Six conversations, one thread: the best of Difference Makers Discuss Season 4

Season 4 of Difference Makers Discuss covered a lot of ground. Sydney and London. Olympic tracks and the maize fields of Tete Province. Online exam halls in South Africa and audit rooms in Zambia.

Six guests, six very different lives, and on the face of it not much in common beyond a professional qualification and a willingness to talk honestly.

Watch them back to back, though, as host Sinead Donovan does in this special episode, and something else emerges. Every one of these stories turns on the same thing: the decision to connect with another human being when it would have been easier not to.

Here is what stayed with us.

Connection is a practice, not a personality trait

Kingsley Aikins arrived in Sydney on a posting from the Irish export board and, in his words, did not know a single soul in Australia. He rang the son of a neighbour, asked to be introduced to the local Irish business network, and was told there was not one.

So he started one. Twelve people, one dinner, a name borrowed from a rugby ground. The Lansdowne Club is still running today, and it is now the largest Irish business network in any city in the world. When tickets went on sale for a recent St Patrick’s Day lunch, a thousand of them sold in twenty minutes.

The second half of Kingsley’s story is even more instructive. Looking for someone to lead the club, he wrote a letter to Tony O’Reilly, then head of the H.J. Heinz food company in the United States. In Kingsley’s own assessment, a huge name and a nobody. O’Reilly wrote back, suggested lunch, and Kingsley ended up working for him for twenty one years.

One letter. One lunch. Twenty one years.

Aster Thackery’s version of the same instinct starts in Greenwich rather than Sydney. She moved to London five years ago during COVID, pregnant with her second child, knowing nobody, and did what a lot of new parents do. She started a coffee meetup.

It did not stop growing. There are now around 2,000 active parents in the group, with no religious, school or institutional affiliation holding it together. In 2024 Aster organised a free village fair for local families. More recently she added a family morning tea for International Women’s Day, which sold out, with around 80 parents and children attending and local women in business donating prizes.

The detail we found most interesting is what she did next. Rather than keep it informal, Aster incorporated the group as a nonprofit social enterprise, specifically so that it would exist independently of her and her bank account. That structure turned out to be the point. It gave other people something to build on. One mother now runs free business networking and workshops for women in the community. Another is learning to run events with Aster’s support behind the scenes. A third is organising a charity event using the group’s ticketing infrastructure.

Aster also offers the sharpest line in the episode. People say they do not have a village any more, she notes, but plenty of them want to have a village without being a villager. Being part of one means contributing to it.

For Chartered Accountants, both stories land in the same place. Community is not something you find. It is something you take responsibility for.

Impact at scale runs on commercial discipline

Manuel Rodrigues offers the clearest illustration in the series of what happens when social purpose is built on a genuinely sound commercial model.

Escolha do Povo, the people’s choice, started in Mozambique in 2014. It now works with roughly 55,000 small scale maize farmers and 14,000 soya farmers in Vila Ulongue, in Tete Province. The project buys their crop, processes it for the formal market, and, crucially, uses that same maize and soya to manufacture chicken feed.

Alongside the feed factory sits a commercial hatchery producing day old chicks, and a training programme that teaches small scale farmers how to buy chicks and feed, raise the birds, and sell them into their own communities as a protein source. The project recently opened its eleventh retail store, across central and northern Mozambique. Last year it began producing its own fertilised eggs, building breeder houses in partnership with two local communities who will supply the project directly, replacing imports from Zambia.

The insight that makes all of this work is a cash flow insight, and it is one any Chartered Accountant will recognise instantly. Maize and soya are harvested once a year, twice if a farmer is both lucky and savvy. Poultry turns capital every 35 days. Manuel’s model moves a farming household from annual income to monthly profit.

That is what he calls the flywheel. Farmers grow the inputs, the project buys them, converts them into chicks and feed, sells them back, and the farmers sell the birds. As feed volumes grow, so does demand for maize and soya, so the project can support more people, so volumes grow again.

Twelve years in, the microeconomy is still turning. Social mission and commercial discipline are not in tension here. One is holding the other up.

Resilience is what you do when the plan breaks

Caitriona Jennings qualified for the 2012 Olympic marathon while working full time at PwC. Her description of how she managed it will be familiar to anyone who has trained and studied at the same time. She cooked every meal for the week at the weekend. She dropped her work clothes into the office in advance so she could run in and run home, deliberately without a backpack, because a backpack changes your stride and she was determined to stay injury free.

Then she achieved the qualifying standard in Rotterdam in April 2012, PwC gave her time off from May until after the Games, and everything was in place.

Race day did not go to plan. Caitriona picked up plantar fasciitis in the weeks before the marathon, an injury she fully expected to run through. During the race itself, compensating for it gave her a stress fracture in her foot.

She finished anyway.

It took her a long time to come to terms with that day, and she says so plainly. But her reasoning about why she kept going is worth sitting with. Her goal had been to finish, and she was still able to reach it, just not in the way she had planned. Had she dropped out, she believes it would have been far harder to make peace with. And asked whether she would run it again knowing everything she knows now, her answer is yes, because she can say she is an Olympian. Opportunities have to be taken when they are in front of you.

Adapting the route to the goal rather than abandoning the goal. That is a more useful definition of resilience than most.

AI belongs in the workflow, not in the judgment seat

Nick Riemer’s company, Invigilare, uses AI to make education more accessible in South Africa, and his position on how AI should be used is one of the most carefully thought through we have heard.

The technical argument comes first. Traditional online proctoring streams and uploads everything a student does, then processes it on a server. Invigilare instead runs AI locally on the student’s own device, trained to recognise the difference between ordinary behaviour and behaviour worth flagging, and discards the rest. The upload drops to a file of five or ten megabytes. That matters for two reasons. It means students with limited connectivity are not excluded, and it brings the cost right down for institutions, because servers and processing power are where the money goes.

The ethical argument is the one to hold onto. Invigilare is deliberately built as half technology company and half academic company, with an even split between software engineers and academics. AI flags. A human academic reviews and decides. Nick is unambiguous that AI is a guidance tool, and that when the outcome is something as serious as a disciplinary process, you do not hand the final call to a model.

His view on AI in assessment is equally clear eyed. There are moments in a professional education when you should sit a closed book exam with no assistance, and there are tools to enforce that. But AI is going to be part of working life, so students need to learn to use it well. Copying and pasting an answer from a model is not a skill. Applying a model to a real scenario is. What Invigilare measures is how a student prompts, how much they have taken verbatim, and whether critical thinking is happening at all.

Liswaniso Namatama, auditing in Zambia, arrives at the same conclusion from the opposite direction. He is quick to reject the idea that audit is number crunching, box ticking and fault finding. Audit is about understanding how businesses work, assessing risk, exercising professional judgment and helping organisations improve, across an unusual range of industries. One month an NGO, the next a mining or manufacturing business.

AI, he says, handles routine transactions, analysis of large data sets and faster reporting. What it cannot do is sit across a table from management. Professional judgment comes from that interaction. Certain risks only become visible through it. And when findings need to be explained, and questions answered properly, it is better done person to person.

Two professionals, two continents, one conclusion. AI raises the value of the human parts of the job rather than removing them.

The things that count but cannot be counted

The episode closes where it began, with Kingsley Aikins, and with the observation that ties the whole season together.

Schools and colleges teach hard skills, he points out, and you need them. Hard skills get you on the ladder. Soft skills get you up the ladder. But academic progress is a function of a grade, a score, a mark, a metric, and none of it has anything to do with the person sitting beside you. Then you arrive in the world of work, where resilience, determination, grit, attitude, humour and, as he puts it, craic all count enormously. Because they cannot be counted, they tend to get discounted. He calls that a gap, and a shame.

Two habits stand out for him.

The first is listening, which he notes is never actually taught. Most people, he says, listen for the gap. They are waiting for their moment to jump in with their own story, their own advice. We hijack conversations. We offer advice that does not work, because it is our advice and not theirs. Real listening means attending not only to what someone is saying but to what they are about to say next, and being genuinely curious. We live, in Kingsley’s phrase, in a strangely uncurious world.

The second is a particular attitude to luck. Can you make luck happen for you, or does it only happen to you? There is bad luck in the world, he acknowledges, and no amount of effort prevents it. But serendipity does not visit you in bed or at your desk. It happens when you are in motion, when you put your talents on display, when you talk to strangers, when you deliberately seek out people who do not think as you do. He quotes Daniel Kahneman: success is a matter of luck and skill.

Put those two habits together and you get something close to a method. Show up. Listen properly. Stay curious. Be in motion.

The thread

Six conversations, six perspectives, and one thread running through all of them.

Kingsley wrote the letter. Aster started the coffee meetup. Manuel sat down with farmers and communities. Caitriona kept going when the plan fell apart under her. Nick built a company that keeps a human in the loop by design. Liswaniso keeps insisting on the meeting that a model cannot replace.

As Sinead puts it at the close of the episode, what it takes is the courage to connect, the willingness to show up, and the humility to keep learning.

None of that appears on a transcript of results. All of it is learnable.

Listen to the podcast

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