Jonathan Tweedie

We need to be able to convert stories into understandable dialogue for individuals.

So you take whatever is relevant to them and you take their story and you take their experiences and then you try and...

put that into the context of then, well, what do I mean by risk?

How do you make decisions in your everyday life, which are actually about how you take risk and how you view risk?

And then how do I show you what that looks like in the world of investments?

And then why you need to be able to adjust your thinking on that as time progresses.

Yeah, so I do.

I think our industry, in fact, industry in general, uses consultancy in two ways.

The first way I think is fundamentally wrong, but is used probably the most regularly, which is simply to validate decisions so that you abdicate responsibility for the decision you make by bringing in a consultant to effectively support your thinking and ideas to go, that's all right, the consultant said this was absolutely the right way to go, and no one ever gets fired for doing that.

I think the way we try and use consultants and the way I think they add real value is when you recognize that they can actually bring a skill set that you don't have and they can help you think through what the problem is, think about the outputs you're trying to achieve and then challenge and challenge all the time and push you to make the decisions.

that are going to take you outside of your virtual comfort zone.

So they always fill the empty chair within your boardroom and create that environment where they're pushing you to think differently.

And I really admire that in the consultants we work with.

I find it refreshing when I come away from talking to consultants and go,

oh yeah, they took me to the edge of where I was comfortable and then pushed me a little bit further because that just encourages me to go away and think more about it and to start reflecting on the fact that we are always going to have to push the boundaries of what we're trying to do.

How do we learn best?

Lucky enough, I disappeared off to Oxford and did their executive leadership thing.

I learned two things, probably a pretty expensive two things to learn.

The first one was never build forts, which is always about pivoting.

The moment you build yourself a fort, you put yourself into an environment where you can't change your mind because you're rigid and stuck to one space.