101 – Introducing Sue Johnson: Corporate Insights into Communicating the Value of Technology for Social Impact

[00:00:00] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s David Stern. I’m a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my absolute delight to be here today with Sue Johnson, one of our new non executive directors. I suppose not completely new anymore. You’ve been with us for quite a few months. Sue, welcome.

[00:00:26] Sue: Hello, thank you, David. Yes, I think June was when we officially started. It has been a few months now, so I’m getting to learn a lot about IDEMS and the team, which has been really interesting for me.

[00:00:40] David: One of the things which instigated this episode is we were together face to face, really, for the first time for an extended period just last week at our full team meeting. Of course, this is not going to be just last week by the time I release this episode, because it’s going to take a bit of processing. But we were face to face together for the first time and it really was so valuable just having your eyes on the room, seeing, commenting on what you were observing.

And this is exactly why we wanted to bring in non executive directors to help guide us, to help us in this sort of transition period as we’re looking to grow. But what I don’t quite understand is why were you interested in the first place? What is it about IDEMS that sort of caught your interest and helped you to join us?

[00:01:22] Sue: Yeah that’s quite a story. I officially retired three years ago, which is a term I hate but I had worked for a large corporate IT company for a very long time and felt it was time to step away from that. So I spent a year or so really just finding my feet, having spent a long time being very stressed in the corporate world and was looking to get involved in something voluntary. Scouring websites looking at things like being a trustee of a charity, that sort of thing, I found your advert, I guess you’d call it, for non executive directors.

And I read about your company and what you were looking for in directors to come and help you. And it ticked pretty much all the boxes of my experience and skill set that I had. So I kept looking for a while, did I want to be a trustee of the scouts or the RSPCA or whatever else? And I kept coming back to this because it was such a good fit for the skills and the experience that I’ve got.

The thing that particularly appealed to me about it was your focus on social impact, the fact that you are a not for profit, and the reason why you are in business. And I found that very refreshing in a world that can be very cutthroat and commercial and certainly very different than the environment I had spent a large part of my career in. So that was very appealing, and I wanted to find out more, so I contacted you, and Danny, and Kate, and the rest, as they say, is kind of history.

But it was your reason for existing, and your purpose in life, that was the really appealing thing to me.

[00:02:59] David: I think this is where we’re very grateful, we ended up getting so many more non executive directors than we anticipated because of the interesting people who applied, like yourself. As you say, your corporate background, in many ways, you were doing things which relate to what we’re trying to do, but from a corporate perspective. A big part of what we feel we need is to understand better how to lean into the business side of what we do. And we don’t want to just become corporate, that would be totally against our purpose.

But we do recognise that we need to work with corporates. We need to understand how what we’re doing fits in into the sort of more corporate world in different ways. And so having someone like yourself with that wealth of experience, who knows that but is interested in trying to do things differently and seeing how we’re trying to do things differently, this was just, oh, it was great.

So we were delighted to have your application and going through the process as we’ve got to know you. It’s been great. So thank you for joining. Thank you for joining us in general. Thank you for joining me on this episode.

And I guess my next question is, you’ve now sort of been digging in a bit. Is it, from what you understood of our perspective, you know, our purpose, which is why you joined, you’ve now met quite a lot of our team, how does it match? How does the reality match up with that initial interest?

[00:04:21] Sue: Good question. Yes, I think it does very much. It was really interesting to come along last week and meet all of the team or a large proportion of the team I think were there last week. Really interesting just to be in the room watching how you all work together and interact, it was a joy to see. Your team is incredibly talented. They’re very motivated, very driven, very focused. I think one thing that struck me and the other NED who was there last week was how many hats you all wear, busy doing all sorts of things. And not just the day job or even the day job plus a bit more, but the day job plus five or six or seven different things too.

And hearing about the projects and passion the whole of your team have for what they’re doing on a daily basis, the fact that they are interested in communities and issues and problems the other side of the world, and they are driven to work really hard, they all appear to be working incredibly hard to try and solve those problems, with technology that they know about.

So it was very impressive. I sat there thinking, what a great team that you have and how lovely that they are all that motivated and driven in this day and age. So yeah, very impressed.

[00:05:33] David: Thank you. I must say, we’re very proud of the team as a whole. We don’t quite know how we’ve been able to sort of identify people, but the team as it’s come together, and as you say, the different hats that people have taken on within that team, we’re really grateful for. And I think one thing you mentioned when we were talking together there about this many hats is this fact that in some sense, once people get too many hats, there’s this risk of actually them losing track of the things they need to be doing. And I very much understand that and recognise that.

One of the things which I found very interesting is that, as a whole, and I think this comes back to the motivation within the team and the understanding within the team, which maybe is related to the transparency, the things they drop will always be add ons, which is what I’m really grateful for.

Then the danger, of course, with that is that when we’ve got our important external deliverables, if they get dropped, that messes us up as an organisation. And when you’ve got many hats, you have to be ready that some of them are going to get dropped. And I think you might have heard about our sort of staff databases, it was called, and how often that’s been dropped.

And this is the reality that when people do have these many hats there are things which are not a priority, which can’t be made a priority. But that recognition of how having that is actually also motivational for the team.

And so I guess my next question to you really is, as we were digging into some of the different topics with the team, one of the roles that I think yourself and, as you mentioned, the other NED who was in the room were able to play was then representing some of the discussions we were having to the wider community of NEDs. My question to you is, looking at that motivation which is there internally, we have been singularly unsuccessful at communicating this well externally. I feel that the NEDs have had to dig pretty hard to find that interest. And this came up quite a bit about how should we be communicating?

And I found it was extremely valuable in the last week that the two of you were there face to face, were then actually helping us to communicate better to those who are there virtually. So I’d really like to get just any thoughts you have about that challenge that we faced to communicate what we do and how we work and the essence of it. So any observations you have on that would be great.

[00:08:03] Sue: Yes, certainly. I think it’s always difficult when you’ve got people who are very technical working in the weeds of a project to be able to bring yourself up to a higher level in order to articulate the big picture message. The history I had in the role I had in the corporate world, we had the same issues and we used to describe it as people needing to be T shaped.

So you need to have the broad view, as well as the in depth deep dive. And that’s very difficult to find in individual people. It’s a skill that I guess people learn as they go along, in that if you want to be successful, you have to be able to pull yourself up to that thousand foot view and be able to articulate the value of what you’re doing to the fund holders, to your clients, to whoever it is.

In our case, it was VPs or whatever, but it’s the same thing. If you’ve got five minutes to get across your idea, your view, what it is you’re trying to achieve, you have to be able to boil that down to language that those people can understand in a very short space of time. And it is very difficult and it is very challenging and it’s certainly something that the teams I have worked with over the past have struggled with.

And as a manager and a management team, we would spend ages trying to whittle that down into something that we could put in front of a VP or an external client in a few number of slides or a very few number of sentences. And it isn’t easy, and I think it’s something that probably, certainly I and some of the other non exec directs can help with.

I don’t think it’s a skill that comes naturally to people who are very technical because the whole language that you would naturally use with your maths backgrounds and, for me, the computing background, is not something that easily translates to business language for someone who’s wanting to know whether they should invest money or spend money or write a contract.

So it is one of the more challenging things I think of the tech industry and maths, physics, electronics, whatever it is. I think that is one of the much more challenging aspects of it is how do you actually articulate that in a way that is meaningful. I don’t know if that answers your question.

[00:10:27] David: It does explain why we’re having this problem. What I observed is that you were already helping in that when we had the other NEDs come in virtually. As you said, the NEDs, yourself and others, can help with this. Is it about us building those skills now or us leaning into your skills to do this?

That’s I guess part of the question, I’m interested in your thoughts on this. How much is it about taking people who have those skills who are now part of the sort of extended group and leaning into their skills or leaning into them to help us build the skills within the core team? Or you might not have an answer to that.

[00:11:04] Sue: I think it’s probably both. I think in the shorter term, leaning into the skills that we have would be helpful to you immediately in that you don’t have to then build those skills immediately. I don’t know all the other NEDs particularly well but I’m getting to know them and I think they all have skills in that area and could help with that. And I think initially we would all be very willing to help with that, but I think it’s probably a skill set we can help your team to learn.

It takes time and it takes practice. And I think that’s certainly something I and some of the others I’m sure would be very happy to help with. And I say, we’d be very willing to work one on one on small groups to achieve that. But certainly, initially, I and I suspect the others, would be very happy to help do that for you in the initial stages.

[00:11:57] David: And I was hoping you might answer that, because my next question is to lean into that.

[00:12:03] Sue: Okay.

[00:12:03] David: One of the big areas we spent a whole day with you on R-Instat, which is one of the topics where we recognize the amount of work that’s gone in. There is something really substantial here, but it is not ready to be commercialised. And so we put a lot of thought in before you came in to think about what are the missing steps to be able to commercialise this. And then yourself and other colleagues were very successful at pushing us to say, well you’re still not communicating this very well.

And by the time we got to actually communicating to the other NEDs in the evening, actually I felt that the two of you did such a good job of actually helping them access information that we were not communicating well. So why is R-Instat interesting? Why should we care about it? Why are we putting effort into it? Can you help me to understand that from your perspective now with what you’ve taken out?

[00:12:59] Sue: Yes, so having spent the, I think the best part of Thursday, listening to information about it, and the demonstration by Roger and your team was I think key to both me and Rayden understanding what this actually is. Because while we’ve heard about it before, I don’t think either of us really grasped how useful it was and what it actually did. We found that very useful.

So, my understanding of it is this is the tool that has been in existence for many years in different guises. It has evolved over time to be a tool that you use across many different projects and many different environments. And it is very useful in those situations to quickly analyse data without having to have people who understand coding.

So they can click on menus, they can put in things that they want to find from the data very easily from drop down menus and menu driven interfaces to analyse the data in a way that is useful to them in their situation.

And from what we understood, this now needs reworking because R isn’t necessarily the language of choice. Python and some other things have come along and can be more useful in certain situations. In order to do that, you need to refactor the whole thing. And you’ve got, sounds like you’ve got a very good idea of how you would like to do that.

I wasn’t quite sure that whether you really decided how you want the look and feel of it to be. But I don’t think that’s important at this point. And I think we spent some time working with you to get to some fairly simple high level sentences that fund holders would grasp and understand. So one of the big things I think you were trying to achieve with this was to make it web based, cloud based, and therefore could be delivered as software as a service.

I think it took us quite a while to get to that point in terms of the discussion, but we did get there. I think that was a light bulb moment for Rayden and for me. It was just like, okay, now we get it. Now we understand why you want to redo this. Because while the menus currently look a bit clunky, they’re very functional. So that’s in itself, not a justification.

The fact that you need to use these backend different languages. Yes, we got that. But again, did that justify the whole rework? But the fact that you could roll it out to people remotely as software as a service, your services in the cloud have just resonated with us in a way that made sense.

It was a very useful session. The actual demo itself really helped us grasp what it is you’re doing with this and how it’s used in some of the very low resource areas and some of the very remote parts of the world and the use it has. So that was very valuable, that day.

[00:15:59] David: And I think it’s worth, it’s really interesting to hear back the sort of things that we discussed and this idea that actually once you understood that the improvements we were going to make would mean that it was software as a service, you then understood, okay, that’s how then the business models come to be able to get return on investment on what you’d actually be doing on that in this sort of way.

And I think that, as you say, yes, we had that, we were aware of that, but we were never articulating it in terms of that simple fact. And it’s so important, just for clarity, from a business perspective, that’s where the business models can then obviously follow.

The other thing I think was really interesting in the discussion is that when you were describing it, I could have associated that to SPSS or to any other stats package, which has been around for a long time as a menu driven system.

And I think this is good to hear in the sense that actually your description of it doesn’t differentiate it from, in some sense, established software which is doing this. Because in some ways that’s what it is, an open source software which will be serving the role and part of the motivation is the fact that these software who are not open source but which are really useful for just standard data analytics are needed in low resource environments.

The thing I didn’t hear, which I want to feed in again, is this key point where that’s where we started, but on the journey, we actually found that the innovations we did within that, aren’t just useful in low resource environments. And this is why we need software as a service, because we actually find that compared to the stats and data packages which are out there there are certain innovations related to working with multi layered data and the specific tailored analyses and these tailored components where this is needed everywhere.

And that’s sort of where suddenly we recognise that oh, it can’t be used everywhere yet because as you said it looks, I liked your word, clunky. It’s a good, it’s an appropriate word. It looks like software which was designed a little while ago, even though it’s not that old in its current form. There’s good reasons behind that. But if we’re going to get it to be able to be useful as software as a service and actually achieve its potential, which we think is extremely wide, and we did dig into a few particular audiences, then the key is the redesign.

And again, you nailed it. We know it needs a redesign, but there’s many ways that this could happen and we’ve certainly not decided on exactly what that look and feel should be. In fact, more than that, the work that we’ve been doing in other areas, our current belief is that it shouldn’t look or feel in one way.

We could actually have it fitting in different ways for different audiences and having multiple looks and feels. That’s all we know. We don’t know what any individual one looks like. So in essence, you’ve captured almost everything, explained much better than I’ve ever done before, with one slight exception, which was the new usefulness in high resource environments. And you’re explaining it better than I’ve ever done in the years and years I’ve been trying to do it. This is why we need you and others like you, so thank you very much.

[00:19:23] Sue: Oh, you’re welcome. I think it was really interesting to have the discussion last week about the low resource uses first and then have the discussion about how this could work in these other environments. And I think those discussions were very interesting and very useful as well, because they certainly helped me get to the, where could this go, and how could it be, in business terms, bringing the revenue stream, how can it be self supporting and then bring in the investment to keep developing it for the different niche areas that we were looking at and discussing.

And I think we came up with a couple that would be definitely worth investigating because they could be good revenue streams up front. I think we needed to have this specific low resource discussion first in order for us to then get to that next, okay, where else could it be used? How could it be useful? How could it be used in an environment that would bring in revenue that would help fund it.

So I think it was a natural progression. Certainly for me, it made sense doing it in that order, having come in fairly cold in the last month or two to what it is and what you’re trying to achieve with it.

[00:20:35] David: Yeah, and I think what you’re highlighting, which is correct, is that the use case that we presented is related to some of our climate work.

[00:20:43] Sue: Yes. And the important thing for me, the fact that you now have the history of having done lots of different client engagements in different areas with different focus, and this tool has been useful across those different areas and different clients, sometimes in very different ways, but it’s been the common factor that has helped you deliver the bit you were committed to deliver across those projects. And that is the value that I saw of moving it forward into a more product like environment.

[00:21:17] David: Yeah, absolutely.

The other point which came out of that, which is something that we’ve been really struggling to communicate in the past as well, and I’m sure I will be doing an episode with Kate on this in the near future in much more detail, but it’s really the way that we are beginning to understand that when we’re working on these complex problems, there is no technology solution which is what’s needed to solve the complex problem. They’re just removing a blockage somewhere in that complex problem.

So it is the fact that we are building these reusable tools, which almost always, we are finding every tool we’re building, whether it’s R-Instat , which relates to data, analysing data in different forms and making that easier and more accessible to people who would otherwise maybe not have access, in certain ways, or whether it’s the app builder work that we have, where we’re actually building apps in ways which again make it more accessible to people who would otherwise not be contributing in the same way.

We find that what all of these are doing, they’re needed in almost every area we’re working in, and they’re just part of the many things that are needed in terms of the technology, where the technology can help unblock different things. The technology is never the solution, it’s just an unblocker, you know, for the big problems we work on.

And this is what we’ve always struggled to communicate. And what I found really interesting with I think part of the insights that you and Rayden were bringing was this aspect that, actually, that wasn’t challenging to understand. The impression I got, that this actually, oh yeah, of course, that makes perfect sense, whereas we’ve never been able to articulate this before, and I felt that aspect that if our main goal isn’t to build tech but it’s to have social impact then the tech has to be sort of taking the back seat in some sense, we have to build tech which gets out and it’s a product and you know we are in that sense a startup.

But embedding it as we have in these bigger projects, which is about achieving social impact, that’s been central to who we are. And I was surprised that that was relatively easy to communicate. Do you want to comment on that at all?

[00:23:30] Sue: Definitely. So I think the story of your company and why you exist is one of your key values. And I think that to me, it’s the fact you are solving real world problems. That’s the interesting part. The technology and the tools you use to do that are great, but they’re not the reason for you being. The reason for you being is to get involved in the projects that have social impact and make a difference to real people’s lives on the ground.

And to me, that’s your unique differentiator between why you’re in existence and why other companies, organisations, are in existence. And the tools and the technology are just part of what you’ve got in your kit bag to make that happen. And you need them to be as usable and reusable as possible so you can make the most of them in the projects that you are engaged with, where the focus is having social impact.

That’s how I see it. And I come from a technology background and I’ve had lots of people over the years tell me that this bit of tech is great and this tool is wonderful and this bit of software is brilliant. And yes, but what are you going to do with it? And it’s what you’re going to do with it and what you’re going to achieve with it that’s important. And the story and the impact and the, how are you going to change the real world problem? That’s the interesting part. The technology and the product is interesting, but it’s not your reason for being.

That’s how I’ve seen what I’ve seen and heard from you to this point.

[00:25:08] David: Absolutely. And that’s really nicely articulated because the point is, which is so important, is that if we are going to succeed as a company, we’re finding, the reason we’re building tech is because actually the tech solutions that are out there aren’t fit for purpose for the problems we’re trying to solve.

And what we found is that the more we get into that, the more consistently the tech which is out there is not fit for purpose in similar ways, consistently in the way we’re wanting to work. And so what I find is really interesting is that our reason for being is to be able to use our skills as mathematicians, as data scientists, as mathematical scientists in general, for social impact.

And what we’ve ended up finding is that within that, we’re happy to use whatever tools already out there, but the tools for the needs of our contexts, they’re not fit for purpose. And so we actually spend a lot of our time building tools, we always knew that there were some tools that were needed, but quite how many, and in quite how many contexts, and that joined together thinking to be able to solve, to actually, not solve, but contribute to moving the dial on these really complex problems.

So no, it’s great, it’s amazing how much you’ve understood with so little, you know, opportunity to really dig in. It’s a credit to your observation skills, so thank you.

[00:26:36] Sue: You’re welcome. Glad it’s been helpful and useful.

[00:26:42] David: We’re actually a little longer than I’m normally supposed to be. I get told off when I make episodes too long. But I’ve enjoyed talking to you so much. This has been great. Are there any last thoughts or last things you’d like to share before we wrap up?

[00:26:56] Sue: Only that it was very interesting to come along last week. It was very insightful and that I, and hopefully along with the other NEDs, are looking forward to getting more involved and actually adding some value to what you’re doing.

So no, thank you very much for having me today to talk about this.

[00:27:11] David: It’s been an absolute pleasure today, last week, in general. We are so grateful for yourself and the other non executive directors who have joined us. This is a process that, when we started, which is over six years ago now, we knew we wanted something like this, but we’d never quite known how to put it in place.

As you said, we put out an advert to seek for non executive directors. And the response we had, we couldn’t be more grateful. We ended up taking nine when we were thinking of taking four. But it’s just a testament to the amazing people like yourself who were interested, engaged, and had skills that were clearly complementary to where we are and needed for where we’re going.

Thank you. It’s been an absolute pleasure and we will speak again soon. Probably not in an episode, but in general. Thank you.

[00:28:07] Sue: Thank you David.