This episode is another conversation with Daniel Thornton (like Episode 2 but this time with bells on) about Covid, companies dying, electric cars, corporate bullshit, and the Succession series.

Daniel Thornton - Bio

Daniel studied PPE at Oxford and History at LSE. He’s had huge experience in central government. He worked in the Foreign Office, Parliament, the Treasury, DCLG and has been a Private Secretary to the Prime Minister.

He’s been a programme director at the leading think tank the Institute for Government, the Director for External Relations at Ark an educational charity running dozens of schools and is currently an adivsor with the global vaccine alliance GAVI.

References

• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies - Geoffrey West
• Exit, Voice, and Loyalty - Albert Hirshman
• On the roots of Succession - Jesse Armstrong
• What happens in the Room - Lucy Prebble
• I love electric vehicles - Rowan Atkinson

And found later...

• Fact check: why Rowan Atkinson is wrong about electric vehicles - Simon Evans

Transcript

Mark (00:00): Hello, I'm Mark Foden. Welcome again, after quite a long break, to the Clock and the Cat. Things have not changed. We shall be continuing to explore the emerging topic of complexity to help you make better decisions and ultimately to be more effective. Whatever you are involved with. If you're new to the podcast, it might help to go back to Episode 1 for a 7 minute introduction to complexity. We'll wait for you...

Mark (00:30): If you went away. Welcome back. Today, I'm with Daniel Thornton. I've known him for ages. He was the first person I interviewed for the Clock in the Cat in Episode 2 in 2018. And gosh, that's a long time ago. If you heard that episode, you'll know that, Daniel's history is in central government, which he talked a good deal about. Then. He currently works for Gavi. Gavi is an alliance of big name global organisations like the World Health Organisation and the Gates Foundation. And as it says on their website, they help vaccinate almost half the world's children against deadly and debilitating infectious diseases. And as we shall hear, Covid has been a big deal for Daniel. So Daniel, hello. It's great to have you back after all this time.

Daniel (01:12): Thanks very much, Mark. It's great to be back on the Clock and the Cat, the sequel.

Mark (01:16): So Daniel tell us about Gavi and Covid.

Daniel (01:21): So as you said, I was working at Gavi previously, and I talked about that on the previous episode. I came back to Gavi in 2020 and pretty soon after I rejoined the Covid Pandemic started. As an organisation that has a big immunisation role in the world and infrastructure to, to immunise a lot of the world's population, we naturally saw a role for ourselves working with other international organisations like the World Health Organisation and UNICEF.

Mark (01:54): That must have been a hell of a shock starting a new job, going out to Switzerland, was it? And then suddenly Covid!

Daniel (02:00): It was a very, it was a very intense and stressful time for me. I think relatively speaking, I wasn't a nurse in intensive care, but I, nonetheless, I think it was probably the most stressful, stressful job I've ever had because you were constantly operating in an environment where we really didn't know what was going to happen next. And everything was pretty high stakes. We didn't know that there, there were any vaccines that were going to work when we started, but we worked on the basis that there would be, and that, and that if there were vaccines that were going to work, we needed to make sure that the world's population, wherever they lived got, got equal access to them. And that was a real struggle because countries looked after their own populations first, and the countries that had money and vaccine production on their territory were able to secure supply in a way that most of the world's population was not. So we were constantly running uphill to get vaccine supply early on in the pandemic.

Mark (02:56): So what were you doing? You talking to governments, talking to pharmaceutical companies? What?

Daniel (03:03): Well, my role was, was talking to governments. so I helped to, helped us. One of the people who helped to set up this thing called Covax, which was the organisation that was trying to distribute these vaccines encouraged the development of purchase and then distribute. Then my focus was on, on getting the money in. so eventually we raised more than 10 billion. It's a lot of money but we did that by June, 2021. And I think if we'd had 10 billion by June, 2020, then we could have been in a very different situation. We could have helped to get lower income countries at the front of the queue rather than at the back. So my overall feeling is it was a unprecedented effort, an extraordinary achievement by loss of people to get the vaccines that we did and to get the coverage we did in for lower income countries to have the supply and for them to distribute the vaccines. But it was not good enough. and a lot of people died who shouldn't have because we were slower than we should have been.

Mark (04:06): Okay. So if you put your complexity goggles on, what did it look like?

Daniel (04:12): I think complexity's interesting in this context from a lot of different perspectives. You can think about the disease from a complexity perspective and how it's spread thinking of the networks and the contexts between people and the, and the fact that some nodes in the network were really important for transmission and others, not so much.

Mark (04:32): Were you doing that thing? Were, were you doing network analysis

Daniel (04:36): No, that wasn't our job. But we did need to understand the prevalence of the disease and to see early on... This isn't my background. I'm not an epidemiologist, but we... people who ran the organisation work and I work with certainly were. And so understanding when it was a really small disease, just how potentially devastating it could be and the need to start moving and start raising money and set up the contracts with manufacturers and so on, that we knew we needed to do that because we, there were people who understood the way these diseases go. And this was, and had seen the way previous diseases had spread. And the absolutely vital thing is to get in early. If you can reduce transmission early, it goes from a problem... you can avoid the extraordinary scale of impact that the disease had on the world, perhaps 20 million people dead, the IMF estimated $12 trillion of lost output, which is, it's a pretty big number.

Mark (05:34): It's absolutely mind bogglingly massive, isn't it?

Daniel (05:38): And we estimate the vaccines that we distributed through Covax help to save 3 million lives. But the fact that 20 million died and we saved 3 million is... it tells you how much more we needed to do. But, coming back to complexity, I think the other thing is that it was interesting for me was seeing an alliance set up cutting across different organisations and within existing organisations. So it was a massive startup within an existing organisation and how some of the challenges around flexing the existing structures you had to borrow people, expand, use consultants, and how the existing governance structures interacted with that scale of new operation.

Mark (06:26): One of the things about complexity is that the uncertainty and operating in that uncertainty. But one of the things a massive global problem does is focus the mind. Everyone agrees what the problem is and it makes it easy, easier to organize around it because you don't have to spend time working out what the overall problem is. And so people focused on it and things happen in a way that they wouldn't in more ordinary times. Does that make sense?

Daniel (07:00): That's certainly right. And the vaccine industry went through a massive transformation of, in terms of the scale. I think the average year, you have about 5 billion doses produced. And the industry went to produce three times that or something. Including accelerating new technology - mRNA and other, other new platforms that hadn't really been viable until then got accelerated. And indeed we were able to get things done in the organisation, spend money and make... place, pretty big bets on, on different vaccines working in a way that we just don't do in ordinary times. vaccines take a long time to get introduced. They take a long, takes a long time to get approval for new programmes.

(07:50):** Because people want to understand what they're getting into and the trade-offs and so on. And in the environment of the pandemic, it was that the risk of inaction was so great, but I still think we didn't move fast enough. And I think that's, you're right, that in some ways it was easy because everybody knew what was happening. But I also think that people, even in that circumstance, find it hard to let go of the existing structures, and ways of working. We've got to have this committee meet and we've got to do this and we've got to... of course you've got to give papers two weeks in advance of this meeting. Everything changed in Covid: two weeks that was a lifetime in Covid time. So there were definitely some struggles in getting the speed that we needed.

Mark (08:33): Certainly here, I think we saw you've got to do things differently, particularly procurement, you've got to take risks and the decisions that were taken in the UK about procurement of PPE are certainly getting a proper kicking now looking back on it. So you can't win. And not that I'm particularly defending what happened? But, put in that situation not knowing what was going to happen, not knowing how big the risk was going to be. You had to make some, some pretty rapid decisions and some of them were turned out to be a bit daft, but...

Daniel (09:08): That's right. And I think you need to suspend the normal perspective of procurement as you say. And the UK government did that pretty well in some respects, by bringing in a venture capital... which is very hard for the public sector to, to manage because public sector procurement, as is, is designed to, to make sure that there's, you're minimising corruption and giving a fair shot to everybody. And so things proceed in a very structured way where you get to deliberate carefully on each stage of the process, totally inappropriate for a pandemic where you, you need to go with the best data you've got. and the best business sense, which is probably not in the end got all that much data around it and place bets...

Mark (09:58): I forget the name of the woman who was in charge of this because as you say, I think she came from a venture capital background. Now you can look at it two ways. Yes absolutely need that mentality to make things happen at the pace that you need to. But looking at it the other way, there was a great deal of a claim for the implementation of the vaccination program and the speed at which it was done. But it struck me that that in itself was not a complex task in the way that we would talk about complexity because it was pretty clear what was required. You need to vaccinate X million people. It was clear the regime that you needed for the various vaccines. And so it was, big scale, yes, I'm getting it moving, yes. But there was a good deal of clarity ultimately what had what the problem was and what had to be done. So I reckon that part of it at least was relatively straightforward.

Daniel (11:03): Yes. And I think the NHS is good at some things and not so good at others. And one of the things it's good at is that emergency response where you, you want the whole system to do more or less the same thing and keep repeating it with the whole population and so other systems that lacked that ability to have a hierarchical system with implementation across the whole country, it was a lot harder for them to set up a mass immunisation system. And the other thing that the NHS did brilliantly was, was provide the base for great science. And the UK had, really good studies that proved the efficacy of different treatments and vaccines and so on. And that's really hard for decentralised systems to do in the same way. But I think I mean there's a whole inquiry going on about the overall UK ex response and clearly not everything went, went quite so well. ,

Mark (12:02): The thing that makes me pause is when I hear... I haven't heard it so much recently, but when politicians talk about is... we must invoke the Covid spirit to change government and the way things work, but actually that's pie in the sky in the sense that there is no flag to rally around in normal times. And it's not appreciating that the complexity that that comes in the absence of that rallying flag, that's the hard thing to cope with. And we need to change the way we do things in order to do that.

Daniel (12:40): Yes, it is, it's tricky. Kate Bingham was the name of the person you were Kate Bing you were looking for. So I think there are cases where there is a very clear need and a burning platform post Brexit. The UK given the technology transition and post Brexit, the UK really needs some, some car battery factories. And that's been clear for a few years. And I think the business as usual approach to procurement and spending public money, hasn't worked in that case. It was one of those circumstances where no doubt some work needed to be done to build a political consensus, but you needed, you needed a venture capital approach, and a willingness to take risks with public money because otherwise it just wasn't going to happen.

Mark (13:33): So is that what's happened? So I'm not fully up to the, with the, with the battery story. So I think that there was going to be a big battery up north somewhere sorry, big battery factory up the north somewhere that stopped because of lack of funding. But there's something else happening in Wales now.

Daniel (13:52): There are some things happening but I think Europe as a whole is obviously way behind China on this, and behind the us and the UK within Europe is behind. because I think Brexit has exacerbated the challenges of getting people to invest, in the market, given the rules that exist and the fact that the rules are changing soon to, to, to make it harder to, export to, to count cars made in the UK as able to enter the single market. It's been pretty clear unless you, unless you come up with a different deal, whether you, you need to, you need to have domestic production of vac uh, of, I was going to say vaccines. That's another, that's another story. . You need domestic production of car batteries, electric car batteries. And the only way you're going to get the startup costs paid for that is to have a, have a, have some subsidies. And, the company that I think was due to produce that everybody was betting on was a pretty small, it was an Australian small company. And these, this is, is a big operation where you need to carry some, some risk for a good period. so you need deep pockets and so on.

Mark (15:04): Daniel, just one second. I don't know if you can hear the church bells...

Daniel (15:08): Ringing. I can, I can. It's village life.

Mark (15:11): Yes. Well, there's a church next door and my wife just went off to ring them. So what I'm going to do is shut the windows.

Daniel (15:22): So we were talking earlier about organisations dying and there's an interesting thinker on this subject called Albert Hirschman. He has a very interesting personal life story. He was in Marseille during the second World War helping to get refugees out from occupied Germany and France and so on. So he's a very interesting person generally, but he wrote this book called Exit, Voice and Loyalty. And I think it's got wide application people apply and can be applied in all sorts of different circumstances. People either have voice or they exit. And I think this applies in companies if people don't feel like they're, they're being heard, they, they get out or they... all, there's this thing about quiet quitting isn't there, where, where people stay in the company, but they've really exited, they're not really doing much, they're keeping their heads down, they're staying out in trouble doing the minimum necessary.

(16:20):** And I think one of the things that goes on that contributes to this Exiting is, is denial. And the corporate bullshit that I was talking about, where I think it obscures what's going on. It really removes voice because people aren't heard, they don't have the chance to express themselves without, causing an upset because everybody's talking in this abstracted, jargon filled language. So he's really interesting on that subject and he applied it to development economics, but I think it applies at all kinds of different scales.

Mark (17:07): Quite few people talk about agency, which Is that the same thing? I guess?

Daniel (17:14): I think so, yeah. Voice and voice and agency pretty close. Yes. Yes,

Mark (17:18): Just carry on that, this thing about the batteries and particularly about uncertainty. So I read an article in yesterday's Guardian by Rowan Atkinson, and he was talking about well, his enthusiasm for electric cars and how he feels that he'd been, I think the title said he'd been, he felt he'd been duped by the industry or something like that. And he was talking about, ultimately maybe battery powered cars aren't the way forward maybe, we're going to need to use some technologies like hydrogen, which... that introduces a good deal of uncertainty here. And how do we, how do we respond to that?

Daniel (18:02): Yes, I'm not convinced hydrogen is the right thing to use for cars or for domestic heating. But anyway, the point, the general point you're making is, I very much agree with, which is that there's a lot of uncertainty. I think you get periods of what look like stability or the things that changing under the surface, and then you get these phase changes. And we we're going through that at the moment with, with car technology and it's requiring a pretty fundamental re rewiring. And it leads to big opportunities for shift in the players. And that's where the Chinese are, are now the biggest exporters of cars, in the world, taking over from the Japanese and the US and Germany and so on.

(18:53):** Everything can change with this, with this change in technology. So there are these moments when you need to be very live to the, to the changes, and sensing the change in the environment. And if you're proceeding in a, let's call it, a Clock way the world is ordered and predictable and you can measure carefully what's happening, and it's all about profit margins on additional petrol cars, then you lose sight of the wider environment. And I think one of the interesting things about complexity and great book by Geoffrey West on Scale is looking at the different scales of what's happening... and one of the other interesting things from that book is the point he makes about the difference between cities and companies and the fact that cities generally live on and are sufficiently, diversified in what goes on in them to survive, on the whole. There are some one-industry towns that expire, but, whereas companies definitely die. If you're in a company and what can you do to stop it dying? If you, if you think it's important to keep it going? I think that's a really interesting question. Why companies die and what how, how best to respond to that.

Mark (20:10): Certainly, yeah, it's a natural cycle of things. Cities probably die too, but the time scale is different. It might be a thousand, 2000 years, whereas companies - big ones - it's a hundred years. And so it's not just in scale in terms of size, but in terms of longevity. And you've got all these different phases going on I don't think there's a fundamental difference, it's just the time scale is different depending on the nature of the thing that you're talking about.

Daniel (20:48): Yes, no, I can see that maybe it's just a timescale. Let's say you're inside a company and things are going wrong now, why what do you do? And how do you... why is it that companies find it hard to recognise the changes in environment? And I think we talked about this last time, the limits of top-down knowledge and action. That's the issue is that if organisations are too hierarchical, then knowledge doesn't travel up the hierarchy. And signals that come down the hierarchy are not sufficiently don't leave enough flexibility to people to adapt.

Mark (21:32): I think that's right, because a company, in order to compete, has to get... it has to acquire learning, become better at what it's doing, being a few percent more efficient here and be few percent more efficient there in order to be... to deliver more or to deliver what it does, more, more cheaply. And so you have to get really good at doing that one thing, but if the context changes you need different mechanisms for understanding the world. You need different mechanisms for communicating about what's going on outside. And of course if there's change going on, you're going to have that information is going to be, imperfect. There's going to be a good deal of opinion. And the mechanisms that you've got for, improving the company in stable times are just hopeless coping in uncertain times. And god knows things are changing hugely at the moment. You've got cars, changing all sorts of technology, digital technologies changing the world, AI and all those things are changing at once. And I just don't think the mechanisms that we have, in government and in a lot of big companies are just able to cope with that.

Daniel (22:51): The habits are not right. I think that's right. And I think there's a psychological element to this as well, and the word denial is very important. I think it's often, easier to just deny that something's happening and keep your head down and keep going.

Mark (23:09): You could look at that two ways because you if you have a disturbance that rocks the boat, then it's important for captain to have the hand on the on, on the wheel and steer the ship through it, say, oh, carry on. Ignore this stick to what we're doing, buttress the shaky confidence. And if it is just a freak wave that hits the boat, then everything will be fine. But if it's not, then that approach isn't going to serve well because it means it's going to take that much longer to address what's really happening and to promote the ways of working that are going to be necessary to deal with lots of waves of this sort.

Daniel (24:00): Exactly. And I think the, one of the characteristics of corporate bullshit is that there's a lot of abstractions and people don't talk about examples. And they don't allow multiple perspectives to be shared.

Mark (24:16): So sorry, say more about these abstractions. What do you mean?

Daniel (24:21): Well, I think abstractions are, are pretty useful. We use them all the time. We know what things are because we put them in categories of like, this is a door I've come across this before. I think I'll open it and go through it. and that that abstraction is an intellectual level, but also at a bodily level. What a door is instinctively, you don't have to stop and think about it too much.

Mark (24:43): Oh, I see what you mean. So, for example, an organisation diagram is an abstraction of the structure of an organisation. Do you mean it in that sense?

Daniel (24:54): Yes, that's one of the ways. A key type of abstraction is data where the data is used as a proxy to represent what's going on in a company. Sales have grown by this, or profit margins have grown by that. But unless you have somebody who really knows what's going on and the data, the extent to which the data is an accurate story, the extent to which the data is telling you what some part of the story, but there's a lot of other things that are important going on. And I think the data in the end can only be used as part of a narrative. So we, we take decisions by telling stories to ourselves, to each other and the data will be deployed to support a story that suits the people who are telling the story.

(25:45):** If the people are at the top of the organisation, they'll tend to be liking stories that help avoid the whole thing being turned upside down and the things that are reasonably comfortable for them being disrupted. So how do you deal with that? Well you create environments in which people can be honest, that's a key thing. But you also talk about real stuff. So this is what this person on the front line of this organisation is seeing. These are the interactions with the customers. This is what's happening in the case of Covax what are people showing up to clinics? Are they getting immunised? And if they're not, why? What's going on? What can we do about that?

Mark (26:27): In a stable environment you can rely more on the data, can't you, Because we've had 2%, we are selling 2% more shampoo this week, and you absolutely know that's going to be happening. But if there's, a massive change in the environment, then,

Daniel (26:43): Like with car technology, at the moment the electric car sales are still only 5%, 10%. Much higher in Norway, but most other places, not such a large percentage. But, but it's pretty clear that that's, that's coming. So, but I think you're right that the you need to look at a lot more, particularly when things are changing, but even, when they're not the data is only ever a partial representation of the story. And also, if it's, if the point of the company is to make money, then the profit margin is pretty important. But if the point of the organisation is to do something that isn't captured by data, then the data is really only a small part of the story.

Mark (27:27): The thing that we respond to is the stories that people put around the data. Typically people high up in the organisation and they look at a set of data and come to a view and summarise it in a sentence. And that's what dr that can drive things. Whereas there might be all sorts of subtlety in the data that one sentence or one glib summary of what's there doesn't do. And, in complexity, that does not serve

Daniel (28:05): Absolutely right. I was and there are cases where the data is really not the thing at all. I've really enjoyed a TV series i called Succession, which has just ended the fourth season. It's about a media organisation and the, and the children of a charismatic, brutal founder and who's going to take over when this person dies.

Mark (28:30): So I'm really interested in this because I think I'm the only person I know hasn't seen this . So, tell us how succession applies in a world of complexity.

Daniel (28:43): Well, the bit that I lighted on was how the scripts were written. And I was reading a description by Lucy Prebble, who's one of the, one of the script writers... of what happens in the room where you've got a group of very talented, script writers together, I suppose you could say brainstorming on the script. And the script is a thing to behold, I think this is the best TV since The Wire, and that's a high, high praise in my book. So she describes, being in the room and it's a mixture of British people and Americans, varied group, about 8 or 12 people, and they'd get together for five or six hours a day for a few months. And they're chatting and mocking and giggling and discussing at lunch.

(29:29):** And so that's the description of the room. But she also talks about the role of Jesse Norman. Sorry, Jesse Armstrong, who talks about running the [writing] room as being like throwing a party. You're responsible for the guests, the atmosphere and ensuring that people want to come. So you've got this very creative process going on, and somebody is helping to create the environment in which things can happen. But they're not, they're not dominating, they're not running the proceedings, and everybody contributes. And everybody people try things out and they get tested and then they get dropped or they get built on, or they get somebody riffs off something. and I, and I think that, so most, most business processes aren't like writing the script for a, for a TV sh TV series, but,

Mark (30:22): So it's jazz rather than a symphony.

Daniel (30:27): That's right. That's right. It an improvised jazz. But with enough structure that ends up being a script which is defined, which gets played by some actors in a defined timeframe and so on. So things resolve themselves from this, from this inchoate process. But you've got to have the spaces to do that stuff. And if you you can imagine a paint-by-numbers approach to script writing produces really dull TV. So this character who has this plot purpose and this character, and when you watch something which has that paint-by-numbers aspect to it... it's super dull...

Mark (31:09): And God knows there's enough of that about, isn't there?

Daniel (31:12): There is. There is. And so allowing, the characters to do something a bit unexpected and within a overall development... and a consistency and a coherence to it, that's a, that's a real...

Mark (31:26): How did that happen in this context? It must have been the folks with the money, presumably knew what was going on and decided to carry on.

Daniel (31:37): Yes. Well, Jesse Norman has I keep saying Jesse Norman - Jesse Armstrong , Jesse Norman is somebody else. Jesse Armstrong. Yes.

Mark (31:44): He's MP for Herefordshire, isn't he?

Daniel (31:46): That's right. So Jesse Armstrong has talked about the process by which he ended up writing a book, playing a key role in writing a script. I think he wrote some of the early scripts for Succession and he was going around LA pitching to various potential companies that were going to produce the show. And, he ended up with HBO, which is the one he wanted, because I think HBO produces a lot of the, a lot of the best TV at the moment. And part of it is giving people space to do things that that is a little bit a little bit different. And, you get talented people and you give them space to do their thing. There are moments in every organisation where you've got to do that. And if you try and run it like a, like a marching down a parade ground or something, you're just not going to achieve anything.

Mark (32:41): If you're going to give people space, do you've, and particularly if you're going to give them both space and a lot of money, you've got to trust them. You've got to have some sense of belief that they're actually going to deliver ultimately.

Daniel (32:56): That's right. Trust is really the secret sauce in a lot of things that we do. And coming back to Covid, which I realise everybody's sick of, but it's been a big part of my life. So dammit, I'm going to talk about it. Governments that had populations that trusted their governments, the excess deaths as people say in the epidemiological world, are much lower than [with] governments where trust was very low. Where small parts of the population got immunised because they didn't trust their government. Vaccines could be anything. So trust is the secret sauce in a lot of what happens. And it's not, you can't really, you can do surveys and things, but it's not, it's not really very easily measured. Something that's built slowly over time by behaving in a particular way, particularly not, doing some things that particularly avoiding certain behavior, being truthful and telling... and being credible and, having those interactions at all kinds of different levels that are decent, I think, and respect people's circumstances. All of that. It takes a long time to create. But I think it's, it's what companies need to do. It's what governments need to do.

Mark (34:24): So we've come neatly circled back to where we started. I'm thinking that we've probably got to the end. There's a bunch of stuff we haven't talked about, but we've done 40 minutes, so I think... shall we wrap it up there, shall we?

Daniel (34:41): Great. Well, thank you very much for having me back, Mark. It's been a, it's a great series. I'm really pleased you're starting again, and I look forward to listening to all the interesting people that you are going to get on the podcast.

Mark (34:54): This is completely out of the blue. I I'm quite busy at the moment, so I haven't done any, so, I'm going to do some more for sure. Before we do finish..If you found what you heard useful, please do subscribe via your app, by email or on the website, or to be down with the cool kids by rss. Also, as I don't use Twitter or Facebook anymore, please do what you can to spread the word. You'll find the Clock, the Cat, and me on Mastodon at https://mastodon.social/@markfoden #TheClockAndTheCat. If you're not on Mastodon, well, join now. In the meantime, before you forget, message emails, semaphore or otherwise, let your friends know about the Clock and the Cat. Thank you very much. Goodbye.

Daniel (35:35): Thank you, Mark. Goodbye.