connection with so many people who you come into contact with within a professional setting.
If I look at my father's generation, my father is almost 80 years old, and he reminisces a lot about people who he went to school or university or was in the military with or worked with during his career that he's completely lost track of. I don't think that will happen to my generation. I think if you want to, you will be able to stay connected.
A personal example of that is that I went to school with a very talented Irish artist called Richard Hearns. Richard was born during the 1980s in the civil war in Lebanon, and his (birth) parents gave him and his sister up for adoption to his father, who was in the Irish army with the UN in Lebanon.
We always got along pretty well at school, but we were hardly the closest of friends, but social media came along, we connected, and we stayed connected. A few years back, he was looking to take in a weekend in Amsterdam while looking for some representation in a gallery in the city, and we got together for a meal, and we learned things about each other that we didn't really know. Now, I don't think we would have been able to do that had it not been for the connection through the social media platforms in this way.
Recently, I got talking with a colleague who's Lebanese; This was before the blast. I was telling her how I'm really looking forward to going back to Lebanon which is one of the most amazing countries I've ever been to. I mean we think the Irish are welcoming, we don't have a patch on the Lebanese
Maybe it's something about nations who like to kick the shit out of each other, we open the doors for people from abroad. I can't wait to go back. Beirut is by far one of my top three favourite cities in the world. It is absolutely chaotic, completely crazy but it is the most wonderful place and it’s the people that make it what it is.
Anyway I was telling her that I actually planned to go back with my friend, Richard because I want to help him to relocate his family in Lebanon. That he's never been there. He's never met any of his family. He's pretty sure that he does have family left there and he wants to try to retrace them.
It turns out that the reason why she is living in the Netherlands is because she found out that she had a half-brother who had been given up for adoption, like my friend Richard, and had lived his whole life in the Netherlands. She tracked him down, and that's why she decided to come here and study. She said, "I have all of this information: people who helped me contact and locate my brother. I can give you all that information so that you can help your friend, Richard."
I don't think we make those sorts of connections in the same way. We wouldn't be able to - or it would have been a lot more effort or maybe a lot more serendipitous - 20 or 30 years ago. I think that those connections are still serendipitous but they're amplified or catalyzed by social media and how we manage to stay connected to people.
Have you learned any lessons along the way that you want to share with people about success in life or success in your career?
I think I talked a bit about compassion. It has been an interesting route for me over the last few years especially during the period where I was really in a burnt-out state. Being an analyst, I have a tendency to over-analyze and want to understand how things work. How does this whole psychology and emotions thing work? What do we know about this?
I knew nothing about beforehand and I was absolutely fascinated by it when I understood how psychologists and psychology as a study defines happiness. Essentially, we have four basic emotions that we feel. If we're wrong, we want to correct that, and we become angry, but if we go too far on that spectrum, it turns to aggression. Aggression is a form of “over-response” if you will.
That means that there's a proportion and adequate amount of anger in the situation that triggers it. The same for sadness. When we experience loss, we feel sad. However, if we allow sadness to go too far, we end up with depression. Then we have anxiety and fear and so on. As I learned this, I asked the psychologist who I was seeing at the time "OK. So what about happiness? How do I become happy? How do I go from happy to joy?"
They said, "Happiness doesn't work like you have a little happiness, and you can turn it up. Happiness is actually a direct response of the relative absence of the other three." That blew my mind.
I think everyone wants to be happy. I would hope they do. I would want happiness for other people. How you do that is maybe by finding ways of allowing people to feel just a proportional or appropriate amount that they need of anger, of sadness, of anxiety in a specific situation. But try to remove the risk of over-compensation of that emotion for them.
In my own life, I would be successful if I manage to do that in every possible way. I think what would make me feel successful is if I could do that for as many people as possible that I come into contact with or that I have an impact on, whether that's through my profession. Quite often, I'm looking at business process improvement, and that change sometimes can mean that people could lose their jobs.
That doesn't mean that you can't do it in such a way that you remember that human component. You try to make that journey on the Kübler-Ross curve a little easier, because the grief curve is very much the same curve you see people have to go through for any big change in their life - professional or personal.
Making that journey a little easier and realizing that it isn't linear for me, that's success. Making change better, easier – having a happier outcome basically.
Is there anything new that you're working on or that you're involved in that you'd like to share?
That's a really broad question. Give me a moment to think here. There's nothing maybe necessarily new but I would like to kind of sum it up by saying that we've talked about social media, we've talked about the impact of Covid-19 on society and the responses that there are and so on. I think we need to start putting “people” central to those responses. I'm a process guy, right? Always thinking in terms of SIPOCs - a supplier and an input to the process, and then an output and a customer.
I think we need to start really thinking about those suppliers and those customers. We need to have a conversation about how best to link them up. Everything we do in life is a process, right? Whether it's when you get up in the morning and make breakfast or how you get to work or whatever. These processes can be defined, and they can be written down, and they can be explained, and we can analyze them. Too often I think that the conversation is supplier-focused.
I think we really need to return to customer-focused. When people were running around and thinking about lockdowns and whatnot and saying, “what about the economy? We need to get ‘back to work!’” I think we really lost sight of the fact that the economy should actually benefit the people who live in that society. If you start to not put people first, well you're not going to have any economy left anyway.
I think we really need to have a conversation about what we want to achieve because we have a choice at the moment. I think it's a huge challenge in our professional lives, in our personal lives, in the world around us. In general, we should remember that we always need to interact with people and we should put them central to all the decisions that are facing us.