When I began my time with the Laidlaw Scholars program, I thought a great deal about measurement.
My first summer of research was about social capital: the relationships, trust, and networks that hold communities together. I spent months working with survey data, constructing indices, running regressions, and trying to turn something as intangible as human connection into something that could be studied systematically.
Two years later, near the end of my Leadership-in-Action project in London, I found myself walking through Kew Gardens beneath cherry blossoms, listening to a group of parents tell me what had stayed with them years after participating in The School & Family Works’ Family Group program. They did not speak in the sterile language of outcome variables. They spoke about confidence; about learning how to respond differently when a child became angry or withdrew; about finding other parents who understood their circumstances without needing everything explained. About no longer feeling alone.
Somewhere between those two moments lies what Laidlaw has taught me.
I haven't stopped believing in measurement. If anything, I care about rigorous research more than I did when I began. But I have become much more conscious of everything that sits behind a number, and everything a number can fail to see. My six weeks with The School & Family Works made that lesson unavoidable.
I arrived with what I thought was a strong project; S&FW had extensive evidence that its therapeutic intervention helped children and families while they were participating, but much less evidence about what happened years later. I wanted to find former participants, interview them, and begin tracing those longer-term trajectories. Then the organization challenged my plan. Clinical governance raised legitimate concerns about consent, safeguarding, and the ethics of retrospectively contacting families after a therapeutic relationship had ended. My first instinct was frustration: the project I had carefully designed suddenly seemed much harder to execute.
In retrospect, that was one of the most important leadership moments of the entire scholarship.
Leadership, I had often assumed, meant having a clear idea and convincing people to follow it. At S&FW, I learned almost the opposite. Leadership sometimes means caring enough about the purpose of an idea to let go of the idea itself. So the project changed. Instead of conducting a handful of interviews during my six weeks, I worked with the organisation to build an ethical framework through which longitudinal research could happen properly in the future: prospective consent, clear separation between therapy and evaluation, participant choice, and questions that sought to understand change without asking families to relive painful experiences.
That framework was shaped by people who knew things I did not.
It was shaped by Mark Griffiths, S&FW’s founder, whose journey from teaching children with profound emotional and behavioural difficulties to psychotherapy taught me something about looking beyond what is immediately visible. It was shaped by Lindsay, who sat with me over the organisation’s spreadsheets and quietly reminded me that every elegant research proposal eventually has to meet the operational reality of someone who must collect and maintain the data. It was shaped by therapists and governance staff who understood ethical risks better than I did.
And, most importantly, it was shaped by families. At Sparrow Farm Primary School, I met a child who had once struggled even to enter a classroom after a traumatic experience, but who now spoke about friendships and feeling more comfortable at school. I heard about a mother who, through the confidence she had developed in Family Group, had begun writing CVs and applying for jobs. Walking through the school, I watched children spontaneously greet the S&FW therapist in the corridor with an affection that no evaluation metric could fully capture.
At Kew Gardens, parents changed my research design again. They told me that some people might prefer an anonymous survey to an interview. They explained that who makes contact matters. They reminded me that what researchers call “data collection” is, from the other side, a person deciding whether to trust you with part of their life.
That is perhaps the deepest change Laidlaw has produced in me: a greater respect for the moral weight of asking questions. A global mindset, I have also learned, is more than the accumulation of international experiences. I have been extraordinarily fortunate to study at Georgetown and Oxford, conduct research in the United States, and work with families and practitioners in London. But crossing borders does not automatically make someone globally minded. For me, global citizenship increasingly means being willing to let another context unsettle your assumptions.
It means recognizing that institutions, communities, and people have forms of knowledge that cannot simply be imported into a model developed somewhere else. It means approaching difference with curiosity rather than certainty. And it means understanding that the privilege of moving between countries and institutions carries an obligation to listen carefully to people who do not have the same ability to enter those spaces.
I hope to spend my career doing research in economics and public policy. Laidlaw has made me more ambitious about what that research can accomplish, but also more cautious about how it is done. I want to keep asking difficult empirical questions. But I also want to ask: Who is absent from the dataset? Whose definition of success are we using? What relationships produced the outcome we are trying to measure? What might become invisible when we reduce a life to a variable?
Ethical leadership, for me, will mean carrying those questions into whatever institutions I eventually join. It will mean being prepared to change course when evidence, ethics, or the people affected by my decisions demand it. It will mean trying to build with communities rather than simply designing for them.
My final slide at S&FW said that many of Family Group’s most valuable gains were under-measured, and that my project was an attempt to help make those invisible gains visible. I think that sentence has come to describe my Laidlaw experience too.
I entered the Scholarship wanting to understand the forces that hold people and communities together.
I leave knowing that some of the most important ones are precisely the things that are hardest to see.