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In this episode, Chris and Nick continue discussions about the world of interim management and welcome Rebecca Fox to discuss her extensive experience across public and private sectors. Rebecca shares candid insights about the realities of interim work, emphasising that there’s no time for a hundred-day plan—it’s all about a day-one approach. She explains how interim leaders must quickly fill leadership voids, build trust, and create certainty in organisations facing strategic misalignment or transition. The conversation explores the relentless pace of modern CIO roles, the importance of commercial awareness, and why technology leaders must focus on outcomes that drive revenue, grow margins, or reduce risk rather than just managing technology for its own sake.

The discussion shifts to broader challenges facing technology leaders today, including the pressures of cost optimisation in PE-backed and public companies, the increasing complexity created by SaaS proliferation, and concerns about AI adding another layer of complexity without addressing underlying process issues. Rebecca argues that organizations need to simplify before layering on AI capabilities, warning that simply bolting AI onto complicated legacy processes will create bigger problems down the road. The group discusses how AI might represent an opportunity for smaller, more agile organisations while larger companies struggle with vested interests and accumulated technical debt.

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Show transcript, automatically generated by Descript (so forgive errors etc).

Chris: Hello and welcome to episode 3, 3

6 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me, Chris Weston. Nick Drage. And this week Rebecca Fox. I.

Well, welcome

to WB 41, episode number 3, 3 6. We, we, we’ve got Nick and Rebecca, but our first day I’m gonna ask Nick, how are you doing, Nick?

Long time no. See. What’s your week been like?

Nick: I’m doing well. Just for the discussion I’ve been for the last week, I’ve been I’ve been vibe, coding, vibe, sorry, vibe coding, a bash script, just to run a stone, a survival game and see if, see if it’s actually gonna work. So it’s like a, it’s like a Monte Carlo simulation of the game rather than trying to play a card game like 2000 times just from the script.

So that’s what I’ve been up to for the last week.

Chris: Wow, that’s a whole week of trying to quite make a bash grip. Is that, is that, is that the right, is that the right tech tool for this? But isn’t AI

Rebecca: also supposed to make things quite quick as well? If it’s taken a whole week to do, it isn’t, isn’t AI smashing?

Nick: I, I have, Jesus, this is, this has started earlier. I have been doing other things in the last week, but that’s, that, that, that would be, that would be the highlight, but also. It’s been interesting to see how slow the process is in that. I’m like 90% of no sort of the way there with how the logic of a program should work.

But still, it’s something I’ve done so regularly that I, I catch myself out and can sort of waste hours. I’m just making mistake.

Rebecca: How many prompts did it get you to where you are now with this, with this bit of vibe? Oh, like like six. Okay. I think you’ve said about 600. ’cause you could have probably just written the code quicker then, right?

Nick: See, well that would assume that one I know bash scripting, which I know enough to get it, like only slightly wrong. And two, I’m, I’m very much not a natural developer. Like the, the big stuff I can do quite well. The detail of make sure this punctuation is here or use spaces in this kinda line, but not that kinda line.

Is, it feels like it’s designed specifically to trip me up. So that’s why it’s basically a case of asking the lille, what does this look like? Copy and paste that in, rename the variables. Take it from there.

Chris: Absolutely. It is designed

Nick: to,

Chris: to catch you out Anyway, so but, so yeah, so we, we heard Rebecca there.

So Rebecca, welcome to the podcast, Rebecca Fox

Rebecca: to see you. Thank you. Thank you, thank you so much for the invitation. So last week, I, last week was actually pretty exciting. I went to an evening dinner on Tuesday. Which is great. Spon sponsored. It’s always nice to have a free dinner, which is talking about Ned how to become a ned, which I, I did a, a course on last year, but also being part of a foot C two 50 doing an NED stuff, but a really busy job that I’m currently exiting.

You know, love to get a ned well and some fractional work. And then on. Thursday actually, my, my partner Hayley and I did a workshop as part of Manchester Tech Festival, which was great the first time. We’ve done a workshop together and interesting enough, we are still together after doing that workshop.

So I’m very proud of us both for, for surviving. That and also well, we’ll talk about next week. And then this weekend we’re super exciting. My son’s just bought a house. My son’s 29. He’s just bought a house, so me and he went to see him and see what he’s bought and help him in able clean it and do all the little jobs that that he couldn’t do.

And I’m sure there’s lots more work to do. So it’s been a really exciting and busy week last week. So yeah, it’s been great.

Chris: That is a busy week and yes, you know, team handling a kind of a presentation can be a bit stressful. And Matt and I have done it actually. And you know, we we’re not, we’re not partners in that sense, but, you know, we’ve been together a long time and we’ve and we, you’re still

Speaker 2: partners.

Chris: We’ve never, we’ve never fallen out. You know, the, the, the, the relationship has, has, has, has remained, but yeah, that’s, that’s a difficult one. And then of course, houses so, you know, so this week for example, I. Actually my daughter came back from university. She’s only been there two, two weeks, which came back to pick something up or something.

So I had that going on with you know, people going after university and, and new, new thing, new, new, new things. But I also did the UK IT leaders event in Manchester last week, which was nice because quite a lot of our Midlands tech leaders contingent were there. They made the. Arduous and app perilous journey at the M six to Manchester to to get there.

And also, you know, met up with a, you know, a lot of people that I haven’t seen for a while which is always nice, isn’t it? And met a few new people as well. So, you know, new friends and new acquaintances are always welcome. So yeah, last week was pretty, pretty busy and busy work-wise as well. We, it’s one of those, it’s a funny time in business at the minute.

A lot of it is a bit soft and people are struggling a bit, and again, we still talk to lots of people who are looking for work in, for CIOs or leadership type roles in it that, you know might not have been expecting to take so long to look for, look for a role. It, you know, it’s, it’s definitely. A tricky market, but it’s not dead by any means.

And in terms of what we are doing, yeah, it’s, it’s busy. There’s lots of stuff going on, and I know lots of people who have exited a job and found a job really quickly as well. So I think it’s just one of those, it’s a, it’s a softish market, but yeah. Interesting stuff going on. So it was a, yeah, it.

Rebecca: It was nice to see Manchester features part of it leaders as well, by the way, you know, I, I, I live in Manchester and it’s an absolutely amazing city.

It

Chris: is. It’s you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s got a good claim to be the, the fourth or third city in the country. And that’s you know, that’s good. You got Birmingham as the second city, obviously mean. It’s the fourth city, obviously it’s, it’s

Rebecca: before London, Manchester, come

Chris: on. Yeah, maybe. All right. And that I, I, I, I understand the point of view, but you know Yes.

Fair enough. We, we won’t, we won’t go down. We beyond that route. But yeah, good week and I’m glad everybody’s had a good time. So what we’re gonna do is we, we’re gonna talk in a moment about interim CIO work. We had a conversation with Duncan. Stop. A couple of weeks ago about, about interim work in general.

And because Rebecca is, has been a, a regular interim and even went into a current permanent role on an interim basis, and as we talked about with sometimes, sometimes that turns permanent we’re gonna talk about that and how it’s changed over the last few years and Rebecca’s experience in that. So

Speaker 2: I’ll see you in a second.

So then Rebecca, a fair,

Chris: a fair chunk of time in interim in public sector, private sector. We talked with Duncan a few weeks, a couple of weeks ago about, about the kind of mentality of, of, of people going into interim and the kind, you know, they don’t necessarily have the time to, to sort of sit down and, and come up with a hundred day plan and all that kind of thing.

How, how has you, how have, have you approached this over the years? Would you agree with that? Is it something you just sort