Conversations with Tony Nicholls - Episode 6: Tony & Sophie Tidman

Our Tony Nicholls has decided to stop working from the end of March 2025, he still finds it hard to use the R word, so we decided to make the most of him these last few weeks that we have him, and try to bottle his wisdom and experience, slash milk him for content before he goes. We're releasing these short 10 minute episodes for the next eight weeks, which will take us up to his last week with us. Each episode will focus on a different topic, a different element of his time at Mayvin or his career at large. 

In today's episode, Our Tony is joined by Our Sophie, Sophie Tidman. Sophie wanted to ask Tony about the pivotal moments in his OD career. She asks, What took you into OD? What has shifted your perspective through the years, what has challenged you and because we love a good blunder here at Mayvin, any pivotal blunders.

Please do feel free to get in touch with us or Tony directly, if you'd like to pass on any well wishes for his R word. 

Thanks so much for listening! Keep in touch:

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Transcript

Claire Newell  00:09

Hello and a warm welcome to the Mayvin podcast. This episode is part of a special, new mini series called Conversations with Tony. Our Tony Nicholls has decided to stop working from the end of March 2025, he still finds it hard to use the R word, so we decided to make the most of him these last few weeks that we have him, and try to bottle his wisdom and experience, slash milk him for content before he goes. We're releasing these short 10 minute episodes for the next eight weeks, which will take us up to his last week with us. Each episode will focus on a different topic, a different element of his time at Mayvin or his career at large. In today's episode, Our Tony is joined by Our Sophie, Sophie Tidman. Sophie wanted to ask Tony about the pivotal moments in his OD career. She asks, What took you into OD? What has shifted your perspective through the years, what has challenged you and because we love a good blunder here at Mayvin, any pivotal blunders, I'll pass you over to them now enjoy.

Sophie Tidman  01:16

So I wanted to talk to you, Tony, about your od career, what? What were the pivotal moments? What took you into OD? What shifted, shifted your perspective through the years, what challenged you? What were your pivotal blunders? 

Tony Nicholls  01:33

Blunders, right? Okay, well, we'll get to the blunder in a moment. So yeah, that takes me back to I was an HR director in a relatively small business. I was having a conversation with friend of mine and colleague, or ex colleague, Siobhan Sheridan, and I was thinking about going into OD, because I'd heard about this thing called OD, and I didn't know what it was. And she said that, well, the way you do HR is a bit OD ish Tony, so why don't you have a look at that as a space to go into? So I did, and the first thing I came across was a master's programme run by Roffey Park. And so I decided to do that to discover this thing that was called OD. So that was my first, first sort of real go at it. And that was quite, that was quite a transformational journey through that masters as I think our Masters is for people where that's what we're hearing from, from participants that have gone through our masters. It's transformational, both in terms of learning about what OD actually is, but also the personal development that takes place and professional development that takes place. So that's started me off in my career in organisation development. I think another pivotal moment for me was when I joined Mayvin, and I was asked to facilitate on our core practice programme. So within the civil service, we run a programme for developing organisation development and design capability, and we've been running it for, well, Mayvin has been running for sort of 15 years now, and I started facilitating that programme, and that was transformational in terms of me really beginning to ground myself in what are the core models and tools and techniques of organisation development and design, and also, what does it take to develop a capability in others in organisational development. And of course, as you're doing that, my practice is developing all the time as well. So that really grounded me in a broader sense of what the field is about. And what I noticed when I really, I really got quite excited by it, because what I noticed was we were developing OD capability, yes, but actually I think what we were developing was really good quality leaders and managers, because these were the participants on these programmes, are sort of middle to senior managers and leaders in organisations. And what we're developing is their capability to bring presence and influence and impact into their into their roles. So my, my big thing in my career has always been sort of the middle to senior managers, what's what's their lot and what is their impact, and how can we improve their lot, but also improve the way they lead and manage others? So I started to think about that. You know, we weren't just doing OD here. We were developing broader capability across organisations. 

Sophie Tidman  04:22

What were some surprises to you about OD? So you knew you kind of wanted to go into it

Tony Nicholls  04:27

Yeah

Sophie Tidman  04:29

Did you know what you were getting into? Really? 

Tony Nicholls  04:30

Not really. No. I think what attracted to me was my intellectual curiosity, and I that's probably where one of my blunders would come in is that, I think I started out trying to show people how clever I was. They, you know, you get into things like complexity and chaos theory and murmurations and all that clever stuff. And I think I would try and show off too much. And that's not, that's not the land with with participants. Whether they're in OD or not, what they what they want is an experience, and what they want is a space where they can learn. So it took me a while, and again, I'd go back to something like core practice, where you learn, you observe. You're always working with a co facilitator and observing some of our great associate consultants, for example, like Shelly Hussain and Helena Clayton and people like that. And, you know, and I started off actually core practice doing one of the sessions with James Traeger. You notice that what they bring is just a presence. They bring curiosity and good questions. And yes, they, you know, we show them, show people a model or two, but what we do is facilitate people doing their own learning. And that's a fundamental shift for me, was this isn't about showing how clever I am. It's about bringing a presence that's useful for the participants in their learning. And again, that for me, is about leadership and management as much as is about ODM facilitation

Sophie Tidman  05:55

Change since you've been at Mayvin?

Tony Nicholls  05:57

Good question. I think I've become less anxious about showing off. I don't I don't want to show off anymore. I think I've brought a presence of I bring a presence now that's genuinely curious about people and their context and what they're bringing into the room. And with that comes more questions than statements. Rather than making statements of truth or statements of fact or statements or bringing models, I do bring those, it's more about So tell me more about your situation, and that's interesting. Let's explore that more. And yeah, just bring that curiosity and inquiry into the room. I get feedback that I am now more I'm calmer, more present, more grounded. There's a vulnerability and a humility that's coming into the room with me now that wasn't necessarily there before

Sophie Tidman  06:56

Yeah, didn't allow for it before. Yeah, yes. That is always what I've noticed about Mayvin and our associates, like how powerful that is and how relatable it is, and grounding. 

Tony Nicholls  07:11

Yes, and I think for for us to create a space where people can do their their work, in order to learn, to reflect on their practice and develop their practice, they need to bring humility and vulnerability into the space, and the best way for that to be given permission to do that is for the facilitators role model that. So if we role model that, humility and vulnerability then makes it easy for them to bring it in. Yeah. Again, yeah. I repeat this story I've told him before, having a conversation with some associate consultants about how quickly we are able to create a situation where people open up very quickly and do start to do deep work with their practice and offer vulnerability and humility. How do we do that? We talked about the phrase we came up with, 'This is the antithesis of threat'. What we bring is the antithesis of threat. What we bring is vulnerability and humility. Whereas in most situations, in most organisations, what's in the room will be competition, hierarchy, a sense of threat in that if they say the wrong thing, that will be used against them. Even, even in relatively nice organisations, there's always some some of that in the room, whereas a facilitator that doesn't bring that is genuinely curious and genuinely open, I think, allows people to very quickly do what comes naturally to them, which is to to talk about their situation and reflect on their practice.

Sophie Tidman  08:32

Yeah, care, isn't it? 

Tony Nicholls  08:35

Yeah, I do care. I genuinely care about everybody that walks into the room that I'm working with really do because organisations are hard. They're difficult places to be in and to thrive in. They can be they can be human systems, any kind of system, families, social groups. Sometimes they can be quite challenging situations. So organisations in particular, can be quite dehumanising at times. So I think it's an opportunity for them to revisit that and rekindle their humanity and their agency. 

Sophie Tidman  09:09

Yeah, and I noticed when you kind of talking about programmes, it was transformational. It's not just oh yeah, can do this a bit better. It's transformation that vertical learning, I think you often refer to, which is not about adding more stuff to the pot, but really transforming our world for you, expanding our world for you. And of course, you can't do that when you're under threat can you?

Tony Nicholls  09:32

No, no, no, you can't. I think, I think creating space for vertical development is critical and and starting to recognise that we can do that in smaller spaces. We don't need to be with people for six months in order to develop that trust. We can do it quite quickly. So, you know, we now run, don't we? We run webinars 90 minutes, and in 90 minutes you can do, if you structure it right, you can do enough work for people to have that moment of of transformation, introduce a new concept, but create the space where they can reflect on that, with colleagues, with with strangers, even. But if, if the vulnerability and humility is there, then they they open up the space for them to start to see the world differently through that particular framework that we've introduced. So you know that that led me to start to think about, well, if, if it's if the world can't afford traditional programmes which are eight, nine months in length, and they're looking for something much shorter and sharper, then how do we do that? And that's, you know, that's hence we, here we are with Mayvin, with our Kickstarter events and mission led events and things like that, which are, you know, shorter events. But people are still getting some shift in their worldview about how complexity arises in organisations and things like that

Sophie Tidman  10:12

The quality of presence and really sharpening the intervention for that, the here and now, yeah, how does your book fit into all of that journey?

Tony Nicholls  10:58

Always wanted to write a book. Had about 16,000 different titles over the last 15 years that it was going to be. None of them ever worked. Started writing probably about 10 years ago, got one paragraph done and didn't like it, so stopped. So again, it was, it was, you know, having spent time in Mayvin to really deepen my practice and really understand, I think, what Mayvin version of OD is, and that was aligned to, I think what I wanted my version of OD to be that enabled the writing of the book. So it was a combination of, you know, Martin writes in the forward the Mayvin branded book, that it's difficult to see where Tony ends and Mayvin starts, and vice versa. And so that's absolutely true. I've taken lots of practice from Mayvin and thinking from Mayvin, your practice based learning as a concept. That's all there in the book. So it's distilling Mayvin into a book. But there is also a lot of me in there and a lot of my career in there. So it's a blend of those two things. I talk about my time in financial services and contact centres and working with team leaders and middle managers and so there's a lot of what I've experienced in life in there, with an overlay of mayvins practice in there as well

Sophie Tidman  12:07

And all our clients, I think, as well. 

Tony Nicholls  12:10

Yeah, yeah, there's some clients. Yeah, absolutely, yeah, yeah,

Sophie Tidman  12:15

Lovely. That's what we have time for. Thank you, Tony,

Tony Nicholls  12:18

kay, thank you. That was a nice conversation.

Claire Newell  12:22

Thank you so much for listening to us today, and we hope to see you next time. Take care. Bye, bye.