Seb Wood: The leader is the servant of the organisation, but they’re also making the difficult calls. So it’s a really complex and difficult thing that I think a lot of people get wrong.

They sort of aspire for leadership in a sort of sitting on a throne, making the decisions, pointing the finger kind of way. But actually you are constantly weighing up what is good for this organisation, what is good for my people, and therefore what is good for my clients?

Lawrie Philpott: My guest today is Sebastian Wood, who is the managing director of an engineering design consultancy called Whitby Wood based in London, but operations in various parts of the world, which I think Seb will be telling us about in due course.

And Seb and I met probably around about five years ago, I think now, Seb? When with my coaching and organisation hat on, I wandered into a board meeting of a charity where Seb was a very significant, if I may say so, board member, but a board which had difficulties with organisational performance.

So we talked to the board about that and in due course, spent probably about three years doing all the things that were necessary in order to bring the organisation into a fabulous position. And as a result of that, I got to know Seb better. We talked a lot in those days when we were all locked up courtesy of the COVID pandemic.

And we talked about organisations and life in general, so as is the want with clients we’ve become friends over time and Seb very kindly agreed that we do this podcast this morning about leadership from the SEB perspective and the engineering design perspective and maybe a little bit more generally.

So I hope Seb, that’s a reasonable introduction to how we met. And it’d be very interesting just to hear a little bit about your career. From when you chose to go to university and how it evolved to where you are today.

Seb Wood: Sure thing. Thanks very much, Laurie. I just, on our meeting on the charity board, it’s what I think one of the things that drew us to each other is, it’s one of these strange things about leadership.

That you can kind of smell and feel when it’s working and you can smell and feel when it’s not working. And it was, it was quite remarkable in that boardroom how quickly one could get to the conclusion that it wasn’t. Anyway, so my journey, well, I think. The sort of the question of leadership, I think you can only really see in the rear view mirror about how it emerged.

But if I was to give a version of my story with sort of leadership entwined, it sort of goes back to Cub Scouts. It goes back to being head altar boy. It goes back to being deputy head boy at school and things like that. But I think my first sort of real recollection of the sort of push and pull and difficulty and realization of the loneliness of leadership was in my gap year in Tanzania where I ended up.

Most people in those days did teaching of one form or another, and I wanted to do something practical, and I ended up in a fairly remote village in the EBA Mountains trying to help the villages, and we are talking sort of mud huts and tin roofs here on how to repair an irrigation channel, which was the lifeblood of their farming and therefore their food.

And in that scenario, one would’ve naturally thought that if someone, well certainly from our perspective, once someone turned up with what appeared to be a pocket full of cash and some motivation and the ability to sort of by the things that needed to be bought in order to fix this irrigation channel, that it would all be fairly straightforward, but actually it wasn’t.

And I immediately found myself in realizing the dynamics within the community where the women did most of the work, and to get the men to actually commit to doing something that was essential for their very survival in the end took me to contact the local, well it was the local pub.

It was a, it was a sugar cane production facility and I bought an entire weekend supply of sugar cane juice, which was quite alcoholic and offered this to all the men of the village if they turned up and built this thing. And it worked. But it’s a sort of. It’s a sort of little microcosm of what you think is gonna happen, what you plan to happen, what actually happens, and then how you actually have to lean in to actually make something happen.

And then an outcome and everyone, and then in the looking back, everyone says – Oh, well done Seb you did it! And they have no idea what went into making that thing happen. I then went to university. I did an engineering degree four years at Exeter. And actually by then I had decided that I was gonna become a music maestro and set up a record shop with a friend of mine and later a music festival.

But that’s where I met my late wife, Jenny. And actually my fourth year I had a baby and so I thought I better get serious and joined my now business partner at his previous practice called Whitby Bird I joined there as a graduate. And I stayed there until Mark sold the business to a big Danish consultancy called Ramble.

And I then stayed a few more years, became a director, took my family out to India, by which time I had five kids. And we spent two years in Delhi setting up an outsourcing center for Ramble. And after returning from that, after two years, I got back together with Mark and we set up Whitby Wood.

Lawrie Philpott: When was that said? What year was that?

Seb Wood: That was set up in 2016, February, 2016. Okay. And we have grown, we now have five businesses, the uk, Serbia, India, Singapore, and Dubai. Also have various offices around the UK and including Milan and Italy. And it’s quite a flat business.

There’s a lot of autonomy that’s given to each business. The shareholding structure is set up to encourage that and to encourage leadership and drive and motivation. And I think that the sort of ingredients of that has led to it being pretty fast growing where probably 220, 230 staff now, and we’re working on some pretty significant things, both buildings, bridges, infrastructure, master plans, and much more besides.

Lawrie Philpott: Interesting because of the different locations.

And I think one of the things we’ve talked about before is the notion that people want to be led, but you are in these different geographies. I wonder whether you therefore have to play a different tune according to the different geographies and whether there’s some supervening tune that, kind of, applies to the whole lot and overall culture?

Seb Wood: Very much so, and I think we all like to, or many of us, if you’re like me, like to read books on leadership, and when one reads these things, you sort of think of it as something that you are someone was born with or that just is, and someone has become a leader or they haven’t become a leader.

Actually the, the story of my leadership journey is one of a constantly evolving leadership style, and the story of my business started off with me leading the UK business and then various businesses joining us, and then me bringing up with my business partner, mark, sorry, the two of us bringing up leadership capability within the organisation so that I could then both move position to more of a sort of group managing director, chairman type role, but also change the style because as you say, how the UK is run, how Serbia, Singapore and India run are different, not only because of the personalities involved, but also of the cultures. And I think one international leadership conundrum and challenge is enormous, but mostly because of culture and understanding different perspectives and how those cultures view the world and I think that’s a life journey. And one can go for the sort of application of one’s own culture on everyone else, which is one way of doing it or the version that I prefer, which is more alive and more culturally diverse and more culturally interesting, and I would like to think more beneficial for the business generally. Is one where you invite the cultures to meet together, but that is an enormous challenge because you are on this journey of discovery constantly and that is the nature of the business I’m in.

Lawrie Philpott: So is there a supervening sort of cultural message, purpose message, something that aligns with your own purpose as a leader that you carry to each one of the locations in the same way and then at a lower level, you’ve got cultural understanding, which is more local.

Seb Wood: Yes. I mean, it’s worth saying that we are, we’re engineering consultants, so people hire us to give professional advice and to do calculations and design just so people are clear.

If you picture big buildings going up a frame goes up first or with a bridge is much clearer. There’s a structure that you see, the structure is always visible or the action that happens in the ground when someone digs a hole and builds a concrete basement. All of that stuff we are designing, so we’re professional advisors and so one of the challenges particularly working internationally is different people’s views on different cultures and whether we should be working for certain people or not. And where has the money come from and is it legitimate? And that’s a really complicated thing for any international consultant of any flavor. And when you work in different geographies, you are accepting the way that culture works and you can try and force your ideas on it, but you’ll probably fail.

So in terms of your question, we believe passionately in our people, and lots of people say they believe passionately in thing in things. The people belief is really about if it for us, If you’re dealing with engineers, engineers are the guys and girls who, when you were at school, were pretty clever.

Usually they were really good at maths. They’re pretty hardworking, they’re quite diligent. They then went on to do four years at university rather than three. Like a lot of people. So they, they’re clever, bright, hardworking people dealing with, preventing big things, falling down and killing people.

That’s fun that we are, we’re building these things and we’re, and we’re constantly weighing up this risk. So the key for me in any form of consultants, but particular engineering, is to release the capability and imagination of that person. And if I can sit here and say, this is the way we should do it, or I can say, oh, I can turn everyone on and then in my case, I’ve got 220, 230 clever minds all working and coming up with ideas. So culture is super important and that’s, trying to encourage people to grow in themselves. It’s trying to tell them or help them realize what’s good for them in their growth. It’s trying to infuse a direction of the business and also to make enough money to pay for things and to grow.

So people culture and answer your question number one, and then client culture. And that’s really, you know, you’ve got to serve your clients. I mean, you’ve got skills. You wanna apply them, but your clients are paying you to do something. They’ve come to you for a reason.

So really understanding what it is that my client actually wants and how I can help him or her get there is really important. So client people. And then the last one for me is impact. And I, this is probably a massively overused word, but. In the world we’re in, which is a huge challenge politically, socially, everything.

We’ve got this overriding issue of what’s happening environmentally and socially but we are running along, we’re going along on this train that’s chugging along. And so what we have to do is not chuck the baby out with the bath water. We’ve actually got to always be seeing what impact we are having to shift the dial. So when we look backwards, we can always say, okay, we’ve made progress. So people, clients impact, If that was the overriding, and I think that’s cross-cultural and I think all of the managing directors in my business would say, yeah, that fits.

They might add their own bit about wanting to be the best designers or the most reliable engineers or whatever, but the overriding, I would say that they, everyone would agree with those.

Lawrie Philpott: Interesting to ponder then a triangle, which is the owners of a business at the top, the clients at the bottom left and the organisation and all that goes with it, the people at the bottom right. I think there’s an interesting. Question as to where leaders, managing directors, chief executives should put their strategic effort. You quite rightly have said the client is important, but I wonder whether there’s mileage in the notion that putting one’s effort into making, let me call it, a fabulous organisation.

Fabulous. In all sorts of ways. The best people, best trained, best developed, best communications, best culture and so on. That if you do that, the clients are gonna notice it anyway. It’s a sort of an automatic reaction. Does that appeal or?

Seb Wood: Yeah, definitely. And, I think within the design world. I think there’s two flavours, I mean there’s mixes, but I’m being extreme, but there are two flavours. One is I think we should call Whitby Wood, and the other one is, I think we should call Seb. Now much that I’d love people to call me, I think, in terms of serving the staff, serving the clients, serving community, serving society, and longevity.

It’s the question, let’s call Whitby Wood is a much better question. And I think in design you get one flavor, which is a very principle led, I want said on every single job, which sort of limits growth to a certain extent. Or I want Whitby wood on every single job, which means you can really go for it.

And although can get both types of leaders in, in both situations, I’m definitely for the Whitby wood one, and for me it’s very clearly about service. So where does the leader sit? The leader is the servant. The leader is the servant of the organisation.

But they’re also making the difficult calls. So it’s a really complex and difficult thing that I think a lot of people get wrong, and they sort of aspire for leadership in a sort of sitting on a throne, making the decisions, pointing the finger kind of way. But actually you are constantly weighing up what is good for this organisation, what is good for my people, and therefore what is good for my clients?

And that’s one of difficult decisions, sacrifice, service, all those sorts of words. And that’s certainly my style of how I think about leadership and the reason I think that’s also so important is not only how everyone feels about it, but if you want longevity. I think most people do, although people talk about having lots of different changing jobs and whatever.

I think people like stability, they like to feel secure. When they feel secure, I think they come up with better ideas and they do a better job. So that sort of longevity in that stability, I think comes from a leadership of service.

Lawrie Philpott: I think service is a very interesting thing. There’s a man called Greenleaf who writes about servant leadership alot.

And I guess if you’re gonna go into that mode, which I think is right, then you’ve got really a whole realm of difficult choices. What we call the number of hours that you’ve got in a year at your disposal as a leader, and how you then go about choosing the optimum range of things that you as a leader ought to do.

And then of course there’s the question about how well you do those things. So we’re in the servant leadership facing that very difficult realm of choices because you’ve got all the enthusiasm that Sebs got about all the kinds of projects that you’ve got, and you’ve got all the pleas of the people at your door to spend time with Seb.

That’s the Whitley Wood people and people out there in the market, clients that want to do that. So dealing with the time conundrum seems to me to be a real challenge Seb, for people who are in the MD or CEO position, what do you think?

Seb Wood: Absolutely core, and I’ll make a confession. I mean, There was a big turning point in my life that happened recently, which was through tragedy, but it really showed to me that I wasn’t getting a lot of things right.

So the story is, up till 22, we’d survived COVID, we’d done all sorts of things. We’d obviously had lots of conversations as well, and the business was successful. I mean, it was growing. All the businesses growing. I think at that point we were just, we were just in discussions getting the Singapore business going.

But I would say that I was jumping around and I think a lot of leaders do this. They’re sort of try, you know, they’re trying to push into a more strategic role and then they fall back into something. And, a lot of that is they, we, sorry, they, I use the excuse of, well, you know, I only I know how to do that.

Or I want to be involved with that decision or whatever. And actually it’s because of your inability to move up a gear or move up a level. And what happened to me was in 2022, my wife we had had a quite an interesting year and she had got a backache and a week later was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Which has, is a whole story in itself. But it changed everything for me as one could imagine. But in terms of the leadership of the business, what happened was I had a stark choice of, do I spend whatever time we’ve got left together trying to run the business, or do I actually turn to the people who I’ve been trying to bring up, but probably have also held back because of who I am and who a lot of people are, and just say, guys, I can’t. You are gonna have to do this. And I was very, very lucky that my business partner Mark, who is an extraordinary person in every way and has a sort of, you know, ability to think short, think long, think left, think right, and every possible different dimension that you can imagine.

You know, rang me up and said, look, I think you need to step back and let these guys show what they’re made of. And over time, it wasn’t immediate, but over time and in accelerating ways, I did. And my deputy, Chris Murray, who now essentially runs the UK and a number of other really important colleagues, and my business partner, Mark, just stood up and I had no choice but to let go.

Now, the remarkable thing was that. The business did extremely well, which I think is also a challenge for leadership is that you’re like, okay, it’s done very well without me. What does this mean? And obviously the answer is, well, you’ve built something and now they’re obviously better at this bit than you are, and that’s all fine.

But it does make you feel a little bit redundant. But what fast forwarding that my wife died 13 months later, I came back into the business probably a bit fast, but I came back into the business and then, and the intervening 18, 19 months has been one of, you know, rigor of not going back to the things that Chris and the rest of the team do much better than me.

And not tinkering and and trusting people and holding people to account. Yes. And moving into a space where I’m more useful across the group of companies and the future of what the group of the companies looks like. And that’s an enormous, I mean, you could just say these words and it all sounds very straightforward, but it’s an enormous transition for all of us.

So in a sense, out of this awfulness, In terms of the business, it was probably a form, if I can say a form of good fortune that, that it enabled a change. That may, I’d like to think would’ve happened, but probably over a longer period, but may not have, I may not have ever got there.

Lawrie Philpott: It’s interesting, Seb, in the work that I do, you know, there are some things which come under the heading of the bloomin obvious. And, you know, when I say to chief executives who are burning with stress and workload and hours and all the rest of it, one of the most straightforward things, your job is to create the organisation to do the work.

Make sure that it’s there and keeping up to date with the changes that happen inevitably to any organisation and are happening much more regularly, much faster, more viciously. In this day and age, and of course if you don’t create and maintain the organisation to do the work, and everybody will say, well, I do, I do. But one of the sources of organisational failure is that they’re not creating and maintaining the organisation to do the work. You get into a series of organisational deficits which add to what I might describe as organisational debt and when the debt becomes too large, failure is beginning to shape you in the face.

And I don’t mean financial debt, I just mean an organisation that is decomposing and then needs transformation, which is very expensive, very distracting. And we hope works, but isn’t guaranteed. Thoughts on that, creating the organisation to do the work.

Seb Wood: Absolutely. And here in the UK, but also across the business.

I talk about the evolution of the business. Now, as we know, evolution is a kind of never ending thing, and that is the truth, and that’s why I use that word. And we do it in different ways, you know, but really, you know, organisations are organisms and they’re not static, and they exist in the world, which is also an organism or many organisms, which isn’t static. And so I think one of the really difficult things about leadership, but it’s also very exciting, is that you have to always have a perspective of reevaluating, I call it repainting the picture. So I love it when people say to me, so, you know, what’s the goal of your company?

And you think, well, today, tomorrow, the next day, which one? you know, it’s, it, you are constantly repainting this picture. And it’s a, so you create an organisation, for me, the basis of a consultancy is the people.

My grandfather wrote a book called Small Is Beautiful and his son, my uncle Christian, wrote a book called God in Work and it was actually about the organisation of people and how you create smallness always, whether it’s a small organisation or a big organisations.

People talk about seven people, 15 people. There’s certain dynamics that work. And so first, you have to keep those. You have to. And that’s like, I know that person and I can relate, and once you get really big, it becomes more difficult. So there’s a sort of, what happens naturally is you grow and then things grow, and then you have to split them apart and grow them again and split them apart.

So there’s that sort of dynamic. Then there’s who’s emerging as leaders and there’s that dynamic and keeping them. So there’s that organisational side and you’ve gotta keep it alive so that creativity is maintained. So there’s a change thing there. And then it’s the all important thing of what’s happening out there to the clients we’re serving.

And In construction, I’m sure it is the same in every sector, bubbles constantly appear and you think you’re doing brilliantly and then they burst and you’re not, and so there’s the interaction with that and I think the answer in design consultancy is super flat, super nimble. And so for me we grew this organisation and it sounds like a plan, but a lot of it’s by accident. And then you’ve got these different businesses with different leadership, and what you do is you think, oh, we need to create a group structure. And then you look at other companies and go, oh, they’ve got a group structure.

Maybe we should do something like that. And so you get an idea in your head, but actually you have to constantly reevaluate that and you have to respond to the different leadership in the business. And I have recently gone through another transition on this about how we keep these businesses together, working in different geographies, but keep it very nimble.

Because the nimbleness means survival. It means serving the clients. because the client situations has changed and then our situation has to change to support them. We can’t just say we only do this. So making the organisation, I’m sure it’s true in many, many different fields, but in consultancy and particularly in construction development which we are serving you have to be quite fluid. So you have these, you have these organisms that are constantly shaping and changing. And then in all of that you’ve got these individuals who want this thing called a career. And I think the key to all of that is the difficult intimacy of conversation, of working out what people are trying to do, where they’re going with their life, what they want, what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, and pointing and having those honest conversations. And I would, that’s what it all boils down to, is these intimate conversations.

Lawrie Philpott: I very much hope you are enjoying this episode of Leadership Listening.

If you like this episode, please hit like and subscribe. If you’ve got thoughts and reactions on this episode, please put them in the notes below. Or email podcast@leadershiplistening.com. There’s something that in my parlance we call corporate mendacity. Okay. The ability of organisations deliver lie.

They might, you know, to put it, at its most start, they might lie to clients or customers. They might lie to their staff. They might lie to their stakeholders. They might lie to themselves. So an awareness of corporate mendacity and avoidance of it, I think is an interesting notion for leaders to listen to, which is what this podcast is all about.

But there’s that question as well, what do people want from me as the CEO, as the MD? And I guess there’s a question that goes with it. Do they know what they want? Or is it a case of they just, they recognize it when they see it, but can’t easily define it by its absence?

Seb Wood: I think a lot of leaders would probably say the latter.

I mean, I think some people do there, to be fair, I think people might say if you really had a conversation with them as opposed to just doing a poll, they might say, I wanna know the truth. They might say. And, and truth comes with, I’m an adult, they wanna know what the plan is, however difficult it is. I think also it, you know, it was a stark question for me on returning.

So I was, I don’t know, 50% in work while Jenny was my wife, my late wife Jenny was sick. And then, you know, I’ve slowly increased my sort of work since she died. And that challenge of, what do I actually add? Because you know, when you, when the organisation’s working, you’re saying, well, I need to serve this organisation properly. I need to do something different. And then what is the thing that people need me for personally? I think there’s a humbleness to good leadership I think. You can be confident and everything else, but within yourself, humbleness as opposed to arrogance is really, really key.

And I think the question of what do I add on a personal level is my, you know, there’s certain things you need to be doing, but what do I add personally is probably something most leaders continue to ask themselves throughout their careers. And it’s not, oh, I know. I just do this different scenarios. So for example, the sort of the leadership in the charity that we both met on would be, you know, I was in a lucky position of not being chair or anything like that. And I could put my hand up and say, isn’t this the obvious question we should be asking ourselves? Which is obviously if you are running an organisation, is a bit more difficult to do that because you’re asking about your own capability potentially. So I think the telling the truth thing and doing the right thing for the organisation, a really, really key.

So, you know, truth is central.

Lawrie Philpott: Mm-hmm. And we’re in this day and age politically, perhaps in particular, we’re getting into something of a post-truth environment. And that I think has some very unpleasant consequences unless our leaders wake up and recognize it. And just picking as well on your word about being humble, I think it’s not a matter of being like humble as Uriah Heap was. It’s, it’s not that. But I do remember reading General Norman Schwarzkopf’s story. He of Gulf War One pretty tough soldier to say the least an America General now, no longer with us, but worked in a porter cabin in the desert during the first Gulf War, which was a pretty bloody and gory thing, but in his 17 or 18 hour day, listened to classical music, quietly going on in the background, openly wept when there was a friendly fire.

Occasion that killed a small number of American troops. So here we have the humility of the warrior in that form. He could be, I know, very strategic. He could certainly be very operational. He could be very sensitive to music. He could be tearful. Involuntarily when he heard that his own troops had been killed by his own friendly fire.

It’s that kind of bandwidth that leaders need, and I think leaders need to concentrate on that bandwidth and ensuring that it’s got lots of different facets and learning how to use how and when to use those facets.

Seb Wood: I think it becomes one of the things that my father always said, and my father’s still thankfully with us, and he was a wonderful leader and he still is a wonderful leader.

But you know, he right from an early age when my sort of fascination with what he did, he said it’s very lonely being a leader. And I sort of didn’t really understand it. But if you manage to get yourself looking over the horizon, it is easier for you to see the wood for the trees.

It is easier for you to see the truth in a situation. And so I often find this in our management and director meetings because they’re run by other people. I can take a perspective, which sort of sees over the top of things, it becomes easier to say. But was that the right thing to do or is that actually what we want to be doing, or whatever it is. But you have to pull yourself out so you are not affected by the ins and outs of what’s going on.

And I think I’ve got a challenge at my organisation, but imagine doing that with people’s lives. I mean, it’s extraordinary.

Lawrie Philpott: And that brings me to another numeric point. You’ve got 220 people. But a lot of them will have other halves, children, parents who to some extent may be reliant on them.

So you’ve actually got. Quite a big community in your care.

Seb Wood: This is credit to my business partner Mark. You talk about ESG or sustainability or whatever. And Mark has a wonderful way of bringing focus to these things. Because you can get lost sometimes. And he’s consistently said that the greatest social responsibility that a businessman has is to create employment.

And it’s one of those things that one grapples with, and if you take it really seriously, obviously you cannot harm an organisation, but when you employ someone or when you let someone go, or worse, redundancy or whatever, the ripple effects are enormous and that does weigh heavy, but you still have to make those decisions.

You can’t run away from them. And the web of impact is huge. And when one thinks of it, you could, you can multiply these numbers, whether it’s by two, by three, I don’t know. But it’s enormous.

Lawrie Philpott: And just looking forward then Seb, we’ve got the onset of AI, and I think we’re only sort of scraping at the surface.

Now, if you listen to people like Eric Schmidt, who was the chairman of Google, he says, you kind of won’t recognize today in three years time. So you’ve got the challenge of AI and technology more generally with quantum computing and so on and so forth. So the CEO, the managing director faces that and has to be staunch in the circumstances of that kind of gale that is coming for your business.

How do you think about that?

Seb Wood: I mean, it’s mega, isn’t it? I think number one, you know, one can call these AI a challenge, but it’s also an enormous opportunity. But I don’t say that in a sort of, don’t worry about it kind of way. There’s this combination of it’s happening.

So from a business perspective, we need to enter into it or we won’t compete. From a people perspective, a lot of, and I’m sure this is true of lots of different consultancies and also physical manufacturing and all sorts, that there’s a lot of drudgery in work. What percentage, who knows?

Depends what sort of organisation you work for. And actually to do less drudgery is a good thing for the human soul and, and how you feel. And happiness. People who do a hundred percent drudgery probably lead more miserable lives than people who don’t. So there’s an opportunity there. So it is happening.

There is an opportunity, but it requires huge wisdom. And my grandfather had this wonderful. Turn of phrase about the onward stampede and resisting the onward stampede and that that is huge leadership. That’s not saying we are not gonna do AI, we’ve got nothing to do with it. But it is about the wisdom of different decisions that are made.

And I think for me, the scary thing about this this whole area is that it feels like the future governance of it is in a few people’s hands. And so there’s huge power, but there’s huge responsibility. And what are those people like? Are they good people? My father always says you need good people in every walk of life.

And it’s so true and so I think the challenge there is huge, but that’s probably a whole other podcast in itself. But for us, what the exciting thing about it is, I think what often happens in engineering is that you get these very bright people coming out of A-level. They go into university, they do some crazy stuff that the university encourages them to do, and then they come into consultants and they go, oh my God, I’ve gone back 10 years. Because we are just not up to speed as the university’s latest thinking. And part of the trick of an organisation like ours is to say. Come in and challenge us. A couple of years ago, we had a load of placement students from university and we said, you know, design a building using AI. See, just see what happens. And so I would like to think if we do it right, it will essentially release more time, more of this thinking time, more of this ingenuity that I was talking about.

You know, you’ve got an individual and you’ve got the key and you’ve clicked it, and suddenly they’re blooming as a person and ideas are flowing and they’re challenging things. If we have AI that can mean that they’re doing less of the drudgery and more of that. That’s gonna lead to not only better building design, but it’s gonna lead to the solutions of climate change, of energy, of biodiversity, loss of et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That’s where it’s gonna come from. And so if we can get that right. Then you just become a sort of beautiful ideas factory. And for engineering that’s super important. Because when kids say, what do you do? I say, look out the window. And I say all of that, anything you can see, that’s us.

Yeah. So it’s pretty important

Lawrie Philpott: And I think knowing your organisation a bit, that you’re doing some fabulous things. You let me know that you were in the business of putting those houses onto Silverston race circuit, which seemed to me, you know, wonderful. If you are a petrol head, you’ve got these beautifully, very imaginatively designed houses there, but I’m sure you’ve got other projects which are close to your heart.

Which are the ones that you like most from the Seb point of view?

Seb Wood: From the Seb point of view, I mean. Some of the things, some of them I’ve been intimately involved with and they’re special in that way. And some are things this organisation has done, and some of them are old organisations and some of them other organisations.

But one of my earliest projects was being as a junior engineer in the design of a part of the BBC broadcasting house complex, next to All Souls Church, and it was just such an amazing experience, in hindsight, I mean it was difficult, but it was, in hindsight, it was such an amazing experience with amazing people.

It was a big concrete structure and I was very involved with it, and that not only the design, but then going down to site and talking to an experienced concrete guy who gave me a good telling off about the size of the reinforcement bars that I had specified, which they then found very difficult to lift.

I love the wonderful thing about construction is that it’s like, it’s like a sort of cross section of society. You’ve got laborers, you’ve got skilled craftsmen, you’ve got specialized subcontractors. You’ve got all of that side of construction. Then you’ve got these main contractors who are trying to make the damn thing happen.

Then you’ve got the developers and the project managers and the quantity surveyors who are trying to control it. And then you’ve got the designers, which we are part of. And then you’ve got the money and you’ve got the ultimate client. And then you’ve got the people who are gonna use it.

Why construction is so amazing is that it’s a thing that involves everyone and you need everyone. You need all these different people and they’ve all gotta get along and they’ve all gotta be able to communicate to each other and they’ve all gotta go for a common goal and they’re all doing different things. So thisis just like sort of leadership defined, if you what I mean?

Lawrie Philpott:Yeah, absolutely.

Seb Wood: Then at the end of it, you’ve got this physical thing. That was really important. We’ve recently completed a bridge or a boardwalk down at Canada Water for a wonderful client called British Land with a wonderful architect called Asif Khan. And it’s why that’s wonderful. I mean, it’s lovely and beautiful.

I mean, it’s stunning. Everyone loves it. But it’s also a place of, it’s like an amazing staircase. People meet for some reason, people like to stop on staircases and talk. And it’s like that. And so it’s a sort of meandering point and a meeting point and There’s a big development going on around it and I’m sure over time there’ll be this fabulous development all round and the centerpiece will be this simple boardwalk.

Lawrie Philpott: As we draw towards our closed Seb. I mean, you’ve got a period ahead of you. Who knows? 20, 30, God knows what number of years. What do you want leadership to give you in the future?

Seb Wood: I would like, one of the things I love, you know, if I’m a leader, I would like to think that some people might think I’m a bit of one. It’s the continuous learning. Leadership isn’t something that you’re just, you either get or you don’t, or you become, and then you’re, that. It’s a constant, you know, it is an intellectual and emotional challenge, rollercoaster journey, and the more I do it, the more I realize I don’t know very much.

I recently took my middle daughter to look at Exeter University where she hopes to go there was a series of lectures. We went to a sort of series of mini lectures on philosophy, religion and, and theology and sociology and various other things. And it’s just these, I, every single lecture I was like, oh my goodness, I wanna go back to university.

And I feel to give me is that constant that learning and becoming better. And why? Okay. Personally, it’s interesting, but one of my passions is young people, and particularly my children, that they can see something and go, okay, that’s good. Like I talked about with my father and my grandfather and my mum and you, Laurie, you know, and my business partner Mark. I would like to think that people would think, what would Seb say?

That would be amazing? And I think as a leader, you are a steward. You need to know when in a particular organisation your time’s up and someone else is better than you. And your role is to sort of, I don’t know, shepherd the sheep or whatever you want, whatever analogy you wanna do for a period of time and take it somewhere and help people on that journey.

So, yeah, I think, you know, that’s the idea that I might grow people and the people might grow me is pretty cool.

Lawrie Philpott: That’s really good. Two questions to finish off on. I’ll give you both of them so that you can take them in order or out of order. Secret passion and pet hate.

Seb Wood: I think the pet hate, it really is one of the things we’ve talked about in preparation of this podcast is. And I don’t mean that I hate the people who do this, but people who are desperate to be leaders and have no idea what it actually entails and then are therefore really poorly serving the people that they’re meant to be leading.

And there’s so much of it. I mean, in the public eye, you can see it. We don’t need to mention any names, but just look at the news and that’s the reason it’s a pet hate is because those people are being let down and the period of life, they’re under that leadership, they are being let down and they’re not learning or they’re learning what bad looks like.

This sort of yearning, this sort of ego driven yearning for being. The big man or the big lady, or whatever you wanna say. And then just not being able, and we’ve all experienced it. We could all probably name several.

Secret passion. I love gardening. I find it very, I think like a lot of people who have their own businesses or in leadership positions, I’m not good at, I’m not good at switching off.

There’s certain things that allow me to switch off and go into a different place. And gardening is one of them. And I was trying to work out what it is I like about it because I’m actually not a very good gardener. But I quite like, you know, getting plants into a place where they start to thrive and then it starts to work.

And I quite like the physical nature of it. And I like talking to my mom about her passion of planting and it’s just quite intimate and it takes me into a different place. So that’s that. I mean, that’s a current thing because it’s lovely and sunny. Don’t ask me that in the winter. I certainly wouldn’t do that.

Lawrie Philpott: Well that’s great Seb. And truth to tell. One of the things that has drawn us together in the past is great conversations, and I’m really grateful on behalf of Leadership Listenings viewers and listeners for this morning’s conversation, which has lived up exactly. To the previous ones and I hope there’s gonna be future ones because there are lots of subjects that are germane to the Leadership Listening audience.

Thank you very much indeed, Laurie.