Episodes, grouped by theme

Henrik is a Danish medical chemist who has spent more than 20 years in clinical drug development — a decade at Novo Nordisk in haematology data management, senior roles at NNIT, and biometrics leadership at Symphogen. Today that experience runs through three companies: CIMS Consult, his life sciences consultancy; Novyra Life Sciences, where he is CEO and Clinical Information Management Lead; and Safe Implant Technology, the research company he leads. The thread through all of them is the same: he wants to know where data comes from, how it moves, and whether it can be trusted when the decisions on the other end affect patients.

AI is like a horse. It wants to serve you, and it wants to make you happy. You can actually flatter an AI machine.

Data has a supply chain

At Novo Nordisk, Henrik's team borrowed the supply-chain management theory developed during the Second World War and applied just-in-time thinking to trial data: data logistics, information logistics, information supply-chain management. Last patient out to database release went from the usual eight to twelve weeks to a matter of days, and the FDA later used the case to teach people what data intelligence actually is. In an ICH stroke study, his team could pinpoint when elderly patients had their intracerebral haemorrhage — because a stroke is not just a stroke: whether it was a bleed or a clot changes everything that follows.

The audit that found a changed data point

His sharpest story comes from an audit of a sponsor exchanging SDTM data over a "secure" FTP site. Inside the CDMS, everything was validated and beautiful. But the exported XPT file could be opened in SAS, changed from male to female, and saved — with no audit log and no change control. Fifteen administrators had access to that folder, with no record of who was in it at what point. His point: compliance doesn't travel with the file. When data leaves a validated system through a channel with no audit trail, you have a hole — and the people now paying to find those holes are investors, who routinely hire people like Henrik to ask one question before an acquisition: can we trust that data?

AI needs a fence, not a leash

Henrik's position on AI is practical rather than starry-eyed. Every deployment starts with a framework: you tell the engine where the boundaries are, then you build checkpoints around it and test it continuously to keep it inside. He is candid about why — AI models want to please. They can be flattered, and they will agree with you. "You have to know potentially the outcome before you ask the question," he says. An AI machine cannot ask questions of the future; it works from references, not invention. Used correctly, AI can speed clinical quality work enormously. Used incorrectly — without real knowledge of your own data — "you can make a devastating tragedy out of your company."

Coaching, not policing

When Henrik runs audits, he opens with a promise: "I'm not here to slaughter you. I'm here to find opportunities for improvement." Quality improves, he argues, when sponsors and sites are coached to understand standards rather than simply policed for mistakes. His dream is continuous, risk-based monitoring that replaces old-school periodic checks — oversight that catches issues early and makes trials both faster and better quality.

Henrik Nakskov is a Danish medical chemist and life sciences specialist with more than 20 years in clinical drug development. He runs CIMS Consult, is CEO and Clinical Information Management Lead at Novyra Life Sciences, and CEO of research company Safe Implant Technology.

Gerrie splits her time between boardrooms and stages, helping leaders turn strategy into behaviour that people actually adopt once they're back at their desks. She works with senior teams on change leadership and culture across pharma, consulting and global organisations, and coaches speakers one-to-one. What interests her most is the least measurable thing in any company: the space between people — the pauses and side conversations that quietly decide how teams really work.

Bring out the elephant — let's have a look at it.

Behaviour, not slogans

Gerrie's frustration is with change that lives on a slide and never reaches anyone's Monday morning. Leadership, she argues, must own the what and the why — the vision, the North Star — but her work is the harder, quieter part: what do you actually want people to do differently, and what are they really feeling about it? Strategy is easy to announce; behaviour is what has to change, and it changes in the human layer most leaders skip past.

In praise of barriers

"I love barriers," she says, and means it. Where visionary leaders find them frustrating and default to demanding more — more urgency, more delivery — Gerrie flips it: get the team to name what's actually stopping the strategy, and you've turned a motivational problem into a solvable one. The question becomes collaborative — do we knock it down, climb around it, or jump it — rather than a leader shouting from the front. And the biggest barrier is usually the elephant in the room: the thing Brits especially are too polite to name. Her craft is designing the conditions in which people feel safe enough to point at it.

The HOPE framework

Drawing on behavioural science and the Harvard research on happiness at work — which links it to better decisions, better outcomes and lower burnout — Gerrie builds it into something organisational. Happiness matters but isn't enough on its own; her HOPE framework adds realistic optimism (not blind positivity, but a grounded belief that things can improve), a genuine sense of purpose, and, finally, an outward turn — from your own contentment to how you help the people around you. It's happiness with a job to do.

Gerrie Hawes is a corporate behavioural psychologist working with senior teams on change leadership and culture, and a one-to-one speaker coach.

This conversation includes discussion of suicide loss. If you're struggling, Samaritans are free to call any time on 116 123.

Clive has been a management consultant and business advisor since 1990. Before that, an English literature teacher to students in what was then Rhodesia; before that, a childhood on Aesop's Fables and Greek myth. Thirty-six years later the mission is unchanged, and he can point to exactly where it came from.

We are our own baseline. Only we will know what is normal for us.

A 36-year mission that hasn't moved

Clive describes his vision in explicitly utilitarian terms: the greatest good for the greatest number, judged on outcomes rather than intentions. He traces it to his mother reading him Aesop's Fables and Greek myth, and to a year teaching English literature in what was then Rhodesia. The lesson from that year has outlasted everything since: never assume what people from a different culture or background are capable of learning.

Two diagnoses, two decisions

Clive was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation after the loss of his younger brother to suicide. His pulse was found to be 30 during a routine pre-operation check — low enough that his blood thickens and stroke risk climbs sharply. Two weeks in intensive care, a pacemaker and an ablation brought it under control. His advice is simple and repeatable: check your resting pulse, and if it's regularly under 50, get it looked at. The second diagnosis was prostate cancer, caught through routine PSA monitoring. The operation ran six hours instead of two once surgeons found his prostate at four times normal size, and was carried out by a da Vinci surgical robot. A year on, full recovery. His own statistic, offered without softening: one in eight men in the UK will get prostate cancer, and one in four of those diagnosed too late will die of it.

Turning ESG from box-ticking into an open door

Clive trains small enterprises through a non-profit accreditation body, the Organisation for Responsible Businesses, to formalise the environmental and social value work they're often already doing informally. His own assessment took six hours over six weeks and cost £300. What it unlocked was access to public sector contracts — a market he estimates at around 40% of all UK business activity, much of it now legally requiring suppliers to demonstrate social value under the Public Procurement Act. Most small enterprises, he says, don't yet know the requirement exists.

Quickfire round

Advice to his younger self: spend more time giving before getting, and spend time inside a small enterprise to understand it properly. Top qualities for building a team: diversity, a can-do attitude and mutual support — "no one is an island." Favourite thing outside work: rescue dogs — three Jack Russells, the eldest 16 — alongside writing, photography and community volunteering. Golden rule, in life and business: FOR — Fun, Openness, Respect.

Clive Bonny is a business advisor specialising in IP protection, ESG accreditation and dispute resolution, and a trained suicide-prevention counsellor. He is a survivor of prostate cancer and lives with atrial fibrillation.

Ashish was 18 when a consultant gave his father six months to live in a two-minute conversation, handed him a flyer, and moved on. His father lived six years — long enough to see Ashish through most of university, three months short of graduation. Years later, writing a publication strategy for a phase three prostate cancer trial, Ashish realised the lead investigator was his father's own consultant. His father had never been told the trial existed. Nothing in the inclusion criteria would have stopped it. That gap became the rest of his career.

Inclusion debt just compounds as the cycle goes on.

Inclusion debt, defined

His term for what happens when patient voice is skipped at every stage rather than one. It starts in early discovery, where unmet need gets defined by a focus group of eight to ten patient experts underpinning programmes worth billions. It compounds through protocol amendments, through recruitment budgets thrown at social platforms that skew toward people already willing to share data online, and by market access, where the value dossier tells one population's story. By then, he argues, it's too late to correct — the debt has already been spent.

Data that doesn't talk to itself

Unwritten Health's Equity Engine works community-first: gurdwaras, mosques, temples, African and Caribbean church and ministry networks, built one relationship at a time toward a UK panel now past 6,500 people. He's candid about the trust problem underneath it — the UK Biobank breach comes up unprompted in community conversations — and his answer is to keep showing up as a commercial entity that says so plainly, rather than pretending otherwise.

AI without the disingenuous design

He tested a prostate cancer recruitment flyer through the platform: a Black man in a polo shirt, smiling on a golf course with his wife. The feedback came back immediately — men living with prostate cancer aren't playing golf, and if they were, they wouldn't be smiling through it. It's the kind of design failure that reads fine in a meeting and fails on contact with the people it's for. He's now working with Lancaster University on models that synthesise patient data without importing bias or hallucinating conclusions, including where the data centres physically sit.

Ashish Rishi is founder and CEO of Unwritten Health, a Manchester-based patient experience data platform. He sits on the scientific advisory board of IHI-READI (REpresentative Clinical Research, Advancing Inclusivity in Europe) and the equity committee of the US Prader-Willi Syndrome Association.

Louise spent nearly 30 years leading technology and transformation for global corporations before her mum's dementia journey pulled her toward something more direct. Laying photos out on the coffee table, she could always find the next picture to keep the conversation moving — not through faces alone, but through colour, object and place. When she asked a carer why the albums sat unopened between visits, the answer was simple: without the backstory, she didn't know what to say. That gap is where the company started.

The photos shouldn't be a memory test. They are there as a supporting actor in the conversation.

The reframe is the whole product

Ask someone with dementia if they remember something and the failure to recall reads as a loss, every time. Flip "do you remember when" to "I remember when" and the pressure disappears — whether or not the other person remembers anything at all. The goal isn't to surface memories; it's to encourage interaction without fear of failure.

Automating an instinct, not a database

Photos go into ReelLife's family admin portal, facial recognition groups faces so a relative names each cluster once, and location data is checked and corrected. The platform then generates conversation prompts tuned so the next photo picks up the same thread. Always having to think of the next thing to say puts real strain on carers, and social care already struggles badly with retention — tools that support the moment of caring, rather than the logistics around it, are still rare.

An investor case that holds two things at once

Venture capital wants volume and return; dementia care is personal and slow. Louise's answer was to make the business model itself the ethical argument: a low monthly subscription at scale, aimed at a genuine gap, since most existing technology covers medication tracking and safety monitoring rather than the moment of connection. She also pushed back gently on framing dementia as a disease that affects women more than men — the more accurate picture is who ends up doing the caring.

Louise Callin is the founder and CEO of ReelLife Conversations, a social care technology company helping people living with dementia connect through photos.

Andreas Beust is CEO and managing director of GCP-Service International, a Bremen-based CRO working across medicinal products, medical devices and in vitro diagnostics, president of the Association of International CROs, and a guest lecturer at the University of Bremen. He also, by his own cheerful admission, isn't entirely sure how a man who started at the biostatistics desk ended up running the company.

Those that can communicate generally tend to stand out.

From the biostats desk to CEO

Andreas is refreshingly honest about how it happened: saying yes to almost everything, a good deal of luck, persistence, and an unusually far-sighted founder — also an Andreas — who, well short of retirement age, deliberately began planning his succession because clinical research moves too fast to leave leadership to chance. It's a reminder that careers rarely follow the plan, and that the willingness to take the next thing on matters more than the map.

The skill nobody teaches statisticians

His sharpest observation is that, among technically capable people, the ones who can communicate are the ones who stand out. In a field full of brilliant specialists, the rarer ability to translate the science for sites, sponsors and patients is what moves a career — and, not coincidentally, what makes a trial actually work. Sample size matters enormously at the start of a study; so, it turns out, does being able to explain why.

Pulling back the curtain

Beyond the day job, Andreas's mission is to make clinical research less opaque. Having stumbled into the industry by accident, as many do, he found a world that's hugely impactful yet rarely well understood from the outside, and he wants it to be more shared and more communal. That instinct also shapes how he sees the CRO's future: shifting from cleanup-heavy monitoring and source-data verification toward a genuinely data-driven way of managing trials.

Andreas Beust is the CEO and managing director of GCP-Service International, a Bremen-based CRO, and president of the Association of International CROs.

Most of what we obsess over in clinical research is technical: systems, standards, the mechanics of getting to Database Lock. This week's guest made me sit with something less comfortable — that the thing quietly deciding whether a team catches its own mistakes isn't in any SOP.

Graham Allcott, founder of Think Productive - Global Learning Partner and author of KIND, argues that kindness, not niceness, is an operational lever, not a wellbeing nicety. It's the least "pharma" conversation I've had, and one of the most impactful.

Trust and kindness are rocket fuel.

Graham challenges a belief most of us have quietly internalised: that success comes from being ruthless. His argument is that the ruthless archetype isn't just unpleasant. It's inefficient.

Kind is not nice

Nice is about being liked. Kind is about being honest in a way that helps the other person. Nice avoids the difficult conversation; kind has it early, before it becomes a CAPA. Nice tells a junior data manager their listing looks fine; kind tells them where it doesn't, and why it matters. In an industry that runs on accuracy, that distinction is about data quality.

The mechanism: psychological safety

Kindness earns the "rocket fuel" billing because it builds psychological safety — the sense that you can flag a problem or challenge a decision without being punished for it.

Anyone who's worked on a trial that went wrong can usually point to a moment where someone knew. Knew the query rate was climbing. Knew the timeline was fantasy. And said nothing, because the environment had taught them that speaking up cost more than staying quiet. The errors don't disappear; they surface later, at lock, in an audit finding, in a regulatory question you can't answer well. Kindness lowers the cost of speaking up early.

Retention and critical thinking

The second-order effect is people. People don't leave the work, they leave the way they're treated while doing it — and in a business where trial knowledge lives in individuals rather than SOPs, retention is capability.

It also protects thinking. In fear-led cultures, people optimise for not being wrong, which means doing what they're told and thinking no further. That's the opposite of what you want from the people closest to the data — the ones who catch the "that's odd" before it becomes an unblinding risk.

Why this belongs on a pharma podcast

Every system we deploy ultimately depends on people telling each other the truth quickly. That's a cultural capability, not a technical one. Graham makes the case for it in language that survives contact with a P&L — and turns it practical, laying out concrete principles for engineering a kinder team rather than hoping one emerges from a values poster.

The uncomfortable takeaway, for me, is that most teams I've worked in were quietly getting a fair chunk of this wrong — mistaking pressure for rigour, and nice for kind.

Graham Allcott is the founder of Think Productive and the author of KIND: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work.

This episode discusses suicide and bereavement. Support resources are listed alongside it. Some episodes are harder to introduce than others. My sister, Naomi, died by suicide in 2024, and Suicide&Co supported my family from almost the first day — so this conversation with its co-founder and CEO, Amelia Wrighton, is a personal one.

Amelia built the charity out of her own loss, to be the support she'd needed and never had. We talk about why grief after suicide is different, why the right time to reach out is day one, and the difference a space with no judgement can make. She also dismantles one persistent myth worth carrying with you: asking someone directly whether they're having thoughts of suicide never plants the idea — it gives them permission to speak.

This was not a detached interview for me to sit through. My sister, Naomi, died by suicide in September 2024, and my father died 203 days later. In the middle of that, I found Suicide&Co — I think it was the same day, or the day after, we lost Naomi — and it has framed my family's grief ever since. So when I say this episode matters to me, I mean it more than usual.

Amelia Wrighton is the co-founder and CEO of Suicide&Co, the UK's national charity for people bereaved by suicide. She built it out of her own experience: she lost her mother when she was nineteen, went largely without support, and later founded the charity — in 2020, with her co-founder Emma — to be the thing she'd needed and never had. Her whole approach runs on a single, quietly radical idea.

You are not alone. You do deserve support.

Why grief after suicide is different

Amelia is careful to say it isn't a "grief Olympics" — no loss outranks another. But bereavement by suicide does carry things others often don't. It's sudden, and it shocks even families who feared it might come. It sits under a long shadow of stigma, so the people you expected to show up sometimes go quiet and disappear — which leaves isolation and shame on top of the grief. And it's emotionally complex in a way few of us are equipped for: you're left trying to understand a mind you can no longer ask.

Support from day one

The idea I most want people to take from this is Amelia's answer to "when should someone reach out?" Her answer is now day one or two. Not because everyone wants counselling immediately, but because early contact resets two foundations: that you are deserving of support, and that you are not alone. Get those wrong and everything that follows is harder.

Practically, that looked like this for us: a free Help Hub and app to reach for at 3am, then flexible early bereavement support — short, regular sessions built around the fact that holding down any routine in the first weeks is impossible — and, further on, twelve sessions of proper counselling. All free. It didn't make the journey easy. Nothing does. It kept us company on a very hard one.

A space with no judgement

Both Amelia and I are people who talk — to friends, family, strangers. But she draws a sharp line between that and talking to a professional, and I've felt it. Friends and family want to fix you; they can't help it, and neither can I when it's someone I love. A counsellor is trained to do the harder thing: sit with the pain and hold the space so you can explore it yourself, without anyone tidying it up or telling you it doesn't make sense. That non-judgement is where the work actually happens.

She uses a metaphor I keep returning to. Picture the trauma as your hand pressed flat against your face — it's all you can see, and everything else is blurred. The work isn't to remove the hand. It's to move it slowly back to arm's length: still there, still clearly yours, but with room to see joy, perspective and the rest of your life around it again.

Ask the question

If there's one thing worth carrying out of this newsletter, it's this: asking someone directly whether they're having thoughts of suicide does not plant the idea. It's a persistent myth, and it's wrong. What the question can do is give someone permission to say, honestly and maybe for the first time, that they're struggling. It's a genuine skill and it takes practice to feel confident — Amelia points to formal training such as ASIST — but the myth stops far too many people from ever opening their mouth.

Who the system misses

For a healthcare audience, the systemic picture is the part to sit with. Around 70% of people who die by suicide are men, and only about one in five who died had been in contact with mental health services at all — yet most people in those services are women. The people at highest risk are largely not reaching the system. At the same time, Amelia argues women get overlooked at specific, high-risk moments — perinatal mental health and domestic abuse among them — where the same shame and silence keep people from putting their hand up. England's suicide prevention strategy flags these groups; the gap is who actually gets seen.

Orange

Amelia and I discovered, halfway through, that we're both connected to orange — for her, simply a colour that lifts her; for me, the colour of Naomi, who used to run for charity in an orange vest. After she died I bought a wardrobe of orange. I nearly wore an orange jumper to record this. It's a small thing, and it's everything: grief doesn't only live in the hard conversations. It lives in a colour, and in the people who understand why.

I never asked for this journey. But if this episode nudges one person to reach out a little earlier than I knew how to, it will have been worth recording.

If you need support

You don't have to be in crisis to deserve help. If any of this is close to home, these are good places to start.

• Samaritans — for anyone struggling to cope. Call 116 123 free, any time, day or night (UK & ROI). Or email jo@samaritans.org.
• Suicide&Co — for anyone bereaved by suicide. Help Hub, free counselling and the free Sidekick app at suicideandco.org.
• In an emergency — if someone's life is at immediate risk, call 999.

Amelia Wrighton is the co-founder and CEO of Suicide&Co, the UK's national charity supporting adults bereaved by suicide.

The podcast was built on a simple premise: in an industry run on data, protocols and pressure, we rarely stop to ask the human questions. This episode is where that idea came from. I first met Dermot Whelan — broadcaster, comedian and full-time meditation teacher — at a conference in Prague, where he closed with a short meditation on busyness that landed harder than anything else in the room.

In this conversation we get into panic attacks, why "rest and digest" is as real as fight-or-flight, busyness as a modern status symbol, and his sharpest reframe of all: treat your own stress the way our industry treats data — take the information, don't judge it, and get curious. Practical, funny, and quietly useful for anyone running hot.

Dermot is one of Ireland's most recognisable broadcasters — a comedian, best-selling author and, for the last few years, a full-time meditation teacher who walked away from a chart-topping radio show at the peak of its ratings. His mission is deceptively small: make the techniques for calming your own nervous system simple enough that anyone will actually use them. Or, in his words, learn to "make friends with your stress response."

Stress has a terrible marketing team.

Stress has a terrible marketing team

Dermot's central reframe is one most of us in high-pressure roles have never been offered. We're drilled on fight-or-flight — stress is bad, stress will kill you — and almost never told about the opposite state the body can drop into, rest-and-digest, which he cheerfully rebrands "Matthew McConaughey mode." The point isn't that stress is fine. It's that our perception of stress does much of the damage.

He cites a large US study of around 30,000 adults, later made famous by a well-known TED talk: people who reported high stress and believed stress was harmful were markedly more likely to die prematurely. The group who reported the same high stress but saw it as useful outlived everyone — including the people who'd tried to avoid stress altogether. The stress wasn't the variable. The story they told about it was.

The part a pharma audience should steal

Dermot's advice is to treat your own stress the way our industry treats a dataset: take the information, don't judge it, and see what you can transform it into. We're rigorous and non-judgemental with trial data and merciless with our own. His fix is curiosity — which, not incidentally, is the one behaviour that only shows up once you're out of a stress state.

It's practical, not abstract. He talks about "peace pinchers" — the small, personal, often invisible stressors that set the tone for a whole day. His own example is almost embarrassing: his fitness tracker showed his stress on stage in front of 2,000 people was low, while the daily scramble to leave the house registered at double that. The intervention wasn't a retreat. It was getting up fifteen minutes earlier.

Busyness is now the status symbol

Both of us have watched colleagues wear exhaustion as a badge of honour, and Dermot has the research for why. He points to Columbia Business School's Silvia Bellezza, whose work shows we now signal status through busyness — the 20-minute reply to "how are you?", the phrase "good busy." A century ago, status was leisure; the Downton Abbey set boasted about how little they did. Now "I have no time for myself" is the flex. Once you've seen it, as he warns, you can't unsee it in a single team meeting.

Protect the thing you'll cut first

The most useful operational idea for anyone running hot is his framing of recovery as non-negotiable infrastructure. The walk, the workout, the thing that resets you — that's a foundational block in your Jenga tower, and it's invariably the first thing we sacrifice the moment a "more important" Zoom appears. He runs off-work activities through a filter he calls DRAMA, worth keeping somewhere findable:

1. Detachment — genuinely unrelated to the job
2. Relaxation — it actually settles the system
3. Autonomy — it's for you, not your boss or your kids
4. Mastery — you're learning something, using a different part of the brain
5. Meaning — it adds a sense of purpose
6. Affiliation — you're doing it with, or for, other people

If your "downtime" ticks none of these, that's why you don't feel better after it.

Check in with your heart

Asked for his one golden rule in life and business, he doesn't reach for anything strategic. It's "check in with your heart" — brought down from the head for ten seconds before a decision. He's fully aware how that lands in a corporate room ("I've now lost half the room"), and says it anyway. The brain, in his framing, is a great servant of the heart and not much more.

We closed the episode the way we opened the friendship — with a sixteen-second box-breathing exercise, the kind the Navy SEALs call tactical breathing. It's the whole thesis in miniature: one small, repeatable signal to your nervous system that you're safe, deployable before the difficult conversation or the presentation you're dreading.

I'll be honest that this was not a detached interview to record. Dermot led with kindness toward me at a genuinely low point, and it changed the trajectory of what I do. If there's a takeaway for our sector, it's that the systems, standards and timelines all still depend on people who are regulated enough to think clearly. That's not soft. It's operational.

Dermot Whelan is a broadcaster, comedian and meditation teacher, and the author of Mindful and Busy and Wrecked.