Introducing Uncommon Threads

It's unrelenting analogies and puns from here on out

Hello 👋🏻

I’ve had quite a few new people subscribe since I last posted (welcome, very pleased to have you here!), and I’m aware that I haven’t given any of you much to validate that decision. 

I haven’t been writing much recently but I have been busy plotting. I am very genuinely and seriously committed to making some real change: mostly in my life but ideally also in the lives of the people around me. And also in the lives of people I don’t know on the internet, if possible. Oh, and while we’re here I’d quite like to make changes to how lots of organisations are run, and maybe how they relate to each other and to wider society. 

And, when my ego gets the better of me, I guess I have a desire to change our global systems and the way that we all experience and relate to the planet. Me? White gal hero complex? Never. 

In any case, whatever my myriad motivations, I’d like to introduce you to Uncommon Threads. Yes, it is the positive and constructive flipside to Unravelling Together. Once we’ve unravelled, we’re going to take those deconstructed strands and we’re going to weave something better. (I’m aware that the thread analogy may get tortured at some point but I’m running with it for now). 

Uncommon Threads is my umbrella for bringing together my various interests, passions, skills and experiences into something that hopefully can help me find exactly what my contribution to improving human and planetary health is. And if I can help as many individuals and organisations as possible to do the same thing along the way, then that'll be just fantastic.

Why ‘Uncommon Threads’?

Beyond my enjoyment of the thread puns, there’s another reason why I’ve chosen the title ‘Uncommon Threads’. I believe that we all spend far too much of our time focusing on certain aspects of ourselves, treading a well worn path and losing the idiosyncrasies and ‘non-conformist’ interests and passions that don’t quite fit into the life we’re living in that exact moment. 

What are two things you really like that wouldn’t typically go together? Do you like death metal but also enjoy sitting at home on a Saturday night crocheting? Do you get engrossed in building financial models in excel but also hold a deep passion for barefoot fell running through the mountains? Do you care deeply about the environment but also really want to buy a new backpack and set off travelling?

Humans are endlessly fascinating and what makes them particularly fascinating is the enigmatic richness of their interests, passions and sources of joy. 

When I first started planning to start my own business/organisation/whatever you want to call it, I felt that I would have to keep it quite separate from this Substack. The audience who wants to read about my thoughts on how and why we should rethink ISO standards and how we can improve data interoperability in the NHS probably is not the audience who wants to read my thoughts on why late-stage capitalism is wreaking havoc on all of our mental wellbeing. 

But maybe they are. Maybe, just maybe, I’m not a unique and special little flower who is interested in a wide variety of the things that make up our world and who likes to see how they connect. 

And maybe I should trust my audience to take the bits that resonate and leave the bits that don’t, rather than trying to do it for them. (Don’t worry though, I promise I won’t write too much about ISO standards). 

The letters 'I S O' being overgrown by greenery (or at least that’s the prompt I gave the AI, the closest it could get was my initials s🤷🏻‍♀️)

So how did I get here? 

I never knew what I wanted to do when I grew up. I didn’t want to be an astronaut or an actress; a doctor or a politician; not an explorer and not even a lion-tamer (actually, lion-tamer was never really on the table). And to this day, I still don’t know. 

What has been so good and freeing about not knowing is that it’s allowed me to trust my instincts, follow my interests and build new ones, and to go on a journey that I never could have planned. 

I studied History at university and loved it, particularly the modules I did about the history of political thought. This was my first reckoning with the idea that modern Western democracies were not necessarily the epitome of societal structure and that the notion that everything had inevitably ‘progressed’ us to this point was deeply flawed. 

Then I graduated and, pretty standardly for a British arts student, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. What I did know is that I was very interested in understanding and utilising the best parts of the public, private and third sectors to try to improve the lives of citizens and also to see how those sectors might work together more effectively. 

An introduction to tech

So, what has this looked like in practice? Well, I've spent most of my twenties working in tech in London. I started at Entrepreneur First, the renowned Talent Investor, where I first saw and became incredibly excited by the potential of entrepreneurship and challenging conventional career paths. It was also my introduction to how technology can make real change in the world and the enormous potential of bringing together groups of people with different skills and knowledge to create new and unexpected things greater than the sum of their parts. I also learned a great deal about community building - I was lucky enough to run the alumni community and learn about what makes communities tick. 

However, it was also where I realised that, as a 25 year old working in Venture Capital, I had limited experience of what it actually took to build a company - beyond the admittedly substantial amount that I'd gathered through osmosis by watching thousands of others do it. So, I joined Accurx, then a 30-person startup, building communications software for the NHS. I joined as the second operations hire, fatefully, 2 weeks before the first London lockdown for Covid-19, and what followed was a total whirlwind where the software was adopted by 98% of GP practices across the country.

An introduction to the public sector 

In my 4 years there, I have covered pretty much every aspect of operations, from organisational and team goal setting, to data protection and contractual compliance, to commercialisation and signing contracts with NHS England and almost every single regional health board in England. What I came to see as the connecting thread through all of that work, and what I care most about, is what it takes to become, and to remain, a trustworthy supplier to the public sector.

With this came a deep desire to fix the issues I see in public procurement, which I believe can only happen if we start to focus on problems we want to solve and outcomes we want to create, rather than looking solely at inputs and tick box exercises. I believe that in order to do this, we need to create a much better shared language and knowledge between private and public sector organisations. How can you possibly trust and then effectively deploy something you fundamentally don’t understand? 

There are two parts here that I believe we should be focusing on:

• Number one is working out how we can democratise access to building and, to be honest, even just using technology so that people who are actually experiencing the sharp end of the modern world’s difficulties have the resources and ability to solve their own problems rather than having a bunch of rich white people saying they can do it for them (for a decent price of course).

• Number two is harnessing the energy, talent and, let’s face it, ridiculous amounts of money that are in the tech sector to stop building bloody B2B sales optimisation tools and start building solutions to real and planet-destroying problems. 

The start of the unravelling 

On that final point then. Can you tell I’ve been a bit frustrated?

As many of you here know, as it’s on her recommendation that many of you found this Substack, last January I had a chance encounter with Rachel Donald of Planet Critical. This in itself is a fun example of Uncommon Threads coming together: I’d started a WhatsApp group called ‘Weekend Walkers’ in the hopes of a) getting out of London and into nature on a more regular basis and b) bringing together my various groups of friends and their partners so that we could all get to know each other better and end the habit of only ever talking to the same people at parties. 

Rachel was a friend of a friend and came along and told me about what she was doing with her podcast. It was around this time that I was reading David Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ and the two experiences collided to make me realise that I was profoundly dissatisfied with not only my own life but also the standard options available to me to change it: get a new job, move house, find a partner blah blah blah.

I spent the rest of last year learning more and more about the polycrisis and realising just how urgently things need to change as well as how deeply they need to change. Thus Unravelling Together was born. The following few months made me realise that all of my energy and excitement was coming from this exploration and less and less from my day job. So I decided to quit and, after a helpful brainstorming session with Anthropic’s Claude, launch the umbrella concept of ‘Uncommon Threads’.

I’d had lots of people tell me that ‘unravelling’ sounded profoundly scary. I still think the unravelling is an essential part of the journey but the core idea and feeling I want for Uncommon Threads is one of empowerment. I want to use this platform to help everyone to realise that we all have so much more power over our own lives and the systems we live in than we’ve been led to believe.

Back to Uncommon Threads

So here are some of my Uncommon Threads that I have been keeping somewhat separate from each other but that I believe will make for a much more colourful me if I choose to embrace them, wholeheartedly, all at once.

I’m Olivia and I’m just as happy wandering around an ancient archaeological site as I am trying on a VR headset and killing zombies. I fundamentally believe that billionaires should not exist but I will be going to the Taylor Swift Eras tour this summer and I will be in costume and singing very loudly. 

I’m Olivia and I love thinking about the big picture and what the world will look like in 10, 20, 100 years but I have also spent four years designing a role for myself that has involved looking after the minute granularities of NHS assurance processes and filling in excel spreadsheets about API calls.

I’m Olivia, and I have found a great deal of fulfilment in the tech startup scene in London and I genuinely believe in the potential of technology to help us solve our most pressing problems. I also believe that the way that tech is built, incentivised and and controlled is deeply damaging to the vast majority of people and needs to be changed as soon as possible. 

I’m Olivia and sometimes all I want to do is talk about the polycrisis and the absolute madness of the situation that humans have created for themselves and find it hard to engage with anything else. And sometimes I just want to send Instagram memes about what our burlesque names would be with my best friend. 

I’m Olivia and I’m really excited about this new phase of my journey and everything I’ll learn from setting up a business and creating content and hopefully growing a bit of a following. 

And sometimes I just want to go and sit in the woods and howl at the moon.  

So what’s the one thing you can do next?

I’d like to invite you to think about/write/share your own list of ‘Uncommon Threads’. What are the things that make you “you” but that might surprise people? And if you feel open to it, I’d love for you to share them in the comments.