Innovation Unleashed: Heidi Mottram's Journey and the Impact of Northumbrian Water's Festival

[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15 minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, educate, and inform other water sector leaders from across the globe. My name is Piers Clark and today my guest is Heidi Mottram, Chief Executive at Northumbrian Water, and we're going to talk about the Innovation Festival.

Heidi, wonderful to have you with me. Thank you for taking the time.

[00:00:26] Heidi Mottram: Oh, great to be here, Piers.

[00:00:29] Piers Clark: Now, um, we like to start by understanding a little bit about your background and you're different to most chief executives in that, um, you had a career outside the water sector before you joined us, uh, dealing with trains, I believe, is that correct?

[00:00:45] Heidi Mottram: That's absolutely right. Yes. Um, before I came to Northumbrian Water in 2010, I'd worked, um, for the railway industry for, for nearly 25 years. So, um, uh, and my last job, There was his managing director of Northern Rail, which is a very large railway franchise, um, operating around about two and a half thousand trains a day.

So this was quite a change, but a very good change, I think.

[00:01:11] Piers Clark: And you joined the water sector. It makes it sound like you've, uh, you've only just come to the water sector, but actually you've been, you've been in the role for over 10 years.

[00:01:20] Heidi Mottram: Yes. And, and, and, and that in some respects is a little bit of a surprise and everything to do with how passionate I feel about it.

Um, when, when I joined, I think I was the first female UK and now there are many, so I'm delighted about that. I think we have got a very diverse group of. of leaders. Um, and now I feel a little bit like, you know, one of the old hands and that feels odd, very odd. Well, let's talk a bit about what Northumbrian water is.

[00:01:50] Piers Clark: Can you just explain who you serve, where you, the geography you cover and the activities you do?

[00:01:56] Heidi Mottram: Of course. So, um, for those people not familiar with the UK, um, obviously our system here is, is privatized and we are one of the big regional privatized water and wastewater companies. The country was split up largely regionally, largely in, in common sense areas related to water catchments and, and cities and towns associated with them.

So we operate in the Northeast of England. Um, and, but unusually, um, and it's a slightly, uh, a quirky factor of UK water, there are also companies that only supply water. Um, they're largely in the south of England, not exclusively. And we operate two of those, Essex Water and Suffolk Water, which we operate together as Essex and Suffolk Water.

So across those two areas, we serve around about four and a half million people. million customers, around two thirds of which are in the North East, getting water and wastewater services from us. And around a third are in the South East of England, and they get water only services from us.

[00:02:59] Piers Clark: Excellent.

Thank you. Now, the purpose of this podcast is to talk about the Innovation Festival, something that Northumbrian Water started, pioneered, I'd like to say, um, five or six years ago. Uh, can you tell me what is the Innovation Festival?

[00:03:15] Heidi Mottram: Okay, so it's a little bit longer than that now, Piers. It's 2017. Um, so, uh, And I'm just, yeah, I'm so delighted with how it's gone.

So it's provenance was really that we were, um, always in Northumbrian water pushing, pushing, pushing to find the best ideas, the newest ideas. There's lots of challenges facing water, um, systems around the world. What could we learn from other people? Um, how could we challenge our thinking? So innovation, if you like, was in our DNA.

We, uh, we made it everybody's business. We'd have an innovation department. It was everybody's business. And we were thinking about how to give that a bit of an accelerator really. Um, and the story goes, and it's become a little bit, uh, famous in a way that myself and our, uh, CIO, um, we're in a taxi going to the staff Christmas party and chatting about all of this.

And what could we do? How could we make it even bigger, even better, put more energy behind it? And Nigel Watson, who's our CIO, said, What we'll do, we'll mash together everything that we're already doing with all our amazing partners that we work with, with, with something that I love passionately, and he does, um, a British summer festival.

So it's going to be like innovation and Glastonbury altogether. And of course I thought that was a bit wacky, um, and a bit mad, but I could absolutely see the genius of it because when we're in, places where we're doing music or culture. We're at our most creative, um, and that was going to help us really take innovation on, but we needed a kind of serious element to it.

So the innovation festival was born. It is literally like for any of you who hasn't been to it, like a British summer festival. We have music, we have street food, we have Ted talks. We have all sorts going on, but there's serious work done using sprints and hackathons and all the tools that we all use in our working lives.

But in an amazing atmosphere where people are having fun, uh, their brains are free and people literally now come from around the world. Um, and it's spawned some children as well. We could talk about that, but yeah. And

[00:05:27] Piers Clark: I think the key thing there is it's, it's multi day. It's a whole week that you set aside off site.

And people operating in different, um, different tents, as it were, uh, picking off different topics. It's a hugely encouraging and exciting to be part of.

[00:05:47] Heidi Mottram: Yes. So the first one we had six sprints. And I think about four hackathons, something like that. Um, and in the last one that we ran this July, we literally had 50 sprints.

Um, and I think about 10 or 11 hackathons. And then the, another amazing thing that we now do is we run alongside the festival, a festival for young people who want to make careers in STEM industries. And we had. Um, on site and online a thousand school children interested in this work and that's our future.

Um, so that's a another sort of parallel amazing thing that's going on with the festival.

[00:06:28] Piers Clark: Brilliant. Now you've been doing this for like say seven years. Um, let's, Pick off a couple of successes, some of the things that have come through the Innovation Festival, been nurtured through the Festival, that are now making an impact in the, either in Northumbrian water or across the water sector.

[00:06:46] Heidi Mottram: Well, because there are so many ideas and it creates a literally a multi million pound pipeline of ideas, that's really quite tricky, but a few come to mind. I think the one that, I often think is the the real poster child is, um, is we made a map of what was underground. Now, many people who work in utilities will know that this is a real conundrum because utility companies hold their own maps, predominantly digital these days, GIS related systems, but sometimes still in paper.

Um, but we weren't very good at sharing them. Um, for a whole series of legal reasons or technical reasons. So, um, back actually in, in the first festival, we got, we got in the tent 50 or 60 people from different utilities, including the lawyers. And we said, we're going to have to do something about this. Uh, we also have the nation's map makers, the Ordnance Survey.

And we cracked it. Um, and the way it was done was, was by creating a tool that could access everybody's data and make a map out of it for the purposes of, of doing the work. But once the work was done, It disappears like Snapchat. Um, and so that made people comfortable that their, uh, systems were not visible to potentially to competitors or to other people.

So that was incredible. And we, we did a map of the, a little bit of the race course where the festival is done in 2017. Then we did a map of Sunderland. Then we did a map of the Northeast and then we gave it to the government and they've done, they've created now the map of the whole of the UK and everybody's beginning to use it.

And I feel incredibly proud. About that we calculated it would have about a 1. 5 billion benefit to our economy

[00:08:26] Piers Clark: Absolutely. And you should be rightly proud of it. I mean, I've actually been to an event at the Houses of Parliament here in the UK where it was talked about, and it is pan sector. This is across the whole of the UK.

And it's not just water company assets. It's gas, it's electricity, it's telecoms. It's just phenomenal. And it is. I was hoping you were going to use that as the poster child of your example, because it is absolutely spectacular. And a perfect example of how collaboration and innovation works. worked brilliantly.

Um, all right, what about the even better if? Is there anything that you look back at now and think, God, if only we'd done that, um, that would have been better?

[00:09:04] Heidi Mottram: Well, I have to say I'm sort of laughing a bit to myself, Piers, because every year when we do this, things happen that we didn't even know were going to happen.

So it has a sort of slightly uncontrolled element. to it, which is, which is of course exactly what you want for a festival like this. So normally when I turn up at the beginning of the week and ask people what's going on, um, particularly Nigel, he'll shrug his shoulders and go, I'm not absolutely certain.

So when you ask me, you know, what could it do? I think the people and the collaborators, of which there are roughly around 3000, um, every year, and I think about 33 countries now, They're the people who are going, I know what we need to do next. Not necessarily Northumbrian water anyway, anymore. Um, we were a sort of facilitator and guide, but the thing has an energy.

Of its own what we do try and do though is to say what are the problems that are facing all of us What are the big issues of the day and make sure that we have got our work focused on them And I think we're very good at that. So when you ask me what next, I think, well, it might be some of our ideas, but it's likely to be a whole load of other people's ideas too.

[00:10:10] Piers Clark: Yes, I think it's probably worth acknowledging here that, uh, off the back of the success of the Northumbrian Water Festival, it's been picked up and a festival's been held at Sydney Water, I think a couple of times, actually.

[00:10:23] Heidi Mottram: That's right. And I think there's talk of one in, there has been talk of one in America.

[00:10:29] Piers Clark: Brilliant. It's exactly what we want. Spread the love, spread the learning. And, uh, and this, um, is, uh, spin offs, yeah. Sorry, I lost you very briefly there, Heidi, but I think you've come back. Um, so, uh, let's talk about what we've got.

Do you, how much longer do you think you'll run them inside Northumbria? And is this something that you'll keep doing year on year?

[00:10:54] Heidi Mottram: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, why would we not? Okay. I think it's certainly become the UK's water sector plus festival. It's become a festival for technology companies, huge global technology companies.

Um, you know, your Amazons, your NVIDIA's, your Cognizant's, your, uh, Microsoft's, I could name hundreds, you know, are getting something out of this. So we're. We are a host now, um, of something that other people need and want. So absolutely this will this will carry on for for whilst ever that need is is there.

[00:11:32] Piers Clark: Yes, well, the challenges we face in the water sector, I fancy we're going to need innovation festivals for many years to come. It is also worth noting that even though you're working in a privatized water sector here in the UK, the innovation festivals you run, from the first time you set them, you have made open and available to all of the other, privatized water companies in the UK, and I believe pretty much everybody comes along and gets, gets involved.

[00:12:01] Heidi Mottram: Um, absolutely. The philosophy of this is, is open innovation, open data. And right from the get go, I would have actually said that most of the water companies, um, participated. Everybody's in. And as I said, loads of other companies that are a bit, sometimes a bit tangential to water as well.

[00:12:20] Piers Clark: Wonderful. Thank you. Apologies to anyone listening that we just lost a couple of seconds there.

Heidi's actually in our hotel room, so she's dialed in and is working on hotel Wi Fi. Heidi, let's come to the final question which, um, we like to finish this, uh, these broadcasts with a bit of reflection, uh, and it's the question of what is the best advice you've ever been given, either by your parents or by a friend, or in fact one way to think of it is what's the advice that you would give you.

A young Heidi Mottram starting out her career. Would you have said, Stay with trains, Heidi. Stay with trains.

[00:12:55] Heidi Mottram: I listen, I love trains. I still love trains. Um, and, but I love water too. Um, I, I love giving services that make a, make a difference to millions and millions of people. That really matters to me. Um, and so I think, can I, can I have two, um, my one's, my dad and, and one is something through work, my dad.

Um, hard working Yorkshireman always said, Heidi, if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well. And I think lots of people have probably heard a similar sentiment, but I give everything my all, and some, because of my dad. He was a grafter, and I'm a grafter. And then I think the other thing, which came through the inspiration of two particular people early in my career, which is the the power of people and one of the things I say to people is that people work for people they think they work for organizations but really they're motivated and inspired either by their boss or their colleagues around them to to make a difference and to do more with that way we're driven by our connections And so I've always felt that I personally needed to be worth working for.

Um, and I love being with people because together we're the thing that makes the difference.

[00:14:12] Piers Clark: That is a fantastic message and every leader in any organization should be thinking about how do I make it that I'm worth, I'm worth being your leader. That's such a good message. Thank you, Heidi. Thank you so much for your time.

You have been listening to the Executive Exchange with Piers Clark. I've been talking to Heidi Mottram, the Chief Executive of Northumbrian Water, about the fantastic Innovation Festival programme that they've been running. Thank you very much. Please join us next time. Goodbye.