Episode summary
Episode 365: Chess Club v. Drama Club: Where do you find your people and what does this mean for ...
The Fiftyfaces Podcast
· · 28 min · Guests: Sally Bridgeland
Summary
Sally Bridgeland frames her new book, Chess Club and Drama Club: Building Creative and Resilient Businesses Together, as a way to explain why organizations need both the rules-based, quantitative “chess club” and the narrative, creative “drama club.” She argues that investment and governance often overvalue the chess club, even though uncertainty, culture, and inclusion require imagination, storytelling, and different kinds of judgment.
She also says the idea is grounded in her recent work across a broader board portfolio, including chairing Bellev and the Development Bank of Wales, where she has seen how smaller businesses, local investing, and political objectives change the shape of decision-making. Those roles, along with mentoring, have sharpened her view that leadership is not just about technical skill but about understanding people, purpose, and context.
A major theme is board and committee effectiveness in a hybrid world. Sally says meetings have become too performative and too sequential, and she makes the case for “acute listening,” more space for discussion, and chairs who create the right altitude for strategic conversation. She sees AI as useful for compression and drafting, but not a substitute for human judgment, body language, or the messy narrative that shapes good governance.
Key takeaways
- Sally Bridgeland says organizations need a “club mix” of chess club and drama club thinking, not a choice between them.
- She argues that governance often overweights compliance and process, while underweighting storytelling, inclusion, and imagination.
- Sally says her experience at Bellev and the Development Bank of Wales showed her how different smaller, local, and politically shaped businesses are from institutional investing.
- She believes hybrid meetings have made people less attentive, and she promotes “acute listening” as a more disciplined standard than active listening.
- Sally says AI may help compress documents, but it cannot replace human sensing of tone, dynamics, and the story behind decisions.
Notable quotes
“I think our the way that we have meetings has got a bit more chess club, a bit more everybody put their hand up”
“acute listening is you don't even start thinking about what you're going to say next until the person has completely finished speaking”
“It's about mixing those two things together”
“diversity is a statistic and inclusion is a way of life”
“AI is just maths, very good maths, very interesting maths”
How the episode opens
So I've noticed as a board and committee chair. I think our the way that we have meetings has got a bit more chess club, a bit more everybody put their hand up and then you speak in turn because that's the way we do it on teams. That isn't a good use of people's time because they're not actually listening.
So my brother taught me the phrase of acute listening, which is more than active listening. Active listening is when you're empathetic and and there's some great YouTube skits of, you know, girlfriend listening to boyfriend about talking about computer games or whatever and repeating the right words and she sounds like she's interested and it's clearly not. So acute listening is you don't even start thinking about what you're going to say next until the person has completely finished speaking.
That is really difficult and it's not what we normally do in board meetings. I'm Ethan Devit and welcome to the 50 Faces podcast. A podcast committed to revealing the richness and diversity of the world of investment by focusing on its people and their stories.
This podcast series is kindly supported by Franklin Templeton and Alvine Capital. Franklin Templeton is a global investment management firm that provides a broad range of investment solutions including mutual funds, ETFs, alternative investments, wealth management, and technology enabled financial services. Founded in 1947, the firm manages approximately 1.8 8 trillion in assets under management and serves individual and institutional investors across more than 150 countries.
Alvine Capital was founded in 2005. It's European focused private capital advisory and placement agent that provides capital raising services to investment managers from its bases in London and Stockholm. It creates bespoke capital raising programs that blend appropriate investor targeting and sophisticated marketing to deliver a fund raise aligned with institutional expectations.
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- institutional investing
- leadership lessons
- organizational culture
- portfolio career
- fulfillment and resilience
Companies and tickers mentioned
- BEN
- Development Bank of Wales
- Franklin Templeton
- Alvine Capital
Watch the episode
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
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The Fiftyfaces Podcast, this episode and its artwork belong to Aoifinn Devitt. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
