I was delivering a lecture on the Masters Programme at City, University of London in 2018, and I was expressing a frustration of mine with the students. My frustration was that whenever there was a high-profile collapse of an organisation, a leadership scandal, a high-profile collapse of an organisation or some startling statistics on mental ill health at work, there was never an interview or expert opinion from an organisational or business psychologist.
And then…
My call to them was to go out into the world and ‘make some noise’ to champion our profession and bring research to life in a practical way. One of the students directed the question back to me and asked “What are you doing to make some noise?” I was initially stumped and referred (a bit defensively) to my work with my various clients. But it set me thinking about what I could do to reach more people. That weekend I recorded my first podcast episode, at that time I called it an audio blog as I had no idea what I was doing or where it was going!
That was back in March 2018 and since then the podcast has clocked up 175 episodes and has been downloaded over 147,000 times around the globe. According to the podcast search engine listenotes.com, People Soup has been ranked as one of the top 2.5% shows globally out of around 3.4 million podcasts. We’ve also won awards. For three years running, from 2019, People Soup won the best podcast ‘Chisi’ Award from Chris Winson, the curator of 365 days of compassion.
What’s in a name?
And finally, I’m often asked about the name, People Soup. It was inspired by a quote from Abraham Maslow, who said “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.” The quote got me thinking about the workplace and how were all navigating through a heady (or soupy) mix of people, behaviour, events and challenges. When the blend is right it can be first rate. Behavioural science and psychology has a lot to offer in terms of recipes, ingredients, seasoning, spices and utensils – and so the name People Soup was born.
You can find out more here and browse the whole back catalogue here.
