The big interview with Adam Boddison

Emma De Vita finds APM’s new chief executive raring to go, with the energy and ambition to take the profession to the very top.

We speak the morning after you know what. Yesterday, England’s football team was beaten by Italy on penalties during the Euro 2020 final. “My wife’s Italian, so it was an interesting experience in our house,” says 39‑year old Adam Boddison, APM’s new chief executive, who lives in Coventry with his family of three young children. His eldest, 12‑year‑old Antonio is a “massive Harry Kane fan”, but Boddison warned him that “you need to get used to this if you’re going to support England”. It’s good to be realistic about these things.

While the headlines lambasted the cruelty of penalty shoot‑outs in deciding the tournament’s winner, Boddison is all too aware of the unfair vagaries of the life chances meted out to us. It comes from being raised in a household filled with foster children, the victims of unhappy circumstances whom his parents cared for. Growing up alongside children who’d been let down by society has left an indelible mark on Boddison, who saw the same things happen to child after child: “When there are so many children that need to be fostered, that’s not an issue about them as individuals, that’s a system issue.

“I tend not to be judgmental about people because they are often the way they are because of the system – and that could be society, their family or job or whatever it is that they’ve grown up in,” he says. It’s left him with a desire to make a genuine difference, to fix things and to be ambitious about making positive change. Above all, it seems, he wants to realise potential. “Underpinning all of that is this philosophy that, for me, anybody from any background can achieve and do really well in life with the right support and the right development,” he explains.

Our conversation turns to the leadership attributes of England manager Gareth Southgate. “He has been both praised and criticised for the kind of belief he’s had in the people he’s got, and he’s taken the view that actually he has invested in them, and he’s going to make sure that he believes in them right away,” he says. “I tend to do that – that’s my kind of default position – but I’m probably not as good as Gareth at that, so…” he tails off, laughing.

Boddison’s level of energy is infectious. You tend to sit up straighter, become a bit more enthusiastic, when you listen to him. He admits he’s terrible at switching off from work (and can’t imagine sitting around watching boxsets at the weekend), mainly because work for him is as far from a 9‑to‑5 slog as you can imagine. His life’s work is to make society better. It’s what motivates him and keeps him driving forward.

“My wife says to me, ‘Sometimes Adam, you don’t really have a job, you have a kind of way of life’,” he says, agreeing with her that, “I have to live and breathe a job… I need to work for an organisation where I get up in the morning and think I really want to get in, because every minute I spend is going to make a difference,” he explains.

His career cuts across many worlds, from teaching and academia to the third sector, but the golden thread that runs through it all, he explains, is his love of developing people: “I’m drawn to roles where I can actually make the world a better place through the development of people.” Project professionals, he says, have a big influence across the organisations they work for, and being able to use that impact for the greater good is part of the reason he wanted APM’s top job.

We speak before Boddison is officially at his desk at APM’s Princes Risborough HQ. I’m curious to find out, as an outsider, what his take on the project profession might be? “Project management is the beating heart of contemporary professional life, but I think we don’t really know it yet,” he says. “There’s a tipping point coming.” He draws an analogy with marketing, where over the past 20 years, marketers have gone from the junior backroom bods in an organisation to having a C‑suite role.

In a post‑pandemic world, Boddison believes, project management can help organisations maximise return on investments and deal with budget squeezes. “This past year‑and‑a‑half is going to accelerate what was already coming, which is the renaissance of project management… My sense is that project management doesn’t get the recognition it deserves. Within the sector, people know about it and they care about it, but outside the sector it’s not known widely enough exactly what this group of people do and the value they add. We need to improve that… It needs recognition all the time, even when it’s going well,” he says.

To join APM, Boddison is moving from his chief executive role at the National Association for Special Educational Needs (Nasen), a membership organisation for teachers in the field. His six years there has brought about some impressive achievements, including growing membership tenfold from a base of 3,000, diversifying revenue streams and introducing an international strategy. “I was appointed on a ticket of turnaround and growth,” and he has succeeded.

In contrast, APM, he says, is obviously in “a very good space”, particularly with its chartered status. He sees the main opportunity for APM as growth in membership. “There is a profile challenge for us as an organisation and that’s the kind of thing that drives me. What motivates me a lot is identifying the real barriers stopping an organisation from accelerating to achieve its true potential. I like to remove those barriers and supercharge an alternative, which is to take it forward at high speed and where it can really make a difference.”

Having not even left his Nasen post, it doesn’t seem fair to pin him down on how he intends to achieve this (and he kindly bats aside my attempts at doing so). What’s clear is his emphasis on using culture and values, with an emphasis on people development, as a way to achieve change (he rails against the obsession with strategy that organisations have had, often to the detriment of bringing people along together under a common banner to achieve success).

Boddison grew up in the Wirral. His mum ran a playgroup, his dad was a gardener, and he was the first to go to university (Warwick), where he studied maths. While running a summer camp on campus, he was approached by someone running the teacher training course that happened to be next door, and was persuaded to join. That’s how Boddison’s career as a maths teacher began, but it wasn’t long before he became involved with the university’s work with special and gifted children and the work of the specialist schools and academies trust movement. It was his growing experience of primary, secondary and tertiary education that led him to conclude that education was “in a mess” – and his ambitious early career plan was born. “I decided that I should become secretary of state for education, because then I could fix it,” he says.

Boddison found himself working more closely with government and with politicians. “And that’s where it all went wrong,” he says unexpectedly. “I realised that politicians have accountability, but it’s actually quite hard for them to make change happen because they only have this five‑year window… It’s hard to get things through unless there’s some kind of magic set of coincidences.” Did this big disillusionment shatter his career dreams? “No, not really. I saw it as an opportunity to change direction.”

He quickly realised that the best place to make a difference in society was in the third sector, “because I thought charities stand up for what they believe in and they actually have an ability to influence both the politics side of things and they work very closely with the civil service”. Hence his move to Nasen, and his interest in APM, with its strong links to government and the civil service. “We’ve got to get the organisation to a point where it can maximise its impact,” he reiterates.

Boddison says he enjoys bringing people together, relationship building and joining the dots. He also enjoys going the extra mile just to see if he can help someone achieve what they are capable of. When asked about his qualification in clinical hypnotherapy, he explains that while working as a maths teacher, he saw how some children were being held back by attitudes that had been imposed on them by parents who thought there was nothing wrong in saying maths was a struggle in a way that they would never talk about reading.

Boddison tried bringing Derren Brown‑style magic into the classroom, but while that engaged many children, there were still some left with mental blocks, so he turned to neuro‑linguistic programming and then hypnotherapy. Eventually he opened a Saturday practice, where he specialised in working with children who wanted to achieve but were holding themselves back, be it a musician unable to perform or a runner scared of racing. He was successful but doesn’t have the time to practise any more (as an aside, he says there was a time he had to remove his qualification from his CV as people were scared to look him in the eyes).

Beyond the work he loves doing, and spending time with his family, Boddison doesn’t have much time off. He likes to play the piano and is in the local amateur squash league, and also has a love of musical theatre (his favourites are Phantom of the Opera and Wicked). Speaking six weeks before he takes the APM hotseat, Boddison says he’s very much looking forward to starting, keen to supercharge the profession right to the top. And unlike the England football team, he won’t be leaving anything to chance.­­

CV: Adam Boddison
2021 chief executive, APM; chair of the corporation, Coventry College; trustee, Academies Enterprise Trust; visiting professor, University of Wolverhampton
2015–2021 chief executive, National Association of Special Educational Needs; chair, Whole School SEND Consortium
2013–2015 founding director, Centre for Professional Education, University of Warwick
2012–2015 academic principal, IGGY, University of Warwick
2010–2012 academic director, Warwick in Africa, University of Warwick; assistant headteacher, Royal Society of Arts
2018–2010 area coordinator, Further Maths Support Programme
2001–2011 tutor/warden, University of Warwick
2005–2007 lead practitioner, Specialist Schools and Academies Trust, London
2004–2008 maths teacher, Finham Park School and Finham Primary School, Coventry

Education
2019–2021 MBA, University of Leicester (in progress)
2020 PRINCE2 Certificate in Project Management, Axelos
2005–2008 PhD, mathematics education, University of Warwick
2007–2008 DCH, clinical hypnotherapy, Institute of Clinical Hypnosis
2004–2005 MA, educational research methods, University of Warwick
2003–2004 PGCE, secondary mathematics, University of Warwick
2000–2003 BSc, mathematics, University of Warwick

 

By Emma De Vitta

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE AUTUMN 2021 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.