I have now typed up my speech to the CIWEM AGM and added it to the blog for the 18th July

Today the 19th of July has been another special day. Lis and I have been involved in two events.
Lis represented the Company at the Annual Service of the Imperial Society  of Knights Batchelor at St Pauls Cathedral. She says that it was a very moving Service with traditional hymns and the most colourful regalia .Why was I not there ? Well I was with the Lord Mayor , Alderman David Wootton and his Lady,Liz,  in the Mansion House.

On the 14th July  1197 King Richard 1st sold the Thames Conservancy to the City of London  for 1500 Marks . To celebrate this memorable event , we present the Lord Mayor with a jug filled with Thames water , after which we all partake  a glass full of this healthy product . This resonates well with our decision that we toast the health of our guests with Thames water in our lunches and banquet . That presentation was today. I was in the Mansion House with Ralph Riley our Clerk , Ivor Richards, the Thames Warden and Steve Sansom, the Company Jeweller who was charged with procuring the jug.It was a very enjoyable occasion.

Today 18th July has been one of  an emotional roller coaster. It qualifies to be on the blog because I was asked in my capacity as a retiring CIWEM Trustee and as the Master Water Conservator to address the CIWEM AGM as our main website shows. I went to a CIWEM Trustees dinner last night where some very nice things were said.  I was presented with a  lovely picture of pelicans -chosen very carefully with great thought by Lorraine Nick Reeves' PA . This is especially significant because the small consultancy company ,which Lis and I have run for several years, is Pelican Portfolio( although not much has happened in recent years ). Thank you .
Today ,before the AGM and unfortunately during most of the prior Trust meeting ,I attended my first meeting of the General Lighthouse Authority in Trinity House - a very interesting experience . This coupled with the role as Master is a new beginning, as I retire from  the CIWEM  Trust Board ( although I will still help the Trustees )  and have retired recently from the PLA and my job in NI . These were all poignant experiences.
I used some handwritten notes for my speech and I have yet to type them up . I hope to do so this weekend and I will post them then.
This is now done and added below

ADDRESS  TO THE CIWEM AGM JULY 18 2012

Fellow Members of CIWEM

I was honoured to be asked to address this AGM.  I wondered what I could say which drew a common thread between ending my time as a CIWEM Trustee, after 17 years of service, and starting my time as Master Water Conservator.  It caught my breath to realize that I have been a member of CIWEM for 45 years, but I remember, with pride, my year as President in 1998/9 and the President’s Award in 2002 .

What could I say, which might be insightful, even helpful, but which is not egocentric?

So here goes

• Be prepared to learn
• Be prepared to take advantage of opportunities
• Believe in what you are doing
• Do what you think is right
• Be prepared to admit that you are wrong and not be stiff necked
• Value yourself as a unique individual, but value your place in a team

But first I would like to say something about the role that CIWEM and the Water Conservators have been, and will be, as part of my life. I have always believed in the role of the third sector in life  and in turn it has helped me. But everything I have achieved has been as part of a team and I will return to this in due course. I would like to acknowledge the contribution and friendship, in particular of Nick Reeves – his OBE was well deserved.  We have created some good things together ; for example, the ideas around the confederation of environmental bodies – ultimately becoming the Society for the Environment.

Be patient with me because what I am about to say might seem passé, even quaint, but at the time the ideas I describe were novel.  I remember that, when I started, one of my first jobs was to calibrate Spiralarm lamps, which were modified miners’ Davy lamps, to monitor  atmospheres in the London sewers.  But I did oversee the introduction of the very first instrumental monitoring systems, including the use of Draegar tubes.

Be Prepared to Learn

This cuts right to the heart of what CIWEM is all about . I have been fortunate in moving from one job to another, partly due to fortunate opportunity and partly because I was prepared to tackle new challenges. Do not be afraid. Do not be afraid of saying ‘ I do not know – tell me’ . During my time with Anglian Water, we decided that the motivational forces of learning would the catalysts for the changes we sought.  So, we started by determining that we would be a Learning Organization and we joined the European Consortium of Learning Organizations.  In this concept , explicit knowledge – so called book learning- is combined with experiential learning in a formal structure.  Everyone had to participate.

An organizational persona of this concept is the Knowledge Management Organization, but we were fortunate enough to have the vision to create the learning alter ego for the Company – the University of Water, which was considered to be one of the most successful corporate universities of its time. This led to the insight that knowledge management is not good enough . We needed to evolve into wisdom management.  The feedback loop, so beloved of experts in this field,  is data and experience to information to knowledge to wisdom to creativity to innovation to more data.  This is more a forward moving spiral than a loop.  Let me exemplify this with a topic familiar to you all – the problem of nitrate in drinking water.

Data are the observations that drinking water and raw water can exceed statutory limits . It will also include data on soil chemistry ,rainfall , human health and so on. 

Information is the interpretation that  the data  show the correlations of rises in concentrations in water with time of year, rainfall and land use.  There will be a number of feedback loops with other data sets such as those of soil quality.  It enabled us to determine the natures of the various sources of nitrogen in water.

Knowledge is the understanding that most of the nitrate in water comes form the conversion of organic nitrogen in the soil, rather than excess fertilizer use and hence it is farming practice which is the primary cause of any perceived problems.

Wisdom is the ability to decide sensible courses of action in changing practice to abate problems. It brings together a number of knowledge strands, such as those on the effectiveness of various treatment techniques. It balances the virtues of treatment of raw drinking water  and of sewage effluent  against those of changes in farming practice . In fact that debate- that wisdom- is still very much in the centre of how to deal with nitrate in water as part of the price controls set by the economic regulators.

Creativity is a concept more difficult to grasp. Some people are born innately creative, without any experience, but for most of us it comes out of the wisdom of knowing what works and what does not work.  But none of this is related to age.  Younger people can be wise and older people can  unwise ;young people can fail to be  creative, whereas older people can be creative . In the example I have used, creativity would be the conception of new ways of farming , new kinds of fertilizer , new strains of  crops and so on .

Innovation , finally, is the practical application of creativity, I call it research and marketing.

So with all this new thinking I was appointed Director of Innovation for Anglian Water in 1994 and in fact I was the UK’s first Director of Innovation and  I did a lit of work with the DTI Innovation Unit. We created one of the first really big websites in the water industry and I remember having to argue very hard at the Board to do this . This included an intranet, which we called the Encyclopedia of Water. This is rather quaint, but back in 1994 , not so long ago, it was a big step forward.

This is the essence of CIWEM – we are  a learning organization.  CPD is essential – I know that keeping records is a pain in the bottom, but that is the price we have to pay. The Institution today has talked about recruitment and stakeholder engagement – well I can tell you that in talking to employers we have to learn to use their  language on management, such as about learning at work, rather than trying to sell expertise on land management or water services or whatever.

Be prepared to take advantage of opportunities

If you are prepared to learn, it is amazing what happens.  I would say that my career has been one of hopscotch. When one  door closes another opens.  I left Anglian Water, joined the Environment Agency Board on the basis of my water knowledge, then I left the EA and joined the board of the PLA on the basis of what I knew about environmental management and rivers in particular. I left the PLA  four months ago and on the basis of what I had learned previously, and in particular my knowledge of ports and navigation, I have just joined the Board of the General Lighthouse Authority in Trinity House.  A common thread is that fact that CIWEM is a very credible reference point of value to employers.

Believe in what you are doing 

I guess that this connects to the notion of doing what you think is right. Whilst I would not advocate allowing one’s heart to rule over one’s head, it does no harm to show passion about your work. In Northern Ireland , where I worked with your Chairman Jim Oatridge in the Utility Regulator, we developed an organizational persona, which is objective , focused , evidence based and transparent, but through that transparency our customers and stakeholders could see that there was a beating human heart, which cared for the 45 % of the population of Northern Irish people deemed to be energy poor.

It was this innate sense of what is right and what is wrong which led to  CIWEM developing a Code of Ethics ; this now forms the basis of the codes of several of our sister bodies in the rest of Europe and forms a very substantial basis of the code used by the Society for the Environment.

Be prepared to admit that your are wrong

I can say now with the benefit of hindsight, that I must have been a pain  to work with from time to time, but I have been lucky in working with some forgiving people. I have learned that there are times for putting one’s hands up and saying that..

 ‘I  give in I was wrong’.   Pursue what you believe in but listen and respond to others  It is amazing what comes out of this dynamic.   But what I can share with you is the understanding which came out of  my time with the University of Water.  People make decisions in two ways:

·        Easily  and quickly using instinct, but find it hard to change their minds because it feels threatening to them as a person and to their reputation.

·        With difficulty and great persuasion based on hard knowledge – but they find it easier to change their minds if new knowledge emerges.

The truth is that we are all a mixture – a variable mixture – of these traits and we need to understand how we must manage our own characters and how we can spot them in other people.

Value yourself but be a team member

‘I can do it ‘ That is what I can pass on to you , but remember you can only do it with others . That is my final gift to you, based on my experience in CIWEM. Do not be daunted by challenge, because you always have your family around you . That is what I take forward to the Water Conservators , which after all is a progeny of CIWEM . Honour tradition, but innovate ; try your ideas out on your colleagues and you will be surprised how much they will support and help.  Maybe you will not be surprised because your presence here today shows, I think , that you understand these messages very well.

So good luck to the Trustee Board – I will help them for another year , good luck with the new Headquarters . But finally, I would like to recognize all the help that Lorraine Poole , Nick Reeves’ PA has given me over the years and to thank her formally. 

Sun shines on the Water Conservatives !

41 of us, including guests, got together at West Runton for the 'Cromer Weekend ' from Friday 13 to Sunday 15th July. It was  a difficult start for some folk as the weather was awful and there was a bad accident which closed the A11. But we all made it in time for a very jolly evening. Next day was altogether different and a cloudy start turned into a warm, sunny day. We did all sorts of things - bird watching ( during which some rare spoonbills were seen ) , rambling ,  golfing , photographing ,going on the preserved railway to Holt, and visting stately homes , Cromer , Sheringham , Holt , Norwich and of course a crabbing competition( two crabs caught, but four crab cakes eaten !).  After another splendid  meal ,we all went to the End of Pier Show in Cromer for a lovely evening and lots of laughter . And herein lies the mysterious tiltle . We had arranged to be welcomed by the compere as the Water Conservators, but he got it wrong and described us as  the Water Conservatives !!!!!!!!

Sunday was another beautiful day and we dispersed or stayed on for seal trips , more stately home visits or even the odd glass of Pimms. We all enjoyed ourselves with this mini holiday, but we thought of absent friends particularly one or two who had to pull out because of health problems. We all hope that you recover soon .

Thanks to everyone for coming , particulary those who had to drive for serveral hours each way
With a bit of luck you should find some photos on the website .

Today 11 July Lis and I went to the Port of London Challenge on the Thames . And once more our ladies streaked ahead to win . Well done .Lis joined the PV Salient at Westminster Pier and I joined our team at Temple Pier expecting to be the passenger in the cutter and ready for rain. But our Bargemaster Johnny Dwan made it plain that I was too heavy and I was not needed as a passenger !So I followed our team with the Deputy Master Barry Dennis and his Lady Jan on our Bargemaster's boat . The race was beween the Embankment and Chelsea .We all then gathered for the prizegiving and refreshments on the Salient . It was a very pleasant evening with only infrequent showers !!! Thank you girls and Johnny . I will write a fuller report for the web.

Went to the Paviors Court dinner last night( 10 July ) in Charterhouse - their new home . Lovely old building . Paviors received their Ordinances in 1479 but are still 56 in the Order of Precedence - so it shows just how old the Livery movement is  . Met some Liverymen who are interested in water  affairs and in WET 10 - so this might be worth pursuing . Excellent speeches by the Master  - Alderman and Past Lord Mayor Sir Michael Bear, and Alderman  Roger Gifford from the Musicians Company , as principal guest. A very enjoyable evening with good food - thank you .

Visit to the City of London Freeman's School 5 July

Lis and I went to our first engagement on the very day after Installation . It was a beautiful sunny afternoon in Ashstead and we went for the Headmaster and Governors' Lunch and Senior Prizegiving .We were very impressed with pupils and anyone who fears for the future should take heart from what we saw at the School . Well done to you all . There were numerous Prizes given by Livery Companies and I will be reflecting  on what we can do from the Water Conservators .

Today  July 4th was my Installation and my wife Lis and I are so proud and honoured by this .The ceremony and lunch all went smoothly . I was especially pleased that Pamela Taylor CEO of Water UK gave an inspiring after lunch speech . I really do recommend that you read it on the Worshipful Company of Water Conservators  or Water UK websites .We really do need to build our connections with the water sector and we look forward to doing more things with Water UK . Rather than repeat all my ideas and thoughts I think that it might be more efficient if I just reproduce my speech . But before I do so , can I say quite genuinely that I would not be doing this today if it had not been for a wide circle of friends in the Company . Thank you .Together we can  do some great things .

MASTERS  INSTALLATION  LUNCH SPEECH TALLOW CHANDLERS HALL JULY 4^TH 2012

Wardens,Mr Alderman Liverymen, Ladies & Gentlemen

Thank you Pamela for a most insightful speech and for your kind words.  The resonates very well with the aspirations of  our company .

I invited Pamela to speak to us today  because  one of my objectives is to strengthen the link between our company and the water industry.  I hope that you will agree with me in saying that this was a very  successful first step.

We will publish her speech on our website and other locations.  If you want to read it at your leisure  you can do so.

May I thank our Deputy Master Barry Dennis for his leadership over the past year.  I am sure that you will agree with me that he will be a hard act to follow.  His generosity in his gift of a Master’s Goblet is deeply appreciated and provides a lasting reminder of his year.  I acknowledge that Barry and his wife Jan are true water conservators having been on the River for many hours in our cutter in the Jubilee Thames Pageant.

May I now welcome the Wardens installed today , Ivor Richards who is the Thames Warden, Roger North as Fleet Warden and Peter Hall, the latest recruit to the Wardens team as Walbrook Warden.  I know that we are going to make a great team working together.  Teamwork will be one of my key objectives for the year. 

I think that water management  has much to offer the wider business and social  communities. We should not just to be good at what we do, but we should be role models. Water has always been at the heart of society and indeed our motto – without water there is no life- demonstrates this.  Never has a time felt so right, when we have the subjects of flood and drought in  people’s minds, for us to be at the forefront of society championing the virtues and benefits of water conservation.

A second objective is to draw together tradition and innovation. Creating new traditions to add to the old  if you like, and this was an underlying theme in Pamela’s speech.

A third objective is to engage with the membership to create new ways of working together and this resonates with my second objective  of teamworking. I want as many members as possible to be active in my year.  Not only  do I hope that  members of the Company will  feel satisfied by this, but  that it will act as a beacon of attraction for new members .

I will develop and elaborate on these themes at future events.  I will not be accounting to you for all of my activities on your behalf in luncheon speeches,  but in the spirit of moving forward I have taken a deep gulp and Lis and I will be using modern social media and we will  keeping a blog going through our  year – but not beyond. The address is http://masterwaterconservator.blogspot.co.uk.

We  are planning some great events this year . We have the visit to the Globe theatre in Sept. , a Carol Service on Dec 11.  But much more important,  please let me know what you would like to do and if you would like to be involved in the planning.

We will be having a great time in Cromer the weekend after next if you want to come at this   stage we will try to fit you in but we cannot guarantee it .

The retiring collection  today will be for the Hackney Carriage Drivers Disney trip – so please give generously.

The Worshipful Company of Hackney Carriage Drivers organise a trip to Disneyland Paris on a three-day trip of a lifetime for children with life threatening diseases. A convoy of over 100 London taxis, escorted by the Police, London Ambulance Service and A.A. assist throughout the trip.

They are  planning their nineteenth event to Disneyland Paris, and it is by the support of the Livery, general public and corporate sponsors that they  are able to undertake such an event. 

The families involved are unable to take holidays alone because of the children’s health.  This  support to gives them peace of mind and allows them to  enjoy a break from treatment and therapy. The drivers give their vehicles and time freely and the event is organised by unpaid volunteers.  3500 children have benefited from the trip.

You heard from Court Assistant Keith Tozzi in his welcome that we have the winner of our Company Dissertation Prize with us today.  Please can   Lucinda Gale  come forward to receive her prize for the  dissertation: 'Empowering individual carbon footprint reduction:  Development of a tool to assess the impact of lifestyle choices on carbon footprint and to personalise emission reduction alternatives” - which she submitted in fulfilment of her degree of Master of Science in Climate Change Impacts and Sustainability at Brunel University Institute for the Environment. Congratulations .May I take this opportunity to Welcome Alan Kay the MD of Costains who was admitted to the Freedom of the Company this morning.  Alan was instrumental in arranging sponsorship for the Brunel Lectures which are now one of our annual highlights in our programme.

It is an honour for me to offer congratulations to Past Master Colin Drummond for the award of an OBE in the Birthday Honours list. Unfortunately he cannot be with us today.   It is well deserved and brings credit to us all.  And whilst on the topic of congratulations please can you join with me thanking and congratulating Court Assistant Sue Paterson who did a sponsored City abseil down the Lloyds Building  recently.  However I think that in being our webmaster she found it easy to spider her way down the side of the building. 

Thank you to the Company for electing me . Lis and I are deeply honoured and we will do everything we can in our year for the Company.  Finally thank to all of you for coming today and in particular thank you to Pamela once again.

May God go with you and may we wish you all a safe journey home.  See you in Sept at the Michaelmas Court and lunch.