I started out as a journalist – for the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, the Mail on Sunday and the Independent – then a BBC producer on Start the Week, In Our Time and All in the Mind, as well as science and history documentaries. I’ve been doing the same job in different rooms ever since: turning something complicated into something people will actually stop and look at.
I launched NHS UK with 80 videos in 10 weeks; it became Europe’s largest public health platform, with 50 million visits a month. I won £1.5m from Government for Digital Babies, a national digital service for new parents that became a priority project for Number 10. At Time Inc I built a video proposition into a commercial content business — most of the work in this portfolio comes from those years. I founded and led a 25-person enterprise storytelling function at Lloyds Banking Group, working with the CEO and board through a multi-year transformation that reached 65,000 colleagues and 30 million customers. Most recently I led storytelling for consumer digital and AI at UnitedHealth Group, a business serving 141 million members.
The lesson hasn’t changed in twenty years. People don’t adopt change because the technology is good. They adopt it because they understand what’s changing, why it matters, and what it means for them.
I now run Well Told, a strategic narrative practice founded with the bestselling novelist Abi Daré.
If you’re building something that needs to be understood – in-house or as a client – I’d like to hear about it.