Episode 418 – Thoughts on winning with Cath Bishop

Cath Bishop‘Our definition of success has led us to a place that’s actually constrained us from exploring what we’re capable of. We’re not getting the innovation or the collaboration that we want. We need to think about things differently.’

If you’re enthralled by the drama of the Paris Olympics, here’s a thoughtful take on what you might be missing if you’re focused primarily on the medals table. World Champion rower Cath Bishop has competed at three Olympic games. When she won silver in 2004, the pain of missing out on gold led to a decades-long reexamination of the idea of success, across sport, education, politics and business. 

As an international conflict negotiator and a leadership coach, as well as an advisor to several sporting bodies, she now makes the case for a richer, more human, more sustainable vision of what it means to win well – what she describes as the Long Win. 

This conversation will change how you watch the Olympics, how you think about your business, and perhaps even what you value in life. 

AUDIO

VIDEO

The Long Win site: https://thelongwin.com/

Cath’s site: https://cathbishop.com/

Cath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cath-bishop-a0029847/

Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/

The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/

The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Substack: https://extraordinarybusinessbooks.substack.com/

The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/

Alison Jones: I’m so, so delighted to be here today with Cath Bishop, who has competed in rowing at three Olympic Games, very timely this, winning World Championships gold in 2003 and Olympic silver in Athens in 2004. Remember that, we’re going to come back to that.

She’s also been a diplomat for the British Foreign Office, specializing in policy and negotiations on conflict issues, and now works as a leadership and culture consultant, executive coach, speaker, facilitator, author. We honestly could be forever on this. She’s a member of the executive education faculty at the Judge Business School at Cambridge University, an independent advisor to British Gymnastics on cultural reform, an advisor to the True Athlete Project, co-host of the Inside Out Culture podcast, writes monthly blogs for The Guardian on Culture in Sport, more distinctions, honestly, than we have time for right now.

But crucially, she’s also the author of The Long Win: There’s more to success than you think, which has just been published in a second edition.

So I feel like I’ve taken up half the podcast with that, Cath. But it really is an extraordinary set of achievements. Very good to have you here again, anyway.

Cath Bishop: Great to be here. Thank you. It always sounds so well planned when it’s read out like that, but of course the reality is I just get…

Alison Jones: it just kind of happened.

Cath Bishop: …opportunities and I take most of them up.

Alison Jones: Well, it’s really lovely. We’re talking just before the Paris Olympics begins. So I’m really excited actually to get your take on, on what that means, how the athlete’s going to be feeling. They’re on their way to Paris just now or they’re just arriving in Paris. Are you empathizing? Are you excited for them?

Cath Bishop: Oh, I am in lots of different ways thinking about, yes, these are sort of huge moments of anticipation. Everybody’s dream is alive and all those sort of hard winters are behind you. So I think there’s huge excitement. It’s actually really quite, from a logistical perspective, it’s really great for the British team, you get on a train, you get on the Eurostar. You know, it’s so much easier than flying to a different continent where it’s difficult to get things, you don’t know what the weather’s like and the time zone differences. So, in lots of ways that also, those things can dampen your excitement a bit. Whereas, you know, Paris Olympics feels almost like a Home Olympics.

And I think that yes, that creates an extra buzz for us.

Alison Jones: But with really, really good food.

Cath Bishop: Yes, exactly.

Alison Jones: So you said that the dream is alive for them at the moment. I mean, it’s going to be a very different story when they come home because they will either be winners or they’ll be whatever a winner isn’t.

So I’d love, could you share with us your own experience of the Olympics and the highs and the lows of that.

Cath Bishop: So one of the things that I’m noticing at the moment, I’m enjoying the buzz from the athletes. They’re excited. They’re ready. And our system, if you like, the elite performance system, knows how to prepare people. There’s no one who hasn’t eaten the right foods or had the right sports science advice. So they’re well prepared and that in itself feels good.

But what I’m also noticing, that I’m less happy about, is a lot of the old narratives returning. Nike have got a particularly, they call it gritty, I call it deeply outdated, sort of set of posters that are all very macho, that sort of echo this sort of old, you know, only the winning counts, all of that stuff that heaps pressure on the athletes.

And in a way, sort of reinforces how you have these brilliant, talented people and really saying only a very small number of them are actually going to have a value in two weeks time, which I think makes no sense. They’ve all pushed the boundaries just to get there.

There’s so much to celebrate. There’ll be amazing stories within races and everyone will play a part in that. And yet sort of externally, we start to sort of say we’re only going to value this, you know, the person who comes out on top for whatever reason, and luck will play a part in that, and all sorts of other factors will play a part in that. And that sort of depresses me a bit, because I think, misses so much of what elite sports, sport at any level, has to offer, and I think, you know, for me, when you are only valued for a result which you can’t completely control, then that’s also really potentially damaging to your sense of self worth, your identity, the fact you’ve really laid yourself vulnerable, you’ve put yourself out there to race, to completely deplete yourself in a sport like rowing, to, you know, mentally, physically, emotionally, culturally, with your team, just give everything that you can, and then for other people to say it’s not enough is a strange experience and often quite, you know, can be damaging for many athletes.

And so I, you know, I fear that the narratives around the Olympics are sort of falling, in my mind, backwards when in fact, you know, really we are beginning to develop a broader set of principles around sports, but it hasn’t kind of cut through some of those ingrained narratives.

And, you know, when I left with the silver medal, I was thinking, gosh, have I failed? Or is there anything to celebrate here?

Alison Jones: Which is extraordinary.

So in 2000, just take us through that little personal story, which you begin the book with. And I think is almost the start of everything, isn’t it? It’s like, wait a minute. There’s something really unhelpful about this binary distinction.

Cath Bishop: Yes, I mean, I walked away from Athens going, well, how do I make sense of that? What is, you know, what kind of judgment do I give to that? What judgment are other people putting on that? I mean, I had come 7th and 9th at two previous ones, so it felt a hell of a lot better to be kind of joining the podium party, as it were.

And I think, you know, that single moment in time crossing the line is what everybody else sees. And yet, really, there were 10 years of my life, a decade of experiences. Is that all just assessed in a tiny fraction of a second? Or do we need to bring a slightly different perspective here? Do we need to be valuing other aspects of that journey?

And really, that was the question in my mind when I left, sort of now 20 years ago, that really took me on this journey, that I explore in the book, to investigate how we define winning, how we think about that, not just in sport, but in business, in education, across society, and how sometimes if we are too narrow in our definition of success, it actually can constrain us.

It can hold us back, it can stop us appreciating other things that are also of value and that’s then a bigger loss to our lives but also collectively to our schools, businesses, workplaces, sports clubs etc.

Alison Jones: Planet. I mean, it’s extraordinary, isn’t it, the depth of this.

So that, in a sense, that moment of crossing the line, which, as you say, is just the tiny tip of the iceberg that’s visible to everybody else and on which you are judged. That started for you, obviously, this sort of bigger thinking, which I think very quickly spread beyond sport, didn’t it?

But you said something a minute ago that I thought was really interesting, that there are new narratives in sport. I think very much triggered by your book and your work. Just tell us a little bit about what you see emerging as a different, perhaps more rich, more nuanced narrative to that old, gritty one that Nike stuck with.

Cath Bishop: Yes, so I think quite a lot comes from the athletes themselves and in a way they show up where perhaps leaders and organizations have failed to modernize or move with the times or humanize the world of sports and athletes themselves are saying mental health matters. You have people like Adam Peaty, our double Olympic champion, really share his story of struggling, of defining things through the medal, then realizing the medal doesn’t make you happy.

And in fact, how could he have been in such a state of total depression and turning to drink and drugs when he had two gold medals? You know, he’s a living example of the fact it can’t only be about the medals. Even when you have the medals, it doesn’t turn out great and you’re only a small fraction of others.

So, I think those stories are helping people see something different and, you know, viewers, spectators, sports fans going I’m not happy about that, I don’t want that to be the story. That’s not actually the values we want sport to represent. And therefore I think there are some moves in the more enlightened spaces, coaches thinking differently, coaches who really see themselves as nurturing people rather than being part of a medal machine, you know, understanding perhaps also what we see and hear from sports psychology, behavioral understanding, neuroscience, that it doesn’t help an athlete to put more pressure on them, to flood them with stress hormones and all of those sort of fear based drivers that often these old narratives play on.

So there are, you know, there are new elements of understanding sports psychology, et cetera, new elements of coaching, athletes voices that are different. And I guess an exposure of those stories, gymnastics, perhaps the biggest one, and part of, you know, what supported the book when it came out was it coincided exactly with the Netflix documentary in 2020, Athlete A, that then triggered gymnastics, the sport, the gymnasts themselves to come out and share their stories of abuse, of bullying, of horrific environments.

And that’s something that, you know, then you can’t ignore the scale of that. And I think society in itself will no longer accept that, certainly in Western societies.

So I think there are drivers for change, but what some of the narratives this week tell me is we haven’t really made enough progress in advancing, well, if it isn’t just about the medals, what is it? And that’s where I think, you know, we had this UK Sport, our performance agency, who distribute money for Olympic, Paralympic sports in this country, talk about ‘winning well’ in their strategy, but they haven’t really defined it. They aren’t giving out money around it. And the money is still tied only to medals, which really it is, then we don’t see that bigger systemic change.

So metrics, you know, need to be more qualitative, need to change. That’s, you know, one of the areas that I think we just haven’t been bold enough in, and that’s perhaps, you know, for the next period, for the next Olympiad, for the next set of leaders to think about more carefully.

Alison Jones: This isn’t just a question, is it, for organisers in sport? This is for all of us because one of the reasons that it is as it is, is because we are so addicted to that really simple narrative of gold medals and winning and heroic moments and so on.

So I guess how can we as spectators look at these Olympics differently?

Cath Bishop: Yes, I think we have, the good news is we can be addicted to it, but we also have another way of thinking. And so this is where just pausing and thinking about how our brains work is important. So, you know, the medals kind of really plays to the short-term addictive part of our brains where we like our posts to get liked. We like somebody to follow us.

But I think that’s a part of our lives that if anything, we’re trying to find ways to minimise, to not let it control us, to put our phones down for a minute. And so it’s almost the same thinking about this. Let’s just not only look at the medals for a minute. Let’s think what else is happening in that race.

What’s the story in the interview after? What does this athlete kind of learn along the way? What are the challenges they’ve had and how have they managed them? And okay, maybe they came fifth, but they’ve gone faster than they’ve ever gone before, and they had a broken leg three weeks ago and all sorts of other challenges against some, you know, incredible, physiological specimen, who was simply born with some huge advantages. And they got closer to them and they pushed them and they found out much more about themselves. And so the stories are there if we listen to them.

And actually we love the stories. Part of why you know, the podcast world has really taken off in this space is because people want those deeper stories from sport. They want to understand actually what people have gone through. And so it’s really kind of training ourselves to stay and almost find the, you know, I listen for the after performance interview, more than crossing the line. I want to know what story lies behind that. The commentator just tells me who came first, second, third, fourth, fifth. Yes, I could see that with my own eyes. I’m interested in the human story and that drives us. Another part of our brains, in fact, a bigger part of our brains really is tapped into that sense of progress, being part of something, the social belonging and learning from others.

And so, you know, part of us wants that too. So let’s just remember that and feed that bit too.

Alison Jones: And that really segues beautifully into the wider application. So beyond sport, we have, I mean, it’s a very obvious parallel, isn’t it? We have quarterly results, we have competitors in our space, you know, we draw a lot metaphorically from the world of sport when we talk about business.

So I guess what’s the corollary of that? How do we think differently about what it means to be successful as a business?

Cath Bishop: So in the business world, you’re right, we have these very narrow, short term metrics, and that is increasingly leading us, not just in business, but across society, to miss out really important aspects of the culture. So if you look at, you know, NHS, Metropolitan Police, where both worlds have had lots of reviews, and any number of crises in business from the CBI and whatever the latest one might be.

Then you see this sort of focus on short term, narrow, superficial metrics, so numbers, without understanding the human costs behind it. So it is about, yes, shifting what we measure, thinking about on the way to getting this set of quarterly results, what’s the team experience been? Are people burnt out or have they been learning and thriving and they’re ready to go for the next quarter?

So it is understanding much more how, in sport we call it our performance process, that leads up to the result. And in sports psychology we separate out those two concepts of the performance and all of the process of the things we do to prepare psychologically, physically, and the actual result we get, which we can never completely control because weather is involved and judges and our competitors and injuries and all sorts of other things.

And so we hone in on that performance process and it is in a business context and thinking about how did you go about getting those results? There are any number of ways we can achieve a sales target. We can sort of stop competitors, we can work 20 hours a day, or we can collaborate and think differently and constantly innovate how we work.

So they might all lead to the same number, but they’re drastically different in experience, and there’ll be drastically different in what you’re then setting yourself for the next quarter and the quarter after that, and three years time. So unless we’re paying attention to that, measuring it in some way, valuing it, then we’re not optimizing it. And we’re also potentially going to mean we hit a short term target, but at the cost of longer term.

And that’s really what Long Win is getting at. It’s absolutely not saying we’re not interested in performance. It’s actually saying we can get better long term performance if we think about it differently and use some different metrics and value some different aspects, some of those things might be harder to measure.

One of the things you see with a performance sport is the athletes don’t not work on their mindset because it’s hard to measure because it’s such a critical part of performance. You’d never say that, but in the business world, we don’t talk about mindset really very often. We talk about, you know, the stuff we can see.

And so we’re automatically not optimizing the human part, you know, the people in our organizations.

Alison Jones: That’s such a brilliant point about measuring mindset. You’re right. Just because it’s unquantifiable does not mean it’s not foundational to the success of the actual performance at the end of the day.

You brought out The Long Win in 2020. We didn’t get a launch party. I’m still a bit bitter about that.

 And as you say, it coincided with that British Gymnastics expose. But really it was, it was pretty radical at the time. I don’t think many people were challenging the existing narrative. Now you, in the last four years, have been doing a huge amount of work with leaders across all sectors, really exploring this thinking, getting people engaging with the principles and so on.

What have you noticed? And also, why did you do a new edition?

Cath Bishop: Yes, so I think, I mean in many ways I was struggling to sort of move past the book and think about another one because I still had so many people kind of discovering this idea and themselves getting to the point of going Oh, we’ve missed something, our definition of success has led us to a place that’s actually kind of constrained us from exploring what we’re capable of. We’re not getting the innovation or the collaboration that we want. We need to think about things differently.

So, because I kept sort of finding that, you know, I felt I was still having to explain the concept. And the second part was that the people I did work with were still saying, we need more help. Tell us how.

And whilst I’ve been really keen, like you can’t just replace, okay, it’s a simple set of metrics that often we follow now with another simple set. The whole point is we need to think about them differently and it’s not a magic, you know, answer these three things and you’re done, you’re on The Long Win.

It is about, meaningfully working out what matters and it’s the process of working that out that is so valuable rather than, oh, just tell me what new metrics to use. And so I’ve been very clear not to be prescriptive and give a sort of, yes, you can’t give a kind of tick list, but people wanted more help and were saying, how can we do this? I’ve read it, I want to do it, but then when I’m faced in this sort of short term system, I don’t really know how to do that.

And so, you know, the driver for the new edition was to add in these stories in the extra chapter, that are little snapshots of leaders across sport, business, politics, education, who are bringing aspects of long win thinking into their organizations and what that looks like.

Because it isn’t just one thing, it might be very much a leader living the values, as in the case of Morgan Sindall and the group CEO there, who will make sure that when he goes to every leadership program, that he wants to make sure all the leaders being developed, you know, they have access to him and he’s part of that. But he doesn’t talk about the goals, the objectives in terms of targets. He just talks about what the values mean to him, what he’s looking for. So he’s reinforcing that.

So that for me was, was kind of one little snapshot into how a leader is consistently, not as a one off thing, trying to work and prioritize, you know, to him, this is what matters most.

And, you know, in another case, it’s about thinking differently inside school sport. So rather than let’s win the next trophy, let’s think about actually our bigger goal is will our children be active in their lives in 10 years time and are we doing the things they need to do? And along the way, we’ll play some fixtures in netball and football, but actually the bigger piece is making sure everyone leaves school ready and set up for an active life.

So success needs to look very different than just that local trophy. It’s part of the piece, but it’s not the only thing that matters. And so those stories are to help people start to think, what could this look like for me?

Alison Jones: It must have been incredibly, I was going to say rewarding, but also kind of poignant in a way for you to see this working out, to have those conversations with people. What was that like as you prepared the second edition?

Cath Bishop: Oh, it is really exciting. And, when there are occasions when I hear almost indirectly someone talk about long win thinking and, others sort of reference it to me, and I’ve not been part of the conversation, then you know that this is an idea that resonates, that’s helpful, that’s timely.

And I feel, yes, I believed that all along and for it to reach people who are ready for that and interested in it is, yes, that is enormously fulfilling.

Alison Jones: I mean as a publisher as well, it’s been terrific just to see that and remember with that conversation, it’s time for a new edition.

Cath Bishop: Yes yes.

Alison Jones: I remember the 2020 one was of course intended to come out just before the 2020 Olympics, which never happened.

Cath Bishop: Yes. I mean, that was such a sort of, in itself, such a classic experience. I felt I had to be out for the Olympics and for various reasons, kind of missed that timing. But then, yes, what a stupid arbitrary timing that was for me to sort of really then feel down and distraught.

Alison Jones: I’ve failed!

Cath Bishop: Yes, when the Olympics themselves moved, you know, and then it was actually the space of not having an Olympics in 2020 that allowed these stories to come out.

So, I mean, there was huge coincidence of timing and I acknowledge that was nothing that was in my control. And I think that for anyone writing a book is, you know, sometimes catching the zeitgeist is hard because of course I was writing it four years before when probably it would have been poorly received.

And it’s just at the beginning of this, actually when Netflix Athlete A came out, people were like, oh my goodness, why is this happening? We’ve got no thinking around this. And I’d literally been thinking about it for four years, really 15 years. And so there’s something about trying to capture those moments and I don’t think you can predict them.

But there’s, I think if you’re involved in your field, you can somehow intuitively sense that it’s time for something and you might have some insights there.

Alison Jones: I think that’s right. In a sense you were ahead of the curve of the bulk of people because you were at the coalface doing this stuff. So, I think that is perhaps the transferable lesson, isn’t it? It’s what you can see from your vantage point, is coming as a real kind of societal conversation;

that might be something to lean into and explore and think, well, what is this going to mean to people in two years time? Thinking about the timescales of a book and how can I engage in that conversation and lead it?

Cath Bishop: Yes, I think, you know, all of us want to be, and I remember actually… … I remember Simon Sinek brought out his book, The Infinite Game, just before that, and that’s the first one, really. Maybe Margaret Heffernan had written about this more broadly. The first one in that space, and actually I thought, oh no, he’s sort of stolen things,

Alison Jones: My book.

Cath Bishop: And we talked about it, but actually he was creating space for the debate that I was all ready to step into.

And I think that it was then, you know, then I sort of realised, yes, all the time you’re creating a space for there to be more debate in this area and you want more people to come into it. But that was also a sign. I mean, he’s quite a zeitgeisty sort of guy, isn’t he? So, in a way it was a sort of vindication and I would have stories and insights that he couldn’t.

Alison Jones: Course.. yes. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Even if you’re writing a book in a similar or related topic, your perspective on it is going to be different because you have a totally different set of life experiences. I mean, frankly, Cath, nobody has a set of life experiences like you.

You’re in a very lonely spot on a Venn diagram.

Cath Bishop: Yes, I won’t plot it if it’s that lonely. Yes, like to think there are lots of people in different spaces on the Venn diagram, so it’s actually quite a, yes, quite a sociable Venn diagram.

Alison Jones: …is very social, you’re very well connected, but there’s probably not many people that share all the overlapping

Cath Bishop: the middle bit.

Alison Jones: Yes. Tell me what your, I mean, I guess it’s up to you to choose whether it’s just a general, if you’re writing a book, or if you’re thinking about a second edition, but what would be your best tip for somebody who’s listening at the moment, who has aspirations write?

Cath Bishop: Yes, one of the interesting experiences that’s actually evolved out of this, which I love, is having this monthly column in The Guardian to write about topics of culture in sport, because often they’re not written about. And that creates a discipline of having to write an article that’s about 950 words about a big area.

For example, Culture and Gymnastics. And you’ve got a 350 judge led report around this and all sorts of stories. How do you condense that down? And I, to this day, find it a really helpful challenge each month to think about quite a big topic. How do I make it interesting? Because these are sort of, you know, traditionally everyone clicks on the topics that are about football and Pep Guardiola.

So how do I kind of create some kind of draw, some sort of insight, but I’ve got that only a really limited space and I think that is really useful for driving the economy of your thinking and really getting to the point because often you put in stories and stuff, but what’s this really about and so I think that practice and whether you’re just doing it in a LinkedIn post, or whether you’re putting a blog on Medium or on your own website.

I think writing articles that are painfully tight, like that, no more than a thousand words, about one of your chapters, for example, or one of your key concepts, is a really useful thing to do just to hone and, you know, tighten up, sharpen up your thinking.

Alison Jones: And that focus on what’s in it for the reader, I think is so vital because so often we start from what’s fascinating to us and what we know and what we do but really putting us, because you have to do this as a journalist don’t you, you have to say well what’s going to catch somebody’s attention in a really noisy world. So that realism that we are putting forward more nuanced, more thoughtful narratives but we have to understand that people are busy and that a very limited number of things catch their eye and we have to work within that constraint as well, that’s a great challenge for a writer, isn’t it? Is raise the conversation, but start where people are?

Cath Bishop: So you’ll go, what’s the new bit here? What’s the bit they didn’t know before? Because we regurgitate stuff, our evidence that we have, but add ‘so what’? You know, always asking that ‘so what’ question? So I feel that’s kind of keeping my kind of writing muscles well exercised and thinking.

Alison Jones: Yes, love that. And, you know, I always ask my guests for their recommendation. I can’t remember what you recommended last time. I should have looked, but what are you going to recommend for us this time?

Cath Bishop: Yes, that’s really sort of challenging, isn’t it? I’ve actually been going, I read a vast amount and I’ve always got umpteen books on the go. I think I always recommend Margaret Heffernan books and she’s got another one that she’s in the middle of writing, so I’m super excited about that. But I’m actually, I’m in the middle of reading a book that is very multidisciplinary that is by Anthony Seldon, which is called Trust.

And Trust is an issue that is written, he wrote it in 2009, I think, and it is, It could have been written for 2024. I met him recently at a conference, I found him fascinating. He’s somebody who is also, I always like authors like Matthew Syed, Margaret Heffernan, who go across genres, so it’s not just educational, business, but we’re thinking across and looking at the societal impact. He does that very well to be thinking about trust in organisations, in schools, in the family, in government.

And I think trust is such a fundamental issue. And he’s saying back then, oh, we’ve got a trust crisis, but here we are, 2024. We can say exactly the same. And so yes, I am really finding his thinking incredibly powerful. And so I mean, he’s a great public thinker of our time, isn’t he, Anthony Seldon.

Alison Jones: Absolutely.

Cath Bishop: And so I think that it’s maybe a book that, because it’s from a while ago isn’t talked about, but it could have been written this year. It’s so brilliant.

Alison Jones: That’s great. Thank you. I always think of him as a sort of writer on education or a speaker on education, but he is much broader than that, isn’t he?

Cath Bishop: He is, and of course he writes these biographies of prime ministers, and yes, he was the Head of Wellington School and definitely a thinker on education, but of course, what is education? It’s all about shaping

Alison Jones: yes, shaping…

Cath Bishop: …society, the leaders of business and industry of the future and all of that. So I just, yes, he’s such a kind of profoundly insightful guy who also has that breadth of knowledge and ability to, yes, think deeply. And I think that’s what’s missing.

 I’m always someone with my work, whether it’s with schools or businesses or sport, I’m thinking about our patterns of thinking, our behaviours, and how we interact with each other, and those are things that he understands very deeply and how they play out across society, but also has a vision of some bold things that could be done differently.

Alison Jones: Yes and writes really well, which is always helpful. Brilliant.

Cath, if people want to find out more about you, more about The Long Win, more about the stuff that you do, all of it, where would they go?

Cath Bishop: Yes, so I have a website, cathbishop.com. That’s sort of broadly, you know, just kind of what I do, my speaking work. I’ve also set up around the book, thelongwin.com, which is a website aimed to also help people stay on board with the idea and what might it look like, and to read more stories and examples of how others have been engaged and to get more reading prompts and podcasts and things to keep that thinking going.

And then I’m on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter. Very easy to find with Cath Bishop. And yes, maybe plug into some of my Guardian articles and sign up to the Inside Out Culture podcast, which I do with Colin Ellis, just started a few months ago, which has been a great adventure. And it’s really about helping conversations, people to understand and start having more conversations about culture.

It’s not something we’re usually trained in or learn at school and in the office. We’re often very good at technical expertise as a lawyer and engineer, but I think people need to develop a bit more competence and language and confidence to be really actively developing the workspaces that we’re in.

Alison Jones: Oh, I can feel a second, another book coming on, Cath. Just going to leave it there.

It’s such a joy to talk to you. It feels a really timely moment as well, just after the launch of the second edition, just before the Olympics. Obviously, it’ll be mid Olympics by the time that this goes out, but I do hope, you know, if you’re listening to this, you’ll really take that challenge from Cath and be more creative, be more insightful, be more thoughtful about how you’re watching those stories of winning and not winning playing out.

So good to talk to you today, Cath. Thank you.

Cath Bishop: Brilliant. Really enjoyed the conversation.

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