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.