Iltelligence Forums Webinar
On 14 July 2020, Edward Goodchild chaired the fourth of Intelligence Forums’ video conference webinars. Thirty members joined to listen to and question our speakers.
Our first was Xavier Brice, Chief Executive of Sustrans, a 40-year-old charity comprising 650 employees and volunteers across the UK. He joined in 2016, from TfL where he had developed a new cycling strategy for the city which ultimately lead to the introduction of the Cycle Superhighways and Cycle Hire Scheme.
Xavier believes that the way we get about shapes the happiness of our society, which dovetails with Sustrans’ vision for a UK-wide network of traffic-free paths, connecting cities, towns and the countryside, and the communities that they serve. He highlighted two areas where COVID has had an impact on the charity’s ambitions:-
First – in the early days of lockdown there was a large increase in the number of people who took up cycling. A simple reason was that with diminished traffic levels people were no longer worried about being knocked down. Evidence that if cycling can be made safe, people will want to do it, and according to a UK wide Sustrans survey, 50% of people would support a reallocation of road space to cyclists, to help make this possible.
Second – COVID has significantly altered the way that we live. Whether shielding or not, people have embraced the necessity of working from home, and the attendant lifestyle and health benefits from the reduction in commuting and business travel. Xavier’s view is that while may be a correlation between economic growth and the country’s transportation infrastructure, there is not a causation. Transportation per se, is simply a means to an end; it does not in itself create economic growth.
So now that we don’t need to go to the office every day, he asked, is it time to rethink what we want from transport and what it should look like today and in the future? A Sustrans survey, taken before lockdown, indicated that 59% of those surveyed would be happy if their daily needs could be met within their local area. Indeed, “Live locally” is an established concept. In Paris, for example, the mayor, was re-elected on a promise to phase out vehicles and create a “15-minute city”. She wants to encourage more self-sufficient communities within each arrondissement of the French capital, with grocery shops, parks, cafes, sports facilities, health centres, schools and even workplaces just a walk or bike ride away.
Melbourne, too, aspires to local living albeit with a longer 20 minute neighbourhood travel radius, and Xavier contrasted this with the huge investments that have been made so that Sydney, for example, is accessible from London, over 10,000 miles away, within 24 hours!
Xavier believes that we have reached something of a “London Eye”, or “Eiffel Tower” moment. Temporary planning consent was only ever granted for these structures, but both still remain standing years afterwards. Once installed people liked and supported them, and this he believes is the point that we have reached with cycling. People have accepted the many temporary road layouts and the reality that if we want to encourage more cycling we must make it easier and safer.
Johnny Pawlik, the Founder and Global Marketing Manager of Mantra Media (“Mantra”), was next to speak. He has over 18 years of experience in online marketing, and has consulted with the European Parliament, British Members of Parliament, and the NHS, the board of Opera North, at Australian Federal Government, Leeds City Council, Sheffield City Council, the UKTI and many others.
Mantra, he told us, seeks to build captivating, exciting creative campaigns to help businesses, charities, and governments. Culture is at the top of Mantras agenda, and its mission is to deliver compelling communications and data-driven creative marketing services for people that share its values in building a healthier, more conscientious, and kinder planet.
Johnny outlined a number of Mantra’s campaign successes over recent years, including the following:
In 2016 Mantra set up an Influencer training academy in Kyoto to assist British businesses in penetrating the Japanese market, and since then its business has grown strongly in the country. It now has offices in Kyoto and counts Atelier Japan and regional government amongst its clients, as well as the Tokyo Taskforce which it has assisted to encourage corporate entities to donate to and develop charitable projects in Japan.
In 2017 Mantra worked with the Careers and Enterprise Company, which recognised that because a large number of kids were not connecting with their school mentors, they were not taking advantage of the world class careers education that it offered. One reason was the lack of diversification amongst the mentors, many of whom were middle-class middle-aged white women. Mantra designed a demographically targeted online campaign with compelling visuals and messages in order to resonate with young people and to encourage them to sign up for educational opportunities. In the first 24 hours the website had over 1 million hits and more than 1000 people signed up.
In 2018 Mantra worked with a Brisbane based charity “Stand Tall 4 PTS”. It designed a month long campaign during which Invictus athletes, active servicemen and women and first responders travelled over 4500km across Australia to raise awareness of battle trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress (“PTS”). The campaign reached over a million people worldwide, saw a doubling of engagement for the charity in less than a week, and an increase in its Facebook reach from 83 to over 260,000.
The company has recently launched a series of podcasts which include “Learning from Leaders” and the “Entrepreneur Series”. These are available on its website along with its “Valuable Insights” guides. One on SEO was used by over 200 businesses within 24 hours of its launch.
Mantra’s bread and butter business is marketing, he said, but it also has a soul, and everything it does must meet its values and ethics. It is a collaborative business, not about short term gain but wishing to make the world a better place.
Our final speaker was Kyle Whitehill, Group Chief Executive Officer of the Avanti Communications Group, a British based company with offices across Europe, Africa and America. Founded in 2002, its vision was to design, build and launch pioneering satellite technology to provide high throughput capacity across Europe, the Middle East and Africa along with a resilient and secure ground network.
Kyle shared his views on how COVID is likely to permanently change the way we work.
Avanti is headquartered in London with 60% of its business in sub-Saharan Africa, and pre-COVID Kyle spent some 60% of his time travelling. A significant challenge for anyone with an already demanding job. Having survived a period of lockdown when no travel has been permitted, he now questions how much of it had really been necessary, and whether it would resume once COVID has been vanquished.
Lockdown required that those who could work from home should do so, and Avanti’s employees were asked not to come into the office. And this has continued even though restriction have been eased. Of the 150 employees who worked in the Blackfriars office only three have returned, and of 70 who worked at Goonhilly Downs, six now come in.
Several weeks after the start of lockdown, however, it was apparent that working from home posed significant challenges for employees. Some were required to home school their young children and many simply had no suitable work place in their homes.
Kyle believes that we have reached an inflection point. The Government's call for people to go back to work has had little impact. The people on the streets, are tourists and shoppers with a preference for the West End. Those who previously came to work in the city have not returned which has presented a systemic challenge for the economy of small coffee bars, sandwich shops etc. He suggested, however, that outside of London activity had picked up since lockdown restrictions began easing.
In his view, we will not return to working in high density locations such as Canary Wharf. In the pre- vaccine COVID world it is simply impractical. For example, Shell’s offices in New York house 1000 employees on the 32nd floor of a 42 story high-rise. It would take the elevators seven hours to get everybody up to the higher floors…… and of course seven hours to get people down from those floors, in a socially distanced way.
Avanti’s solution is to abandon the central office concept, but recognise that employees who work from home also need social contact and community. To this end Kyle envisages a network of smaller localised offices, conveniently situated near clusters of Avanti employees. Those who live in the region can work from home on certain days but rotate through the local offices on others.
For Kyle, “micro-office” thinking is the way forward. Another step, perhaps towards the people-centred economics advocated by E.F. Schumacher, which he set out in his 1973 book “Small is Beautiful”, and believed would enable environmental and human sustainability.