S05 - E07 Steve West

What does leadership look like when pressure is high and certainty is low? 

Professor Sir Steve West opens with a disarmingly personal story - a vice-chancellor in tears while mowing the lawn, unable to fix what's happening. It's the starting point for an honest conversation about the real demands of leading in higher education.

We cover authentic communication, why a leadership team that challenges you matters, and how to make hard decisions without losing people. 

Steve also shares practical thinking on crisis preparedness - and why recovery, not just the initial incident, is where most organisations fall short. We finish on student mental health and what young people are saying about sustainability, AI and the future.

If you find this useful, please subscribe, share it with a colleague, and leave a review so more people in education leadership can find the conversation.

Let us know what you think of this episode - drop us a message and connect via LinkedIn. 

Transcript

Welcome and a COVID turning point

Nick MacKenzie 0:00

Welcome to the latest episode of EdInfluence. I'm Nick Mackenzie from Browne Jacobson, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Professor Sir Steve West, Vice Chancellor of the University of West of England. Steve, I'd like to start, as I do with all my guests, by inviting you to share a story from your life that will give me a picture of who you are.

Steve West 0:22

Okay, great. Thank you. I'm going to choose a period in my life and in many people's lives which was quite disruptive. And it's and it's the part of the world when we started to engage with COVID. And there are two bits to this story. The first bit was the amazing staff that I worked with over that period, both within the university, but also working with the NHS. We ended up having a hospital on our campus, so 320 intensive care beds, and working with the Army and the NHS and our staff, the amazing amount of effort and energy that went into that. And I was here right the way through it, engaging, sleeves rolled up and doing whatever it took for us to get through that. But then as the journey went on, I started to think about how everybody's lives were being impacted, our students, our staff, their families. And the story is during that period, I was doing these sorts of questions and answers and trying to keep staff motivated and focused. And I told a story, and this was completely off the cuff. This was not a story I was going to tell, but I but I but it but I did, and I just wanted to reflect on that. I was in the garden and I was cutting the grass, and I started to cry in the middle of cutting the grass. And my he would have been 18-year-old son came out into the garden and saw me. And he came up and he said, Dad, why are you crying? And I said, Because I can't fix this. I can't get I can't make this better for people, both in the university, the students, the staff. I can't find a way of making it better for them. And he stopped and he just looked at me. And this has never happened before. He's not a particularly emotional person. He put his arm around me and he said, But dad, no one can. No one can make this better. All you can do is your best. And that stuck with me. It still sticks with me in terms of the power of what he said and how it made me feel at that moment. And I just described it to the staff in the same way that I'm describing it now. And it was an amazing moment when staff and students just connected because we were all in it together. We were all human beings trying to get through a very difficult period. And that I think has stuck with me in terms of whatever happens in our sector or across the world, fundamentally, we're all the same. The same human beings with the same emotions, with the same often the same issues that we're trying to struggle and get through. And that should bind us, that should help us get through those things. And I keep going back to it because it is the way I want to lead. It is the way I want to be part of a community to make things better. So, in a nutshell, that's that story has stuck with me. And telling it every time still makes me feel quite emotional. And that again is something that I think leadership has to find a way of connecting and being emotionally intelligent and also not being afraid to show vulnerability. So that's why I've used that as my example.

Nick MacKenzie 3:58

Thank you, Steve. That's a great story. Could can we perhaps stick with storytelling for a moment then? You've

Storytelling that feels true

Nick MacKenzie 4:06

led for at least two decades. You've sat on national boards, you've spoken in many different rooms, virtual and real. And we're all watching right now in the national politics as we record this, where leaders are perhaps struggling to get their story across. Currently, you lead in a large organization, lots of students, lots of staff. What have you learned about using storytelling and actually getting your message to land?

Steve West 4:39

So the number one for me is you have to be authentic. You have to believe in the story that you are telling. And you have to be clear that the audiences that you are connecting with have huge diversity, lots of difference, both in terms of their life experiences, their lived experience, there, what drives them as individuals, but sometimes what drives groups, what drives communities. And that your storytelling has to connect in a way that makes sense to them. And that's quite difficult often because there are very diverse communities, both looking for, seeking, and wanting to engage in different ways at different levels. And you've got one shot as a leader in terms of trying to convey enough that connects with enough people to get the followership that you're looking for in order to progress and move things forward. And sometimes you can do that very well and it works. And sometimes you have to find multiple different ways. You can't actually get it to work in every setting the same way each time. So the learning is it's got to be authentic, it's got to be natural, it's got to be believable. And if you don't believe it, then don't go out there and try and convince people that this is something that you want to do. Because if you're not believing it, why do you expect anyone else to believe it? Be prepared for challenge. I think most people want to engage, but they want to engage in a meaningful way. So be prepared to accept the challenge and then work to create reason, a rationale. In the end, people may not like the message, may not align to that message, but but what you have to do is get enough understanding in order to make it happen. And to demonstrate that you're doing it for the best of intentions. And that's, I think, absolutely the case at the moment across the sector. We're having to do some really difficult things. The politicians similarly are trying to do very difficult things under dynamic global circumstances, and the universities are no different. And some of what we want to do and some of what we need to do does have impact on many people in our organizations and will continue to do so. But in the end, what we have to hang on to is we're trying to ensure that our future for our universities and our university is a stronger future, and therefore we have to build to that. And the world is moving so fast that we can't fossilize and hang on to stuff that we used to do in the past that's really well beyond its sale by date. But you've got to believe and you've got to understand enough, have enough emotional intelligence to understand that landscape, that ecosystem that all organizations sits in, and be able to connect in that space in a real sense and do it in a way that demonstrates you understand and you care. And if you don't understand and you don't care, then chances are the message won't land. Chances are you'll struggle.

Nick MacKenzie 8:07

Thank you. I wanted to pick on something you just shared then, and actually it goes back to your opening story as well. I think it was

How leaders do hard things

Nick MacKenzie 8:15

President Obama who once said hard things are hard when he was trying to get the healthcare reforms through in the US. Yeah. What have you learned over your career about how you actually do hard things?

Steve West 8:30

It's good if you've got people that you can test out your thinking in respect to those hard things that you're trying to do and get their view, get their feedback. Obama's right, hard stuff is hard stuff. And you know, it it it it will remain hard because it's going to have an impact, and that impact is negative and positive in different order for different groups. So testing out and thinking that through and testing it out before you try to engage with large audiences is is a good thing to do. So, in order to do that, you have to have diversity of thought around your table, your leadership group, or however you want to frame it, but that group that is going to help you understand, a leader understand what are the consequences. And I think that applies not just to education, I think that applies to any large sector. I work in health, I work in in local government areas, and it's the same issue. Leadership is about taking people to places that they hadn't dreamt about going into often and are fearful, perhaps, or excited, and and balancing that out is the job. So if you test it, have people around you are not just going to say, Yeah, that's fine. Don't worry, just do it. That's not that helpful because you know that that's not going to be the reality. So having good feedback, challenging feedback sometimes, but genuine feedback is really appropriate and really positive.

Nick MacKenzie 10:07

Sounds to me you're you're also saying a bit there about make sure you have a strong team around you. What what have you learned?

Building teams that actually work

Nick MacKenzie 10:15

Yeah, I think we can all recognize it's difficult to build a team. What have you learned about building the team?

Steve West 10:22

Oh, well, I've built teams and for many, many years. So my background is in health, and I'm really clear that teamworking in health is critical, but but actually it applies to pretty much every situation. And I used to do surgery in in clinical areas and and theatres. I couldn't do my job if the cleaning staff hadn't done theirs, if the people behind the scenes creating instruments that were sterile and dressings and all of that stuff. So it's very easy for something to go wrong very early. So having the ability to rely on a team and everybody in that team, knowing what they contribute and how they contribute, and feel part of that is essential. Looking specifically at the leadership team, what you want to be able to do is to get diversity of thought and diversity of views around the table. And that's not always easy to do. Building a team is also a dynamic situation. There are moments in my life when I've had the dream team, and I'm sure every leader will be able to recall that moment because it just clicks, it just works. Everybody knows what they're doing, they know how other people are going to react, they know what they're leading on, what they're supporting, how the ebb and flow of big decisions happen, and how you support each other. That's the dream team. So it's a bit like watching, you know, world-class football, using a football analogy for a second, where every player knows the game they're playing, but they also know around them the rest of the game and who they can rely on, how they move, how they support each other, how they take position and all of that. It's just beautiful to watch. There are other occasions where it's a bit like, frankly, watching my sons do Sunday football when they were growing up, where every player around the table, sorry, on the pitch in this case, runs after the same ball. And they don't really take much notice of what's going on around them, but they all just run for the ball. And I'm sure leaders in every level will have had that situation. So the dream team and then the team that isn't quite there yet. And of course, every time you add to the team, you have to rebuild the team because as a new dynamic arrives and a new set of circumstances emerge. So taking care of that team is really, really important. And sometimes we don't necessarily recognize that and we don't necessarily focus on it. We don't have the time, we'll we'll we'll convince ourselves, or we don't have the money to maybe get some facilitation in when we need external facilitation. So all of those things, the housekeeping piece, sometimes we don't we we neglect. When it works, it it's efficient, it's effective, it it really does transform. When it doesn't work, a lot of that energy dissipates into fixing stuff after the event and repairing after the event. And I'm being you know, brutally honest, I've had the whole spectrum during my life. And uh the the leaders that I've spoken to from every industry sector I can think of have had similar experiences. So it's not particular or peculiar, it is just what happens in in uh complex organizations. I guess if you are, and I and you know, I I guess I could have been uh just running my own organ my own company as a foot surgeon and just getting on with it in private practice, and then I would only had myself to to talk to and work with. So it might have been simpler, but boy, we in being part of a big organization, do you learn an awful lot about yourself and about others?

Nick MacKenzie 14:21

What was it that made you realise leadership was actually what you wanted to do? I was quite interesting what you've just said then. You've had a fascinating

Why leadership became the path

Nick MacKenzie 14:29

route in leadership in the sector. What was it that clicked for you that made you want to pursue what you've done?

Steve West 14:37

Do you I well I never dreamt of being a vice-chancellor, that's the first thing. So as I went through my career, or have I been going through my career, I every job I've had all the way through, for that period, it was the best job in the world. So I was never actively looking for anything. So when as a clinician, I was really happy that was the best thing in the world, working with patients, making things better. Fantastic. And then I got into more of an environment where I wanted to make a difference. So I was seeing stuff around that was going on, which was sort of outside my control, uh, immediate control, and thinking actually we could do this better if we did this and did that, then maybe we that would make life easier. And so that started to suck me into this idea of leadership. And to begin with, it was clinical leadership and academic leadership. So being on the teaching side, so I spent quite a lot of my early career one foot, so to speak, in in the NHS and one foot in universities. And then at some point I realized I couldn't, I had to make a decision which camp was I going to stay in for the vast majority of my time. And I chose academia, and then I got into leadership management jobs, running departments and that sort of stuff, and then ultimately moving up the hierarchies into university senior leadership roles, and then ultimately uh vice-chancellor, chief exec. But I've also in that space hung on to some of the clinical work and some of the clinical policy direction stuff that I used to do throughout my career and some of the research throughout my career. So I've managed, I've managed to navigate quite a complex space and it all gives me energy. That's the that's the thing that I can take from all of it. So, why do I do these different things? It's because I keep learning. It's because you can transfer some of that from one area to another. You can watch what other people are doing and learn from them, and that keeps me fresh and keeps me interested and curious to want to find out more. So my wife would tell me that I'm really rubbish at saying no to people that ask me to do things, except when she asks me to do things, and I'm quite good at saying no. So, so I haven't quite got the balance right, but it's the thing that I really enjoy. So it's I don't see it as a job, I don't see it as something that is you know to be done. I really enjoy that whole leadership space. And I'm still learning, I still get tons wrong, and it and you ask the question, why doesn't that work? I tried that last time and it was brilliant, now it's not working. So being able to reflect and change and try to motivate staff and colleagues is a wonderful thing in the same way that teaching was a wonderful thing, or clinical work was a wonderful thing. When you make a difference and you can see the impact, you've cured a particular condition, or a student suddenly gets the thing that you're trying to teach them, and that magic moment when it's aha, they go, ah, it's that, I get it. And you've and you can see the just the joy in their face that they've worked it out, you've you've coached them. And it's the same in leadership, it's exactly the same feeling. So, you know, that's what I guess that's what's motivates me, but it's also what keeps me fresh. And, you know, because after 20 odd years as the vice-chancellor, you know, you could think you know it, you've seen it all, you've done it all, and it's all a bit, you know, samey. It isn't. It's never the same day twice. So that's the magic of, I guess, leadership in universities. Every day is a different day. And I'd argue I thought the same when I was a clinician, I thought the same when I was a teacher.

Nick MacKenzie 18:47

I was going to ask you about how long you've been in the role, and that that feels like a long time. So but I think you preempted me uh there. I think you've eloquently answered why you still do what you do. I I think I came across, I think it was Adam Grant. He he proposes rethinking, he calls it. It's I was trying to, I think, get into difficult problems more, but the shorthand of it is think like a scientist. And I think it's that challenge, it didn't work, wasn't wrong, and that curiosity you talked about. Has that been particularly useful carrying on the um the research and the clinical side to help you with some of the challenging problems?

Steve West 19:26

Every day. So as a clinician, I was taught to be curious, to listen hard. Nine times out of ten, the patient gives you most of the answer that you're looking for to make the decision, the diagnosis, and then to engage with the treatment. So that has never left me that that genuine interest in people to and to be curious about how they were presenting and what they were presenting, and then to be able to navigate with them something that could work for them. And that's about giving information and allowing them to make a decision that they are able to make and are keen to make. So a true partnership. So that skill set, that that ability, that curiosity, and sometimes the clinical bit is about in being a bit like a detective, trying to go on the on the hunt to work out what's going on here. So there's a bit of that. The second bit is around communication and engaging differently with different audiences. That's the life of a clinician. And then I also had the pleasure of being able to work in industry where we were trying to do product development in a retail environment to be able to support clients, patients with foot conditions. And that taught me about the commercial and taught me about the retail environment and the science that needs to go in if you're going to be creating products, all of that. So that those two things I draw on every single day. And I'm often asked, you know, how how many management books or programs have you been on? And the answer to that is very few. And it's not particularly because I'm not interested, I am interested, but I'm interested in reading case studies and and and understanding the dynamics rather than the theory. I'm dyslexic as an individual. So putting me in front of a book is my version of hell because it's just so difficult for me. Over the years, I've learned how to manage that, of course. But if you give me sort of case studies and learnings, then I'm much more likely to be engaging with it. So a couple of books How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's on my must have list for being a leader. And then there's some newer ones, newer versions coming out. Mark Watson has just written Aha, which again is a really interesting. Way of looking at leadership through the lens of case studies and different industry sectors. And then the other thing, there's a couple of books that um that I've dipped in and out of, and they happen to be following some great leaders in in football, in sport. So leaders that have managed to take their teams to the top of their game, and that's been amazing. Thank you. I had pretty one of the previous guests was a lady called Catherine Baker who wrote a book about staying the distance, which again was how sports teams not only get to the pinnacle, but then they stay there consistently. And I think I think that's really she has some really interesting points in it. Yeah. Conscious of time, and there's loads that I could discuss with you, Steve. I wanted to my previous guest is a lady called Lucy Easthope, who is a leading figure in disaster planning

When help is not coming

Nick MacKenzie 22:58

and disaster response. And she talked about the startle factor, the idea that the job of a leader isn't to present a crisis, it's to be less paralyzed when it arrives. So I think underpinning it, there's a bit of assumption there will be a crisis at some point. And she uses three words as a kind of activating test. Help isn't coming. Um you've worked across so many different types of organizations as a clinician in the university sector. Does that idea resonate with you?

Steve West 23:32

Yes, very much so, especially at the moment. The university sector is in quite a difficult space at the moment. And help isn't coming would be a good way of describing, I suspect, the reality and how people feel. And universities are going to have to find their way through many of the challenges that they're facing. Government is not going to intervene, it can't, it can't intervene, it wouldn't be appropriate for it to interven intervene, and it hasn't got the resources to be able to do it. So we've got to find the solutions. So I think there are a number of uh mini-cycles of crises, if you want, that happen in a university. And then every so often the big wave hits you. And it's pretty unexpected, although on your risk registers, if you have them, chances are it's articulated in there. And I'm thinking about you know, everybody's a risk register talks about the massive threat around cyber, so a cyber attack. So it's there. We probably with COVID we had pandemics, but I'm not sure we ever really rehearsed what would that mean in our organizations, in the same way that many things on our risk registers we will rehearse and we do rehearse, there's lots that we don't, and then inevitable, it's usually the thing that's not on the risk register that catches you out. So that ability to be agile and be able to respond. There is something about none of us would attempt to run the marathon unless we'd put some training in and unless we had practiced that. And I think as universities, generally we don't necessarily train for that marathon which which converted is the crisis that hits you. We might train for bits of it, but we don't put it all together. And when there's a really big thing that hits a university, it it's sometimes a bit it's a bit difficult. Whereas in in my experiences in the health system and in the police and in many other public sector organizations, they uh army would be a classic example, they train and they uh really push themselves in those simulations and they really try and think things through. That hasn't necessarily been the case in in higher education. We're getting better at it, and we're beginning to use scenarios and we're beginning to do the training for that, and we'll run desktop reviews and sometimes we'll run bigger simulation events. But do we do enough? Most of the big things I would probably say that we would we would be able to manage the immediate. So the first 24 hours, let's say. Often the bit that gets missed is you get through the first 24 hours, and that's usually multidisciplinary, multiple agencies involved, and then after you have to work through, then well, where's that left us? And how long are we going to be in this state? And how do we recover and how do we move forward? That's the bit that we spend very little time. It's certainly in my experience in universities, very little time focusing on. So we're we're part match fit, but we're not completely match fit. And that, you know, every opportunity that I have to see other organizations doing this, I have that conversation. Okay, so you've got through the immediate, but what does it now look like for the next week, the next three weeks, the next month? Because if it's, for example, if it's a security cyber event, then they go. We've just seen, haven't we? We've just seen big Marx Suspense, co-op others have all been hit and they are knocked out for months, maybe even years. Jaguar Landrober is another one. What would that be if it was like a university? What does it mean to our core systems? Because frankly, we've all done the brilliant job of moving to digital in practically every aspect, and cloud in practically every aspect. We don't have the papers anymore. We don't have the paper trail. And there's a big piece which is well, actually, maybe you do need the paper bit. And we got rid of it because that was inefficient and ineffective and and and. So there's something about how do we really rehearse what the true risks are in our organizations, and how do we practice both the immediate and the recovery phases.

Nick MacKenzie 28:32

I wonder whether there's something in Lucy's concept of startle fact that was linked to something else I wanted to ask

Pause to go faster

Nick MacKenzie 28:40

you earlier. You you used a metaphor of football. And I was talking to my daughter who's learning to drive at the moment, and I was talking about cognitive load and the fact that it's amazing, like really good sports people, how they seem to have more time than everybody else, but they clearly don't. Um what what are the you know in space and time? And you I think you talked about time. What have you learned about trying to get to that point where your teams almost look like you know, that top class sports person that just seems to find that extra fraction of a second to make that decision? Because I I think you see the pace we all live in actually. Sometimes there's almost that ego and bravado to make a decision quicker. And perhaps the more intelligent choice is to just sit a tiny bit longer.

Steve West 29:30

Yeah, we we use in our in my team, we use pause to go faster is the sort of the moment that brings everybody back into the space, and anybody can call it. So when we're in a huddle and we're trying to work out something that's just happened and we're trying to work it through, there'll always be somebody in the room that goes, hang on, just pause, pause to go faster here. And you need that, you need that ability to call it out because in the moment you get swept along. And there's almost the point of now, hang on a second, we're going down this at 100 miles an hour. Maybe, maybe there's a different way, and having the courage to do that in a leadership team is is quite special when that happens. Because suddenly you're what you're doing is you're fracturing the mindset and the thinking. And the problem with teams is they just get into the moment and then they get into oh, right, we've got to go this way faster, and then you know that there's probably not going to be a good ending to that, but you're swept along. So there's something about how urgent is this? Are we dealing with? Is this a moment where actually you know the fire, the building's on fire, you've got to take action, you've got to get out, all of that stuff. So, so do we understand how urgent is the issue and how fast do we need a solution? And most of the time, most of the time, the issues that we're dealing with are not like the burning platform or the burning building. Most of the time, there's an opportunity to pause and ask just the question, are we sure? before you then go to the next bit. And when you do that, then sometimes you'll get very different outcomes, very different solutions.

Nick MacKenzie 31:34

I love that you've got a shared language as a team to call that and a shorthand to get into that space.

Steve West 31:40

Yeah. It's because it if we do it, then we everybody knows that's the moment to just stop.

Nick MacKenzie 31:48

Yeah. We're nearly out of time, but as I've got you, I did want to touch on an issue that's important in

Student mental health and what works

Nick MacKenzie 31:57

higher education, but actually more broadly in society. And you're leading the National Task Force on Student Mental Health. And I was wondering, it's been going for a little while. I think you've got a reporting headline coming up. I was just curious if you could share a few thoughts about you the work you've done there and what you've learned and what the picture looks like, because it seems an incredibly complicated space. But what have you learned through that work?

Steve West 32:23

So I've learned, first of all, you're right, it is a complicated space. We've got ever-increasing demands that we're seeing in young people, in particular around their mental health and well-being. It's about 20-25% of the student population that will have episodes of poor mental health, some will have diagnosed mental illness. Over the three years, four years now, we we've worked as a task force to identify some streams of work that could help. And what we've been publishing are is guidance notes, we've been publishing case studies, we've been publishing best practice across a range of things to understand what institutions are doing and what's successful, what works. There's loads of stuff out there. We've done a piece of work to pull all of that together, and we've just finished a survey looking at the use of data analytics in being able to potentially predict students who may be in distress and using technology to try and help us do that. And we put a survey out, we've had 94. This is in England only, it's 94 responses, which is a really good response rate to around probably 35 questions in total, 40 questions. So a lot of effort gone in. We've just done the analysis. And that's going to be published fairly soon, the sharing the outcome of that. What I can say is that there's very clear evidence that universities are using engagement data to as a proxy to try and identify students who are potentially at risk of either dropout or risk of the fact that they're disengaging and therefore there may be something else. Less clear around well-being analytics, there's not much happening in that space, it's very complicated. And whilst the technology is helping, it is about human interaction, it is about human engagement to follow through. So whilst we get a long way in triaging with technology, you still need human beings. Not surprising, really. So that's the that's one piece of work that's just been concluded. We're looking at a piece of work around social ostracization in terms of what the impact of that is on student mental health. And the other piece that we're doing is a bigger document that will draw all of the elements together. What have we learned in that space completely? I'm not keen to keep creating more policy. I'm not keen to create any more papers and discussion points because it's all there. What we need to be focusing on is implementation across our institutions. And there is a piece that's that we'll be considering, which is do we need to move to a national standard for student mental health support in higher education? And if we do, what would that look like? And how might that be embedded in our organizations? And that's a discussion that's coming up in a week's time. If we agree as a task force that that's something that we want to do, then we will work with regulators to be able to have a discussion about well, is it a regulated thing? Is it an embedded thing in our institutions? Our autonomous institutions need to be accountable for this in the same way that they are for health and safety and equalities duties, or is it something else? My preference is that we get this embedded for all the right reasons in organizations and that they are clear what they're doing and whether or not it's having an impact. They are clear with their students, they're clear with their students and staff about what to expect. And the regulation piece, if we get this right, isn't required. I also want to try and build a community that learns from each other. We don't need to be wasting time reinventing stuff. If it's working in one place, the chances are we should be able to pick it up and transfer it. So that's a piece of work that that's also happening that we'll pick up next week. And at the bottom line is doing it through the lens of what do students need? What do they really need to thrive and flourish and succeed in their careers and in their time at the university? And do we build within them their own resilience and their own understanding of mental health and well-being and what they can do for themselves to support and when to ask for help? Really, really important.

Nick MacKenzie 37:29

Thank you. I could ask lots more of you there, but I want to respect your reported deadlines and meetings. And we uh we're we're

Young people give us hope

Nick MacKenzie 37:37

out of time, but I think there's a nice segue there to something where where I wanted to finish our discussion today. And perhaps actually going back to your story at the beginning, and where your son and the moment you had with your son where he helped helped you. What quality do you see in young people coming through your university or more widely that you wish you had or had more of?

Steve West 38:03

Well, this is another story very quickly. I was with a group of 14 to 16-year-olds. Bristol every year runs Bristol Heroes celebration. So these are young people, very disadvantaged young people from Bristol who are who are recognized and awarded. And I was having a conversation with four young people, 14 to 16. And what blew my mind was first of all their story, how they turned their lives around and what that meant for them and their parents, just absolutely flawed me. And then a follow-up set of conversations with young people around the world that they were living in and their understanding of that world. And I was talking to them or with them for an hour after the event. And basically, what I what we went on was this journey around their hopes, their fears, their drivers, their wishes, really, and their ability to articulate it in a very passionate way. But what came through really loud and clear was one, they are concerned about the environment and sustainability. They are concerned about artificial intelligence and the impact that that has, both on the environment but also on people. Passionately engaged around the concerns around social media. These are 14 to 16-year-olds. We got into politics, we got into capitalism and communism and the benefits and disbenefits of all of that. We got into some really deep stuff around the life course. So, how do they reinvent themselves over time when there's too many unknowns? And then they also asked me some hard questions around what my thoughts were around education and the role of education in transforming lives and all of that. These were 14 to 16-year-olds who were having conversations that demonstrated to me they care passionately about each other. They care passionately about the world that we live in, they don't like what they're seeing, and they're asking hard questions to us about what are we, what are we going to do to sort this out? Because they feel let down. And that was, you know, that's just left me with a huge amount of hope for the future that these young people who are very disadvantaged in so many ways can articulate that in such a way that that it made me think and still think, I still think about that. And this was a week ago. And I'm seeing the same thing in our universities, people who are wanting to get on with their lives, who want to do good in their lives in the main and want to make a positive difference. And that's the I mean, that is the magic. That's why I stay in education and universities. That's the magic of a university. Every day, transforming those lives happens, and it's a joint effort, it's a team sport. And that gives me hope. And I sort of sit there and I'm this morning. I was with the minister and I challenged the minister and said, look, you know, this is this is the world I live in. This is what I'm hearing from my students. And, you know, boy, have we got a mess to sort out because we're not doing a very good job at the minute of giving them hope and giving them opportunity that makes sense. That's our job. And it's this generation, my generation, that needs to do it. Nobody else is going to do it. So let's roll our sleeves up, get in there, and create the hope and create the opportunity. So I said that to the minister, and and it, in fairness, absolutely agreed.

Nick MacKenzie 41:56

Well, I think that's a wonderful place to finish our discussion of on hope and the magic of higher education institutions. So, Steve, thank you so much for joining me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed our discussion, and I hope our listeners have as well.

Steve West 42:12

My pleasure. Thank you.