Hello

Origins

I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I didn’t want to be an astronaut or an actress; a doctor or a politician; not an explorer and not even a lion-tamer. To this day, I still don’t know. 

What has been truly miraculous about not knowing, is that it’s allowed me to trust my instincts, follow my interests and build new ones, and to go on a journey that I never could have planned. Uncommon Threads is really just the next phase of that journey. 

The Common Thread

The journey has always been underpinned by an interest in understanding and utilising the best parts of the public, private and third sectors to try to improve the lives of citizens and also to see how those sectors might work together more effectively. 
 

Discovering the power of technology

So, what has this looked like in practice? Well, I've spent most of my twenties working in tech in London. I started at Entrepreneur First, the renowned Talent Investor, where I first saw and became incredibly excited by the potential of entrepreneurship and challenging conventional career paths and saw how technology can make real change in the world. It also ignited the spark of the enormous potential of bringing together groups of people with different skills and knowledge to create new and unexpected things greater than the sum of their parts. It was also where I learned about community building - I was lucky enough to run the alumni community and learn about what makes communities tick.

Solving real problems

However, it was also where I realised that, as a 25 year old working in Venture Capital, I had limited experience of actually growing companies, beyond the, admittedly substantial, amount that I'd gathered through osmosis by watching thousands of others do it. So, I joined Accurx, then a 30-person startup, building communications software for the NHS. I joined as the second operations hire, fatefully, 2 weeks before the first London lockdown for Covid-19, and what followed was a total whirlwind.

In my 4 years there, I covered pretty much every aspect of operations, from organisational and team goal setting, to data protection and contractual compliance, to commercialisation and signing contracts with pretty much every regional health board in England. What I came to see as the connecting thread through all of that work, and what I care most about, is what it takes to become, and to remain, a trustworthy supplier to the public sector. From understanding how your organisation can operate within the wider political context through to the details of what needs to go in cell A7 of your seventieth NHS assurance spreadsheet, I love to connect the dots.

With this came a deep desire to fix the issues I see in public procurement, which I believe can only happen if we start to focus on problems we want to solve and outcomes we want to create. This, as opposed to the current practice of looking at what solutions already exist and how many ISO certifications you can force a small supplier to get before you’ll contract with them. I believe that in order to do this, we need to create a much better understanding and shared language between private and public sector organisations. Watch this space. 

Unravelling Together

But there's another strand to this journey. As I started thinking about how we might go about overhauling our broken public procurement system, I had a coincidental meeting with someone who put me on the path of understanding quite how broken all of our current systems are. 

We all know that the planet and the people in it are in some serious trouble, and we need to get organised, creatively, imaginatively, and pretty bloody quickly if we are going to make the changes that need to happen so that we and future generations actually have a planet to live on. So, I started my Substack, Unravelling Together, to explore the assumptions we all make about how the world must be and start to unpack them so that we can weave ourselves something better.

Uncommon Threads

And that's what Uncommon Threads is all about. It's me taking an enormous leap of faith into the unknown to start bringing together all of these threads of my life and interests into something that hopefully can help me find exactly what my contribution to improving human and planetary health is. And if I can help as many individuals and organisations as possible to do the same thing along the way, then that'll be just fantastic.