What if the secret to transforming local government isn’t better business cases, but a culture of rapid prototyping and building genuine trust?

In this episode of On a Human Basis, Joe sits down with Peter Gadsdon, who recently retired after an extraordinary 46-year career in public service and local government. Starting out at 16 repairing televisions in East London, Peter rose through the ranks to become a Corporate Director, pioneering human-centred design, digital transformation, and agile service delivery across Redbridge, Lewisham, and Brent councils.

Drawing on decades of frontline and executive experience, Peter shares why real transformation requires leaders to create cover and psychological safety so teams feel safe to test, learn and grow. He details how Brent Council prototyped community hubs in church halls and libraries for two weeks before committing long-term funding, and explains why securing solid financial foundations and building high-trust relationships with elected members are essential to cutting through bureaucracy. This is a pragmatic, inspiring deep dive into service design, relational leadership, and what it really takes to leave public services in a better place than you found them.

In this conversation, we explore:

• How fixing televisions in East London provided the logical blueprint for unpicking complex council processes
• Why effective leadership is about creating cover and psychological safety for teams to innovate
• The practice of rapid service prototyping: testing community hubs in a church hall for two weeks before scaling borough-wide
• How to navigate local government finance to turn short-term experimental funding into core revenue services
• Applying the Pareto rule in public management to focus on the 20% of effort that delivers 80% of the value
• Building strong, honest working relationships with elected politicians and local council leaders
• Why "board fatigue" kills momentum and how to recognize when it's time to adapt or stop a failing project
• Ethical data governance, cybersecurity strategies and maintaining service agility in times of crisis

This episode is especially relevant for:

• Public sector directors, chief executives and corporate leaders
• Local government transformation managers and service designers
• Policy professionals and council officers interfacing with elected members
• Frontline managers seeking to embed test, learn and grow approaches in public services

Stay connected:

• Follow Joe on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/joseph-badman
• Read the latest chapters from our upcoming book: https://relationalservicedesign.com
• Master the methodology: https://basistraining.co.uk/
• Partner with us: https://basis.co.uk

Right, I want to talk about a whole bunch of stuff. I want to talk about leadership and public services. I want to talk about innovation and design thinking and prototyping. I want to talk about all that stuff. But to begin with, your career path has been... Stranger than fiction. You started out repairing TVs and ended up as a corporate director in local government.

Tell me about that. What's that? What's that trajectory? So I grew up in Dagenham in East London, weren't a lot of aspiration around in Dagenham and everyone left school at 16. I don't even think my school had a sixth form from memory. I think it came in after I left. I left school in 1979. And the thing was to get an apprenticeship, they still had apprenticeships in those days.

It was just before the YTS scheme came out. You won't remember what that is, but it was an innovation from indentured apprenticeships, but it wasn't really. It was just a way of cutting money out of the system. But anyway, I was lucky enough to get an indentured apprenticeship with a company called Radio Rentals. As a TV engineer, I always wanted to do electronics from a small child, always building things when I was young.

And so, yeah, I met my ambitions when I left school by getting a job. I spent three years as an apprentice and then was fixing tellies in East London for a few years. Then got into a supervisory role when I was 23. I think I was the youngest supervisor in the company at the time. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed sort of making decisions and asking people to do stuff.

Part of my nature, I think. I mean, when I was young, when we first left school, we used to go down, used to have to go down the high street to book a holiday in those days. There was no internet. You couldn't book a ring and do it. You went into a shop like Thomas Cook or something. And it was always me when all my mates were organizing like a holiday to Spain or something.

It was me that went in. organize it all, collected all the money, sorted it all out. So I've always had that sort of nature, I guess. Yeah. And then I met my wife at work and she really was the one who encouraged me to start doing some sort of like go back to college and do some sort of like management courses. So I did my first courses with my wife, actually.

We did two, one called Employing People and one called Financial Decision Making. And they were at East Ham Technical College, and that was in the 80s. While you were still at radio rental? Oh yeah, I was still at radio rental then, yeah. I was probably about 26 at that time, from memory. Maybe a bit younger. And so I quite enjoyed that.

And then we sort of got together, started having children. And then I did a diploma in management studies while I was at radio rentals. But towards the end, by then, I'd moved up to sort of like a district manager and managing a workshop and the service for centres for radio rentals, company car, car phone and first come out.

Yeah, they'd just come out, the old car phones. So they had to be installed in the car physically, all built into the car. They wouldn't allow that now, would they? I think, and I was doing my diploma, which was a two-year course in management studies, and then halfway through that, I could see that there wasn't a career in TV servicing by then.

This was now around 1991 type. So I'd done 13 years at radio rentals, working up from an apprentice to a sort of like a middle-ish manager, I guess, with a company car and a car phone and a petrol card, because until I was 29, I'd never bought a gallon of petrol as it was then. It's litres now, isn't it? Yeah. Because I'd always had a company car and I'd always just, you know, done it on the company's expense.

There was redundancies going on, so I asked if I could be made redundant, and luckily, you know, they said yes. So I left Radio Rentals in 1992. I didn't have a job to go to, but wanted to get into local government because in my DMS, my Diploma Management Studies course, there was a load of people from local government in Essex on it.

Right. Because they were going through, get this, a restructuring of local government. Oh, no way. And creating unitary authorities from two-tier systems. That sounds familiar. And that was at the time when Thurrock was created, obviously now renowned for getting in lots of debt by investing in things it shouldn't have done.

But also Southend Borough Council was created as well. So from Essex County Council and all the districts, they created some, but not others. And so the people on my course were all talking about this and it all sounded at the time very strategic to me. So and the other thing is, is they didn't work weekends, which obviously in the service industry, I always worked on a Saturday.

So I quite liked the idea of not working weekends. I had three small children at the time. So I said to my wife, well, I'll just get into local government when I go. So we went off to Ireland for probably about 3 weeks, something like that, in the summer of 92. And then when I come back, there was a little advert in a one of those freebie papers you used to get.

Again, you don't get them anymore, do you? So this is all analog rather than digital. Yeah. And it said safety inspector required Redbridge Council. So I didn't even know where Redbridge was because it's not a name synonymous with this area. Of course, yeah. Because it's actually in Ilford, Redbridge Council. And anyway, so I worked out where it was and I applied and got the job.

And the reason I got it is because I'd qualified as a safety advisor in one of my jobs in radio rentals. When we went into Europe in the early nineties, they brought out something called the six pack of health and safety, like display screen equipment. Everyone had to get free glasses, didn't they, and all the stuff like that.

So I was sent off to Coventry Management Centre for six weeks to get qualified, which I did. never really used it, but then did use it to get into local government. And so, you know, that was started my career in local government in 1992. I spent a lovely summer, well, autumn and moving into the next year in the summer, just going round schools and elderly persons homes and any other asset that Redbridge had, which they had a lot more then than they do now because, you know, people have divested in a lot of their assets, unfortunately.

in local government, as they did in the NHS at the time as well. Sold off lots of hospitals and then had to buy new ones, didn't they? And spend more money. Yeah, just inspecting boiler rooms and going around doing that. I then got promoted. I think within about a year and a half, I was the head of safety at Redbridge, which was good and I enjoyed that.

And then I went into, I became the business manager there. And I finished my DMS while doing that. My second year of my DMS, I funded myself for a Barclays loan they used to do in those days, but got the time off. I used to have to leave at four, two nights a week. When I say time off, an hour off of work to get to the college to do my night school.

And then when I'd done that, I'd done my diploma, I then funded myself through an MBA. This was all at Redbridge. And so by 95, six, I'd got an MBA, a private sector type one, not a public sector one. I think that gave me the language and the understanding of management, to be honest with you, the grounding to speak with more senior people.

And I always found it easy to understand the modeling and the models and theories of management and how to apply them. It just seemed to be something I could understand where I know some people do struggle with the strategic interoperational. It was something that I sort of understood and it's probably because I'd come up through the ranks.

I mean, spending that probably year going around schools and, you know, elderly persons homes and, you know, adult learning, people with adult learning difficulties, homes and all of that. in talking sort of management and all of that about their safety concerns and that it sort of gives you a good grounding and understanding in all of the things, including the depots and the bin collection and the roads and the potholes and all of those things and the grave digging and everything.

I had a whole, you know, smorgasbord of all of the things that local government did and I had a good working knowledge of it. And if we go back to what I said when I, you know, at the beginning, I'd always been like building things and like electronics and that. Yeah. And I got trained in how to logically work out problems.

Right. Okay. Because that's what you have to do when you're fixing teles. You have to go through things, understand maps and drawings and work all that out. It just... for me, I was able to understand and unpick how all of these processes worked in my mind and understand where the issues were. And originally for health and safety reasons, but then when I moved into more management, then actually, you know, problem solving some of those more difficult issues around how we better serve the residents and businesses of whatever council I particularly be working with.

Funnily enough, did 13 years there as well. Right, okay. So this is 26 years into my career now. I now have four children because my son was born in '95. And then I left Redbridge in 2006, early 2006. I was head of performance at Redbridge when I moved and I went over to Lewisham as the head of customer service strategy, I think it was called, right, when I when I first went.

over there, and I primarily actually followed my boss. So my boss was Leslie Siri in Redbridge, and she went over to be the corporate director of customer services in Lewisham. And a few months later, I followed her there. And that's where we first met in Lewisham when you came in as one of the graduates. Talking of the graduate scheme in local government, it came out while I was at Redbridge and I actually was involved in setting up the Redbridge scheme originally when it first came out.

So I'd always had an interest in that and also the people coming into local government and getting some really top graduate people into a profession that they wouldn't normally go in. Because at the time when that first happened, probably in the early 2000s, I think it probably was, we didn't have anything like that. And so where were the next leaders coming from, you know, in local government and people like yourself, you know, where were they coming from?

So I've always been a great advocate of the local government. graduate scheme, because also it was a rich vein of enthusiastic, talented people that you could use to, you know, make things better for the residents and the businesses of whatever council that you work for. So, you know, I'd always done that. And as you know, when I got to Lewisham, I did tap that vein quite extensively.

Extensively, you moved them all up. in there, moved them all up, got them all into, you know, gained full paid work. And we did some good things at Lewisham, actually, with that. So moving on, I did just under ten years at Lewisham. So what's that now? You're up to like 36 years now. I do my maths. Honestly, it drives your mouth, doesn't it?

So 36 years in, I left there and went to be in. Transformation before you left, right? Yeah, so I was. we did transformation. I first got involved, I've always tried to get involved in like government initiatives or whether it be regional, so like whether it be like London councils or the local government association or for a time there was the DCMS, which were sort of funding innovations around things like business process review and improvement, BPI, and then that moved into things like the design council, double diamond type innovation and change work.

And so I'd always sort of like making sure that myself and any teams I was with was on the cutting edge of this stuff. And at Lewisham, it was quite easy because we had Barry Quirk as the chief executive and he knew everybody in, you know, in the regions and in central government. And it was towards the tail end of the previous Labour government in those days.

And he always used to, I always remember, he'd sort of like swing past my desk. We're all in them like sort of pig pens, weren't we? Yeah. They called them, you know, it was open plan, but you had, but you couldn't see anyone. It always struck me as a little old, did they? I called it open plan, but when you sat down, you couldn't see anybody.

You're in a little maze. In your own little area. And just could hear the sounds drifting across. But anyway, that all went eventually, didn't it, with modernisation of buildings and, you know, and hot desking and all of those sorts of things that troubled people for time, as I remember. And he just said, Michael Bichard's a friend of mine.

I think he's Lord Bichard now, isn't he? Might have been a sir then. He's chair of the Design Council. Why don't you pop along, see what they're doing? And then we got right into, didn't we, the innovation and transformation work using the Design Council approaches. Well, I want to talk a lot more about that because I think we genuinely were at the very beginning of that whole movement of human-centred design.

But you went from Lewisham to Brent. So from Lewisham, Leslie moved on. She went off to Islington to be chief exec. I spent another couple of years there, enjoying myself, but felt it was time to move on. So a job came up at Brent I went for and got. So I was there. I retired in April. Just recently, yeah. This year, yeah, not that long ago.

I was there just about 10 years. So what's that now? 46 years, is it working? I know I don't look old enough. Yeah, so 46 years working. Thank you for your service. Yeah, you're welcome. And yeah, so that got to Brent. They had no transformation, nothing really. They'd gone through quite a painful change, both at political level and then in the managerial level.

Yeah. And it's sort of been a pretty much a big clear out of management in Brent just before I got there. And so it was a fairly new team, had an interim chief executive at the time. And I went in initially, again, this was another conversation about, well, it'll be this, but the job's going to change. So I initially went in as director of IT because I by then managed the IT in Lewisham for a while as well as other things that I was doing corporately.

And within three months, I'd got a redundancy letter at risk. Right. Because they'd restructured. Ideal. Yeah, ideal. Yeah. They'd restructured. And then I, I think then I became the director of strategic commissioning. That sounds quite fancy, doesn't it? Yeah. But it had all policy and communications and member services and all sorts of things in it.

And my fledgling as I was building, you know, transformation teams, I had three transformation managers by then. Yeah. It took me about a year in to sort of set that up. And I had three people working on transformation program for the council to deliver its savings and support the services. And then the big change for me, I guess, was when Carolyn Downs came in as the chief exec.

A year after I started, she rightly restructured in the way that she wanted it and I became the assistant chief executive. And that's when the transformation thing really took off and, you know, and digital, you know, the big push on digital transformation. because I had the IT, I just sort of brokered the shared service with my old council, Lewisham, and then we brought Southwark in.

So that's been running now, what, for about 10 years as a shared service, providing the IT endpoint device and critical infrastructure services. Yeah, so became the assistant chief exec, and then about four years after that, became a corporate director, first customer services. And then I given environment, all the environmental services added on to customer services in the center.

And then I got added on housing and then some of the environment got moved out and other stuff got moved back in. So, you know, just usual corporate directory type stuff for about the last six years of my career, I guess. So that's how I got there. Well, if you need your CV, we'll just take the transcript of this, buzz it through ChatGPT, job done.

So we started talking about design thinking and I met you in 2009, 2010 when I joined the graduate scheme. I was very lucky to join your team because... We were at the very beginning of this movement of human-centred design, design thinking in local government. I didn't realise at the time, I just thought, oh, this is an interesting methodology.

What I didn't realise was that that discipline didn't really exist in government before that moment. So we were right at the very beginning of it. How is it that you sort of find yourself at the beginning of these movements of new ways of thinking? How did that come down? I think it's just my natural nature or resting state is I'll always try anything.

I remember working for people that I always felt were a little negative and would expel more energy defending their position and the status quo. And they were testing and trying things and seeing things would work. And I always, working for people like that, I always found it frustrating. So, mentally in your mind, I thought, when I'm, when I get to it, because I always in my own mind knew that I would get to a, a position where I would be able to make decisions myself on this stuff.

I thought when I get there, I'm not going to be like that. I'm going to encourage people to test and try and do things and give them the cover they need to do it because it's really hard working in this area. It's ambiguous. There's no clear end goal necessarily all the time. It's sort of hard to sew a button on it, as they say.

Yeah. And so people need some frame that they can sort of work within. Yeah. And so if their boss gives them that cover and they feel. like they've got their back and they're supporting them. And I think that allows them to innovate and try these things and work in this ambiguous way. Because I've worked in it when I didn't get that and I found it very stressful and hard.

And I worked in it when I did get it and I found it easy, much easier to do. So always at that point in my, you know, my career when I was younger, I thought, well, you know, when I, when I do, when I am in that position, that's the environment I'll create. And sure, so that's what, that's all I've sort of ever, ever done.

So I've always accepted anything. A bit like when I said with my career, I was given this, I was given that, I did this, I did that. I've never said no to anything. I've always said, yeah, all right, I'll try it. And just see where it lasts. Because everything basically boils down to the fundamentals of, you know, there will be a process, but what's around that is people and emotions and you've got to make the two work together and you've got to, infuse people in doing that.

So it doesn't really matter what the technical subject is. Most people can pick up any subject over time enough to be able to work and manage within it. So I don't believe this technocrat stuff. at all, to be honest with you. Well, I want to know a bit more about what in practice does it look like creating the boundaries and the cover for people?

Because I'll give you an example. I've mentioned this to you before, but when I was a grad, so I would have been, I don't know, 23 or something, we were working on this channel shift program. You may or may not remember this. You'll remember the channel shift program, but you might not remember this specific example. And we'd built this We built this dashboard of all the call center data.

Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. We had to get Lindsay's. Exactly. Yeah, Andre. To build the spreadsheet behind it. And to make up to my lack of intelligence. Yeah. So we've built this. I say we, Andre built this thing with a little bit of input from me. And we were just about to go to a board meeting. with all the other assistant directors, housing and customer, because you were out at customer then and Ralph was doing customer.

Yeah. And I was supposed to be presenting and sharing all this really great insight about where there was failure demand in the system and bottlenecks and all this stuff. And like 5 minutes before the meeting where I was going to do this show and tell, I broke the whole thing, like completely irreparably broke it. So all these people were teed up to come and listen to us.

I do remember that. Yeah. And me and Lindsay came over to you and I just said, Peter, I'm so sorry. I've literally just broken this thing. And you just said, do you think there's any way of fixing it before the meeting if we pushed it back? And I said, I really don't think there is actually. And he said, okay, it's fine.

These things happen. And you literally, because all the assistant directors were all in the same spot that you were talking about with the little partitions. And you just went around everybody and you just said, something's happened and sorry, inconvenience, but we'll come back and we'll do it again properly. And I was so unbelievably worried.

And then after I saw the way you reacted, I was like, oh wow, it actually is okay to mess up if you just are honest and own up. So that's one example of where I think you could have reacted differently. And I would have then, that probably would have influenced the way that I worked under you from that moment onwards if you'd have been different.

So that's one example. What else does it look like, creating space and boundaries for people? Well, first and foremost, you've got to sort out the finances of anything. I've always, that's always been my belief. I've always wanted my... fingers in the finance pies, because, you know, without finance, it's hard to do anything, isn't it?

So I've always had a keen interest in how the money works. Follow the money, as they say, and you'll understand how you can get things done. So that's the first thing is in order to have good resources, you do need money. So I've always started from that base of trying to build from, you know, accessing funding to make sure that, you know, when you want to build and break something that, you know, we've got we've got a solid financial base to have to have done that on.

And the reason you were doing that failure demand stuff was that was all around savings again, wasn't it? Yeah. If you remember, I do. Yeah. It was around 2010 time, wasn't it? That's it. You know, and I think the Labour government had just been replaced by the then was it conservative liberal coalition, coalition, wasn't it?

And it was all about austerity, wasn't it? Do you remember? I remember it very well. And there was this big push around, you know, making those savings. But in order to make savings, you've got to invest, haven't you? Yeah. You've got to invest in people, you've got to invest in systems, you've got to invest in, you know, different ways of working.

So that, to me, the first thing is, I've always tried to get, you know, available funding in order to do that. And in many times in local government, when you're doing that and you're building a new team and all of that, you can't, you can't get, core revenue funding because, it's like hen's teeth, isn't it? It's hard to find, but you can get capital and then capital can be treated, you know, in certain ways as well.

And you'll have something like the minimum revenue provision for capital. because they have to have revenue that covers capital in finance. And so there's always money within those margins that you can use as one-offs to start to build a proposition that if it then works, you will get core funding because obviously they see the value of investing to save in these things.

So that's the first thing. You've got to have done that, which I would have done by then and we would have done that. I always make sure, and I've always made sure that I support my colleagues, so my peers. So like you said, I went around and talked to people. They would have all listened to me at that point because, you know, I'd have had a good connection with them.

And, you know, we were friends in many ways. They all worked in the same area. And they know, you know, they know I wouldn't have been bullshitting them. They'd have known it was genuine. So I would have felt comfortable at the time going and saying, oh, look, you know, it ain't really worked, but, you know, the prize is worth it.

Let's wait and do it. So it's about building relationships. So it's about money and it's about building relationships. But it's mostly about, you know, setting a clear vision. Yeah. And showing people that this is what it's going to look like, you know, in two, three years time. Let's. immerse ourselves in what it does gonna look like, what it's going to feel like, you know, where we're going to be.

Because if you can do that, it doesn't matter your path, it goes off on tangents or, or you go straight to it. You know, luckily, sometimes you do go straight to it, but not always. And mostly you don't, mostly you walk around the garden like a teddy bear, don't you for a little while. One step. Oh, I see. Tiggly under there, that sort of stuff.

Do you No, I'm with you and I'm with you. I had too many kids. That's what it was. So, yeah, so, you know, get the finances right, build relationships, build trust, you know, and set a clear vision for people. And we'd have done all that by then in Lewis, haven't we? And actually what you were working on was really good.

And it did show, it showed where the bottlenecks were. Yeah. Because you've got to shift those senior managers to change what they're doing. And they like protecting things, don't they? People. So it is natural. I do understand that. It's uncomfortable when you're not, you know, when someone is dabbling in your garden and you don't want them to.

But that's the only way I've ever found that it generally works is that, you know, you do it that way. I don't know whether it's a good analogy, but, you know, how's you boil a frog and that, you know, you turn the heat up very slowly and it doesn't notice, does it? It's too late. That's a nice image. Thanks for that. It's too late.

I mean, there's lots of things that I observe about you seeing you operate that I've always found very interesting. You remember everything, which I think is, which I think is really interesting because... I've seen you do this on many occasions because you're able to keep people honest about the things that they've said and you never have any notes.

You all just like got it up in your head, which is really frustrating and like an elephant or something. You've got your phone, yeah. But you're also quite playful in work in a sort of way that's unique to you. And I wonder how much that is just you or whether that's you doing that on purpose because I think it does make watching you, it does sort of make slightly trickier conversations possible because you can, it's a softer way into it.

How do you think about that? I think that is more me than it is like consciously doing it. And I don't know whether how that started, whether it was always me or whether I was doing it and then it became me or not. But even at school I was always sort of like one of... So I was making the jokes and getting sent out for saying something the teacher didn't like.

Nose against the wall. Can walk up and down. We had a story called the potting shed. That's another story in my school. Only in Dagenham would you get that. If you were naughty, if you were naughty, they'd sent you out of class. They've sent you to a potting shed, literally a greenhouse, where you played darts and smoked.

Sounds great. Yeah, I know. We wouldn't do that once a month. Not smoking. We don't condone the smoking. We wouldn't do that once a month. You've got to remember, this was the 70s. Yeah, it's a different time. It was a different time, wasn't it? Yeah, but literally that was the punishment. Send you to the punishment. But anyway, you know, these are those things.

So yeah, I don't know which came first, but it's just natural, really. It's just how I am. If you're still here, my assumption is you're finding this conversation useful. recording these interviews because we think it's important to share stories of people who are leading and designing more human, impactful and relational public services, and we'd like as many people as possible to see them.

If you think you can help us with that, then I'd be so grateful if you did one of three things. You can just like the video and that'll help other people to find it in future. You can leave us a comment and let us know why you stuck around, or you could subscribe to the channel. And honestly, I've got no good reason for that other than It would cheer me up.

Okay, back to the interview. Well, we're talking about taking circuitous routes to end goals and the importance of having a clear vision. I suppose what that makes me think about is more agile ways of working, more sort of testing and learning and prototyping. And I know that's something that you've you've been doing for a very long period of time.

I wonder if you can talk about some examples of that in Brent and how that more test and learn approach has come about. The reason I'm asking is because obviously test and learn is a big, big focus for government now and there's lots of funding going into that around the country. But I think there are less examples outside of digital and in service land.

of the literal practice of testing and learning and what it makes possible. So I think it's good to tell stories about that. Yeah, that would be a good example. I suppose our community hubs would be the main one, which was less digital or more about, you know, changing the way we interact with our residents in particular, not so much businesses, but our residents in particular.

So we did some, what we called them, In Brent was outcome-based reviews, right? So, obviously, the focus being on the outcome, and we use the design principles from, you know, the double diamond. from the work of the design council. I by then developed my team, my transformation team. It was less digital at that time, but it was more just focusing on transformation.

And we had maybe there was probably three or four of us doing it. Then we trained the team in design council methodologies. And then we picked some areas where we said, what's the outcome we're looking for? And one of them was around this interaction with people, but being closer to where they live, rather than all everything coming out of the Brent Civic Centre.

So we did quite a big piece of work and we tried to do these in three months because the other thing is that if things drag on for a long time, everyone's got a day job, everyone sort of like loses focus don't they and gets on. So we tried to... do it in that time. But the big thing was is to get some sort of like voices into the system.

So we trained some staff to go out with their phones and just talk to customers at the front desk and in community settings and all of that and just with the phone just have that interaction and do some video. We did a lot of data crunching around numbers of people, where they live, what benefits they're on this, you know.

So where does the data tell you to go? So we had the sort of data set. We had the voice of the people there. Then you talk to the services themselves and asking them at the frontline. It's important that you get the frontline. So people doing the job, you know, it's not rocket science, it's what people do. You know, what's it like being the employee here doing that?

What frustrates you? What can you do? And then we put all that together and got all of that data together. And we had a day where we invited, you know, service users, staff, all the agencies that other agencies and community organisations, because a lot of this is, you know, the answer is to work very closely with your community organisations.

those people that are empowered and want to, you know, change what's going on on the street and in the in the local area. And we did a big day with all visuals and videos and, you know, built up that understanding of what the issues are, what people are saying, what they want to do. And then, you know, that's that sort of like visioning, opening out the diamonds going out, you know, and then got people to vote using the dots, you know, the dots on the boards.

getting them to vote on areas because we've got them to sit down in groups and come up with ideas. And a big idea that came out of all of these was to couldn't we sort of like use a local sort of building and like maybe have a service there that's more holistic, you know, and how we could do that. So that became our community hub.

So that was one of the things we said we'd prototype. There was a number of things we said we'd prototype, but that was one of them. So we went to Holston. I think it might have been in something like November, because I remember we had like a double-decker bus outside and diesel fumes pumping out when people were going in and talking to people.

But we also, we hired the local Methodist Church Hall and for two weeks we had all of the different services there, all just doing frontline stuff and we were testing and prototyping it. Like actually doing the things? Actually doing it, yeah. And it was just for two weeks and we just, you know, got a bit of money to fund it because again, you know, why would, why would like frontline services send people there?

because they've got to do their day job back at the civic centre. So we were sort of like backfilling a little bit and stuff like that and pulling favours in and doing all sorts of stuff. We got the members involved, the local ward members all fully engaged, the leadership fully engaged in it, because they could see that if it worked, it would actually make a difference.

And that was very successful. So I've worked with colleagues who run libraries and agreed that we could actually prototype this service in Holsden Library. Right. So we just set up in Holsden Library. Again, I got some funding, one-off funding to do it. It was over a couple of years. It was sort of like capital money. And we took on a guy to be the hub's manager, and we got a couple of staff in there.

And we ran, we ran a hub service just out of Holston for 18 months. Right. Learned a lot from it. And by then, this is that point about, I don't know, boiling, boiling up the frog or whatever, you know, by then it was such a good service that people wanted it replicated. So we, and again, I was working on that in the background and getting funding and putting in a bid and different things.

And after 18 months, we actually rolled that out across the borough, mostly in libraries, not all in libraries. I think they've now got probably six or seven community hubs. And just before I left, we developed that into a service not far from Harleston in an old NHS building that we leased that had adult adult social care learning support in there and it was being underutilised.

And so we put in there a hub service along with a homelessness service along with the adults as well. And so now there's like an even bigger sort of service there which they've called New Horizons, which is a lovely, lovely sort of summation of what it what it is. Supporting families, you know, and And we've done quite a lot of work with a number of community groups, one in particular called Suffra, that's a local charity that does food bank and support.

And the whole thing is sort of run by them. And we've got our own staff there as well. And it's based on food as well now. So people can go there and get a meal, they can also have their all of the issues that they may have sorted out by different services at the same time. And then they're on that program now for, I believe they might have moved up to six months because we sort of prototyped it recently, up to three months.

And it's a subscription model where they also get like about 30 pounds worth of shopping each week for a free, three or four pound a week subscription. And it's sort of more dignified way of doing it as well, because it's not based on money, it's based on stars. So like a tin of beans might be one star and a loaf of bread might be one star and stuff like that.

And everyone got like 26 stars to spend. And then there's a lot of free produce that they can take as well that would be soiled if it weren't used. You know, it's given by organizations and supermarkets and stuff like that. So that's now open. And it's also got our homelessness service there. It's a real, you know, thriving hub.

So, and that all came from one of these outcome based reviews where we did a lot of the work, opened up people's mind, come up with ideas, prototype that, remember that took two weeks, then 18 months, then rolled out. We then had obviously pandemic where we had to frontline. Well, we changed it to a telephone service, actually, at that time.

And then focus a lot of our energy on building food parcels and getting them delivered for quite a while, which was very successful during that period. And then we had to reinvent it again back after the pandemic and go back to where it is now. So, and it's, you know, one of the most valued services, I think, in the in Brent now, but it wasn't something that was ever there before.

So I think this is such a good example for lots of different reasons. This is the essence of prototyping, very quickly testing in practice in a space, getting real information and data and learning about what works and what doesn't work. What I'm interested to ask is this approach, I think, is It's the only effective approach when you're dealing with enormous amounts of uncertainty and you don't really know what's going to work or not.

How else do you accumulate the knowledge without testing? But it's very hard for everybody in the system to do it. So it's hard for people on the front line to be released to do it. It's hard for the managers to get cover. because they're thinking, God, the caseloads are going to be going up. What we're going to do for this two weeks when they're off in the Methodist Hall.

It's very hard for finance directors to say, well, all right, I'll sign you a check for this thing. And I've got no idea whether it's going to work or not. So what's the conversation at those different levels? You can work in any direction you want. You can work frontline to finance director or finance director down. It goes back to what I said earlier, isn't it?

starts with the money. Yeah. Now, you know, with... we did that prototype and we did all those things. But prior to that, I'd been building up, building up trust with my colleagues. You know, I'm not just coming in and saying a load of words, give me a load of money, and then it'll all get fritted away. I think, you know, if I say I'm going to do something, I genuinely think most people I've worked with would say, well, yeah, we'll do it.

You know, and I've never, I've never It's never been for me myself in that sense. It's always, you know, it's always trying to focus on the outcome, which is for the residents of, in this case, Brent, you know, and for the politicians, because they are a representation of those people of Brent. They've been put there by those people, you know, and they've been given a very important job to do.

And so, you know, supporting and servicing what what they require is the number one thing, isn't it? You know, as long as you stick within the boundaries of regulation, law and governance and all of those things, which is obviously, you know, a given that you have to do. So it's building up those things of trust, understanding where the money is and what money you can use for how long.

And, you know, I think we were talking in the before when we had a coffee before we before we started that, a lot of times government will just drop money on a council, with three months to go and say, can you do something around this or can you do something around that, can't you? And so there's always little pots of money that can be used to innovate with.

But you've got to be trusted in order to do that. So you've got to build that trust with politicians, with senior managers, especially in finance. You've got to build a good working relationship with them. And then you've got to deliver, haven't you? So up to that point, I mean, obviously I've been doing those things for a while in Brent before we got to doing the outcome-based reviews on which led to the community hubs.

And so while they were always testing it, I was I was in the background working on the next bit, sowing the seeds. This is what's going to happen next. This is what we're working on. This is what we need and all of that. So when it comes to the transition, that that goes as smoothly, as smoothly as it can. So, you know, frontline staff going in there.

We had a bit of money to backfill. there, you know, so they could cover it with overtime or whatever it is that, however they covered it, it made them feel a little bit more comfortable, didn't it? Because, you know, if you've got, if you've got five members of staff taken out for two weeks, you know, I don't know what that would be in money terms, but no more than five grand or something, then that's given into their budget so they can either use agency or other staff or manoeuvre people around so those people can it yeah you know and I think you do need a little bit of that to start with in order for people to free their minds up from being defensive and saying no no no because the other thing is is they say well when you set up this community out who's going to run them where are they going to go you know they're starting to feel well I'll be losing my frontline staff yeah you know all of those things are going on they might not that's all very real as well isn't it of course it is and so you know you've got to be able to well work with people and bring them along and sell that vision that what it's going to look like.

And so that's all I ever try to do is create the right environment in order to be able to do that so that the staff who are working on it, whatever it is like the community hub. can do it, can innovate, can try these things. I mean, it was a bit of a leap for our library service at the time. Yeah, of course. Which weren't in my area.

So I didn't have direct management control over any of that. But my colleague at the time, Phil, it was in his area, he was a corporate director, you know, he gave it its support. But they've got like a tenant there now, aren't they? And they're trying to get their kids' library and do this, and then we've got people there giving advice on open public spaces.

Those things aren't easy, and they had to work around and work out how they could work together. And that took 18 months for us to get that model right before we could then roll it out to the other libraries, which we did, and it's now thriving. We'll talk about the environment where this kind of work is possible. I think one of the things that needs to be in place for this kind of work to happen is for people not to be overwhelmed by far too many priorities.

And that's a real challenge in local government because there are always more priorities than there's time in the day. How did you think about that? Because this is just one chunk of work. This is 1 priority and a massive portfolio of work. How do you go about prioritizing that stuff to make sure that people are focusing on the things that have the potential, that the highest potential for a return or better outcomes, whatever.

Yeah, that's a good question. It's probably hard to answer in many ways. There's always the Pareto rule, isn't there? And I've always found that it's pretty good, you know, 20%, the effort gives you 80% of the, you know, the outcome. The value of the outcome, yeah. You've got to be able to pick those. You know, what are the what are the what's the 20% of all of your work that's going to deliver the 80% of what you're trying to do?

And, you know, you have to be clear about that. And you also have to be clear that when you've when you're working on something, if it if it clearly isn't going down the right road and it isn't working, you've got to stop it. Too often people don't stop it and it continues on and on, doesn't it? And I don't know, not so much in Brent, but I think a bit in Lewisham, certainly in Redbridge, they had this sort of like board fatigue where there'd be boards and boards and boards set up, but no one ever shut any of them down.

There was a few in Brent, but nowhere near like I've worked in other places. And I think that's a symptom of people just not being honest and saying, well, actually this ain't working, let's just stop it. start again, because everyone sort of tries to protect their own little areas. So I've always just looked at what are the main things we need to be doing.

It's always going to be supporting the budget process, isn't it? Because that drives a lot of behaviors and approaches to things. It drives political careers, you know, if they get their budget savings a bit wonky then that can create all sorts of problems I mean do you remember at Lewisham when they brought in that car parking charging and cashless too early and it like nearly you know it was like that it took up so much management time for so long didn't it and it needed to be unwound you know it wasn't necessarily not the right thing to do it was just the wrong time to do it in many ways so Yeah, I think you've just got to know what are the right projects that you do focus on and the others just come along anyway with it.

And it's like you were saying, if I can create an environment where you think, oh, he's all right, he's gonna, if I'm muck up, it doesn't matter so much as long as we learn from it and we move forward, then yes, you'll have that one big project that I want you to get done because that's the one, the 20% one, but you'll do the others anyway because you'll want to. I know that because that's why I know that what people are like and I'd want to do that as well yeah so I've never sort of worried too much about that so you have the main projects that you know you have to dilemma yeah and then all there's lots of other stuff that I I've always found does get delivered, but people would more worry about if they weren't in an environment where they felt they could deliver more generally.

I've always had my managers and staff say, oh, Pete, stop saying yes to everything. I know they feel like there's another project. I'll come back for a minute. Oh, I've said we'd do this. Yeah, but there's something interesting in that, isn't there? Yeah, we might have just accumulated some more projects, but what is clear is what are the real priorities that absolutely do need to be delivered?

And also crucially, where are we trying to get to on those projects? And I think those things are often pretty wonky. It's not clear what the real priority is, and it's also not clear what the goal is. And if you can't be clear on those things, then it's inevitable that people will pull it in different direction. And I'd always say get the building blocks right.

Yeah. Because you can't build a house without good foundations, as they say, can you? So you've got to have the finances all sorted out, but you've got to have other things like the governance has to be good. I don't know if you're doing digital, you've got to make sure that the infrastructure is solid and cyber secure and all of those.

You've got to have those things in place. in order to have successful projects and for people to be able to work in a successful way. So you always have to make sure that the fundamentals, the building blocks are strong. And then you can build up, you can build up from that. Say more about the governance, because I think that is a, it's almost like cholesterol in the arteries, veins.

I don't know, I'm not much of a... Depends on whether it's good or bad cholesterol. I don't know, cholesterol in the veins of public services is the... sometimes the poor governance or, you know, board fatigue, all of that stuff. What does that look like when it's working well? What's governance that helps actually learn?

To be honest with you, I think, so the pandemic highlighted this for me more. I mean, I've worked in different committee structures from when I first started in local government, it was the old traditional committees where the chair had all the power with their director. and it actually created cultures of thiefdoms, and it wasn't a health, in my view, it wasn't a healthy approach.

And when they went to a cabinet style model, I think that helped a lot in being able to innovate and change because it speeded up decision making. Now you do need checks and balances and all of that. You need healthy and good scrutiny because in a lot of councils, it's pretty much a one party state in a lot of councils.

So they're not going to get a lot of scrutiny from the opposition because of pretty much not one mayor. So, you know, and that's something about the political world that the leadership of a political organisation also needs to be able to let themselves be scrutinized by their own people and give them empower them to do it because it's hard enough anyway isn't it and you're trying to manage a whole group you've got to give people something to do you know they don't not everyone just wants to be a backbencher either do they but if you're going to do that you've got to make sure that that check and balance has at least got some like teeth uh teeth in it um because it you do need to keep your governance you know, on the straight and narrow in that sense, you know, they're broad, fairly broad routes, but you do need to operate, operate within them.

So it's important that an organization to be healthy has good governance. Yeah. You know, otherwise you start making bad decisions and you end up in bad places. And it might not be for a few years or whatever, but ultimately you will, because it's just the way it's just the way of the world, isn't it? So That's why I'd say it's healthier to work in a place that's got good governance.

But it'll also mean that you probably can speed up decision making. Yeah. If it's got good governance as well. And I don't say in the pandemic, but obviously they relaxed rules on things like procurement and that, didn't they? And you could make decisions more quickly to get, you know, things like masks and stuff like that.

But you still had to then publish what you were doing and make sure there's a, the public could see it and, you know, challenge it and those sorts of things as well. But obviously it does speeding up the cycle, doesn't it? Because in local government, when you're planning sort of like a decision, it could be up to like, I don't know, two, three months, couldn't it?

Yeah. Going through different internal bodies, boards and that, and then into the political arena and then up into, you know, a decision at cabinet or, or at full council. So, yeah, so getting the governance right, but getting it healthy and good. So you need a good audit sort of system as well that checks and dips in and make sure that is working well.

All of that you have to have in place. It's one of those building blocks that, you know, when you've worked for a good organisation, they've got that right, I've found. We've talked a bit about decision making. I know that's something that you, that's one of the parts of your role you've always enjoyed the most. What kind of information do you feel like you need in order to be able to make good decisions?

Because I always noticed with you that you were able to make decisions pretty quickly. But to do that, you need good information, right, to be able to do that. So what do you need? Well, I think you need to understand the subject, whatever the subject is, you need to have, normally when it comes to a point where you've got to make a decision, you've had a fair few conversations about it in, you know, with your management team or the council management team, if you're on it like I was, you know, things really come completely out of the blue.

And when they do, you just have to use what knowledge you've got to make a decision. But generally, it builds up to a decision. So you have to understand the subject, you've got to understand the unintended consequences of it. That's something that I think not everyone necessarily does. You might make a decision to do something and then all of a sudden it affects someone over there, although you don't really realise it should.

I think before you make a decision, you need to try and work through what the impact of that decision is. Yeah. Not just, you know, yes, we're going to buy that, you know, yes, we're going to buy that. But actually, when we do buy it, do we have to maintain that long for anyone got to we got to bring in any staff in to run it and we got to do all this.

And what happens to these people who over here who when we run that might not be running this the same way. there's more to a decision than just what's in front of you. There are lots of other facets to it that you have to understand. And I don't know, I think over the years you build up a... a compendium of knowledge about these things, I think, or I certainly did, that allowed me to be able to work through that in my mind fairly quickly.

Yeah. And know what the consequences of doing these things are. You don't always get it right necessarily. But the other thing is, if you don't, you've got to acknowledge that and learn from it and do it quickly. If it isn't right, you've got to, you know, row it back a little bit, haven't you? But yeah, yeah, that's, I don't, I don't think there's anything I couldn't couldn't write down how I do it.

I just it's just something I'd sort of like I think about the money, I think about the people, I think about the consequences to the environment it's in and all of those things and what the long term consequences of having whatever it is that the decision has given you. Yeah. Is because everything's got a life that needs to be sustained, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, you said a couple of times about, you know, something's not working, you've got to You've got to stop it or you've got to be honest. And I think that's something that's very hard for people to do. It's a rarity that you find people that are very comfortable with that level of honesty and that level of willingness to actually just say, do you know what, this isn't working, let's row this back.

Because it's a challenge, isn't it? Because in a role like yours, you've had to be sort of quite passionate about, you know, this is what I think we need to be doing in order to get the buy-in to do that. But you also have to be humble enough to say, actually, we've tried some of these things and it didn't work. It's hard, isn't it?

I think what tends to happen though in reality is you don't stop something, you just adapt it. You modify it and you repackage it and put it back on the rails is what tends to happen. more often than not. Yeah, more often. I mean, there are things like that example of the parking charges where that just got completely rode back because it didn't land well at all.

And I suppose the lesson there was for us, we should have done a bit more testing of that policy before, you know, it was adopted. But again, it was you know, looking for money, looking for budget savings, looking for all those things. As I say, I don't think it was the wrong thing, that one actually, just at the wrong time.

You know, I'm sure that his cash is parking now in that area. We could check. We could check. Haven't been over there for a while, to be fair. Stop the camera. Yeah, I mean, there's... There's far more complexity in local government than people assume, I think, isn't there? What on the face of it seems like to one directorate or one individual, well, this is an obvious solution to a simple problem.

More often than not, it's really not that simple because it involves lots of stakeholders, it involves people. And I think that's where You use the word testing where testing is very, very healthy early, as soon as possible, you know, lowest fidelity that you can get away with in order to accumulate learning. But yeah, well, I think the point around testing or prototyping and doing all those things is that unless you go out wide first with that first diamond and you bring gathering all the information you can about whatever the subject is and you focus it on outcomes, not on inputs because you get lost in all of the inputs.

You focus at what we're trying to achieve, what's the outcome we want. And then you look at all of the data and then you bring in all the actors around that have an involvement in it or a stake in it, and you share all of that and you open it up for conversation and ideas. Yeah. That's, you know, really what you need to be doing all the time, whether it's in microcosm, small doing it, or whether it's like that big, you know, event.

And that I explained earlier around the community hubs. If you don't do that, you're not bringing people with you, but you're also not understanding what the issues are and what people want from it. But it's got to focus on outcomes. It's no good focusing on inputs and processes. It's got to be the outcomes. All of that other stuff you can then do.

And then the prototyping bit is important, but you can do that really cheaply. And really quickly. And really quickly. Whereas, I mean, I worked in, I won't say which boroughs it was, but I've only worked for three, so, and it weren't, it weren't Brent. But, you know, if you wanted to do, if you wanted to change something, you had to write a business case, you had to do the issue.

I mean, there's so many hurdles to get over that you just lost the world, so you didn't bother. And they never innovated because of it. because it was just too much wading through treacle to just get the smallest thing done. And that might have been fine for the finance people at the time, keeping a control over spend in their mind.

Actually, in reality, they were costing money, you know, they were costing it. So it's... Well, the tight you grip it, the worse it becomes, right? Yeah, this is a really interesting conversation. I mean, we're just about, I won't say which local authority, but we're just about to start a piece of work where we're running a prototype of an approach to delivering savings and process improvement.

So instead of doing all those level of outline business case, business case, PIDs and all of that stuff, getting very quick to the testing and then using that to decide, well, which savings opportunities do we prioritize on the basis of our very, very quick testing. I think it's a real misconception that this this kind of way of working is hard and resource intensive.

Done well, it should be. We're going to do this really, really quickly. And there's a place for pids and all those things. Once you're into a project and you want to try and manage something, you know, between a couple of train rails, then you know, that sort of there is a place for that. But there's also a place to, you know, test and try things out and move a bit quicker on those sorts of things to get to the right sort of solution.

And then, it has to be implemented, doesn't it? And you can bring in your project disciplines at that point, can't you? Yeah, I think for the way of working with this that we're talking about to work, there needs to be some real hygiene factors in place. You need to have the right people in the room, because if you don't, then they're going to pull in an opposite direction later on.

You need to have good facilitation. I got interested in facilitation because of you, because you've put us on Pin, pinpoint training, the old pinpoint balls, that's pinpoint, yeah. The glue is my top take. I first saw those when the Audit Commission first started doing their inspections of local government. What that would have been like, when would that have been in the 90s?

And they had these boards with sticky paper and pins and stuff. And I asked them afterwards. And it's a German process that they obviously go through it in much more rigidity in Germany than we ever used it. But ever since then, those boards followed me everywhere. We ordered them everywhere we went, didn't we? But it's foundational, the principles in that facilitation approach, that you try and include a really diverse range of voices in coming up with it or in understanding the problem.

But it also means that no one person can dominate. Exactly. Because of the way the facilitation works. And that's what's good about it. Everybody feels they come out there feeling like they've been able to contribute, you know, what they feel. And I think that's the most important thing of them at all. You do come to a consensus and those agitators and those that, you know, don't want to do it have been in there.

But the consensus, if it's the right one, it is as emerged, as it emerged, hasn't it? Well, more or less consensus, you know, yeah, well... They won't necessarily still agree with it, but they'll see that it came about in a democratic way, you know, which is the foundation of the way we all live anyway, isn't it? So, you know, it's got to be right, isn't it?

Looking back now, reflecting on on this 40 odd years of doing this work, what I mean, think about anything you want, but I'm thinking specifically about some of the work you did in Brent because Incredibly transformative. I think some of the shared service stuff has a lot of implications for local government reform. But what are the things that you're most proud of now?

Now you're looking back. Now you're out your suit. Yeah, I know. You know I'm out my suit. Yeah. But don't fit me anymore. Yeah, exactly. For the good reasons. It's really exciting. For good reasons. Yeah. I guess what I'm most proud of really is that I think I left Brent in a better place than when I went there. Right.

I feel like I had some contribution toward not the only person, obviously, but I feel like I did. I mean, through the pandemic in particular, I think Brent responded, I mean, I'm sure every council did, but responded really well to that. You know, we created a lot of support for people that, you know, were very vulnerable and were really struggling.

You know, we got funding and people could apply for grants and funds and things like that. The community hubs themselves, the extension of that into the New Horizons project was really good. I was working on another project just before I left where we were getting a community group in to start running the CAF back in the Civic Centre, which closed down.

at the pandemic and never reopened. And now that's reopened now. And, you know, they're supporting people back into work through that program, you know, and I'm really proud of the work that my team and they did in order to do that. Yeah, lots of things like that. The probably we had one of the first cybersecurity strategies in local government.

We set up one of the first sort of boards around the ethics of data. So before we did anything with a sort of like digital IT data usage, we'd take it through this board and add external people on where we'd talk through what the implications are. And mostly the implications are that you've got to make sure that the people that are receiving these services and changes have had an input and understand what you're doing with their data.

So, you know, you've got to share that information with the public and things like that. Yeah, lots of things, basic building blocks, having a really strong digital and transformation team, really good customer services. Yeah, lots of things I'm proud of. So many actually that it's hard to list them all, but the politicians there were great with me in particular.

I really enjoyed working with them and they're a good bunch of people and my colleague peers that I work with as well. So I had a really enjoyable time there actually. I'm proud of some of the legacy that I've left there. your retirement due was like a little mini festival at the Town Hall, and I was Civic Centre. I was at the Civic Centre.

Sorry, apologies, Brent. I love that Civic Centre, because when you're in there, it's really used by the community. It's in it's in the heart of the community. Yeah, it's the thing that I when I first went to Brent. It's one of the things that I thought, well, actually I could work here. I walked into the civic centre and it was just the hive of people moving around, lots of people from the community, officers of the council.

Just generally, it's just a buzz. It's a very modern building. It still is in terms of it's what, about 13 years old now. But it's a lovely space and it's used really well. The design of it was very good. Yeah, the design of it was very good. It's such a nice place to work in. one of the things that I was struck by was the obvious relationship you had with the leader of the council and with members.

I remember you saying to me a long, time ago, probably about 15 years ago, we were talking about Barry Quirk and you'd said that one of the real successes that, or one of Barry's real successes has been his ability over a very long period of time to navigate the balance between the work with members and in the case of Lucian, the mayor of the council. and his role of the head of paid service.

And navigating that over a long period of time is inevitably quite difficult. And it seems like that's something that you've figured out for yourself as well. And I wonder how you've thought about that. I just, it's, you know, when you're going up through, this is advice for anyone who's going into local government and wants to, wants to get into more senior roles, one of the big questions I ask you is about your interface with members and how do you deal with members this, how do you deal with members that?

And like when you're not working with members, you sort of feel, there must be some sort of, is there a thing here then? What is it that, you know, but they're just the same as you, they're working in the same place because they want to deliver better outcomes for the people of that area. And when you realise that, then actually, and they realise that that's what you're trying to do, then it becomes, you know, the relationship becomes better, I think.

I think it's no different to what I was saying about with peers or colleagues. You have to build up a relationship from the trust with people. And then I think you can have honest conversations with them because they know that It's coming from a good place. Yeah. And you've not got an ulterior motive and you're not trying to, you know, there was a politician in Redbridge years ago when I worked there and he used to say to me, oh, can we do this?

And I'd say, oh, no, you can't do that. And he'd say, I was curbing him. You're curbing me, he used to say, because I was saying no, rather than what is he trying to achieve and how can we get to it in the right way. And I think that's another thing with politicians that you've got to remember is it's not necessarily their day job, remember?

Yeah. And they've got to be learning that as they go. So you've got to understand what it is they want to achieve. And it, you know, they might have an idea, but it might not necessarily be the best way of doing it. And then it's trying to, you know, get them to see that might be a you know, another way of getting to the outcome they want than the one that they're trying to, trying to promote.

So, you know, this, but basically it comes down to a working relationship when there's mutual respect and trust. And I've just always tried to, you know, be honest as I can with people. They know where I'm coming from. They know I'm, you know, what sort of person, you know, it's coming from. And I think that probably helps.

That's all. I don't think there's anything else. I haven't got any magic answer to that. No, it's foundational, isn't it? Relationships are primary and then everything else is derivative. I think so, yeah. So, and that's why I've always, you know, that's the thing that I think you need to, you know, you need to build that first.

It's like that thing, don't they? They say that what, you know, there's a reason why the period of time for someone to be on probation is 6 months because you have a You know, you have a couple of months of sort of like just talking to people and getting to them and they're all thinking, oh, they're all right. You have a couple of months of starting to deliver and they're thinking, oh, they're all right or not.

Then a couple of months of, you know, moving on and by six months, you've got your feet under the table. You understand you're probably working at, you know, 90% by then, or they've realized that you're never going to work and that's, they will extend it or you're gone. So, it's that sort of period of time. They say, it takes six months to get, into, and that's because it's the relationships that take the time to build.

What do you do in order to get those relationships kick-started when you start any role? Jeff, well, I've always just worked hard. delivered what I've been asked to deliver and had conversations and help people. Yeah. So people are always in need of some support and they'll always ask, any chance you can do this? A lot of people just say, well, we're really busy.

We can't do that. I would just say, yeah, yeah, we're doing it. And then I'll, you know, I'll go back and say to you, oh God, we're doing this damn minute. But I've always been like that. I kind of, it's just the way I am, you know, but I know that when I was coming up, whatever job I was in, if I asked for help, it's because I needed it.

And if you didn't get it, made it even harder, didn't it? So why would I want to make life hard for somebody if I could help? Yeah, that's just how I see it. But those things give you a little bit of credit in the bank each time, don't it? Yeah, you know, until at such point where you've got quite a lot of credit in the bank.

So when something does go wrong, if it ever did, God forbid, Yeah. it might not be as disastrous as it could have been given who you are. Yeah, or when you got to ask for the finance. Yeah, whatever it is or whatever, yeah. Great. So that ladder thing in it would be nice to people on the way up. You know, there's a way down as well, weren't there?

I think you got off the ladder a nice spot. Yeah, I'm not complaining. I'm not complaining. So look, Peter, honestly, I respect you so much and you're really good. You're really good, mate, and you've had enormous impact on my career and lots of my peers as well, and I really am so grateful for that. It's really nice to be able to have this chat.

What people won't know if they're watching until the end of this video is that this is the second time we've done this interview because we accidentally deleted all the footage, which is not ideal. So you're also very gracious. It probably worked out for the best, isn't it? I think so. Clearly six months Seven months on, I'm a more relaxed person than I've been there.

Well, we'll call it there. Thanks, mate. I really appreciate it. Brilliant. Thank you as well, Chad. Cheers.