69. Curiosity, Connection and Creativity in the NHS: An Intentional Coffee with Dr Ben Allen

🎙️ Wild Card – Whose Shoes? with Gill Phillips
Episode: An #IntentionalCoffee with Dr Ben Allen

In this episode, Gill Phillips speaks for the very first time with Dr Ben Allen - transformative GP, former ICB leader, and curious explorer of how the NHS can work better for staff, patients, and communities.

Ben and Gill have connected through LinkedIn where Ben describes himself as: "GP, NHS leader, convener and innovator. Releasing potential, creating joyful and effective teams. Supporting large scale improvement."

On the podcast, Ben shares his bold decision to step away from a formal leadership role to pursue a two-year “personal learning experiment” - visiting teams, shadowing people across the NHS and beyond, and testing new ways of connecting, leading, and learning.

✨ Ben and Gill dive into:

• Building trust and psychological safety in teams.
• Why creativity (perhaps a RAP or a ball of wool!) can shift culture.
• The power of connections and ripples in complex systems.
• How social media can be more than noise - a space for learning, challenge, and collaboration.
• The hope found in unlocking the untapped potential of human beings.

It’s a rich, hopeful, and energising conversation about leadership, curiosity, and finding new ways to make change happen.

🍋💡🍋 Lemon lightbulbs

🍋 “Make everything work harder” – capture, share, and amplify learning so others can benefit.

🍋 Psychological safety is built when we stretch people’s vulnerability just enough – trust grows through human connection.

🍋 Creativity in healthcare (a poem, a musical, a ball of wool!) can feel radical because our systems are so rigid – yet these moments are what people remember.

🍋 Impact in complex systems is messy and hard to measure – but ripples matter.

🍋 Relationships are as vital as evidence; systems are only as strong as their connections.

🍋 Social media isn’t just a hobby – it’s an underused engine for ideas, learning, and collaboration.

🍋 Hope comes from recognising untapped potential in people and organisations – not just from more money or resources.

🍋 Stepping out of your comfort zone to explore and learn can bring rich rewards.

Useful links

Find out more about #CYPWhoseShoes:
'Whose News?' Edition 14 

BRAND NEW - The #CYPWhoseShoes story so far, told with a ball of string! 

Ben's Youtube channel

#MatExp the Musical

Listen to the episodes around #UniversalHealthcare (Episodes 56-62) - explore further some of the issues and people mentioned in this conversation:

56. Becky Malby – Universal Healthcare
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1838805/15239449 

57. Tom Holliday - Children get less
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1838805/15363315

 58. George Winder – Don’t medicalise poverty
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1838805/15461390

We LOVE it when you leave a review!
If you enjoy my podcast and find these conversations useful
please share your thoughts by leaving a review (Spotify or Apple are easiest to leave a review - navigate via 3 dots) and comment on your favourite episodes.

I tweet as @WhoseShoes and @WildCardWS and am on Instagram as @WildCardWS.

Please recommend 'Wild Card - Whose Shoes' to others who enjoy hearing passionate people talk about their experiences of improving health care.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome & Introductions Gill sets the scene, introduces Whose Shoes? and her guest Dr Ben Allen.
• 2:40 Ben’s Journey: From GP to System Explorer Ben shares his background, home life, and why he stepped away from an ICB leadership role
• 7:25 Making Everything Work Harder How capturing and sharing learning creates ripples of impact.
• 10:47 Creativity and Discipline in Change From GP crisis RAPS to liberating structures – why creativity matters in the NHS
• 14:07 Storytelling, Evidence & Celebration Gill describes Whose Shoes? work in Staffordshire and the challenge of capturing impact
• 15:39 Outrageous Creativity in a Serious System Ben on poetry, playfulness, and why NHS culture finds creativity “radical.”
• 19:35 MatExp the Musical Gill recalls a bold, unforgettable (and slightly naughty!) NHS Expo performance
• 22:55 Psychological Safety in Practice Ben’s risky but powerful facilitation exercise – making people feel what’s at stake.
• 28:32 The Power of Connections Networks, liberating structures, and unplanned collaborations that change systems
• 32:57 Social Media as a Learning Engine How Twitter and LinkedIn fuel ideas, challenges, and collaboration
• 36:51 Teams, Trust and Culture Exploring how individuals can influence and shift team culture
• 40:18 Human Connections at Work Stories of small changes (like staff rooms or train journeys) that build stronger teams
• 45:55 Two Years of Exploration Ben’s “learning experiment” – shadowing, visiting, and feeding insights back into NHS design
• 50:04 Bridging Roles & Next Steps Ben’s new role as Medical Director and why he wants to be a “bridge” across systems
• 55:57 Closing Reflections Ben leaves a message of hope; Gill wraps up with thanks and next steps

Transcript

Gill Phillips  0:00  

Gill. My name is Gill Phillips, and I'm the creator of whose shoes, a popular approach to coproduction. I was named as an HSJ 100 wild card, and want to help give a voice to others talking about their experiences and ideas. I love chatting with people from all sorts of different perspectives, walking in their shoes. If you are interested in the future of healthcare, and like to hear what other people think, or perhaps even contribute at some point, wild card, whose shoes is for you.

 So my podcast guest today is Dr Ben Allen. I've never spoken to him before today, as in not one word ever, but we've been connected on social media for a while, and I think have been a bit intrigued by each other's work and with a lot of shared interests, but then Ben put a post on LinkedIn in August that really resonated with me and fascinated me and I wanted to know more. Ben spoke about how he stepped away from his ICB leadership role two years ago to contribute to the NHS in a different way, supporting the people who design the systems, connecting with frontline staff, and exploring best practice. He talked about the different ways he has got involved and what he has learned along the way. He did this in his own time as a personal learning experiment. I was interested in what Ben has to say about some of the key themes of this podcast, including building positive relationships across systems and seeing diverse perspectives, especially from outside the NHS and the impact of what seemed to be lots of things, starting with coproduction, contributing in a different way, creativity, curiosity, connections and community, I picked up a fundamental belief, which I very much share in the untapped potential of human beings. So on the day of Ben's post on LinkedIn, I rather outrageously invited him to be a podcast guest, and he kindly agreed what I would call an intentional coffee. So here we are, welcome. Ben, I'm really excited to talk to you today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what you've been up to over the last two years?

Ben Allen  2:40  

Sure. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for having me on. It's lovely to be here and lovely to meet you. Yeah, so that's a big question. So, I mean a bit about myself broadly. I don't really share this so much. I'm got a lovely wife called Joy. We've been we've been married for 14 years now, and and a couple of kids who we home-school and we foster babies, which is more that's my wife's kind of the lion's share of that, but we've often got a baby, often for kind of six to nine months, something like that. That's my home life and then work life. So I've been a GP partner for seven years at Burley Health Centre in Sheffield and that's where I really discovered my kind of passion for leadership and improvement just by seeing the unreleased potential in the organisation and not knowing how to release it, getting really curious, reading books that were often around, kind of organisational psychology, organisational development, and seeing how if we can kind of create the context for great work to happen, and Then Then great work unfolds. So, it's, how do you what are the principles? What are the things you need to change within an organisation, so that great care becomes a networking of that? And so I learned about that, and I spent the last five or six years putting those principles into play, and we've seen lots of improvement there, and that's been building high performing teams, is probably one of the things that I've built the most interest in and then I had some time as a clinical director for primary care at the CCG and at the ICB. And during that time, I found that I just it was very still quite hard for me to put into ESRI, but I didn't really feel like I was able to make the difference I wanted to within that context. It probably took me a little while to kind of work out more work out why that was. I certainly wasn't leading a team, and I think that's something that I particularly enjoy. And there was a point where I just thought a lot of the things that I really enjoy doing, I'm really gifted at that. I think I'm best placed to do. I didn't really know if there was some kind of job or role where I could do that, and so I thought, I think that I'd been constrained by what can I be paid to do, and I would do quite a lot of bits of work that I wasn't being paid to do, but just because it seemed like the right thing to do, or I was enjoying it, but I kind of, there's a baby that kind of resented it, because I'm like, I'm giving of myself. I'm giving value that I've got. I. It to helping this organisation or this person to grow or be better, and I can see that it's valuable and it's worth something, but this is just not being paid and so and I realized that was actually a bit of a barrier to me just doing what I loved. And so, I decided that I had to step down from my ICB role and just spend time just going where my interests lay, where my strengths lay, and just did a lot of exploring. And that was kind of really liberating. And I was able to stay on as a GP partner for half the week. And that just meant that I was able to get into lots of interesting spaces. And my my goal then, and it still is now, is how, how do we make the NHS the best it can be? And the two areas I was thinking of around that was, how do we help people designing the NHS, designing the work, to design it better and more thoughtfully, and how do we help people who are doing the work to do it even better? And that's to do with, how do we help people to connect, to share ideas, to learn from each other, to challenge each other, to provoke each other, to think differently, to work differently. And that's often and this is the kind of thing I kind of touched on on that post, was it's a lot to do with in a complex system, it's so important the relationships between organisations. We've often got highly performing organisations with very poorly functioning connections, and the system itself just becomes, I know about as good as the connections are. And so I was then like trying to explore, how do we, how do we help those connections to grow and grow in trust and grow in richness and grow in understanding? And that led me to visit lots of people, and yes, yeah, I had this principle of really wanting to make everything I do work a bit harder. See if I go and visit somewhere I learn, but I'm like, Well, if I can share that, then other people can learn, and if I can share that on a few different platforms, then even more people can learn. So, I was trying to get a discussion around it, so I would visit places, and I would also invite people back to my surgery. So, I've had dozens of people come and shadow me, yes, from all different not just NHS, outside the NHS, even politicians and things just to kind of really blur the boundaries, build relationships, and try and help people to see the system and dream. How do we do this better? So that's been my kind of couple of years, which is coming today, because I'm I am now getting a more formal role, but brilliant. That's been the kind of a bit of a bit of the story of the last couple of

Gill Phillips  7:25  

years. I think that's so interesting and so much it resonates with me, and things to learn from as well. I think you'd actually put in that post make everything work harder. I think is something I'm really rubbish at, because, you know, for example, I've got over, I think two, two and a half 1000 whose shoes scenarios on our database, and I've developed those, I mean, like you Sam, sort of picking up on people I love working with, and I've done little pockets of work, and sometimes it's been unpaid, and all of those things. But because it's so sort of heart led, and then people know whose shoes, perhaps because of the work we've done around dementia care or around maternity care, is the big one. So that's the one. It's bit like looking at the beach ball from different sides. And this is an analogy I've got with Lyse Edwards, who I'm sure we'll come and talk about Lyse a bit later, because she's very much a shared connection. But people think whose shoes is about one aspect, and actually we've got all this sort of richer material behind the scenes. And similarly, you know, you put a lot of effort into a post or sharing something, but some people are very good at milking every bit of learning and putting it out in different contexts. And basically you've, you've done the hard work. And I'm one that sort of tends to go on and do the next bit of hard work, rather than necessarily making the most of what we've done, you know? So it's interesting to learn from other people and hear little phrases like

Ben Allen  8:57  

that, yeah? And it requires a lot of discipline. And so one of the ones that's quite frequent is when I when I run a meeting at work, I'm quite interested in meetings. I'm interested in facilitation, because I think that's where a lot of really great stuff in organisations can happen, is through the engagement processes. But I find it quite hard to to learn and pick up new ones. And so when I've led, I kind of do different things all the time, so I'm always trying to think of, how can we do things differently? And I will take photos of the boards that I've used, the questions I've used, and then I will try and kind of share that on social media where I say, like, this is a in general practice. You've only ever got 30 minutes to meet with people, so you've got a lot to do in the in those 30 minutes. So, I will after the meeting, and I'm already tired from cramming in a meeting into my day, but I'm like, I want to make sure this is captured and shared, so that there may be someone somewhere who gets to benefit from it. And another version has been so. Even kind of done some stuff on YouTube to help patients to understand changes in general practice, and that kind of thing I've done, but I've even kind of spilled into poetry, because I realized that I did this really careful, kind of four minute description about the changes in general practice, and it had some engagement, but I thought, I wonder if I make this into a kind of a poem rap called the GP crisis rhyme, and it had like, four or five times more views, because it's entertaining. So it's a case of like, you've got your content, but how do we, if we wanting to, you know, help change happen. What are the platforms? But also, what are are the ways that we can make something memorable or gripping or interesting, because different people engage in different ways, don't

Gill Phillips  10:47  

they? Yeah, they really do. And one thing that jumped out from what you said then Ben was and I thought, No, this is not me. It's never going to happen. It requires a lot of discipline. And I think I end up jumping from one thing to the next, and because I'm interested, you know, as I can tell you, are in so many different things. You can sort of go down rabbit holes and so on. But I think what you're saying of making the most of what you're doing. So, I said we'd mentioned Lyse Edwards, and she's naturally come back into the conversation. We've been doing an in depth whose shoes project over the last three or four years in Staffordshire, around children and families joining things up for Children and Families, mental health care experienced children and I loved what you said about how you and your wife foster babies. This is such a brilliant role, and now, most recently, around special educational needs, disability, neurodiversity, it's been huge, and it was just the most amazing day on the first of July, we had a celebration event. And you know, for the NHS to call it a celebration event in this sort of climate at the moment, and we brought together people who've been part of the story, and Lyse, I think you may have met her through liberating structures. I met Lise through liberating structures. She lives and breathes liberating structures. And we did some fairly outrageous things. So we had a ball of wool and told the story over the last four years, linking up the people around the room, they could choose when they came on board, and tell their little part of the story. And we did it all live. And so Colin, my husband, the technical director who you met briefly at the beginning, was there, and I said, You are not to go wandering in the grounds. You've got to film this. You've got to capture the evidence in every way we can. So we're now making some I've got a YouTube channel, but to make a sort of really good film, to actually try and really tell a story, takes a lot of time, and I'm lucky because Colin's skills are there, and I enjoy doing I like doing the storyboarding and the creativity side and telling the story. But it is, it's been a lesson. Really, could people say, with whose shoes, what's the evidence? You know, what impact has it made? And I mean, obviously there are different ways of expressing that, but just to have those live people popping up with energy and enthusiasm and showing how we've connected across Staffordshire, the parents groups, the children and young people themselves, the educationalists, the director of children's services, were, you know, all there in the room telling their part of the story, and to bring that alive with a video or something like that, to get that opportunity was very, very rich, really. But it's the time to follow up, isn't it? And sometimes, I mean, what I've found over like, I've been my whose shoes journey, if you like, has been the last 17 years. And sometimes the biggest things, the best things, I've got no evidence of, because I was so busy at the time, you sort of jump onto the next thing, and you haven't got time to actually invest in, in sharing the information and putting something together. That's a legacy, really, in a way.

Ben Allen  14:07  

Yeah. I mean, that impact question is really tough, isn't it? Again, in a complex system, the cause and effect are not really kind of obvious. So much so, yeah, so a lot of the time we have to be working with what we intuitively feel like is, is going to be the thing that's going to make transformational shifts in people's minds or in the system, but also, we don't want to be wasting our time and energy. So that is a really, really tricky one. One thing I want to the the celebration event you mentioned, which sounds brilliant, and your description of the kind of like the outrageous approach to what was done on that day. I'm often quite aware of how even as small amounts of creativity in our NHS world can seem outrageous and creative, but I think it's more an expression of how boring the NHS culture. Often is and business culture, because we've got our kind of management scientific world, but like, there's the art spaces all around us, and I do something like a poem at a conference, and it becomes like this really radical poetry isn't radical poetry is everywhere. There's way more radical things than poetry. I think it just seems radical because we're so used to doing the same thing that we have the same format all the time. You know, it takes a bit of bravery, but the creativity is there. Need to be inviting people in. You've got some other, other kind of approaches,

Gill Phillips  15:39  

and it's true, and people remember it they you know, I've got a bit of a challenge. People have gone to various events and conferences inevitably over the years. What do you really remember? And it might even have been a powerful presentation at the time, but it will be something like the GP crisis rap, that's what they'll remember. Ben, yeah, so I wish we'd come together earlier. Really, I wish you have been at, perhaps you were, I don't know, NHS Expo on the main stage in 2017 we did Matt exp, the musical. Oh, my God, right. So MatExp is our big maternity experience campaign. It's been very, very inclusive. And we ended up with, I think, 35 people who were all in there that they were themselves. There was a GP, obstetrician, mother, midwife, bereaved parents. It was, it was very real and very moving. We had Jackie Dunkley bent, who was the chief midwife for England, and led brilliantly and our creativity enabled by the fantastic Sarah J Marsh, who somehow had steered this path whereby she put together a proposal for what we were going to do about maternity. And it ended up in this my vision really? I think I'm crazy. Sometimes. I think I had a vision of like, a West End musical, but it wasn't far off. We crowd sourced a piano. We weren't going to pay for anything we got Forsyth music shop in 150 year-old music shop in Manchester, gave us a better model because it would have their logo bigger on the piano. You know, there's always reciprocity, isn't there? Yeah, and we brought together. We told the story through poems, through whose shoes, poems and scenarios. We had people popping up around the audience, so it gave a logistical nightmare in terms of miking people up. And then at the end, we went to the front and we were told, No way could we go on the stage. We could go along the front of the stage, but not on the stage. But the people at either end of the group were a bit forgetful, or perhaps they hadn't, you know, sometimes not everybody in the group gets that message. So up they went on the stage, and right across the stage, we've got all these people singing about better births for everyone. And honestly, it was, it was disappointing because it was the penultimate session of NHS Expo. So it was a really big deal. We had, I think we were before the health minister. And so a lot of people had come along not to see our session, but to get good seats for the session afterwards, and some people were there on their laptops in the audience, and we were trying to get them engaged. And we think that maternity is important for everyone. Did they agree? Stand up? And people were still sitting down, and we said, Well, we really think that maternity is relevant to everybody. Stand up if you've ever been born. And these people were trying to put their laptops to one side too, because it became uncomfortable then not to be standing up, you know. So it's a little bit naughty. And it was all filmed, and I never got the footage, never got the footage. And and I could see that it was risky that, you know, really, really serious subject, and to tell the story through music and poems and bit of a laugh and we had such good feedback, including from some fantastic people who are leaders in, you know, who've experienced baby loss and really sad experiences. Thought it was so authentic, but that didn't give the confidence somehow to, you know, tell the story loud and proud. And I thought that was really sad, but the people who were there experienced it. We've got some bits of footage in there, you know, they've been shared a lot,

Ben Allen  19:35  

yeah, and there's something, I mean, the process of exploring is, what, what do people want out of a conference, and therefore, what would be the mechanism to help people to get that and be a bit surprised if we arrived at the one that we've got? Yeah, I've been quite inspired by them. If you come across Nick Shackleton Jones, he's written a book called how people learn, and that's, oh, I'll check that out. Really brilliant. So, one of the concepts is around push and pull learning. Yeah. How, when we're interested, we pull learning in. So, we get podcasts, we get YouTube, read books. We're interested, we push learning. Is the difficult one where someone's already not interested. And so one way is, you know, testing somebody. That that's one crude way of making someone interested for the sake of a test. But it's like, what are the other ways that we can make people interested? And that's often through an experience. So, an example of this that I did was, again, it was risky. With that, I was doing a talk on on principles of how to build high performing teams, and one of them was about psychological safety and facilitation. And I was talking to some quite senior doctors. And so, I thought I could, I could tell them that this matters, and I could tell them that, you know, when you're back in your surgeries, do people really feel able to speak up? Because if you're missing their voices, that's going to really matter. And I thought, well, they might just think they may grasp the point. But instead, I said, Oh, by the way, um, I've been asked by the ICB to just double check with you, because they want to do some teaching sessions. And I want to just check, what are the areas of medicine that you're feeling like you have not got a very good grasp of at the moment. Are there things that you where you feel about your depth, where you don't really where the medicine is you're not really clear to you? Or that if there's a weak area in your practice, basically, because, if we can find I just want to drop them down so that they can put on a learning session. Do you mind popping your hands up and just letting me know which areas and so, of course, there's like 100 of them in front of all their peers who's going to put their hand up and say, so there was one or two brave people who stuck their hands up. I wrote that down to great, so I'll let them know that these, the areas that you want to grow and learn on. Is that okay with you? And then I moved on to my talk, and then a minute or two later, I kind of came back and said, like, what was that experience like? Did you feel able to say what the areas that you wanted to learn are? Could have all got areas. Want to learn them. But did you feel comfortable putting your hand up? How did you feel when I said, Okay, this is what you've said. You know, you've had an opportunity to contribute, and I've got your ideas, and that's now set in stone. How did you feel about that? So I was trying to create. Yeah, rather than make the point, I made them feel uncomfortable unrepresented and psychologically unsafe to be able to contribute. And so I was then I was able to make the point about both, how do we develop psychological safety so you can speak up in awkward scenarios, and how do we make those awkward scenarios much less awkward through facilitation? Yeah, so I got that from Nick Shackleton Jones, that was a but very, felt very risky doing an exercise like that. I thought any, any massive reaction I got from them, if some of them felt really like that, was that I shouldn't be doing it in that way. It would, if they got a bit annoyed, it would almost make the point better.

Gill Phillips  22:55  

Yes, yeah. And it's only by trying something else, isn't it, that you find out, you know, you get an idea like that. I mean, I've found through my work that it's confidence sometimes, and just you kind of push the boundaries a little bit more, and you can see people's eyes light up. I think that it's quite interesting that with a live audience, you do something and you get a reaction. Don't you good or bad or neutral or whatever it is. But, you know, if you get good, I suppose, at sort of scanning the audience, and, you know, I try and pick out when you see people's eyes light up, and you kind of know that you're taking it in a good way, in terms of actually opening some real conversations, rather than just, you know, another training session or whatever it is, that's exciting. Yeah, that's that's interesting one. Ben, you know, deliberately, you know how far you go in terms of you basically made it experiential. And I think experiential is always, that's what people remember,

Ben Allen:  23:57  

yeah. And it does make me wonder how much further we could go with our communication skills in front of the crowd. I mean, people who made leaders aren't necessarily people who've got training in communication, and I don't know if without particularly that good about giving people asking for feedback and giving it so we can improve. You know, this is something I've kind of picked up from reading books from the corporate sector where you where you hear about some interactions, about how people have given feedback after a presentation that wasn't that good, so they could improve. And it's really uncomfortable when you read it, but you think like, you know, we're not doing that. And so yes, I've been along. I haven't probably signed up to it yet, but I've been along to toastmasters a few times, which is, it's a group of people who are training each other to do public speaking. Oh, really. And, yeah, they're everywhere, and they're pretty good value. And you you join for a month, and there's about 20 people will speak every evening, so you're just getting loads of practice, loads of feedback. But then you then start to really notice just how so many of the teaching sessions we have, or the other session. That have their, you know, conference and things, but people just haven't been trained in in speaking or to be getting huge amount of feedback, and it feels like a real loss, because the amount of effort it requires for everyone to get together, and I'm speaking as someone who has not done that journey either. I'm just aware of communication is so important, isn't it? Exactly, I think we owe it to the people who have made the effort to come to to be doing it, not just based on our own kind of instincts. How do I think I can do a good talk and then just doing it? I think we need to get better at that.

Gill Phillips  25:36  

Yes, and the standout talks, they really stick with you. I think, I mean, I don't want to pick out sort of a favorite from my podcast series, but one that I absolutely loved recording and has really, really stuck with me. I did a podcast with a guy called Steven Russell, who grew up in care, and for me just, just sitting talking to him, it felt like an hour of Goosebumps. He was telling his story. He was telling it from the heart. I hardly had any editing to do. He He grew up through the education system as an outsider, you know, didn't get qualifications, but he's now able to use his experience to help other young people in the same sort of circumstances. So he's inspirational to young people who are in care, perhaps being told they're a bit rubbish at school. They're not achieving, they're not conventional. And my next podcast is actually going to be with a young woman called Aurora Thompson, who Steven Russell had a book launch. So he's written his book about overcoming adversity, and he had a book launch conference, which was the opposite of the conferences that we've been talking about that nobody remembers, because everybody would remember this. And I think he had six young people as speakers, and the first one was Aurora Thompson talking about her childhood, and it just blew people away. And it was the first time, apparently, she'd ever done a talk. So, I got talking to Aurora, and she agreed kindly to be on the podcast, and hopefully it's an opportunity for her, helping her build her profile and so on, but more importantly, sharing her story and people will be listening. So Steven Russell, Steven had spent this time with me, telling his story, and it was so special, but I realized he hadn't, you know, we got towards the end of what needed to be the end of the podcast, and he hadn't really talked about what he's doing now to help young people. So I'm really hoping he comes back for a part two, because that was not something to be kind of like rushed in three minutes at the end. It's a whole story in itself. But I met Steven through Lyse Edwards, and that's where these fantastic connections come, isn't it? Yeah, sounds great. So connections. Ben, let's talk a bit more about connections and how these for me, informal networks, things that you can't plan. I think for me, I kind of throw seeds out. You know, I met Lyse at a one to one session in a breakout room in liberating structures, and it led to this extraordinary project across Staffordshire. I can't plan for that, but I think by kind of putting yourself out there, then these opportunities come along.

Ben Allen:  28:32  

I remember growing up hearing the term networking and hearing about people doing it, and I never really got it, really. I wasn't. I'm not a natural networker, and I'm more of a natural problem solver. I think so. When I you know, when there were struggles in my practice, the thing I did with the problem solving, I did was, was to learn from textbooks and make that happen in my practice. But then when I started to get more interested in large scale change the problem solving led me to networking it, but it's not a natural thing for me to do, but it's I'm not even completely clear where it came from, but it felt like the thing to do to make change happen for me as an individual, to make connections, but even to support the web of connections, but the cause and effect doesn't feel very clear to me. And going back to the kind of impact and evidence, thing that you were talking about earlier, it feels hard to prove, but it feels like the context that enables anything that even does have evidence to actually be able to play out or to be shared or to work. You know, it's a little bit like relationships and trust, like you can have evidence based medicine, but unless you've got a context that is functional with a degree of trust, you've got nowhere to put the evidence based intervention anyway. And it feels a little bit like that. It feels a little bit like the richness of the connections. This is what enables ideas and challenge to flow. And I think social media is an incredible place for that. I again, I stumbled across social media. Twitter, as it was, I tend to use more LinkedIn. Now, there's something about the way that people can tag other people in you can find people are like minded. You can find out new ideas. It's a great way to find out news and information. I find it, but it's also a great place to share what you're doing, but it's also a really good place to question and challenge people a bit. And it's something that happened more on Twitter than it does on LinkedIn. I try and make it happen. I try and make it happen on LinkedIn still, but it's that kind of like asking people questions, you know? And I went to an interview recently, and they were saying, what would you do if you were faced with this problem? And that's like, well, if I'm honest, I'd probably ask chat GPT, and I'd probably go on LinkedIn and see see who else has solved the problem. And, you know, you'd find out someone who's solved the problem, like, a few months ago, and you might be able to then connect with them and get it emailed. So yeah,

Gill Phillips  31:06  

and you find it instantly. That's what I found. I mean, certainly, when Twitter was at its best, I've pretty much built what I do through Twitter and a problem you've got, or, you know, an example you're looking for, it was, like, within a couple of minutes on Twitter that somebody would come back, and you've got a decent network, and you help other people, and they look to help you. Yeah, I think so many people didn't really get Twitter in that it seems like a just frivolous platform, and the idea of actually being able to get a link to a research project or an idea of what someone's done so so quickly, and then somebody else builds the conversation, and suddenly you've got a great thread. And I mean, for me, with sourcing whose shoes scenarios, whose shoes scenarios are sort of very brief statements from one person's point of view that you may or may not agree with. Well, of course, Twitter, that's what it was. So you'd hear someone you know from the heart saying something really vibrant and perhaps provocative. That's what whose shoes is really so I'm very, very grateful to Twitter.

Ben Allen:  32:13  

Yeah, I don't, I don't think we've really fully got our heads around the world with with social media and what it can offer. I think that we really well understand the importance of scientific knowledge and qualifications, because that was the thing that got stuff done historically, was scientific discovery and evidence based medicine. But as the world becomes more complex, it's often the connections between ideas and people that are the thing that's going to help get things done even more so, and that's often what social media enables. Yet I don't think that. I think it's, it's just sits there as a hobby for some people, yes, whereas actually, I think it's going to be increasingly integral to how we get things done. And certainly that seems to be how we're both using it.

Gill Phillips  32:57  

I think I've been lucky in that I naturally enjoy it. I love connecting with people, and I love connecting people to each other. So, you know, it can be quite a pain sometimes, you know, I've got two people, I think they need to talk to each other. Okay, they're both busy. They need to talk to each other. And I think that makes it that I would naturally want to share something on social media, as I can feel that you do, whereas, when you get kind of guidance that you should post three times a week, or you should do this stuff, I don't agree with any of that, because unless you've got something to say, Don't post. And when you have posts from the heart and make it count, hopefully, you know, and comment on other people's things, not because you want to improve your stats, or whatever it is, but because you've actually got something to say and you care about the conversation. So I think there's some pretty dodgy advice, really, about social media. And I don't go along with that, but I love the way I mean coming back to what you were saying, Ben about connections and how hard it is to measure, but how you can feel that things are changing. I mean, I think you've used one or two watery images, you know, to go with the flow and so on. I think ripples and ripples are impossible to measure, but every person you talk to, I mean, hopefully people listening to this podcast, we won't know what little perhaps snippet resonated with somebody or someone running off as I'm now going to to read Nick Shackleton Joan's book, because that's one that I've sort of noted from our conversation. So you don't know what ripples you're enabling, but I think something that by doing my whose shoes work, as I say, for 17 years now, we have a pretty set format for our workshops, whereby, in the afternoon, we've sown seeds all day for people to feel that they individually can actually do something, whether it's something really small or something big. And we invite them to make a pledge if they want to. And then I do a session, sort of live in the room, where I ask people. Or who's passionate enough that they want to actually share what they want to do with the whole room. So it's risky, because, you know, like you're saying, with that group of 100 people, and this would typically be 50 people, for someone to think my idea is big enough that I'm going to go first. And very often, the people with the best ideas aren't the ones that are putting themselves forward to go first. But I think what I wanted to say in terms of kind of added value and connections is that I can pretty much feel now that if someone makes a pledge and something that they want to do, that I could link them with somebody else who's already doing it, who's struggling with it, you know, a mate to work with on it because of my connections and social media. So people tend to think, I think, quite insularly, you know, you're working with one team or one trust, but actually link up with somebody else, you know, and it just makes, I think, it makes the whole thing more fun, more doable, it makes people less lonely. It makes them a bit bolder to try something and to put themselves out there a bit more, but it's not the traditional way of doing things, and I think that's what you've picked up on so strongly.

Ben Allen:  36:12  

Yeah, no, I love your ripples analogy. Yeah, yeah. We see cultures within organisations by I even think of social media is having its own culture. And you know, you can see how some cultures can change over time. But I, I think we've all got a role in in helping spaces to be more how we want them to be. And, you know, being curious and and and kind, and you know, when you get annoyed to to take a step back before you start replying. I think we've all got a way of being able to make it a more hopeful, productive space.

Gill Phillips  36:51  

And team was, I mean, you must have some fantastic examples around teams. I know something that fascinates me is if someone says, Oh, my team's got this terrible culture. And you think, how many people seeing that and wanting to change that, and how much confidence does it take? Because you're part of that team, aren't you? You know, you might have just joined it, or you might have been there a long time, but the culture within your team is negative, or whatever it might be, how can an individual kind of change that

Ben Allen:  37:21  

there's a question, there's a question that's a big question, yeah, and

Gill Phillips  37:26  

it might be a rhetorical question, I don't know. Yeah.

Ben Allen:  37:29  

Well, I mean, so, so some of the big principles that have certainly made a difference in our practice has been developing psychological safety and trust. We can come back to that there's stuff around engagement and making sure that we're really listening well to staff but also to patients that we're engaging with the people who were meant to be there for. There's things around finding the right leaders. So often, the kind of people who gravitate towards leadership roles are not necessarily got the leadership traits that are going to most be the kind that we need in people who are going to bring out the best in other people, which ultimately is what I think, to make some of the best leaders, because we have to find those leaders and help them to get into into roles. Recruitment has been really important, and making sure that you've got really good structure around how do we help make sure that everyone in the organisation is known and understood and understood, and their strengths are understood and their challenges are understood, and they're being they're being enabled to grow, oh, and communication, communication around the practice, so that people understand what's happening. Yeah, so they're probably some of the main strands, that's so that's what an organisation could do. But obviously anyone could potentially have a part in helping to develop those, any one of those strands, and we all have huge knock on effects, whether we're a formal leader or an informal leader, we have a knock on effect our behavior helps shift and challenge the things that are happening

Gill Phillips  38:57  

that's interesting. It reminds me another podcast that I did was with Dr Matt Hill, talking about psychological safety. And again, I remember some of the examples. I remember him talking about, I suppose perhaps an overlap with my work, in terms of looking at things from different perspectives. And you know, you're an established member of the team, and a new person joins. And you might think that your department's super friendly and inviting and welcoming, but how does it feel for that new person walking in on that day, and what you can do about that? And I remember as well, he used an example of a train journey. So his team, perhaps three of them, four of them going up from Plymouth, I think, is his area, to Manchester, and how you could have a train journey whereby everybody catches up on some work, you know, they're looking at their phones and so on. Or you could have an opportunity that those people who perhaps never get the chance to have a really in depth, not even in depth, conversation, just talk to each other as human beings. Things, and perhaps their family or whatever is going on for them, and to kind of use that time to get to know the team and how rich that is, rather than just being in your professional role. So I find that sort of thing fascinating, though, the different human elements that we sometimes lose these days.

Ben Allen:  40:18  

Yeah, when I first came to my practice, we had a room that was only used by the doctors. There was no real staff room. So just the kind of the act of making the biggest room that we had to be a communal staff room, meant that people were now interacting much more. So there's things that we can sometimes do that is just changing the context within an organisation. That just means that sometimes the way that desks are arranged, and all that kind of that kind of thing can kind of impact on what the interactions end up looking like. But also, there's a ways of facilitating conversations at work. One of my favorite that we've ever done was everyone brought three things in that mattered to them. Oh, wow. All these exercises that you can do require pitching it at the right level of trust that you have. This might work better in smaller groups, in some organisations, but we managed to do it with about 2025 people. People brought in three things that were meaningful, that mattered to them, and they and they shared it. We went around, and it was just amazing. So you just learned so much about people. You'd learn about people who'd lost loved ones and people what mattered to people like within it. So it might have been a driving test, or it might be something to do with a hobby they've got, or, you know, it was just really varied. There was tears, there was laughter. It was a beautiful experience. And I think most people would have viewed that as being a nice break, you know, from the fast paced work. But because I know that psychological safety is one of the is possibly the most important thing in a high performing organisation, and one of the ways you do that, I think, is to stretch people's vulnerability a bit enough that they can manage and when that goes well, and when people start revealing things about who they are as a person, it means that when something goes wrong on another day, the bonds and the connections between people and their relationships with that bit richer, and they can handle they can handle challenge more. And so I realized that that's the work that was being done in that meeting. And so we need more of that stuff, I think. But it often doesn't you know if work is measured by how many patients are seen, then we don't do the work of building high performing teams, which is what you need to see lots of patients and get good, good experience and outcomes.

Gill Phillips  42:39  

I think you've explained that so well, I really do. And just thinking about that exercise, I like the fact that people are choosing themselves, what they bring in. So if they know they're going to talk about them, they can choose their level of vulnerability, can't they? Whether you know, like you mentioned, bereavement or something, perhaps that might be their most important thing, but they're not going to take that into work, perhaps not this time, but perhaps if you ran it in a couple of months time, and those more human connections have been formed, you'd feel safe to take that in that's so interesting and important.

Ben Allen:  43:14  

Yeah, I know that's that's a great point. And Patrick lancion is one of my favorite authors absolutely love. Like, all his books are just brilliant. They're like, novels with with, like, about a third of its theory at the back, but we have one of his exercises around psychological safety in a small group. You ask, I think it's like, where did you grow up? How many siblings? Tell me about your kind of siblings? And then it's the third question. Was like, tell me a challenge that you overcome growing up, right? Which feels like quite a and he said in the book, there's lots of context where I feel like this question is just too big and too you know, felt worried about delivering it, but he's in every time he's he's done it, it's gone really well. And that's been my experience as well. And I think it's partly that Gill it's that if you want to talk about something really vulnerable, you can. But of course, no one knows whether or not it's your most, your biggest challenge that you ever came yes and yeah, I would recommend that as a as a little kind of trust building, kind of warm up.

Gill Phillips  44:19  

I've got a lot of homework here, sorry, a growing pile of books, and there are links to explore on that, but that's what I love about these conversations and connecting with with people, like minded people and so on. It's brilliant. Wow. So where do we go from here? Tell me a bit more about your two year journey, because to me, that was what inspired this podcast. And I was really fascinated by it seemed to me like Miriam Margulies, who goes and explores Australia and New Zealand and finds out about people and what sits. Behind you know, what makes true Australia, what's really going on? She kind of gets to the the absolute core of people and society and what happens? And I think I've got another friend and a podcast guest, recent podcast guest, goody Singh, who I'll mention, because she's amazing, and she's just gone around the UK looking at children and families and health inequalities, and it's going to go out, I believe, as a radio four series starting at the end of September. So it seems to me, quite a few of the people that I know in some way or another, are doing the same kind of thing as you've been doing. Ben, you know, rather than doing a formal training course or something conventional that ticks a box, just go and find out about things. Tell me more. What have you been doing? Yeah, so I'm

Ben Allen:  45:55  

just trying to think about what are some of the more interesting aspects to this. So just to recap, I I would spend time on social media, and then I would hear about things that were that were positive. I connect with someone online, and then I might go and visit somewhere, or if there's a really great example of something happening, I might visit and, you know, sharing stuff online that I've been doing, and then that's then led to have been able to support with some of the work NHS England are doing when they're designing bits of like the GP recovery plan or the incentives that we work towards, and the the neighborhood, national neighborhood implementation program as well. And kind of done some designed a leadership training course, which I really enjoyed, where almost kind of CO creating the content with the with the participants. That was that was really brilliant, and I was trying to think of what some of the kind of main points were. And I think it's something around the fact that we so often work in our little context or our silo, and we kind of almost kid ourselves that as long as we're kind of doing the work that comes in and working to our contract that we're doing our doing our job even as well as we could. But there's something about understanding the context in which we're working in that kind of completely reframes a lot of the activity that we're doing. And I find that the services that surround general practice are just kind of these kind of mysterious organisations. Often people even email and don't even leave a name, you know, it's just like 111, or something, or, you know, or the ICB team, and you just don't know who they are. You don't know what matters to them. You don't know what their problems are or what the challenge is between our organisation. So I would just very frequently email, and I would reply and or if there was things that were problems in a way, that they were communicating, or something that hadn't worked out because of some problem between our organisations, I would follow it up and try and get to know people. And now often I'm able to, you know there's been various things like the some of the results that come through are not flagged red when they should be, and I know who to contact and say that, do you realize it's not flagging red, and no one's going to see that? Or the NHS app? I realized that that it said on the NHS app that if a result has come through from your GP surgery, you can click on it and see if it's from your hospital. It said, we can't give you results from hospital. You need to contact your GP surgery. Well, of course, if it's from the hospital, you shouldn't be contacting GP surgery, contacting the hospital. Yeah, the NHS app advice was wrong. I mean, how many 1000s of people were reading that and being redirected to the wrong place? So it's like I managed to get that changed again, partly through, through kind of knowing who the right person to contact might be. So that kind of idea that making out there somewhere, making these anonymous people and organisations, people you've got a relationship with that you can then even challenge a little bit, because you know, you feel a warmth to each other when you know each other, and then you're able to and then off the back of that you you're more likely to kind of get somewhere where you're actually helping each other out. Yeah, so there's something around that I think that's been really, really rich and and so my next role is going into so I'm a medical director for physical health and neurodiversity at a NHS community and mental health trusts called in Rotherham and Doncaster. Oh, that's really interesting. You start that? Sure. Yeah. So I've very intentionally taken a role that is both where one it's I've got, and I'm staying as a GP partner. So I will both be a GP partner and a medical director in a big trust. I'll be working in Sheffield, and I'll also be working in Doncaster. I'm a generalist who will be working in a specialist service, so I'm hoping to almost be the bridge between those those spaces. Yeah, I can feel it, yeah. And it'd be really interesting to kind of see what richness that that might bring. So it's a way of me being a. To almost do the things I've been doing, but in a more formal role.

Gill Phillips  50:04  

And I think for me, as you're talking I know in our short preparation for this, we've mentioned one or two Shared Contacts, and one of my very special people is Professor Becky Malby. And I did a sort of mini series within my podcast series around universal health care and talking to people who, just like you Ben, are actually joining things up, finding out about people making those relationships. It gave me the wonderful opportunity to talk to my long term friend Tom Holliday, so some of the guests I didn't know and some of the guests I did know and to hear more about Tom's work as a consultant pediatrician, who's also easily could say, yeah, the tests are all fine. There's nothing wrong. Discharged or not, my problem, you know, I'll refer you to somebody else. And just like you're doing, I think he was making relationships with people like the school nurse, you know, people that before he wouldn't have had, he wouldn't have known who it was. It was just one of these anonymous, impersonal services. And then I think you've summed it up so well that you can challenge people a bit more. You can, you can have a proper conversation, because you actually know each other. And I was fascinated. I spoke to George winder, he was a GP up in Leeds, and Bill Graham, I think, you know. And I did these separate podcast episodes with each one talking about the role of communities and universal health care. And now we've got the 10 year plan that actually talks about communities. So is it going in the right direction? Do you think? Yeah, I

Ben Allen:  51:44  

think so. It's really hard, isn't it? Because every time there's a big change, there's a lot of trauma involved in changes in there, and he's got to feel like it's worth it. I know that Nuka in Alaska is probably thought to be one of the best performing primary cares in the world and for the money that it costs. And yeah, I know that they're kind of working in much more in much more integrated ways, as are lots of places. The way that I've kind of thought about the change in the sense that making me feel like it's necessary is that I kind of use the analogy of how people often have a single condition and a single medical condition, and the clinician can manage that that problem with a guideline. But then people start to get, like, two problems or three problems. You kind of got these three or four guidelines, and you're trying to use three or four guidelines all at once, and these guidelines are never designed to be used with other guidelines, right? Just like medications, they're all proven to work individually and not with others. So you get this kind of increasing complexity. And so actually, you can't just manage someone with five guidelines. You have to manage them in a very different way. You need a changed approach. And I wonder if this is the integrated care that we're moving into, is a bit of an equivalence. If you've got one service that you need, fine, you can go and use that service, but once you've got like, you know, five or six services, and some of them completely outside of medicine, like, you know, the police and social care, and you've got the care workers and coming from the care home and schools, schools, some of there are people, and it's not everyone, but there are some people who've got loads of services involved. And it's not the same. It's not just like one service times six. You've now got this total mess of appointments, of assessments, of interventions. It doesn't work. It needs a different approach. And I think that this is what it's getting at. I think it's getting at okay, how do we as organisations who are all intervening in this person's life, get ourselves together and work out what their challenges are, and how can how can we help them? And it might mean that some organisations have got to do it the same as what they're doing, and some organisations are going to get to do less than what they're doing. And hopefully, if it's also more effective, then you might be able to get better care for the for the same cost. That's what I'm hoping, is the logic, and it'd be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Gill Phillips  54:08  

Well, I think you're playing a massive part in that, Ben, and it's been so fascinating to talk to you. And I think you've touched upon what Tom Holliday and my Darzi fellows friends would call a lot of wicked problems. And I think the way that you've explained things so sort of straightforwardly, and that that example at the end, with the multiple conditions and so on, that was really interesting. And I think this podcast is aimed at people who aren't medical professionals necessarily, and I think you've really added value in terms of explaining some of these things that sit behind the system and what the problems are. And I think the more people understand that, that the more progress we can make together to to actually improve things. So huge. Thanks. Thank you for coming along to talk to

Ben Allen:  54:56  

me. It's been, it's been, yeah, it's been an absolute joy. I. Leaves you with one one thought, which I often do, which is around because then people find me to be quite a hopeful person and and I want to kind of explain where that comes from, which I think lots of people could apply to their scenarios. Most people can see that there's challenge and there's difficulties, and it feels like we just need more money and more people, and that I think we certainly do. But at the same time, most of us can also see that the people around us and our organisations are suboptimal. They're not working to their full potential. I think most people can see that, and I I see the hope as being how can we help the people that we're working with and the teams that we're in and the organisations we're in and the connections between us, if we can help those things to be working at their full potential, then we can get a huge amount more done and better care and a better experience for those staff and for patients. And so that's been, you know, that's been my helping that to happen has been my main interest.

Gill Phillips  55:57  

So a note of hope on the end, which is what we all need, and a brilliant lemon light bulb to finish with. Thank you, Ben,

Ben Allen:  56:03  

I'm Gill, thanks for what you're doing as well. Yeah, to creating these conversations. And, you know, I, I was listening to your podcast whilst I was pushing the pram at half five in the morning the other day. So, you know, this is an F a way of being able to, you know, we didn't learn at universities all the time. There's, it's really important that we find ways of helping people to learn differently. And so thank you for what you're doing. I did start a podcast, and I have another discipline that you've had to continue. It so well done.

Gill Phillips  56:31  

You're younger than me. There's time for everything. Thank you. 

Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would be fantastic if you would leave a review and a rating, as well as recommending the wild card whose shoes podcast series to anyone who you think might find it interesting, and please subscribe that way you get to hear when new episodes are available. I have lots more wonderful podcast guests in the pipeline, and don't forget to explore and share previous episodes, so many conversations with amazing people who are courageously sharing their stories and experiences across a very wide range of topics. I tweet as whose shoes. Thank you for being on this journey with me, and let's hope that together we can make a difference. See you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai