All right, Hi Mike. Yes. Hello everyone out there.
I was gonna say good morning, but
I'm sure it's good evening somewhere or
it's morning here so I'll say good morning to you.
I'm just north of London. So it's some it's 10 o'clock here. But um, I've been on the since seven o'clock this morning. So, yeah.
Doing back to back. Oh, yeah, I
mean, I don't know if it was the best time
though interesting week, I skip most of my normal work meetings to just to continue to be part of this very interesting.
So it is interesting. Definitely.
And so it's without words.
I'm just not sure how much I'm absorbing. I was up you know, in your early and you just suddenly think oh, I in fact, a moment ago I went and grabbed a blanket because I thought well, I've been sitting for far too long. It's ridiculous.
But after this session, we go a little bit in the forest with a bicycle so it's also a good perspective. Nice.
Where are you?
Um, Bavaria. Munich. 50 miles something like this. countryside. Okay.
I'm in Switzerland, but
wow. Yeah. It's not you can really tell it's if it's countryside or city because it's very small. So
you're close to cities and close to the countryside.
So, Davina, how have the sessions been so far that you've been at?
They've been good, is it? I guess they've got quite a sort of anecdotal way of going through, hasn't he? And I guess also just being on receive, it's, it's fine. You just sort of like what? It's kind of quite a task to be sort of, like, on and on and on. I don't know who's doing this one. But um, yeah.
And, you know, when Divina, you said, it's getting anecdotal, I was thinking yesterday, because when we need to write something, you know, that we have heard anecdotes and stories of it will require some creativity from our side to put those thinking, and to extract the meaning out of it. And to write the thing that the other speak the same thing. Because when you have a conversation, and when you write, I think, especially when I was thinking about the constraint mapping system and how I'm going to write about it, if I have to write so.
I think though, when it comes to the narrative or a story, you've got the connections, rather than just the linear idea, you've got so much more richness to remember something by
Yeah.
But yeah, it's it's a balance, isn't it?
What do you retain? And what do you put? Exactly,
exactly, and also, because the narratives that take different meanings in you know, in different regions, because most of the stories because I'm not from the European background, so when Dave, you know, puts forward something, you know, that is very familiar to that culture, but I don't know I have to search and then I have to dig Okay, so if he had thought that Oh, What could be the, you know, the underpinnings? So, I mean, from that perspective, I was also thinking because it will be read by the whole world. So, we need to come up with something we need to decide that we should come up with as simplistic idea, you know, we should put so that everybody can pick it with least effort. I mean, that was my understanding of the whole situation.
Then also, I guess the the nature of wiki is different people will come to them in different ways. So, and different people will be react really attracted to what they want. I think one of the lovely diversities within the, the Red Book is, is that it is very personal accounts of how they've used connecting, which brings a lot to it. And as you say, it's from different places in the world, too. So, yeah, I don't think he wants it is de snowdens memoires. dizzy. So,
you know, the most fascinating thing what Dave said yesterday? I mean, he put forward a narrative, and he said, Every educated person should know that. And I didn't know that. I said, Man, okay. I mean, I know his sense of humour. I have met him, I know, his, you know, sarcastic sense of humour. I said, Man, then I searched something by segment, you know, because all of the narratives that are coming up, I have to do a bit of research so that I can, you know, come on the same page, same frequency, and then I started working on it. So that was my, you know, finding an observation about attending through the forest.
Well, I was thinking that also, when you say something like that, it's also a way to push this idea to the people. So you could do the same thing, just tell something from your culture, and then say, Well, every single educated person should never, then it means that everyone else is going to go and research it.
Yeah, I loved it. I loved his, you know, his way of putting things
up, this is part of the idea that it gives us this crowd together. cultural aspects. So it's just, and that we have to look for. And one thing just it's writing. And I believe pictures are very helpful, are metaphors. It flavour a lot of different touches, and content. And
you know what, maybe this is the format of this session, maybe we are the human sensor network.
I'm sure he would be proud of us to self organise.
I would be proud of myself. I could organise myself at the moment.
Well, nitsa I'm listening to this whole conversation from Austria, which is pretty close to risk, cultural kind of background, and I have the same experience as you do. So a lot of the exam students speak to me, just to let you know that you're not you're not the only one.
Apologies, guys, I thought I'd actually finished. I thought I only had three sessions this morning, I suddenly realised that for so.
Apologies. All right.
So I'll assume we got everybody. Yeah. And Bonnie's trunk, shrunk truncated head. All right, nose up only. Okay, so this is we're talking about sensor networks. If you've read the Field Guide, which I hope you have, or at least skimmed it, you'll see that sensor networks have come like one of the key aspects of it, like if you haven't got it scrambled to build it. Yeah, if at the end in the transcend session, where you're going to need it again, rebuild it. So a sensor network is effectively the ability to engage a large number of human agents in near real time. possibly even in real time. Now, the one of the drivers for this is is really fairly simple. It's, it goes back to the the radiologists who actually don't see the picture of a gorilla. Right. So if 83% won't see something which is in plain sight, that is going to be a day to day basis and during a crisis is potentially critical. If you know that variation on that is where you have six kids playing with a basketball, three in white and three in black. And the woman in the gorilla suit walks through the middle and beats a chest and then walks out and people don't see the gorilla. But if that was real, the gorilla might then go on rampage, and you might all die and you'd be blamed for it, because the video evidence would show that you've probably seen it, right. So, yeah, we sometimes talk about this as finding the 17%. Because that's the number of people who see a gorilla. And the problem is that they come to believe they were wrong when they talk with the 83%. Who didn't? Yeah. So the idea is that if we can bring in multiple human senses, who can actually see if I have 100 radiologists, 17 of them have seen a gorilla? Okay, if I only have three humans around me the chance of any of them seeing the gorilla goes down? That's kind of like a basic equation. Yeah. So sensor networks are designed to actually give you real time feedback loop on things like attitudes and beliefs, but also help you identify outliers. So function is very simple if you're going to have to do really hard things. Yeah, let's, for example, say you decide to do a nationwide lockdown, it would actually be quite useful to know how people feel about that before you do it. And where the weaknesses are, and if there are aspects of that, which would be different in different places. So in general, for human systems, universal interventions are generally a bad idea. Or they can be a good idea, but they're very, very temporary, in their effect, because human beings are highly contingent. And we'll all do this. I mean, if I noticed, I've done it. Right, is kind of like, Well, you know, I haven't seen anybody apart from my wife for the last three months. So I could probably get away with doing this. And it probably wouldn't harm anybody. And we all start to create those sort of exceptional based material. Yeah. So measuring attitudes is key. I can't overemphasise this. attitudes are lead indicators. Compliance is a lagging indicator. It doesn't matter whether it's patient safety, safety in the company, ability to change anything you can do, which measure how people feel about something is critical, because that will actually give you indications downstream, the same is true of cybersecurity and everything else. So one function of a human sensor network is to get that data in real time, and see what it means. The second function is to actually engage a large network of people in real time situational assessment, and generation of possible solutions. And that's where we get into the finding the 17%. So that's kind of like the function. Yeah. Now, there are various networks available to people. So one is your actual employees. And it's very rare for people to actually user employees. One of the three core principles in the handbook is communicate by engagement. So when we talk about using a network of employees, if you can engage employees in assessing the situation and coming out without possible interventions, and you get some feedback, you don't need me to communicate to them about what you've done, because they've been engaged in the process itself.
Whereas if you regard them as sort of passive recipients of you know, behavioural science, behavioural science manipulation, and behavioural sciences becoming definitely the problem, not part of the solution at the moment, all right, because it's de facto manipulation. And people have fairly good bullshit detectors on that. Yeah. The other thing is, if you are going to have to do something working out where it will have an easy passage where where it would have a hard passage, where is it important? Because that that determines how you allocate your resources. So if you're a company, your employees are a sensor network, your customers are in a sensor network, your suppliers are a sensor network, if you think about it. If you're a government, it's even easier because it's your citizens. And if you don't know some of the original work was done on this when I was working with the US on counterterrorism. And one of the problems I was set by Admiral john Poindexter, who led the programme was how do you reverse Ashby's law. Ashby's law is the law of requisite variety. So it basically says as you get increase in variety of stimulus you have to put more More energy into the variety of your response. So only variety matches variety is the phrase. So that means if you have terrorists doing bad things, they're throwing stimulus into the system in large numbers. And of course, you've got to respond to all of those stimulus. Yeah, so the information advantages to the terrorist. Because if you really want to prevent or failure, you have to do things like we do at airports. I mean, if you look at airport security, is completely disproportionate to the threat. You're actually at far more risk of getting run over a bus and never been on an aircraft with a terrorist bomb. The perception of threat is different than the money which goes on that is huge. Yeah, compared with other methods. So one of the things, we found them that it was much faster now we have the idea once in Washington, is actually one of the ways you change the information, mesh information advantage, is you increase the diversity of your sensor networks, because as a government, you have more diverse sensor networks available to you through your population. So you distribute the energy cost of information processing into those networks, rather than having to do it yourselves. And then you throw information at the terrorists. So the information has the terrorist has to process more information. And then there's a point at which the strategic advantage switches. Yeah, so that was a core piece of work, which still has validity today. And I still remember at a conference in Maryland, it was one of those conferences with the US intelligence community that you get used to where it takes you three hours to get through security to get into the hotel where they're holding the conference. And you're sort of do a presentation, and then you're sent away, because you're not security clear to the conversation which follows, then you get pulled back in and you get asked a question, which means you know, exactly what they've been talking about. But you know, then you have to answer it. It can get really scary. I did release in Tampa once with clapper, who was then head on intelligence, and the bastard, and he put me on as the first keynote. And he announced this is 2000 people from the CIA and NSA and everything else. And he announced that Snowden was keynoting at his conference, but didn't say which Snowden. And I still remember, I didn't realise this. And I went on to the stage to this awesome sigh of disappointment, all right, and then clicking of safety catches, because I think I was gonna die. I think why the bloody hell did you do that to me? And he said, Well, I made sure everybody turned up on time this morning. That was that. Either way, we have this and somebody said, Okay, so what do we do with al Qaeda? So we can see this point about citizens, sensor networks? I'm going to come on to those in a minute, because they're a key part of this. But how do we actually throw information at the terrorists which disrupts them? And I say, well, you you do things, which they don't, which they say you won't do. Because then they have to accommodate because they've got a whole mythology, history and constructing about how evil you guys are. And I said, Let's leave on one side for the moment whether you are evil or not, because I have my own opinions on that. But they have these myths around that. So it's kind of like you have to disrupt it. And somebody said, well give us an example. And I don't know whether you've ever been here, but you can think of the perfect example of what you're saying. But it is the worst possible thing you could say to the audience concern. And the trouble is, when one of those locks into your brain, you really can't get rid of it. So I guess the road to hell with it. I'll go for it. And I said, this will tell you the period. This was when Sharon was Israeli Prime Minister. I said next time Sharon comes to Washington arrest him as a war criminal.
And there was this stunned silence around the hall and this little voice came up from the back and said, buddy, what do you mean by that? And if you don't know, Americans, when they say, buddy, it's kind of like a rattlesnake. It's a warning device, or I've been called buddy is not a good thing. And I said, well think what it would do to al Qaeda. Yeah, they'd have to put a huge amount of effort into country and what you done. Yeah. And in doing so they'd reveal a huge amount about them. And then that works. And eventually they got it. I mean, I must admit, I was trying to think what was Lee's retreat from Gettysburg. And can I get to Dulles Airport, you know, alive. Yeah. But it was. That was actually they got the point. Yeah. Actually, this is quite important. I'm using this in context of counterterrorism. But it's quite important in terms of communication generally, right? is you can't afford in the centre to be caught out by the diversity of the network. Because that's where weak signals come from. That's where you get unexpected consequences. Yeah, the only thing you can absolutely guarantee about interventions in a complex system is that whatever you do will have unintended consequences. And so the more actors there are in the system, the more threat you are So again, this sort of engagement, making them part of a denser network is key. So let's go through some of the approaches on this. The other key principle is there's all sorts of ways you can consult people in real time. So you can use things like social media, you can create Facebook groups, you can create websites for people to do things. You see a lot of this in crisis management. So you know, the IT community was scrambled to create methods by which people can report things. And that's all really well and good. But that's a solution responding to a problem. And what we're trying to do is to create a capability that can respond to the problems before they arise. And one which respects a key fact. And I said this in dc 20, or 30 years ago, anything an algorithm can interpret an algorithm can create. No, and that's the big problem we got with social media at the moment, you can't trust the material. Yeah, because the amount of data which has been created by algorithms, or even by human bot farms is huge. So it's not the wisdom of the crowds. It's the tyranny of the herds. Because it's what is called in complexity, or at least I call it that and unbuffered feedback loop. Yeah, so basically, the problem with unbuffered feedback loops is they always tend to think about automatic stock trading. Yeah, that was eventually abolished, because it led into a downward spiral, which no human being could control. It's what worries an awful lot of us, I did a strategic threat seminar on the top of the bloody mountain in colour in Utah, not so many years ago. And we had to identify existential threats to humanity. Ai was actually one of them. Because if you look at what's happening in AI use on warfare, we're creating unbuffered feedback loops. And if you want to have an example of what can go wrong with that, there's a wonderful book called swarm by Michael Creighton, the guy wrote juicy Jurassic Park, which is kind of like worth reading, if you want some warnings on that sort of phenomenon. So either way, I'm going to run this. So you can create a feedback loop using social media reporting, team rooms, everything like that. And we should probably document some of that capability. What I'm going to talk about now, and the other thing you need to do, and it is kind of like key, all of this anger before it comes to sense maker, is if you want to build capability, people have to find it useful in its own right. So the idea you build systems for things which are valuable to you, and then you have to try and get people to participate in them is one of the real problems that we've got. It's one of the big, big myths of HR. So the way I've always described this is you have to create networks for ordinary purpose that you can activate for extraordinary need. Okay, so what I'll do is I'll talk about how we do this at government level, then I'll go on to Well, I'll, I'll talk about it generally. So there are various ways you can do this. At this point, we are coming into sense maker, right, which is not open source. So you can do this, but the only thing you can't do is a sort of triangle based signification. Right. Now, that is actually quite important that actually came out to the counter terrorist work, because you can't afford for people to know what answer you want to hear.
Yeah, because or, and this is a big problem with opinion polls. Because the problem with opinion polls is people respond in rows, not how they actually feel. Yeah, and this is also unique people be descriptive not evaluative. Because if people are evaluating something, they worry about what it means. If they're describing something, they're less likely to actually worry about it. Yeah. So sense maker signification was actually designed, you know, three positive qualities on a triangle, so that you don't know there is no wrong answer. You don't know what answer is expected. And questions are descriptive not evaluative. Or if they are evaluative, they're at a micro level, not a macro level, with no consequences for the individual. Yeah, and that's how I can go into the sort of scientific reasoning behind that, but that that's a key part of it. Yeah. The other thing which actually happens if you don't know when people are signifying something into sense maker, and there are considerable advantages to having had a visit in chairs in the Department of Psychology because it entitles you to wire up first use funds. Psychology students and conduct experiments on them and they can't say no to it. which actually means you've got to be really suspicious about all psychology experiments, because they're performed on psychology students, which can like is the physicist in me bolts at that time. But what actually happens if you give people a triangle, a different part of the brain engages is called novelty, receptive, not autonomic. So autonomic is day to day response. And that's what you see with like Likert scales on questionnaires. You just go down, you're just ticking, you're not thinking much about this automatic pilot. With a triad, you can't do that. So a different part of the brain comes into play. And this is what carnavon called thinking slow, not thinking fast. Though autonomic novelty, receptive processing is actually a better explanation that comes from the real science. So you're triggering that. So you're going deeper. And that's important for attitudes and non game ability. So one of the ways that you do this, and this is kind of like building a sensor network, is you give people tools that they find useful for day to day function. Yeah, and the tools use all of the things that you want to have in place when you need to consult them or ask questions. And you also want to use it to give you background data anyway. So I'll give you the example for the work we're currently planning to do in the US on post election peace and reconciliation. And anything you do with a complex adaptive system, you do indirectly not directly. Now, because if you do things directly, I mean, anybody with teenage children know this already? Yeah, direct action doesn't work. Yeah. Or only works in extremists at massive energy, cost, destruction, and Governor's What else? All right. So what we're going to deploy, there is five different types of system. One is a system for schools, which is this, you know, there's a tick box in American education, like there isn't the Baccalaureate in Europe, which says round about 16 to 18. Kids need to engage in the community, they need to do statistics and research methods. Yeah, they need to do interpretation. So there's kind of like an educational requirement there. So you produce a pack, which exactly matches that educational requirement for the schools? Yeah, in which the kids become journal keepers and journalists. Now, we've done several of these in Wales, Malmo and elsewhere, right? Including difficult areas like Pakistan and lippia. Yeah. So what you're doing is you're giving the school something which has huge value to them, because it gives a tick box. The kids like it, because they can kids love going out and interviewing people that they don't like, answering questions, but they love interviewing other people. Yeah, one of the things that we did in Ohio, which was funded by Victoria secrets, which is, you know, it was great, greatly ironic, where we got kids to act as journalists to investigate adult obesity. So they went out and interviewed obese adults and parents. And what actually happened is what I predicted, so I was quite pleased on it, is the kids change their eating habits. So the way we change the kids diet was by getting them to investigate a problem, not by giving them moral lectures. And also they changed adult habits, because they started to beat up their parents and parents tend to respond to children more than they respond to doctors or nurses. Yeah. I'd say this as a father, if your daughter decides to take you in panic, right?
So those sort of mechanisms come through. So that was one, right. We also found that we didn't need to reward the kids, we could give them certificates. Because if they had a significant having done anthro convexity, yeah, that gave them a good additional thing for their statement of their experience statement for college or for work. So the certificates actually mattered more at that age. So that was easy to do. And then we could actually ask people or invite people and say, well, you're really active on this, would you like to have special status and go into weekly generally, there'll be a special status journalist. And if you complete your material, and what we did in Wales is you can actually spend some time with a Welsh rugby team before they beat the English saris, that weekend is coming up, right, that's tomorrow. And so we did what governments can do, which is give kids access to sports people, and, you know, artists and people like that, that sort of thing is in the gift of government on school programmes. And the other thing I'll say is nobody ever refuses to be interviewed by a kid on a school project. Right and they get Access to people experiments were done in Chicago in this they gave a project based school. Yeah, the task and they gave market research tasks to interview every CEO of companies based in Chicago. The project got all all that sorted within a week, the market research companies didn't manage it. Yeah, because being interviewed by somebody young, there's less fear factor in it, it's kind of like you're more open, you tend to teach. The other group we're looking for is to work on sports clubs. We've done this in South Wales, and sports clubs. And coaches want to know why kids play why kids don't play. They want to know about parents, they want to avoid attitudes. And because they're the coach, they can make keeping a diary and can be a journalist as part of the coaching regime. And they get utility from the data. Yeah. So that was powerful. We're also now starting the early experiments with church youth groups. Because that's a big issue for current churches on the age profile. Yeah, and the young people who are in the religious group want to interview other people discover it, find people in common. Yeah, so you can see what we're doing on the purpose. The other one, which we've just that I'm in negotiations on at the moment is really good software company, they created an app for small shopkeepers in Africa, which actually does all of the accounting for them, in return for which they agree to interview some of their customers. So we're going to build sense maker through the open API's into that. Now you see, what I'm doing is identifying people who already have networks who can actually motivate people to do things. And I'm giving them things that they find useful in their own right. And that way, I'm creating a sense of that. You can do the same thing in companies. Sorry about that my printer is in my study, and my wife is printing off lists. I hope he won't come through. So the other thing you do in companies, is you remove reporting requirements. So in one Italian company, we sent two salespeople, if you keep a narrative record before and after every sales visit at the start and end of each day, you don't have to write a sales report. So we didn't make it compulsory. But we actually got about 80% compliance because nobody wanted to write a sales report. But stories before and after a sales visit are far more useful for a sales manager than a retrospectively coherent report after the date. We've now got that idea from work I did with the US Army in Afghanistan, where we said to company commanders, keep your patrol records up to date in the field, you don't have to write a patrol report. And both of those have the advantage is you have real time data not retrospective data is coming in real time. Yeah, so that's where you remove a reporting burden from somebody because it's easier to keep small records continuously. Then put things together later. I mean, anybody who's self employed will know this, we've all got x. And if we record expenses and income as they happen, there's no big burden at the end of the year tax bill. If you do what I did for one terrible three year period, did you keep putting them in shoe boxes, and you end up with three years of shoe boxes, and the Inland Revenue threatened to sue you? Alright, so again, that's not an unusual pattern here to mind. But I want to get back to the good news is they ended up owing me money rather than the other way round. But that's a good accountant. Right?
So you get the principle, right. The second thing is, you don't survey people, you ask them for an opinion. Right now, there are some differences in cognitive age on this right. I think if you're looking at well being so we're about to create, this is something we're hoping to have on the website that anybody can download for free next week. Is anybody can download sense Baker's nap and keep their personal lessons learned records about COVID? Yeah, well, the idea is to make it free for any individual to do it, but anything you do is share and share like his creative commons. Because that becomes a useful asset. If you want to do it in your organisation, then obviously, I mean, this is also to be honest marketing, right? But what we're basically saying is we can build into the signifiers early indication of mental health. Right so people can see it's you. It makes sense to capture lessons learned in the field under fire, but they don't want to take in well, but taking intake to well being surveys is why would I bother? Yeah. But what we can do is we can look at the way that indexing of stories about what I've learned change over time. Or change by group to give us that weak signal type detection. Yeah. And again, that's usefulness. And that's open source. If you're doing one of the other functions, which is, here's a situation I've got, and you present the situation to a diverse group of people, you get them all to write a micro assessment. So what do you think is going on non-compulsory and index it, then that gives me the 17%. So I've got a lot of different people interpreting the situation, I can look at the patterns. And I can also ask them for what would you do about it? Or what do you think would happen next, which is a micro scenario. Now, if you do this, you're not serving people, you're basically engaging them in a current dilemma and giving them a sense of participation. But if you do this, they need to get feedback and the writer secondary comment within 24 hours. So you say you did that, here's the results, what do you think and that becomes a continuous process, because actually, their interpretation of the conclusions is also valuable, because that gives you a better sense of, you start to see the principle. Now, if you've got networks already established to a journalist, well, then you can check stuff in into that, because it's already there. That's the networks for ordinary purpose, you build for extraordinary need, right? And then you can look at patterns. And so the thing we're doing on the US This is the Peace and Conflict stuff. This isn't to do with this isn't a result, but I'll just show you is we will then look for common patterns of localised concerns, which are actually in common the regardless of the political or religious origin of the individuals. And then we'll put it Yeah, theological and politically diverse groups together to actually work on those problems, but we won't talk about their differences. And this is kind of like the way you do peace and reconciliation, is you put people from different backgrounds together to work together on something where they actually are in agreement, and let them build those patterns of interaction before you start to handle the difficult issues. And that this is, in complexity terms, changing the dispositional state of the system. So there's several things going on in the moment, when is I actually do have one of my research assistants who are collectively known as the coven, for historical reasons, they quite like being called the coven even have Kevin cackles now, which are quite scary. But we've got one of them working on this full time, because on the citizens stuff, we've already done a lot of work on citizen juries. And one of the things we want to do with this is to create an ability to select the citizen assembly, because we can map ideological attitudes. So you can end up instead of just doing the demographics selection for a citizen jury, you can actually have a matrix of ideologies against demographics, and create a representative group from that. And then during the assembly itself, you can pulse the whole population and get feedback in real time, and presented on screens to the jury. Because you can actually come with a conclusion they can go out everybody's on your sensor network and respond to it, you can put the pictures on the screen. So you get rid of this. I know what people really think stuff. So she's writing a white paper in the manual on that, which will be a supplementary manual. Yeah, to the actual handbook. But we'll also put that in the open space wiki.
So say what we got is communication by engagement, fast feedback loops, people coming up with ideas. Yeah, and feeding back and celebrating the ones you're using the ones you don't say we're taking these, what do people think, should we try this, anybody prepared to help? So you create that dynamic, distributed feedback. And the nice thing on that is you actually don't necessarily have to present the real strategic issue you face. We've done it where you can present infographics of publicly available data and see what people think. And we did this with one of the big oil companies. Yeah. Well, we actually presented a negative stories about the company in the press with the company's publicity. So we put paired things on that. And we got employees to tell stories about what they thought even thought they had, they would develop. And the reason we were doing that, and then we get feedback quite quickly, we would actually work it out. You know, we were looking on how they could retain good employees. Because good people don't want to work for evil companies. Yeah, and the fact that they were trying to defend themselves in the wrong way was actually producing the wrong result. And then I had a glorious thing at the hay festival, I suggested something which thought they would never buy for they bought it. I said, What? Why don't you let us because they just gone down a purpose route and sorry, purpose. Purpose is ridiculous. It's like mission statements. It's just rebadged. So I said, Why don't you give us a purpose statement. And we'll produce all the ante stories that your employees and the outside will produce to turn it back on you. And yeah, all I said, just pay for me to buy a really good meal for a bunch of cynics. And so I got a bunch of cynics. And I know a lot of them together for the evening. And we Yes, had a glorious time with the mission statement on the war in the private dining room thinking of all the ways the message can be twisted and fed back. And I don't think they ever recovered from the report. I wrote on that, right. And, by the way, if anybody wants to do that, we're really into that these days. That's, that's highly enjoyable. So and you actually just reminded me, I need to put that up as a method that needs to go as a method on the website, which is the cynic response to purpose. So that's kind of like what it is. Alright, so different methods, so that there's got, you need to build this. So you either replace a function or you find something that people want to do you get the material for that, that there are these different options. And then when you start to activate it, there needs to be rules as to the activation to ensure feedback. Because the way to destroy collaboration is not to give feedback. If people put things into a black hole in the centre, and this, by the way, is one of the big problems with employee satisfaction surveys, because by the time they're done, it takes months before HR equipment processed anyway. And by the time the executives get it is too late. And by the time the employees get it just doesn't match where they were. Yeah, we can do that in real time.
Okay.
I took longer than I thought it would, but I was late anyway. So I apologise for that. So questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, I'm pretty sure this is an emerging field. It's going to be a big part of what we're working on the centre next year, we're looking at new forms of democracy. And I actually see sensor networks as providing a alternative to democracy. Yeah, I actually don't think you can do it with big data, because it will be gained anything explicit will be gained. But if you think about it, and if you keeping in Wales, we have this thing called the future generations act. So we've passed a law which says that no law can be passed in Wales unless it takes account of the next generation. So one of the ways to actually use democracy is to use the next generation effectively as reporters rather than traditional market research and focus groups. And part of the problem you've got, by the way, is political parties. There's a wonderful, I've got the name of the guy who did it the huge influence of Freud on politics, which is really dangerous. Yeah, is the whole issue about focus groups and working out how to manipulate people. And we all looked after by machines of loving grace, or something, I think, is the film. Yeah. That's actually quite dangerous. Because at the moment, politicians aren't saying, I believe in this, you want to support it. They're saying, This is what people want me to say. So I'll say it. And that becomes a downhill spiral. So it leads to homogenization of the political parties. And that means the energy cost of extremism goes down. Yeah, the minute people don't have choices, which we didn't have, I mean, neoliberalism. homogenise things. So one of the things I'm thinking this sort of thing can do is different groups of people can look at different aspects which are coming out to this because different groups think in different ways. Yeah. I mean, Wales and Scotland are actually commentary in in culture, whereas England is socially atomistic. And that's one of the reasons for some of the cultural differences in terms of the way things work. So the ability to actually tailor policy to individual areas also comes from this 10 string. And that's part of building resilience.
Cindy, we were about to say something your your your image went yellow on me. All right. So you obviously made a noise and zoom thought you're about to say something sorry.
Oh, sorry, Dave. I was just grabbing the document.
to flash
at and I asked you about the purpose statement, you say the cynic responds to purpose statement. So you find all the NT stories, and then what happened next, I know you have a very enjoyable time, but I mean to COVID one.
I've actually the executives have got it. I ended up with a breakfast which started at seven o'clock in Paramount and went on till midday and became lunch, right? And what I did with the barista go through it and say, Well, how would you counter this? Right? And one of the main things we taught them is why it's a Harry Potter solution to be honest, it's, it's called. I asked you the question, right? What's the spell the Harry Potter uses to kill the bug off. Come on, you must know your Harry Potter right. now now now now now. Now that's the win against the really evil guys, the Bogo is the thing that you most fear, it comes out to the cupboard. It's actually where you know that staples a werewolf visiting the most afraid of is the moon and it's not Voldemort for Harry.
Ask my daughter. Okay.
What you do is you imagine the thing you most fear and you make it ridiculous. Right now, that actually is a classic technique of communication, you get taught it in rhetoric. If somebody hits you with something which hurts you start to exaggerate it to the point where people are laughing at it. Yeah, and if it's hurting you, you make itself up. Or if somebody says, You're an evil bastard, then you start to recount all the terrible evil things you do. And you just make it worse and worse. Until the whole audience is laughing and the person is basically neutralised, I probably shouldn't have taught you that one. Because it's Yeah. So we were taught rhetoric at school. It's every kid should be taught rhetoric. It's really powerful. So that's what you do. You You basically the point about anti story generation, is it tells you how it could be used, and it helps you get your preparation together. Yeah. It also, to be honest, should tell you don't bother about planning purpose statements, because they're a complete waste of time. I mean, I can tear any purpose or mission statement to type because it's context free. If you really want to do it. You use parables. I mean, this is one on one stuff. I mean, all the major world religions teach through parables. They don't have mission statements or purpose statements, they have parables. And parables are sufficiently ambiguous, they can adapt to different contexts and people can't dispute them. That's it if you really want a mission statement, yeah, don't have a mission statement, don't have a purpose statement, have a bunch of heuristics and some parables and train your executives to tell variations on the parable, which are based on their own experience. And lo and behold, you've got you've got something which will work. I mean, it won't sell a million books and get somebody 60 k speaker fees. But you know, that that's that's shouldn't be what this stuff is about. I mean, literally come on purpose statement is mission statement is exactly the same thing. I mean, and that book purpose is truly utterly appalling, because it's entirely retrospectively coherent. Yeah, and it's highly selective in what it does. If there's too many management books like that is Yeah, catchy word. Talent does it with anti fragile as well. I mean, we known about systems that get stronger by, by under pressure for years, they're considered the type of resilience but if you want to best sell a book, you have to claim something is highly original and unique and different. And it doesn't contribute to the field which is why there'll be an academic life really raise talent because he never attributes. And he blocks everybody I'm I'm blocked by talent, I'm quite proud of them. Simon wardley is blocked by talent. Nobel Prize winners are blocked by talent. Do you get blocked by talent if you dare to disagree? But I say that that is the problem. I mean, I know you have to live with stuff like that. But what's actually quite a sin is you know, having having effectively an attack on it can really wake people up to the dangers the purpose statement, because purpose statements are always platitudes. And platitudes are an absolute delight for cynics. Now, they can just take them apart, whereas a parable can't be
just thinking in terms of the dispositional state drives or the in the large organisation is like the, the, the focus on purpose is so strong that it's, it's almost like very difficult to challenge and then
something else in three years time it will go through the same cycle. It is the problem I mentioned in the previous group of HR departments or od departments who've got a Stockholm Syndrome relationship with the CEO.
I think sometimes also, it's the focus on purpose statement rather than actual purpose, isn't it?
It's the I call it the tyranny of the explicit Yeah, if you make something explicit, you destroy
that there's a lovely sort of mass rudan updated anecdote. The company come and say, Oh, we've got this new vision and mission statement, can you give us some advice on it? And he says, well, rather using the glossy paper, Use Cheap paper and pre fold it into the shape of an aeroplane. And then you're going to save the company time and an effort.
Yeah. I mean, it's also a main relation on this. And I remember when I was working with legendary smithkline, Beecham, and we came up with a heuristic because we were working on the merger. Anybody who looks good in the first year of the merger, you should fire because actually, those are the people who are working at reading what you're saying in your declarations, and they're basically playing the linguistic games to look good. And the people are just getting on and doing things aren't playing those games, you end up with a political foes getting promoted.
Dave, have you actually said that to anyone?
Yeah. Because,
I mean, what's the response to something like that? Because, you know, people want
people to listen. Yeah. Well, yeah, yeah. Legend, he was quite good. I mean, he, I mean, he was CEO previously because smithkline, Beecham, IBM never recovered from this. So some IBM salesman took me in to see in, in the States. And we just got on. And the trouble is that we got on because I wasn't like IBM, and I wasn't saying what I'd been wanting me to say. So it became as well, you know, this, Cindy is a complete vilamoura, which is most of my life. Now, it's generally true. Actually, if you're doing a merger, the general view is don't say anything. Yeah, this is, the minute you say something from the centre, you'll get gaming behaviour and rebellion, right? What you do is you start to change interactions. And this is what we did. Yeah. You create asymmetric teams across the two companies and get them to investigate opportunities for synergies. And then you talk about the ones which came up with good ideas. Yeah, you use archetypal story forms. Yeah, you move very quickly to change the interactions between people. And then you start to celebrate the interactions which work human sensor networks do the same thing. And then you get that that sense of direction emerges very quickly, and you just keep reinforcing it. And you don't set up anything to kill, what you may do is to say what we don't want to be. So actually, the purpose statement has value. Yeah, it's actually generally easy to agree. We don't want to, and it's difficult for people to argue with that the minute you say we do want to. That's it. He did.
They were linking to the corporate initiative. Can you comment on you've got, you mentioned that universal intervention is that idea. And then corporate initiatives tend to be one size fits all and then and then push it down? And I'm just like, recalling how many stico, you know, centralised group that's been set up to, to drive corporate initiatives. What would be your response to that? I mean,
and yeah, I mean, look, I've been in large corporates are my life, right, I have not seen a single major consultancy led corporate initiative survive beyond four or five years before it gets replaced by another attempt to do it. Now, if you can't learn from that sort of failure, there's something deeply deficient in the system, it doesn't work, right. If you do something different, what you do is and it's very simple, it's complexity principles, you change into you change interactions, you celebrate success, you punish failure, and you allow patterns to emerge. And that allows locally contextual solutions. Now again, a human sensor network will give you that these will identify where you know, parts of the system will welcome change, and parts will resist it. But you don't know what those are before you do it. So if you've got an idea about what sort of company we should be massive dispositional state find the areas where people would move to that position quite quickly. Help them do it, celebrate what they did, and then see who's ready to move. Next. you're managing an ecosystem, not a machine. So you can create some walls, you can create some pathways, but you can't control the whole process.
This is very different from the traditional change management approach. Right? So the first thing is you have a big programme, you've got a steer code and you met stakeholders, right as if that's the right way to do I mean, you kind of, I feel like Personally, I need to navigate in between I need to kind of kind of cope with what the big engine expect me to do. But at the same time as I create those networks and stakeholders start to use complexity in a in a different way. So I feel like I'm in between
you do With where people are I don't disagree with that, right. But I do think and certainly if I'm in a generalist mode, I'm speaking at conferences, I've yet to see any executive defend these initiatives in public. Because actually, they all really know it isn't working. It's just part of the game they've learned to play. Right. And it's often a distraction devices like companies adopted and safe. They know that they won't be expected to deliver results for three years, but it makes them sound good. Now, there's the famous TS Eliot quote, which I can find for you, right? It's in the wiki, right? Is nothing pleases so much as to pretend to be doing something new, but carrying on with what we did before. Yeah. And yeah, it's a lovely quote. Alright. So I think what you do is you say, Okay, so let's take the anti story thing, right. Like, we got the purpose statement, let's see how it could be destroyed. And let's create counters to that. And the counters will be changing people. Let's find out how the purpose statement is really going down. And what sort of stories have been generated and correct, is that we deal with employee satisfaction surveys, we know they're a waste of time. But we start off by saying you need to explain what the satisfaction survey said, we can help you with that. And then wait until people realise the explanation is more valuable than the survey anyway. And they just switch over to that says, migration strategies. And you know, the role of people like me, to be honest, is to challenge it in public, it's to it's to, you know, say the Emperor has got no clothes. And gradually that start to switch and you will see it switch. Alright, just remember, the whole issue about mission statements, purpose statements, corporate initiatives, is a phenomena of the last three decades. It didn't exist before that. Yeah. And it's going to disappear as fast as it grew. And the problem is, it's driven by management consultancies. Yeah. And they're not able to sustain their partners drawings at the level they want. So they're driving up utilisation. So if you look at McKinsey, McKinsey is used to be quite a good firm, but you look at the stuff they're producing on COVID. And agile at the moment. It's trivial beyond belief. It's just recycling old platitudes in different ways. There's nothing of any depth in it whatsoever.
Joking if you're saying something, I can't hear you. Now, yeah, okay. Okay. Anything else from anybody?
Can I just, it's just import from earlier connecting with what you were saying about stuff you're doing in the States. And obviously, here, talking UK, there's been a whole load of homeschooling and this concerns about gaps in sort of education, and what have you, is there anything being done about how there could be some economical free training with youngsters that could fit with the National Curriculum? So they could be working to sort of generate some of the information and things?
The answer is yes. All right. I mean, when things were hoping the you feel guide will do is make this something that people can do at government level. So we're actually I mean, on Monday, when we've got agreement now from one of the main public sector consultancy groups, which is to actually adopt the assessment process, we're building for the thing that won't compete with our network, because these people work immediately at Cabinet Office level, which small consultants don't All right. So but I remember going into dentistry to say a bad story on this with the nudge unit. And I said, Look, we got this mechanism. Yeah, please make it an abscess. Every British school is going to create journalists, it will cost you virtually nothing. It will give you the data to identify when the system is ready to be nudged. And I thought it was pretty self evident. I still remember he said, Well, we don't need that, because the government Tell me what they want. And I just changed things to make it happen. And he just couldn't get that concept of mapping. And then people are now getting it. And we are now getting the interest. And there are now actually VCs and others who are realising this could be big. And when we put in a bid about six years ago, but we asked it, it would cost us about 50,000,010 50 million over two years to create every school in every country in the world, telling stories. Yeah, and after that, it will be self sustaining, right? And we didn't get the funding, but I'm a woman, as I said in it, because, you know, we'll if we ever have a pandemic, we'll really need this. And people are starting to remember that you know that you need those feedback mechanisms, right? The peace and reconciliation, stuff originated in Colombia, that will now move into state. So there's a time when these things start to change, right. We're in one of those times. So going back to what Bonnie said, Yeah, there's it there are times when you actually need you need to call out the negative and be positive and sometimes you may have to wait here for people to listen. But I've actually found that an awful lot of the business we get comes from people who said, you know, you know that thing you said five years ago. It's often an introduction to a conversation. And sometimes that's what you have to do. And for people in corporate and bodies use me like this anyway, all right, you bring people at me and say it. Now, that's what we get paid to do sometimes, right is to, you know, to be the voice crying in the wilderness who can be cast back into the wilderness at the end of the day. I sort of regard wheelchair is slightly preferable to Cambridge, at least it has some gradients in it, but that's another matter. So. Yeah, David? Yes.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah. Okay.
I just wanted to ask whether, you know, the work of Travis bush and Bob Marshak on dialogical D, because it very much resonates with the with your approach?
It doesn't, it doesn't, right. The problem with it is it's heavily workshop based. And all of those techniques, I think, have big problems, because they privilege the cultural bias of the facilitator. So it all those processes linking with things like participative action research. And if you look at the ethnography, which has been done on that, it turns out the people who turn up to the workshops, the people who match the cultural expectations of the facilitators, and therefore it doesn't reach the parts that the other parts need to reach. And critically, it doesn't scale. Yeah. So the principles are there. But workshops do not scale for society level change. What they do is they make people comfortable. Yeah. And I think that that's my problem. All right, you have this debate with a few people, including Sharma good, right, I think I mean, schirmacher and sanghi, to my mind, and neocolonial. What they've decided is if everybody was a white, liberal MIT, educated male who read some Buddhism and didn't understand it, that the world would be a better place. Yeah, and that's what they privilege, right? The reality is that the world isn't like that. It's make weekly where make weekly talks about natural systems. She is thinking about redwoods in California engaged with deer. Most of us are deal with buddy cockroaches in inner city areas. Yeah, those are natural systems as well. So for me, it's all about how do you scale? And how do you remove the ideological component of facilitation? Yeah, and the big thing on narrative and this is a big, lots of people have created narrative databases, but they want to curate them. It's fascinating. The people that I mean, I just talking with some Aboriginal groups in Australia, because six years ago, they were doing this and they wouldn't work with us. And I said, these podcasts want to curate your stories. They want to treat you as a curiosity. And now they come back because that's exactly what happened. They were treated as a curiosity. Right. And the curation phenomenon you see this with journalists, they want to gather people's stories, and they want to curate them. Yeah. And yeah, our whole focus is on curation is distributed, not centralised.
And I find it quite interesting as well. Because as I collect lots of stories or narratives, there are lots of people who don't want to deep dive into it. They just say, Oh, just give me the, you know, just give me the high level, give me the three bullet points. And then but actually, the, the jewels are actually, in those stories, I feel a lot of people are not, they just don't feel comfortable. They say, oh, you're a qualitative researcher, you comfortable with all this data? Oh, just give me the next sec summary I've been asked
I've done is I've basically downloaded a sensemaking set onto an iPad and given it to an executive and just have fun with that. What I don't do is I don't put your what you're playing to here is performance anxiety. The reason they don't do that is you know more than they do. And therefore they don't want it and they don't yet so they are basically by letting them play with stuff. And then yeah, that's actually more effective than take the story. Sorry, God,
I don't know. Yeah, like I just have an example for a couple of months ago, a friend running ethnography for like a huge financial aid institution. And they they did exactly that. So they did notice something by going to the field. They noticed like problems, like real problems that like the community didn't want that investment because was disturbing for them. But because of the way the workshops were hold and the way the paperwork was done, the solution didn't have this knowledge and was actively acting to actively acting us are horrible, but anyway, just creating like a start of methods to be able to formally ignore what was happening and when they're there. Thanks for watching. Called by the ethnographers, they could just refer to the paperwork and ignore effects.
What we've also found is the manner. One of the problems is it's a big problem with bigger projects people try and start off small, rather than starting off big. Yeah, are they use workshop and then people can challenge it. If on the other hand, I mean, it's why I try and get people to use mass sense before the story capture. If you can say all of our employees contributed to this, it's very difficult for somebody to ignore it. And they'll be curious about it. Yeah.
Yes. And
if you have to give them three bullet points, Bonnie, you give them paradoxical bullet points. And when they say what does it mean? You say, Well, I don't know. Do you want to have a look? Yeah, yeah, y'all understand this? I don't, I just got the statistics. I'm just, I'm just a researcher. Right? I'm giving you this historical pattern. I don't what it means, but I can show you the stories whether you work it out.
I think that's very clever. I did that recently. And not really
even it's actually it's more devious, clever. But yeah,
it is. What I've done is actually on getting the sound bites from the staff and then putting, and then we do have, we did have a workshop with the various senior executives in the room. Now what I did was actually I just show them, these are the stories, but I feel that I did handpick the stories, but I I consciously pick the different views and put it in front of them as the result they actually realise the voice of the of the employees and some of them are quite nasty, but what I what I struggle with is I feel like still I am doing the filtering. I try to be as open Yeah, and I I should not but what I manage is yes, I do still have 12 pages, but kind of mix it up nicely. they assign more executive look so they can scan through those stories quickly. But they're not seeing the whole they are so it's it's still my objective judgement to pull your
and any thoughts or what you select problems. I mean, I think some of the most effective ones I've done is where we've we've actually created something and then we sat the executives down and say what's keeping you awake tonight and give them the result the next day. So we make it more proximate and more immediate. Okay, guys, anything else with we're 10 past the hour, but I was 10 minutes late in so I feel I owe that at least. I've got 15 minutes now before the next session. And that's that's actually quite good for last few days.