In this seven‑minute interview, Professor Pete Alexander talks with Dr. Alan Watkins, a former physician turned global leadership consultant. Watkins explains his 25‑year journey from practicing medicine to running a consultancy that serves about 100 CEOs and senior leaders worldwide, aiming to reduce human suffering at scale. He shares a personal highlight of helping the British rowing team win its most successful Olympic medal haul, illustrating the joy of applying his expertise to his own sport. Watkins introduces his core framework that distinguishes three dimensions of human activity – I (being), We (relating), and It (doing) – and warns that most leaders are addicted to the short‑term, operational "It" while neglecting the "I" and "We" dimensions. He argues that true competitive advantage comes from developing the self and relationships, which can dramatically accelerate thinking speed and quality. He cites a client CEO who now thinks ten times faster, linking this to neuroscientific concepts of myelination and abstract reasoning. Watkins advises leaders to prioritize personal development over merely acquiring knowledge, to hold a "meeting with yourself" to double thinking speed, and to elevate the sophistication of the I and We dimensions. He mentions his extensive publishing record (10 books), TED talks, and the upcoming wellbeing app, and provides ways to contact him via his website complete‑coherence.com, social media, and YouTube. The conversation underscores a mission to scale reduction of human suffering through leadership transformation.
Chapters
This is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast, where business leaders share their insights. It is 6 questions in 7 minutes because successful business leaders are busy and rarely have more time to spare. So let's get to it. Question number 1: In a few sentences, please tell me who you are and what you do.
Hi Pete, I'm Dr. Alan Watkins. Uh, I used to be a physician, so MD, PhD. I gave all that up 25 years ago. And so for the last 25 years, I've been running a global consultancy that works with leaders all over the world. So every geography, every market sector, we work with about 100 clients from the CEO down, just helping them to transform their organizations, um, and develop, uh, and just do better in the world.
Well, Alan, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Question number 2: What is something that makes you smile and/or laugh about working in your industry?
Well, in addition to working with multinational corporations, I had the great pleasure of working with some professional athletes. In fact, one of the biggest smiles came to my face. I worked with the GB Olympic squad into 2012 London Olympics and also Rio in 2016. And about 3 months before the 2012 Olympics, I was asked to go and help the GB rowing squad. Boy, did that put a smile on my face because rowing was my sport. Right? So to help your own sport in your home Olympics, that's the best gig ever. And fortunately, I was able to help them achieve their biggest medal haul of all time. So that was a source of great pride.
Well, congratulations not only on being able to help them get those additional medals and stuff, but yeah, be able to have an impact on your favorite sport. What a great story. Question number 3. I have a fictitious book with all the answers for business. What chapter would you think most companies should read?
Well, one of the things we recommend for our client base is to start to see the problems that they're facing slightly differently. So we'll often get a leadership team to write a list of all the things they're dealing with, and then we organize them. And what we discover is that 85% to 90% of the time is spent on short-term operational tactical issues. That drive the top line and the bottom line. It's kind of what we call the short-term "it," and then occasionally they think about the longer-term "it," the vision, ambition, purpose, strategy. But overall, most leaders in our experience are sort of addicted to task, target, goal, metric. So we call that an "it addiction." I'm addicted to doing things in the rational, observable, objective world. And we think that some of the acceleration and the competitive advantage they really seek doesn't come from there. It comes from the interpersonal world of relationships and strength of relationship bonds between each other, between them and the customers. Um, and so helping them to transform that, uh, is really key. And then of course, uh, the area that they focus the least on is what's happening inside of them, their human beingness. So many leaders have collapsed from these three dimensions of being, relating, and doing, or I, we, and it, just to the it. So they become human doings. And so the chapter I'd get them to read was to realize that their life exists in 3 dimensions, not 1 dimension. And some of the improvements they're seeking actually comes from the 2 dimensions they're not paying as much attention to, which is the I and the we dimension.
Hmm. Very insightful. I'm looking forward to reading that chapter myself. Question number 4. Other than the generic work harder, have a great attitude, and and care for customers. What advice would you give to other business leaders?
I think for us, it's all about development. It's about leveling up as a human being. And so rather than just acquiring some more knowledge or some more skills or a bit more experience, which is, which is good, that's learning. The game changer is developing. So that's changing yourself as a human being, changing the quality of your relationships. And if you change who you are, you become more mature, more sophisticated, more capable, and the relationships between you and the rest of the exec team, or you and your customers, gets much stronger. That will transform your business. So it's increased sophistication in the I and increased sophistication in the we to drive a transformation of the it. So one of the things I suggest to leaders is that actually, as a neuroscientist, I could show you how to double the speed of your thinking. So you could learn to think twice as fast as you've ever thought before and treble the quality. Now, if I show you how to do that, that's going to change your ability to do stuff. They go, yeah, that will completely change my ability to do stuff. So when was the last time you had a meeting with yourself to figure out how you double the speed and treble the quality? I've never had a meeting with myself. Well, why not? Too busy doing things. There's the problem, right, is we're addicted to doing things and the thing that would cause the greatest advantage to us, which is changing who we are as human beings, moving up a level and up a level and upper level, we haven't even got time to consider how to do that. Um, so actually, if I could get them to increase the sophistication of their I and increase the sophistication of their we, it transforms your ability to do the things you need to do.
Wow. I, I mean, I, I can only imagine the, you know, being able to do things or think, think through things in half the amount of time, what you could do with that extra time, it would be extraordinary. And is that what you found with your clients?
Yeah. I mean, one of the CEOs I've been coaching recently said that actually he now thinks 10 times faster than he ever thought before. And he was a smart guy before. So it's literally game-changing. So if you take this idea of development as a human being, The quickest metaphor for people to understand this is the difference in development between a 6-year-old and 12-year-old. And one of the things that happens is the front part of your brain speeds up because your neural tracts myelinate. So you can think faster and also think in the abstract. A 6-year-old can't think in the abstract. A 12-year-old can think in the abstract. So the ability to think in the abstract, one of the things that can do for you, for example, is you can do algebra. A 6-year-old can't do algebra. They don't understand the question. So you can say 4x 16, what does x equal to a 6-year-old, and their answer is crayons or my shoe. They didn't even understand the question, right? So they can sit all day trying to figure out what the answer is to 4x 16. You ask the same question to a 12-year-old, they'll answer it in 2 seconds. So the speed and their ability to resolve the problem when they develop, when they level up, when they move up a level, is unbelievable. So it's possible to teach people adults how to go up to another level and up another level and up another level. And that's a large part of what we're doing with our client base is transforming the quality of their consciousness, their ability to think faster, to think better, to solve the problems and cause less suffering. Wow.
Simply amazing. Love it. Question number 5: What other business leader like yourself would you like to acknowledge and invite to be on my podcast?
Would like to acknowledge one of the 10 books I've written is with a a mate of mine called Nick Dalton, and until very recently he was the number 2 in the HR function at Unilever, one of the biggest FMCGs in the world, and he's a brilliant guy, entertaining, amusing, absolutely fantastic on strategy, and one of the world experts on industrial relations. Sadly, he's a Tottenham Hotspur fan, so, you know, we'll let him off that, but he's just great company and a great person to talk to about, you know, how businesses need to set themselves up for the future.
Well, I look forward to, uh, talking with them, so thank you for that referral. And our final question, question number 6: please tell me about your first job.
Well, um, I went to med school straight out of high school, um, and qualified as a physician about the age of 23. Um, and one of the great, uh, privileges of being trained as a medical doctor is you're up close and personal with human suffering on a daily basis. So if you're paying attention, you really learn what it means to be alive and how to handle difficult circumstances and how to alleviate suffering. And so I'm often asked, what's— why did you leave medicine after 12 years as a doctor and do this? And the simple answer is I couldn't reduce suffering at scale when I was a consultant on the ward or, you know, I might have 50 patients to look after on the ward and maybe 150 patients now. 200 people. And when I went into primary care, you've got 2,000 patients as your average primary care physician, but, um, you know, 1,800 of them are okay, you never see them. So you only ever see 200 people again. So just wasn't enough scale. So for me, it's always been about reduction of human suffering at scale. So I eventually left 25 years ago and thought, well, if I work with big corporations, uh, it's a different kind of suffering, often mental health and, and all of that, and self-esteem issues and confidence and so on and so forth. So it's much more upstream. It's not the kind of physical end-stage suffering you see in modern medicine, but it's a lot of the really early stuff that you see. Um, and some of our clients have 350,000 employees. So if we improve the quality of leadership of that company, we potentially reduce the suffering of 350,000 employees. If you take the families, that's maybe a million people. You take the supplier base, that's 5 million people. And that's one client, and we work with 100 clients. So For me, it was always about, you know, the reduction of human suffering. So my first job, I learned what that really was, what suffering was. And, um, you know, so I'm sort of driven by compassion really at the core of me and the company to reduce human suffering. And we do that by accelerating human development. So as people become smarter and wiser and more perceptive and more insightful, they make better decisions and cause less problems for themselves and their employee base, their customer base. And we start to build a better world, which is to the benefit of all of us.
Absolutely love it. And it's amazing, just hearing the mathematics that you're talking about to reach that scale. And it's wonderful that the impact that you're having. So thank you for that. And Alan, thank you so much for being on the show. How could people find you?
They could Google me, just Google Dr. Alan Watkins. They'll probably find some of the TED Talks I've written. You know, it's been seen by a few million people, those TED Talks, just about what you can do to improve the quality of your life. You know, go on Amazon, you can find any of the 10 books I've written on a whole variety of different subjects, from leadership issues to change to the past, present, future of HR, you know, to how to solve the world's toughest problems, what's going on with the food industry, why politics is broken. You know, any of those books, you can find that, or you can just contact directly through our website complete-coherence.com. You can follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter. You can go and see our YouTube channel. So just reach out. We're a pretty friendly bunch. You know, we're very responsive and we've got a load of stuff that can help you. We're just about to bring out a wellbeing app that we're really super excited by. So watch out for that where we can put the power of transformation in your hands on the app.
Oh, it sounds very exciting. I'm looking forward to that app myself. And this is Professor Pete Alexander with the Winning at Business and Life podcast. Get hundreds of amazing business insights from previous guest episodes on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for listening.
