Are you Chess Club or Drama Club? Do you focus on the detail or prefer to imagine the bigger picture?
In this Transforming Business episode, Martin Parker speaks with Sally Bridgeland, author of Chess Club, Drama Club, about why we need a mixture of both clubs within teams, and within ourselves.
They discuss how the ‘Club Mix’ can enhance team dynamics by balancing creativity, structure and different ways of thinking, including the value of neurodiversity and inclusive teams. Through real-life stories, business insights and practical exercises, Sally explores how the ‘DJ’ can create the perfect mix to drive business success.
Available to listen here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Sally Bridgeland is an actuary with extensive experience in innovation, risk management and responsible investment across investment management and pensions.
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
Chess Club, Drama Club by Sally Bridgeland is available for £12.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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SHOWNOTES
Timestamps:
01:04 – What is the distinction between chess club and drama club?
05:06 – Why is having a mix of both clubs important?
06:40 – What is the ‘club mix’?
14:06 – What does the dance between chess club and drama club actually look like?
20:26 – How does the ‘club mix’ apply to politics?
23:45 – Is the chess club, drama club divide a gendered one?
27:24 – What is the role of the DJ in this space?
30:55 – When were you at your most and least motivated?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Martin Parker: Hello. My name is Martin Parker, I’m professor at the University of Bristol Business School. And it’s my pleasure today to be introducing Sally Bridgeland, who is the author of a book coming out in September with Bristol University Press called ‘Chess Club, Drama Club: Building Creative and Resilient Businesses Together’. Sally is an actuary with extensive experience in innovation, risk management and responsible investment across investment management and pensions.
She was CEO of the BP Pension Scheme in 2007 to 14. Sally’s non-exec portfolio currently includes chair at Nest Invest, chair of the Development Bank of Wales and chair of BelleVie Care and non-executive director at Insurance Intact UK. Sally is a mother of one and a mentor to many. Ruthlessly analytical, she dances freestyle and doesn’t care who’s watching.
Thanks for joining us today, Sally.
Sally Bridgeland: My pleasure, Martin.
MP: Grand. So let’s talk about your book and some of the ideas that have fed into it. So I think probably a place to start would be the title, ‘Chess Club, Drama Club’. So you’re kind of suggesting that there are two different ways of thinking about or acting in organizations. One, that’s a bit more like a chess club, and one that’s a bit more like a drama club.
So can you unpack that distinction a little for us to start off?
SB: Yeah, I think in a lot of books about culture, you will get descriptions of how the storytelling, the mythos is important, but also the logos or logos is important. The logic. And what I’ve found in, in business is that those two things are very complementary to each other, a bit of a yin and yang going on in how we think.
But the reality is, is that a lot of the organizational structures, the regulation that I see certainly in financial services and even the way our education system focuses on grades and the right answers to things, tends to overemphasize and really emphasize the logical the rational argument, whereas the creative complement to that is increasingly important in a world where we have AI doing a lot of the work for us, where there are some big problems to crack, like climate change, and where inclusion and inclusion of ideas is a prize that organizations are keen to get but haven’t really got beyond diversity.
So really, the idea is that the playful things that we might do through clubs like chess clubs and drama clubs are things that we can and should bring into our daily lives and our business lives.
MP: So are you sort of suggesting that the kind of people who might join a chess club would be different to the kind of people who’d join a drama club.
SB: Well, what I normally do is ask people, you know, which club would you rather join? You know, I’m an oddity myself before you ask me.
MP: I was just about to.
SB: In that I’ve never been a member of a chess club. And when I play chess with my daughter, who’s pretty good at it, we play dinosaur chess where we’ve got dinosaurs lined up at the side. And if either of us just get bored, it’s gone on too long or actually we know how it’s going to end. One of us has the right to say extinction, and the dinosaurs would just crash over all the pieces and the game’s over.
So it’s a bit of a drama club version of chess, and the only club I’ve been a member of is a drama club, but it was a drama club at Imperial College where it’s fair to say most of the people join the dramatic society because they want to operate the lights and the sounds and the technical side of things, which is probably more the chess club side of a drama club.
So I would say I’m very much on the edge of which I would rather join, but I can see the attraction of both. But asking people comes up with some fascinating answers. You might think, well, anyone who’s an actuary is going to be Chess club because they’re good at maths and they’re good at logic, and they like that kind of stuff.
But you will find if you ask a group of actuaries, there will be those that put their hands up for the drama club. And that in itself is really interesting. And it probably reflects either their work situation or their home life or their backgrounds, where, yes, they were good at maths, but they were also entertaining or enjoyed performing in some sense, or loved the storytelling behind it or the language of maths.
My inspirational maths teacher, she came from a school when maths was in the languages department, so it was all about that… the poetry, the creativity of the maths that those who study maths to university level will really resonate, will really resonate with them.
MP: So presumably you would be arguing, and do in the book, that too much of an emphasis on one side is going to be a bit of a problem. So if we just imagine organizations as being places of kind of rules and algorithms and rationality, we’ll get a rather thin, possibly dysfunctional version of organizing.
SB: It might be perfect, but wrong. And, you know, they carry on doing something that ends up not being the thing that anybody needs them to be doing. But will do it to a level of perfection and accuracy that is completely exemplary. So yes, but yeah, it’s all about the club mix and that’s obviously in the dance track sense.
It is what I would be dancing to freestyle, but it’s about making sure that you deliberately ask, are we being too drama club about this? Are we being too chess club about this? What are we missing? What would the drama club say? What would the chess club say? So I’ve got coins that I can toss. I’ve got, I’ve done an app.
Now that tosses the coin for you. If, like me, you’re not very, you’re a bit fingers and thumbs and not very good at tossing things. And the book has these constructs, the club mix questions, which deliberately invoke creativity and then analysis. So that in different business situations. And that’s the kind of if the reader gets nothing else out of it, it’s trying to remember that mix and trying to make that habit an important one of keeping that mix.
MP: So you mentioned the club mix. So I was kind of starting off with the two that, if you like the two sorts of oppositions chess club and drama club, but your actual recommendation is that people need to be kind of flexible in moving between both of those persona or ways of organizing something like that, which is why you use this metaphor club mix.
Can you unpack that a bit? I mean, I’ve already said you’re a dancer, so clearly it’s something that attracts you.
SB: Yeah, yeah. So the, whether the moves are dance moves or chess moves, the important thing in a team situation or even if you’re thinking individually. But ideally, if we’re talking about inclusion and creativity, it’s better to think about that when you’re together. Possibly having done some brainstorming beforehand. But in a crowded room where you’re trying to think about, are we missing something or is there something else that we need to be thinking about?
Both of those questions, if you start with a creative, expansive question, a drama club question. So it will be about what’s the happily ever after? What are the things that could get in the way of this? The characters, the relationships, the plots, how this has to unfold. Those are the kind of drama club, creative questions, and then the chess club questions, which will sort of work in pairs with the drama club question, will then ground that back in reality, uncover the, so what? Okay if we think that this might happen or that this is an opportunity, what do we do about it now?
What are the steps that we take? Let’s map this out on a board. Let’s have a plan because we talked about a chess club organization and how they might do something perfectly, the danger with a drama club organization is that they’re too creative for their own good, and they don’t settle on anything. They don’t implement anything, but they will have wonderful ideas, beautiful creativity, but get bored when they’ve got to a certain point.
It’s the dinosaur chess all over again. It’s when your innovator, your entrepreneur is constantly moving on to the next idea. And that is as frustrating for members who prefers to be in the chess club as the stodgy, completely bureaucratic organization is for members of the drama club. And yet both need the other, so finding ways to pull in those answers from the different clubs perspectives is important.
And yeah, I’m not talking about you need to go around your team and make sure that you’ve got a mix of chess club and drama club. You just need to be aware of what you’re starting with and match the right tasks to the right team members and the right predispositions, so that people enjoy doing what they’re doing.
MP: Yeah, because there are some sort of versions of management and management development that allocate roles. The famous one is Belbin’s Team Inventory, isn’t it, where you get different sorts of roles allocated to different people within a team? Your approach is less mechanical in that sense, isn’t it? And I, I have a sense from reading what you’re doing that the questions are intended in some sense to prompt us to oscillate between the chess club aspects of ourselves and the drama club aspects of ourselves that you want that kind of movement to take place.
SB: Yeah. And if you look at, and I’ve used the Belbin team roles in the past, and I’m a coordinator, which would reinforce the fact that I’m trying to make sure things happen and that everybody’s talking to everybody and that things move into the right place. In network theory, I’m a boundary spanner. I sometimes say I married the right man in being called Bridgeland, in that I’m bridging the land between things all the time.
But there are other times when I don’t. But there’s more stories about that in the book as well. The completed finisher is probably close, more closely aligned to a chess club player where there was moves and they get immense satisfaction out of finishing something. And then the plant is probably more drama club, where it’s all about the ideas, whereas the coordinator and the shaper will be more about building those two things together.
So yes, and if you look at the Insight colour wheel, the blue colours and the red colours tend to be more chess club and drama club. But being, I suppose what I’m really keen is that these aren’t labels or boxes that we put people in and say, but your drama club, you can’t do chess club. It’s more the most important thing is the way that we work together.
MP: I guess another element of this is the way in which, because you said, you know, particularly facing kind of grand challenges and that some of, you know, the massive global difficulties that we currently have to address that many of these questions require ethical or political understandings and interventions, and they sound to me like they’re more drama club than chess club.
But there’s a sense in which very often it’s easy to say what you’d like, what you’d like the world to be like, but without specifying the kind of mechanisms. If you like the sort of theory of change that might allow that sort of world to be created. So in a sense this is that partly what you’re saying as well, that this kind of the, yeah.
SB: Definitely. So your classic politician would be drama club would be out there making big statements and big ideals without necessarily of thinking through the chess club moves that you might need to take to get there. If you look at theories of change and theories around business, probably the things like the Three Horizons framework, where horizon one is kind of where you are now, and horizon two is incremental change from where you are now.
That’s much more a sort of chess club move, whereas the horizon three would be a bit more, ‘let’s imagine where we need to get to, where we are at point B, what the world would look like there and what are the things that we need to be doing differently’. Those kinds of innovations would be a bit more drama club because it’s focusing on that happily ever after, how do we get there?
But also building in some of that the knowledge of what the art of the possible is. And I love the fact that the expression, I don’t use it in the book, is the art of the possible is very much painting that picture is a drama club kind of narrative of different scenarios, different stories that we can tell ourselves about the way that we could get there.
But the reality is, is what quite often happens in politics is you will suddenly been told that we need to be net zero by 2050 without anybody having thought about how we’re actually going to get there, and whether net zero is the right measure and whether we know what net zero is. And you will then get, as we’ve seen in the field of climate change, a whole load of academic work about whether net zero is the right target or whether there are other things that we should be measuring.
You get a lot of people who measure things. The actuarial profession is one of those who will be looking at, have we got the right data? Can we analyse this? But actually what’s important is not mapping out and checking that we know exactly where we are on the path that we’ve already trod, but actually what the path needs to be in the future.
And so that’s why the drama club comes in in that.
MP: That’s really helpful. It’s probably worth for our listeners trying to flesh this out a bit now. I mean, you’ve got an enormous amount of business experience, particularly in kind of as a non-exec and in various kinds of environmental issues as well. Can you give some illustrations of the kind of the dance, if you like, between chess club and drama club that leads to your nicely placed club mix that makes everybody want to dance.
SB: Yeah. So, so I think the moves alternate. It’s a left right kind of march, a chess club, drama club. And in something like climate change you might imagine a whole load of possibilities. So if I think about the Air Force, where I’m an Honorary Group Captain and the role in 601 Squadron means that I’m about introducing external thinking into the debates about things like net zero.
We might look at synthetic fuels, we might look at hydrogen, we might look at reduced training in a different way. We might look at electrifying vehicles using electric scooters instead of diesel powered engines around the bases. We might look at alternative uses for air bases and the role of the drama club there is in exploring those stories about how that works.
The role of the chess club then tends to be thinking about how we would actually implement individual things. And you tend to go in this explore and expand and then tighten back. Let’s are we still on track? Are we still doing what we wanted to do? How does this fit in with the other ideas that we’re developing at the same time?
How does two things mesh together? So it’s almost like a chess tournament or chess and drama club tournament going on at the same time with a number of different things in play. But it is that collective endeavour and shared happily ever after, what you’re aiming for, that purpose that is really important. That means that people will have that shared sense of there’s something about the shared sense of human endeavour that comes into, you know, tackling those big problems and pulling one innovation from one place and another innovation from another place.
That at the moment it’s really difficult to imagine AI being able to do that, which is something that I find very exciting about chess club, drama club is by invoking that creativity that AI doesn’t have. We can actually because it’s just trained on the data set that’s out there already. It’s looking backwards. We can actually ask the right questions and ask different questions that will take us on a different dance going forwards.
Did that answer your question? It didn’t feel quite like I was going chess club drama club in that. But it’s more about the dance that everybody needs to dance so that we’re all… we’re less focused on the game that we’re currently playing and more focused on the game that could be.
MP: Yeah, I guess I was thinking about sort of particular examples in the sense and, you know, say when you’re speaking about pensions, for example, then there’s a whole series of actuarial questions. You’re absolutely right. And your training presumably helps you think about those kinds of questions. But obviously there’s a kind of, well, an environmental horizon to the way in which we need to start thinking about pensions and insurance and all the rest of it.
Which means, I guess, that creative forms of thought are necessary in order that we can imagine a future in which things like pensions and insurance are possible, but also for the companies themselves to think about ways in which they can actually guarantee their futures. Yeah. So I guess I was thinking, can you give us sort of, give the listeners some sort of examples of the way in which this dance has proceeded, the move from actuarial calculations to some business innovation, different sorts of strategy, whatever.
SB: Yeah, I think probably the best example is how we think about operational resilience in insurance companies. And that can chime in with the longer term resilience around climate change. Or it can just look at things like cyber attacks or the situations that are kind of outside the scope of the models. The models would be what you would traditionally describe as being very chess club.
You’ve analysed everything. You’ve worked out your assumptions and how things work. The drama club aspect to this is the scenario testing or even assuming that things go wrong and you don’t care why, you don’t care what probability that happens, but you just care that you know what you would do if it did to make businesses, and that’s the resilience part of making businesses more resilient as well.
So you’ve asked yourself a question of, you know, if this goes wrong, what would we do to recover from it? And then you can kind of work backwards and say, actually, is that good enough, or is that causing harm to our customers, harm to the environment in a way that it would be too costly or too inconvenient for people to respond from?
So the drama club question of, you know, what would happen if this goes wrong or why might this go wrong, then helps you become more resilient and develop those specific steps that mean that you wouldn’t get there in the first place. Regardless of your models, you’ve actually found a creative way out of the situations you particularly want to avoid.
In insurance company terms, that’s called operational resilience. That’s a regulatory framework that we all have to look at, and it gets away from statistical distributions and says, yeah, I know it’s unlikely, but it might happen. So let’s look at making sure that we can deal with it if it does. That kind of thinking in climate change, in the things that are typically a longer time horizon than your average business planning cycle of a year or maybe five years for the strategic conversations, that helps translate something which seems a long way off into what do we need to do today.
MP: In terms of sort of business and politics, very often it’s said that we adopt short time horizons, either because of, you know, shareholder value or the implications of the next election, whatever it might be. But I guess your kind of your invocation of drama club is an attempt to think long term about longer futures. And particularly, you know, given your experience in insurance and pensions and so on, those are businesses that have one foot in the future already in a sense, aren’t they? They’re not simply thinking about, you know, delivering the next pile of whatever it is, but thinking about what the world might look like in 20, 30 years time.
SB: And when you have a change of government and we’ve just had a change of government in Wales, chairing the Development Bank of Wales is about looking at the stories and the happily ever afters that the Development Bank was working towards with the current, with the previous government and seeing how those align with the, with the current, the new government.
So quite often and certainly what I found was quite interesting around net zero was how the baton was passed quite effectively between Boris Johnson and the conservative government to the labour government. And it’s only when you’ve got Trump and someone else on another continent, challenging and questioning that, that you would actually think, well, why wouldn’t this be a good thing to do?
It was, it became not a party political issue. And pensions has benefited, as you say, from that, in that for the future benefit of future governments, it is helpful if individuals have their own pension savings because they will be better able, you know, quality of life, less reliant on the state. There’s a time frame over that that goes across generations, definitely beyond the political time frame.
So what happens is that you pass the baton in a way that fits with the story of the incoming government and what they want to achieve in the near term. But actually, the longer term story, it’s like, each government is just an episode in this particular boxset. And you just want to make sure that the flavour of that particular episode and the ups and downs and the achievements, actually match what they want to do while still sticking to the same longer term goal.
And if you imagine it in those terms, it can make it easier to be less frustrated by the fact that you’ve got new members of the plot suddenly parachuting in and not knowing what went before, and that you’re the guardians of the I call it the previously on the West Wing moments of explaining what’s happened so far that is relevant to the current episode. Being able to tell those stories is really important.
MP: I’m always very sympathetic to any West Wing analogies. It’s such an interesting but it’s a fascinating account of an organization that we follow for quite a long time, don’t you?
SB: I watched it during lockdown, and it was just genuinely more reassuring for Martin Sheen to be in the white House than Trump at the time.
MP: Indeed, that’s right. Yeah.
SB: That’s edging on being a political view.
MP: There were a large number of Americans who believed that Martin Sheen was actually the president at some time. Not sure that that’s the case, but I’ve certainly heard it recounted. Can I just, pitching this in a slightly different direction. And I don’t know how you respond to this, but it seems that one of the ways you could understand the chess club drama club thing is by thinking this in quite gendered terms as well, that, you know, there’s a kind of a sort of masculine trading in explicit forms of logic and rationality and all the rest of it, and then at the risk of deploying no more than gender stereotypes, a kind of a sort of feminine account of intuition or relationality or care or whatever it might be. Do you recognize that sort of gendered way in which I’m describing the opposition?
SB: Yes and no, in that I happen to have been brought up with family members where the men were particularly creative and have not followed. And I’m a mathematician, so surely that’s but the whole. And it was one of the things that when I started writing the book, and was talking to people about it, people would say, oh, so this is a feminist book about the rise of the importance of the female perspective.
I said, well, it is about diversity, but it’s not about gender diversity. I think the concern I have about and a lot of women have about quotas and statistics around making sure we have the right, the right women, the right number of women around the table. The danger is, is that the women end up behaving like men to succeed.
If the metrics by which they’re judged, if the processes and organizations that they’re working within, are the same as they ever were, then you might have diversity, but you won’t have inclusion really. You won’t have inclusion of different perspectives. You will just recruit those women who can do the same jobs that men could do. And do them in the same way.
And that’s difficult for women generally as to feeling like, actually, we’re not really expanding the way that people are thinking, but equally, there are a lot of men out there who would hate being labelled as pale, stale, and male because they are creative and wear loud shirts and all of that stuff, which is lost by again playing the same game.
And it was very vivid to me when I, so I was the first group leader at BP to work part time. It was very countercultural. It was unusual. They liked it because they got my expertise for 60% of the price at three days a week. But a lot of senior men would come to me from BP and outside, say, how do you make it work?
And a lot of men who could be offering more to their organizations are not really given the opportunity. So it’s a bit like the guy that you thought was chess club fessing up to being drama club, or wanting to be drama club, by using the club mix questions and by thinking about chess club and drama club, you can just make it normal and habitual for anybody to be allowed to have an idea, rather than the woman who is the only woman in the room.
And I’ve been there many times being asked to think something differently. Or what do women think about this? On the assumption that I can speak for 50% of the population, you know, so I, I thought about whether this, the book, should be about diversity in the statistical sense and decided that it isn’t. It’s actually about the fact that the human brain is wonderfully creative, and we might waste some of that if we don’t deliberately empower people, require people to be creative, and to use that brain power.
MP: And your role in this is to be the DJ, yeah? To be the person who is kind of soliciting different forms of behaviour and thought from the variety of people that you have around the table or in the organization. Could you just talk a little bit about that, about how you imagine your kind of, convening or, yeah, DJ role? That’s probably the best way of putting it.
SB: Yeah. So, so the role that I play as a non-exec, most non-exec work is done either through conversations with the executive before meetings or in meetings. I don’t write things very much apart from 40,000 word books. And what I will be thinking is, have we got the mix right in this conversation? And either asking a question of someone and saying, yeah, well, you know, I bang on about chess club and drama club all the time.
This feels a bit chess club to me. Can you tell me a bit more about the context, the politics, the people that are involved here. Can you tell me more about the happily ever after? So you’re then directing, changing record and deliberately swapping it over to the b side and deliberately asking somebody else to put a different club perspective into the room.
That then gives other people the opportunity to either pile in and the conversation can get very chess club or drama club, whichever one you’ve invoked. And then again, the DJ says, right, I’m going to fade in to a bit more, let’s get a bit more of the other perspective there so that actually we can make this idea happen, or we can actually find an idea to do something about this and then keep going through those kind of cycles.
But this is not necessarily about the big world changing ideas. It’s just… it can be just when you’ve been presented a paper at a board, which is just loads of numbers. And I know, much as I love numbers, I love charts better because you know, pictures telling stories is something that’s a lovely club mix in itself, but I’m most interested in the so what, and what do we need to do next.
And those are very… invoking what’s behind what’s the story behind these numbers that I need to do something about and do something with. So the DJ is constantly saying, right, we’ve got too much of that, let’s have a bit more of this, or which is the club that we need most to answer this question, or to deal with the situation?
An interesting situation is when you’ve got people who think they’re disagreeing with each other and they’re not. At one level they might be, but at the next level up, at a drama club level, they might not be. And so if you can go up to the purpose and the happily ever after, you can see and you can mix them together and say, look, you’re both arguing for the same ultimate thing, you’ve just got different ideas about the way that we get there.
Let’s pick the best. And that’s the way you can mix things up.
MP: Nice, yeah, thanks Sally. I was just thinking, as you were talking about the kind of the way in which boards of various different kinds, whether for commercial or public sector organizations, really do need to kind of solicit disagreement, don’t they, that otherwise, it’s very easy to fall into a kind of groupthink. I like that phrase that, you know, people think they’re disagreeing when they’re actually still agreeing, and particularly when we need, as I said before, I think, to start to think about solutions that we haven’t thought about before in order to deal with some very, very big problems indeed.
The kind of thinking that you’re encouraging could be really, really valuable. Last question from me, and I’m going to be cheeky and use some of the questions that you’ve got at the back of your book, which you call a moment for self reflection. So let me just pitch one of these. Looking back over your career, when were you at your most and least motivated?
SB: Ah, now, the reason I put this in the book was because I’ve done it and it’s now most motivated. Least motivated was when I thought I was doing the right job, and I write about this in the book as well. I thought I was doing the right job, and then I was suddenly faced with possible redundancy. And that was a real crisis of confidence for somebody who was pretty chess club and had been very good at getting ten out of ten all my life, and then suddenly realized that I’d been doing the wrong thing.
I felt a complete sense of failure and terrible, terrible, and was suicidal. Whereas now if I do, if I do my curve of motivation over time, I love what I’m doing now because it’s a wonderful it’s a mix of different roles and different people and different situations where I’m thriving from the boundary spanner and the co-ordinator in me, that is the mathematician that is picking ideas from one place and recycling them somewhere else.
And I can choose who I work with. So lucky to be able to do that and be on boards of organizations where I really, really support and love their purpose. And thankfully, they’re all great places to work where the people that I’m working with are great too. So it is more about a happily ever after in the plot.
It’s moved from being actually what motivates me is being on the right, on the right stage, with the right people.
MP: Wonderful. That’s a really nice place to end our conversation. Thanks ever so much, Sally. So I’m Martin Parker, University of Bristol Business School. I’ve been talking to Sally Bridgeland about her book, ‘Chess Club, Drama Club: Building Creative and Resilient Businesses Together’, which is published by Bristol University Press in September 2026. Thanks ever so much for spending time with us, Sally. And, I hope the book goes really well.
SB: My pleasure. Thank you, Martin.
Richard Kemp: Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Transforming Society podcast. If you’d like to buy a copy of this book or any other book published by Bristol University Press or Policy Press, we have a 50% discount code valid until the 30th of September. Just go to bristoluniversitypress.co.uk, select your book and then enter POD03 at checkout. That’s POD03 at checkout.