"I think it's important to have regular colleagues that you bounce positions off all the time," he says.
But after coming into the post with no previous experience in a similar post, he says much of his agenda is still undefined.
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"So much of it just has to wait until situations arise, and then you deal with it," he says.
"I think my individual style isn't totally known yet," he adds.
And while Illingworth says it's also too early to tell how long he will stick around in the post which his predecessor filled for a quarter century, he has already spent half of a lifetime at Harvard.
"I guess I'm one of those middle age people at Harvard who are kind of career civil servants of this place," he says.