My work in the NHS has focused particularly in recent years on developing compassionate leadership in health service organisations. What really has struck me over the years is that health services are about ensuring high-quality health and wellbeing for people of our communities, yet at the same time, the experience of staff is often that their health and wellbeing is damaged. High levels of stress, intense workloads, and then in 2012 in the Academy of Management Review - one of the premier management journals - there was a special issue on compassion, and for me it kind of crystallised the importance of looking at compassion as a core value in health services, and therefore as a key characteristic of the kinds of cultures we need to create in health services so that we can deliver high quality, continually improving compassionate care for patients, and also ensure that we are providing high quality continually improving and compassionate support for staff because those two things are intrinsically linked.

My work has been really powerfully shaped through the work I've done in health services because the encounter between academic knowledge and practical problems, I think, must lead to a kind of mutual shaping. For example, one of the things that we discovered was the key elements of cultures of organisations in healthcare that deliver high quality care: A clear vision, a commitment to a limited number of strategic goals, support and compassion, learning and innovation, and team and into team working. The challenge then is how do we achieve that in practice. So that really focused my work on how do we change culture. And that's particularly about leadership. Of course, every interaction by every one of us every day shapes the cultures of our teams and organisations, but the role of leaders is particularly powerful. And that led to really shaping our research and our interventions around developing leadership capabilities in health service organisations that would deliver those key cultural elements to ensure that we were meeting the needs of patients. In my work in health services, it's fundamental that I should ensure that the research I'm doing and the contributions I make are practical because the challenges that are faced in health services are enormous. The biggest challenge is workforce. Very high numbers of vacancies in most countries around the world in health service staff. High and increasing levels of staff stress. High levels of sickness absence, and people quitting their jobs, leaving early. So finding solutions to some of those problems requires real practicality, and I think this is true not only in relation to work in health services, but it's becoming more generally true for humanity.

The problems we face are enormous: climate change, loss of biodiversity, weapons of mass destruction, pandemics. I think it's vital that researchers ensure their work is practical. Of course, we need theoretical approaches and new theory, but I think to some extent the balance is sometimes too much in favour of the obsessions or the interests of researchers themselves rather than the real-world problems that humanity faces. Compassionate leadership, I think, is central to developing health and care services and enabling people to live their lives as healthily and as happily as they can. The future I think is applying that concept of compassionate leadership to the way that all of the agencies which affect people's health and wellbeing work together so that we work compassionately with people from social care, local authorities, voluntary sector, the community, families themselves in a collective mission to create the best conditions for people to live the happiest lives and the healthiest lives that they can. [Music]

The RECIRCULATE project finished last month, in March. It was funded by UK Research and Innovation, through The Global Challenges Research Fund, GCRF.

It was one of the projects funded under the call, which was centred around growing research capability in order to address some of the issues facing developing countries. And in alignment with this call, the RECIRCULATE project focused on addressing pressing water problems that face the African continent. And this relates to water use and safety, and over a number of years we've been involved with this. So, through this project, we've been able to create transformational impacts in African society.

So, with the recent project that I've just finished, the RECIRCULATE project, for example, this was included as a teaching case in one of my modules, the postgraduate module, which is a master's level module, on corporate entrepreneurial mindsets. And I used that as a teaching case to talk about sustainable entrepreneurship and sustainable innovation, something which students really enjoyed.

My work is important because I am addressing key issues that are of importance to organisations, as well as society. These are some of the issues that align with the current United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. For example, the RECIRCULATE project, which I completed last month, in March 2022, is addressed by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, which was around water problems.

So, we've worked with regulators here to respond to their kind of developing needs about what is good regulation, and is regulation working, but also how can they do regulation better? And that typically means more focus on automation.

So, we're focusing on the documents that firms produce for investors, normally quite long documents, maybe a couple of hundred pages. And traditionally, those documents were written to be read by individuals. Of course now you've got hundreds of thousands of these documents, so firms are looking for ways to automate the process of reading and understanding. So we work with computer scientists to find automated approaches where we can read thousands, or hundreds of thousands of documents.

Our research has impacted on regulation in a couple of ways. The first impact has been with assessing the sort of quality of regulation and whether it's working or not, and whether regulation needs to change or adapt. So, we've done work evaluating current regulations and the potential need for developments of those regulations, or changes to those regulations. And then we've also done work with regulators that has looked at the way they approach the problem of regulating financial markets when there's thousands of documents being produced, and they don't have the time to read everything. So, we've been looking at ways to automate the analysis and the screening of reports so that regulators can look at a wide variety of reports without having to have hundreds of thousands of people manually looking at them.

Why should researchers care about impact?

I mean, I think there's two reasons, really. One is at a personal level, that it's actually quite important and quite satisfying as an individual to be thinking that your work is being read and it's making a difference. I think the other reason why impact matters is from a career progression perspective.

I think now the focus is much more on different elements of research, showing how your research makes a difference, rather than the traditional approach which has just been publication. So, I think in order to make progress as an academic, we've got to be thinking of demonstrating the value we're bringing as researchers, rather than just focusing on publishing papers in academic journals.

One area of my research recently has been looking at the adoption of artificial intelligence technologies in law and accountancy firms. And there's been quite a lot of hype about professionals losing their jobs and becoming irrelevant because AI will take over their work. We were looking in our project at the challenge for mid-sized firms in adopting these technologies. The story is different to that hype, really.

It tells us that technology can be used to automate certain tasks within a law firm or accountancy firm, things like auditing, but it doesn’t replace people’s jobs. It, in fact, often augments what they can do. It enables them to do things better and do better things and provide a broader range of services for their clients, moving into more creative advisory services, rather than simply doing the necessary chores, if you like, of conducting an audit or due diligence on a merger.

That's not to say there aren't any challenges. We're dealing with professionals, and some people describe it as herding cats, getting professionals to do things that they may not want to do. They like to be independent. So, getting them to adopt new ways and new technologies involves quite a lot of persuasion and demonstrating that it will be good for them and enhance their professional position, and maybe also, crucially, offer better services to their clients, because often that's the first priority for them. We adopted throughout the project a so-called design thinking approach, so that was all about practical engagement in a workshop format with participants from the firms to develop new ideas about how they'd use AI and how they develop their business models.

And then, as a major output from the project, we produced a toolkit which enabled other firms who hadn't been involved directly in the project to be able to self-diagnose, think about their own businesses, think about how they might apply AI. So in a sense, it was, kind of, a resource left after the project for other firms to pick up and work with. And that, I think, has been an important part of the success of that project too, to leave a legacy and allow other firms to benefit from it who weren't necessarily involved in the project at the outset.