and welcome you to technical session number six, cultivating the creativity of innovation. So the standard reminders, the Wi-Fi code, if you're on the Marriott's Wi-Fi is all caps, RIC, Rick, 2024. There are QR codes up here. Please scan that and give us your best questions and don't forget your feedback at the end. We thrive on feedback. Those of you that are internal to NRC know that I've been very curious about in our workload perspectives, I'm all about feedback. So please, please, please give us feedback. It will help us. We're going to have live polling questions in this session. So the text number to submit your polling questions is 22333. So that's 22333. So you should be able to see them when they come up using the QR code. There's tabs in there. If you need your magnifier glasses, you can turn your phone sideways and it'll help you if you need to click in those tabs, but they are there. What else? Oh, all of these sessions are recorded. So give us your questions and we will do our best to get through them all and your question will be famous on the internet known as the NRC RIC website. So with that, I would like to ask for poll question number one to go on up. It's my understanding there's about a 30 second delay for the folks that are joining us in the ether on the internet, on our web platform. So we'll give them some time to participate in our polling question. And the question is, what does innovation look like? So while you're answering those questions, I'd like to do some introductions here because I'm very happy to be sitting on this stage with this illustrious group of professionals. My name is Melissa Walker and I'm the director of Embark. I sit in the office of nuclear reactor regulation working for Andrea Vale who has very graciously joined us today sitting in the front fan club. Very happy to have some innovators and next-gen people supporting us here and contributing to the conversation because I know that they're loading questions for us. The Embark Venture Studio is the NRC's innovation and transformation accelerator. We partner with NRC personnel across the entire agency. We don't just do NRC activities. And we support the program of corporate offices to facilitate experimentation and prototyping. So really what we're trying to do is remove barriers and help our very smart people do their jobs better, more effectively, more efficiently. And we also have the opportunity to partner with our licensees on a variety of products designed to help to transmit information back and forth more readily. Many of you know that as MAPX, Mission Analytics Portal External. So today's session is cultivating the creativity of innovation and we have some exciting panel of experts here and they're going to talk about fostering creative and innovative environments in their parts of the world. And we did a little math and we figured that sitting up here we have over 100 years worth of good, bad and ugly work experience. So take advantage of what you can learn in this session and share with others. So first I'd like to introduce Mr. Milton Valentin. He is the Acting Branch Chief for the Human Factors and Reliability Branch in the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, home of the Innovate NRC 2.0 program. Milton and his staff provide technical support to ensure that innovative ideas are considered for implementation across the NRC. Milton has held a number of positions in NRC and commercial engineering firms. He's also a registered professional engineer, not something I can claim to be. Milton, as part of my introduction, can you tell us what your favorite question is and why? Well, good afternoon everyone. And I'm glad to see that this microphone is loud and clear. It's been a day. I would say that I'm also very happy to be here and share some of the experiences that we have gathered as the group that leads innovation in the agency. I would say that my favorite question is typically, how are you doing? And it could go all sorts of ways. So you just need to know when to ask me when this is going. If you wanna have a good time, my friends and colleagues would know, hey Milton, what's going on? And they will hear some stories. But it is important to be genuine and honest about what's happening because there's a lot of change and there are many opportunities that we should not take for granted when we say how things are going. So I would like to embrace that spirit of being genuine and sharing what's actually happening because you never know, somebody may be going through a similar situation, maybe they may have some solutions that you may wanna consider. So that would be my favorite question. All right, thank you, Milton. So how's it going is not just a I'm fine response for you. Good to know, I'll tuck that away. Thank you. All right, Ms. Tina Taylor is a Senior Director Research and Development at the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI. The first time I heard EPRI I was like, what does that stand for? It is the Electric Power Research Institute and thank you for joining us today. Tina is responsible for nuclear innovation and leads EPRI's engagement and collaboration with the global nuclear community. Tina has worked in the electric power industry over 30 years and she holds a degree in chemical engineering. Tina, what's your favorite question and why? Thanks for having me as part of the panel today. I have a lot of great cocktail party questions, so if I catch up with you later I'm happy to share those. But in the context of fostering creativity and promoting innovation, I like to ask people, how can we make that happen? Because a lot of times when somebody has a new idea there's an instinct to say that can't happen because or you have to think about this barrier. But if I ask it that way, then we can work through together what are all the things that people have to think about to make something happen. And I usually get convinced rather quickly that it's possible when my first gut instinct might be that it's not. That's a good question. Thank you. Next to Tina we have Mr. Christopher. Chris Craighead, he is the NRC agency culture lead in the office of the executive director for operations. And he heads a team in development and strategy execution fostering an ideal work culture. Prior to joining NRC, Chris stood up the new Atlanta office of Medicare Appeals on behalf of the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Chris has a career success in building highly engaged and productive workforces, delivering key mission centered programs and products. Chris has a degree in legal studies. Chris, can you tell us your favorite question and why? Yes, well good afternoon everyone. Thank you for having on the panel. So I like your questions. I think for me a good question is what's new? I think in the spirit of innovation as we encounter different challenges and problems in the workplace, we're kind of always thinking about them and how to get around them, how to deal with the barriers that you alluded to. And knowing what's on the top of someone's mind will probably let you know what they've been thinking about in terms of solution and workarounds. So that's one thing that I try to ask myself is, okay, what's new? What's my focus? What's the next step? How do I get around this? It's a very good question. Thank you, Chris. And last but certainly not least, we have Mr. Luis Bedencourt. And he's the chief of the Accident Analysis Branch in the Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research where he leads a diverse team and research portfolio, including space nuclear, consequence analysis, and delivery of the first ever NRC artificial intelligence strategic plan. Luis held several positions previously in the NRC and he's also a registered professional engineer. Luis, what's your favorite question and why? Well, first of all, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. It's great to connect with all of you. One of the questions that I always ask to my staff and to myself is, are we trying to solve the right problem or are we trying to solve the convenient ones? And I always ask that question often because we tend to go always with the noise rather than the focus of what is the end goal that we're trying to achieve. So it's always a way to reset our mindset, okay, what are we trying to solve and what is the chance of solving it? So that's one of my favorite questions that I always tend to ask to me and to my staff. Thank you, Luis. So it looks like we have all of our responses in on what does innovation look like? And it looks like most of you believe that it looks like process improvement followed by better tool implementation and then there's a tie for regular technological overhauls and different organizational structures. Thank you for giving us that feedback and helping us understand from your perspective, process improvement and tool implementation are innovation. What I'd like to do today, if we can have the speaker slide back up, is talk a little bit more and delve into innovation. We've defined it as to make something different. So think about it in terms of three ways of thinking. You have incremental, you have expansive and you have disruptive. So if you think about incremental, then what you're looking at is improving a process, a method, a way of doing business, like a wrench. You have a wrench, you can tighten a bolt. You have a wrench, you can take your tag bolts off of your car and replace your tag if you move out of state. So there's a process improvement there. You're complying with the laws of wherever it is you've moved to. And it's the same in our industry. Process improvement can be an incremental process where you make micro changes and they lead to larger changes. And when you think about expansive, you're making something more accessible. It's a broader reach or a capacity. Think of the rotary phone to your smartphone. That's a pretty expansive change. You went from, I can pick up the phone and call someone and I'm tied to a certain location with a certain device to I have this phone where I can still call people, but I'm not tied to a location and I can also do email and I can take cool pictures from the stage or maybe I can do some artificial intelligence leaning type things with this device that used to just be for making a phone call tied to a certain location. So there's also disruptive and that's to render something obsolete or replaced with something better. Think the candle for your day to day lighting situation to the light bulb. That was utterly disruptive. How many of us use candles to do our work in the evening? I would venture to say none of us. No one online and no one here. We like to have them for ambiance but we're not doing business processes with our candles at least not in this industry. Maybe some of the others, but not this one. So that sort of sets the stage for you in terms of the terms that we're using and how we define them. Incremental, expansive, disruptive are all part of the innovating, making something different. So today I'm gonna put my speakers in the hot seat but first we're gonna do poll number two. How do you think innovation makes you productive and successful? Again, the text is 22333 if you want to send in your answers. We've already got, nope, we've got some. Some of you are very fast with your texting. While you're doing that and the answers are coming in, I'm going to ask my speakers, are our organizations empowered to drive innovation? I wanna say that again. Are our organizations empowered to drive innovation? Milton, you wanna kick us off? Sure. I can tell our story from the NRC side and we are actively working in empowering different segments of the agency. Innovation is happening. We have a long history with innovation. It's nothing new. But now with the NRC Innovation Program, which we call the Innovate NRC 2.0, we are looking at those innovation pockets within the agency and we're trying to leverage those synergies to understand how the internal processes are changing, how we are benefiting from those changes and where are those changes happening so that we can see how the agency is transforming and in that sense supporting our transformational goals to become a risk-informed, modern regulatory agency. So I would say that there's work to be done but certainly we are devoting resources to make sure that our organization is empowered to thrive in innovation. Very good. I appreciate that, Milton. So you see the Innovate 2.0 program as reaching beyond NRC as well because we're bringing in additional thoughts on how we can do better from the ideas within but the kinds of conversations we're having. Absolutely, we are networking and socializing with other organizations that are also pursuing innovation. We are trying to build a network of people that understand what's happening and that could share lessons learned and opportunities for us to just learn from each other and just keep addressing the key issues that we see. There's a lot of common themes out there and certainly if we talk, we collaborate, we could get further working together. I agree with you and I think Tina has something she wants to add to that on what EPRI is doing along the same sorts of lines. Yeah, I'm thinking about how lucky I am for the type of organization that I work in for this question because we're all about innovation and research and I would say I wanna talk maybe a little bit about within EPRI and then the industry as a whole. Within EPRI, we are deliberate about innovation so we set aside money to work on deliberately innovative ideas, we have internal competitions for that, we give prizes for that, we ask those kind of questions as we hire people but ultimately the things that we innovate are really only most valuable if they're then adopted by the whole industry and I would say right now I see a batch of leadership in the industry that's hungry for innovation that is trying to understand what they can do within their organization to foster that which is great to see but there is this reality even within EPRI and certainly a little bit more so with the industry at large that innovative ideas crash into the day to day need to run the business so we can give somebody money to go work on a project that they find innovative but then we still expect them to do their time card and have a budget for that and get a report done on a certain period of time so I think we're in that phase right now where there's a lot of hunger for it and a good head start but there's more to go to really unleash everybody's best ideas I think. That's a really good point I think you have offered some badges or things or coins through innovation but sounds like you offer real prizes in EPRI. Well, EPRI means you get to spend time on this and go work on it. Oh. So it could be an assignment. Well. We try and frame it like a prize. It is all in context, right? Some people love their job so much that they thrive just doing it but no, I would say the NRC actually we have done some work to standardize the recognition for innovation. We have our annual innovation celebration ceremony and there are prizes not only recognition but there's also a lot of visibility and opportunities to share the work that has been done hoping that all people can appreciate the power of innovation and that collaboration that happens when people come together and having similar issues or just having similar interests and they come up with a solution faster and they implement that solution and they see the efficiencies that could be gained and then more people learn about, hey, they did this. I could do this too. So it's not only what we're trying to do with recognition but also the effort in shifting the culture to make this innovative mentality more consistent and just to be something natural that happens without us having to point out, hey, good job. This is great. We can use this. So it's something that is taking time but it's happening. So certainly looking forward to see what else comes out of the brilliant minds of the NRC. Ooh, brilliant minds. And that leads me to Chris because you said something about impacting the culture and creating this atmosphere of innovation. Chris, I know you have some deep thoughts on the subject. Yes, thank you. So yeah, very well said Milton. So in culture, it's often think about how do you innovate culture work, right? And so I was glad to see that we had some responses on organizational structure, right? Because there's things that we've been able to do from a structural standpoint that help us really focus and pinpoint on areas of culture that we want to really focus on and improve. And so we've talked a lot about this new cultural leader model that we've done in the agency and the instituted that allows us to leverage the strengths that you just spoke about, Milton, the things that are going on well with innovation and figure out, okay, what are the behaviors that are driving this success and how can we spread this across the rest of the organization? And so we're looking at different ways to manage culture, influence culture, which has been really great. And then a part of that obviously includes how do we create the right culture for our organization as a whole? Looking at specific behaviors that we've learned drive innovation. So one thing is important is sharing ideas and making them open and making people aware of the ideas that are out there.  And oh, I can contribute to that. Oh, we can actually make that idea better. And I've already seen that evolution here in the NRC and putting different things on the table. One thing that's really helpful with that is spending time questioning our current practices and our current approaches to things, which I've found to be very helpful, something that we can do more of here at the NRC. Typically we'll put an idea out there and sometimes we'll spend a lot of time questioning the new idea when really it's just been more time questioning our current practices. So all these type of behaviors that we're looking at really are helpful in helping to foster what we would call a more ideal culture. Thank you, Chris. And that sort of ties into what you were saying, Tina, in terms of your prize is more work. It sounds like we have more work to do on our cultural indicators, the results of our efforts on doing innovation and how do we incorporate that. And I'm sure that many of you find that same sort of thing in the pockets of the organizations that you work in. You feel like I would like to change something. So how do I do that? How do I innovate? How do I step in and make these impacts? Thank you. So, Louise, we haven't touched on tech too much, but you've been around for a minute.  I forgot what the right term is. You were a co-champion. Co-champion. You were a co-champion too. So we really do have some experts up here. Hey, Tina, you got it next year. You hear that? Andrea, you got it. The way they described it wasn't necessarily fun, but they said it was... It was fun. Oh, okay. So we haven't really brought in tech too much, but you've got a keen interest in what's going on with our artificial intelligence, capabilities, potential, not just what's going on out in industry, but what's going on in the NRC. And it sort of touches on our culture of how do we, how do we expand what we're doing and how do we innovate in areas that maybe we don't have as much expertise? So I think that's a really good question because when people think about innovation, they think always about AI. How can AI make our life more easier? And one of the things that we have been doing on the area of AI, at least at the agency, it is something that is not new. We tend to be a very data-driven organization, and AI is basically another tool in our toolbox. And one of the things that we have been finding in the early days before SHOTGPT and everything that came into place, we have this thing that is called like a Deficit Focus Research Program. And one of the things that that program has helped us is to try to find those ambush within the organization to think about in the next five to 10 years, how can this technology make our life easier and what it has helped us before all of this wave of AI came into place is to build that foundational knowledge to be able to cultivate an AI-ready workforce. Now recently, what we have been seeing is that the agency has been more like the son that is trying to eradicate of how can we as an agency be able to use this technology to improve the way that we work? And we are not alone as an agency. The whole federal government is actually now pushing us to be able to look more of how AI could be used in the way that we work in order to drive innovation. So recently, I think you heard the sheriff talk about this today. He basically tasked the whole agency to think about how AI could be used to improve the way that we work. It was a very challenging task that was still in the process of working upon it. But one thing that I love about the project that we have so far is that the sheriff was basically like the son that he was able to eradicate this culture of, okay, we have this technology, how can we make it better? So we were able to bring all of the 23 offices and including the regions to start talking, hey, how can we use AI in order to improve our licensing, rulemaking, environmental, and so forth. And one of the things that we have found is that people have a lot of great ideas and that didn't happen by chance. It happened because we had this ambush through the focus research program as well as all of this bucket of stuff across the organization. And now they're starting to come up and one of the things that we're planning to move forward is okay, we're gonna be embracing AI as a way for us to cultivate this technology to be able to innovate and to be able to improve the way that we work. More to come on that, we're gonna be able to release some of that information hopefully in the next month or so. But I think that's what is really important. Sometimes you wanna have those ambush to be able to grow up and sometimes you wanna be like the son that you're able to drive all of the shades of the organization and at the end of it, we have done both. And that is something very important that you're talking about innovation. It's about the people, it's not about the organizations. As long as you have the people to be able to cultivate and foster that knowledge and to be able to use that, people naturally wanna solve problems. They wanna be able to make our lives easier. And at the end of the day, it's all about goes back to the human. It's all goes about culture. Thanks, Luis. That's a really good point about the culture. And you see that in the responses here. Number one, that your work must be connected to purpose and where do you get your purpose? It's being driven by the culture. There are some noted academics that talk about the drive to improve is driven by not only enjoying the people that you work with, but buying into the environment that you're in on a daily basis and how much time you spend in that environment and how you can engage with it. So thank you. Most of you think it has to be connected to purpose and that you have to develop and build bridges between all parts of the organization. And so I would say, I hope that you see that representation here on the stage. We have representatives from across the NRC and our one every participant. Thank you so much for coming in to have this kind of conversation on a more personal conversational level as opposed to presenting a paper and a technical presentation that you've got to be fast with your note taking or you miss the statistics. So we have some statistics. We'll move along to our next sets. And I just want to sort of encapsulate the comments that I've heard here. What I think I've heard is that for us to have a value for our organizations to be empowered to drive innovation, that benefit has to outweigh the cost for us to really have a value, for us to have that buy-in for participation and for delivery. We heard from the commissioners this morning as well as the chair, he said, we have to understand our why. We have to look at our why. And we heard from Commissioner Caputo that we must deliver results. So at the end of the day, we can't have innovation for innovation's sake. You want to connect it to your purpose and to your points and involve the people and give them the right skill sets and set the right kinds of culture. So thank you. And I see that poll number three is up here. What are the characteristics of the most innovative organizations? So while those are coming in, I'll pose the next question to our panelists here. Do our mechanisms for success build capability and enable people to deliver? Think about that in terms of your own organizations while they're thinking of their answers. Do our mechanisms for success build capability and enable people to deliver? What do you think, Milton? Well, how do you find success? And that's the key. Like if we understand what success means for the organization or the segment of the organization that you work for, that would make it easier for you to identify what are gonna be the most beneficial goals or activities to work towards. So it is, again, important to communicate and have a common understanding of what are the organization priorities, what is success for that organization. And then everything will just happen naturally because everyone likes to be successful. That by itself is motivation. But at the same time, how are we building from that success and coping with the changes that are happening and just understanding what are our clients or constituents needs in order to continue being successful? Because challenges are gonna continue to change. So it is important to keep understanding the landscape and also to communicate with your management, with your team and understand what are the, with your stakeholders. It's important to understand the landscape and the challenges to be able to identify success. Hopefully that will just cascade into good things. That's a really good point. How do we define success? Some people define success by how much money they have in the bank. Some people define success on how well they're integrated across the organizations. Some people define success as being good at what they do and being happy with what they do. That's a really valid and interesting point on that question. Do our mechanisms for success? How are we defining success within our divisions, our branches, our organizations, our companies, our piece of the company? How does every defined success in your parts of things? Yeah, that's a really tough question because when I think about how people define success, I go straight to KPIs. I don't know, maybe other people do too. I think one of the things we hold on too tightly is value for our members. That's what we try to focus on and measure. And it's sometimes hard to draw a straight line between that and innovation. So I think about innovation more as it's one of your foundational qualities you want in your company. Like we have, many people probably have definition of what your core qualities or attributes are.  And so I put innovation alongside those things. It's a necessary aspect of your culture to have and to promote to then be able to run whatever it is the business you're trying to run on top of that. So I think about it that way. That's a great perspective. Chris, you look like you're ready to jump in on the identification of how you define it within your culture. I think we've seen within the NRC some desired culture that maybe we don't all possess yet, but we're working on it. Yes, we're working on it. It's a great way to put it. So I think we're talking about the characteristics of innovative organizations. There has to be the capacity for taking risk. It's a very important part of having some bandwidth for, in order to get to success, you have to have some room for failure, some trial and error, some experimentation. And so I think those are things that we could look more closely at at the NRC. I think as a whole, we could gravitate for being a little bit less perfectionistic in how we approach our work. You know, being regulators and expectors were very trained to just be precise and on point in everything that we do. But when it comes to innovation and thinking differently and trying something new, it's gotta be a little bandwidth there to fail. And even not just necessarily fail, but have something to learn from and build on. So those are some things that I think factor in success along with what you said, Tina, I like what you said about the values. All those things can be done within the context of our organizational values, which we hold close. So I think having a little room to experiment and try something new in the context of our values will get us to where we wanna go in terms of success. That's a great point. Typically, large bureaucratic organizations are structured to grind risk out because bureaucratic institutions are designed to defend the bureaucracy. And like you were talking about safety culture, you know, it's really important that we have our steps and our standardization in the proper ways of executing our mission. But at the same token, we're talking about innovation and needing to take some risk and create some space for risk. So how do we define what that risk looks like and how do we step into that? Particularly when we're looking at AI and the potential of new tools and technological capability, how do we create the space that's safe for risk but also protects the bureaucratic institution that is in need of defending itself? Does the bureaucratic institution need to be preserved? What a great question. I did not say that, boss. Thank you. Let's talk about taking risks. Look, right. My drop. Yeah, it's a hard comment to follow because then I come with my boring thing about, like, you know, there's different ways of looking at risk.  What is, so it is being innovative is being brave. It's putting yourself out there, being vulnerable. And that is something that doesn't always get the recognition that it deserves because most of the innovators and the people that discover things, they were seen as crazy people. And it's just like in this professional environment, opening your mouth and saying something that hasn't been thought about could be something that may hurt your professional reputation to some extent, but what we're trying to do at least in the NRC is help those innovators be equipped with the right speech, the right story so that they can convey those ideas in ways that are relatable to the people that are gonna listen to those ideas in ways that connect to the agency priorities. We have designed, and I shouldn't say we, it's actually our innovation team and our contractors. They have put together training courses to help innovators understand what would be the best way to communicate those ideas and to convey and convince and maybe create some momentum so that there's more support when they speak about their ideas. So hopefully that alleviates some of that personal risk that some people may take when they present those ideas. And also it opens the door for people to be more open to listen to things that may not have been proposed before so that there's openness in trying new things and perhaps improving processes that, yeah, they work, don't break it. Well, it's not about breaking the process, it's about improving it. And maybe you need to bend it, you need to crack it up a little so that it changes, but that first step, it requires bravery. So something to think about. Luis is over there chomping at it. I have been trying to jump, but I think the conversation is so good. And I think going back to what success means, like at least for me, done is better than perfect. And one of the areas that I think we as organizations need to be looking upon, sometimes we need to let people to fail because through their failures, their areas that we are able to learn, and at least on the area of AI, that's an area that we are currently working upon on how can we create those sandbox environments where people can test their ideas and people can start testing on whether or not this makes sense or not. And if we fail, that's okay because sometimes those failures leads to better ideas or leads to better solutions. So that's one more that I always tell to my staff, done is better than perfect. So do not try to be able to have perfection in the solution. AI is brand new. And I think that's an area that we should expect that there will be some early failures when we start adopting it, but that's part of a culture of innovation that to those failures we are able to learn and to be able to have something better at the end of the day. You know, I wanna jump on that one a little bit because we heard the concept of failing, right? And we echo that too. We talk about failing where the consequences are low. And sometimes it's hard to think about where are the consequences low and what we're doing. But just in the coffee talk this morning, I heard several instances and shared a couple of people playing with AI in their personal life, right? Not to write the next topical report to submit, but I heard somebody made an org chart with Muppet pictures. I heard a man. I've seen that before. I heard a man use AI to write a love note to his wife and send it to her because he wasn't gonna be with her on Valentine's Day. And then as I was trying to show somebody last week how to use co-pilot, I said write a bio for Tina Taylor at Epri. And I loved it. I felt so good. This is like my new therapist, I think. So people touching and playing with different things that are different for them, you know, don't discount the value of it not being just to do their job, but maybe it's how you run your team meetings or encouraging people to play with things, you know, and they're more personally or have a team event where people can fly a drone or run a robot. And I think that's really important. Those kind of things are pretty, it move us all along in being open-minded. And I think that's really important. When I look upon where our agency was six months ago, at least on the area of AI, education tends to be really important because we have to demystify what is AI and what is not. Many people think that AI is this shining tool, but that we should be able to solve a lot of our problems. The way that I can take AI is like, how can AI be helping me to automate the boring stuff? So I can focus my attention on stuff that is more important to the missions. And I think on that area of playing with the tools, that is really important to be able to cultivate an AI-ready workforce because once people start to see the possibilities on the promise of what AI can do, that's when I expect that it's gonna be an explosion. And that's what I have been seeing in the nuclear industry. Three years ago, I never expected to see the explosion of large language model or something like chat GPT at the industry. I do see that also coming at the NRC. It is expected that we're gonna be able to embrace this technology, but that has to happen through education to your point. Yes.  Yeah, no, this is a great conversation. So it can probably tell I've had some experience resisting conformity and kind of stirring the pot a little bit. But that's a really critical element. What you touched on earlier, Milton, is the bravery that's sort of required to say, hey, I think we need to try something different here. And let me voice this or put it out there. I think it's really incumbent on us as an organization to really build that expectation into how we operate and to how we lead and how we influence to create an environment where it's easy for employees to do that. We make that an expectation coming in. You're new to the organization. This is where we're at. This is where we're trying to go. And we actually need you to give us different perspectives on our work and how we function and ultimately change the culture. So I think it's such a critical element of innovation. I think that that coupled with working across the organization a little bit better, having different offices work together on projects will also move the needle in innovation and help us be, I think it was said earlier today by one of the commissioners, just be more adaptable to change because change is imminent. Those are great points and it ties right into what you've given us back, that the sustained top level trust and support are a key element of the characteristics of the most innovative organizations. And being brave sometimes means speaking to management, open management and trying something different and taking a professional risk and saying the thing that you're thinking but not sure how it's going to be received. And there has to be a creation of space to allow that risk to be taken.  So I think that you've all talked about that and the importance that we have in valuing it and celebrating it. So how do we, just to carry this a little bit further, how do we reward that? How do we move it forward and say it is okay to be brave and we want to see more of it? I'll go first. So I think the one thing that we could focus more on is, and this is all in our data, I know we're a data driven organization. So if you look closely at where we're at in terms of our culture, it's in there, is being more enthusiastic, showing open enthusiasm toward these new ideas. I think we tend to take a posture where we're more kind of questioning and thinking about it and pondering and analyzing every element of a new idea. We can kind of shift a little bit more towards being more encouraging, being more receptive, and okay, we have this idea, let's not look at all the ways in which it won't work. Let's look at the things that we can do to make it work. That's just one. That's good, how do we make it work? And I would say yes, it's important to receive those ideas and welcome creativity in that sense, but it's also important to present a complete story. And that's the part that sometimes we see a lot of ideas and we see a lot of people with great enthusiasm, but the story's not complete. And if you cannot articulate your idea in a way that is providing benefits and pros and cons, perhaps you need to think about it, go back, write your speech, do your homework, and come back with a more complete story so that it could be better received. And there's nothing wrong with having friends and other people that could listen to you before you speak to your supervisor or there's nothing wrong with consulting with your colleagues.  And then work together to have a complete story and then move it forward. And perhaps create also some other support from other people that may see potential. So just build your own team, come up with a group of supporters that may bring more value to your... Council of Champions to help you work through the ideas. You played right into what my organization is supposed to do. We listen and we help with process improvement or ideas or how do I take this data and do something with it? How do I show it in a way that will convince my supervisor that it's worth the money or the time or the people to put into this thing and see if we can make some incremental change or maybe we can make some really impactful change. These are good. There looks like there's more thought processes going on over here. Yeah, I will say at least when you have, talking back to AI where it's still in the early phases of the organization, I think to be able to reward those is to celebrate those early wins early and often because I think through those early wins, people can start having confidence like, wow, my work is really value, really matters and they will have a sense of belonging, like I belong here, I belong in this organization and that's the way that we can create a culture of innovation that for people to show, like I belong in this organization because I was able to make a change and people show what I was able to see how I was able to make that change for everyone. That's very good points. So do our mechanisms for success build the capability and enable people to deliver or are we still building it? Still building it. And what does that process look like to build it? Besides making a safe place where you can take risks. Well, when I was listening to Milton talk, I was thinking about the concept of innovation allies, somebody that hears the idea and then helps those people bring that idea forward, adds the capability around it. I think that's a part of it is not making people feel like they're going it alone with an idea. But the other thing I'm thinking is it's important to understand what is a reward for people and what is success for people. And I think that's rapidly changing as our workforce changes. I'm pretty sure it's not the same things I think would be a good reward. So there's probably an element of innovation in that just understanding what it is that does incentivize the particular workforce that you have and how to use those incentives to advance innovation. What incentivizes the workforce we have? That's a great question. And I think some people would say it's generational. Some generations want to be paid. They want to get that incentive award. They want to take some cash home. Others like, no, I want time off. I want flexibility. I want to be able to see my kids' games or, hey, I want to see my name up in lights. I want to host one of these sessions and get this recording that's never ever going to die off the internet. And my kid's going to go see it and see what a dork I am. I'm sorry, what a great parent I am. And so you're right. What are the incentives? We see characteristics here about drawing from experience at all levels. I think that's something we see at the NRC is people want to be recognized for the work that they do and understand how it fits into the mission specifically, not an esoteric, oh, I think this thing is useful. It's this connects to the safety culture in this way or what I do feeds what we're providing to our licensees or the licensees are telling me that this product that we put out doesn't work for them because it only works on one computer instead of being able to sign in from anywhere. I think we are building it with our tools. I don't know if you want to comment more on where we're going with our AI tools or potential AI tools and how that fits into our overall structure. Because if we can get ChatGPT to write some great things for us, maybe that will help us reality test some of our ideas or maybe it's going to hallucinate and give us crazy things. Sure, I can share a little bit more about what we have learned through this exercise of where AI could be used in Saturday NRC. So I think there's no surprise that everybody wants their own large language model, some type of a ChatGPT for the organization. That's what we saw the majority of the ideas of how can we better mine our data? How can we be better able to learn from this data? And one of the things that people were asking more about when you look upon data, we tend to be a very data-driven organization and we tend to ask, am I getting the right result? But I think with AI, it's a little bit different rather than saying, do I have the right result? How accurate the start result needs to be and whether or not the result makes sense. So that's what I have been seeing a lot of the AI tools of the use of the NRC. There's also the common uses of machine learning to be able to have some type of predictive analytics as well as the area of using natural language processing to be able to better understand the NRC jargon. I think everybody knows that the nuclear sector, we have our own jargon, so it's really hard to identify what do we mean about a specific term of the regulations. So those have, where we have been seeing the use of AI, the majority of it is mostly of generative AI. How can I learn better about my data? How can I be able to better crowdsource my data not only from the NRC, but from other sources of data? So that's what I see at least in the initial terms where AI could be used at the NRC. Thanks, Elise.  Yeah, a great comment, Luis, and even what you said earlier about, you know, finding fulfillment in the workplace. And I think anyone who's with the NRC and understands our culture data, you've hopefully or will hear the term blue behaviors. And we've shown through our data that we have a strong desire for an environment that is more humanistic encouraging where there's support and feedback and mentoring and those type of things, knowledge management, also being more self-actualized where you're enjoying your work, you're enjoying the people that you work with, you're finding fulfillment in the mission. So these are some of the things that we're seeing with our workforce that are their values and that we're trying to shift our culture to match that. It's your good points. Would you say that it's similar at EPRI where we're looking for that self-actualization and the acknowledgement and sort of willingness to step out? I would say we see small segments that want different things. So I'm not sure what blue behaviors are. I wanna learn about that. We have a lot of opportunities for people to participate in cross collaborative discussions. And those are fantastic, but honestly it's only a small percentage of our teams and it's the same people all the time that kind of like that part of things. I don't know, I'm kind of interested to go ask some people what they think about this, what they're looking for in their job. I would say that the newer employees we have, they're really tied into the mission of nuclear. They're here, they're in this industry to save the world and they're crystal clear about that. And there's no time so that they have a great sense of urgency. But in terms of what is personally fulfilling, I'm not sure I have a good beat on that for our whole organization. Okay, I did some interviews for some summer student hires and I asked them to talk about products that they had delivered for their stakeholders. And more than once I got the question, what is a stakeholder? And in my mind I thought, that means I've been in the government too long. But going back to your point about KPIs and the younger generation believes that nuclear is now, it's a green energy, we've got to absolutely pursue it. So how do we engage them and give them the success capability that they need? If they're motivated and it's got to be right now, and we have large bureaucratic organizations or similar large bureaucratic organizations, be it power production or otherwise, how do we engage them in a way that speaks to this behavior of being willing to take a risk and take the chance and be passionate while also doing the time cards and the administrative things that we all function on? I think it's asking, probably asking, right? How could we do this faster? That I think is the big drive right now is the urgency, the speed. We have to be faster as a whole industry. And there's a desire to say, what's the payback on something financially? But I don't think that resonates with a lot of the new workforce. But how can we do this faster? How can we accelerate it? Is a great driver for doing things more innovatively. And we need to ask, how can we do it differently and listen and then think, can we actually do this? I was gonna share a recent story. We were briefing our management about something that my team was proposing a timeline. And for that particular step of the process, one of our younger staff proposed, well, we're planning that this may take one or two months. And then one of our senior managers just, it broke my heart because he just broke the news. Well, last time we tried this, it took 13 months. So I think there's an opportunity to work with this younger generation to help them understand that, yeah, we have aspirational goals and we have ideas in our mind of how things could go. But the reality is that we need to find a balance in what we would like to do and what is feasible. And that is the part that we just may wanna be more sensitive about because we don't wanna disencourage this younger generation and just tell them, hey, this is not the way that it will go. It would be more about, well, let's work together. Let's see how we can get this going and explain the steps in the process, explain the intricacies in each of these processes that they don't understand yet because they're new. So there are opportunities to really mentor and help this younger workforce to be more aware of the limitations that we have because the reality is that we have aspirations but we also have limitations. And those limitations may just be part of the process and we may not be able to get rid of them or we will. But in the meantime, communication is key. So let's just talk and help this younger workforce to just cope with what we have. So our stakeholders, those who are interested in what we're delivering in our products and deliverables, maybe they can help us with moving the needle from one month, from 13 months to maybe more than one month but not 13 months. Okay. I wanna say something or what Milton talked about. And I think with this new generation, what is important to them is to have a seat at the table. We as an organization, we tend to be more focused on the hierarchy and this new generation, they wanna play a key role early in the game and they have to have a seat at the table at all levels of organizations. So we need to be able to empower them to have a position in whatever decision making we are trying to do because that is gonna be able to change the way the energy works as part of our culture. They need to have a sense that they have a seat at the table. We heard today, we commissioned a caputo in her remarks of how women they need to have a seat at the table. The same thing has to happen with this new generation. We need to allow the opportunities for them to have a seat at the table. That's a really good point. A seat at the table and to be heard will give that confidence to then be willing to take risks. At the end of the day, there's an element of fear, I think. We have our processes that we've been doing and sometimes we're afraid to experiment with something new because we know that this thing works and although it takes 13 months maybe we know that we can get there eventually. And if we change it, are we gonna be able to do it in two months or is it gonna take us 26 months because we changed something and we broke something along the way? Very good questions. I'd like to go ahead and ask our final polling question and ask you for your input on where is innovation needed the most at the NRC. So while you're working on those, I wanna thank our panelists for answering the question about our mechanisms for success. At the end of the day, change is a difference. There's a change in the difference in the power, the control, the tools or the structure. So we have to change what our definitions of success are sometimes. And we need to ask and we need to employ some balance to be able to move our initiatives and ideas forward. So I see we're getting some comments in and it looks like unfortunately licensing processes are taking the biggest hit on the areas that need the most innovation at NRC. I will say that there's lots of creative thoughts out there. We just gotta figure out how to employ them within our bureaucratic structures to make sure that we're doing what needs to be done. We're checking the right blocks and accomplishing the safety mission first while also improving what we can to make our processes better. But really innovation is needed everywhere. We all have pockets. There are things from the time sheet you were talking about to the first day introduction. All these things weaken impact, but they sometimes feel very incremental in like millimeters as opposed to feet. But part of being an innovator is to keep trying to keep after things and to keep working them. And I had a colleague in a previous organization who said I'm just so tired of explaining this thing again. Why do people need me to explain why we need to innovate? And it's like, well, that's part of innovation is you have to keep after it. It's about perseverance and persistence and gathering the like lines together to be your champion counsel and help you work through how we can sell the idea better and make that mark and make those changes. So I would say that exponential change is possible. This nexus that you've heard here, people, the culture and the effective technology are all implementation readiness driven types of things that create that structure that we can build on. We can innovate if we put our will into it and we keep going and we keep trying. There's opportunity. You've all touched on ideas about balance and understanding what our stakeholders view a reward as and how do we define success? How do we move our culture from where it is to what we want? And how do we incorporate the changes? The changes in us, the changes in the new people that are joining, changes in the technology. How do we pull all that together one step at a time? I welcome some reactions from my panelists and I'm gonna ask Ken who's been patiently sitting over there taking questions. I think I was supposed to have picked up something so I could see the questions and read them. Oh, we have some great questions. So I'll give my panelists an opportunity to think about that they wanna react before we start taking some of these questions and we will continue having this conversation. But I just want to affirm to you that exponential change is possible. So, I don't know if you wanna, okay. Join us on stage. Thank you. Okay. Oh, wow. Good questions. Wow. All right.  Thank you. It's all the people in the front row here. I kept seeing them typing questions. I think I've left enough time to get to maybe most of these. We'll see. All right. Question for Tina. As Epri looks at industries in nuclear and other, what are common ways companies prioritize and decide which innovative ideas to pursue and dedicate resources to? Do you want me to repeat that or have you got it? Yeah, I've got that. So we actually have a part of our company. We have something called a global innovation, effectiveness cohort.  And one of the very common things I see, which I don't know if this is a great practice, is most of the time people say we want to be innovative. So we're going to have a way to collect innovative ideas. And then hopefully we're going to have a commitment to implement those. And so a common part of that initial process is some way to collect ideas. And then it goes to some kind of committee who determines which ones will move forward. And that committee is almost always made up of senior people in the company very entrenched in how we do things the way we've always done it. And a lot of the really innovative things seem to get filtered out in that process. So that's what I see as a common approach and what we've been teaching ourselves as we compare notes and figure out what works really well is you have to do something different than that. Because you don't want to filter out the most radical ideas right from the start. You want to have some other kind of process that moves ideas along, considers things that don't seem obvious, even in the first part. And that's really hard to do. So I don't know quite how to do it, but I think that's an area to focus on. Okay, thank you very much. And I learned something once you touch the star, it disappears. So I'm glad you didn't need me to repeat it. So those of you that haven't gone yet, you now know. All right, this next one is for Luis. With the NRC as process-based, how does NRC management make sure that good ideas are accepted and adopted by skeptics? Oh, that's a hard question. I think on that aspect, it's just to show at the end of the day what's the outcome that we're trying to achieve. It's always good to be skeptical at the end of the day because we really need to be thinking upon what we're doing today is for the American people and the public, what we're trying to do is to be able to be more efficient in the way that we're doing business. So in that aspect, what we try to do is to show the benefits of the idea rather than the risk. Obviously, we need to put the guardrails. So once we start developing an idea, but we also have to be very keen on what is the benefit of this idea. It's okay to be skeptic, but at the end of the day, we need to be longing for the see, okay? How is this idea is gonna benefit not only the NRC, but also the members of the public because those are the people that we're serving. We're serving our nation to do better, so. Thank you, Chris. I'm sorry, Luis. Luis, say like, Milton, I'm not confused now. Chris, you have the next question. How do you see culture impacting the ability to innovate? Yeah, so that's a great question. I think, you know, if we look at culture, we're looking at our capacity to produce and perform. And having a culture that not only says that we want to innovate, but actually the day-to-day is encouraging that innovation, rewarding that innovation like you talked about, Tina, inspiring that innovation. I think part of our data talks about knowing the business process, right? So our entire organizations who are understanding our mission, understanding our day-to-day, will help inspire some of this innovation and things that we can do differently. So I think the culture plays a very integral role in that, and I'll just use the example of a new employee, because we talked about that earlier. Someone coming into our environment, our work environment, can they say, oh, they're serious about innovation here? You know, that's what we want the response to be. So I think culture has a tremendous impact on our ability to innovate. I think that the shift that we're trying to make now where we're looking at our specific day-to-day behaviors, starting with our leadership, can help drive that innovation and really inspire it. Thank you. That's a great response, Chris. All right. Milton, when innovation begins, lots of people instinctively balk at change. How and where in the innovation process do you handle this? You want me to read it again? Yes. Okay. When innovation begins, lots of people instinctively balk at change. How and where in the innovation process do you handle this? When you balk at change? Balk, as in they're resistant, they don't want to, the knee-jerk reaction is, don't want to do that. Well, that could happen in different stages of innovation. Like it could happen at the beginning of presenting an idea, it could happen once the idea has been assessed and that you understand that it's actually feasible and then you go to the implementation part of it and there are no, like, maybe resources or time to make it happen. So it could happen, but what we try to do with the innovation program is prepare the innovator to cope with that resistance because it is part of the process. Like you will find, you will always have challenges, you will always have people that will say, no, this is just not gonna work, but how do you keep thriving? How do you identify the right time to present your idea? How do you build your story to perhaps just convince other people and keep presenting that idea in other places that may be better received? That would be the strategy, but unfortunately, that's part of the process. So it could happen anytime and whenever it happens, we try to support the innovators in just coping with that resistance. It's a great point. I heard someone say that we all have lots of great ideas, but when it comes to the actual implementation, sometimes we struggle. So I think that you've all sort of touched on that and the need to reward and create space for innovation. It also incorporates a little bit of process change and a willingness to stop and say, hey, this impacts my work directly, but maybe I can learn something from it. Maybe there is a piece of this. It doesn't have to be the complete upheaval. We're not gonna do time sheets anymore, we're just gonna pay people. It's like, no, we can do some incremental changes, maybe in our process to make it more friendly. And there are other probably better illustrations that y'all are thinking of, but the idea that you just have this initial reaction of, I don't wanna change. I don't like change. Well, it's part of life and it's one of those things that we have to work through and if we want to innovate, if we want to see the successes in innovation and Vana is down here nodding her head vigorously, we have to check that initial reaction and say, I don't wanna change, but, and I think I can improve. Maybe it's incremental, maybe it's dramatic, but a pause to think and resist that initial no, I don't want to change. You're all looking at me. Okay, I'll stop talking. I still have 18 minutes. So, let's get through some more of these questions that Ken has identified for us. This one's directed to the NRC staff. How do you support innovation in an environment where people feel too busy to innovate? Go ahead. Can I jump in on that? Yes. Because we have something really cool we did. That was what we heard and we did surveys of our team. Why can't we be more innovative? It was always, I don't have time to innovate. And so we started this thing, it's called Starlight Labs. It's a little hard to define what it is, but one aspect of it is we have regular virtual engagements, I'll call them, because they're not really meetings, on a topic, and everybody's invited in the whole company and we'll have a couple of people that might know a little bit about that topic. Could be, I don't know, using LiDAR to survey an area or something. And it's just brainstorming. We have a virtual whiteboard, people talk and think about how might I use this in my area? What have I had experience with? What are all the problems? Why you don't wanna use this thing? That all can come out in that space. And miraculously, because there was a meeting, they could add to their calendar. It gave people an hour a month to be innovative. But then those conversations really propelled a lot of other interactions with people that didn't even know each other or didn't work together. So that's something to consider a model. I'd be happy to franchise for everybody. Starlight Labs coming to a department near you. Well, we do have something similar, which is the Jam. And that is something that happened last year, two years ago. And so there has been those opportunities where we grant time for everyone to come together and just brainstorm. And there were like some like live boards and some interactive tools that were prepared for the staff to just like have a word cloud and propose just words and ideas and just articulate what could be the solution for certain common themes. So that has happened is something that we have learned a lot from. And there's a lot of information that has been processed and that probably still needs to be processed because there was a lot of information that was collected. But certainly it is very important to keep looking for that time where people are allowed to provide ideas and be part of those like brainstorming kind of exercises because it is true we're busy. And it's just, you know, we need to allow time for people to contribute. That's a great point. And there is in fact more things coming out of the Jam. The analysis of ideas and the inputs are still ongoing. I don't know if research or EDOs. Sure. So yeah, it's a great question. I think one thing I've learned being a part of organization is everyone's busy and there's high workloads all around. I think there's another perspective to that question. I think if we talked about the bureaucracy and the way government works, sometimes you have a flood of work coming in and you don't have the people yet and you have to wait for a budget to hire. And so you kind of stay in this kind of chronic cycle of not having the resources you need. And I've been a part of other organizations that really kind of defined my tenure there dealing with backlogs. And so I think sometimes having those heavy workloads can actually put a little bit of pressure to innovate and in the moment think, okay, there's got to be a better way to do this. But we've got to come up with something different because this isn't sustainable. So I think there's another perspective with respect to- Necessity being the mother of invention. Yes. Yeah, that's a good point. And sometimes if you think about, you hear about initiatives. We have this initiative. We're going to do this thing. It's like if it's an initiative, that means it's not embedded in the cultural DNA. And so how do we go about embedding these things? You've got your Starlight Labs and we have the Jam periodically and you've got Innovate 2.0. You're constantly talking about culture. You're on the cutting or maybe more appropriately bleeding edge of artificial intelligence and what we're doing. So how do we continue to embed those things into our DNA so they're not just the shiny new object? I think an area that I found, at least that we do in our group, that even though it's not related to AI, we set up priorities of, okay, this is what we're going to be spending our time. So every two weeks, my group basically sits down and I'm basically not even in the group. And they talk some of themselves of how they can better improve the way that we work. And I think that's beautiful because it's something that they have done organically without me even asking. And I'm not even part of that discussion, but I get the outcomes and the results during the branch meetings and through the side conversations. And I think it's about that to be able to allow staff and because you prioritize what is important. Obviously we need to be able to prioritize our mission, but we also need to be able to prioritize. They need to have their time to talk about themselves because that has to happen at all levels of organization. So it's just to allow that space for our people to be able to talk and having that whiteboard because that's basically what they do. But that has happened organically without even me asking. And I think that's part of a healthy cultural organization that happens without even me as a leader telling them how to do it. It's a great point. All right, I know we're drawing to a close. If we can change our slide to the final one. We've got some weeks, if you wanna get in touch with us and on to the next question. Y'all are not off the hook yet. How do we address the ask to provide data showing the success of innovation or return on investment when a lot of the innovation in terms of process improvement cannot easily retract in the immediate or even near term? Any takers on that one? It's part of the value of innovation. Not everything will be quantified in terms of pennies and FTE hours. There's a lot of value that comes out of making things easier and just having ideas being considered for people to have the motivation and the satisfaction of contributing to the organization. So not all the benefits that we are seeing can be quantified. And it's something that we're trying to do better at because when we captured success stories and implemented ideas, the innovators don't always know how to quantify the benefits out of it. They know that they are doing less work. They know that things are easier but it's not always easy to quantify that benefit. So it is an area that we're trying to do better at but the reality is that most of the innovations and the benefit that has come from the ideas that we have tracked may not be able to be quantified but there's that qualitative value of, hey, we're doing things better. We are using newer methods, newer tools. We are keeping up with what's happening outside the agency and that by itself makes us look better. We are more professional. We're more on top of what's happening. So it's a matter of just conveying these benefits in a way that can be appreciated. I think this question speaks to the results. How do you demonstrate the results of this innovation? How do you prove that what was is inferior in some way to what is? And it's sort of like one of my new favorite examples of how much money did we spend going from typewriters to computers and how do you quantify what you saved or what you spent? We're not buying typewriter ribbon. We're still buying paper, but we can do so much more with a computer than we could with a typewriter. So how would you quantify all the things that you get out of that computer versus what you didn't get out of the typewriter but the typewriter wasn't designed for that? So I think this question is a little bit of that chicken and egg kind of aspect of you've got to be able to show and demonstrate that yes, where we were was one place and where we've gone to is something else and there is value in there. And some of our organizations including mine will pretzel ourselves into trying to find a dollar figure or a time figure to apply to that but it can be extremely challenging. I don't know if you find the same thing and in every we're forever saying, well, the government doesn't really save money because we're not a money making institution but sometimes we are. Yeah, I think we definitely have sort of achieved the driver of if we aggregate all of the industry's data, there's things that are possible that we can't even articulate today, right? And we definitely have challenges as we keep going forward. Data is becoming more valuable to people and a greater desire to protect it or sell it. But maybe a quick example of something we were able to do that we didn't know we were gonna do. We embarked on a process to aggregate work order data so that we could understand better preventive maintenance strategies and optimize that around cost value-based maintenance. But one of the things we found is that by having all that data, we were then able to also analyze the time it took to do all these pieces of work and provide insight back on that where could there be a focus to reduce the time and therefore reduce the money? So I think going forward as we have all these more powerful tools that will continue to be developed it's more about what the value will be in the further future because you took these steps today to build this body of information or these capabilities or these skills or these innovation muscles. It is hard when you then encounter the CFO and they want the payback in a year or whatever the time period is. But I think there's that aspect of inspiring by the possibility. Inspiring about the possibility. I like it, that's a great phrase. We still have time for a question or two more but I want to remind you that I want your feedback. So if you haven't scanned the QR code please do so and go to the feedback tab and give us some actionable information on your thoughts about this session because you clearly have lots of questions so thank you for those. Here's a question for the panel. How do each of the organizations maintain energy around innovation and maintain staffing levels to make innovation happen? Well, we have allocated FDEs to manage our innovation program. However, we need to give a big shout out to all the volunteers because it's just not possible to run the whole program with just a number of people. It's an agency program and there's a lot of networking, a lot of communications, a lot of briefings, a lot of activities that are happening in different segments of the agency. So certainly having that additional support from people that are motivated towards innovation makes a difference. Very good. Luis? I think on this one it's more about what is the angle I would like to read something that I read the other day. I think you guys remember when Netflix, back in the day they were able to send you a DVD to your home and that's the way that we were able to watch movies and then but they did something that I found that was really interesting of they found around in the early 20s that that model was changing and they needed to be able to change and they were one of the early adopters of AI and what I found, what I was actually reading the quote which I found really interesting is that we need to be able to inspire people and this is the quote that I found, if you want to build a ship, do not gather people to collect wood or assign them task but instead teach them to yearn for the badness of the sea. And I think that's where we need to be able to tell them the possibilities of what is beyond the sea. What is actually what's the promise of AI? So rather than telling them, oh, day one, come to the organization and I want you to do S-Y-N-C, we need to step back and tell them what is the possibility, what is possible to the use of data, to the use of AI and I think if we can instill that early to all of our new generation and even to our existing staff that's what I can see that we have a culture that it will be able to sustain itself even when we are gone, so. Thank you. Well, we have just a few minutes left. Are there any additional thoughts that you'd like to share or should I ask you another hard question? I'll jump in because I wanted to plug something. We have had for several years now a series of meetings called the Global Forum for Nuclear Innovation, something that you all might be interested in. Our third one is gonna be this summer, last week of June in Miami and we have as our theme this time ambition into action and to prepare for that meeting we did a large survey of the industry so I thought I'd just share these results with you. We asked about is there enough innovation in the industry, are there ideas and 83% of the people said the industry is full of ambition. But 77% believe there's a disparity between the ambition that we have and our ability to turn that into action. So we, through the survey, came up with five barriers that people identified. I think you guys will be happy to know none of them was regulatory. So, you know, it was financial planning and resources, resistance to change or sticking with the status quo, unclear definition of the goal, too little leadership and inadequate planning or research. And so those themes will be explored at that meeting this summer if that's something that you're interested in following. Well, that sounds very engaging and interesting. You said it's in Miami, in the middle of the summer? It's in Miami, great hotel rates though, last week of June. All right, great hotel rates, we all like those. All right, I would like to say thank you, Milton, Tina, Chris, Louise. Thank you for coming and sharing your thoughts, having an engaging conversation. Thank you to you all for asking some fantastic questions. We did not get to all of them and we'll explore the ways that we can respond to those and give you more insights on creativity and culture and innovation. And Louise has an AI session coming up. Please come tomorrow at 3.30 p.m. We get to have all these thoughtful discussions in the end of the day, goodness. Mercifully, none of you heard our stomach's growling. I hope that you have a wonderful evening and thank you for joining us for this technical session and go forth and be creative and innovative and ask us questions out in the hallway if you have them. I know you have more of them and thank you. Have a great rest of the rick.


So with the involvement that you have now with some of the careers team at, let's say, Schroder's, is there common things that you see that are good qualities in candidates and those that are not good? Yeah, definitely. So I do sort of help out on the assessment days and the insight days and things like that. The one, I think the standout quality that does really separate a candidate is intellectual curiosity. And I know we've, you know, me and you have spoken about this before. Everyone knows that, you know, the finance finance sector, all the different industries offer a lot of grad programs and there's a lot of variation within that. And a lot of recruiters know that a lot of students will just sort of, you know, machine gun, take a machine gun approach and just try and hit every company in every sector and, you know, throw as many applications out there as possible and hope, you know, just play the numbers game, which definitely has a merit. You know, buy everything out there, just as far to you know, it's probably 100 grad schemes in the city, maybe more of a decent size. I think that's impossible to, you know, you have to have, you have to be, you have to discriminate a little bit between them, between them so the applications are high quality. But I think having intellectual curiosity, like genuine intellectual curiosity about an industry and showing that and demonstrating that is absolutely key. The demonstration that being so important because the amount of students that I meet, you know, we do sort of speed interviews and things like that here.  Now, everyone that tells me I love investing, I love equities always have done. If they struggle to answer that question, then it's just not that compelling. They're not making that much of a compelling case. So, you know, to the interviewer that they, that is genuine. It's like saying, you know, if you ask me, you know, what football club do you support and I say I love United always have done you know, you know, did you watch the game at the weekend and I don't even know who they played, and I've never been to old Trafford, and I don't even know who the star players are, you're not going to believe me that I'm genuinely interested in Man United. You know, having intellectual curiosity then demonstrating it is super key. I mean, to my point that I mentioned earlier about picking subjects and things like that. If you follow what you love, I don't think that's a problem. If you're applying, you know, for jobs because you feel you know you just should go into finance because you did a finance related degree or your mates who are applying for finance and that just seems like the right thing to do. I would encourage, you know, students to really try and find a bit of finance that they think genuinely appears somewhere they can enjoy the most, that they can have the most fun. Because you know it's a tough assessment process to get the internships and tough jobs is then tough when you start working these companies. If you don't, I think genuinely enjoy it and generally attracted to at least some parts of the role. I just don't think you'll last the course. So, you know, you're working for a long time. So, you know, I think it's to not do something that you at least not everyone can walk around loving their job. You know, that is, you know, that is a sort of dream situation, but that's sort of not the reality. But I think you can enjoy a decent amount of it to make it worthwhile and enjoy your career. So to make sure you demonstrate that well with examples to assesses is really important. And that can be, you know, the go to one that a lot of people will I do and the finance society at university, and that's fine. I've got to understand the amount of people, you know, if there's 150 people in your, your university's finance society times that by 30 universities, plus international, you know, the US universities and everything like that. You know, most people are probably going to have that as they go to evidence for intellectual curiosity. You know, so I work in equities. If someone says they love equities, they love investing. You know, I would hope, you know, a good quality candidate will be running a portfolio or investing themselves doesn't have to be with real money. I didn't have any money at university invest, but you know, you can run a paper portfolio, you know, simulations, etc, etc. You're probably going to ask honest be asked on a stock pick. You're going to want to have at least probably two or three up your sleeve now you don't need to be quoting, you know, the 2014 cash flow statement but you've got to have a view. I'd encourage that view to be different than the market view.  I'm not an investor. I work on investment desk. I'm not an investor. I'm not going to ask someone about, you know, the valuation multiple what adjustments they're making to balance sheet, etc, etc. I just want to know, has this person thought reasonably sensibly through the investment case of a business. And then the other thing I'd say is pick a stock that's not Tesla, Apple or Facebook because the amount of times I hear those, or people give a stock recommendation it's one of those. You just not differentiating yourself. Also, you know, most PMs and most fund managers will know that the investment case for those stocks better than any student.  So yeah, sorry, long, long answer to a short question. Number one, intellectual curiosity evidence it as much as you can. Yeah, and then like my final question then is that beyond application so now that you're at the level of experience that you're at in like direct to position. Yeah, what thing would you say has been something that you've had to learn in the workplace that you've had to work hard at to then help that process. Then doesn't necessarily where it could be technical knowledge, but for most people I guess it's not always that because you've got to manage. You're working in a large organization and so on. So how's that journey been. Okay, so I have three points. I promise I won't talk as long as I did for the last time so so that the first one I will make around the technical ability. I'm not naturally technical at all. My role I'd say has a reasonable amount of, you know, technical knowledge that it's needed I need to speak well about equities to clients I need to have a view on these things I need to understand the investments. That's well enough both of you know the team I work on but also peers and competitors. But ultimately, you will learn the technical side, whether you are technical or not. I know that the technical side of finance puts a lot of people off. There are elements of finance that are very, very technical. I can imagine, you know, things like trading. Some quantum fund management stuff is very about actuarial. Attracts very technical people but there's, there's this bit of a myth around finance that everyone, you know, can do the black skulls equation in the city in their head or whatever it's, it's a complete myth that I think everyone loves to keep up.  If you're not technically minded, please do not be put off by Korean finance. There are just a thing you learn it and be the bar for how technical you need to be. It's a lot lower than anyone will probably publicly admit in finance. So that's just one thing that I've learned all of that. And most of that I did my CFA and whatever, but it's not that when I speak to students and it really puts them off a lot of stuff in finance. It's, yeah, I find it quite disheartening because the industry needs to have a better job on that, you know, marketing itself to people that think about the world differently. In terms of my experience and the two things I'd say I've learned. One was definitely humility. So when I started, especially when I started at Schrodinger's, you know, I was 26. I'd just been an international hockey player for a few years, played in Holland.  I was, you know, I wouldn't say I was getting a photocopy and getting a tease. Not quite that bad, but it definitely took a while to, to, to just, you know, I think I probably thought I was going to be doing a lot more exciting things in my first year or two than I actually was. So sort of just being humble and just being quiet and listening was really, really important for me. Now, you know, I know a lot of other people have different experiences going into their grad scheme. So probably isn't as much of a sort of skill that they have to learn, but linked to the second one. So this is something I see across interns graduates not here, but most places is this is just patience. I was definitely a bit impatient at times when I think over the last few years, you know, just wanted to progress super super quickly, you know, you know, it was hungry to progress to get given more work to get given more responsibility. And I think most places are very good at nurturing and developing talent over time. But you just do also have to be to be patient and, you know, it's great to have hungry graduates and people like that that do want to take more on things like that. But the firm will give you enough work to do you will be pushed in terms of your learning not just on the job but most likely exams and any other assessments and things that the companies have. I would just encourage everyone to as you know, as my parents and colleagues encourage me to be just just it will all come just just in good time and there's an advantage to being young and naive and inexperienced. On the grad scheme, you have free license pretty much maybe not all companies but the ones that I know to email pretty much anyone in the firm to just have coffee. That's an amazing thing to go and do.  They're going to think that I'm going to want to job there. Because why does someone that's at direct level wants to go and do that unless there's something business related was there might be and that's, you know, completely fine but it's a graduate. It's a class to go and do that to definitely go and do that, and then just be patient and just, yeah, just don't be too, don't be in too much of a rush.


There are three different sources of sediment to the deep sea sedimentary record. The first is to originate material that is delivered via rivers into the oceans. The second is dust that is blown in from the continents by winds. And the third is biogenic material formed by organisms that lived in the surface of the ocean that die and then subsequently rain down through the water column to the sea floor. As a source, these types of material are buried in the deep sea sedimentary record. The nature of the sedimentation process is such that the youngest material lies close to the sea floor and as the sediment becomes progressively deeper, it becomes progressively older. Thus the deep sea sedimentary record provides a beautiful inventory of ancient climate from younger to older.