DTX Unplugged

Welcome to the very first episode of DTX Unplugged, the podcast that gets to the heart of business evolution. Hosted by Sabrina Berko, Head of Content at Clarion Events, and Ollie Pickup, award-winning technology and business journalist, each episode shines a light on the leaders and change-makers reshaping how organisations approach transformation.

We’re kicking things off in style with Nick Hodder, Director of Digital Transformation and Engagement at the Imperial War Museums (IWM).
Nick’s unconventional journey - from leaving school at 16 to leading digital strategy for one of the UK’s most respected heritage institutions - is a masterclass in adaptability. With experience at brands like Microsoft, Google and British Airways, he’s now on a mission to humanise digital transformation at IWM, using cutting-edge AI to unlock insights from 11 million historic images.

In this episode, Nick joins Sabrina and Ollie to discuss:
  • Why transformation starts with people - not technology
  • The danger of “the tech-first trap” and how to avoid it
  • Using AI with a human-centred mindset in high-trust institutions
  • How heritage organisations can teach commercial businesses to stay adaptable
  • Building psychologically safe, change-ready teams through radical candour
  • What Blockbuster and Kodak can teach us about purpose-led innovation
  • Why finding your ‘why’ is more vital than ever in the age of AI
If you’re leading or implementing digital transformation, this episode is packed with practical wisdom, brilliant metaphors, and thought-provoking insights.

👉 “Now is the time to build communities of like-minded professionals. Go talk to your peers, figure out what you don’t want to do as much as what you do.” - Nick Hodder

 🎧 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
 💻 Register for our upcoming DTX London event, taking place on 1-2 October here
📌 Check out our website at dtxevents.io
🔗 Connect with Nick on LinkedIn

Creators and Guests

Host
Ollie Pickup
Award-winning technology and business journalist
Host
Sabrina Berko
Head of Content, Clarion Events

What is DTX Unplugged?

DTX Unplugged delves into the major challenges and innovations shaping business transformation, embodying our event's focus on the critical intersection of people, process, and technology. While rooted in the DTX ethos, this will be an industry-focused platform, tackling key issues, spotlighting groundbreaking innovations, and raising awareness for important topics across the sector.

Sabrina Berko:

Welcome to DTX Unplugged, the podcast that gets to the heart of business evolution. I'm Sabrina Berko, head of content at Clarion Events, the organizers behind DTX.

Ollie Pickup:

And I'm Ollie Pickup, an award winning technology and business storyteller. Each episode, we sit down with leaders, innovators, and changemakers who are reshaping how organizations think about transformation.

Sabrina Berko:

Whether you're leading, implementing, or building transformation strategy, this is your monthly dose of insights from the people making it happen.

Ollie Pickup:

This is all about the critical intersection of people, process, and technology, and the real stories behind successful evolution.

Sabrina Berko:

What are we waiting for?

Ollie Pickup:

Let's dive in. And welcome to the first episode of DTX Unplugged. And what a way to kick things off with an incredible opening guest. We're delighted to be joined by Nick Hodder. Nick is director of digital transformation and engagement at Imperial War Museums, and that's Britain's national museum dedicated to understanding modern war and wartime experience with five branches across England.

Ollie Pickup:

Nick joined IWM in May 2020 and has built a digital audience of hundreds of millions globally. Nick's also a TEDx speaker and one of computing IT's Leaders 100, which recognizes the most influential figures in British technology leadership. And at IWM, he's doing something incredibly fascinating, using AI to unlock insights from 11,000,000 historical images while championing the idea that real transformation goes far beyond technology, cost reduction, or revenue generation. A warm welcome to you, Nick. How are you doing today?

Nick Hodder:

Great, Oliver. Yeah.

Ollie Pickup:

Brilliant. Fantastic. Well, you've had quite the unconventional career journey. You left school at 16, and I love this. Your LinkedIn education section simply and unapologetically reads none everything, which perhaps gives us all a hint about your approach.

Ollie Pickup:

You spent two decades working with major brands like Microsoft, Google, British Airways, and Panasonic before deliberately shifting focus to apply your transformation expertise in the nonprofit sector. In this opening episode, we're exploring why digital transformation or business evolution often involves winning hearts and minds. And we're also gonna discuss Nick's radical candor approach to building change ready teams and what heritage institutions can teach modern businesses about staying adaptable.

Sabrina Berko:

Nick, we always start by asking our guests three core questions to begin with, and then we have one final one that we'll come back to at the end of the interview. So question one, what's the most significant transformation challenge hitting business leaders right now?

Nick Hodder:

You might think the arrival of AI is an amazing opportunity, and and I think it genuinely is. But one of the real challenges is how broad that technology is. It can and probably will affect almost everything. So figuring out where to start and there's a little bit of, I can't remember who came up with the phrase, the tyranny of the possible, but there's quite a lot of that going on here. There's so much you could do.

Nick Hodder:

So actually bringing it down to some sort of realistic idea of some proof of concept that you could test is actually a real challenge. There's a couple of things, I think, as a technology leader. One is dealing with the leaders around you and their expectations around kinda AI and technology. Then there's also your own approach and your team's approach. Like, how do you stop yourself from spreading yourselves too thin or being paralyzed by the possibilities?

Nick Hodder:

So so I think, really, that the answer to that I don't fully know the answer to that, and no one does. But I think, for me, it comes down to starting with why, which is a bit of a Simon Sinek thing if you've read that book. So I think understanding, you know, what's your purpose as an organization, you know, that North Star vision, and what does the AI mean in that context. I think there are some serious gains to be made through AI and productivity potentially, and I think you should have one eye on that, but another eye certainly needs needs to be on what's the kind of vision and purpose of your organization. Have you felt AI through that lens to come up with actually something more meaningful for your organization?

Nick Hodder:

Because potentially, this change changes your job. It makes a technology leader actually more core, more central to delivering that vision and purpose. Part of this is actually bringing technology leaders up to a more senior level within organizations to benefit from their insight and expertise into how to leverage AI to to change your business or your organization.

Sabrina Berko:

You touched upon many different pain points there. Considering all of that, can you share a transformation example that genuinely impressed you and why?

Nick Hodder:

This is gonna sound like a crazy one, but maybe the UK government. I don't know how often people say that. In all seriousness, actually, that gov.uk transformation has been really significant. And I think the way they've approached that, it's not finished. It probably never will be.

Nick Hodder:

But there was a point where there were and probably still are hundreds, maybe even thousands of different websites that you have to go to as a citizen of Great Britain to do your admin, and it was a nightmare. And it is slightly better now, thanks to the work that they've done. I think more than slightly better. It's considerably better. And I think that is down to not any sort of technology choice necessarily.

Nick Hodder:

I'm although I'm sure they've made some good technology choices, but primarily down to the approach, they've been really human centered. They've been really focused on accessibility and just simplifying things. Often that is taking things away. As a result, think they've built something that's really accessible for people with accessibility needs, but also everyone. It's much clearer.

Nick Hodder:

It's so much nicer for everyone, much better experience. And it means you kind of put off stuff less because you know it's gonna be slightly less painful.

Sabrina Berko:

I hear that. I think you really hit the nail on the head there, focusing on looking at the people, the process, which leads really nicely into my next question. Where do most leaders go wrong when trying to find that balance between people, process, and technology?

Nick Hodder:

To a certain extent, there is a kind of a a technology first trap. There's there's maybe a difference between IT and transformation and digital transformation, etcetera. Often when people first move into these roles, they view their job as a technology job. Luckily, there are lot lots of people that have been around a long time. Go to conferences like the one Sabrina runs.

Nick Hodder:

Go to those conferences, and you'll meet loads of people who can give you great advice, which is amazing. And often that advice centers around not technology at all, but actually people. And so I think it's that technology first trap that is often the biggest problem. Yeah. We we obviously run museums.

Nick Hodder:

I don't think ever anyone's ever sort of been to a kind of our sort of World War one experience and come out thinking, oh, what this needs is more blockchain. Right? No no one ever talks and blockchain is very good. It has lots of excellent applications. But you don't start with blockchain.

Nick Hodder:

You start with problems, and then you think about what possible solutions there are to those problems. And maybe one of those solutions is blockchain. But most problems are people related, either your customers, in our case, our visitors often, or your internal customers, your internal stakeholders. But most of the time, you're solving a a people problem. Even if you're a b to b organization, you're actually ultimately solving people problems.

Nick Hodder:

They're just working for another business. And so what I always used to think about is people, process, and technology, and in that order. So I start with the people, then look at the process, then look at the technology that supports the people in the process. I've started to add adaptability into that now. So, actually, what we're looking for is, certainly inside your organization, an adaptable culture, adaptable people, adaptable processes, and then implementing adaptable technology.

Nick Hodder:

Why? Well, because the world is changing really rapidly. And when we talk about people in our roles, often we talk about the people inside our organization. But the the rapid, arrival of AI and lots of other different technologies has resulted in changing consumer behavior, which changes the business landscape within which you operate. So when we say people, it's not just people inside your organization, it's people outside your organization and understanding how they behave, their change of behaviors, how they're operating.

Nick Hodder:

Often, technology departments in organization actually have access to most of the data, have the expertise around data. So they're actually in a really good position to, you know, talk to your other business stakeholders about what the data's telling us about consumer behavior and things.

Ollie Pickup:

Thank you so much for those answers. Adaptability is definitely important. As the father of two reasonably young kids, I'm trying to encourage them to be adaptable. You mentioned there the tyranny of the possible. I really like that phrase.

Ollie Pickup:

I heard one the other day. It was regarding which AI to to follow, to invest in, and the quote was, the wolf that you feed will be the wolf that wins. So something for us to think about there. But you joined IMW in 2020 right at the start of the pandemic. What attracted you, and how do you go about transforming a centuries old national museum when the world is being transformed around you?

Nick Hodder:

It's interesting. I kind of wasn't necessarily keen to change roles, but this came up, and I was kinda interviewed in January 2020. What attracted me is, I think, sometimes when you think about Imperial War Museums, perhaps it's the name, you think about, okay. This is a place where there are lots of tanks and planes and kind of missiles in a big room. So that's kind of what I has in my mind.

Nick Hodder:

But once you start to learn a bit more about IWM, you realize that, actually, this is an organization about helping people to understand war and conflict and the stories behind war and conflict. And they're very human stories. And so they're kind of there are tanks and planes and missiles and things, but actually, that's a route into talking about what happened, what the experience of, like, being in the aircraft was like, what the experience of being near where that missile landed might have been like. You know? So so, actually, there's a really good kinda cause here and mission in terms of helping people to understand war and conflict.

Nick Hodder:

And there are some cool things and there are heroic stories and there are sad stories, but it all comes together to create a really impactful experience. I think that's what really attracted me. And then when I arrived, I had a long night experience when I arrived in May 2020, we're in lockdown. All of the museums were permanently closed, and I had to sort of ask, do I still have a job? But luckily, they they said that digital is now more important than ever, which I completely agreed with.

Nick Hodder:

So that was a relief. And also, there was a slight silver lining, not that I'm glad the pandemic happened. I definitely am not. But for people like us in digital transformation, it actually gave us the impetus we needed internally in a lot of organizations to actually prioritize all of the big transformation work that that we wanted to do.

Ollie Pickup:

Tell us about this AI project with 11,000,000 historical images.

Nick Hodder:

There there are actually a couple of projects that that that is worth talking about. So one of the the and this is really, again, people first, human first. A lot of people talk about AI as human in the loop. I'm not sure about human in the loop because it sounds like if you if I Oliver, if I kept you in the loop, maybe Sabrina and I were having discussions. I said, oh, Oliver, I'll keep you in the loop.

Nick Hodder:

That's me sort of just, like, pinging you an email saying, oh, we've discussed this. If you're in the loop, it doesn't mean that you're necessarily deeply involved. And so we've stopped using human in the loop, and now we talk about human centered AI. And that really works for us. I think we have, over the years, done loads of kind of I guess you could consider them crowdsourcing projects where we did a project called lives of the first world war where thousands of volunteers helped us to identify the names of people and to describe their involvement in the First World War.

Nick Hodder:

We're responsible for the nation's register of war memorials, and that meant that we had to go and discover them because there was no one with a list of war memorials. And so we got lots of volunteers across the country to help us to find and discover war memorials, take photos of war memorials and send them to us. And then we have people in the office, volunteers, who were, like, writing down the names of the photos and uploading the photos and the names to the website. We've used crowdsourcing to collect kind of the millions of names and other information about war and the history of war to help people to better connect with conflict. And AI provides us with another fantastic opportunity here.

Nick Hodder:

So we have over 11,000,000 images relating to war. When they arrived, often they literally back a truck up and it's got boxes of photos in, and often these boxes are not well labeled. We actually have loads of photos that don't have any useful information attached to them. So we've been experimenting with computer vision for probably eight or nine years now.

Ollie Pickup:

And can can you just explain what computer vision is?

Nick Hodder:

Compute computer vision is a form of AI that can essentially look at an image. Sometimes that image is a frame of film or multiple frames of film and essentially tell you what's in it. What you would get is a kind of a label. It would just say there's a 98% chance this is an aircraft or something like that. Post transform, you've got large language models working in unison with computer vision.

Nick Hodder:

So now you can show computer vision an image, and it will tell you what's in the image but using natural language. So it used to say, oh, there's a 98% chance this is an aircraft. Now it will say, oh, this is a mark nine Spitfire. It's got this tail number, which means it's specifically this one that's here, and it was restored in this like, it'll literally give you everything that it knows about that particular mark nine Spitfire. And this is a real example.

Nick Hodder:

Like, we're kinda shocked at how good it can be. It's very good at Spitfires. Right? It's like all AI today. Sometimes it's startling how amazingly correct it can be, and sometimes it's shockingly bad.

Nick Hodder:

You know, it's getting better and better all the time, and we're finding that, you know, less and less we're getting these hallucinations and things. However, the bar in terms of accuracy is very high for a museum. It's very high for imperial war museums. So what we're always trying to do is ensure that whatever we do meets that kind of quality standard. So we are using computer vision and LLM to give us a kind of first pass description of what's in these images, and then we're using our volunteers, often many of whom have actually got quite a lot of deep subject matter specialism to tell us, oh, yes.

Nick Hodder:

That's absolutely right. That's a that is a helicopter. It's this particular helicopter. And, oh, in fact, that's not landing in Scotland. It's landing in The Falklands.

Nick Hodder:

It's the people plus AI, but the critical aspect is the human, and it's not human in the loop. It's human centered. It's, like, grounded in what our humans, our volunteers think is the correct description.

Ollie Pickup:

Thanks for explaining that, Nick, and some great examples there. I wanna talk about this LinkedIn section for education, none everything, which suggests you've learned by doing, and that goes back to your point about adaptability, I suppose. So how does this inform your radical candor approach? Could you tell us a little bit about that?

Nick Hodder:

It was an awful lot I didn't know at the time, because I was very young and stupid. I I subsequently think that I probably have ADHD. I really struggled at school in terms of concentration, so I wasn't doing very well academically. But I was really interested in TV and film. When I left school, I went to the Prince's Trust who had something called the Young Enterprise Scheme.

Nick Hodder:

And I applied for a grant to start my own video production company, and they gave me a grant. But they also gave me a mentor who helped me write a business plan and started teaching me about business. And then I was able to, using that business plan, apply to NatWest and got a small business loan, bought lots of equipment, set up my own video production company that I that I ran for several years. Actually, that was all about you know, we talked about adaptability. I didn't know at the time, but that probably taught me some really important foundational skills.

Nick Hodder:

You know, when all of a sudden you're running a business, it's only you. You have to work out how to do everything. Have to work out how to do your accountancy, your tax, how to keep on top of your costs, and learn about pricing. So there's all these things that kinda you learn as you go through business and life. And you're kinda if you force yourself into a position where you're on your own, it's just down to you.

Nick Hodder:

It's sink or swim. I think I probably needed that, and I think it it helps me an awful lot. And I think it also it teaches you to be honest with yourself because you don't have a choice. You mentioned Radical Candor, which is a book, and I think that is something that's really important, especially now, which is about how to challenge people. Challenge yourself to a certain extent.

Nick Hodder:

Challenge other people as well, but from a good place. If you've got doubts about what you're doing and you're not sharing those doubts, that's a problem. So we have to be really honest with each other, especially with stuff like AI, where we actually don't we actually don't know often what exactly the right thing to do is, exactly what the right thing to build is. So assuming that everything's gonna be brilliant and not challenging anything is probably not a great idea in the context of today and this kind of AI revolution. So today more than ever, I think challenging yourself, questioning yourself and others is important to get to a point where you do move forward.

Nick Hodder:

So it's not about paralysis by analysis, but it's a it's about challenging, but finding a way forward. And that's why that kind of vision and purpose and your why is really important and that being shared across yourself and your colleagues in your business about what you're trying to achieve and being willing to kill your darlings on the way and be willing to let it go if we figure out that it's not gonna work. So that journey has taught me a lot, but, I haven't finished learning, I still make any of mistakes.

Ollie Pickup:

I was listening recently to a professor at I think she's at Harvard, Amy Edmondson. She talks talks a lot about psychological safety and how so few people actually stand up and shout. I think it's such an important point that you make there, Nick. What advice would you give to business leaders who are going through transformations in terms of creating that space for honest dialogue during a major change?

Nick Hodder:

Read the book Radical Candor. That's probably a good idea. I think there's something else around autonomy and trust as well. What we're doing with AI is lots of proofs of concepts, several of them, and it means that I can't run all of them, and I probably shouldn't. What you need to do is enable trust and autonomy within those teams and allow them to discover.

Nick Hodder:

So the interesting is, like, you know, I've never done a major AI digital transformation before because nobody has. So it's not like I can embed myself with these teams and give them the benefit of my knowledge on this subject. I don't have any. Right? So so, actually, in some ways, I I might be in the way.

Nick Hodder:

So, like, stepping away and allowing the teams to develop these proofs of concept to test and learn and figure out how they might well, I can come back to me and say, here here's what we've learned. That autonomy bit is probably more important now than it ever has been before.

Ollie Pickup:

Fantastic. Well, you've worked everywhere from sun microsystems to guide dogs to imperial war museums now. How does your approach to transformation change when you're dealing with this heritage institution versus, I don't know, a start up or a corporate? And what can commercial organizations learn from your approach?

Nick Hodder:

There are some significantly higher risks. We're an organization that people trust to give them. I think authentic answers is probably the the best way to describe it. The reason I say that is because war and conflict is complicated, and often there are many sides. People think, oh, there might be there's two sides.

Nick Hodder:

We set a high bar. Saying that high bar doesn't mean that we don't use or we don't trust AI. It means actually actually, it's like it's a more in some ways, it's more fun. It's a better problem statement. It's like, how can we make this notoriously, sometimes incorrect bit of technology?

Nick Hodder:

How can we make that work when the bar is so high? And rather than not bothering, we've set about trying to make it work. And it's not perfect all the time. We're not right all the time. But do you know what?

Nick Hodder:

It's actually significantly better than I thought it would be, like, a year or two ago.

Sabrina Berko:

It's so exciting your approach of kind of not being afraid to fail and going for it even though the bar's so high. You're like, you know what? Let's just give it a go. It's okay if we make mistakes. We'll learn along the way.

Sabrina Berko:

And then you can share that with other businesses. So having that stance, like, what piece of advice would you give to business leaders starting their transformation journey?

Nick Hodder:

It's that kind of why, you know, I've sort of, I think, described where IWM are, like, what we're trying to do. We're trying to help people understand war and conflict. So whatever we do needs to help with that. And I think that comes from our kind of our vision and purpose. Even if you're a commercial organization, you need a bigger why, ideally.

Nick Hodder:

This isn't just an AI thing. They're kind of obvious examples, but they are worth bringing up time and time again. That's things like Blockbuster and Kodak. Blockbuster are actually relatively advanced in terms of their understanding that broadband would lead to streaming, which would likely be the future of kind of movie rental. And they even took quite a few steps, like, towards that.

Nick Hodder:

Unfortunately, they partnered with a company called Enron. Turns out they weren't the best people to partner with, around sort of building out a kind of, a a fiber network in The US to help them do the streaming. So that obviously all fell apart when, it turns out Enron lied quite a lot and did a lot dubious accounting. But at that point, Netflix was still sending DVDs out in the post. Right?

Nick Hodder:

So Blockbuster hadn't they knew what was gonna happen with technology. Blockbuster's problem was that they were leasing 9,000 physical stores, and it's really hard to immediately terminate the leaks on 9,000 stores. You've got massive, massive overhead. So for an organization size of Blockbuster, it's really hard to pivot. With Kodak, Kodak invented the digital camera.

Nick Hodder:

They've the patents for the digital camera. And, actually, they were some of the leaders in digital camera sales. But then that they were very protective over all of their profit margin, most of which was, around film sales and film processing. And so it wasn't in their interest to really go all in on digital cameras, where if you're, like, Nikon or Canon or Sony or Panasonic, you don't have any film sales to to protect. You know, you can go all in on digital cameras, and that happened very quickly.

Nick Hodder:

And so within a sort of five to ten year period, Kodak were kinda wiped out. Things can change really quickly. If your why is I want people to access movies in the simplest way, and I feel like there's an opportunity for us to generate a revenue from making that customer experience so simple, That's what Blockbuster did. For years, it worked brilliantly. It was really simple.

Nick Hodder:

There was a Blockbuster really close to everyone, you could go and you could rent a DVD or a video. For Kodak, if their why was there's this concept of the Kodak moment they used all the time about capturing memories. If the idea is capturing memories, then build your business around that. The problem is they followed the kind of the immediate profit, the short term profit rather than that kind of why. And whilst that works for them and their shareholders for a few years, in the long term, actually completely sunk the business.

Nick Hodder:

So this is where, as technologists in your organization, you can be saying, well, look. If this is our why, what does our why look like in the world of AI? How does consumer behavior change in the world of AI? And how do we start testing proofs of concepts for that new world? Because it might be it might there's a very high chance it fundamentally changes your whole business model.

Nick Hodder:

The most important thing is that is that holding that why, that vision and purpose, that, like, central to what you're doing. It doesn't matter whether you're a commercial organization or a nonprofit like us. If you put that at the heart of it and allow yourself to change everything around that, that means you will, to a certain extent, mitigate some disruption. Whereas if you don't do that, if you just go if you're just going, how can we use AI to generate a bit more revenue or save a bit of money? The problem is you're making yourself much more open to disruption, I think.

Ollie Pickup:

That's such great advice. Thanks so much for sharing those insights. Beware the tech first trap, honest discussions, how to create that safe space for, you know, that psychological safety so people can speak up. What does why look like in the age of AI? I think these are really fantastic insights, Nick.

Ollie Pickup:

So thank you so much for your time. Any key messages you wanna get across, and how should people connect with you?

Nick Hodder:

I'm on LinkedIn, so feel free to follow me and connect with me on LinkedIn. I think it's that message around adaptability, really. You know, the why is important, and you adapt around that. I think building communities of like minded professionals is really important today as well. So I think take the opportunity, especially now, to go and kind of network with your peers and hear what they're doing.

Nick Hodder:

Doesn't mean that you're gonna do exactly the same as them. I think you just need to understand the kind of range of possibilities and figure out what you wanna do or what you don't wanna do. And now is the time to start talking with your peers, networking, hearing what everyone else is doing. Yeah. I would definitely encourage you getting out there right now and creating some space for yourself to to think and hear about what other people are doing.

Sabrina Berko:

It always comes back to people.

Nick Hodder:

It does.

Sabrina Berko:

Thank you so much,

Ollie Pickup:

Nick. Thanks so much, Nick.

Nick Hodder:

Thanks, Oliver. Thanks, Sabrina. It's been a pleasure.

Sabrina Berko:

You can find all the links resources from today's conversation in our show notes. DTX Unplugged is brought to you by Clarion Events, the team behind the DTX shows, where business transformation leaders gather to share ideas and drive change.

Ollie Pickup:

If you're leading transformation in your organization, visit dtxevents.i0 to join the community, and don't forget to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Sabrina Berko:

Thanks for listening. And until next time, keep transforming.