Transcript: Unpacking Innovation, with Peter Ptashko FRSA
Peter Ptashko FRSA talks with RP and Sam about how social innovation works from the perspective of change management specifically in different entrepreneurial settings across the world.
00:00:00 RP
Hello. I'm RP. I'm a sustainability professional involved in impact investing in social enterprises.
00:00:07 Sam
And I'm Sam, an advocate on the role of technology in the pursuit of social innovation, nation building and sustainable development.
00:00:15 RP
We’re both from the IGP's MSc Prosperity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship program.
00:00:21 Sam
And welcome to
00:00:22 RP and Sam
To prosperity and beyond.
[BREAK]
00:00:32 Sam
And we are back. It's been a minute since our last episode, and as usual, we have another amazing guest with us.
00:00:40 RP
That's right Sam! I’m absolutely excited to introduce the next guest. Suffice to say that our guest today has a stellar career in social entrepreneurship with over 10 years of experience in dealing with social enterprises globally, he has made a name of himself. Currently, he's the founder and CEO of Cambio consultancy working on Change Management with a range of clients across public and private sectors.
00:01:03 Sam
So some of the organisations he has worked with include UnLtd, which is the UK Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs where he helped secure an investment of over £10 million for universities across England and the global Social Entrepreneurship Network, where he led 60 members in over 70 countries to better support social entrepreneurs across the world. And without further ado, let's all welcome Peter Ptashko.
[BREAK]
00:01:38 RP
Social innovation often involves thinking outside the box and Peter, we'd like to ask, can you name a literary or fictional character who you think is a good example of a social innovator? I think Sam and I were throwing back and forth this question and the example we thought, well is like Robin Hood.
Like, yes, the tagline “stealing from the rich, giving to the poor” might be simplistic, but Robin Hood did have his merry men. He clearly had this like idea of bringing in more people as like the maneuver for social change and what might have been illegal then might just be creative innovation now.
00:02:25 Sam
Yeah, just a disclaimer this idea is entirely RP’s and he's just that creative so he therefore came up with this ice breaker, which I think is perfect for this episode.
00:02:34 Peter Ptashko
Absolutely. Well look first of all, thank you so much for having me on your fantastic podcast. It's a privilege to be here and to speak to your listeners. So I think is a great icebreaker. It's a particularly good icebreaker because Robin Hood is actually a myth and legend, I guess from my hometown of Nottingham. So I grew up in Nottingham, spent 20 years. That's very relevant. I'm going to pick a different example. So myself and my partner were watching a film a couple of weeks ago called the Lost King. I've been meaning to watch it for some time, and it's about Richard the 3rd. So a long forgotten 15th century King who has a bit of a bad reputation, mostly for losing a big battle and having half his head chopped off, which tends to give you a bit of a bad reputation. But actually he is undergoing a bit of rehabilitation as a social innovator because he established the modern legal system in the 15th century. So this idea of being able to get legal representation in the courts, whoever you are. And certainly if you're not simply part of the rich and powerful ruling class, actually that was a big change. He also provided a lot of support to the North of England, which is where I'm from. So I think a good example of a social innovator from a long time ago.
00:03:44 RP
Wow, that's a very good example. Setting up the legal system with literally half the head.
00:03:46 Sam
It's a historical example.
00:03:55 Peter Ptashko
I didn't realize this was going to be a comedy as well as social enterprise, but I'm loving it so far.
00:03:57 Sam
I guess now that we have that out of the way, let's start with your personal background. So you completed your bachelor's degree in politics and you have a masters in globalisation where you pursued modules on Western and East Asian politics as well as gender development. So having said all of that, how did these things influence you and your approach to change management?
00:04:26 Peter Ptashko
I think the keyword there is global because I took both the UK centred approach, but then also looked to good practice in other places. I've always been interested in in what works in other countries. As you can perhaps tell from the name on part Ukrainian. So my family is from a strong refugee background in eastern Europe and when I studied at Warwick, we studied with the very international community and certainly my Masters degree. I think I was one of only two people from the UK in a class of about 40 or so.
So the international perspective was really key. So I was looking from a very early point for lessons of what works, some of the places and how you build communities. So, interested in topics within my degree in inside the curriculum from around the world. But actually, what are those practical, tangible examples of how we can make a difference. I always drew a line between theory and practice even when I was studying because it was clear to me that knowing all the answers is one thing, if you did. But actually applying them in the real world was a whole other challenge.
00:05:27 Sam
Right, right. Yeah. And unfortunately not a lot of people have a clear understanding, right.
00:05:33 RP
No, but there some people actually are built to learn more and lead with real life examples than it is in academe.
00:05:39 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.
00:05:43 RP
And I think this moves into the next question I feel. You mentioned in another podcast that having self-awareness is quite difficult to do and you also said that you begin any consultancy job with a focus on the person slash yourself.
As someone who is partnered, father to two cats, and the CEO of your own consultancy firm, how have these roles been sort of incorporated to your sense of self? More importantly, how do you make use of the sense of self, the influence innovation across the world.
00:06:20 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, for me person centred approaches are really key. When I started out in the social enterprise sector, I was very focused on the individual entrepreneurs and the role they played. There was a lot of support. I felt out there for technical solutions to social problems.
Lots of great business coaches, lots of very talented high potential social ventures that actually there was a lot less support for the majority of people out there that were sort of interested in the topic or just trying to get started or something off the ground.
And I thought really strongly that what was missing was that focus on the self, on the individual entrepreneur and their unleashing their abilities and talents to create social change, whether that be through starting a scaling, a social venture now, or whether that be through taking those skills and experiences back into their existing business, as an intrapreneur, potentially.
I was more concerned about developing the individual than I was about building the most fantastic Unicorn or venture as the practical next step for them. I've applied that to my own personal life. You know, I have a I'm lucky to have a great family.
A couple of cats as well as a husband as well, it’s like having three cats. They'll never listen to this, so it's fine, I can say that. And you know, and it is about placing the focus on individuals that can make change and giving them the full potential to do that. I think that applies in your professional life, certainly in my work, but also in your personal life investing in people but especially people who have that potential.
The last thing I would say, there's a great sporting analogy here. I'm a big fan of sports, partly because of the meritocracy, the harder you work linked to skill that the better you tend to do. But for me, the point here is, in order to have some fantastic social enterprises, you need to have lots of people involved in entrepreneurship. The same as if you want to have the number one tennis player in the world, and Spain often have the number one tennis player in the world. They have a lot of people playing tennis.
You know, that's a baseline or we look at the line of success in the Women's World Cup, it's because there are a lot of women now and girls playing football.
So to achieve those heights, you've gotta have a lot of people involved, and that means you need a person-centred approach.
00:08:24 Sam
Right. Yeah.
00:08:26 RP
I just wanted to sort of forward this thought then. Not necessarily like as a challenge, but rather, what do you say of the people who feel that they can separate their professional and personal life that, like the self-centred approach, does not matter to them because like if they can coordinate themselves in a professional meaning and the person doesn't have to bother.
00:08:48 Peter Ptashko
I think they'd be kidding themselves. I don't think it's easy to draw a firm line between those things.
00:08:52 Sam
So they're being delusional? Delulu in the Gen Z speak
00:08:54 Peter Ptashko
I mean, I don't want to upset your listeners because some people might see this is a challenge they want to take me up on, but no, look I think in all seriousness, certainly taking my fields and my own lived experience running a business or helping other people to do that. You know you have to draw your own lines in the sand in terms of where your work life and your personal life end and begin. Think about the pandemic and we were all having, you know, 30 second commutes from our bedroom office to our living room quite often, if you were lucky enough to have that sort of set up. So it's very hard to draw those lines and they become easily blurred. It doesn't mean to say, I don't think it's important to do that, but it's hard to do.
And really, if you are sufficiently conscious of yourself and what your strengths and weaknesses are, what gives you motivation and what your passions are, it's easy to start making those decisions. But I would never say it's inherently simple. Anyone that says that it is, I think probably need to look at themselves and reflect a little bit more. It's tough, there's no easy answers there.
00:09:59 Sam
Yeah, yeah, I mean, beautifully put. And having said that, perhaps we can transition to more conversation centred around innovation. So as we all know, it has been the buzzword for the past quarter century and specifically in our programme, which is prosperity, innovation and entrepreneurship, we're taught about the different approaches to innovation: that it can be a process, it can be a product and also a mindset.
And in your work and consultancy or wherever you approach a client that comes to Cambio consultancy, which literally translates to change consultancy, what is your definition of innovation and how can we create more innovations or social innovators in the world today?
00:10:43 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, it's a really good question. It's the question that I answer or try to answer every day in a slightly different way with the clients that I work with. And first of all, I say I'm very lucky to work with UCL and both teach and supervise on this particular programme, and with many other universities. I'm a big believer that universities are a bit of a Crucible for social innovation, for change, for lots of reasons, not least the expertise and the academic excellence that takes place, but also frankly, the degree of entrepreneurs and innovators within that space. Staff, students, alumni and et cetera.
In terms of how I define or work with social innovation and my interest really is in social innovation, innovation without a kind of clear purpose that has a social attachment, is not really my bag. But I think social change has never been more needed than it is today. If you look at the scale of the social challenges and problems that we have that faces, you know? I was actually meeting with a university today, we were talking about what are those key trends emerging and they're not, it's not difficult to find them. You know, we talk about climate change. We talk about diminishing resources. We talk about generative AI. We talk about the role of the private sector and public private partnerships. You know, there are threats in the world today, but there are also real opportunities.
I think the key, if we talk about entrepreneurial mindsets and innovative mindsets, is to see the potential and opportunity in some of the most challenging environments, because that's really the only way we're going to solve some of these major problems. For me, it's loving the problem, but not being too attached to a particular solution. The more you have proximity and ideally some lived experience of that particular social problem, the more you're able to tangibly work up solutions.
But it's quite often not the first solution that you arrive at, in the world of enterprise, let's say that is the one. But if you fall in love with the problem, you're likely to get there in the end. So for me, innovation is often about falling in love with the problem but being quite agile with the solution.
00:12:39 RP
So it's like this formatting of like an agile solution definition.
00:12:45 RP
And sort of the transition that from that is like innovation then generally is concerned with improving and understanding of the status quo.
00:12:55 RP
And sort of the transition that from that is like innovation then generally is concerned with improving and understanding of the status quo. That assumes that something is lacking with the status quo, and that needs to be changed to improve for, “the better.” So in trying to innovate for prosperity or social change, are we in danger of changing something for the worse? And how do we avoid that?
I think, relevant current example and then spoiler not spoilers because..
00:13:21 Sam
It’s been out for a while.
00:13:24 RP
It's a bio-pic. So people should already know, like the innovation on the Manhattan Project or the life of Oppenheimer, where he well, in the movie, he made such a point where the point was the chase of finding out if it's possible.
And then you chase it. Then you chase it when you suddenly figure out that the innovation is no longer yours, and then all of a sudden, we've changed how we do warfare. And now everything in the world is now on a deadclock to for to the first country to launch the first nuclear weapon after the World War like how do we avoid that?
00:14:04 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, it's a really, really good question. There's a few questions in there I think I mean.
First of all, allow me to digress slightly, but I live in in north London and Camden and we live on a Victorian road, so the property we live in is a Victorian flat conversion and it was built in 1884. And I'm often asked the question especially by taxi drivers, “why is it so narrow on your road? Why? Why is it hard to drive down?” Because we have cars parked on both sides and just running for one car to go up the middle. So quite often in a situation and you have to wait a while for the car or the OR the shopping or whatever to arrive and you know it's tricky.
And I say, well, that's because the road was built before cars existed and it's built so that you have enough room to get a horse and carts going up and horse and carts coming down. I've got photographs in my apartment from around 1903 where you can see a horse and cart going up the road and people walking along the side. So a much calmer neighbourhood in those days.
So, the point I'm trying to make here is that we have to do a bit of digging sometimes to work out the way things are, the way things were made. And if I take the example of the horse well back 100 years ago, you'd think to want to travel faster. We just need a faster horse for me to train and come up with a brilliant programme. And then, of course, Henry Ford came along and we had the automobile. That's a major shift, isn't it? That's an innovation outside the box.
So innovations can come in really small tweaks. I mean, Uber is a good example. If we take the theme of transport. Yeah, it's a that's a platform. It's a marketplace. They haven't invented the taxi. They've just brought people that need transport together with forms of transport and drivers. That's a fairly small tweak, but it's has been market changing and market leading in the way it's driven innovation in that space.
But equally, there are some major innovations like, of course, the car in the 1st place that has fundamentally changed in the way in which we live our lives. So these are all major changes. If I come to the Oppenheimer film example you've used. Why I went to the cinema again actually over the weekend to watch that for the second time. I think.
00:15:54 Sam
It is a good film, right?
00:15:55 Peter Ptashko
It's a great film. Maybe this is a spoiler-alert, but I think it's absolutely favourite for the Oscars in February. But one of the key takeaways from the end of the film is where Cillian Murphy is talking to the character that or the actor that plays Einstein and he talks about, “have we created this chain reaction?” I think you're referring to, have I inadvertently back in the 1940s started the ultimate chain rection that will destroy the world by placing the power of the atomic bomb in the hands of the American government, ultimately in the world, it's interesting.
We can't always predict what our actions today will create tomorrow. The Manhattan Project is a great example of that, where it's started out as an arms race with Nazi Germany and became an arms race that we're in and still today. If you look at the conflict in Ukraine, which matters to me personally, of course, because of my background.
I think about what that delicate balance we have has it ended or war or will it ultimately create the war that will destroy humanity? It's a great question. What I love about it, though, is that ultimately it's in the hands of humanity to decide. We-make-those-decisions! And it forces us to come around the table. And so I believe that actually, I think it's prevented a lot of wars.
Yes, it presents this sort of doomsday scenario of a war to end all wars, but it also gives us the tools and the opportunity to maintain a peaceful planet. But we have to take that opportunity and we have to elect the right people, we have to make decisions as the public to hold our leaders to account.
So there's a little bit of social public policy in this as well as innovation, it's one thing to build something and innovate, but then when we place it in people's hands. What do they do with it? And for me, It's what do they do with it that really counts.
00:17:35 Sam
Right. And I like that, you know the points that you made just now actually ties well to that sense of self that you're talking about a while ago where you stressed the importance of having that agency. But at the same time, I want to probe a little bit further.
How do you think strengthening this sense of self actually makes you more relatable, or the products that you come up with more impactful in the long term because it can sound counterintuitive, right? If you focus on yourself, then you can actually come up with better products and so maybe can you articulate a little bit more on that aspect?
00:18:06 Peter Ptashko
Yeah. I mean, for me it comes down to the lived experience of personality. I mentioned a little bit about lived experience. I think your lived experience will shape the decisions that you take and you're far more likely to come with an innovation if you have genuine lived experience and proximity to the social problem or any problem than if you don't.
And if you, you know, take the example of the Oppenheimer film, there's a reason why the Manhattan Project took place in the Los Alamos, because Oppenheimer had a specific biographical experience of the place, and he combined his love of physics with his knowledge of a whole range of subject matters of language and astronomy and the physical place.
So you know your biographical story and the way in which you answer questions is not limited to your subject based knowledge. Clearly, Oppenheimer had this world leading understanding of quantum physics, but that wasn't the main reason he arrived at the atomic bomb, or indeed the solutions around that he arrived at it was the sum of the lived experience. So the personality of the individual and the strength of that personality in the will or the collection of individuals.
The Manhattan Project was no one, not just simply one person, [the personality of the individuals] will shape it. So yeah, you can't simply draw lines around a person's intellect or their wisdom potentially, or the team or the practical experience. You kind of wanna draw dotted lines between all of those things. I think that really matters. People often forget.
00:19:32 RP
And find a healthy medium?
00:19:33 Peter Ptashko
That, yeah, absolutely. What a healthy medium, but. You've got to take the whole. Yeah, you can't pick out any one element and it's very easy when you look back to do that. I think that's a mistake, yeah.
00:19:45 RP
I think well ultimately, why like the Manhattan Project is a social innovation is because it wasn't just Oppenheimer's work. Yeah, he didn't do the Nobel Prize because there wasn't, like, a patent he created for it. But ultimately, bringing together all of the brightest minds in physics and then sort of creating this project. It is a great example for social innovation.
00:20:13 Sam
With disruptive effects.
00:20:17 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, of course. I mean, look, there are two sides to that and I don't want this to feel as if it's a long plug for the Oppenheimer film. But I mean what I would say to have a bit of counterbalance is that of course the other major film released at the same time was Greta Gerwig's Barbie, which in many ways is perhaps seen as an antithetical opposite. But in fact actually there's some really interesting similarities there. If you've watched it as I have, also twice. Because I'm equally fascinated in in a very different way.
Spoiler-alert warning, maybe as well. But the underlying issues there around gender and how men and women work together in society. What I like about it is that it's rightly talks about the role of women in society and what Barbie has or hasn't done in a sort of quite slightly satirical way.
But it also talks about the fact that the only way we're gonna move forward is together. And responding to, you know, male insecurity, but also the role of women and men in a modern society, is the challenge for all of us tomorrow. So I quite like that as a takeaway and that is an answer to the modern world to take on, I think quite often, polarised opposites, where we see innovation through the lens of either something really powerful and really positive, or something really negative, whereas in fact a lot of truth is somewhere in the middle.
We're losing the ability to really be able to understand that. University is one of the few places still where you can really unpick grey areas. In the wider world, it's all about polarised opposites. I think that's a real shame and a real mistake.
00:21:45 Sam
Yeah. And on that note, perhaps we can take a quick break before we continue this interesting conversation.
00:21:54 RP
Before it becomes about a Barbie and Oppenheimer film podcast.
[BREAK]
00:21:59 Sam
And we are back. So right now, perhaps we can discuss the significance of a bottom-up approach. In an interview, you are quoted to say, “You don't get change from the top. It comes from the bottom. If you wait for governments and politicians to change, you're going to wait a long time.”
So, do you still believe in this statement and why do you think top-bottom change doesn't work even if that's the prevailing system that we have right now? And how can we innovate this?
00:22:30 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I, I spend a lot of time in my day job in enterprise innovation change, but I also do a bit of working around politics as well. The politics of social change, some of the biggest changes in society have come through a desire for change from the population as a whole, not just you know, politicians or leaders of different varieties. We just look back to the foundation of the NHS, the National Health Service in the UK. That came from a desire to have free it at the point of access healthcare, which was a really revolutionary concept. It's pretty revolutionary today. There aren't many systems that would copy that, you know, six years later or so, that's still or more, it's still going strong.
So I think innovations like that do come from a groundswell of public opinion and a desire for change that politicians often then follow through with. So bottom approach really matters, and I think entrepreneurs are well placed to deliver that. Innovators is well placed to deliver that simply because you know they work with raw materials, they have the proximity we talked about lived experience and they’re, you know, resilient, they fight for resource.
They're able to demonstrate impact and then potentially even scale that a bit. You can at that point often get politicians or leaders coming in and saying, “Well, actually, you know, I've seen that innovation. We want to help, we want to help scale that we want to provide a policy perspective. We want to give that regional reach or investment.”
So you know, I mean there is a value in politicians. I don't want to be sort of pigeonholed there, but I do think a lot of the leg work and the hard work goes before that and it's powered by entrepreneurs and innovators first and foremost.
00:24:15 Sam
Right. You mentioned something about the availability of resources and I just want to pick your brain a little. If you think that availability or scarcity for that reason, actually affects an innovator's propensity to be more creative. So in your experience, if this person comes from a very, let's say, not so privileged background is that person a little bit more creative than somebody who has all of the resources available to him or her?
00:24:43 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, I do think there's a role for scarcity to play in terms of resource, in terms of access to ideas and quite often in the research and the sort of people that I work with, we see individuals that have had, you know, disadvantage in growing up and realising potential and haven't had access to the resource but have some inherent talent, and again proximity to the problem, that enables them in combination to come up with really interesting innovative solutions.
It just seems to happen time and again. So in the research, sometimes they refer to as a talented disadvantage, perhaps slightly unkindly. But the idea is, you know, you've got a passion to make some change. There might be a scarcity of resource, but you know you're driven on and that seems to work more effectively and more efficiently than somebody that has, you know, potentially all the resources in front of you. It isn't driven by passion and motivation.
This is a kind of link here with some of Simon Sinnek’s work around purpose and you know, starting with “Why” this idea of you know, he often uses the example of the Wright brothers and you know how is it possible that these individuals could figure out manpower flight when they had no access to college education or resources?
But they had the passion and the will and they and they drew connections between the sort of organic ecological world and machinery. It was the individuals and society who were given all the money and the and the kudos and were followed by media companies that ultimately weren't able to follow through and didn't get that first because they weren't really driven by that desire and that passion, the purpose to make a change. And I think that applies, of course, in social change.
I think it also applies in innovation that is, perhaps more, typically for profit. I don't, what I would say, I don't lump people into either the social change category or the for profit category. Reasons for innovation go beyond money and purpose. But I do think you need to have purpose and be driven by something that's more than just yourself. I think to make a real change it has to be more than just you in there.
00:26:51 RP
Yeah. So we can channel through like social entrepreneurship and then with social innovation, the Institute for Global Prosperity creates cohorts, the champion prosperity in different parts of the globe. As someone has experience in advocating for social entrepreneurship, given your experience of work at GlobalSen, what brings some of the challenges of social innovation you observe across the world?
00:27:17 Peter Ptashko
Yeah, I was looking at to be the executive director of the Global Social Entrepreneurship Network (Global SEN) for a couple of years. That was pre pandemic really.
You know when travelling around the world and holding events in big centres and conferences was something we could do in for a while then we couldn't. One of the challenges is that challenge of bringing people together, under one roof, or with the technology to enable real integration and conversation.
That is a physical challenge, but it's also getting people on the same page challenge in terms of creating a conversation that's rich enough with the right people in the room to make change. That's increasingly difficult to do, especially within this sort of polarised world that we've talked about already. It's harder and harder to bring people together that maybe think differently.
They don't want to be in the same room together, and they go from office, sometimes an intellectual disagreement to a one that can become quite personal quite quickly now I find, and I think that's a real shame.
That clash of ideas and difference of background and lived experience is really critical to creating solutions. So one of my challenges is always, “how can I create platforms for others to come together and have a conversation?”
You know, I'd host events, panel conversations, travel from country to country with the express purpose of learning them. So sharing, learning and bringing partners and players together that that needed to be in the same room.
What I'd find as investors, entrepreneurs, policymakers, the media were often hanging out in different locations without the strong enough connection between them. There weren't enough opportunities for them to engage with each other, and that's where the magic happens. Number one for me was about how do you draw those connections together.
But I think number 2 is, you know there is a large amount of resource out there. There's a lot of money for social change, but it is in the hands of a relatively small number of individuals, pension funds, investment impact, investment funds. So it's about actually showcasing demonstrable innovations and individuals that and scale those approaches. It's this idea of a missing middle. I spent a lot of my time talking about this idea, “where are those scalable solutions that we can feed through a pipeline to access this resource?”
The money is there that you have to be able to demonstrate the impact and scale it. So we're still trying to find those scalable solutions and innovations, but they are out there and a big part of our work is trying to find them and make some of those connections. Then and now.
00:29:53 RP
Do you find that these problems are parallel across these countries, or are you citing specific instances?
00:30:00 Peter Ptashko
I think there are global problems which have particular ways of formulating themselves in a geography. So I I see the same challenges over and over again in a slightly different geography and presented in a slightly different way. And again the local solutions are the solutions we should be looking to, but sometimes there is obviously a resource and then lessons learned in other places that can be applied. And that's when the magic happens. When you apply the proximity in the lived experience to the expertise and the sort of “been there and bought the T-shirt” approach that others will have.
If you bring that all together in one place, that's when you create the really powerful innovation, in my view. But quite often those two things are separate. So you've got the entrepreneur, the innovator, that have got their local experience, that kind of know the answer, but they just to have the resource or the playbook. So how do we unite those things?
00:30:53 Sam
Yeah, I mean we've discussed a lot of points already and we've covered a lot of topics and you sort of like hinted about the scalability of social innovations and of course I guess in conjunction with that, we have to look at if it will stick right? So in order for it to really stick in a specific context. It needs to be designed with the ecosystem and local circumstances in mind, because otherwise it will just be irrelevant. So given this, were there any similarities or differences that you notice when you work with different contexts as well as when you engage with these diverse range of clients across countries? And if you did notice these patterns, what do you think this reflects for the future of social innovation?
00:31:40 Peter Ptashko
Hmm. Yeah, great question. So ecosystem management and kind of building platforms is kind of what I do. I've done it for other people and in the previous employed roles I've taken and then my own consultancy practise. All my work is really about building platforms, partnering to amplify impact.
I'm one person with a small team, you know, partners, freelancers, but ultimately the way we're gonna scale this solution is not by having big organisations with lots of people working for them. It's actually about building bridges between walks of life, countries, places. I mean the commonality here is that we're all people. And people, when they speak different languages have different lived experiences, will have humanity in common so that that core humanity.
That's why conversations bring people together in a physical place is just as important as it always was. You know, this concept, this idea. You can run a brilliant international conference and I've, you know, I've been involved in a few of those, whether due to my own work or others.
But the reality is it's the networking and the conversation that takes place around those topics and conversations that that really matter. The expertise is important, but you bring that in the room and panels and keynote addresses are just the first starting point. They're not the end or the be all and end all if you like, of the purpose of these events.
What happens when you bring people together over a glass of something alcoholic or otherwise. That's, I think, where we see potential solutions and partnerships or the nascency of them evolve and emerge. So I think that is key.
I think fundamentally people have passions and things they care about and you know, very often people focused, “can we harness those passions? Can we keep those passions going and moving overtime.” Because it's very easy for cynicism to come in, especially in the modern world where we know there are so many challenges.
It's easy to become, you know when we fall in love with the problem, it's easy to become cynical of it as well. And is it possible to solve? Climate change being the prime example of that?
But you've got to remain passionate and engaged and driven to solution. I have no problem with cynicism if it can be fuelled into resiliency and actually creating solutions. It's worth cynicism for the sake of it and where it creates a lack of progress.
Can we create that sort of passion and resiliency to make change? And I think that's something we all have in common. We may care about different people in different communities, and there is some division there, but ultimately there's a lot of people and humanity focused issues we really care about that we could bring together and could do more to do that. I think.
Finding the commonality in focusing a bit less on the division.
00:34:19 RP
Well, not so many things to ask for future social innovation and for future innovators? [Sarcasm]
But honestly, I think it's really relevant to like, even in the journey, even a personal journey to find something that you can be attached to or passionate about something.
Not to sort of grandstand thing, but it's sort of like the meaning of life where like you find something that you're in love with or either doing or solving. Yeah, that you push it forward and you bring in more people, more resources into sort of this trajectory.
So in closing, as we draw close to this lovely podcast cast. thank you for again thank you for participating. We'd like to ask.
We are not the first, nor are we the last innovators in this world. And with today's ever changing landscape, what's a timeless piece of advice you want aspiring innovators to know?
00:35:21 Peter Ptashko
Hmm, timeless piece of advice. I always want to be a bit careful when you give out these one liners, they come back to haunt you.
00:35:29 Sam
In the future, like, why did you say this?
00:35:35 RP
Hopefully not very, “like build your roads narrower.”
00:35:41 Sam
Or build the wall!
00:35:45 Peter Ptashko
You know, again, I think it's safer story to speak from my own lived experience here. I talk a lot about life experience as you know, a big believer in that.
Is to say actually, “Build the partnerships and the platforms that you would be proud of that create the solutions that you can stand behind.” I spend a lot of my time in my own work building platforms for other people. I don't have a specific sector or a specific issue that I am most passionate about. I'm passionate about a lot of issues, but what I try and do is create platforms and partnerships for others to champion those issues.
And through their impact I create impact. The more impact that people and the organisations that I work with have, the more impact I have. So their success is my success. I think that kind of partnership approach is key.
So build platforms and partnerships that you can be proud of. And I think if you can do that, you can scale that, and your lived experience should really matter. Rather nobody is you. So if you can be the best you, you can be. That's pretty unique. It should be pretty special. That's what the most successful people do. They build their own brand and they build success being the best that they can be.
Of course, a bit of luck, a bit of skill on the way does help, but that that unique lived experience is absolutely critical.
00:37:05 Sam
Right. Yeah. I couldn't think of a better ending. Yeah.
00:37:09 Peter Ptashko
No, it's my real pleasure to be with you. And I wish you and your listeners all the best.
I hope this has been interesting for you and something you'll take away whether you're exercising, eating dinner right now or doing something completely different, it might give a different spin to your next spin.
00:37:13 RP
Building the next nuclear bomb
00:37:19 Sam
Definitely for sure…. No no no… Let's stop with the barbenheimer references. It has to end. Thank you so much again Peter, for having us and we hope that you had a lovely time as well.
00:37:34 Peter Ptashko
Thank you. I did.