Alpamayo Coaching on Tour meets Jo Tavassoli at the Ordnance Survey Headquarters for a conversation with a strong sense of place.

A recent gig for Alpamayo Coaching on Tour was a delightful meeting with Jo Tavassoli.  It was a conversation in which a sense of place was at the core of everything we talked about.  It is literally central to her employer’s purpose, while it is metaphorically at the core of almost all the work I do as a coach.

We met at her place of work, which for me was something like visiting a shrine holding physical, emotional and spiritual significance.  This shrine is the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey (OS), home of Great Britain’s National Mapping Service.  Calling it a shrine might seem like a flight of fancy, yet I’ll stick with it as the OS maps which originate there, have exerted an influence on me since childhood.

Their physical significance has been in helping me navigate every sort of terrain in Great Britain.  As a child I looked on with wonder whilst wiser elders interpreted three-dimensional complexity using a two-dimensional OS map, and as an adult, taking on the mantle of individual or shared responsibility, to be sure of our location in unfamiliar territory.  I have experienced the full emotional gamut with maps too, ranging from the euphoria of navigating complex terrain to arrive at the intended destination, to the delight of interpreting 3D reality using a 2D construct.  I recall the anger and frustration of getting my map reading wrong, perhaps petulance too if I am being honest.  Fear even, in situations where poor navigation resulted in an existential threat!

The spiritual significance came to mind as Jo was showing me into the building talking about how knowing where you are in the world is only just behind food, air, water and shelter as one of our fundamental survival needs.  She said perhaps now even more than ever ‘knowing my place’ is essential for individuals, communities and organisations.  The strength of her belief and the passion with which she conveyed it prompted all sorts of thinking and feeling which caught me a little off guard.  Alongside thinking about the importance of place in a physical sense came more spiritual exploration prompted by enquiries often cropping up in life’s journey; for example, where am I now? What is my intended destination?  How do I get from one to the other?

That’s quite a lot to have going on in your head within minutes of my meeting Jo again, for the first time in around 14 years!  I suspect I seemed a bit distracted yet still noticed that, despite the genuine pleasure in meeting again, there was a sense in both of us of not being sure what came next in the conversation now we had reconnected.

In the period while we were finding our way towards the mutual purpose of the conversation Jo was a brilliant host and showed me round some of the historical paraphernalia of land surveying and map making.  There was a 1792 Ramsden theodolite , one of the very first, and the extraordinary story of the installation of more than 6,500 trig points across the UK.  Each of these acted as bases for theodolites while they were being used to survey the landscape, producing data on which the maps we use are based.  While I was taking a picture of the theodolite Jo introduced me to Ordnance Survey’s CEO, Nick Bolton.  His obvious enthusiasm, his willingness to share it, and the comfortable and the easy connection he made with his team and their visitors said something about the culture of the organisation, reinforced throughout the rest of my time at the OS.

Standing in front of the altar to OS cartography with Jo

Perhaps the most reverential place for me was an ‘altar’ to the OS map which had versions of maps from the earliest days up to the contemporary OS Explorers.  I couldn’t resist getting a picture of myself and Jo in front of the map display.  ‘Iconic’ is a much-overused word these days, but I am going to use it here.  The colours, the key, the look of the maps have been such a big part of my life.  Something to have national pride about too, as I have not come across maps elsewhere in the world which come close to the quality produced by OS. 

Leaving behind the altar to cartography, Jo took me to lunch and there we reminisced about our first meeting.  She had come to the University of Southampton in early 2004 as part of a university admissions process called UCAS Extra.  Jo was an A grade student across the board yet had not found success in application for a medicine place and was looking at other alternatives.  We met as I was Director of Undergraduate Admissions at the time.  I can recall the meeting as I was struck by how thoughtful and thought provoking she was.  If she had a view, she would share it which meant she was energising to speak to.  Other things I remember from that time are a strong sense of her Cornish heritage, and the concern she had for her Mum who was very poorly at the time.  Happily, Mum is recovered well and is in good health now, yet looking back I am reminded of the challenge Jo and others like her had in managing full time study and care responsibilities for family members struggling with their health. 

What Jo remembers of our conversation on that day is ‘for the first time in my experience of visiting universities and talking to people, I felt I had been fully listened too and understood’.  I was struck about this being yet another example of my undergraduates of that time being more aware of my coaching skills than I was!

As a result of our conversation Jo decided to come to the University of Southampton to study Chemistry, deciding to take the three year BSc programme, following it with a PhD and a one year post-doctoral role, all in Southampton.  Our trip down memory lane did not dwell for long on this part of Jo’s story although it did cause me to recall how Jo was an articulate ‘out loud thinker’, willing to challenge received wisdom, and to see things from different perspectives, perhaps even enjoying being something of a maverick.  To complement these skills Jo had several looks she would use to convey what was on her mind, if she did not feel like talking!  There was a look conveying ‘Really?’ in response to something she did not agree with, and one saying ‘I think I know better although I’ll keep it to myself just now!’ to name just two.

I smiled each time one or other of her range of ‘looks’ was called into action.  One was employed when she said ‘some of my colleagues find it difficult to think that I might be an introvert…I suppose you do too’.  I said I was not surprised in the least which won me what I think was a quizzical look, perhaps one questioning if I was pulling her leg.  I was not, and I told her how I had always found her a reflective individual who benefitted from the opportunity to process internally.  I shared that I thought that trait might be behind her occasional energetic expression of opinions that people might misconstrue as a feature of an extrovert.  To me I thought of it more as a function of an introvert finding it difficult to attenuate the ‘strength’ of their messaging when they did choose to share their thinking.  In fact, something else I remembered about our conversations of many years ago was never to try and persuade Jo of a particular point of view, or campaign for her agreement too strongly.  Instead, she valued time to consider her thoughts and feelings, and she could always be relied on to share them at a later date.

Jo recounts that her time as a scientist was very multidisciplinary and she was afforded the opportunities to try her hand across different experimental fields; this has been something which has proven important in her career to date.  It featured in a sequence of positions she held at the University encompassing delivery of scientific outreach activities; coordinating interdisciplinary research activities; and programme managing a multicentre research activity (called ADEPT) whose common aim was to develop techniques for electrodeposition of functional materials for use in a variety of applications.

I am conscious of the story so far being all about study and work and of course life is about so much more than that.  For Jo, it had involved meeting Ali, marrying him and starting a family, which now includes Jo and Ali, and their two sons, aged 10 and 8.  I am normally careful not to give undue exposure to partners in my story telling but am going to make an exception in this instance as Ali is known to me, as we were colleagues in the Department of Chemistry for several years.

Despite knowing them both individually, I have never known them as a couple, so I was pleased to hear news of their marriage.  They started their family shortly after getting married and Jo talks about motherhood as something she is learning from all the time, and which she feels makes her a better leader.  One particular example of leadership learning extrapolated from motherhood is in relation to fairness.  This is a strong value for Jo, applied to herself, the experience of others, and ensuring systemic levels of fairness too.  She described learning that fairness is not about treating everyone the same way.  It is about understanding their needs, setting expectations accordingly, and then collaborating appropriately to ensure they are met.

She talked about how she encourages both of her boys to be curious and to challenge received wisdom.  Her experience is this can lead to situations which are difficult to manage, yet she tries to expend effort on meeting that challenge, rather than denying her boys their right to curiosity through exerting a firmer parental control.  I was trying to picture the young boys applying Jo’s level of curiosity and how that might be in the classroom, and could not help but smile inside at the nature of the dialogue between them and their teachers. 

In early 2020, around her tenth anniversary of working at the University, several experiences conspired together to encourage Jo to think about what she wanted to do at work.  Like everyone around her, she had to adapt every aspect of her life in the face of the lockdowns precipitated by the onset of COVID19.  For Jo that meant coping with the home schooling of two young boys, with home being in the midst of a major but stalled refurbishment.  She remained at work throughout and found the challenges of hybrid working difficult in terms of meeting everyone’s needs and expectations.  It was not clear whether these experiences were the sole influence on her thinking, or if they caused a seed of an existing idea to grow and flower.  Either way, in the middle of 2020 she realised ‘if I was going to be working it needed to be more meaningful and I needed to be getting more in return from sacrificing my time’.  It was an interesting turn of phrase that ‘sacrificing my time’ and I reflected on how many people feel that is what they are doing in their work.  It was language I thought might help me in thinking about my own work life integration.

Her memory of the need for something ‘more meaningful’ chimed with our present-day conversation in which Jo mentioned several times the importance of ‘doing work that matters to me’.  Back then, in pursuit of this Jo looked around and saw a job at the Ordnance Survey (OS).  She called it ‘serendipitous’, a top word although I have alternative language that I like to use to describe this:  strategic opportunism.  She saw the job as different from what she was doing at the University while being something that she could adapt her skills to.  In the style of the day she was interviewed remotely, was offered, and then accepted the job, as Business Growth Manager.

A quick sidebar to this story is prompted by what business growth is like for OS.  From the general public point of view (or at least mine!), it would be easy to assume that growth might involve selling more maps, or making them available in different formats.  While this is certainly important to them, less than 10% of OS business is wrapped up in content available to public individuals.  More than 90% of their geospatial work is for public and private sector clients, all looking to understand how ‘place’ is influencing the products or services they offer and this is where Jo’s role was focussed.  Once again, I find myself connecting the coaching that I do with the centrality of ‘place’ to what Ordnance Survey does.  I am drawn to a line on the OS website that they use to describe what they do:  ‘At OS, we use location data and intelligence to illuminate the unseen’.  Borrowing heavily from that phrase to describe how I coach as ‘in partnership with my coachee, exploring our unique sense of place, and combining our intelligence, we illuminate the unseen’. 

Returning to Jo’s transition from the University to the Ordnance Survey.  It was nine months before she met most of her colleagues in person which was a challenge faced by many of us at the time, and not an easy one.  Nonetheless, Jo said of her transition four years ago ‘I took the leap, and have not looked back’.  The first difference she noticed was the need to reframe her understanding of the word ‘customer’.  In her university experience she felt that the importance of the customer had a strong presence during her time as an undergraduate, yet elsewhere in research and in her research management roles, it had less significance.  At OS the customer voice is central to business development, as is an understanding of the marketplace.  Instead of only thinking about what is possible and what is feasible , now there was a need to factor in what is sellable.  It was a bit of a mindset shift for Jo, and prompted me to think that for many people undertaking a career change, a reprogramming of their relationship with the word ‘customer’ is often necessary.  It certainly was for me!

After lunch we walked around the grounds of OS, some maintained and some left for nature to do her thing.  In the grounds was another reminder of the importance of understanding ‘place’ in the form of a memorial to those members of the Ordnance Survey who lost lives in both world wars, where an understanding of place was a matter of life and death.

While walking around, our thoughts turned to leadership, something at the front of Jo’s mind because of the work that she does, and also through the MBA studies she is undertaking at the Henley Business School.  First of all, she talked about what matters to her.  We have already touched on fairness and the need to ‘do something that matters’ and increasingly she is finding the latter satisfied by contributing to diversity and social mobility discussions at OS.  She talked about how other important issues in the workplace for her are being engaged, challenged, and stimulated.  Problem solving is her thing, which fits with her observation that she also likes to be bemused and entertained!  The phrase ‘positively perplexed’ came into my mind.  Jo likes perplexities, if there is such a word!?

Jo said that ‘once again I am a square peg in a round hole’ and I wondered where that phrase was going to lead.  Very quickly it became apparent that this is a state of affairs that really suits her although perhaps those around Jo might find that difficult to comprehend.  She said ‘I don’t see it as my job to try and change the shape of the hole’.  What you hope for is recognition that the mismatch between your square peg and the round hole you fit into is a good thing, not a situation where others seek to find ways to get you to become more ‘round’, a better fit.  There was a really powerful sense of the Jo that I remembered in this metaphor and I certainly experience it as an asset.  She challenges received wisdom, sees different perspectives, and it a bit of a maverick.  All of this is not just for the sake of it; it is targeted at solving problems, meeting challenges.

There was another insightful metaphor Jo used to describe the complexity of her current role, which involves leading OS’s bespoke delivery to government departments.  The picture she painted was one in which she had been asked to cultivate an acre of wheat.  Instead of being able to secure the land, equipment and seed to do this, she routinely has something more like a vegetable patch and some wild seed mix!  In her mind there is no criticism of OS this metaphor; the work that Jo supports is additional to the huge volume of planned work that OS has each year in delivering its public task, and being inventive about resource and timescales is needed.  She is bemused at the idea held by some of her friends that this is something she might hate; the opposite is true – the challenges and complexities in the work are very stimulating and are what makes the job ‘exciting’.  There was a ‘Jo look’ at the end of this, inviting some form of comeback from me.  I did not have one, simply because I thought the square peg and window box storytelling was a beautiful example of self-awareness with a purpose.  Sharing the stories was a way of telling me what really mattered to her in a way that I could understand.  My choice is then to either celebrate the uniqueness of her as an individual or to try and reshape her into my view of the world.  I choose the former.

It was enjoyable talking to Jo about our leadership stories.  I can’t speak for her, but there was certainly learning for me in hearing my out-loud thinking, as well as from what she was telling me about her experiences.  Included in these were Jo’s discussion about the basis of her being a good influencer, a skill honed during her various programme leadership positions at the University in which she needed to influence people without having management responsibility for them.  This ‘matrix style’ of leadership has translated well into her roles at OS too.  Jo talked about the emotional component of leadership, describing herself as emotionally driven and able to tap into the emotions of others.  She has experienced on many occasions during change programmes, that people are at ease with talking to her about what is really going on for them.  Sometimes this unburdening has in turn created testing situations for her.  In an assessment of her own evolution Jo thought of her management of difficult/ conflict situations as an area of continuing development for her.  While not denying the truth of this challenge I shared my appreciation for her ability to create a trusting and safe place for people to share in the way that they do.  All of this is part of Jo’s wider interest in the leadership theory and practice of how to connect the ‘people part of the puzzle’ with business needs and strategy. She believes in the importance of knowing the people she works with and co-creating with them the environment for success.

I shared my changing relationship with evidence (seeking validation from what has worked in the past) and emergence (being at ease with the fact that something of value will come from a decision or action), which I see as the two endpoints of a continuum of behaviour.  I am aware of how over my lifetime I have had periods where I have favoured one over the other.  A broad characterisation is that as a scientist I favoured evidence, but as an educator and as a coach I favour emergence.  At least as interesting is how with shorter time scales, perhaps even a single discussion, I might strongly favour one over the other, or perhaps switch between the two.  I am curious about the consequence of this behaviour, on achieving what I was aiming to achieve.  I asked Jo what her relationship was with evidence and emergence and after a moment’s thought she said ‘I am open to influencing in an emergent manner but if it came to a point of blockage I would go away and accumulate evidence to support my case before returning to the discussion.  The real trick is to know when the evidence is going to be helpful in persuasion, and when it might make things worse.  I’m still working on this part.’  I think that suggests she has an equally complex relationship with emergence and evidence as I do.  I am left with the enquiry ‘what might emerge from the appropriate use of evidence?’ as a way of making a connection between the two.

We had an interesting conversation about growth.  Jo feels she is in the midst of a developmental growth phase right now, through what she is experiencing at work and as a result of her MBA studies.  I said something about the importance of a sense of growth being ever present for healthy personal and professional development, where perhaps growth in one of these areas (for example as a result of motherhood) might compensate for feeling static in the other.  Something about the ‘ever present’ part of this observation troubled me when thinking about growth in the context of an economy.  I struggle with the belief that constant growth is central to economic success as in my mind I connect this with asset stripping of the world’s natural resources and growing toxic consumerism.  Is it true then that personal and professional growth should be ever present?  Perhaps my interest is particularly lively in this area because I am wondering what ‘growth’ looks like towards the end of a career and into retirement.  Although this step is a way into the future for me, I am aware that I want to believe that ‘growth’ remains important throughout the whole of life, including that period after we stop full time work. 

Anyway, enough philosophy, aside from noting it is prompted by the quality, depth and range of the conversation I had with Jo.  We talked about a great deal more, and before I forget I want to thank Jo for making the time and creating space for the opportunity to do so.  It was certainly a living demonstration of her interest in people and commitment to create the conditions to get to know them.

To bring things to a conclusion I just want to touch on how, towards the end of our conversation we explored how we had felt when we first met again, a couple of hours previously.  It seems a fitting thing to conclude this story with as it captures the trust we established during our conversation.  Looking back, Jo said she had been looking forward to our conversation since we had arranged it.  Despite this, at the moment we met, she was suddenly unsure what to expect.  I had felt the same, and for me that uncertainty came out as being a bit muddled in my thinking..  I suspect that this momentary discomfort was all about ‘place’, and how fitting is that in a building dedicated to locating ‘place’.  For both of us our sense of each other was from a different place, in relation to both time and location.  In 2024 we had to establish a new trust, a new certainty in our interactions, to meet the requirements of the new place we found ourselves in.  What an enjoyable experience it was too.  There seemed some connection here to some of the language OS uses to describe itself.  They describe what they do as helping everyone ‘to see a better place’.  I have the belief that conversation can achieve the same, it can help you to see or find a better place.  Borrowing again from the OS’s language conversation it can also ‘illuminate the unseen’.  Gratitude to Jo for partnership in both locating a place and illuminating what was hidden there too.

Alpamayo Coaching on Tour is an experience that is all about storytelling and story sharing with people who I have shared time with in the past, either as colleagues, tutees, or coachees. If you would like to be part of the tour please do get in touch with me. My 'day job' of coaching also involves being interested in the way that other people narrate their stories. If you are interested in telling your story within a coaching partnership I will be pleased to hear from you too.