Thoughts on RAICo1

Being a comms person can be a solitary existence - particularly during Covid-19, for obvious reasons.

Yes, we need to speak to people to get the information we need to communicate. Yes, it's better to be in an office together so we can bounce ideas off each other.

But neither of these things are completely necessary to get the job done (as lockdown proved). Face-to-face is best, but now we have Teams. Or phones. Or email. Or messaging. Or texts. Or WhatsApp. The list of ways of asking questions, and getting answers, is getting longer.

Back when I were a lad, there were just two ways of interviewing people. You got in your car and drove to meet them, or you picked up a phone.

I would always rather do the former, and over the years I've had some amazing experiences because of it. This week we had the "soft launch" of our new Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Collaboration hub (RAICo1), and I was determined to go there, despite the 300 mile round trip it necessitated.

So on Tuesday I found myself in Whitehaven, West Cumbria, which is always a pleasure anyway. I started my working day in the office with colleagues, nipped across town to check out RAICo1, and ended the day back in the office. Oh yes, and I also drove up and down the M6, and through the wonderful Lake District, with BBC 6music for company.

It was a long day, but worth it. I have been talking about RAICo1 with my colleagues in our central robotics team for well over a year now. But until this week I hadn't experienced it. Now I have. And it is ALWAYS worth seeing the things you have to explain to others. So here's my personal take on it. But first, as they used to say on shampoo adverts, here's the "science bit"…



RAICo is a collaborative facility that has been set up as a partnership between the University of Manchester, UKAEA, NNL and Sellafield Ltd, allowing researchers from academia to work directly with robotics experts from industry. The facility offers access to mock-ups and robotic equipment to enable researchers to address nuclear decommissioning challenges. Equipment available includes an array of submersible vehicles and underwater manipulators, together with a pond equipped with an underwater and above water Vicon positioning system, where aquatic-based systems can be tested. In addition, there is a wide range of sensors available including thermal cameras, radiation detectors and simulated radiation sources and detectors that are ideal for testing robot autonomy in radiation environments.



All very exciting, yes? But what exactly is it?

Well for a start for a landlocked Cheshire lad like me, the building is in a spectacular spot on a headland above Whitehaven itself. I'm always a little jealous of my Cumbrian colleagues' proximity to the sea, and RAICo1 is right there. It's not quite in Whitehaven town, but very much on the seafront and just a hop and a skip away from the town's Bus Station business hub. The potential of having such a UK robotics centre of expertise so close to the town cannot be overstated. So I was glad to see that I'd not been overstating it in the copy I've been writing for the past year. Phew.

Inside, the building offers a large space - I'd expected this, but what was gratifying was that it already looks busy. There are cranes in the roof space, a working glovebox, even a large water tank available for testing submersible robots.

I'd hoped this would be in place, and it was great to see it, larger than life and giving the building a real sense of purpose.

What surprised me most was the section at the far end, created out of stacked shipping containers. I entered not expecting to see anything more than some office space. But I was greeted by a large control room with multiple screens, which was being used to showcase how equipment could be controlled on nuclear sites like Sellafield. The visual impact of this can't be overstated, either. We know we need to move our people away from potential harm by bringing in technology. And here it is, the type of control room that will help achieve this - miles away from Sellafield itself, but capable of offering our people a new working experience.

And as the day's purpose came to life, with demonstrations happening across the building's main space, that message was amplified.

RAICo1 is a functional, practical space where the people who own our challenges can come together with the experts who may hold the answers. Its potential is simple to understand, clear to see and huge in potential. That technology - whether it is crowd-pleasing robotics like "Spot the dog" or functional tech like our LongOps programme, can be tested, changed and made ready before moving onto the site, speeding up processes, saving taxpayers' money and making the work we do safer.

For a communicator like me, talking about this stuff is liking shooting fish in a barrel. Or if you prefer, using a remote manipulator arm to activate an AI-enhanced scanning system which can pinpoint and identify a submersible robot in a water-filled silo 100 miles away.

Having now seen it I've confirmed what I thought I knew about the facility. Seeing isn't necessarily believing, but when you're delivering comms it really helps to have experienced what you're writing about.

Logging on in 1980s Cheshire

When I was eight years old, my dad inherited the family home and we moved from my cosy life on a housing estate in Staffordshire to what was, as far as I was concerned, the middle of nowhere. This was a largeish Victorian farmhouse standing in its own grounds in south Cheshire, surrounded by outbuildings which had been used by my grandfather and his predecessors to run a successful agricultural equipment suppliers.

You may think this led to much hilarious fish-out-of-water shenanigans in a 1970s version of the Durrells. But to be honest, I just put up with it in the way people do in the real world. I was never particularly happy with rural life – I didn’t want to ride horses or muck out the cows, like all my new friends at my new primary school were doing. When I got to high school a couple of years later, I was at least mixing with kids who lived on housing estates again… but they were all at least five miles away down a busy country A-road with no pavements, and my parents were too busy making a go of the huge money pit they’d had foisted on them to drive me anywhere.

I know it sounds horrendously ungrateful and selfish of me to have reacted like that. But living in a big house with a huge garden is not really the joyous experience you might think, when there’s a general all-pervading air of penury attached to it.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad… there were some things about rural life I enjoyed, like having a knackered old moped to drive up and down what was essentially my own private road, and an air rifle to ping away at tin cans whenever I felt like it. I recently met up with some old school friends and they reminded me how amazing it was to spend time at my house and do these things, as well as checking the oak panelling for secret passages, and helping ourselves to draft beer from the bar in the cellar.

So perhaps my judgement on my late childhood was coloured by my annoyance at never getting the Atari I so desperately wanted for Christmas. And us not getting a VHS recorder until 1987.

One thing rural life did serve up with astonishing regularity was an assortment of oddballs who looked and sounded like they’d come straight from the pages of Cold Comfort Farm. One of these came up in a conversation with my dad at his recent 82nd birthday party. Dad never really talks about the past. He never really talks much at all, but when he does it’s usually about the here and now – the last book he read, how Manchester United are getting on, recent work he’s done on their house (not the family pile, they finally gave up on that 20 years ago and moved to a nice little cottage).

But as we finished up the fancy pub meal, talk turned to our 80s experience, and I mentioned how once, I’d been chased away from a nearby farm by an angry nutcase whose corduroy trousers were held up with a bailer twine belt and whose jumper and wellies combination was made up of more holes and cowshit than material.

“Ah, yes,” he replied. “That was _______ ___________. He was a proper character.”

I’ve got a shocking memory (the above blanking out of the name in a Victorian novel style is as much about me forgetting the name as it is about protecting their identity), but I countered that I seemed to remember there was some doubt at the time about the guy’s parentage.

“Yes, there was a sister, but nobody knew who the mother was. There was some suggestion they were one and the same.”

Rural life, eh?

So we chatted on, and I explained how for some reason I’d ridden my push bike down the lane towards his house, only to get an unwarranted and quite spectacular reaction. As I recall, I turned my bike around and pedalled like my life depended on it, with him coming after me at a fast walk like a pink-faced, tweed-jacketed T-1000.

Which led to one of dad’s rare stories.

“No-one really went to their farm, it was quite out of the way and they kept themselves to themselves. But I remember one time I had to go for some business reason. The thing that surprised me was that they’d got a tree burning in the grate in their living room.”

“What, you mean an excessively big log?” we all asked.

“No, I mean a tree. They’d chopped down a huge tree, dragged it whole into the house, pushed the end into the grate and then set fire to it. Once the top of the tree had burned down, they got a crowbar and levered the next bit of the tree into the grate to keep burning, with some force.” (he demonstrated this with hand movements and a bit of grunting)

“The thing was, it was a cold day – and the tree was so huge that it went across the floor of the living room, into the hall and out of the front door, so they couldn’t actually shut the doors to keep the heat in.”

The story finished there, with much hilarity around the table. It’s worth bearing in mind here that part of dad’s business was the fixing and selling of chainsaws… but that wasn’t why he was visiting the farm. They were happy with their tree-burning solution to fetching in firewood.

The image of this has stayed with me since hearing it. It’s so nuts that every time I think of it, it raises more questions that I’ll never get the answer to. How can people think that this is an acceptable, or even effective, way of keeping a fire in? At what point during the process did they think – sod this, let’s put the axe down and pick the tree up? What kind of tree was it? How long did they persevere, with the doors wide open like that? Did they eventually have to drag this smoking, charred trunk back out into the yard, where it sat as a monument to failed labour-saving ideas for the next decade or so? Why didn’t they take the idea to Dragons’ Den? Just how much strength would it take to ram a burning tree trunk into the back end of a fireplace with enough force to shatter it? How come they didn’t burn down their home or at the very least fundamentally damage the structure of it? What kind of a mind thinks that all the hard work this needed was preferable to lopping off a few branches to burn?

The thing is, at a most basic level, I can utterly believe it did happen. Because it feels right, for the time, the place and the people involved. Perhaps they only did it once, and realised it didn’t really work. Or perhaps it was the way they always ran their fireplace etiquette, the top end of a tree merrily burning away in the grate, the rest of it splitting the room down the middle, the front doors wide open and the resultant draught being kept at bay by the insane blaze. Meanwhile, the family are gazing into the flames, happy in the knowledge that they’ve saved all the effort of chopping up the tree into manageable chunks, and all they have to do instead is stand up every half hour or so and force it into the grate, inch by inch.

We have such sites to show you

One of the great things – possibly the best thing – about working in communications is that we get to go where few others ever do. As a humble newspaper reporter I drove supercars, went behind the scenes on film sets and had the grand tour of endless numbers of ancient buildings, crime scenes and celebrity homes. Later my police ID gave me open access to pretty much every part of the constabulary I worked for, from the firing range to the forensics lab.

And now I work for Sellafield Ltd, which necessity has seen become one of the most inaccessible places in the country.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way, we used to have a visitor's centre and bus tours, open every day except Christmas Day. But these days the average punter isn’t getting anywhere near the site on any day of the year, let alone 364 of ‘em.

So it feels like a real privilege to be able to spend the day there on a site visit, as I and my colleagues in the internal comms team did on Tuesday.

We were there with purpose – to re-acquaint ourselves with the place after a long time away, and to gain some insight into how we can deliver our messaging to a workforce scattered across a group of operational buildings with varying degrees of communications infrastructure.

As always, it was fascinating. We visited the Fuel Handling Plant and Magnox Reprocessing, two facilities tasked with taking on and dealing with used nuclear fuel. We were lucky enough to see decommissioning in action as a seven-tonne piece of concrete was craned off the remaining Windscale pile chimney. We talked to people whose pride in what they do shines through. We went through the complex processes needed to gain access to, and exit from, some of our most sensitive areas.

Like every time I visit the site, the scale of what my organisation is doing blew my mind. The place is HUGE, and the amount of change since the last time I was there (pre Covid) is extraordinary. Buildings have vanished, and been replaced by new ones. Cranes are everywhere, it’s like Manchester city centre.

The visit was invaluable, and well worth the seven hours I ended up spending in the car to do it. I came back invigorated and ready to communicate. I feel I have an inkling of how we might achieve our communication challenges. I still don’t know enough about how the site works, but I know a little bit more… and the next time some mentions Magnox Repro, I’ll be clear in my head exactly what we’re talking about. Just like previous visits have clarified my understanding of impenetrable ideas like the First Generation Magnox Storage Pond, the Sludge Handling Plant, the Magnox Swarf Storage Silo and the Silos Maintenance Facility.

What we do is amazing, it’s such a shame you can’t see it. But we’ll do our best to tell you all about it.

Comic sans (magic)

When I set up this blog I decided to call it “can you just wordsmith this”, because it’s the kind of thing people ask me to do in my job.

They don’t think anything of it, and to be honest neither did I really… until it was pointed out to me that it’s the kind of thing people ask comms professionals to do which unwittingly demeans the role to a certain extent.
A bit like “can you just work your magic on this?”, it suggests that “doing comms” is a job anyone can do, given the time. Therefore it’s a simple job to knock something together that’s nearly there, and then just hand it over for publication. Just stick a funny headline on it, make sure it’s got all the necessary full-stops, and voila. Comms!
Never mind if it’s not planned, or has no strategic value, just stick it out there and tick a box. If no-one reads it, or it has no discernible effect, that’s probably because the comms person didn’t work enough magic on it.

To illustrate the point I drew up this little cartoon. It’s a little bit of fun which I hope you enjoy…

The wonderful wizard of OS

 

Originally it was going to be called "Our Sledge-afield"

One of the things we wanted to do when we revamped our internal newspaper a couple of years ago was broaden its appeal, and make it useful.

The previous newspaper had become a bit of an anachronism – the standard “tabloid newspaper + PDF on the intranet” approach that has been a staple of internal communications since the turn of the century.

Obviously you don’t want to reinvent the wheel completely – especially if you’re changing something that the audience doesn’t necessarily feel it has a problem with.

But I have to admit I was a bit fed up with it as it stood. It felt like we were filling blank pages with whatever came to hand, rather than driving the narrative. I also found myself questioning exactly what benefit our people were getting from the usual puff pieces accompanied by staged group shots or whatever flowchart lay to hand.

So we went back to the drawing board, with just a couple of deal-breakers – we would still need something in printed form, and it should carry on coming out on a monthly basis.

Apart from that, all bets were off. We engaged with our wonderful design agency and chucked a few ideas around. I had some ideas of my own, and we were able to create something a bit different… but not too different.

The end result – Our Sellafield – fulfils its remit well. We have something that people want to read – and, I hope, something that people want to contribute to. OS plays to the strengths of the business – such as our clear remit to make the site clean and safe for future generations, whilst ensuring articles don’t get hamstrung by the issues that plagued its predecessor - a lack of photos, a need to fill acres of tabloid space each month whether content existed or not, and a lack of clarity of what the newspaper was being produced to achieve.

Its printed edition (when produced, it is currently on Covid-19 enforced hiatus) is a pocket-sized just-under-A4 – making it portable and giving that immediate cue to contributors that a 1,500 word epic isn’t going to make the cut.

Its ethos is “digital first” – with the ability to link to other content in a wide variety of formats (or even include video embedded in its pages).

Much of its content is led by illustrations – our business may have a simple purpose, but getting there will be insanely complex. We want people to understand how thing work and where they fit. This approach also gets around the issue of photography being hard to source sometimes.

And it has been created for use beyond a quick read once a month. We wanted to offer the design skills to the business to create beautiful spreads that could be used again and again – as part of presentations, on TV screens, as posters, to save time and money. Not only does the artwork provide this but the digital aspect of it allows for those spreads to be separated and downloaded quickly and simple with a built-in button. Nice.

Here's a few examples of recent spreads I think fit that bill very nicely:


Agile working

Talking of “insanely complex”, like the rest of the world we’re trying to figure out exactly how the return to the workplace is going to work. It’s the kind of messaging a good infographic works wonders on.

How we value each other… each day (calendar)

Our theme in April was “we value each other”, and the team promoting this behaviour wanted a calendar of different ways through the month our people could do just that. We were able to offer up two pages of OS to create that design at no extra cost to the business – one of the fundamental ideas behind the publication.

A long history (worth anyone reading)

This is a good one… a timeline of the organisation, pulled from an existing table of content but run through our designers eye to produce a slide that would add a bit of interest to any presentation. I know I learned a few things about the business when I first saw it.

A year of OS during the Pandemic

We stopped the printed version of OS when Covid-19 arrived and most of the workforce got sent home. Which meant that the front covers got less of a look-in. This spread in the April 2021 edition attempted to redress that, whilst showing how the publication has created a lasting history of a turbulent time.

Channel guide

Sometimes it’s worth reminding the readership that “internal comms” is more than just getting an article in the internal newspaper. So in March we pulled together a quick guide to what we offer our audiences, in a handy downloadable poster.

Big photos

One of the things I’ve been desperate to do for years is give our wonderful photographers the space their skills deserve. It’s a tricky sell – the general view appears to be “why would you use up valuable space that would be better suited to another quote saying how great we are?” Well, it’s because a good picture, used well, tells a thousand words. As does this one of our Sellafield Retreatment Plant construction site, complete with mean n’ moody Cumbrian sky.

Programmes and projects – showing the golden thread

Finally, a spread from last December’s issue, which was a real opportunity to show the ethos of OS, writ large. An entire edition given over to one theme – our programme and project delivery. This spread shows what we in internal comms were fighting for – the chance to give space and time to explain a few fundamentals, like the golden thread which links our projects to our programmes to our portfolios. It was, I think, a real example of the value internal comms teams can add. The people within our programmes and projects didn’t see the value of explaining something they themselves understood, and the audience didn’t necessarily see why they needed to know it, until they read it. We had to fight to get some of the content, and then fight again to ensure it was pitched at the right level, but it was worth it. And that content can be used again and again.



OS has been with us for nearly three years now and although it has had numerous successes, I believe we’ve not yet realised its full potential.

We in the internal comms team know we’ve got to continue the fight, challenging back when asked to “put a story in the newspaper”, perhaps suggesting an infographic instead, or a board game, a comic strip, or something else which seems mad at first but offers a creative solution which fits the bill and widens the opportunities for the message.

But it’s when the business comes to us with those ideas we’ll know we’ve cracked it.

Strike a prose

Who needs commas?

I wrote a piece recently about all the weird little rules I tend to follow when writing, that were beaten into me by successive angry news editors, proper editors and assorted grizzled old hacks who didn’t want the responsibility of high office but still felt the need to bully their younger colleagues.

I’m not much of a grammar expert, but I do have my rules, right or wrong.

I also know a few harsh truths – that a lot of people don’t read past the third paragraph, and that of those who do, many often skim stories in an “F” shape to get the general gist.

And I’m fine with that.

I try and liven things up occasionally. Depending on the content, I might inject a bit of humour (not always appreciated, it has to be said… particularly in the nuclear decommissioning industry). If I can’t be overtly funny, I’ll try my hand at a pithy headline, or wrack my brains to get in a few puns or a bit of clever wordplay.

Hey, it keeps me sane.

I also like to try out some of the tricks of my favourite authors, where I can – a bit of poetic repetition, to reinforce a point or to jog along a list. A stop-start narrative injecting in lines like “And I’m fine with that” or “Hey, it keeps me sane”.

A random reference to something vaguely cultural, like the 1973 film Westworld. An idle messing about with sentence structure, fracturing a few rules to make the narrative flow better.

I even have treatises on writing by my faves, including Stephen King’s On Writing and Chuck Palahniuk’s Consider This, two books about writing fictional prose which I would recommend to anyone wanting to improve the way they write… whatever writing that may be. I know they’ve helped me in a day job where there’s not an underground fight club or haunted hotel to be found. And far more than anything which might purport to tell you how to write an intranet article.

One author I love who I’ve not dared nick the style of (yet) is the guy responsible for the paragraph above. That rule-breaking piece of prose comes from the book I'm reading at the moment, the second in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, The Crossing.

All his stuff is like that. Enormous sentences with no punctuation. Speech with no speech marks, or explanation of who said what. It takes a bit of getting used to, but he has his own rules and once you get used to them, his stories are stunning. They tend to be about tough, no-nonsense people, and he writes as you’d imagine his characters think and speak. If they were explaining to you how they got out of bed and got dressed, they wouldn’t flower it up with punctuation, so McCarthy doesn’t either (at least, that’s my interpretation).

I don’t think the decommissioning world is ready for the full McCarthy, but there’s a few things I might try, if I get the chance. It would be nice to replicate the process of moving through our change rooms in the cadence of a sentence, or recreate the metronomic beeps of a personal radiation detector via some short. Sharp. Sentences.

Something to think about, anyway.

Robot the boost

The robots are coming, and we'll make sure Yul understand why...

This weekend I watched the 1973 movie Westworld, mainly because it popped up on the BBC iPlayer but also due to my love of old b-movies. I’d misremembered Westworld as “not being as good as its reputation”, but it actually stands up well as a film from its era.

This is the film that spawned the recent remake on Sky, and there are similarities – but it’s a much simpler tale of mankind playing god, getting cocky and its creations going nuts and killing everyone.

The reason why I mention it here is not to remind everyone of my impeccable credentials in the appreciation of old tat, but because after I’d watched it, I remembered that coincidentally this week, robotics and artificial intelligence has been on my radar.

I’m working with the team that is bringing together all the robotics work being done within the organisation I work for. It’s my job to help them communicate out what their objectives are and help the people in the business understand how this technology will be central to us achieving our mission.

We won’t be bringing in robotic gunslingers (fun as that would be), but we do know that people have very real concerns that need addressing as this work goes on.

There’s a simple over-arching message that our robots, working on land, in water and in the air, will be able to do jobs that humans either can’t do or that they really shouldn’t be doing.

It is drones checking the integrity of our buildings, stopping the need to do it using scaffolding and ladders.

It is submarines scouring the nooks and crannies of our legacy ponds.

And it is mini tanks negotiating the narrow entrances to silos that are literally inaccessible to humans, then sweeping up and sorting the waste inside.

And while all this is happening, the people controlling the machines could be sitting metres, or even miles, away.

It is this “removing people from harm’s way” aspect that chimes well for a business where safety is its overriding concern. But it’s also the message that has the potential to upset people who might feel that their job is being threatened. Their role may be at the sharp end of the nuclear industry with the attendant risks that come with that, but it’s what they do, something they feel proud of doing, and something they may even miss if taken away.

Unlike many businesses, ours is not focused on profit but instead has a defined purpose of creating a safe environment for future generations. So if we do move people out of a role, the chances are they’ll be found something else to do to help us get to that end goal. But that doesn’t stop people from worrying, from feeling a sense of loss, and going through that old change curve us comms people are so fond of talking about.

I see it as my job to help people through that, as well as all the other stuff around making sure our stakeholders understand the clear and defined objectives for bringing in all this “shiny stuff”.

If we in the communications department get that right, then all that remains is for someone else to make sure we don’t allow those robots to get ideas above their station.