 Hello, good afternoon. My name is Philip Preston and I'd like to welcome you to today's webinar express leading through turn around and transformation organized by CIM Southwest. Before we get started, I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate. The presentation will last approximately 30 to 35 minutes, followed by a short 10 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by typing into the Ask a Question chat box in the Q&A panel, which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen if watching on a laptop or across the top if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and we'll attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A session at the end. If you want to show your thoughts on social media, we're using the hashtag CIM events. The webinar has been recorded and we'll share the link to the recording with you over the next few days. And finally, you'll also be emailed a short feedback survey after the event, which would love you to complete. It'll only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous, so please do let us know your thoughts. So, I'd now like to hand over to Gordon Seapright, who was our guest speaker today. Well, thank you very much, Phil. This is me. I'm now Chief Executive of Creative Land Trust. I've only been there a year, so it is not yet time for a turnaround or transformation. But what I am going to talk about is some of the stuff I've done before that. And immediately before, and up to about a year ago, I was the Chief Executive of the Eden Project down in Cornwall. I was there for about five years. Before that, I ran the National Cycling Charity and spent a period running the Royal Horticultural Society. So why should I be able to say anything about transformations? Well, here's the great transformation. The first of three transformations I'll talk about at Eden. And this is the one that I think gives me and I hope everybody faith in the possibility of achieving the impossible through transformation. So this is a picture of the landscape that became Eden from just when the idea had come up. And it's an insane idea to take the most destroyed landscape in the poorest part of the UK. So there's an hostile area of Cornwall and turn it into something really, really special. It was a China clay quarry. To get China clay, you blast away all the rock with high pressure water hoses and you are left ultimately with a big hole. And the big hole has no rock, no soil, therefore no plants, therefore no insects, therefore no birds, got no life of any kind. So this is probably the finest example of how man can destroy a landscape. And so the first transformation that Eden had was moving it to this. This photo was taken last year. I mean it's now an absolutely beautiful place. It's got the world's largest rainforest in captivity in a bubble there. It's got mature plants all the way around. It's described as the eighth wonder of the world. There's 5000 rock pins holding up the sides. The bottom is 14 meters below the water table. So there's all sorts of interesting engineering going on. And more importantly it shows that which is possible and it was intended to show people that we shouldn't despair. There's never much of a mess that people have made of the earth. If we all work together in communities and in harmony with nature, then it is possible to save a place. And that was the first transformation and 2 million people came the first year and it was an amazing success and it has transformed Cornwall as well as the Eden project. But then came the need for the second transformation because over time there was a bit of drift and a lack of investment in the site and the visitor numbers fall away. However, completely wonderful the attraction is people have seen it once and they thought that they'd seen it enough and we reached the point that we were down around 700,000 visitors a year. And that really wasn't enough to pay the bills and started getting a bit of a circle of problems with the debt levels growing. Therefore the lack of investment in the proposition therefore fewer people coming to see it. And also a loss of support from the from the local community who taking it for granted for a number of reasons that I can go into and a bit of a drift away from what the initial purpose was. And Eden got into a bit of trouble and it was still bumping along OK. And then we had 2012, which where there was a sort of perfect storm and combination of the Olympics, hoovering up all the tourists and unfavorable weather meant that Eden really hit them buffers financially. And it was time for another turnaround. They began just before I arrived bringing about a turnaround and I'll say something about that turnaround. And my observation is that turnarounds have three phases. There's the one that everybody knows about the one that makes the newspapers the financial turnaround. And at Eden that was fairly dramatic. It was about driving down the debt and therefore being making it possible to focus whatever expenditure there was focus that expenditure on investment on stuff that people wanted to come and see. Including events being ruthless on other costs and therefore starting to get the visitor numbers up and getting into a virtual circle of increased profitability and reduced indebtedness less money going out in interest payments. That's the bit of turnaround that everybody is I guess familiar with and it's a story that you often hear about corporate entities as well as charities. And I would say without being glib about it that's the straightforward bit of turnaround. It's not easy, but it is fairly simple. Spend less, focus your investment. My learning at Eden was that there are two other phases of turnaround which are trickier. And the second is how the rest of the world feels about you. And we found that the rest of the world didn't like us quite as much as we thought. And we look back afterwards and we got a good understanding of that. We realized that as one of my colleagues always said we'd sort of behave like unruly teenagers as though the world owes us a bit of a living and was lucky to have us there. And actually when push came to shove, we didn't have quite as many friends as we had hoped. We couldn't get quite as much support either from local government initially or from national government. That came as a bit of a shock. So then we had to do a lot of work on changing the way the rest of the world felt about us. And that actually meant doing the hard yards of going out there and changing our attitude and showing that to people. All my colleagues, we all served on any number of other boards to try and make ourselves useful. And we turned Eden into a bit of a convening space. We used to say if Cornwall was a village, we wanted to be the village hall where people came together. And over time, we felt we made Cornwall fall back in love with us. But even that's not the hardest part of the transformation. The hardest part of the transformation is how you feel about yourselves. And it was unsurprising that after a couple of hundred redundancies, people at Eden felt pretty battered. And they were finding it hard to feel proud of the place they worked. And so a huge amount of effort went in to turning that around. And I had learned something in my time at the Royal Horticultural Society on what that meant. It meant face to face time. Eden has a little bit more than 500 staff. That is not so many that you can't actually speak to everybody in small groups and talk about what's going on. And bang on about what the plan is to turn it around and get everybody engaged in that plan. And crucially give everybody a clear focus. The focus we came up with was this. And it might surprise you, but although everybody originally knew what Eden was there for, there hadn't been what I would call a strategy. There hadn't been a clear plan of what we were going to do. And the danger there is that you're relying on everybody's shared understanding without knowing that it exists. And you have the risk that people start doing stuff that they know kind of fits with the ethos. But effectively it's pursuing hobbies. It's doing it in the most well-intentioned way. But you can end up with a group of intellectual magpies who are all running towards the latest shiny thing. And that matters because when you've got limited resources, you need to focus them in the right place. And so a huge part of what we did, that first couple of years of turnaround, was actually the very basic thing of clarifying what are we here for, agreeing it, finding a form of shared words that we could all use and getting everybody lined up behind it and making sure and there is no limit to the number of times that you can say this stuff and share this stuff and share conversations about it. And so at the bottom of the slide there you can see that we came up with a strap line which was around transformation. And we went through our second transformation. And that is a nice recovery story. But it's not a recovery story that ends there. Von Moltker, the general, doesn't honestly have many things to commend him. But he did say this very profound thing, that no plan reaches with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy. Mike Tyson, the boxer, put it in another way. He said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Well, that was the experience for us. And we had no sooner got our place in shape than these things happened. Now, Eden is there to show the power of transformation. It's an environmental charity. And yet we still found ourselves a little bit wrong-footed by a 15-year-old, she was then Swedish schoolgirl, and by the Extinction Rebellion guys. We found that actually the stuff we'd been talking about in what we thought was a very clear way for 18 years at that point, well, we were at risk of being pushed aside, of being ignored, of being irrelevant in the debate, because the world had moved on. And we had to figure out what we were going to do about that. For the benefit of anybody who's interested in business school diagrams, I put it onto this. We described it as our pivot point, that our start point was that we had become stable. We had looked after the organization that we were to the point that we could feel confident again. And then we bumped into this massive discontinuity, that the world recognized a climate emergency. And there were other things going on as well. The key one being that we needed to show that we were still relevant. And we were at real risk of not bearing that. So we had to figure out what to do about that threat. And the thing that we had learned from our previous transformation, our second transformation, about bringing everybody together came in again. We brought the whole team together. We brought everybody into gatherings where we talked about this issue. And we were on some occasions quite surprised by the results. We found, for example, that loads of the Eden team were urging us to declare a climate emergency. And of course, a lot of organizations were doing that. It surprised us because we kind of thought that we declared a climate emergency by founding the place. But actually, we needed to be explicit. And we pulled together all the stuff that came from our team. We wrote up another strategy. We created an action plan. It sounds like jargon, but actually we needed a plan because Eden's a complex place. And we needed to focus all our resources and all the possible channels that we had on bringing about the changes that we needed to retain our relevance and make a difference. After all, nobody works in a charity, getting paid too little and working too long hours. If they're not passionate about making a difference. So we did a number of things. One of the most important things in the Eden year is the summer program. In simple terms, Eden needs to get about a quarter of a million people through the doors during the summer holiday six weeks in order to fund what's going on during the rest of the year. And that's the nature of business in Cornwall. But we were perhaps weren't using our time with those quarter of a million people as well as we could have done to tell the stories that really mattered. So we changed our summer program. And instead of doing a blockbuster on the stuff we had done before like space or dinosaurs, we did a rather daring summer program on the subject of biodiversity and mass extinction. It's not classic box office, but actually we found that it gave us the opportunity to share thoughts and concerns and hope with that quarter of a million people. And while they were there, seeing what we can share with them about the planet, seeing a rainforest in the southwest of the UK, learning stories about the charities who are doing great work and the countries who are doing great work, but also learning about what we're losing and how quickly we're losing it. We asked them a load of questions and we gave them a load of tools. We set up these kiosks where people could get advice on what they could do to make a difference. We called it make the change, just little things that they could do. Now we weren't trying to be po-faced about it. The people who come to Eden in that summer six weeks, generally it's their one holiday week of the year. God holidays, remember that? And they would come and not want to be preached at. So it was more about giving people that sense of hope and possibility of what they could do and therefore showing them that Eden had something to tell them. And we got people to make pledges if they wanted to, and almost two-thirds of people who came made a pledge. And it might be as simple as I'm going to put my recycling in the right bin. It all helps. It all adds up. And inspired by our experience with that, we decided to carry it through to our other programs when we were really busy. So this is a picture actually of that year's Christmas campaign. And we've been inside one of the biomes. We put massive artworks by an artist called Luke Jerem. It's called, as you can imagine, Earth. And we would hang that up so that, and it is huge, and play lights on it. So that at that moment when people were perhaps listening to a choir and drinking some mild wine, they also had a reason to reflect on the fragility and beauty of our planet. And there were a load of other activities around this that were relevant to it. The Father Christmas story had a strong environmental action angle. It gave kids something they could take away and do that would make a difference. Just out of frame here, there's actually a Christmas jumper swap shop. So instead of going to Asda to buy a new hideous acrylic Christmas jumper, you could swap your hideous acrylic Christmas jumper with somebody else. A whole set of activities that made Christmas relevant to our message around the environment. We also invested heavily in art. Art, as you can imagine from my current job, is a bit of a passion of mine. We raised money to install a number of major artworks, notably the one on the left here and no photograph is ever going to do infinity blue justice. But what it is is an eight and a half meter tall ceramic sculpture of a cyanobacteria, which is a microscopic creature that billions of years ago belched and farted enough oxygen into the atmosphere that life could evolve. And you can see our cyanobacteria belching out smoke rings. Smoke rings are O's, O's for oxygen. A very literal and yet artistic way of championing a hero of the environment. The other picture is of an artwork called Bird's Eyes, and that's a hundred replica eyes of birds that either... of UK-based birds that either are extinct through man's activities or are on the verge of extinction and they're reflective. And so when you are leaving the site at night, they stare back at you. The site was full of these artworks that conveyed that sort of messaging. We had a way of telling the same story with food as well. We all know that we've got to eat less meat and more plant-based products. But again, you don't want to preach your people. They're supposed to be having fun. We turned one of our cafes into an entirely vegetarian and vegan outlook, but it doesn't actually say that anyway. You wouldn't know it. We just tried to put on the most delicious menu of plant-based meals that we possibly could. And we did some little nudgy tweaks to things like in our other outlets. We put the vegetarian options higher than the Cornish pasty on the menu. Over time, we got up to about 36% of the meals that we sold were vegetarian or vegan in a country where 11% of people are vegans. So we nudged people along with that. We nudged people along by simply getting rid of selling bottles of water. It cost us a lot of money, about £150,000 of water bottles a year we were selling. But we just did away with it and we put taps around the place and encouraged people to use their own reusable water containers. And for our gigs, one of the nicest things at Eden is the eight or 10 concerts a year that we would hold in the middle of the site. We moved them away entirely from single-use plastic. And I remember the first time we did it, at the end of the gig, what the team always do is go around tidying up any left behind beer glasses. And that used to be a one and a half hour job. And the first gig we did away with single-use plastic, we only had eight glasses that we had to pick up. So we're using the site to tell some stories. And then we went beyond that as well. And one of the things we did was rescue an initiative called the National Wildflower Centre, which was a millennium project based up in Liverpool that had fallen on hard times. And the National Wildflower Centre is a wonderful thing now based at Eden in Cornwall. And it's fairly obvious what it does. It encourages the growth of wildflowers around the place for the sake of biodiversity and for carbon reasons. And just to encourage beauty, beauty in all things. We felt it would be lovely if we could live in a country where kids were told, do pick the flowers. And so we set this, we acquired it and then we sort of really ramped it up to offer wildflower growing around the country and to build wildflowers into development schemes. There's a road in Cornwall now that is the first road, I think, in the UK to be built with the support of an environmental charity. Because it's absolutely festooned with wildflowers and orchards and the like all the way along. We also thought, well, we're an educational charity. We already have 50,000 school kids a year coming here, but we need to influence, we need to have even more influence. So we went in two directions on that. We went to younger children and we set up an outdoor preschool for kids to learn through play in the outdoors. Because if kids play in the outdoors, they're going to care more about the environment when they grow up. And we set up degree courses, notably here. Sustainable tourism and sustainable festival management. There was some in horticulture as well. You can see again the link back to the transformation that we were trying to bring about. And then finally among these things, a geothermal energy. You may have be aware that the southwest of England sits on very hot rocks. And if you drill a hole deep enough, and it's a deep hole, it's four and a half kilometers deep, you get down to about 180 degree temperatures. In simple terms, if you drop some cold water down the hole and wait for it to come up, a neighboring hole, you can stick a turbine on top and you can generate electricity. And this was a way that we saw that Cornwall and Devon could transform the rest of the UK's energy use. And so we invested in a geothermal energy scheme and they're drilling right now. So that was a whole set of things that added up to a third transformation for Eden. And the outcome has been that I think I feel safe in saying that Eden is absolutely environmentally credible. And I'm excited, even though I'm no longer there, to see much press reference to this. This is the plan for Eden North, a new Eden project in Morkham on the Lancashire coast, which is going to tell similar stories in a different way based on the sort of the tidal rhythms, the amazing seascapes. The key thing, I think, is that Eden is sufficiently robust financially through its second turnaround and inspirational environmentally through its third to be credible in creating the first of what I hope will be a series of new Eden's. So I did my five years there and it was time to do a different sort of transformation and I really wanted to work in the arts and I wanted to work in London. So I moved across this new charity, the Creative Land Trust. I've been able to use the things I've learned about what works in what I would call 21st century transformational leadership at the Creative Land Trust. These are qualities like humility, always sounds ironic when a guest speaker talks about humility, but you get my drift. Kindness, decency, authenticity, basic stuff. I used to cycle around Eden instead of driving. Having your sleeves rolled up. The thing I would always bang on about with my colleagues there was about, you know, we wanted people who were on the pitch playing rather than in the stands shouting. If you want to bring about a turnaround, that is absolutely what you need. A flat hierarchy, hugely important at both Eden and at my current place. A lot of people report to me. I think it's absolutely nonsense to say everybody should have four or six direct reports. Actually, if you want to be able to pull all the levers, then you don't want hierarchy. You don't want people focused on the big boss at the top. You want everybody sharing and a relentless focus, relentless. Everything's got to be in service of that big plan. So Creative Land Trust, as I say, we've been set up to bring about a transformation. We've been set up because a number of people, notably the Mayor of London and the Arts Council for England and also Bloomberg philanthropies, realize that London has this amazing quality of creativity, which it stands behind the success of the city over hundreds of years. Why is London a globally successful financial centre? Well, it's not down to the weather that bring people here. It's because it's the most creative city. The trouble is artists tend to be the ones who move into a difficult area and they make it a really fun area, really exciting and vibrant area. And then the next thing that happens is they get priced out of it. And that's not mattered so much as long as there was another bit of time for them to move into. But it matters now because there isn't another bit of London for them to move into. So our job is to make sure that we have a creative workspace that is affordable for artists and that is bringing about vibrant, dynamic, creative clusters all over London, bringing neighbourhoods to life, giving jobs to young people especially, creating workspace for all those young people who come out of our arts university. We've got 35,000 arts graduates a year coming out and looking for places to work and they generally can't find anywhere that they can afford. So we're using the money that we raise to acquire places in the long term. The idea is to try and solve this problem once and for all and prove that it's possible to do that. Incidentally, no global city has yet managed to do this, which is part of the appeal. So we're not interested in taking places in the short term. There are plenty of very good studio organisations who do that. We're interested in permanent solutions by which we mean we take freeholds or we take ideally very long leases. In certain circumstances we look at mid-time leases. We're looking at reasonably big buildings, 10,000 square feet and up because art is one of those things that benefits from people working together, collaborating and the serendipity of collisions of ideas and we want to try and curate that if you like. And we've got to work way below market rent. 12 to 15 pounds a square foot including service charge is what is rated regarded by the Greater London Authority as affordable for artists. That is anybody who's dealing with London workspace will know that is way below market rate. So we have to dream up clever ways of doing that and then work with experienced studio providers. There's about 250 of them in London to make the space available. And how are we doing that? Well, we've got to dream up. I haven't proved it yet, but this is how we're going to do it. We're dreaming up a new blended finance model and it will bring together a number of streams of money. One will be Philanthropies. So Philanthropists have long been able to invest their money in art galleries or artworks, but not really before the places where young artists start their practice. So we're creating a donor scheme for Philanthropists. Investment. We are convinced that there is a market there for what I would call patient impact investors who give a damn about art and culture to earn a respectable return secured on London property in the long term. And so to serve art and culture but also make what probably rather more money than they make from investing in those places at the moment. We think that we'll be successful in blending into that some grants. We think that trusts and foundations and quasi-governmental organisations will be inclined to support us given what we do and the credibility that we hope we're bringing to this area of work. And the teeny tiny area of a bit of finance that we'll bring in will be our operating surplus. And that will be tiny because we'll be working stock market and we're a charity. So we won't be making any more money than we have to but we would love to be contributing to the overall ourselves not just covering our running costs. We fairly quickly realised that just doing that is going to take a long time to solve this problem for London. So we're also working a lot through strategic partnerships which is a much-overused phrase. What we mean is we're conveying the value of creative workspace the value that art brings to a place and we're working in partnership now with developers and councils and landowners so that they can feel the benefit of that and the way that the arts bring their spaces to life and we can benefit from getting sub-market or off-market opportunities to acquire and operate space. And then finally, policy and influencing. We don't aim to speak for the sector but we are trying to bring about a transformation of the UK or London's initially and then the UK's arts and culture scene. We're trying to bring creativity to the heart of our cities and in part to do that we've got to be able to influence things like planning policy, like development policy for cities got to get affordable creative workspace right to the heart of things. I rattled through some of the things that I feel are important in 21st century transformational leadership some of the things that matter for transformations and for turnarounds. The single most important thing that I've learned though is this, it's a quote. I don't often do quotes on the office wall that's a bit hackneyed but I can't resist this one. Harry S. Truman maybe the most underrated of American presidents and he lived by this. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit and my observation about successful transformations and turnarounds is if you want them to stick that's what's going to work. If you want to get in the newspapers and just do that financial bit where you cut stuff and stay in business then yeah you can go for the big man somehow it's always a man isn't it? The big man vision and making lots of noise and somebody gets the headlines but actually if you really want to bring about true change then you work with a group of people who just want to deliver the change and don't care too much whether they come out smelling of roses. That's me. Do please feel free to get in touch with me at Creative Land Trust if you want to be a part of that transformation and otherwise I will be very happy now to hand back to Phil and to take any questions that you might have. Okay yeah thanks very much. Great story telling there. We're now going to have a short 10 minute Q&A session. As a reminder you can still submit your questions via the chat box in the Q&A panel. There's quite a few questions actually so I'll try and get through as many as possible. Our first question then is I can back through the early part of the presentation on Eden Project. During these challenging times for all businesses what do you think is more important seizing commercial opportunities or embracing your brand values? Seizing commercial opportunities without being true to your brand values I think is a very short-term way of going about things and I appreciate that some of us at the moment feel as though we've got to be short-term. One of the first things I've done since arriving at Creative Land Trust has been carry out a piece of work on our brand identity so that we can fully understand well how is it that we want to appear to the world and I think that's important because I guess like most organizations we're planning to stick around for a while and we didn't want to take shortcuts. We want to have a reputation for being the good guys and for doing the right thing and so my perception is you've got to be true to yourself and if you are true to yourself and if your brand values are the right ones then the commercial opportunities absolutely will come. Next question. In transformation and alignment of people beyond speaking with them what part of the message works? It's crystal clarity I think. It's not just speaking with them, I should say it is listening. It's a two-way conversation. One of the things that I was fortunate enough to be able to do at Eden was once a year have a thing called the gathering and the gathering is a two-day affair where every single member of staff spends that two days doing shared stuff in a room. The site is closed which is unusual even normally apart from that really only closes on Christmas day but we'd have two days when everybody was together and that had a couple of things that were valuable for really driving home transformation and making sure everybody was sharing it. One is I learned that there is no limit to the number of times you can say a thing and it being valuable so that Harry S Truman quote has been used many many times and I would imagine there are a few people at Eden who could quote it back but alongside that I mentioned the strategy that we wrote up. Well we created a sort of graphic form of it so that you could grasp the whole thing and how it worked on one page and we used that enough so everybody could quote it back but the other great value of bringing people together and doing that face to face and I know that's hard work but you know it works it's important. The other great thing of that was being able to feel what's going on in the room and each year I would get up on the stage to open this thing and I could feel how people were feeling and the first couple of years you can imagine they just had massive redundancies and you could feel a tension. Is he going to get up and say we're losing another 100 jobs and I knew that we'd really turned a corner on that thing I was talking about the way that you feel about yourselves. I knew we turned a corner when I just got up and there was a warm buzz and you could feel the whole room were sort of comfortable and excited about what was coming next so yes there's other stuff but there is nothing to my mind that substitutes for just spending time with the whole team. Do you think environmental messages generally got lost because of the pandemic? We had a number of questions relating to the pandemic so this is the first one. I think kind of everything has been has disappeared down the headlines but actually when you think about it the pandemic is in part an environmental crisis and I think the things that we talk about in the environmental movement have never been so important. You can't imagine the pandemic without things like deforestation for example without agriculture stretching into areas where agriculture doesn't belong so even if we've been chased out of the headlines for a while I think we'll be coming back and the solution to the pandemic is absolutely going to be around solving the same problems that we need to tackle environmentally. So how is the project managing the current situation? Has it done anything different to get through this sort of virtual world that we're currently living in? Well I'm not at Eden anymore but I'd still follow the place closely. I'm a lot of timing in Cornwall when I'm allowed to go to Cornwall and what Eden has been doing is I think a very sensible policy when open of trying to allow as many people as possible to experience the wonder of the rainforest as possible but also continuing this plan to take the Eden message beyond beyond that bottom left corner of the UK and I've been really interested in seeing the progress of not only Eden North but also the work that's been going on towards Eden's in other places notably China and then the southern hemisphere. I think that's really important because however good Eden is in Cornwall it's only ever going to get a million maybe in a great year, two million people that it can influence and actually trying to change the world so you need to do that on a bigger scale. Question mate two-door current position actually RCLT's large workspace plans still in the works does COVID impact upon these plans? It does how it impacts is that's the tricky thing actually it may bring about a situation where there is more workspace available and landowners are keen to take a lower market price for it it may it's going to bring about some challenges especially in high streets of course because retail is not coming back the way that we're used to it and there's a challenge for residential developers in that a lot of residential developments are founded on what they call activation bringing them to life through the stuff that's going on the ground floor and typically that is shops and coffee shops and that dog's probably not going to hunt anymore so there may very well be opportunities there the flip side of that of course is that studio providers have been closed for months artists haven't been able to sell their stuff for months if they've been working they've been having to do it in their bedroom or their kitchen so the arts the creative sector has had a torrid time and you'd say there have been some sectors with huge respect to fishing there have been some sectors that seem to have monopolised the government's attention and there are other sectors and the creative industries which are so important to the UK somehow seem not to be of such interest to the current government and so I think we have a we have a lot of ground to make up general question now how can you identify the need for a transformation before your organisation hits the buttons you know if you're not close enough to the action to spot that before it comes then something's very wrong and yes I take it on the chin about the environmental transformation that was required about Eden the financial one we should never have got ourselves into that pickle so if you need a transformation or a turnaround that's going to deal with those sort of those financial fundamentals of an organisation yeah you really ought to see that coming the environmental one came as a bit of a surprise I think perhaps because I use the harsh word complacency we kind of just assumed that everybody knew we were the we were on the right side of the environmental argument and we're a little bit surprised when suddenly others started getting traction but helpfully you know we were at least it wasn't like we needed to turn the whole super tanker around we were in the position that we were doing something we knew about in hindsight what would you have done differently prioritize more to accelerate change in these projects that's a really really good question I think I just ran through some of the things that we ended up doing because we made them part of the change I think there are things among that because it's quite a long list I know there are things among that notably the geothermal energy project which have been sort of hanging around with us wanting to do it for a long time and I think we got to the right place but there were perhaps things that we could have driven along rather faster to get there but the other thing was I guess the horizon scanning part of it now as a leader part of my job is I know it's another terrible bit of business jargon but part of my job is horizon scanning and I think I mean I adore Cornwall I love living in Cornwall but there is a challenge for you when you live and work in Cornwall that you can perhaps become very focused on what's going on in the south west and maybe we did that and we should have been looking at the international changes a bit more management must make increasingly different decisions about the important issues but they always come with costs or trade-offs what compromises should we not be making now we're in 2021 come back to the point I made about the points I mentioned about decency and authenticity and the one trade-off you can't make here I think is pushing it all on to people lower in the organisation in the organisational hierarchy if there is change to be made and if there is pain to be felt in a turnaround situation oh and there is by the way this change is difficult it has to go right the way through everybody has to take their bit of it and the one area where I would be completely uncompromising is to say that absolutely throughout the hierarchy from chair of the board right the way through everybody has to has to be a part of bringing about that change I think I used the phrase earlier we want is people who are playing on the pitch rather than shouting from the stands I think as a leader in any organisation you have a pretty good idea quite quickly of who is in each of those categories and certainly the ones who are in the stands are never much fun to be around but in a transformational turnaround situation where there tends to be a bit of an emergency you absolutely can't afford them thank you very much some great questions and some great answers so that's all the time we have for our Q&A session today I'd like to say thank you to Gordon for today's presentation to CIM South West for organising the event and I thank you to you for attending we do hope that you've found it interesting and worthwhile our next webinar express the darker side of Nudging is on Thursday the 10th of February at 1pm hosted by the CIM charity and social marketing group you'll find it listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll be able to find more information and to register for the session once again you'll surely be receiving a survey on today's event and we'd really appreciate it if you could provide your feedback so on behalf of CIM thank you for joining us and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day goodbye