Kirsty de Garis: We are here talking today about the MBE, which is offered by Small Giants. And I wonder if you could begin by telling us, please, what is the MBE?
Tamsin Jones: So the MBE is a Mastery of Business and Empathy. I think most people listening would have heard of a Masters of Business Administration, MBA. So it's really taking this concept of how we unpack what it is to run a business across a year-long program – in our case, 10 months. And instead of looking at just the normal business as usual, the Mastery of Business and Empathy looks to the future and says, “How are we going to lead in business with empathy and connection with nature and the people we work with?” So, how do we do things in a completely new way which would take us into what we call the Next Economy, which is a place where we're in balance with the earth and each other.
Could you give us an idea of how you became involved? What sector had you been working in before?
I started out in Australia. I lived in Adelaide where I became a policy advisor to the premier at 23, so very young. I worked on all kinds of policy issues. My passion has always been how do we lead in a way that we can shift the systems to ones that are more equitable? I came into that role looking at issues like women on boards and women in leadership, sustainability and renewables. I had the most brilliant time, and I thought it was very influential and important in terms delivering in line with my values. But I didn't really fit into the political party system at that time. It felt like it really wasn't for young women. It was a very difficult place.
So I went about travelling the world, working on all kinds of initiatives. I helped establish a social innovation and entrepreneurship centre in Cape Town in South Africa, started a business focussed on increasing the number of women on boards, built and launched an innovation hub. All the time I was thinking, well, how do we shift the systems using the various tools of business and community building?
During that journey, I completed an MBA at Oxford with the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, where I met Danny Almagor, who is the chair and managing director of Social Giants Academy. We started to chat about some of the work that Small Giants was doing. A few years later, he got in touch and said, “We're having an Impact Safari, would you like to join us?” The Impact Safari was going to the Centre for Gross National Happiness in Bhutan.
At that time, I was going through a rethink of how I was taught to lead. I was feeling burnt out. I was pushing very hard on agendas that were important, but in ways that weren’t relational or interconnected. I was operating in a way that I felt like the need to change this system was on my shoulders in a way, as if it was something any single person could do. And it was really burning me out.
So in Bhutan I looked at the Gross National Happiness index as a way of seeing the entire community in balance. I learned that an individual’s happiness and the happiness of society are deeply interconnected. So my goal going into the trip was to chart the next 20 years of my life in an entirely new way. Little did I know, a year later, when I was at COP26 in Glasgow, would I get a call from the Small Giants team saying, “We've got this Mastery of Business and Empathy and we want you to head it up!”
In the period between Bhutan and joining Small Giants, I call it my time of sitting in the garden. It didn't mean I was gardening. It meant I was observing and trying to learn about the new systems that were much more interconnected in business. I'd been avidly reading, connecting, hosting events in London with the Conduit Club, which is an impact club, and doing various other activities. I think without me really knowing it, I'd been preparing to be in this space of Next Economy, to be leading this program in partnership with Danny and the team. So for me, it feels like I'm in my life's calling almost. It's a wonderful place to be.
That is a wonderful place to be. Would you give us an idea, a taste of what's covered in the course? What could students expect?
I loved what one of the people from this year’s MBE said: “It's like you take your understanding of business, scrub it from the inside out, and then look at how you can shape it into want it to be for a more hopeful future.” So it's asking you to take your conceptions, your ideas, and rethink all of them from start to finish.
We ask, what is your idea of a good society? What is your idea of a good life? There are these big philosophical questions. But we also look at what are the realities of our current contexts – the ecological context, the social context, we look at the responsibilities of leadership and even our ideas.
I mentioned this idea of zero-sum leadership versus a much more collaborative, interconnected version. We look at the complexity of decision making and strategy in that context that we're in and we look at our biases, but also as a way of underpinning good decision-making. We drill into operations and governance. We look at concepts like stakeholder governance.
There are four guides through the whole process, and we have this principle that we will never take you anywhere we haven't been. So obviously as guides, we haven't been everywhere. So where we haven't been there ourselves, we bring in leading thinkers from around the world.
And it’s an intimate experience. It’s not 100 people; you're literally in a cohort of 30 to 40 people from all different walks of life examining these topics. The most value often comes from the people within the cohort sharing their own journeys and ideas with each other.
We ask people to constantly be circling back through the program; taking wisdom and translating these concepts into action in their organisations. It's not uncommon that I receive a call that week saying I immediately applied a tool or idea, and it made a real impact. You're not just changing intellectually; you're actually shaping your business in line with the leading principles for a business that is much more connected with society and with nature.
You don't often hear those words together in business, thinking about your own personal health and how it impacts your work. I come from the generation that learned you just have to work yourself 90 hours a week, and that's the only way to do it.
There is a whole new science around rest and recovery. We know now that our brains are very active in rest. It's as active as it is when we're consciously contemplating. It’s putting together connections. So rest is fundamental to being able to use your full intelligence, not just focusing on the stuff that we need to solve to address a problem right now. We talk about what it means to do less and to listen more and be more spacious in the way that we do that. Really drilling both into the science and practice of how we lead into our organisations.
We had Simon Griffiths speaking last night from Who Gives a Crap. And he has the most extraordinary systems for organisational creativity that are based on these principles of connection and delight and rest and obviously also big goals that we want to achieve and aligning purpose not just as the heads of an organisation, but within a whole organisation and the community that sits around it. He says rather than thinking of people as customers, think about them as community in relationship.
I love that. Can you tell me what time commitment this is? You mentioned 10 months, but how many hours a week? How does all that work?
So each module is four weeks. We have breaks in between modules and we have two retreats. We say to people, you need about three hours a week for the module time and three hours or so to read and do assignments. The challenges are deeply tied into the business or organisation that you're in. People find these very practical. I guess you would think of it as doing a challenge or an assignment, but actually what you're doing is you're applying your knowledge directly in a way that's going to make your business more effective or you more effective as a leader. So I would see it as a huge part of developing the strategies that you're working on.
We also have two retreats. Both retreats are going to be in Australia. One will be just outside of Melbourne and the other one will be at a very special location for a spacious experience that we are announcing soon.
Week to week we’re Zooming in from all over the place. We have a CEO of a major insurance business in Portugal. We have people zooming in from Israel, from New Zealand. The time zone works well for Europe and Australia. So we have an international cohort and you don't have to travel to be present each week. But we do have these very experiential retreats where we examine deeper ideas.
We think that creating the next economy is a mix of philosophy and tools and practice. So the MBE gives you a chance to do both the practical, but also think about your big visions that you have in your organisation, in your life.
Who would benefit from doing an MBE?
People who are ready for a shift, people wanting to push the boundaries of what it means to be in business. We have people in the cohort from non-profits and governments as well as business, and that is very welcome. This year we have someone from the Royal Australian Air Force, for example, and the Federal Police. We have people who run permaculture organisations. We have the CEO of Village Roadshow. I think what we're really interested in is a diversity of experience, and align around a deep commitment to examining how you do business and keenness to apply that in your organisation.
And what can participants expect to gain from completing the MBE?
Well, that's a really great question because it's so diverse. I will say what they will gain is the answers to their questions, and that will come in many forms depending on what they're looking for. Some people come in wanting a complete reframe in their lives and in the work they're doing. So they might go through a transition during this period. Other people are refreshing choices in their lives, reshaping their organisation in line with new principles of business or designing an organisation that they want to establish in the future. We know that everyone will walk away with new tools that they can apply across their business and a network of people that are there for them, not just for the MBE year, but going forward.
We have a Fellows program which we recently launched, which we're really excited about, and it really means that you'll never stop learning as part of this community and you will always have the support of this group as long as you want to participate. And quite often with an MBE, similar to an MBA, people do join because they want to be a part of this community. I would say this is the most diverse community of people I have seen who are aligned around wanting to see real shifts in business. It is the opposite of an echo chamber. It is the foundations of real societal shifts.
