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Welcome to The Executive Exchange, a premier podcast series for on-the-go senior executives. Each episode features short, impactful podcasts where industry leaders share key insights and experiences from the water industry.
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange 15 minute podcast, in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and educate other water sector leaders from around the globe.
[00:00:10] Piers Clark: My name is Piers Clark, and today my guest is Nigel Watson, former CIO at Northumbrian Water. Now, those of you who listened last week will be aware that we have just spoken to the current CIO at Northumbrian Water, Martin Jackson.
[00:00:27] Piers Clark: And this week we're doing something different. We're talking to the man who was in the post before Martin took over. And that's 'cause I want to talk a bit about transition, what it's like at an exec level to hand over the reins to someone new. And also we're gonna be picking his brains about some of the key projects he did whilst he was CIO.
[00:00:46] Piers Clark: Nigel, wonderful to have you with us. Thank you for taking the time.
[00:00:49] Nigel Watson: Thanks Piers, I'm delighted to be here.
[00:00:51] Piers Clark: Now, we always start with learning a little bit more about our podcasters. So, tell me a bit about your background.
[00:00:59] Nigel Watson: For nearly 10 years, I was the CIO of Northumbrian Water, before I handed over to Martin, which was a terrific role actually. I think the best experience of my entire career, which spanned more than 40 years at a bunch of different sectors.
[00:01:12] Nigel Watson: So I worked in financial services, I worked for GE Capital. Did a bit of a small stint with Microsoft. Worked in travel for Travelport and also in telecoms for Vodafone. So, I had the good fortune if you like to work around the globe in different sectors, and I landed in the water sector for the last 10 years. Now, I'm an exec advisor to Northumbrian Water. I'm very much enjoying that role as well.
[00:01:38] Piers Clark: Brilliant and now for those people who didn't listen to the podcast last week, can you just gimme 30 seconds on who Northumbrian Water are and what they do?
[00:01:46] Nigel Watson: Northumbrian Water serves 4.5 million people in the northeast and in the southeast of England. So, in the northeast to do water and wastewater services. And in Essex and Suffolk we provide clean water. Decent sized in the middle of the pack and a nice sized company, I think to be able to make some impact, but also to be able to operate very efficiently.
[00:02:08] Piers Clark: Excellent. Well, the topic we're gonna talk about today is one that we've never touched on before, which is the challenges at an exec level in particular, when you hand over the reins, because you've been sitting in the group that helped steer the whole business.
[00:02:21] Piers Clark: And you've had 10 years there, so you've established things, people know this is how Nigel does things. And now you are handing over to someone else. And what's that as an executive to do, and how do you preserve the legacy of the things you are proud of and how do you move on and make sure that things get built upon rather than torn down and gone in a different direction?
[00:02:40] Nigel Watson: I guess that is the essence of what we've been trying to do, me and Martin and Heidi who's the CEO. We planned for this for quite some time. So I first sat down with Heidi two years before I was due to leave and said, look, I'm gonna make my exit here at some point and we agreed the two year timeframe, then obviously didn't tell anybody else 'cause that would undermine your authority if you did that.
[00:03:02] Nigel Watson: And I asked her, do you want to make a significant change here in direction or are you looking for continuity, right?
[00:03:10] Piers Clark: Knowing Heidi, she's the sort of chief exec who would've made it fairly clear early on if she thought you were doing the wrong things.
[00:03:17] Nigel Watson: Well, indeed. Yeah. And so she said, no, I'm looking for continuity. And I said, okay, then that's fine. And as anyone would in a position in a leadership role, you have a duty, I believe, to do decent succession planning. So, I'd already been working with my team to identify a couple of candidates that might be able to step up and do the role when I was ready to walk away.
[00:03:38] Nigel Watson: So, I think the bit that's really different and, you know, this was the bit that I worked with Martin is you're a director of the business first and foremost, and Heidi always makes this very clear, it's all part of our one team in Northumbrian Water. So, as CIO, I was held to account for leakage, flooding, pollutions, customer satisfaction, et cetera.
[00:03:58] Piers Clark: So your objectives are the same as that of the operations director, same as that of the asset director?
[00:04:04] Nigel Watson: Exactly the same, yeah. And that I believe has a real power because you are making decisions. So, if we needed to tilt in the direction of, let's say, putting some more investment in wastewater at a moment in time, that meant the water director had to give something up. And the fact that we had common objectives, I believe really helped us to operate at the highest level.
Now, before I went through the plan of my handover with Martin, and I stepped away in August, I had a bit of time between Christmas and New Year. So, I went through my calendar and I spent two thirds of my time being a director of the business, one third of my time running the technology function.
[00:04:42] Nigel Watson: So Martin had been working with me for 10 years. He'd obviously been there a little bit before then, but the bit of the technology function, I was like, that's how walk in the park for you, right? He'd been there through every decision that we'd ever taken. And my leadership style was always like I wanted to be a servant leader, principally, which was kinda go, okay, I'll speak last. I will make sure I've got smart people in the right role, they understand their objectives.
[00:05:07] Nigel Watson: Now, my handover then was to explain to Martin and go through some examples of you will be on the committee that approves contracts, for example. And so you'll be asked, what do you think about how much we're spending on scaffolding? Or, you know, the reinstatement of roads, contract, et cetera, et cetera. You'll be involved in all of those things.
[00:05:25] Nigel Watson: And I'm like, that's the bit that's gonna be new for you. And so that's what we worked on during the handover period.
[00:05:31] Piers Clark: Nice. I mean, it's funny isn't it? If you tease out the things that make a successful handover and it does look like the handover has been incredibly smooth, from what I can see at least, it appears to be having a clear line of sight. You didn't say to Heidi, I'm leaving in three months time. You gave her 24 months to plan and identifying and grooming potential candidates internally and working out what the differences between what they were doing to what they will be doing and trying to bridge those gaps and test that they've got the skillset set. Is that a fair summary?
[00:06:02] Nigel Watson: That's a very fair summary yeah . And look, I'm in the background right, and so if he needs to call me, he absolutely can. And I think so far he is called me like we're six months in, he's called me twice.
[00:06:12] Piers Clark: Brilliant Alright. You spent 10 years in the role and there are a few things that are really quite Nigel Watson specific. I've got two that I'd like to pick on.
[00:06:22] Piers Clark: There's obviously the Innovation Festival and there's NUAR, the National Underground Assets Register. Is there one that I'm missing? Is there something else that we should talk about as well as those?
[00:06:33] Nigel Watson: I understand why people who from external to the business would pick those two 'cause they're both very visible, right?
More internal if you like, I was a technology sponsor at least for a number of large transformation programs, which we executed on over an eight, nine year period. I think we had six successful transformation programs.
[00:06:52] Nigel Watson: I would have this debate with Heidi sometimes at the end of the festival, Heidi would come across and go, this is your legacy, right? And I Would always say no, I think the transformation programs that we led are my legacy.
[00:07:02] Piers Clark: And just to be clear, it was different parts of the business that were being transformed?
[00:07:07] Nigel Watson: Yeah, I mean, we started with customer and then we went to work and asset management. We did employee experience, we did smart metering, we did ramping up for the increased spend in the AMP8 period. So there were a number of those programs.
[00:07:21] Nigel Watson: When we delivered those programs, what we also embedded into the business, which was really important, was a continuous improvement of those processes, systems, and all of the tools that kind of went with 'em. So, the things that we delivered out of the transformation program became products with ongoing investment, not at the same level that they had during the transformation period, but we carried on improving them and we carried on embedding them and I think that was really key to the success.
[00:07:49] Piers Clark: Excellent. Alright, well let's talk about those two other ones that I mentioned, the Innovation festival and NUAR. Let's start with NUAR, the National Underground Asset Register. Martin briefly mentioned it in last week's podcast, but for those who didn't hear it, can you just summarize what the NUAR program is?
[00:08:07] Nigel Watson: Simply put, it's a common underground map of England and Wales. In the past, we've always had our own records of our own underground assets. And then, there might be a PDF of the electric network, you'll have a piece of paper with the gas on and something else with the telecoms.
NUAR brings all of those layers together.
[00:08:27] Piers Clark: And it's not just a theory, it's a real thing, it's a real register that exists and is being used in anger today.
[00:08:35] Nigel Watson: Yes, correct. In Northumbrian Water being used in anger, absolutely. And I also will point out the government really played a massive role.
[00:08:43] Nigel Watson: It had quite a journey and it's almost impossible to separate that journey from the Festival really, Piers. The first festival we only had six sprints and a thousand people. I mean, that seemed like a lot of the time, I have to say. But when we did that, three of those sprints said we need a common underground map. I sat with Heidi and she was like, we should jump on that, right? We should really try and make that happen.
[00:09:03] Piers Clark: And just to interrupt briefly there, for people who aren't aware, the Innovation Festival, this is a annual event held in the summer in the UK where you bring together contractors and other utilities and consultants and they come and they spend time at a festival, a 3, 4, 5 day festival where problems are dealt with through a mixture of, as you just referred to, sprints and hacks and debates. It's not quite Glastonbury, but it's getting there.
[00:09:34] Nigel Watson: It's close. We were looking to do a massive sort of open innovation event, right? That was really the principle of it, and I decided to smash together the innovation techniques that we were using that were working well for us with the idea of a British summer festival. So it has had yoga, poetry, slams, comedy, music. It always has free ice cream.
[00:09:54] Nigel Watson: The intent of that was, if you're bringing people in from the outside, they're gonna spend their valuable time with you. Like you said, it is five days. You want to give them the best week they've ever had at work. That was our guiding principle.
[00:10:05] Nigel Watson: And to create a different feeling, right. You're not walking into a conference, you're not walking into an office. We want to break your daily habits and we want you to have fun because we feel like that's how we get the creative juices flowing.
[00:10:18] Nigel Watson: So when we were planning the 2018 festival, I was going where did we get to with that underground asset register. And they were like, well, it's stalled. Nobody wants to share their data. You could easily understand that that's a problem.
[00:10:30] Piers Clark: So, in 2017 there'd been a bit of a discussion, a bit of a identification of this as a problem. And then inevitably as these things do, it runs out of energy. So 12 months later it's still there. It's still a problem to be resolved.
[00:10:43] Nigel Watson: Yes. In 2018, I said to Clive Surman-Wells, who played an absolute blinder on NUAR from start to finish, I was like, let's just see what we can get done in a week. So we came up with this concept we now call "a year's worth of work in a week" and the idea is where you got 50 people working together.
[00:11:01] Nigel Watson: One team was a team of lawyers. We had four of them, one from each type of utility. We had a team of people who were defining data standards. We had a team of people who were ingesting the data. A team of people who were setting up the platform, and a team of people who wrote an app.
[00:11:15] Nigel Watson: The lawyers, just to take that as an example, we gave them a blank sheet of paper and said, write a data sharing agreement this week. You can appreciate in real life that's probably 18 months of back and forth and markup. Nope, in four days they had an agreement written.
[00:11:30] Nigel Watson: Now was it perfect? Absolutely not. But was it good enough? Yeah, it was good enough to take another step. So, at the end of that week, we had four underground areas of Newcastle mapped and visible on an app, you know, with all of those different layers in it. Obviously not usable, but proved it could be done.
[00:11:46] Nigel Watson: The next step was Sunderland City Council. We all agreed, four utilities, we'd put in £25,000 each and for a hundred thousand pounds we built an underground map of Sunderland. And that was sort of the next step that proved that this could be achieved.
[00:12:01] Nigel Watson: And then we got lucky. We were working with the ordinance survey. We're in touch with the Geospatial Commission, which was a government department, and they decide to fund £ 4 million, the whole of the Northeast and London. And that was the government taking on the baton.
[00:12:17] Nigel Watson: And we played a key role in that because we orchestrated the group that was up in the Northeast. So we brought all of the northeast stakeholders together and there was another team working on the London initiative.
[00:12:28] Nigel Watson: And then the government was happy and I don't know what exactly what they invested, but I think it was somewhere between £30 and £40 million to build out the final production which went live last year. So, from flash to bang, you're looking seven, eight years.
[00:12:41] Nigel Watson: It's delivered now, and we've been embedding it into our business and making sure that when we're digging up the road and things like that, we're using this common underground map. It has by the government's own numbers, a benefit to UK PLC of about 400 million pounds a year.
[00:12:57] Piers Clark: That's incredible. So, you've spent roughly 4 million, a hundred fold increase. and that's per annum, that saving, isn't it?
[00:13:03] Nigel Watson: Yeah, that's per annum. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's good return on investment for the government and we were delighted to be able to play a role throughout to make it happen.
[00:13:11] Piers Clark: It wouldn't have happened if, A) you hadn't created the innovation festival and B) if you hadn't actually had the resolve to keep driving the Innovation Festival outputs .
[00:13:22] Piers Clark: Actually making sure that there's momentum behind the ideas that came up at the innovation festival is probably where 90% of the hard work goes.
[00:13:29] Nigel Watson: Without question. And I need to give Heidi a lot of credit on NUAR as well because she supported that right from start to finish. So we had, Heidi working with government departments and lending her support. I was in at the next layer down, and then Clive dedicated to working with the teams day to day.
[00:13:47] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Nigel, it's been wonderful to speak with you. My closing question to you was going to be, if someone was going to play you in the film of your life, who would it be but I'm gonna twist that question a little bit.
[00:13:59] Piers Clark: Because we've mentioned Heidi quite a few times, I want you to also name the actor that's going to play Heidi. So, I'm putting you on the spot. And remember, she's still your employer.
[00:14:09] Nigel Watson: I'm hoping she's not gonna be offended by this. Okay. I'm gonna go for myself, Tom Hanks. I think he leads with his heart. He always plays his role, you know, he throws his full self into it.
[00:14:19] Piers Clark: Is it Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump mode, or Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips mode?
[00:14:24] Nigel Watson: Well, here's the thing. Tom Hanks is a very adaptable actor isn't he? And he's very believable in whatever context you put him in. And I think as a leader you have to be adaptable and operate in different contexts too, right? You can't just operate with just one style.
[00:14:38] Nigel Watson: For similar reasons, Heidi, I would go with Meryl Streep. Absolutely top of the game. I think as a leader inspirational, is very adaptable, I've seen her lead with different styles, use different approaches but always authentic and always human.
[00:14:53] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with me Piers Clark, and my guest today has been Nigel Watson, former CIO at Northumbrian Water, now acting as a consultant for Northumbrian Water, and we've been talking about what it's like to hand over the reins at an exec level to a successor, and also just a couple of the legacy projects that Nigel was responsible for.
[00:15:14] Piers Clark: Thank you to our sponsors, and until next time, keep asking questions, keep sharing, and keep safe.