Silver Anniversary for The ABP: Six Long-Standing Members’ Reflections on the Last 25 Years

By Charlotte Housden. 

The year 2025 marks a quarter of a century since the founding of The Association for Business Psychology (ABP). To celebrate, I brought together a group of long-standing members, Caroline Gourlay, Steve Apps, Lucy Standing, Ben Williams, and Sarah Lewis, to reflect on what has changed, what has stayed the same, and what lies ahead for our profession. 

The ABP’s Beginnings 

Back in 1999, the world was braced for the Millennium Bug. But fears that planes might fall out of the sky and ATMs would fail didn’t materialise. In the end, the new millennium dawned with more fizz than fallout.  

A few months later, Brian Baxter, Pauline Grant, and Tim St Ather founded The ABP, taking the roles of founding Chair, Vice Chair and Treasurer respectively. Their aim was to create a home for practitioners who were focused on applying psychology in business.  

In a recent conversation, Pauline recalled how the idea took shape after she attended the American Psychological Association conference in New York. The APA had two divisions: Organisational and Industrial (which was similar to the BPS’s Division of Occupational Psychology), and the Consulting division, which she said seemed more “like it could be ‘home’ for psychologists like me.” The downside? There was no such body in the UK.  

In our conversation about The ABP’s anniversary, Caroline shared a similar frustration, remembering the atmosphere of traditional conferences as being far too dry and academic. It wasn’t until The ABP was set up and running some years later that she found it to be “much more practical, much more interesting, much more practitioner-led.” When Ben heard about The ABP, he initially thought it might be “a bit light touch”. But then he attended his first conference and was hooked, finding it “friendly, much less cliquey, and very applied – a natural home for someone commercially oriented.” 

In the earliest days, The ABP was run entirely by volunteers. When I managed marketing for the 2003 conference, and was Conference Dean in 2004, I discovered how much we relied on the energy and support of these volunteers. Pauline fondly remembered the late Richard Taylor and how fortunate The ABP was to find someone like him. “He went beyond the call of duty... treating us all to his remarkable piano playing and joining in enthusiastically on the dancefloor. There’s no doubt that he was an important element in The ABP’s infancy.”  

Growing Up 

Since those early days, The ABP has now welcomed around 7,000 members. Around our table, we traced our own history through our ABP membership numbers, from a founder member Sarah Lewis (33) to Ben Williams (2420), with the rest of us in between: me (at 179), Caroline Gourlay (552), Lucy Standing (1348), and Steve Apps (at 1391). 

Today, The ABP has developed significantly and supports members in many ways, providing accreditation for over 20 university programmes, from the UK (such as Kent and Heriot-Watt) to those in Dubai and Singapore. It also has members from across the world, from Europe, to South Africa, Ghana, America, India, Australia and beyond. 

Steve noted that certification now provides “an alternative to the BPS occupational psychologist chartership route that didn’t exist 25 years ago.” Sarah agreed, describing the creation of a training and certification path for Business Psychology as “due solely to The ABP and Pauline Grant’s efforts.” 

Steve also highlighted The ABP Awards, which form a “massive repository of evidence-based practice,” and celebrated how podcasts and digital platforms are now extending the reach of Business Psychology and The ABP. 

As a group, we talked about what had changed in our profession. Lucy spoke about how career paths have shifted: “In 2000, there were career paths and entry points, there were jobs. Now, it's much more disparate, fragmented and associate-driven. Career paths for new psychologists are anything but clear.” 

Technology has also transformed our field. For Ben, many early-career tasks are now “eminently automatable,” and Caroline compared the difference between “paper and pencil tests” with today’s digital tools. Sarah Lewis said that “virtual working has been irrevocably altered by the Pandemic…. [and] hybrid working has raised challenges for teams and organisations.”  

Sarah also reminded us that much remains the same: the challenge of bringing diverse people together to “produce and create something worthwhile” and supporting leaders of those groups, helping them address the inherent tensions of organisations in growth. Ultimately, it’s all about the psychology of people…which is what we’re all about. Sarah said that “bringing the psychology of people and groups to businesses continues to be both a humanistic and a value-add aim.” 

Looking Toward the Horizon 

Our reflections naturally turned to what lies ahead and how to ensure The ABP continues to evolve with purpose and relevance. AI loomed large in our conversation. Sarah suspects that the ‘bread and butter’ of assessment and recruitment might be “susceptible to an AI takeover” but what can we do that AI can’t? She believes our strength lies “in the sphere of context-specific wisdom and judgement”. 

Caroline added that there must be a role for psychologists in determining how we work AI and develop healthy relationships with it. She also suggested an important role in supporting organisations to respond to the key issue of our time: climate change, “otherwise we’re just fiddling while the world burns”. 

Ben described working with a leadership consultancy who are developing “synthetic relational fluency”, helping leaders learn how to “engage with non-human intelligences to enact their duties.” His task? “To turn that into a psychometric that measures it.” 

Steve also reflected on what we need to do as members. He thinks we need to “continue to promote the value of grey thinking”, resisting the easy binaries and holding space for nuance when the world demands certainty. It is what keeps Business Psychology alive and relevant. 

Lucy thinks that The ABP’s next phase “isn’t only about community, it’s about impact, using psychology to shape the systems that shape work itself.” She wants to see “fundraising activity dedicated to shaping, influencing, gathering the evidence to influence more policy-level discussions.” 

Ben summed it up as “money and advocacy.” The future of Business Psychology, he believes, depends on raising our voice and having the resources to do so - having both the platform and the means to influence. 

Across our group, there was a clear sense of pride and a recognition of how far The ABP has come, that its strapline is true, The ABP is “the home and voice of Business Psychology”. Over the next 25 years, we need to continue working as a community of psychologists that applies insight and evidence to help people flourish and supports organisations to succeed, enabling them to become a better place for us all.  

Meeting Participants  

Steve Apps: Leadership development, facilitation and coaching, with a focus on impactful communication. Steve has been a Sponsor, Treasurer, Chair, Head of Certification and now Business Coaching Psychologist Certification Lead at The ABP. 

Caroline Gourlay: Independent Business Psychologist working with mid-sized businesses, including investment-backed companies, family businesses and professional partnerships. Focused on leadership assessment and coaching. Long-standing ABP member and former Conference Dean.  

Charlotte Housden: Chartered Occupational and Coaching Psychologist, executive coach, leadership development consultant, writer and lecturer working with global organisations and leaders. Charlotte was Conference Dean in 2004 and is now an honorary member.  

Sarah Lewis: Chartered Organisational Psychologist, founder and principal member of The ABP. Very active member for the first 10 years. Facilitator, author, workshop and keynote presenter, post-graduate lecturer.  

Lucy Standing: Runs BraveStarts, a non-profit helping experienced professionals explore future career options. She was previously ABP Vice Chair for nearly 10 years, and last year was delighted to become an honorary member. 

Ben Williams: Chair of The ABP from 2018-2020, and has served on the Board for four additional years in various roles. He was awarded honorary membership of The ABP in 2022 and works as Managing Director and founder of Sten10 Ltd.