An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Collaboration — it’s not working together, that’s teamwork. It’s not aligning and helping each other, that’s coordination and cooperation. It’s not engaging with lots of people, that’s networking. Collaboration is about working out loud, just like scientists did in times of old to solve big complex mathematical equations. Sending their thoughts and insights to each other until together they solved the problem.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Tammy Watchorn.
Dr Tammy Watchorn trained as a scientist before moving into the complex landscape of healthcare to lead change. After many enthusiastic starts that led to ineffectual results, she slowly began to realise that her hard-won accreditation in the process of change leadership was incomplete. She worked out that the only way to really achieve success was to focus on people first and not process. She learned to change how people worked from within the complex healthcare system without drawing undue attention, under the radar from those who were resistant to any change whatsoever. By using stealth-like “ninja” moves that focused on the people who were blockers and “naysayers” she was able to create a momentum of small but significant disruptions that led to some incredible outcomes.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I started my working life as a life-sciences scientist, but I found I was far too impatient for the job. I got bored while I had to wait for cells to grow only to find the experiment hadn’t worked. I knew I wanted to do something that added back and gave real value and fast and so I moved into the National Health Service in the UK to lead projects and programs that would improve patient services and access to care. Being both impatient and easily bored I kept looking for new challenges and difficult things that required new thinking and a little disruption — this meant I moved from department to department frequently. Finally, they bestowed on me the grand title of “Head of Innovation”. There was little by way of objectives other than an instruction to “go forth and innovate”. I could easily have turned the role into a dull procurement exercise of buying trendy and shiny new gadgets and widgets that everyone “ohhh’d” and “ahhh’d” over but would never adapt to or even use. But that isn’t my style. Instead, I decided to use it as an opportunity to shake things up and to focus more on the how and not the what. I felt that it was the how we did things and how we worked that really needed disrupting. We needed innovation to shift us from a slow grinding bureaucratic, hierarchical and process driven organisation to an energised curious group of people who could respond to the needs of the service and patients at speed. Once we had a better way of how to work, we would then find the gadgets and widgets that might help these new services and would be ready to adopt them with open arms.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
One of the biggest disruptive moves I made (and continue to make within organizations) was the introduction of a completely new way of working. I didn’t do what you’d expect and find some “amazing” software that would overnight magically transform us and push it as a big system rollout to change the culture, something that would typically take three years to do only to find out no one used the system! Instead, I focused on quiet, but determined, stealth or ninja-like moves that helped individuals and teams to lead their own small disruptions. I wanted to create a movement with momentum.
I had to persuade people to work differently. I had to provide education on how to do this. And I was in a risk-averse culture where people were scared to experiment in front of each other. So how was I to achieve this? By luck I happened upon a sandpit where I could get people to learn, try out new things and get real work done out of the glare of colleagues’ disapproving stares.
One of my biggest and most successful ninja moves was to lure people/teams, one at a time, into a three-dimensional virtual world where we could work differently without people in the real world seeing and criticizing. QUBE was created for executive education. This meant that learning new methods and working collaboratively were not just easy but the default. There was a culture you dropped into that was inclusive open and curious and people were empowered to participate autonomously. There was a library of People Engagement Tools that provided a ready “how to” for every objective from planning to decision making. This was supported by whiteboards, bean bags and sticky notes. Unlike normal virtual solutions each person was represented by a colourful, boxy avatar. Your avatar could walk around the rooms usually talking and sharing ideas as you would in the most effective and amazing innovative cultures you can imagine.
I did this long before Covid and the onslaught of Zooms or Mural boards and at a time when Video conferencing was still only used as a last-minute solution that most couldn’t access or work out how to use it even if they did have access. People assumed the only way to collaborate was to be there and that meant for many clinical staff an awful lot of time wasted traveling around the country. My disruptive ninja move was to take them team-by-team, project-by-project, bringing them into this new disruptive space and teaching them new ways to work. I quickly realized we could:
- Do things much more quickly and without the need to travel delivering the same outcome in 60% of the time.
- Be collaborative in the true sense by “working out loud” within teams and with stakeholders in a psychological safe space that encouraged diversity of thinking.
- Learn how to use new world tools that shifted us from bureaucratic project management processes to focusing on what we needed to do and engaging stakeholders as individuals to get them on board with the change.
- Put our new learning straight into practice to get the outcomes we desired.
- Have much more fun doing what we were doing and laughing more than ever. Work suddenly became much more enjoyable. (Often people working on QUBE from their main physical office would be told off by line managers for “being too happy and laughing too loud!”.)
It was so effective people quickly wanted to learn how to facilitate working in this space so they could start to deliver all their projects this way. Team by team behaviors, cultures and ways of working began to change without any “big” mandate and without any of the old-school managers really noticing what we were up to. It therefore became sustainable, easy to grow and was “sticky”. It worked so well disrupting from within that I went off to support other organizations in doing the same and haven’t looked back.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
I remember one event we designed for all senior managers in the old-world days. The CEO wanted us to deliver something on collaboration which as an organization we weren’t good at. We were good at inviting others to hear our ideas and then we would expect them to go off directly and implement them. The event format was: pose a question, let teams discuss, then feedback the key points from a flipchart. Everyone knew what was coming and found it dull. No one ever did anything afterwards so it was pointless.
A few of us got together and decided to disrupt the format. We thought it would be a really good idea to design a lighthearted simulation exercise that would hopefully lead to individual insights that could then be put into practice. The exercise revolved around killer wasps escaping from an exploding volcano creating a national emergency. We set the scene with a video and then put managers into teams representing all the key organizations that would need to collaborate to respond to this emergency. What could go wrong we thought … it will be fun, different to the norm and they’ll get lots of insights and “a-ha” moments.
During the session they collected data having a choice of tweets, scientific data or newspaper headlines. Oddly they all pretty much chose tweets that were intentionally funny but useless and weirdly they all got pretty angry at the lack of usefulness of the tweets. At one point we introduced a vaccine for the killer wasp stings. The scientists in the room argued that we wouldn’t be able to create a vaccine that quickly but compromised on an antidote and were more than happy to accept the live volcano and giant wasps. And when it came to collaborating with each other they just didn’t. They hid data rather than sharing it, some turned it into a competition to see who could “win”, some just shouted, nay screamed, at other teams saying they should tell them what to do. Pretty much all of them, despite being senior managers and leaders decided that in such an event they would be “told what to do” by those really in charge. They were angrier than the angry giant killer wasps. It was a disaster. It was a complete disaster. Both us and the CEO were wide-eyed and dumbfounded.
But what was learning for me? First, never, ever, ever try and be just smart and funny as you could well end up with egg on your face and generate more problems than you started with. Our exercise essentially held a mirror up to the managers, showing them up for what they were. It wasn’t clever or fun. It had the opposite effect of what we’d hoped for. Second, before doing anything like this or any big decision think through what will or might happen next. If I’d done that, we likely wouldn’t have run the session. Third, imagine you are them and what you, as them think of the idea, what do you like or not like and build this into your idea to make it better. And finally work through what they might experience, feel and do next at each stage of the process before testing it on the grumpiest and most stubborn people you know. Developing disruptive ideas with this data and feedback will build a disruptor that delivers rather than just disrupting for disrupting’s sake.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
I’ve been very lucky with mentors — possibly as I have the philosophy “if you don’t ask you don’t get” so when I meet or come across inspiring people I don’t hesitate to make contact. Sir Tim Smit (of the Eden Project) was one such person and he’s supported me over the years on a number of occasions. I was also lucky to have a lot of female leaders in the healthcare sector support me as I tried these ninja moves under the radar. They gave me the confidence and silent “nod” to keep trying to do what I was doing even though I was swimming against the tide.
But the biggest mentor, without doubt is Professor Eddie Obeng who completely changed how I approached and did things. He came to a leadership event and I was hooked by his approach. I then started using his teaching (and QUBE) to make the disruptive shifts I thought were needed. He was so generous with his time and mentoring despite being a high-demand thought leader. A year or so later I heard he was in town and arranged to meet for dinner and that, as they say, was that. I told him I wanted to do more of this great work and he invited me on to some training and a few months later I was working with him and his team helping others do what he’d done for me. Life-changing stuff. And then a few years later, when I was saying how much I’d love to write a book he told me to NEVER write a book as it burns so much time. But I like a challenge. And so I wrote a book which is out in August 2022 called The Change Ninja Handbook a multiple-choice story about disrupting by stealth from within. Eddie really is the ultimate Change Ninja though.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has “withstood the test of time”? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is “not so positive”? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I’m a big fan of the #BeMorePirate movement which is about disruption and rule breaking, with the caveat that we don’t break rules that make sense and have purpose, but we do break rules that are archaic, make no sense and actually prevent good stuff happening. I think that’s what good disruption is about and what is needed within big organizations. The healthcare sector is a good example of something that really needs this type of disruption and rule breaking. Irrelevant of country and how health services are delivered we are in a time of unprecedented demand as we live longer, but have never been more unhealthy (physically and mentally), and have more potential cures and treatments than are reasonably affordable. Not only that, but often the workforce to deliver these services is in short demand. The National Health Service in the UK is often lauded as an exemplary model in that it is free at the point of care for everyone. This is a great value to have for a health service and I totally agree with it. But the underlying structure and delivery model is nearly 75 years old and we live in a very different world now. There are a great many people, like me, trying to change things from within, and this can achieve very good results but the processes and bureaucracy get in the way time after time. A great example is video consultations for patients. They work and save time but were only available in remote and rural settings. Trying to expand this to urban areas just never got through the decision-making bodies … until Covid. Then it was a necessity. And it works and works well. But the rules prevent these types of relatively obvious solutions being scaled up. These are the rules that need breaking but the reality is the entire system needs to be disrupted and designed from scratch based on how we now live.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example for each.
Invisible leadership — you don’t need to take the credit for something if it’s achieving the outcomes you seek. Some of my best outcomes I’ll never be remembered as leading. Some of my ex-colleagues might balk at the idea I lead some of the work. But instead of shouting about my ideas and ploughing ahead I would instead find someone who could champion it. Someone who already had kudos that people would naturally listen to while I did the work behind the scenes that would credit to them. I knew and my close colleagues knew and that was enough.
Smart failure — allowing yourself to get things wrong and learning from it rather than passing it off as failure. It’s definitely the best way to learn and create new neural pathways. The example I gave earlier around the workshop with the killer wasps was definitely a failure in terms of what we’d hoped to achieve, but I learned so much about how I needed to really think about the participants, how to design products, and how to really get people to properly learn in a safe way.
Collaboration — it’s not working together, that’s teamwork. It’s not aligning and helping each other, that’s coordination and cooperation. It’s not engaging with lots of people, that’s networking. Collaboration is about working out loud, just like scientists did in times of old to solve big complex mathematical equations. Sending their thoughts and insights to each other until together they solved the problem.
Ignore the doubts — they are just thoughts to stop you doing what you need to do. You don’t need to know what will happen next. You don’t need all the answers. But if it feels right trust it and ignore the doubts. Sure, you can de-risk an unknown as much as possible, have a contingency plan if needed but trust your instincts, ignore the doubts and go for it. Just make sure you engage the right people before you do. Leaving a nice paid job where I had autonomy and where I was making progress in a system that was crying out for these disruptions but where the system did everything to stop me was a hard decision and I was full of doubts about an unknown future. But I instinctively knew I could do much, much more by leaving and doing it from the outside in where I was no longer party to the rules and regulations. It felt right, the doubts were just noise, I trusted that it would work out and it really did.
Curiosity — stay open and curious. Don’t limit yourself to one idea or one train of thought. If you keep all your options open you will discover new things, new people and new thinking that you might never have come across if you are single minded with a specific plan. It is likely I never would have come across the neuroscience elements of what is now a large part of what I deliver for change managers in healthcare without that curiosity. It also taught me how to “hack my brain” quite easily which means I now see everything, even the biggest of crisis, as a potential opportunity for something new and interesting
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
I really feel I’ve just got started. I now have a complimentary kitbag of tools to get others started on their journey to disrupt and #BeMorePirate. I focus on new ways of working (on QUBE), Lego Serious Play for whole systems thinking and Neuroscience for leading change to help individuals and teams shake things up a bit. The Change Ninja Handbook, I think, is a start of what next in regard to this stealth-like approach for disruption and I’m developing 3D interactive masterclasses and also have the idea to develop a board game. If I can build confidence and provide the right tools and support for small disruptions, and do this across organisations starting many small fires then a movement is created that can, Ninja-like, disrupt from within without anyone noticing how or what you did. And the outcomes will speak for themselves. I might not change the entire healthcare system in the UK but I’m having a jolly good crack at it!
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
I know I’ve mentioned Eddie Obeng a lot but his World After Midnight video and TED Talk really inspired and motivated me at the start of this journey. It made me realize it wasn’t just me that thought everyone else was mad.
My thinking wasn’t wrong. And it gave me the courage to learn how to change things and then the tools to help me challenge things in the right way. I didn’t always get It right but there was a lot of very smart failure.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I love to run. I began when I was older. I now also do wild swimming and stay relatively fit. I remember before I did my first half marathon stating firmly that I couldn’t do it. And a friend disagreed replying, “You can’t do it yet!”.
Knowing that there is more possibility than you can imagine from growing is very heartwarming.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Shake up the healthcare, pharma and food industry. The last two drive many of the issues our healthcare services are facing. The food industry is continuously pushing a poor diet, particularly in the west. The pharma industry is continuously pushing pills to fix us and when they make us unwell more pills to counteract the side effects. We have lost, at least in the West, at a societal level the energy, knowledge, motivation to keep ourselves well and instead use the health service to patch us up rather than fixing the root cause. We have outsourced our health to someone else.
If we could create a movement on a big enough scale to redesign services that were aimed at keeping us well, rather than patching us up, there would be far less demand on health services meaning the model would be more sustainable and those that did need treatment for unpreventable illness or accidents would get the best treatment possible.
It’s a massive change but with enough small fires burning, and a growing band of change ninjas to disrupt from within it might just be possible to accelerate it in the right direction.
How can our readers follow you online?
www.change-ninja.com or www.tammywatchorn.com
Twitter @tamwatchorn
Linked in tammywatchorn
I also write the PET of the week blog on Linked in
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Tammy Watchorn On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
