Alpamayo Coaching on Tour meets Simon Crumpler at Chesterford Science Park for a conversation on learning, multidisciplinarity and finding a 'good fit'

Alpamayo Coaching on Tour has been travelling the roads of the UK again.  The gig on this occasion was, once again, at Chesterford Science Park in the site restaurant and bar called Nucleus.  I was there to meet Simon Crumpler who I had not seen for over 17 years!

Beavering away on my laptop at a corner table in Nucleus, lunchtime passed and the place was virtually deserted.  Simon walked across a space populated with empty tables and chairs and when I looked up and noticed him I had the most curious sequence of feelings.  I thought we were back at the University of Southampton of 17 years earlier because my first impression was that Simon had not aged at all and also because I guess the space felt like it could have been one of the University circulation spaces.  Next came the awareness of where I was followed by a sense of role reversal.  Years ago the relationship had been one of tutor/ tutee although I rarely made much of that distinction given my strong egalitarian streak.  Today it I was on Simon’s turf.  He was the expert.  I was the novice.  For a second or two it all felt quite odd, yet very quickly settled into a comfortable reality.

It felt very easy to talk to Simon.  He really had changed very little in nearly 20 years.  His face looked more experienced but not much older, his hair was as I remembered, as was his body shape.  The vain side of my personality wished I had aged so well!  It was fabulous to hear news of his family.  I remember Simon’s wife Rina very well as she was also a chemistry student at Southampton.  For some reason I was still struggling to process how much time had passed since that time so I was shocked again to hear that their two daughters are already 14 and 11. 

More on all that later.  What was striking was how easy it was to fall into conversation with Simon.  As I told him a little of my story, I experienced his generous and attentive listening.  I remember this being a feature of the younger Simon but now there was a depth to his attention that was borne of experience.  I also remember how alert he was as a listener; how there is an sense of their being a pent up energy which somehow never seems to threaten an interruption.  He is a great example of what it is like to be able to prioritise being interested over being interesting.

When the time came for him to tell his story, we time travelled back to Simon’s early education.  He recalled he went to school in an area where sixth forms were separate from the 11-16 education.  He remembers feeling at home in his 11-16 school, achieved excellent results, and won a scholarship to a Sixth Form College which was geographically the most sensible choice for him, perhaps the only realistic choice.  Whist he was a high achiever there too he did not enjoy the sense of entitlement that appeared to him to be present in both staff and students.  There was an expectation that Oxbridge would be in their future that Simon did not like.  Despite having the grades to go there, his choice was to apply to universities where he could fit in.  There was something behind this decision that re-emerged some of his later life decisions too.  I had the feeling it was not driven by an antipathy towards entitlement, it was more a personal tendency to disfavour large establishment organisations.

Simon and I at Chesterford Park, trying to out-stripe each other! Once again, I am struck that selfie composition is much better left to others.

Anyway, Oxbridge’s loss was Southampton’s gain as Simon was one of a relatively small cohort on the Masters in Chemistry (MChem) programme early in the noughties.  He was a self-starter from the outset and took it upon himself to build networks and make connections leading to work experience.  He managed to get a placement in one summer vacation at Merck Sharp and Dohme in Harlow.  He worked in ADMET, short for Absorption Distribution Metabolism Excretion and Toxicity, which focusses on understanding how the body deals with any medicinal produce (ADME), and the nature of any side effects there might be once in the body (T).  He enjoyed the multidisciplinary nature of the work, something else that has played out during his career.  

He leveraged this experience when it came to looking for a placement abroad as part of his MChem degree.  He checked out where else in the world MSD operated and found their presence in Canada.  He asked his MSD Harlow friends to connect him with their colleagues in Canada and was then able to showcase what he had learned while applying his knowledge in industry.  At the time it was fairly unusual for students to be placed abroad.  It was a testament to his enterprise in securing the opportunity and also a recognition from his tutors that he had what it took to thrive in a new environment.  In some regards this was linked to an appreciation that while Simon knew how to have a good time he also understood his own learning needs.  It came up in our conversation when we were trying to remember dates and names which prompted Simon to say his memory for facts assimilated by reading was not good.  He needed to be stimulated in as multisensory way as possible for him to create understanding that he would remember.  He was unusual in always attending lectures to satisfy this need for visual and auditory stimulus as well as giving him the opportunity to make connections which he recognises he is also able to remember effectively.

Simon’s theoretical learning, combined with his two periods of industrial experience, led him to the conclusion that while a career in scientific research was definitely not for him, he was equally clear that an academic career was not.  Nonetheless, he did decide on doing a PhD as a stepping stone towards industry-based research.  At the time there was a sense that progress in industry was difficult without a PhD and this was advice Simon would have had from both industry and academia.  Happily, Simon feels what felt like a glass ceiling to those without a PhD in the past is now much less of an impediment.  Progress now depends more on qualities at work, rather than qualifications prior to employment.  Once again Simon made a clear decision not to move to one of the large, high prestige research groups where he felt that ‘I would have to give up my life in the cause of research’.  What he preferred was the idea of taking on a challenging project in a more emergent group, where he would satisfy his thirst for changing challenges and constant learning.  As important to him in his decision making was the effective integration of work and outside work life.

His PhD was in an organic synthesis project with Prof Richard Brown which was part industrially funded by Ferring. at the time was a company based just down the road from the University.  Working for Richard was an experience that Simon and I shared I also took my PhD part time with Richard, completing it only a year or so in advance of Simon starting his.  We actually worked in related areas, something that I had not been aware of until this conversation 17 years later!

When Simon’s thoughts turned to what next after his PhD he had two things at the front of his mind.  Marriage and work.  Simon had known Rina for a little while but they came together during their PhDs with the intention of getting married as soon as they both finished.  Now career decisions needed to be thoughtful of both their needs.  Simon was still wanting to grow his multidisciplinary experience and found just such an opportunity with the Institute for Cancer Research (ICR).  He thrived while experiencing cross disciplinary research, rich and varied learning opportunities, all experienced in a young and energetic environment.  Again, he had eschewed the more typical postdoc route of being attached to a single research group as too constraining.  The ICR research suited Simon as it was more diverse and was a composite of academic and industry in terms of the way the research was managed.

At the time the ICR model for postdocs was to offer a rolling one-year contract to its researchers with the possibility it being renewed for up to seven years.  This is one of the ways that they ensured a younger research environment at the ICR.  Simon stayed there for four years, but his family circumstances changed towards the latter end of the period with the birth of his and Rina’s first daughter.  A game changer in any relationship and for the three of them it prompted a reprioritisation towards stability.  They both knew that an itinerant lifestyle going to places where work took them was not a picture of their preferred future, so they looked to find a way a centre from which they could both work, while settling into an area in readiness for their daughter to start her first school.  Once again, Simon was not drawn towards ‘big pharma’, instead being much more interested in the more diverse work he envisaged working for a smaller organisation, particularly ones involved in contract research where there was a prospect of working across multiple disciplines.  He also likes the narrative of how working in a smaller organisation offers the chance to have a bigger impact.

The concentration of relevant companies across the north of London attracted his attention.  A friend of Simon’s from ICR had joined one of them, an organisation called Argenta.  He spoke highly of them, so you were motivated to apply when an opportunity came up.  And so it was, as storytellers of old might say, Simon started the current part of his career journey, working in a contract research organisation (CROs).  Twelve years later on he is still there, although the company identify has changed around him, via a period as part of Galapagos, and for the last 10 years as Charles River, a US headquartered, global CRO.

That’s 13 years or so in the same organisation, rising through the ranks to his current position of Senior Group Leader, Medicinal Chemistry.  How has Simon’s need for change and constant learning been met during that time?  I notice something I scribbled down at the end of our conversation to ensure I held onto it: ‘here is a man who seeks variety and learning and when it is not available to him he puts himself in the way of new opportunities to fulfil his needs at the same time as meeting the needs of his organisation’.  He has been able to put himself in the way of change and learning at Charles River as he has found a company with a learning culture and a positive relationship with change.

Some examples of this include leading the response to a client enquiry where there is extreme time pressure to bring together a high-quality scientific proposal, properly costed, and risk benefit assessed.  Multidisciplinarity supercharged!  Simon has done a good deal of this in the past and although he has needed to focus on project delivery for a while he looks forward to working on proposals again.  He is motivated by the time pressure and the need to coordinate different needs and personalities.

We talked quite a lot about how in management training various profiling tools have indicated how Simon has behaviour preferences that span the spectrum between paradoxically opposite behaviours.  Our discussion touched on this asset in terms of being able to build rapport with a wide range of people, and the challenges of transitioning from one behaviour preference to another in the presence of people who might find that transition rather harder.  Intriguing.

In talking about some of the specific examples of his leadership Simon’s commitment to people comes across every bit as strongly as his commitment to science.  It was a LinkedIn post about him receiving a People Award at Charles River which prompted me to reach out to him.  The award came on the back of Simon’s work in creating a new project management team within the company.  This started with him being among those who questioned the sense of requiring a scientific project lead to have high level project management skills alongside the scientific competency that was central to their work.  He took up the challenge of, and subsequently engineered the separation of these two responsibilities; identifying the essential competencies required in a new project management role.  He was instrumental in recruiting new staff to these new PM posts, then managed them as a group, and achieved all of this without putting any of the contracted work at risk.  From the outset of this work, he was aware of the importance of not creating a cul-de-sac role in which there was no opportunity for progression, and has been mindful to ensure those pathways to progression are clearly signposted and understood.  It is small wonder that he was recognised for his leadership of this complex change with its scientific, business and interpersonal components.

So much was buzzing around my head as I approached a conclusion to the story of this conversation.  There was a feeling of wanting to explode back into the detail of the conversation, what was said and perhaps what was not said.  Finding a focus on a conclusion felt constraining and coming to an abrupt stop is simply not an option!  Concentrating then on the things that loom largest in my mind about our conversation……I think I come up with two areas.

Firstly, there is Simon’s lifelong approach to decision making around education and career.  It could be identified as a values-based approach, perhaps even a strong moral compass.  The word that fitted best for me was that he is principled.  He had a strong antipathy for what he felt might be an attitude of entitlement, preferring recognition of his achievement to be on merit.  Interwoven with this was a lack of interest in achieving success by association, preferring working in groups and in areas that were forming their own identity rather than joining something already established.  Whatever the right language is to describe this trait it is one threaded throughout his story.

The second connects with something that the good folk in the Human Systems Dynamics (HSD) community call ‘same and different’, a framework they use to think about complex systems.  I was struck by the experience of same and different in the conversation with Simon.  There was the moment of seeing Simon looking just the same as nearly 20 years ago.  ‘Same’ also captures the consistent application of his principles in key decision making, and the consistency throughout his life of the importance of people and particularly his own family.  Difference captures the importance to Simon of be able to build rapport with people irrespective of their difference to him, and of his interest in working across disciplines, his drive for new challenges and learning.  Yeah, I reckon I might have got there at last, to the conclusion.  The conversation was a great exploration of 'same and different'.  Thanks Simon!

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.