What does “positive influence” actually mean?

Host:

Hello and welcome to NousCast, the podcast of Nous Group.

In July, Nous released its reflections on 25 years of positive influence. The report took a deep dive into Nous' thinking and practice and considered what it means to be a purpose-driven firm. In the conversation you're about to hear, Nous Managing Principal and CEO, Tim Orton sits down with Nous', Minto Felix and Rosanna Hurst to discuss positive influence in even greater detail. They ask what positive influence actually means, how to measure it, the barriers to achieving it, and what it means to Tim himself. Here are Minto, Rosanna and Tim.

Minto Felix:

2024 marks Nous' 25th year anniversary. This means 25 years of positive influence. We thought we'd sit down with Nous CEO and managing principal Tim Orton to discuss positive influence and what this actually means.

Rosanna Hurst:

So Tim, thanks so much for joining us. I think we should start with what does positive influence mean to you?

Tim Orton:

Yeah, define the issue. I agree Rosanna. So positive influence. We're a consulting firm, so our positive influence will always be manifested with clients rather obviously. But the essence of positive influence is we want to work on things that at the end of the day, you'd be able to say, "People are living better lives, companies are delivering better products, better services, governments are achieving better outcomes." So it's really focused on the work we do delivers a better world, whether that's at the community level, whether it's a family level, whether it's at the business level, at the government level, at a national level or a global level. If you think about climate change, we are interested in doing work that makes a positive difference to the world. We use the word influence because we're a consulting firm. If you think about it a bit more deeply, what we've realized, and this really came out in the reflecting on 25 years, thinking about positive influence is first an action. It's something you do, but it's underpinned by a philosophy. I think the risk for all of us is we think of it as a philosophy, and then through our behavior it just gets lost. So we always say, "Action first, underpinned by a philosophy."

Rosanna Hurst:

And if you look across the consulting sector, a lot of firms are now making commitments to environmental, social, and other frameworks. So what sets Nous apart in that sense?

Tim Orton:

So firstly, I'm hugely supportive of those things the other consulting firms are doing, but in many respects, it's almost icing on the cake of their core business model. For us, positive influence is the cake. So we of course have commitments with respect to being net-zero. We have commitments with respect to social good. We have commitments with equity, diversity, inclusion as we should. They're essential to what it is to be a good organization today. But no, our essence is when we do our work, when we do our consulting work, we want it to be delivering positive outcomes, and we have a view that positive influence is a maximalist concept that is, it's not do no evil. That's a minimalist way of thinking about things. We've got to do much better. We want to work on things that really matter, which means that when we think about projects, we ask ourselves a question, is this project going to deliver good outcomes? Is it going to deliver positive influence to the world? If it is, we want to be in there. If it's not, we'll have real hesitations.

Minto Felix:

Thinking through the actions and practice of positive influence, what are the best ways you've seen this happen? What are the methods that have really supported positive influence?

Tim Orton:

So the first thing we realized is it's a critical issue of strategy. That our strategy has to be focused on sectors and clients where positive influence is more likely be had. So that's the first thing. If we don't tick that box, then we're in difficult position because it's hard to recover from that.

Then secondly, there are things about the way we run projects. So the consulting process matters. We need to have a clear sense of what the client's trying to achieve. We need to be technically expert, etc., etc. But there's a whole lot about the way we engage with clients, the nature of the partnership that we have, which achieves positive influence. It's possible to be frank, if you think about when's it doesn't happen, it doesn't happen when we do either poor work, not surprisingly, or we do work the client can't implement or chooses not to implement because we've not partnered with them effectively. So partnerships a critical part of positive influence.

Minto Felix:

So Tim, when you look back on the last 25 years then, what are the types of projects that have had that really positive influence that you've been inspired by and then what hasn't?

Tim Orton:

So I think I'd said joking to you Minto a couple of days ago. It's like asking about your favorite child. So there are lots of projects and lots of clients that I think back with some pride. Two that I would draw out. We've worked with a university for over 15 years where that university's has transformed itself over that period. Now it's taken 15 years to get there and rankings in universities aren't everything, but when they started, they were sort of in the high 100s. Now they're in the mid-fifties, and that just reflects the fact that the world sees that, that organization has transformed through that period. The fact that we partnered with them through all of that and still are and hope to for years to come, I think is a really good example of positive influence because universities run well, can make a big difference.

The second I drew on is we worked with the Royal Australian Navy for seven years. When we started, they were having trouble getting enough people, men and women to staff the Navy. They had lots of examples of atrocious behavior, bullying, sexual harassment. They couldn't get ships to sea, which is what navies exist to do to protect the countries. And so we worked with them over a seven-year through a program called New Generation Navy, which changed the Navy profoundly.

Projects that don't deliver influence, I don't think we're guilty of choosing to start projects that never had a chance of positive influence, or in fact were bad projects to do. But I think there are projects where the client has not chosen to act on the work and probably will never choose to act on the work. And those projects, you'd have to say, don't pass the test at all, because nothing happened. We worked hard, they worked hard, and then nothing happened. That's not positive influence.

Rosanna Hurst:

Over the last 25 years, I think we've done over 10,000 projects. So there must be different types of positive influence across different sorts of projects. Can you talk a little bit about what that's like and is it true that some projects are more important and there's more positive influence to be found in some areas than others?

Tim Orton:

I think there are some projects that are more obviously positive influence than others, and so there's sort of three tiers. The first tier is those projects that you're improving in the health of people. You're eliminating domestic family, sexual violence. You're addressing homelessness or housing problems. There are things that people would look at every day and say, "Yes, that's making the world a better place." Then there's work we're doing where we're improving the way the organization operates. So we're strengthening their leadership. We're helping them develop their culture to be a stronger execution culture. We're changing the structure of the organization. None of which you would say immediately delivers influence, but it'll mean the organization operates better and therefore it's influence, but it's sort of less obvious building each other.

And then the third tier are those things that are less obvious. So we work in financial services. People would say, "What's that have to do with positive influence?" We work in defense safety and security. Now in defense, yes, they're protecting the nation. Is that positive influence? You sort of got to stop and think, well actually a nation being able to defend itself against attack, think about Ukraine and Russia. Yes, that is. So the tier three, you get into these complexities. It's funny, when we actively measure positive influence, we've got a metric. We realized that it was not obvious which sectors had more positive influence, although it was clear, which had more obvious influence. We have realized that there's sort of two things. The first is how profoundly does it affect people's life? It doesn't touch their life very much. Then not much influence. It touches it profoundly, more influence.

Secondly, is how many people is it touch? So we like to work on projects that touch lots of people, whereas a project that touches 10 people and doesn't have much effect on them, that's not much influence. So there is a simple metric in our mind about how profound is the project and what volume of people that touching. That's the second point I want to pick up.

We sort of tried to systemically put into our organizational processes things that keep us on track. But the most important thing to be frank, is if you keep worrying about it, you might have a chance of achieving it. As soon as you stop worrying about it, I think there's a real risk you'll slide off it. And that's why we keep asking ourselves a question. Are we really delivering something of value or have we just become another consulting firm?

Rosanna Hurst:

On that point, Tim, can I just ask, how do you balance the drive and motivation for positive influence within Nous with the need to be a commercially viable, successful organization? Do you see that as a tension or do they work together?

Tim Orton:

Both. He says unhelpfully. What I mean by that is most of the times they work together because there's enough good things that need to be done in the world that people say, "We need advice, we need support, we need external input on this that we need to pay for." That they come together. But Rosanna, I'd be dishonest if I didn't say there have been periods in Nous' history where the work has dried up and we've been saying, "Well, we probably won't get the quality of influence project we want through this next little while because we're going to do some work that's not negative influence. We'd never go there. But it's pretty neutral. But it's good work for us at the moment because it's helping everyone be engaged. It's helping earn the revenue so we can pay people's salary." So yeah, in that sense, there is a trade-off. We've got sort of five reasons for being in positive influence is the first and revenue profits the fifth. Often they reinforce, sometimes they can be at odds with each other.

Rosanna Hurst:

Thank you.

Minto Felix:

Okay. To mark Nous' 25th years, we produced a report on positive influence. It's a behind the scenes sneak peek into our thinking, our work and our business practices. Tim, what was the impetus in writing this report?

Tim Orton:

25 years sneak up on you, which might be an odd thing to say. And in fact, we wrote the report almost after the 25 years had gone because we said, "Oh gee, we better get into this." So it was really a point which we said, "We've been at this for some time. We've learned a fair bit about it. We're probably now mature enough that we could have some interesting things to say." But that was actually the first test. We said, "Let's sketch out what might be in this report. Is it interesting? If it is, let's write it down. If it's not interesting, let's move on and forget about 25 years." As it turned out, we think it is interesting. We think there are importance insights in it. There were certainly things that came out for us we thought we should reinforce that for ourselves. It would be of value. And to be honest, I think a lot of people who might think about joining Nous would read this with interest. Some of our clients, I hope would read it with interest. Other clients would say, "That's great for Nous. We have other things that create meaning for our organization." And we'd be entirely respectful of that.

Minto Felix:

We've spoken about a lot of topics today, but to you, Tim, why is positive influence so important?

Tim Orton:

So this really, it takes me back to probably when I was your age actually, but I went to university first in engineering. I was, to be frank, a terrible engineer. Worked for two years as an engineer and could see that this wasn't something... I was not good at it, but also it didn't inspire me. I was really fortunate to win a scholarship to go to Oxford University. And funnily enough, rather than doing engineering, I did philosophy, politics, and economics. I wasn't terribly good at that either, but it really made me stop and think, what's a good life? The sort of things that undergraduates should always think about. What's a good life? What would you like to do at the end of your life? And then I went and worked with McKinsey, which was a tremendous experience working with very smart people, working very hard on big issues.

But I did think to myself, "Okay, so part of who I am is I'm going to be working a lot in my life. That's an important part of my, so I like work, I like working with people, etc., etc. What do I want at the end of my time or even what do I want to achieve every five years?" And I didn't think just enabling deals, transactions, improvements was enough. I wanted to be able to look back on my body of work and say, "Actually, I've really enjoyed those 10 years, because I achieved this, that and the other. I really enjoyed that work". And so I can look back at the universities I've worked with. I can look back at the banks that we've changed. I can look back at the Royal Australian Navy and say, "That body of work that I did with clients, that was worth doing."

And so you sort of got to be enjoying it every day. And then when you look back, you got to say, "That was the work I wanted to do." I was spending 50 or 60 hours a week working. Geez, I hope I enjoyed it. That's the essence of it. It's let's do something that's worth doing rather than just, it's not a job. It's not just a job. It's about how do we make the world a better place? We, you guys have the capability. I have the capability. Probably people listening have the capability. We can change the world positively. The organization's designed to change the world positively. Well, let's make that happen rather than otherwise. So that's why I care about it.

Minto Felix:

Thank you.

Rosanna Hurst:

Thank you so much, Tim, for joining us today and talking through what positive influence means to you. It was really interesting to hear about positive influence at Nous over the last 25 years. Minto, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and if anybody listening or watching this has been inspired to get involved with our next 25 years of positive influence, please head over to our website and see how you can get involved.

Matthew Clayfield:

That was Nous Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton with Nous' Minto Felix and Rosanna Hurst. You can read more about our thinking on positive influence, including our reflections on 25 years of positive influence at www.nousgroup.com. You can also reach out to us on our social channels. That's all for today. Thanks for listening.