Carmel McConnell MBE launched Magic Breakfast, providing breakfasts to schools, after learning that pupils near her City of London office were going hungry. She has also written a book about practical steps to drive social change, called Change Activist.

Phil’s conversation with Carmel is a must-listen for anyone looking to place social impact at the heart of their consultancy business.

Find and support Carmel’s Magic Breakfast initiative here, and get her book Change Activist: Make Big Things Happen here.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Phil Lewis: Hello, welcome to The Consultancy Business podcast with me, Phil Lewis. We are here to help independent consultants build the consultancies that nobody else can and champion ethics and excellence in independent consultancy. If you’re a regular listener to our podcast, you will notice that we have new opening music. Our brilliant producers have been beavering away behind the scenes, creating something that feels a little bit more in keeping with the kind of vibe that we are trying to put out as a podcast, so less awkward rock and well, oddly more UK garage, which I hadn’t quite expected when we started the process, but we are where we are. So this month we have a bit of a treat for you. We’re going to introduce you to a guest called Carmel McConnell.

[00:01:05] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Anyone who’s going after the money first is an absolute bloody cowboy. Doesn’t matter what size or scale they are. If you want to be a consultant, it’s because you want to exchange your knowledge and support, as an advisor, to help some organisation move forward. And we’ve seen what short term money grabbing has done to the planet and to people.

[00:01:33] Phil Lewis: Carmel is somebody I have known for quite some years now, actually. And she has been an inspiration and a mentor to me over that time. If you are interested in building a consultancy, which has got really good values at its heart, or a consultancy which is trying to do good in the world. Carmel has inspiration, insight and provocation in spades in this conversation, and I think you’ll get a lot out of it. I certainly did talking to her. So I’m going to get straight into it with her now. I give to you, Carmel McConnell. Carmel, welcome to the podcast.

[00:02:14] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Thank you very much for having me, Phil.

[00:02:15] Phil Lewis: So I thought it’d be lovely just to start with a bit of backstory, actually. How did you end up starting Magic Breakfast? How did you end up becoming a change activist? How do you end up doing the work that you do?

[00:02:26] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: I’ve always been someone who’s interested in the impact of social activism, and also a bit cheesed off about things that are going badly wrong like the person up the road to me when I was living in Leeds being deported for no reason even though she’d been a nurse for 10 years but something had gone wrong with her visa and she had a young son so I got involved in anti-deportation stuff and I have been lucky really to kind of merge two separate careers. One is a corporate career where I trained as a technologist, masters in broadband and also, keeping that spirit of social activism. And what was an interesting thing with the Venn diagram was, how do you build organisations that actually generate trust? And how do you, as a social activist, keep going on the social activism while earning some money? Because, strangely enough, no one pays you to be an environmentalist trying to stop the sewage going into the water. No one pays you to be a feminist trying to make sure that women get equal pay in the department in BT where you work. No one pays you. So you have to kind of, if you’re a social activist who genuinely would like the planet to go on for a bit longer and genuinely would like people to be treated fairly, you also need to find a way to pay the bills. And so my combination really has been a mixture of social activism, full-on social activism, and also a great love of how you build great businesses and how you support people in organisations. And so those are the two things. I ended up, after I was working in BT, putting together a consultancy that was looking at the value side of leadership. How do you really deliver great performance, really make a difference in your organisation in a way that puts people first and also really thinks about the planet. And while I was running that consultancy and doing big change programs in the City, I was asked to do some pitching for a book. People said, Oh, that’s quite interesting. You’re sort of a corporate activist, aren’t you? Would you like to write about that? And I said, yeah, yeah. While I was doing the research for that book, Change Activist, as it became, I went out to do some interviews because I was running a big change programme in the city. It was mostly technology, but we were trying to find a way to do it in a way that was going to not cost too much carbon and not do too much damage in terms of people’s wellbeing, mental health, family life along the way. And that’s quite a hard challenge when you’re doing a big delivery project. I went out and I had a few different afternoons away from my desk talking to people I didn’t normally talk to. I spoke to a group of five head teachers in Hackney, in East London, and I was asking them; the work that we’re doing in terms of my company and our support for you — is it helping at all? Do you think that as a whole, we’re on our way to creating a fairer as well as a richer society? And all those head teachers told me that every one of them had to bring in food just to be able to teach that day. Every single head teacher said, yep, so many of the children that we teach come in from homes without food. They haven’t got enough nourishment in them to be able to concentrate. So we bring in bananas, or a few Digestives, or whatever it is, and we just give it out at the start of the class because otherwise we couldn’t teach. So there’s me expecting to come along and have a nice chat about, you know, kind of, oh yes, you know, the philanthropy from the city is really helping and we’re making a big difference. And what I heard was children are in the bins in Tesco, in Hackney, which is 20 minutes walk away from my office in the city, that there were families who have such low income and such high bills that the only thing that they could, reign back on was the food bill. So they were just running out of food money on a Monday or Tuesday. And having to get through till Friday on very little. Parents were missing meals in order to feed their children. And my question, when I think back about it, it was so naive because I said to the head teachers; well, you know, the food isn’t that expensive. Why aren’t the parents feeding them? You know, come on. Why aren’t the parents feeding them? Why are you, why are you bringing in Digestives? And they all looked around and they just said, yeah, you know, fair point, Carmel, but sort of so many of our parents are hungry themselves. And it was one of those moments Phil where you kind of think I have, I had no idea this was happening. And this is London and this is a rich economy and a caring economy. Lots of people would be shocked. And I was shocked. And I said, I don’t know anything about… I don’t know anything about education, really. I’m a technologist. I’m a change person, but I’m also a bit of an activist. So if I could just maybe help in one small way, I’ll drop off food to your schools on a Saturday morning. I’ll drop them off. I’ll go to Tesco in Morning Lane and I’ll drop them off with your caretaker. Oh yeah, that’d be great. That’d be great. So I did that. Next week, I had another five schools saying, oh, you’re the lady dropping off breakfasts. And two weeks went by and I asked them, could we measure any of the impact of this being a bit geeky? I just said, look, is there anything, any way that we can tell whether this is helping or not? And they said, well, okay, let’s measure the amount of fights in the first lesson. Cause the kids are hangry when they come in. And let’s measure something like punctuality. And we had such incredible changes just after a couple of weeks of delivering some porridge, some bagels, some milk to those schools so that they could get something out to the kids, just put it out at the start of the school day. It seemed to me… I was writing about values and I was absolutely shocked to the core at the level of hunger in schools in England. And so I dropped what I was doing, had a chat to my partner, Catherine, and we, after a few conversations agreed that we should take out a big loan and I should take a sabbatical from my business. And that I try and find the right person to do this work, to deliver school breakfasts because the kids had a lunch, but there was absolutely nothing for them in the morning. And the most important lessons were taught in the morning. The teachers were telling us, the most important lessons are taught in the morning, the little ones we let them sleep, because they often come in so upset and so hungry, and then they’ll get through to lunch, but they’ll have missed maths and English by then. So that’s roughly how I started it, and I will tell you more about how it came to grow, but that shock of learning about children arriving at school too hungry to learn was and is a a seismic feeling in my life.

[00:08:56] Phil Lewis: One of the things that’s really interesting, listening to your story is clearly the idea of social change, and the idea of being values driven in what you do and how you do it, has been central to your career, you know, before Magic Breakfast. But then there was this kind of catalysing moment of learning this about these kids and the school environments and everything else. And since then, you’ve gone on and published, I think we’re on edition four now, aren’t we, of Change Activist. So before we dive into a couple of the themes of that in more detail, and I want to talk to you today about a couple of different takes on change activism through the lens of consultancy. Before we get into that, I just love to get into what is a definition of change activism? What does that phrase mean? And how does it show up in the world?

[00:09:45] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: I wanted, of all my life, I’ve wanted to learn from people who’ve been there, done it, and I downloaded the stories of over 200 social activists, ranging from, you know, kind of Gandhi, Mandela, Rosa Parks, more recently Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, loads of people I knew in the neighbourhood who are not famous, but had done incredible things, set up food banks, set up all sorts of community initiatives. I downloaded… and I wanted to find out what is it? What’s that magic in the lives of these people that I can learn from? I would love to be a bit braver. I am the weakest link in almost every environment I find myself. I am a woman who’s lost her keys consistently for 20 years. So I’m, I’m trying to learn. I mean, like how on earth did Mandela go from Robbins Island to building South Africa… we can discuss what’s happening in South Africa right now. But that moment of change… how did Gandhi manage to give India its freedom in a nonviolent way? How did that happen? And what I did, I found that there were just three common attributes. And it was about the passion, the real passion for a wrong that had to be righted, something that you could not ignore, came from the heart. Second, that led to purpose. And third, that led to a plan. And my definition of a change activist is simply based on that someone who takes action in line with their values, even when that’s outside the comfort zone. So a change activist is someone who says, I am scared to bits about this, but it is absolutely what I care about and I’m going to take a baby step. I’m going to do something and I’m going to try. The fear that we feel when we’re trying to move something forward that we really believe in is kind of a good indicator that you’re on the right path. If it’s just like a breeze, it’s probably not outside your comfort zone. So that’s my definition.

[00:11:35] Phil Lewis: I like it. If we think about the world of consultancy, one looks at the world of consultancy, you talk to a lot of consultants, and you talk to a lot of people who buy consultancy, and I’m always reminded of the classic Stuart Lee skit about the values of the Carphone Warehouse, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. It was the Celebrity Big Brother Racism Scandal, you may remember that from a few years ago, and they put out this statement saying this behaviour is completely at odds with the values of the Carphone Warehouse. And he sort of quite brilliantly takes it to task and goes, the values of the Carphone Warehouse are sell more phones, sell more phones and sell more phones. And does it in a far more humourous way than I’m doing it. But I think there’s something true about that in terms of the general perception of consultants that basically… what consultants value first and foremost is cash, you know, at all costs in some cases. But listening to your definition of change activism, you know, it really connects me to what I see day to day in my work, working with a load of consultants, which actually… there are people out there who do have huge passion to try and help other businesses, do have huge passion to help make the business world better and to help actually do things outside of business as consultants that also improve the lot for everybody. And that they will take action in line with their values, and it seems to me that there are fundamentally two ways that consultants can be change activists. One is to help other organisations perhaps walk as they talk it, take action in line with their own values, whatever you’d say. And the second thing a consultant can do is actually build a consulting organisation that itself actually represents the change that that individual is looking for in the world. I’d love your take on that. You know, do you think consultants can become change activists? Do you think that that dual definition of the role that consultants can play in a change activist context is a sensible and plausible one?

[00:13:36] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Yeah. I mean, I think a consultant by definition is going to be a change activist because otherwise it’s, you know, you’re kind of… to set up and to say, I have something that is going to be useful to support anyone, anywhere, I’m going to advise you on strategies that will make things better for you, means that you’re going to be outside of your comfort zone because you can’t as a consultant know what that future is going to be. You have to come up with options. You have to come up with a genuine alignment with what that organisation needs and really put yourself into their shoes and help them. I mean, it’s kind of one of the most important things, I think. One of the phrases that I’ve used a lot with working as a consultant is ‘the difference that we make is the action we take’, you know. If we’re going to say we are really going to make a difference on something like gender equity. And the way that we’re going to do that is that we’re going to audit the women and find out how many women are really cheesed off about it. Then we’re going to publish those results. That’s the way forward. And I’m like, well, I don’t think so. I think paying the women who are doing similar work the same pay would be better. And actually finding out what your gender pay gap is and making it zero, or making women a little bit more equal in this, in the scheme of things would be the way forward. Action, action, action, action. I mean, I have so many people I know who say, well, I was terrified. You said to me, just, you know, just present the facts to those people and say to them, this is the problem that we need to solve. And they’re saying, I can’t say that. That’s going to be too tough. It’s going to be too hard. The truth will set us free, you know, so I want every consultant to first of all be coming from their values, to be coming from the heart. I don’t think consultancy is an entirely intellectual sport, you know, I think it is about wanting to make things better. Most consultants I know are doing it because of a mixture of the professional pride, the growth that it brings, and also because they care. And if you come from where you care, and you line up that with what your client cares about, and you line that up with what society needs the three of you to care about, then you’ve got a fantastic alignment. And like working with organisations. What do you care most about? What’s the number one thing you want to get right here? What is it? What do you care about? And people say, and I’ve heard some people say, I don’t know. What do I care about? Hang on. I said, well, if you don’t know, ask people around you. What does Susan care about? What does Mohammed care about? What does Jane care about? What do they care about? Whatever it is, whatever it is, what do you care about? When you see that people are being mistreated in any way, does it rile you? When you see things happening in your organisation that could be improved, but no one’s doing it, does that get you going? What is it that moves you? What is it that you’re passionate about? Because what we’ve seen in terms of change throughout history is it has to be… we’re human beings. We are, we are emotional creatures as well as intellectual creatures. And we have, you know…. Start with the heart. Start with the heart.

[00:16:32] Phil Lewis: Well, I think I hear three things in what you’ve just said about what consultants can really do to support organisations in that process of change. One is about proper honesty, and you might say it’s something like holding an organisation’s feet to the fire. I remember saying to a client a few weeks ago, I don’t need you to tell me what your values are. I’ll go and look at your P&L and then we’ll have a conversation with three of your suppliers about how you treat them. And I will also talk to three people that you’ve recently let go from the organisation and that will tell me what your values are. So, you know, ruthless honesty, getting into the wiring then, because to your point around the gender pay gap, for example, that is not solved by big declarative statements. It’s solved actually by getting into the quite technocratic detail, actually, of how an organisation works and doing that kind of deep work in that context. And then thirdly, actually, inspiring action — and proper action — off those first two things. And I think sometimes the role of the consultant is you can perhaps say things and you can bring a perspective and you can sometimes bring an agitation that is very, very hard for people inside an organisation to be able to bring. I don’t know if you feel that’s a fair summary or if you’ve got any further reflections on that.

[00:17:54] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: No, absolutely. Absolutely. And it is, it is really important to respect that people are doing their best. I honestly find that, especially through all the years of working on Magic Breakfast and trying to feed hungry kids, people are full of love. People are full of care, and you have to ask them for help. You have to turn on that level of care because the textbook has been, if you’re an accountant, you’re not there to particularly show what a caring person you are. You know, you’re there to get a very good job done on the numbers. But, you know, to be the most caring, loving numbers person, to show how the numbers achieve purpose that is about planet and people, you know, someone who does the business cases properly, that shows the return on investment for doing the right thing for building trust. You know, we need that sort of recognition that people are lovely. And you know, people can be like… ah, it’s very, it’s very soft, isn’t it? But it’s, it’s genuinely not. I work from the basis that people are gonna want to do the right thing unless they’re scared. I’m doing a lot of keynote speeches right now around this theme of take action first, then you feel better. There’s no perfect conditions for doing the right thing. It’s just now, it’s just now the things that you care about, put them into effect now. Now, not when the kids are older, not when you’ve got more skills, not when there’s a strategy refresh, not when… it’s now, it’s absolutely you, you and your gorgeous self have got agency today to take a baby step. Today is very important.

[00:19:28] Phil Lewis: I think that’s so true as consultants because all of us have to make decisions every minute, every hour, every day about what we’re doing with our clients, what we’re doing to win clients, what we’re doing to keep clients and how we ultimately manage those relationships, right? And in that there’s a huge latitude for choice. And we all have choices to make about how we work in line with our own values, how we encourage clients to work in line with theirs, how ultimately we can inspire, provoke whatever clients to perhaps take better action sometimes as well. One of the things that really interests me about the journey you went on with Magic Breakfast. I mean, you tell an amazing story about that. Anybody who has run that kind of enterprise over the length of time that you run it, you know, it is very, very hard yards to do and to scale that sort of thing. And I’m really interested by the work that you must have had to do to… and maybe these aren’t the right words, but cajole, inspire, provoke, sometimes recalcitrant systems of government, or recalcitrant systems of financial distribution, or recalcitrant systems of education, or whatever, to do the thing that is self-evidently the right thing to do, which is to fund children being fed properly in the morning. But nevertheless, we even saw in the pandemic how hard it was for government to kind of get there, right? So most of us who are consultants are also spending our time trying to lure recalcitrant systems into action. So I just wondered what your experience was around that and whether there was anything that you would offer up to anybody who’s trying to get better behaviour out of an organisation and maybe struggling to connect properly with that system in order to be able to do it.

[00:21:27] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: I don’t think of it as a struggle, to be honest. I tend to think if you’ve got a big enough wire, you can get through any amount of how, as Nietzsche said. Sorry to quote Nietzsche, but you know, it’s kind of that thing about, you know, there’s a child who wakes up in a home with no food, goes to school, you’ve got a whole host of teachers and wonderful things waiting for that child in his or her future, but if they miss half a day of learning for the want of something that we could provide for maybe 50p, that’s a tragedy, isn’t it? All I need from you is a bit of help. If you can give me 50p, I can give a child a breakfast tomorrow morning. If you can give me five million pounds over six years, or dear government, if you can give me £25 million over five years, this is the amount of children who will get their morning of learning. And we believe in learning here, don’t we, in this country. We believe in education. We believe that it opens doors. So would you condemn a child to missing out on their future success? for the want of something that we can, with the help of these wonderful companies that have helped Magic Breakfast, provide nutritious… any child who wants a breakfast can have it. There’s no stigma. It’s about helping that child to see that they’re choosing a good breakfast as part of their success at school. It was about making the case that was so absolutely attractive and absolutely simple that no one could say, I don’t think we want to do that, Carmel. People might care more about other issues. People might care more about, you know, investing in solving homelessness or investing in solving violence against women or any other thing. But if we can just get these children fed and every child is precious. Now you start with, you know, were you ever a child when you were young? Did someone help you at any stage at school to say, actually, you’re quite good at this, aren’t you? Why don’t you try a little bit more with bit of work? And I think you’re good at that. Most of us have had something supported in us and opened up by the beauty of teaching and learning and listening. And when you’re really hungry and really upset, it’s so hard to listen. It’s just about making the case so beautiful, so simple, and so persuasive. The only way change happens is when you help people achieve their goals. If you come along and say, I’m a consultant. I’ve got this method. I think you should do that. Well, thank you very much. It’s been a lovely conversation. This is where we’re trying to get to listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, and then say, so, you know, for example, Quaker oats and Tropicana — getting more children to have porridge is a good thing. And I said, I’ve, I’m at X amount of hundreds of schools. I’ve been beetling around trying to get money for these children to have some food. I said, if we could come up with a way of working together, I’ll help you to improve the messaging that goes into some of the children. And we could tell the Magic Breakfast story on the side of the boxes. But could I use your lorries? And could I have some free porridge? Oh, and some free orange juice that I’ll dilute, I promise. And Amazon during the lockdown, they, as Magic Breakfast partners, When the children that were relying on their schools for food were at home, it was about to be an absolute disaster. Children were going to starve. You know, so many children rely on their school food. We’ve got four million children today living in food insecure homes in the UK. Four million. And so, as of a school age population, 17 million. So, Amazon just delivered boxes with Heinz beans. If you look at the no added sugar beans, they’ve got the Magic Breakfast logo on the side, milk vouchers from Arla, loads and loads of cereal, loads and loads of porridge and delivered it in just an Amazon delivery, and delivered about 2 million boxes and didn’t tell anyone about it. I could tell you stories like that from so many organisations. I stepped away from the charity back in 2020. And it’s now led by a fantastic team, an amazing CEO, wonderful, wonderful set of trustees, and going strength to strength. This morning, over 200,000 children were fed by Magic Breakfast and 300,000 through the National School Breakfast Programme. And all of that, all of that growth came by my finding people and saying, does it help you achieve your goals to feed hungry children? Does it help you in what you’re trying to do to help me? Because it’s all about the win-win. The win-win.

[00:25:48] Phil Lewis: Well, what I hear and what you’ve just communicated there is a massive amount of empathy, actually, because on the one hand, when you’re talking about going into systems of government and saying, were you a child once? What you’re actually doing is encouraging that audience to walk a mile in the shoes of the kids that you’re seeking to serve and the families you’re seeking to serve through Magic Breakfast. And then you’re also demonstrating empathy because you understand that the people that you’re talking to in your organisations like Amazon or Quaker Oats, for example, have got mortgages to pay themselves and they’ve got goals therefore, they need to meet. And what you’re doing is demonstrating empathy for that and then simply aligning your incentives and their incentives in a way that, exactly to your point, feels really compelling. And I think so often in consulting, we miss that actually, because we’re so busy trying to prove we’re right, or consultants can be so easy trying to campaign for their particular view of the world, that actually what happens is they miss the important stuff, which is well, as consultants, we need to be walking a mile in the shoes of the people that we serve. And also we need to be encouraging those that we serve to walk in a mile the shoes of ultimately the people that everybody’s trying to serve, be it their customers or their other audiences, you know? So it seems to me that there is a sort of empathy deficit in consulting a lot of the time that we would do well to fill. And that if we did that, we would be much more persuasive.

[00:27:18] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Yeah. I mean, it’s just, you know, just, just don’t, don’t push your thing, you know, like kind of understand other people and their needs first and, you know, respectfully offer support for where people are trying to get to with your experience and with your offer. If it’s a win-win, you’ll go forever. It’ll work beautifully. If it’s you and your thing, fine, you know. The thing, I think… what’s really important from a consultant’s perspective is that real desire to help the person you’re working with achieve their goals in a way that reflects positive values and does good for the planet and for people. If you can do that, and you can be and be a good mate, you know, be a good friend, be a critical friend, be an honest friend, be a challenging friend, but don’t sort of, you know… the people that help Magic Breakfast, and now I’m working on AI For Good and trying to figure out how are we going to put AI into the hands of people are working on climate solutions, people who are working on social justice, as much as, you know, the big tech firms. And it comes down again to the win-win we need in the business community. We need consultants to be finding planet answers and finding someone from the big four, for example, to willingly say, I’m going to put a tiny transaction tax on all of our technology driven revenue, and we’re going to donate that into a bank of AI For Good, because there are so many thousands of activists. The Prince of Wales today was asking, can we please get some investment for these green solutions? The planet is burning and we’ve got people who’ve got answers. But guess what? We’re still hoovering up money for shareholders and not investing in people and planet. So I’d love some lovely people who care about the planet from some firms that have got plenty of money to just put together a little fund or a percentage of their technology consultancy to build a bank of AI For Good. And that way we can. absolutely pour money into more climate solutions and maybe, maybe stay at under 2%. That was a little plea from the heart from me to the technology community. It has been sponsored by our children and our children’s children. Thank you so much.

[00:29:29] Phil Lewis: Well fair enough. And we will clip that and we will make that an audiogram. It’s interesting that you talk about firms with money because a lot of the independent consultants who will be listening to this podcast will feel the opposite to being a firm with money. And I guess the thing that’s interesting to examine might be this. What would you say to any consultant who basically takes the view that I need to get the money in first before I start paying attention to any of this change activism stuff? What would be your answer to someone who came to the table with that perspective?

[00:30:08] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Well, you’re not a consultant, you’re a cowboy. Anyone who’s going after the money first is an absolute bloody cowboy. It doesn’t matter what size or scale they are. If you want to be a consultant, it’s because you want to exchange your knowledge and support as an advisor to help some organisation move forward. Now, you could say you can choose your organisations based on your values. I would totally endorse that, but there’s absolutely no point going off. And we’ve seen what short term money-grabbing has done to the planet and to people. You know what I mean? Yes, you’ve got your yacht, but are you happy? Well, I am actually very happy, but I do spend a lot of money trying to blot out the bad that I do by billionaires one to ten. I really want people to feel that they are choosing to do things that are nutritious for their soul, for their spirit, for their intellect, for their heart, and that whole thing about it is… when people come to me and ask, how am I going to use these change activist ideas in my life right now, I’m saying, what do you care about? What’s important? What kind of life is important for you to live that reflects your true self, because your true self at work is a superpower. If you’re doing it because bloody hell, we shouldn’t have got that bloody mortgage. I should not have got those three yachts because now I have to pay for it. I’m going to have to bash into these companies and rip them off. You know, no, no, no, no, no, no. Think about it. Go small. Think about what you care about. What is it that you would like to do to help these organisations? What is the valuable bit of knowledge or experience that you’ve got that if you said, I can help you with that, you would move people forward in their organisations, in their communities. It is about the genuine exchange that’s done in a loving and win-win way. Now, money comes from that. That’s where the money flows. When people get the honest… and this is exactly what you’ve done, Phil, and why I absolutely admire everything that you’ve done. It is about the authentic improvements that are done with values for those clients. I think when you’re going after the money, you know that you are cutting off your main fuel supply, which is your big heart and your desire for positive change in the world. If you’ve got yourself in a scrape, like financially fair enough, there’s all things that we can flog that are useful, that are short term, but don’t be making it your primary motivator.

[00:32:29] Phil Lewis: I think that’s absolutely spot on. I mean, from where I’m sat, one feeds the other beautifully. So I’m somebody who cares quite a lot, as you know, about kindness in the world and wants to live a kind and generous life. Well, I don’t profess to be perfect, but certainly in terms of my consulting practices, I try and do work, and put messages out into the world, that reinforce the idea of kindness. So for example, it’s really hard to build businesses that don’t actually mistreat people because of the way that we design systems. And without getting too broad, the way capitalist systems work and everything else. But we have set, you know, Corporate Punk up, my own advisory practice up, to be a place where you can actually talk about human potential and you can talk about actually the alignment of human potential and business performance and actually how you can change your systems of governance at work and indeed your systems of work to be kinder. And in sending that message out to the world, if you want to put it in those terms, in planting a flag there, maybe a better way of saying it, actually what happens is you then find the people that actually need the help to do that work. And then going back to what we were talking about earlier on. You can start to hold their feet to the fire about what it genuinely means to be kind. You can start to do the work in the wiring around everything from financial incentives to policies and practices and processes in the organisation that actually help build kinder systems of work. And then in the end you can encourage action so that all of that stuff actually makes it out into the world. And then what do you know, the organisation’s business performance starts to take care of itself. And that means your reputation and your advocacy for your practice as a consultant grows. And then here you are, 10 years later, having a conversation with Carmel McConnell on a podcast, you know. And so I’ve always seen that if you, if you are values oriented and put values first, then in the end, you’ll find your audience and money will take care of itself. It’s not always easy, but your values are the things that cost you as well, right?

[00:34:44] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Exactly. Exactly. And look, being able to look yourself in the mirror and being able to say, I’m doing my very best. I’m living. I’m being honest. I’m really trying to help people. I’m moving things forward with all that I’ve learned in the world. And I’m making a difference any day I can, you know, to have that, it’s so valuable. I mean, we talk about the downsides of consultancy in terms of long hours and the, you know… but if you’re doing every day, you’re doing your very best to help people and you’re living as your true self, then you’re going to wake up in not a bad way, anyway, do you know what I mean? There was one phrase I heard a teacher at a Magic Breakfast school used to say to the children. She said, ‘you are here today to prepare for your future success’. And I love that. I’ve said it to every audience and I want to say it now because it’s kind of what we hoist in today that helps us to go on to our success. And that depth of authenticity is absolutely fuel.

[00:35:42] Phil Lewis: That’s a really beautiful message to send to children as well. Isn’t it? You are here today to prepare for your future success. I mean, what an empowering message to give to kids. I think that’s absolutely lovely. But to be honest, I think it’s a message that more people at work could stand to hear all day, every day as well. And, well, I think one of the things about change activism as well is, is actually, it’s incredibly, as you’ve spoken about, you know, or alluded to a couple of times in this conversation, it’s a very optimistic, positive and go-get view of human nature. Because it basically says, look, we’ve come so far, we can go so much further, let’s inspire each other to do that. And that seems really powerful to me. To close out on this. I’d love just to talk to you a bit about AI because you know, many consultants are spending their time thinking about AI thinking about how they might integrate AI into their practices. Certainly starting to think about what conversations do I need to be having with clients about AI as well. You are, as always, involved in trying to advance the social good in your work. So can you talk to us a bit about what that work is in AI, and also, is there anything that we as consultants should be starting to think about in that context?

[00:36:54] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Artificial intelligence, first of all, you have to kind of remember, any kind of technological development is simply a tool. Okay. So understanding what your goals are, who you are, what matters to you. Those are the most important thing. The AI is only ever as good as the data it’s trained on. So first of all, it has to be human centric AI. It has to be about making sure that we are creating solutions that will benefit humanity and the planet. And that doesn’t seem very radical, does it? But when you think that, you know, the first wave of AI, the biggest search that was coming through all of the large language models, when there were big search engines first out there, the biggest search that was happening was about Viagra. Yes, that’s about planet first and people first, isn’t it? Yes. Thank you so much. Does reflect the industry that it came from, I guess, but I really would like it to be that everyone was kind of thinking, right, you know, organisations that have got the opportunity to upskill and accelerate. I mean, there are so many great things that will be done through AI, but the two really key things are: number one, remember that it is about the quality of the data that you’re taking and then accelerating and maximising, optimising data for what purpose? Are you doing it to, for example, optimising food systems, which is the bit that I’m working on. If we were to optimise food systems so that we imported less and reduce the carbon load and manage to smooth out… and manage to stop having everything so sugar-laden, the savings that we get from simply optimising, using AI, to be able to predict food prices, to be able to reduce imports, the money we’d save using AI and food systems could drop into funds to provide school food. Very simply, we can optimise and improve. At the moment, it will take a ferocious amount of time and energy to predict the pricing structures for different fruit and vegetables around the world. AI can do that very quickly. So you can reduce food insecurity. In doing so, you might be able to do good things for people and the planet, or you might just do good things for supermarkets. So it’s about pointing the AI at the best possible outcomes for people and planet. As consultants, if there are any consultants listening to this, who are interested in getting onto AI, I’m very happy to… there’s a long list and I can point you two on chat or whatever, Phil, but it is really about thinking number one, it’s a tool to improve, to upscale and accelerate, optimise. It is not going to change business direction for people.
It is about accelerating. Where we’re seeing seismic shifts with AI is potentially in areas such as medicine. I was talking to a fantastic young guy who has managed to reduce the amount of time it takes to match donors and organs by about 30% just on one pilot run. So if we can speed up things that just take more time using faster, faster systems, faster thinking, better data. Fantastic. We have to, as human beings, think, what are we using the AI to achieve and let’s make it positive outcomes for humanity and for planet.

[00:40:09] Phil Lewis: Well, we should get some of those links from you and post them in the show notes. If consultants listening to this are interested in the subject of change activism, interested in the subject of how they can inspire their own clients to do better work in the world, and indeed how they themselves can build practices that are more aligned to a change activist agenda, where would you recommend they start in terms of your own work, Carmel, or any other reading or resources?

[00:40:36] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Well, I’m @MagicCarmel. You can find me on LinkedIn. I am mentoring and supporting a big community of people, including CEOs who want to be more change activists. There’s the book, the Change Activist book that’s available. If people haven’t got any money, write to me and I’ll send you some books. I have a commitment to get this idea out there. If people feel like this has been helpful and want to get more of it from me, get in touch and I’ll do a Zoom for anyone who’s trying to make that difference in the world, you know. I’m an open source. Magic Breakfast has been totally open source. Magic Breakfast, feeding hungry children, is like helping businesses to be better and more planet and people. It is something that we’re all helping each other to achieve, I hope. So, anything I can do to help people listening to this, to be able to take action in line with their values, even when that’s outside their comfort zone, then just get in touch.

[00:41:30] Phil Lewis: I’m so grateful for your time, Carmel. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

[00:41:34] Carmel McConnell – Magic Breakfast: Thank you so much. And Phil, thank you so much for being such an inspiration for me. I am, you know, the kindness that you’ve shown me personally, the amazing work that you do. It is such an honor to have the chance to talk to you on this today.

[00:41:45] Phil Lewis: Thank you very much. A complete honour as well to talk to Carmel there. And I hope you got as much value from that conversation as I did. Something that stayed with me actually after that conversation, and to be honest it stayed with me in every interaction I’ve had with Carmel since we met all those years ago, is something really simple, which is; if you’re not being values led in how you run your consultancy or how you run your business, and indeed you’re not being values led in how you show up in your life more generally, then what the hell are you doing? And that challenge that Carmel put forward so eloquently in that conversation, is one that I have personally spent quite a lot of time meditating on, and it really encourages me and inspires me every day to try and do great work and also do work which is guided by ethics and guided by a desire to do something genuinely worthwhile in the world. So if any of that resonates with you, then that’s great as well. If you enjoyed this, then as always, we would be super-grateful if you could rate us, review us, share us with your friends, anybody that you know in the industry who might get value from it, and don’t forget there’s new episodes out first Monday of every single month. So while that’s it for this month, we will be back first thing next month. You can find us on all the usual podcast platforms — just hit subscribe and it will be automatically delivered to you when released. In the meantime, any questions or comments, you can reach me at phil@theconsultancybusiness.com and I will look forward to hearing from you and we will look forward to seeing you there.

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