Amanda Horton-Mastin: leading through uncertainty

Our recent Live Talk in London featured Nottingham graduate Amanda Horton-Mastin (PhD Chemistry, 1986). Amanda is Head of Foundation at the Wimbledon Foundation – the charitable arm of the All England Club, which hosts the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

Amanda and co-host Professor Simon Mosey, the university's Director of the Haydn Green Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, led a discussion under the topic of 'Leading through uncertainty'.

We caught up with Amanda and Simon to capture their insights on how we can navigate uncertainty in our lives, both professionally and personally.

Event speakers Amanda Horton-Mastin and Simon Mosey sat at a table

Our speakers Amanda Horton-Mastin and Simon Mosey

Five life lessons to help you deal with uncertainty

Amanda's talk centred on five key lessons learned during the course of her career, which includes over 20 years at Comic Relief and her more recent role at The Wimbledon Foundation.

1. Creativity and chaos

“I joined Comic Relief early in its life, where the previous Red Nose Days had been organised by a wonderfully enthusiastic group of celebrities including a member of the Royal Family and a tiny staff team.

"The whole place was sort of in chaos, because people had been focused on the event and not thinking about what would happen next and there was a real need to find a path through the chaos and focus everybody towards a specified goal. But what I found in the chaos, was that it also generated amazing creativity"

2. Purpose lends clarity

"Since I was very young, I've had this incredible sense of feeling cross about inequality, so a huge part of who I am as a person is tied to the need to try and tackle inequality wherever it might be.

"It’s very personal, but I think equally in a business environment, a purpose is a goal. If you're really clear about what your goal is and you make sure everyone signs up to that goal, then you have clarity. People understand where they're going. Even though there might be chaos around them, they still know where the direction of travel is, and I think that's what makes the difference."

3. We can’t do it alone

"I've been mad about sport throughout my life, particularly team games. So from the personal side of my life, teamwork has been everything – and what I've also found in work as well is that you just can't do it alone.

"I don't know the answers, I don't even know half the answers! I need to bring other people in and take input from the experts. No one's an expert on everything.

"I remember a colleague who never asked for help, and it was so awful watching them struggle with decisions. Whereas for me, I think if you're working as a team, and you've got a shared goal, that's where you'll thrive and achieve. So that's why I fundamentally believe in teamwork."

4. Overcommunicate

"I've been in situations in the past where my team has been separated not just by physical distance and geography, but also by time and culture.

"It was unbelievably important to make sure that everybody understood what was going on and weren't left out on a limb, feeling unsupported. So it was really important to me to make sure everybody was connected at all times.

"This was in a pre-Covid-19 era before Teams and Zoom. So we were doing phone calls, which are much harder because you can't see anyone's reaction. Actually being able to see people and how they're responding to you makes such a massive difference. So for me, overcommunicating was really important to keep everybody together – and this applies just as much today."

5. Take people with you

"You can force people to do things, but are they going to enjoy it? Are you going to get the best from them?

"I doubt it. So my style and the way I am as a person is that I'd much rather consult with people and have a much more collaborative, collegiate approach.

"If you're working with a team, everybody having the sense that they're being listened to, that they're being taken into consideration, is going to make the whole process so much smoother and achieve a better result."

Academic insight: Simon Mosey – unlocking creativity in times of uncertainty

"People say to me, ‘I'm not creative. I can't come up with ideas.’ So we talk about the concept of 'bounded creativity', where you create a constraint democratically to understand what problem you're trying to solve.

"Once you've got that fixed point, you can then be incredibly creative, especially if you encourage people that don't normally contribute. So we try to get the quietest voices into the conversation. That's usually where all the brilliant ideas hide.

"What we try and encourage is the creation of a safe space and then we try and normalise the word failure – which is something people don't like to talk about. In the time I've been around, the word has got more out of fashion. Yet there's more uncertainty in the world, so you're more likely to make mistakes than ever before. We used to engage in creative problem solving, but nobody wants to admit they've got problems, so now we talk about innovation challenges instead.

"If you're facing something you've not faced before, you're going to have to try something different. Let's think about all the ways it could go wrong and then think about what we are going to try. How are we going to do it in a safe environment? And most importantly, how are we going to learn from it and move on? So it's just really removing the mystique and the fear of failure, making it a collective challenge and opening people up to learn from failure."

More about Simon and the Haydn Green Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship >