Good morning, good afternoon everyone started quiet here. I see some familiar faces joining the morning session instead of afternoon calling in from the UK
or you base Bonnie.
I'm in the UK Cambridge. So sometimes I joined the afternoon session because it works better after a long working day. So I tried to join this one and then maybe one in the afternoon. Good morning, guys.
More people come in. Oh, by the way, we can mock Sonia, she she left the last group and she closed it for everybody, not just for her
hair around me and I couldn't see I'll be making that mistake.
It saved us all from half an anecdote. It was great.
We started on time.
Okay.
Right, two things we we originally said on this group, we'd require an NDA before we started it. We haven't enforced that, because we're not ready to talk about one thing except in very general terms. And that's not us being difficult. It's our partner companies. I we got obligations on that, but I'll mention it briefly. But there's still a whole body of work to do. And that's gonna be a tool anyway. So the third stage of the handbook, so remember, it goes assess it that x app transcend. So the acceptation phases key. And we also Alexander came out with another phrase where we agreed we would keep x apt and operatic. The reason you introduce new words is to actually force people to think differently. I'm having this argument with Mike Jackson because he criticised the you feel guy because of those words. And I pointed out his criticism was full of the jargon of system of critical systems thinking is entirely composed in that form. And what we're actually trying to do is use English language and where we want a new concept, we introduce a new word quite deliberately. We don't provide a special meaning of an old word, because then you don't get those sorts of confusions. Yeah. And I think that To be honest, that's an academic game, they often reuse English words or phrases, and they have specialised meaning if you belong to the group. Yeah. So we kept that out because it links in with the biological approach. Sorry, I've just got some you're apologising, so I can't avoid just exploiting that. So acceptation, the biological forces are in there. And Pierpaolo and rotti who is the guy who introduced me to the concept of acceptation and I'm part of a group that meets in Milan every now and then to discuss it edited and check that chapter of actual the examples were right. Yeah. And you can see lots of examples though, the one everybody quotes which is a good one is spandrels. So architecture created these sort of arcs to hold it and then artists realise that crave a wonderful place to you know, produce, micro decorations and so on. So human beings are really good at acceptation and one of the reasons is actually the role of abstraction or art. So one of the reasons for sense maker trios is they shift interpretation of data to a high level of abstraction. So rather than looking at things in concrete terms, they basically force you into abstractions. And abstraction allows us to combine and recombine in novel ways, which is what acceptation is about. So we've talked about radical repurposing. And that links in with this key concept that in a crisis, you haven't got time to invent things, you've got to repurpose things that you already know. The example I normally give a verities I've lost count the number of things I've repurposed in hotel rooms late at night to reopen beer bottles. Yet where they haven't got a proper bottle opener, I get very inventive about that. And most human beings do. Yeah. So we're really good at adapting to circumstance. Yeah. And it's amazing what you can do, right? What I think you learn a lot when you walk in is I always have duct tape, and parachute thread in the rucksack because there is nothing you can't repair with. long, thin cord and duct tape. Right? You can improvise anything in needing to the bandages, by the way if it really comes to it and splints, right? I've done that. So that radical repurposing is a key stage. The other phrase for this which I use sometimes is manage serendipity. serendipity it's Yes, it's the it comes from a Walpole story about the three princes of serendip, who were sent on quest to find something and never found what they were sent for, but found more useful things instead. And that's where the phrase serendipity comes from. Yeah. So managing for serendipity means managing the interactions between things, that interaction phrase from complexity again, so that we get novel combinations, and people can see things in novel ways. And again, that comes back to this issue about how you scale a complex adaptive system as the same principles, you decompose to the lowest level of coherence and then you recombine. So if I can recombine in a novel way, I will get completely novel purpose. And that is very effective. Yeah, in terms of the way things work. Now, the traditional way of managing for acceptation in the pharmaceutical sector is to look for anomalies, or side effects.
Yeah, the most famous one is a conversation between two members of Pfizer at a conference in Canada, where when noticed a rather amusing side effect of a drug designed for cardiac arrest. And from that, we've got Viagra. Yeah, so yeah. And some of our work is to look at micro side effects. So getting patients to report side effects, not just medical stuff, because that gives you weaker signals. Now. So a lot of the stuff in the handbook, which is related to other methods, like human sensor network journaling of lessons learned, is designed to create the raw material for acceptation. So just hold that as a thought, right. So if I've got an hour, I'll give you some examples on that in a minute. So starting to create your human sensor networks gives you a huge cultural experiencial organisational diversity of interpretation of micro data. So that allows me to combine and recombine that micro data based on the abstractions to suggest solutions. And that links in with the work we've done on Design Thinking which creates a two by two matrix. These have utility I use them a fair amount. The vertical dimension is ethnography. The horizontal dimension is ideation. Or if you want vertical dimension is discovery. The horizontal dimension is generating ideas or solutions. And the two aspects are two extremes expert against distributed, certified expert ethnography, expert ideation. That's things like idea. Yeah, the experts interview people, they run workshops, they come up with ideas, they generate solutions. That's the famous Double Diamond, which is linear in in the main expert mediated, right. I can then go for distributed ethnography expert ideation. So that's where you use a distributed ethnographic tools such as sense maker, you gather a huge amount of user experiences. You look for clusters in those experiences and you present it to experts who can then come up with solutions. That's also called unarticulated needs mapping within agile If you actually present unarticulated needs, from people's day to day experience, you can often come up with technology solutions that nobody has yet thought to ask for. And that's where you really become strategic as opposed to become operational. So one of the ways within the field guide that we're doing this is kind of like you've got continuous journal, capture your pulse in the group, look at the handbook, that's going to create a whole bunch of data by looking at that from multiple perspectives and presenting it to experts, they may come up with solutions they wouldn't otherwise have done. Alright, so that's distributed ethnography, expert ideation, you then get distributed ideation to expert ethnography. So that's where the expert defines the problem. And then you distribute that problem as a problem statement to everybody in your human sensor network and get them to interpret it and as ideas, and then you look at the patent in those ideas. Right, so that gives you a man that that we also sometimes call finding the 17%. So finding the people who've seen a gorilla who have been ignored by everybody else. All right, and that's kind of like a key part of it, that's gonna be one of the first things up in the assessment centre, which I got to finish designing today. And then we get the combination of the two, which is distributed ideation and distributed ethnography, and that we call acceptive innovation. So the first time we ever did this, and it was a big project I led so I tend to talk about it a lot. And partly because I've worked with Philips Lighting in two previous careers, so they keep coming back in, but they don't exist anymore, which is a pity they've been sold off. But what we did is we they had this idea that it would be quite useful if people bought lights as a part of their garden, rather than just seeing lights or things to light a garden. Now up to that time, people bought lights, you know, to light the patio to light pathways. And what they were interested in is light being seen as a garden feature, because that would be huge. So what we did, is we pulled in 3000 stories in a week, from people about their gardens. Yeah, you take a picture of your garden, say why you like it, take a picture of a garden, you'd like to have say why you like it. We didn't ask a single question about light that we hit aspects of light and shade in the signifier set.
So it was, if it came up, we knew it was genuine. We ain't got everybody in the lighting departments in Eindhoven to index all of their technologies using the same signifier set or to mean more accurate or polymorphic signifiers. So if it was different language, but same concepts. So what I've got is everything that the company already knows how to do signify the the level of abstraction. And I've got consumer problems. Remember, I've I've got distributed ideation without a problem. And I've got distributed ethnography without a solution. I then master databases together. And we ended up with five clusters. Those were looked at by marketing department, three of them became multi multimillion dollar businesses. You say the one the one I'm most ashamed of, but which is the most successful? Is it a lighting circuit designed to handle the stress of urine flowing down, staircases in Eindhoven football stadium, was repurposed to create a plastic raw artificial rock which changes colour based on human proximity and pools, which is terribly garish and totally ashamed off, but it's selling really well in Southeast Asia is a different cultural appreciations of colour. So what that's doing is to manage the occasion where two scientists get together and happen to have a conversation now, so that's actually quite powerful and that we can do with sensemaking Yeah, and that's probably the only way we can do this at scale. But we've also got some of the consequences in cruise. So for example, if you look at the cruise within the field guide, we have specialist crews to handle things like unexpected consequences. What if you got to to focused on unexpected consequences? One of the things to remember is unintended consequences can be good as well as bad issues do you spot them enough to amplify the good and damp and the bad? Alright, so that's where you start to create specialists or diverse teams those are on the previous occasion in tangled trios is a network you can you can stimulate to find solutions that ought to actually suggest them. The other big thing we're working on which will be a confidentiality equation, but just to tell you is we've always wanted to interface with NLP solutions. And by the way, I do not mean neural linguistic programming. pseudo science, I mean, NLP and wave most people made it, we finally found somebody who actually uses hermeneutics rather than keyword counting or keyword analysis, which is what we were looking for. And so what we're going to do is to construct an abstract query with sense making more stories like this, find the stories which match your problem. And then we'll use that to define a search, which will then search the whole of the web and find things which have been interpreted the same way. So we're gonna have that ready soon. So that effectively is an example of engine. Yeah. Is your people define problems in the non precise ways, and then we search the web and search your databases to find things. Yeah. And that's a way of avoiding the need to do the signification of the core technologies. It's not as good as doing that. But it's kind of like approximate. Without you think, by the way, that will have the reason there will be NDA is is that has huge implications in terms of discovery on compounds in pharma, and elsewhere, right. And particularly one of the big issues in pharma sorry, Bonnie's own. So she always tends to remind me that I've got to talk about pharma is one of the big issues on farmers, how do you create services around your core compounds, because you have to have a direct relationship with your customers. And you have to create service products, not just be a commodity supplier. So that's what acceptation is about. is it's it's chance discovery, right? And human beings do not discover things by chance when you're focused on structured methods and structured tools. Yeah, and remember that key word about people don't see the gorilla because they're not expecting to see it. And I have said for years that the last thing you want in innovation is to pick people who are innovators. Because they've already got their ideas, and they're passionate about them. You want to pick people who naturally network so that they can see the connections between the people with ideas and the problems.
Yeah, some of the work I did in Pfizer years ago was to find people who I found that eight people in the organisation who are considered credible by scientists and marketing people are like there weren't many. And I got them allocated into full time roles to link and connect. Because there was no point in creating the role and trying to make people credible. I had to work with people who were already credible. Yeah, and build from that side. And that's actually by the way was another example of creating acceptation is find the people who are natural boundaries, founders. Yeah. I give them specialised roles. Okay, so high level picture. This is one of the most sophisticated aspects of complexity science. And the other point to make is that exaptation is a dominant engine for significant evolutionary change. It's actually repurposing so the cerebellum at the base of your brain, evolved in higher apes to manipulate muscles in fingers, and you can see the evolutionary pressure on that it's better feed in better tool use, and exact in humans to manage grammar in language. Grammar was too big an evolutionary step to happen in a linear way. So it required a nonlinear repurposing. And the scary thing is, most of the things we value as humans are actually as a result of repurpose in not original design, which is why things often go wrong. And the other scary bit of science, this is from Walter Friedman, who basically lined that rabbits took their skulls off and wide the map, sorry. neuroscientists do this. He's terribly gentle guys got a degree two degrees in philosophy from China in England as well, right. And what he identified he was studying incense if you if you don't know it, scent is the first sense to develop in mammals. All the all the other senses actually derived from sentience some way or other. So it's kind of like a primary one. And it's far more important in human interaction than we realise. So we subconsciously pick up Farren m traces which determine trust patterns. If you're untrustworthy, you do actually smell wrong. And human beings have learned to pick that up. It's not a conscious goal. It's a sub subconscious scale. It's why zoom conversations are deeply problematic. Because you're expecting stimulus you're not getting anybody who speaks to a big audience when I speak to big audiences. All right, there's something in the interaction. You can't tell what it is. But you get different data. Then you get on a zoom call. Yeah, in terms of the way it's working. So either way, coming back to this point, time I was going with that come to be in a second. When I started down that track, I was so sad. So what he did is he rounded he wide up the rabbits and gave them the same stimulus and then the same stimulus again. What actually happened is neurons Electrical patterns formed around the stimulus. But then he found this fascinating thing. There are chemicals which have evolved to make minor mutations to the neurological patterns. So you never remember anything quite the same way twice. Now, his argument, which has been validated since is that in evolutionary terms, that's actually really important. Because if you had a stable interpretation, things wouldn't evolve. So constant mining mutations increased resilience in the system as a whole. It's another argument against by things like safe and business, process reengineering, is they don't have what we call requisite variety or requisite variation. Right, so the fact that we don't do that is something we can use. Yeah. So for example, I'll give another example of an active method, or this method can be reused for acceptation. It needs to be a standalone method, and then link to acceptation, which is what we call mutating threes. So we do a design session in one country. So in England, we spend eight hours, we work on a design on a problem, we produce a prototype, we produce a solution, then we send the solution on to a team in India, and we don't tell them what the original problem was, we only give them the solution. And they've got eight hours to improve it, at which point they hand it on to a team in San Jose, you get the same instruction. And it comes back to the original group within 24 hours. Yeah. And every time I run this, people said, God, I wouldn't have thought of that. Can I please have it? So what I'm doing is I'm creating deliberate mutation in a short time period, in order that novelty will emerge. So there's a ganar techniques, right. And it's all it links in with this key concept of attention triggering? Yeah, if you make people aware that there's something anomalous, they should look for they find it.
If you just let them look at things they don't. So giving people clusters and say these technologies will link with these stories why in induces the right sort of curiosity. So people look for connections. Whereas if you just said we need some new ideas, people wouldn't do it. You have to you have to focus people, yet where they're likely to discover something. Okay, and get even better at this. As I started off these last week, at 45 minutes, I got it down to 27 minutes this morning. I've now got it down to 20 minutes, I'm feeling really good about life for questions, comments, discussions.
I don't know if you already do that. But that artificial triggering piece? Is it worth almost having a certain colour of hexagon or whatever it is parked in absolutely every process that just nudges people to think sideways? Because naturally want to think in lines. It kind of fits a little bit with this notion about the empty chair. But if it's there, then I mean, it might become a blind spot, and people don't see it anymore. But it's just that all purple? Yeah, is this somewhere else I can use this. And then it can just easily be put into everything else
we do in complex facilitation. So for example, I'll have five groups running on the same problem, I'll give them all a different colour taxi. Then I'll look at the clusterings of the axes and see whether a colour anomalies because often you can see stuff there are things I'm doing on the method card is introduced a joker. So you have to introduce a method which is unconnected with the other methods. And that that's a joke or function. So that's going to be like a, but what we're looking at in the hexagons is like jigsaw pieces, which slot into them to say this is about discovery. This is about analysis, and that will allow a joker. So you've got to do something which is completely irrelevant to what you're looking at. Yeah, if you want to get discovery. Yeah. And again, that's the point, your point you're making devina. It's ritualization. And focus. Yeah. ritual is one of the ways by the way that he may have been spot novelty. Remember that the reason you don't see the gorilla in case anybody doesn't know this is the most anybody on this call scans of what's available to them is 5%. And that's if you're really focused. Yeah, most of the time, you're taking in about three or 4% of the available information. If you really focus it can go up to 5%. If you're Chinese, it doubles. Something about the language, the coevolution of language in the brain is meant that there's a greater focus on context and less on object. And if context matters, which it does in Mandarin, then you have to focus more on you pick up more of the background and less of the things in sharp focus, but it's still limited. What there is that partial memory stimulates a whole series of memories, things that you've done things that you've been trained in, stories you read, books you read. formal training can mean that you automatically trigger some memories. That's one of things formal training does. Yeah. And then this is what was famously called by con both conceptual blending. you blend those fragments together. And the first blended set of fragments which match a partial data scan you apply. Yeah, so based on a partial data set with fragmented memories, you do a first fit pattern match, not the best fit, match. And that's how we all make decisions. And in evolutionary terms, it's still the best way of doing it for a species. Because it means you make very quick decisions based on partial data scans privilege in your most recent experiences, and that actually, most of the time is a good thing to do. But it's really bad for innovation. Now, the other thing, which can also work is to put together teams built on cognitive diversity. So one of the things we're starting to find out now is, well, most of us have known it for years. But, you know, educational policy is starting to catch up on the idea that there is an ideal pupil is nonsense. Yeah, some people are have Asperger's syndrome. They also happen to be very good at math. design that I understand static, alright, Dyslexics don't I mean, I read whole pages, I can't read a page, I can't read a page, sentence by sentence, I just can't do it. And there's a lot of the you will know from the blog, if the spellcheck doesn't pick it up. I literally don't see it. But I read whole pages and I see patterns. And dyslexia historically, is very strongly linked with innovation, because Dyslexics are making connections between things. And the frustration if you are dyslexic is you can't see why everybody else hasn't seen it. Yeah, and I could go on with other functions, there is actually quite an interesting way of doing innovation, which is to actually take people in different so called cognitive dysfunctions and combine them in different groups. Yeah, and that that actually is a form of trios or a form of crew. And people are starting to do that. I mean, I'm still proud of the fact that I remember I was doing a strategy session for Google. And I said, you guys should actually actively recruit people who are autistic. Because provided you properly put the proper controls around the information feeds to them, so you don't saturate them with data, they will make some of the best programmers you've ever got. And that's what they've actually done.
I'm reminded of one of my father's friends when I was growing up was materials chief materials guy for Massey Ferguson. But he was the last one ever, who was a plastics and a metallurgist. He was, he was he was everything, he did a bit of everything. But his other, his other hobby was disappearing into his garage, which was set up as wood workshop. And the crews thing is great loads of people came along who were better at the metal stuff than him better at the plastic stuff than him. But I still remember one moment back in the 80s, when he suddenly started ended up working from home, because they just decided that the prototype was going to cost hundreds of 1000s of pounds for some new dashboard. And I think in two days sat in his garage, he was able to fabricate it from wood. And then that link to another friend of my dad's who worked in engineering, as well. And he got background in Formula One and all sorts, but he was a pretty rubbish CAD drawing person. And there were all these youngsters running around that are much better at that. And he was pretty ordinary in the factory, building little prototypes and doing all the engineering bits. And he actually wants turn to his boss and said, Why do you keep me around? And the boss said, Well, I just like having you here. But both of those people were of huge value, in terms of seeing things difference differently and exaptation within their organisations. But they were working in an era when people with what they had to offer were still valued. But they both spent their entire careers. Seeing that there was no future in their industries, there weren't people coming through, who were going to get opportunities that they'd got or to take on the roles they've got. So something about the constraints in the way the organisation is thinking in the broader picture. Yeah, the methods are great, like the cruise and this, that and the other with the people you've got that there's a sort of long time frame thing about managing and it's partly that generalists, specialists thing, but what sort of constraint manipulation and things might work to just mean that your organisation is just more likely to actually get acceptation with out specific methods,
I think is more processing constraint. I think there's a danger at the moment we're jumping on constraints or there's a be all and end all of things. And then when affordances they're important, but they're not the only way. All right? Sometimes you might map constraints having done that type of intervention. Yeah. So I think you're right in the generalist specialist thing. I mean, generalists know a little about everything, so they can find novel solutions. The educational system isn't producing generalists anymore, even if industry wanted to recruit them. I mean, back in the 60s, when I was at school in the early 70s, it produced a lot. Yeah, because and that was the old liberal arts, even if, I mean, I did sciences and maths, right, and geology. But I was expected, I wouldn't have survived in the sixth form common room, if I hadn't read the same books that the history six and the English six were reading, I was expected to know them. But nowadays, people I mean, my son did a chemistry level, he didn't read any of the novels that they were reading. I didn't see that. And you know that that's, that's dangerous. So if we haven't got that we've got to find processes to do it. Now. That's actually not too difficult. So for example, you know, puts the stuff I was doing at bath University years ago, we used to take people from completely different disciplines and throw them into teams for three months. Yeah, so we put a biologist into a civil engineering team. And they ended up producing a metallurgical version of a spider's web because nobody realised spiders could do that. So when they looked into what the spider did, it gave them the right idea. So you can induce that. And that's one of the things crews do. The other thing that the sort of executive moments I've talked about, you know, using a sense maker, or using specialist teams, is to create associations and ask people what those associations mean. I think there's also things that I think this is going to come back in organisational development. So when I wanted to be a general manager, many years ago, I was put on the general management programme, which meant I had to do a year in production a year in support and year in sales and hit my targets. Right now I've done the year in production, not to be my job, I was a coder, I wrote, I've developed systems, but they learned to go support for you. And after that, I realised you couldn't say, you know, an average call takes this much time we have this much sickness. So we need those many people, you know, nobody's been in support, you would know that. And you also learn the heuristics, right? You know, if you have a major support problem, appoint somebody to give the client meaningless tasks every 20 minutes to get them off your back so you can solve the problem. Yeah. And that sound like practical wisdom that you'd never put in something. And I still remember my year in sales, I made my last sale on the last day of the period. Yeah, and I achieved the target. And I couldn't have done another year because I couldn't live with not being able to pay the mortgage some months if I hadn't closed the right level of orders. But I understood salespeople after that, and I never got into this sort of arrogant dismissal type thing because I knew what they went through. And we weren't allowed to become general managers without that experience. Now, I think that sort of thing we need to build back in because what happens now, if somebody does a BA in business schools, they go to an MBA in an elite school, if you go to an MBA, an elite school, you're not buying an education, you're buying a network. Yeah, they then join an elite consultancy firm where they produce spreadsheets and reports. And then they get parachuted in sideways to senior management, with no experience, and the only way they know to manage is by statistical control. And of course, that's deeply damaging. So I think we're gonna see reversion on that the Japanese interesting, never got rid of lifetime employment and apprentice models. Not for their elite, they always made sure they had that. And I think we'll see those sorts of things come back in. Because that institutionalises, the integrative cuyp Road, and as you go up to management, I've said this many times, the higher we go management, the more you only meet angry customers. Now, this is just a feature of getting into senior management, right? Because you're the first point of escalation. So you have to develop a whole bunch of ways of diffuse intention. And you can't solve the problem anymore. That's the other key thing is you're a senior manager, you can't solve the problem. You can create space and find ways that other people can solve problems. And a lot of people just don't make that transition. They try and work out what the solution is. Yeah. So and your job is to coordinate, you're not making decisions anymore, you're coordinating interactions. And without giving people that sort of experience, and again, I think you see acceptation in people in those roles. The only thing you can do, and this needs to be in it is translation transgenerational pairs. So we know that brain plasticity locks down well, periods of brain plasticity are up until two or three. A lot of your neocortex processing is done by whoever looks after you.
Yeah, we're not sure the mechanism yet. But we know that close physical proximity is important. And if you don't get the right sort of nurture during that period, there are aspects of your brain which never develop, just never develop, and you can't go back. Up until puberty, you still have high levels of plasticity, you don't see racism until kids until after puberty. You just don't see it. You know, kids will play with anybody or anything, kids aren't fazed by handicap. That's another problem. Yeah, kids, yes, yeah, life is constant novelty, they're absorbing a huge amount of data. From puberty onwards, the brain starts to lock down. Because in evolutionary terms, you've got to start the hunt for the tribe. So you adopt the prejudices of the tribe. You have the tribe can't afford that amount of diversity can afford it up until puberty, but after that, forget it. Yeah. And then late 40s, early 50s, men and female alike chemically triggered in both cases, the brain becomes plastic again. Now the interesting argument on this is that if you survive to your 40s, or 50s, and a hunter gatherer tribe, you obviously should move into the wisdom business, but not many of you will survive. So that's where you get the teachers and mentors, right? In terms of the way it works. But if you look at it in science, people have their best ideas before they're 25. In the humanities, it's generally in later life. Because that grandparent generation knowledge is synthesis, rather than originality, you still have, the originality comes from combining different things. Yeah. So what we've done in the valleys, for example, is to put kids together with their grandparents come up with ideas for community improvement. Yeah, not with parents, because there's teneo. Kids grandchildren tell things to grandparents and grandparents tell things to grandchildren, that neither of them will tell to the parents. Some of this is called grandparents revenge. I've told my daughter that I've deliberately forgotten everything she did between the age of 12 and 19. But I intend to remember it in vivid detail when she has Daughter of her own right. And that's called grandparents revenge, right. And it is a common one. But if you put for example, new joiners together with people who are about to retire. Now, all of a sudden, you've got really powerful information teams, as well as one of the criteria on tangled to trio. So people really, somebody very young with somebody about to somebody who's about to retire has got nothing to lose anymore. But they've gotten the network's somebody has just joined, it's got very little to news, and they're naive. Yeah. And then you put them into a three with somebody with middle management when they come up with new ideas. And again, that's a way of missus, going back to the point Greg was making. We don't have generalists anymore. So we have to create processes which create the same function that generalists had.
It's impossible, but it's not as bleak as that. And that lack of plasticity is because of the education system.
No, it's actually it isn't all right. And I think, I mean, there's a lot of things we've got to be careful on here. And we don't know stuff. But we know, for example, that the things we were forced to do as a kid, like learning a poem every week, actually turns out to be extremely useful for developing cognitive connections and abstractions. So some of the sort of ideas that kids should learn at their own pace actually are a bad idea. And you don't see that in any primitive tribe. Right? But there are certain physical characteristics, it's actually very difficult to learn a new language if you'd haven't learned a new language by the time you're 16 or 17. It's very difficult. It's very easy. Yeah. And, you know, we have my mother spoke fluent German, Latin, French, and Welsh and English. But she was told to only speak one language to our kids. Because that was it was a feeling that was confused people. And that was a disaster for somebody like me as a dyslexic. Because Dyslexics find it almost impossible to learn a foreign language.
It's really difficult. I think he needs a different part of your brain as well. My dad learned French when he was at university, and when he had a stroke, the French came back first. And evidently the part of his brain that hadn't learned English was a different areas. So
there are different primers framings there. But I say this is kind of like using the natural science on it. We know that there are exceptions, but in general, yeah, it's under 25. And over 45 is a good pairing. Yeah. And if you look at it, just in sociological terms, a new joining with some new quote with somebody is about to retire what they've got to lose anymore. In fact, they quite enjoy mentoring young people where they are and it's also I mean, I remember, you know, when I was a general manager, so we got a new manager and he I was given somebody to mentor right and she was like, 10 years younger than me and half the cost. I will get in two seconds while she was there. She was there to shadow me, I was tagged to us. And then I would be made redundant that she took over the job. Yeah, she didn't know it either. I mean, it was just you could see it in HR. So she learned absolutely nothing. But my graduate assistant, who is a very bright kid with a philosophy degree actually substituted for me at meetings, because he was absolutely no threat. So he got everything. And people get that wrong on mentoring schemes, they don't produce sufficient distance in the mentoring for the mentoring to take place, they make it too proximate. And by the way, transgenerational pears are really good at innovation. And they're really good at sustainable innovation. So what we found in the valleys project is young kids came up with bright ideas, their grandparents worked out how to make them work. Which is 90% of the battle.
Hey, Dave,
first of all, amazing session. So I'm gonna pull this into direction of startups if that's if that's okay,
now, that's a surprise.
So, okay,
Oh, my God.
rolling up sleeves. So we're talking about acceptation as a form of it, mainly what you were, what I was getting, okay. I have two theories. I want to run by and see if I if I'm grasping this the right way. So first of all, when I look at this, from a startup perspective, we're talking about very concentrated effort from a very small number of individuals who share dynamic roles. Now the exempted part here is that we're gonna have this is an analogy I'm working on so the beaver analogy, right, so the team is the Beaver, the dam is the product through the artefact that it's creating the ecosystem benefits from its existence. The exultation part in the startup is the pivot. Right. So the pivot towards Okay, we built something that the slack example like what we're using was basically an internal product that this that the founders of slack, were using to communicate while they were developing the game. But the game flopped. And so the examination was, okay, let's take this internal communication thing that we're enjoying using, and we'll make it into a massive product so that the pivot. Now the first caught first concept I'm trying to grasp on is okay, we have established organisations and we help startups right. So for the established organisation, the conclusion I came up with while reading the field, Field Guide and whatnot, is that we're going to have a couple of things when it comes to acceptation. So most of the energy is going to be directed in an introverted way for established organisation, and then in a startup is going to be extroverted. So that's like the the energy attractors, so to speak, of the examination processes themselves.
I'm not so sure, actually. I mean, it's just comes back to something we discussed before. Right. I think the problem with funded startups is they're internally focused. They lack external interaction, though, when when nothing pops, they may get exceptive. And that's when we talked about before i would i would put very minimal funding in and for sales, because having to sell something before it's ready. Yeah, increases. Oh, evolution increases stability and increases chance. acceptation. Right. So I think that's one point I'm making. I do think this varies where you are on infectious curves and the life cycle. So if somebody is going to start to create something in the stable market, you want them focus effectively on what I would call a hyenas strategy. I, they have to use something which is going to use whatever the apex predator discards or whatever the apex predator needs, and then you can create businesses very quickly. Yeah. If you're at the executive moment, then you either got to try and be the apex predator, or you've got to be a keystone species. That's a choice. So a keystone species is Intel. Yeah, they make the chips so that people produce the product. All right, whereas an apex predator is IBM. So what's interesting is keystone species survive through apex predator downfalls. But they never dominate in the same way. So I think there's a whole language we need to develop here and startups, which moves away from the sort of Lean Startup nonsense that there's one single pattern, and which realises that micro pivots are probably better than pivots. Right? And co evolution enables micro pivots. So I think there's a whole new language we need to develop on this and a set of processes. And one of the things we worked on with San Diego is how do I if I get a university, for example, to index all of their knowledge, and one of the things we're going to work on there is we're going to create the trails of students so when you join UCSD, yeah, if you're an engineering student, you've put in a trio with somebody from pure science and somebody from the humanities and you've got a job to do every three months. Because what we're doing with that is to build networks across the disciplines who would normally silo. Yeah. And we can use that to generate material. So if a business has a problem, we can get them to abstract the problem, throw it at the database, and then say to the scientists, well, actually your your solutions are indexed the same way as these problems. Maybe there's a repurpose in that can go. And that's, that's the otter that suggests in acceptation. And that by the way, we call it an executive incubator. So you have an incubator reversing incubator, and you have an executive incubator. Okay,
that's, I'm gonna have to process that I want to comment on it. But I feel I'm too ignorant.
Well, I can also put you in time we, we talked about this a lot with Greg, and are they up at Stanford, they wrote the rain for Canvas, and Greg used to work for some of the big VC firms, so I can help you set up a conversation on that, if you really end
up, that'd be amazing. It would really help us establish some of the ideas for the book.
I think the key thing we're trying to do here is to create is this context awareness. So if you're looking at a startup, there is no such thing as a startup. There's an ecology of different types of startups at different stages of life cycles, and you need a language of difference. I'll come back to that key phrase is key phrase interest. And the irony is I find with the systems thinkers who are trying to homogenise everything into systems thinking, to the greats, you know, our coffin and Bates and both say you need to create differences only when you create differences. There's novelty emerge, the difference that makes a difference to quote Gregory
reading into delusive right now.
Yeah. So what you can do with assemblage mapping is the danger, what assemblages do is they create patenting treatment in whole industries? Right, which is why, which is why when somebody does something completely different as Microsoft either Apple did, nobody realises until it's too, too late. Yeah, that's the that's an exempted pivot. So you can have exempted Piglet survival pigot case of Keystone pivots, you can have different types of pivot, that three or four micro pivots are better than one big pivot.
I'm going to pull this into the field field, Field Guide guide book, I don't know it's just a book. So we you got stimulated, stress based and the third one, I'm just flipping through unstimulated, sort of simulated stress based and dispositional. So when looking at the disposition or on the guidebook, what what my conclusion was, this is where we construct scaffolding
is our my, my su UCSD is an example of dispositional. So I get people from the humanities and from engineering and science in multiple pairs, trios across the whole of campus, and they work together for three or four years. And then occasionally, I throw during big problems which require transducer that I built the network, which will find people who can connect things. Yeah, and that's an example of creating space for dispositional. Innovation.
So for for the for the scuffling example. And I want to pull this into the the actual title of today's session, which is triggers. Because I feel I haven't been able to sink my teeth into the trigger part of the examination yet, what would you consider to be the most obvious triggers?
a trigger is a trigger is basically is why are these things connected with these things? Or you have to find a way to connect these things that's actually given to a lot of kids in education. These are two things, what's the connection? Yeah. So if you and it's the example I always give, if you give, you know, the line drawings, kids get a picture of a park as line drawing. And you say, there are six kitchen utensils hidden in the laundry. Everybody will find the utensils, but they won't see them unless they're told they're there. So the key concept is to connect things in radically different ways and ask people questions about it so they can see. Right? And that's the triggering mechanism. So the guy who created microwave ovens for chocolate bar melted in his pocket. That's what happened to lots of engineers. But he realised what it meant. Right now, you can't rely on that sort of coincidence. Sooner or later somebody will realise what an anomaly means. What we're doing is we're presenting them as anomalies up front. So you know, there's something monomers there so even People who aren't naturally innovative will find connections.
But where would they start looking?
Well, that's what we're doing. So for example, one of the ways is you just connect people across disciplines in trails, and then you throw problems to the trails. If I've got 5000 trails in operation across the university, wherever I was going to come up with something, yeah. So that's building capability for ordinary purpose, you can then activate for extraordinary needs. The use of sense maker was originally designed for this in counterterrorism, it was one of the main functions. Alright, so the ability to take capability at a high level of abstraction and problem at the high level of abstraction, and cluster based on the abstractions to remove it from the concrete and say, Why are these user stories connected with these technologies? Right, but you suggested that because of the abstract layer, and we know that by the way, it's the role of art in human innovation, our creates abstractions, which allow us to innovate, that's, that's why I continue to develop on the evolutionary pathway.
So when I pick up on that, just kind of pick up on the art thing, and the thing that you mentioned before, Ahmed, um, so artists, about we use composition. And that's an executive process. And the first part of it is a deterritorialization, like a catastrophe, of an old way of combining things, which leads to the possibility of new ways of combining things. So that's how artists create novelty, according to the list. So artists could be used to as part of an executive process
that links him with a big debate in philosophy of ascetic so there are the, you know, those people who are fundamentally wrong, who say that art is art, if the artist says it's art, and there are those of us who are right, so you're not an artist, and you have a craft. So Picasso learns to draw before he breaks the rules. And if you look at major progression in art, it's people who are competent, the old paradigm will break the rules and find a new way of doing it. And the process of acquiring a craft is a key part of human knowledge anyway. Yeah. Because you understand what it is that you're rejecting. So for example, the greatest innovation in classical music is the Tristen called the LCD, even people who don't like Wagner recognise that the concept of an unresolved tension is nobody thought of it before. And it's now fundamental to modern music. But it first comes interest in is older. It's just incredible. But that's that this last opera? Yeah, yeah. And because so if you look at early Picasa, they're highly competent than ganttic, Varga. His first three operas would be internationally famous these days, if he hadn't reinvented the genre, but his first three offers are written in the Italian tradition. So I think that that's one of the things if you increase craft skills, and then you allow crafts to interact, you get really good innovation. And that's actually how the mediaeval apprentice models work. Because the Masters you know, the journeyman taught. And the apprentice is that together so knowledge didn't transfer vertically transferred by a complex mix. apprentice tell stories, they picked up on knowledge, journeyman, pick it up, journeyman taught, the Masters would meet with other masters of other gills. Yeah, so yeah, there's highly ritualised phase transitions in the system, with large scale Selsey interaction, within what I call acceptable levels of abstraction. apprentices could chat with apprentices because they were all apprentices, but not with masters. And we see this in communities of practice. For example, I remember when IBM set up communities of practice and not yet set them up in functional areas is that we want to km practice. We want to know see practice, and and when I was young, Navy those days, I mean, I appreciate said he wasn't going to bother. And I said, Well, I'll try. So I went in it three days later, I found that Larry and Sergey were right. Because it was working at too low level of abstraction. I wasn't going to have those conversations. I spent the last 10 years of my life working on this field. I'll go there to teach but I'm not going to learn from it. If I'm not going to learn why am I going to put my time in? Unless I'm paid to? To be honest, right? What would you be invested with a community of practice between the principles in all of the disciplines associated with organisational design? So have me and Larry from knowledge manager with Ben from organisational change, because we're all masters in our fields, therefore, the interchange would be more valuable and I think that's some of the sort of things we need to think about.
Right. Dave, can you comment from the coaching side and I remember you mentioned a few times that you know, that some sceptical side of you're talking about coaching Do you see coaching has Has the place
for teams and individuals that don't think it works for organisation change? I think the problem is most coaching techniques come cybereason therapy. Yeah, in organisational change, they're not in sports, I think sports is more interesting because sports includes the physical aspect. But if you look at most of the coaching methodologies, they come from things like adult maturity models, which and I have a strong objection to anything, which implies a hierarchical progression over time, because that doesn't match people's experience. And the problem with therapeutic models is that they assume the need for therapy and they privilege the therapist. Right. So if you choose to work with a coach, you've privileged, the coach, you've done that as a conscious choice to help you through a process, I can see huge value in that. But I don't see it as having any value at all in organisational change. In fact, I think it's quite dangerous. Yeah. Now, having said that, and this is some of the stuff we're starting to work on, right? If you look at sports coaching, actually, what's interesting as a coach isn't necessarily privileged. And there's a huge physical aspect to the coaching, it's not. The other problem, by the way is is what you get in the therapeutic because of the dominance of Freud, and Jung, is this focus on articulation rather than learning. And you get this really strong belief in facilitators these days, unless you've articulated your learning, it hasn't happened. So it's almost it's what I call the Billy Graham School of Management change. They want everybody to come to the mercy seat and confess their sin at the end of the workshop, and accept redemption. Yeah. real learning often, if you force people to articulate it, they won't learn. Now,
I spoke with a someone who's like a business coach, who literally told me that it's basically coaching business coaching is the acceptable way for macro executives to get therapy. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think it's okay, because I'm going to be quite honest, most of them need therapy quite badly. In fact, most of them need confinement, right. So I think the individual coach, the answer, by the way, all the evidence and individual coaching and psychotherapy, all the evidence, says what matters is your relationship with a therapist that the method they're adopting has no relevance whatsoever. Whether it's CBT, or lakonia, or even bloody NLP, for cars, it doesn't matter. Because it's actually about you forming a relationship with somebody who can talk to you and ask you questions. Right. So that's fine, individual level. But that doesn't work at a collective level, per se. And when I get Keegan's work on education, but you can't take a model of other progressive model of education and apply it to organisations, because people are all stages of that simultaneously. Yeah, but we love maturity models, because it privileges the person who says they're at the highest level of maturity.
Well, they're made by the people who sell the thing that is pushing you up the maturity model, right? So everyone, we do the analysis, you're in the middle. But look over here, you could you could get better.
We started spiral dynamics. I had a famous Rao with Don Beck and john. Yeah, I mean, Wilbur wasn't there. So only add to the trio. And I was basically so I mean, spa dynamics is is a pseudo scientific nonsense, Cohen's original research was conducted on his own students has already read his theory. That's the only basis for it. Yeah, there's no, I mean, it doesn't apply at the sort of level of society or groups. But what was interesting is when, I mean, when Bill became a board, they started to invent new colours and new levels. So they produced turquoise. Yeah. And when the crocs couldn't get an endorsement, he wanted to create a new one called J. So it's kind of everybody is creating new levels to imply superiority. And I famously at that conference, I have badges made overnight which was I'm proud to be brown and got everybody to wear them. And yeah, back when furious, he said, brown isn't a spiral dynamics killer. And I said, like, that's exactly the point I'm making. Yeah. But hierarchical models are really dangerous in organisation because organisations are massively coherent they have there will always be people in the organisation who understand something far better than you, and far better than your consultants and they're not at a lower level of maturity. Because they haven't learned to play the language games. You want them to play them. And then the moment I mean, Bonnie nurses who obviously we talked about this organization's forced their employees to play language games in The Virginian sense in order to survive. And that's just ridiculous. And maturity models automatically give rise to that you can't avoid you can ameliorate it with really good people.
All holacracy? Well, I'll give you I mean, the trouble is I like the guy who created it. I think he's a nice guy, right? So I haven't visibly attacted in public. The problem with her lock cracy All right, is that basically he doesn't want to manage. He's like a lot of people in it. They don't like management. This involves making judgement and other people judging you. So he's written that bureaucratic formula is not an operating system. It's an application. Yeah. Which means that nobody has to take responsibility for anything. Now, I can't say who I'm working with at the moment. But we're working with one of the poster child's overall accuracy. Because what it does is it's engendered bureaucracy and an inability of the organisation to respond to change. Yeah, because it's an engineering approach to a complex problem. Yeah, holacracy was never gonna work. Because there are times when you need somebody to make an authority to decision. And that person needs to have a certain level of experience, and you can't have this constant inhibition. Okay, guys, it's on the top of the hour. Yeah. Hopefully, that's enough. Yeah.
Take a question. Before we go slightly unrelated. Have you noticed a few errors? Basically, just wondering what what's the right method to highlight those and get them corrected for you?
Alright, well, first of all, don't send them to me, because I will not respond to them anyway. And I never get worried about it, if you understand what I'm saying why they've heard the first about whether I spelt it right. Yeah. Tell them send them to Alexandra or send them in at the moment, they can't change the PDF that they can probably change them for the hardcopy, which comes out in April, which is also when we will get the higher resolution now. So stack them in that maybe I'll create somewhere on the wiki for people to put them. Yeah,
yeah, that's no, it was more of a service to kind of get the ration but yeah, that's, that's absolutely fine. I'll drop into
Yeah, take care kits. And so Katie, if you want to pass that on to Colin, and just so he doesn't duplicate the effort, and then pass it on, that would be really cool. Kids already gone through it. So that is why I'm always grateful. By the way I get lots of people read the blog, and then send me DMS or emails. And this is a mistake, and I corrected, the ones I tend to get stroppy about the ones who decide to be clever in a public forum.
I'm always happy
to accept private correction.
Now Exactly. Like I always tried to improve the product for everyone and that kind of thing rather than anything else. Yeah. Perfect.