Interview-e with Peter Spurgeon
Having arrived early for my appointment on a dull but not too gloomy December morning, I sit in the foyer of Warwick Medical School and turn over a few ideas on who exactly Peter Spurgeon might be. He’s definitely co-author of the book that I was reviewing for the FMLM Bookclub–Medical Leadership: from the Dark Side to Centre Stage–the principal purpose of my perfectly restrained dart along the A14 from Cambridge. However, a little background research tantalised me with an extra-ordinary professional history that has included academic psychology, air traffic control, shipping, education and, of course, medical leadership. I was not only keen to hear Peter’s thoughts on medical leadership and the value that he hoped his latest book would bring to the field, but I also wanted to uncover a little more of the story of the man who had become an international authority in his own right.
Having grown up professionally with the experiential but somewhat misguided notion of leadership as assertive power-broking from on high, I feel my compass being gently re-directed as Peter comes down the stairs to greet me. After the initial greeting, he invites me for a coffee before we make our way upstairs to his office. Laden with hot beverage, during the ascent I explain rather sheepishly that because of the rolling nature of this new Bookclub review process, I had not yet finished his book. Giving a gentle shrug without even the slightest hint of affront, he settles into the chair across a small circular table that occupies most of the floor-space in his surprisingly modest office and we got down to business...
The interview is split into several parts that I will be posting over the next few weeks. You can either listen along to the discussion downloaded as an audio file (.mp3) or you can read an edited transcript downloaded as a pdf (see links below).
Part 1 - In the beginning, there was psychology
Peter starts by talking about his beginnings in applied psychology, working with air traffic control in the late Eighties and later on with the much slower black box of tanker shipping off Norway. He gives a retrospective rationale on his career so far and moves on to discuss the nature of training, the ethics of decision-making, patient safety and reconciling differing perspectives in leadership and management.
Download: Transcript [PDF, 407 Kb] | Audio file [MP3, 21 Mb]