An interview with Wadham and Rhodes Scholar alumna, Susan Bartlett

I did English and software design – mostly software design and English was a bit of a side line. The software design was a new programme that they brought out while I was in my first year and if I wanted to get that specialization, I had to stay for an extra year; so instead of taking a lighter course load or random electives, I concentrated my electives in English so that I ended up with both an English degree and a software design science degree. It was lovely in the main. I was on the track team, so I had a lot of time in the gym.

In memory it was just sort of a dream two years, really. There was something very nice about taking an undergraduate degree as a slightly older student. I would have been turning 23 just as that first Michaelmas started, and I knew that it wasn't a degree where the result was going to matter. No one ever says like, ‘Oh, you were a Rhodes Scholar? How good was your degree?’ I've never, ever been asked that question. So it was an opportunity to really love the learning of all these new ways of thinking.

It was a complete departure from a lot of computer science stuff that I had been doing before. And there was so much going on at the college level – I even sang in the College choir and I was on the College cricket team. I'd never played cricket before! I was on the university football team – I played soccer sort of recreationally in Canada, but never at a level to play on a team, but I was actually on the second 11 for the women's team. I ran in the Varsity meets of the track team. I wasn't really on the track team, but I had done hurdles before, which is not as common a discipline. Someone said, ‘Oh, really? There's someone who can do hurdles? Could you come?’ And I think we maybe had a basketball team that I played on as well! I'm quite poor at basketball by Canadian standards, but I could do a layup with both hands, so that seemed good enough!

I really enjoyed all that the university and College had to offer. I remember loving the tutorials and just that ability to sit down and really go deep into what you found interesting or challenging, or you were having trouble with.

But I do remember that first Michaelmas term being quite difficult because you're far away [from home], you're a little bit set apart from the regular college life, and it's harder to integrate. Going to university the first time as a 17 or 18 year old, it was very easy to meet people and make friends. I learned it wasn't so easy the second time – it was a bit of an adjustment that first term but then after it was great.

I was grateful to have landed at Wadham. It felt unstuffy relative to other colleges, and the graduate and undergraduate students felt a bit more integrated, which was especially nice for someone doing a second BA.

I met my husband, Sam, at Wadham! He also studied PPE. I really met him on – I don't know if they still do them, these PPE retreats out in Windsor Great Park. Each year there was a theme – one year it was ‘the PPE of food’ and the other it was ‘the PPE of choice’ and it was two or three days in the middle of term and you got a lot of guest speakers and socializing in the bar, and that's where I really got to know him. He put a note in my pigeonhole with his cell phone number after we got back from the conference and we got to know each other over the months ahead.

Yes, we were. Sam and I got married in the College chapel and we had the reception at Rhodes House.

Yes, it was very, very nice and we took the kids around and they were extremely bored as we said, “Oh, well, that used to be different” or whatever! They enjoyed the punting and they enjoyed ice cream at G&D’s and going to Blackwell's and being able to buy books.

Yes, that was at a time when the plan was to become an academic in computer science, so it was always my mental model that the PPE was a little bit of a side trip into another world that would hopefully make me a bit better-rounded. I did research in – very trendy at the moment – large language models and AI. It went well enough and I published a couple of papers. But the main thing I learned was that academia was not going to be my jam because I had sort of six really wonderful weeks working on my research where I was like: “Oh, here's a problem, here are some solutions...I wonder if that works?” and sort of coding it up and see if so. That was all fun and exciting.

But then it was followed by a year of laborious work: “Okay, can I take the accuracy up from 85 to 89% with minuscule sort of things?” I'm definitely a 20/80 person – I was very happy doing the 20% of the work that got us 80% there. The very long, hard and important work of figuring out how to get at that 20% with the 80% of the work which maybe several dozen people in the world might have cared about that time, I realised that it was probably not going to leave me happy in the long run. So I then went out and got a job.

Yes – it snows in October and it's very cold! Sam, that first year, went to University of British Columbia, so he was in Vancouver doing a master's degree in politics.

After he’d finished that, he also moved to Edmonton and worked at the Legislative Assembly of Alberta – his work permits and his right to remain in Canada were tied to his job there. We stayed in Edmonton so he could continue to work at the Legislature and I went to work for IBM in Edmonton in their technology-strategy consulting area of business. I learned a lot and, in a pretty short amount of time, flew up to very small prairie cities that were very cold!

Yeah, I finished up and would have defended my thesis around August and started work at IBM in November. By following the January I was flying to Regina, Saskatchewan to work on a reorganisation of the IT services for the government of Saskatchewan. Then I did a variety of other projects after that. On a personal level, we’d got married and wondered: do we want to settle in Edmonton? We thought not: it's very cold and very far away. So we considered where we wanted to go and we decided on Toronto. My job made it very easy to re-locate because I moved by flying from Edmonton to Winnipeg for my 4-day consulting week, then flying from Winnipeg to Toronto – so I kind of kept the same role but just started flying out of a different airport

Oh, gosh, I don't know. If I had to wager a guess, it might have something to do with the diversity of that background and having spent a reasonable amount of time in such an array of subjects. People are infinite in their variations and their motivations. And when you read a lot of literature (as I as I still do – at least by the standards of someone with like a job and two kids!), and when you have studied philosophy and politics and economics, and you've studied a lot of advanced mathematics and statistical machine learning and all that stuff, you collect a lot of different models and frameworks for understanding the world. And I think that that allows you to extrapolate what matters to people, maybe with a bit a bit more ease because you've got more patterns to draw on. And the patterns are not in a small niche, they run a wide gamut. So I suspect that that might be one of the reasons.

Well, if things were easy they'd be done already. I think it's very difficult to implement change in any context and to get everyone rowing in the same direction. Psychology is a subject I haven't studied, but it's one that I've made a bit of a personal side project in terms of really understanding self-determination theory and things like that. I've read some fairly weighty academic tomes and my time in PPE, if nothing else, taught me the ability to sit down with a very dense, one-thousand page academic book, read through it, and figure out ways to apply it. So I think those are lessons that I apply several times a week!

I would categorise it as fairly mid-pandemic! I think one of the things the pandemic did was make it a lot easier to start a services-based business like ours. Nobody asks: where's your office? You don't need to have expensive office space for people to think you're a plausible organisation. And a lot of other things have emerged over the last 10 years – you don't need to have an email server, you could just sign up for Google Workspace; and the cost of getting started is very, very small for this kind of knowledge-based businesses.

I think that's going to be one of the things that ends up transforming the way that work happens because I think more and more people are going to be able to hang out their own shingle or club together with a few other folks and do work without the kind of corporate overhead, and firms will have less to offer because so much of the infrastructure that they've provided over the last few decades is now pretty accessible for most folks who do knowledge work.

It was a moment in time when absolutely nobody was standing still – there are all kinds of solutions and arrangements that folks are still experimenting with, but nobody was saying, “Well, we're going to be exactly the same.” Everyone had to change. And that is often a good time to be a new business because when you have to change, you start to seek out new information, new ideas and new ways of working, and potentially new partners to work with when you're looking for help in that area [that we specialise in].

Bridgeable was around 60ish at its height – when I joined, I think I was employee number 10, and half of those were actually doing a hardcore industrial design business. So there were five of us doing more of the design consulting, so it was quite small to start and eventually the industrial design was hived off into its own business. Workomics, up until January of last year, was only me – now there are three partners and we have six full-time employees, along with a handful of other contractors, so we're in the 12–14 range at the moment. It's grown quite quickly but we don’t extrapolate a growth curve off of that: we're hoping to stay relatively small and sustainable as a business.

Yeah, I think so. IBM is of course ridiculously large – there were 400,000 employees worldwide when I was there. It's just a behemoth. And then I went to a place with 10, and that was a huge shift –there were no systems and processes in place whatsoever compared to IBM, where the systems have systems!

Because I was there at Bridgeable as the company grew from 10 up to 60 or so, I think you do get to an inflection point in that 15-to-20-person range where you start to need to have the systems and processes of a larger company because everything can't be handled informally and person-to-person anymore. But you don't yet have the scale of a larger company to be able to really invest in those things. I don't know if it's better or worse, but I think it's difficult to be in that 25-to-75 range because it's a size where you're sort of, ‘Well, you maybe need to have HR and maybe you need to have an accountant, and maybe you would like to have 1.4 of those, but it's hard to find .4 of HR’ and that kind of thing. It's a tricky balance to navigate.

I do like the small, intimate team – it takes a lot of the politics or, for lack of a better word, the drama out of work when it's a small team because everyone is pretty focused and there's not a lot of noise. I really love that that size. The drawback is that it's harder to have as much impact in a global context. We quite deliberately say we're focusing our efforts on firms with say, 5,000 or fewer employees. it's very difficult to be a small firm and have an impact with like one of the big Canadian banks, for instance, because they're just so enormous, and it takes too much to turn those battleships when you're a small firm.

So it has its limitations and its drawbacks, but some of what we're after, too, is work that feels fulfilling and flourishing while you're doing it; and having small impact in a more global context within a smaller organisation feels just as good as having impact in a larger organisation because you can see the ways that you're helping people.

I found it very easy in those years to take definitions of ambition and success from the world around me. If you're the type of student who's at Oxford, you're surely the type of person who's very good at scaling whatever ladders are put in front of you. And it can feel very satisfying as you climb those rungs and you can be very effective at that.

But it’s not the only way to gauge success and ambition. In fact, taking the time to think about what really matters and what you value is something that my husband and I talked a lot about during the pandemic. I don't know if you ever read the Globe & Mail [one of several national broadsheets in Canada], but on the back page they have a column where they do both the obituaries and something called ‘Lives Lived’. The obituaries are always a very famous person who's accomplished many great things and has a long list of accomplishments. ‘Lives Lived’ is someone that no one's ever heard of and their family has written a nice little essay about the person. And so often you read the obituaries and they say so-and-so did not have time for their family or etc, etc, etc. And that's never the case in the Lives Lived. It's always about the relationships that they had and how much warmth and light they brought to those around them. We've really tried to make a conscious decision around having the Lives Lived column at the end of the day, not the obituary.

We've both just taken eight months out and were traipsing around Europe with our children and it's a very concrete way that we're living out that that particular value system. But I think the default tends to be towards the tick boxes and the bullet points that show up in the obituary, but there are other ways to be.

Interview with Julie Levison, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a community-based physician at Massachusetts General Hospital.