UNSCRIPTED - EPISODE 378 • EVENT RECAP • PODCAST TAKEOVER
Berend Booms, Associate Editor of Future of Assets, takes over the mic to share his key takeaways from Future of Field Service Live London. The event through fresh eyes, from someone who came in from outside the field service world and left genuinely surprised, moved, and energized.
Sarah handed the mic to Berend Booms, Associate Editor of Future of Assets, to recap Future of Field Service Live London. Berend came to the event as an outsider to the field service world. That perspective makes this episode something different from a standard recap. He noticed things that those inside the industry might have taken for granted, and he wasn't afraid to say so.
He also took Rob Stevenson's keynote idea and ran with it. For every part of the day's agenda, Berend picks a song. The playlist alone is worth the listen.
The Venue
*Alexa play We Are Going to Be Friends, The White Stripes*
The Orchard, eighth floor, central London, close to Hyde Park and Marble Arch. The views were good. The coffee was good. The balcony access was a bonus. What stood out most to Berend was that it didn't feel like a conference centre. No stuffy carpets, no rows of identical chairs. It felt like somewhere people actually wanted to be.
Sarah's Opening Keynote: Amplification, Not Optimization
Sarah opened by talking about priorities. She's a mom first and a leader second. Berend found that grounding. It's an honest acknowledgement that everyone in the room is juggling multiple roles, and that the balance between them is real and often difficult.
The substance of the keynote centred on what Berend describes as three seismic shifts redefining service. The one that stuck with him most: operational excellence has moved from being the goal to being the starting line. The bar has risen. The ambition now has to be amplification, doing the best work possible with the least expenditure of energy and resource, and doing it without sacrificing the humanity that makes service what it is.
Leadership, Sarah argued, is the bridge between what service has been and where it is headed. And the shift she's advocating for is from change management, which tends to be project-focused, to change leadership, which is ongoing and continuous. Berend found that a genuinely useful reframe.
"Leadership is action. It is not a position." -- Sarah Nicastro
Rob Stevenson: Energy Is the Currency of Sustainable Performance
*Alexa play Lovely Day, Bill Withers*
Rob Stephenson, author of Music is the Answer, was the speaker Berend was most grateful for. Not because the session was the most technically relevant to field service, but because it didn't try to be. It was about people. About energy. About wellbeing as something that should be built into how an operation runs, not bolted on as a perk.
The exercise Rob ran, getting everyone in the room to share the one song that never fails to give them energy and seeing it appear on the big screen, is what inspired Berend's song picks throughout the rest of this episode. His own pick for Rob's session reflects exactly what the session gave him.
"Your wellbeing is not a perk. It is not a policy. It should be baked into how the business actually operates." -- Rob Stephenson
Natasha Nelson, Schneider Electric: The Talent Crisis Is Compounding
*Alexa play High Voltage, AC/DC*
Natasha Nelson, CTO of Services at Schneider Electric, spoke about the talent shortage. The detail that landed for Berend: a plumber or HVAC engineer can now get a mortgage more easily than a lawyer or a dentist, because the demand for trades is that high. And Sarah added the number that frames the scale of the problem. For every five technicians leaving the workforce, only two are joining.
Amplification starts to make sense in that context. If you can't solve the workforce gap through recruitment alone, the answer has to involve getting more out of the people already there. AI is the obvious tool for that conversation. But Natasha's point was clear: the challenges in AI deployment are almost always human ones. Technology isn't the hard part. People are.
Patrycja Sobera, Unisys: Drink Your Own Champagne
*Alexa play X, Xzibit*
Patrycja Sobera, SVP and General Manager of Digital Workspace Solutions at Unisys, introduced Berend to a concept he hadn't encountered before: XLAs, experience level agreements. The difference from SLAs is that they're intentionally short-lived. They force evaluation. They allow adjustment. They let you respond to change faster than a standard contract ever could.
She also gave him a phrase he's replacing an old habit with. He's spent years saying "eat your own dog food." He's now going with Patrycja's version: drink your own champagne.
Simon-Kucher Workshop: What If We Just Train the Salespeople to Do Maintenance?
*Alexa play Holding Out for a Hero, Bonnie Tyler*
Simone Schneider and Torben Petersen from Simon-Kucher ran a workshop on how to unlock commercial value from frontline workers. The basic premise: technicians are already with customers. They have a level of customer intimacy that sales functions often don't. How do you help them surface opportunity without turning them into something they're not?
The pushback from the audience was immediate: isn't that just making them salespeople? One person's response cut through: why don't we just train the salespeople to do the maintenance work instead? It was tongue-in-cheek. But it reframed the whole debate and made the room think differently. Berend's takeaway: there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and the moments where someone flips the script entirely are often the most useful.
Think Tank: Innovation That Doesn't Start or End with AI
*Alexa play Go with the Flow, Queens of the Stone Age*
The think tank brought together Clinton von der Merbech of Tomra Cycling, Yasir Sheikh of Honeywell, and Nick Vanderveer of Nexus Black to talk about the human side of digital transformation.
Clinton's observation about flying back from China and feeling like he was returning to the Stone Ages said a great deal about the pace of innovation elsewhere and the gap that's widening. Nick's point about frontline feedback was equally sharp: if you only build what the field asks for, you end up with a slightly nicer version of what already exists. Real innovation requires going beyond what people can currently imagine needing.
Berend's broader takeaway: fear of AI is real, but conflating job loss from economic conditions with job loss from AI isn't fair. The more useful question is what do we do about it.
The Stand Out 50 Announcement
*Alexa play With a Little Help from My Friends, The Beatles*
Berend's favourite part of the day. Not just because of the celebration, but because of what it represents. Roy Dockery, one of the judges, articulated it well: we recognise sales, we recognise revenue. Where do we recognise leadership? These awards exist to close that gap. To make people feel seen. Understood. Appreciated.
"Joining a live discussion, experiencing a sense of community, asking someone about their favourite song. It is something that is much more rewarding than anything any prompt will ever be able to generate." -- Berend Booms
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