If you read all the way down to the bottom of our most recent impact report (and if you didn’t, then shame on you!) you might have seen me mention the ‘killer question’ we developed as part of our recent strategic review.

Row, row, row your boat

Quite a few years ago, I was lucky enough to attend a leadership lecture by Olympic gold-medal winning rower Ben Hunt-Davis. He was talking about a book he’d recently co-authored on strategies for improving performance. The book describes how the British men’s rowing team went in two years from “mediocre” (the word he uses), despondent, and critical of themselves and each other, to a strongly-knit, high-performing team which won Olympic gold. Not only was he a very engaging speaker, but many of the strategies were simple and made a lot of sense.

One of the issues they had was too many options for things they could do to improve.

• Should they focus on diet and nutrition?
• Change up the training regime?
• Change it how? More miles in the boat or more time in the gym?
• Would improvements in individual fitness automatically aggregate to an improved team performance and if not what else did they need to do?

Everyone had their own opinion, and they would waste time arguing or resenting doing something different than what they thought was the right strategy. They needed to come together with a single focus.

Alchemy: turning lead into gold

So they opened a conversation about what their goal was. It started with “Win gold”, and then they drilled down into what they needed in order to do that.

“Row faster”, I believe, was somewhere next on the list. But rowing is a team sport. If individuals row faster, but not together in a rhythm, then that doesn’t necessarily result in success.

Eventually, they settled on “we need to make the boat go faster“. This encompassed all necessary elements: the individual, the technical (materials, oar design etc), and team cohesion.

Critically, they then used this to evaluate every choice they had and every decision they made about their training or actions.

“Should I go to the pub tonight?”
“Will it make the boat go faster?”

“Should I do the 10km training run I really hate?”
“Will it make the boat go faster?”

By challenging themselves and each other against an agreed-upon goal that they all bought into, they were able to simplify and focus their routine and create a sense of coherence. He explains it much better, so I recommend you read the book!

But what about the animals, Celean??

Still, 10+ years on, it’s stayed with me. So, when we came to our strategic review, I was curious to work with the team on what our killer question might be, to allow us to stay on course.

There are many activities that organisations with the vision of a world without animal experimentation can undertake. We can look to support and strengthen novel and emerging technologies. We can provide grants for new research or fund studentships. We can engage and work with those using animals to address barriers, or we can focus our efforts on supporting those who already work animal-free to reach a wider audience. We can work with regulators on testing guidelines or speak to universities conducting basic research.

So our conversation started with our aspirations that science would be animal-free. We are inspired by a lot of the advanced in vitro and other NAMs work. It’s amazing stuff! But we also all felt that that wasn’t quite right.

Many of us came to this work because we care about animals, so ignoring them just didn’t feel right to us.

We know that the people we want to work with are those who are using animals and are interested, confused, or stuck about whether and how they could move away. We care very specifically about *replacement*.

The finishing line

The question we came up with (which, in all honesty, could probably be refined a bit further) was:

“Will it help to further replacement?”.

Because we are relatively small, we also subsequently added a minor addendum. So our guiding questions now reads:

“Will it help to further replacement, more than anything else we could be doing now?“.

It doesn’t trip off the tongue, but the additions were important. Because of the “anything else WE could be doing”, we recognise that we have a skills base which can evolve and change over time, but which doesn’t encompass everything.

There are areas where we have more expertise and experience than others. We need to play to our strengths. The “anything else we could be doing RIGHT NOW” highlights the opportunity cost of our choices. It is imperative that we are always looking at the impact our activities are achieving, and whilst we acknowledge that there is value to things that have an indirect impact, we want to ensure we are always tackling our core issue – replacement – as directly as possible.

Anchors, safe harbours, and too many boat puns

It might seem very simple – downright obvious even – but the discipline of judging our activities in this way is powerful. “Should we attend this conference?” “Will it further replacement more than anything else we could be doing right now?”, and for me personally in a role where you can very easily get stuck in responsive-mode, the thought “Is what I’m currently doing going to help us further replacement more than anything else I could currently be doing?” is a key anchor and method of accountability.

Sometimes that is that I need to ensure our people get paid, are well, happy and productive in their work. But other times I know I can let things go, for the right reasons, and rest assured, we are still making our little boat go faster.