WB-40

On this week’s show we talk with Tech Monitor‘s Ed Qualtrough about the ways in which people are rebelling against the tech giants, and how the CIO might be the most adapt to change in the C-Suite.

On this week’s show we are joined by Julia Hobsbawm to talk about how the pandemic and lockdown may prove to be a catalyst to change more about work than just the physical workplace. You can find more about Julia’s work with the Demos Workshift Commission here:https://demos.co.uk/project/the-workshift-commission/ Show Transcript (Automatically generated) Intro Matt:  Once again, we find ourselves on the precipice of a show. Christopher, is there been anything in your week just gone, that’s been different from the week that came before that that became before that that came before that? Chris: Oh, that’s a really difficult question to answer because,  it’s such a varied lifestyle. Really? It isn’t it. I can’t say that anything significant has changed. It’s been a pretty busy week. I can say that it’s been one of those weeks where I’ve I CA Friday came around very quickly. I had lots to do and this week has started in the same way. Although I was very glad that I’ve got up in the mornings. It didn’t last few days. And being able to watch the cricket on TV, it’s been fantastic. That’s been a sort of, something of a I have a nice little treat in these in these times, but I know Matt, I have to admit it’s been a fairly quiet week in terms of novelty. Sorry about that. Matt: I keep asking hoping, Oh, well, I’ll turn. Instead to Julia, Julia Hobsbawm joining us this week, how was your last seven days been? Julia: Hello? Well, first of all, it’s a lovely thrill to be here. And I love the fact that we had a technological glitch before we came on air that cause I I’m I’m I’m the the, the anti-tech candidate. I mean, I’m not really, but you know my week has been mercifully cricket free. I would have to say I’m probably a sport free zone by choice other than doing 10,000 steps a day where I can get to it. I’ve done. Quite a few bits of far telly and conferences. And so sort of dressing up from pajama bottoms up in front of my zoom, if you, if you know what I mean? So that’s been quite good and Yes. You know, just one, I have become a tremendously house, proud person in this infinite lockdown I’ve been taking delivery of, you know, patch, plants, and that sort of thing. That’s been my week. Matt: That sounds do, are you able to notice any variation in days of the week or do they all just seem to be like something day? Julia: Big big advocate of routine and rhythm and so on and so forth. So actually I do have a little set pattern. Yeah, there’s a demarcation between Monday and Friday and the weekend. But I don’t really advocate that generally. I think that all those rules about, you know, Days on and days off just to be adapted according to what you like. I’ve got lots and lots of kids and we have, we have half a dog it’s complicated. The dog doesn’t completely belong to us, but the dog is with us at the moment and dah, dah, dah. And I end up, I’m like the dog’s grandma because my daughter who’s 20 years, you know, behaves towards the dog, like a single mum that. Sometimes says, Oh, grandma, you take it. And so I find myself plotting around the park with the dog. Sharing that, but you have is . Matt: Yeah. Excellent. That’s good to know. I I’ve studiously avoiding any concept of dog in our home. Cause I, I, you know, at least children, you get to a point where they can clean up after themselves. Whereas dogs are, it appears you have to follow them around with a plastic bag at all times all the way until the end of their little doggy lives, which can’t be doing with that. Julia: Well, is it you, that suggests you’re a cat person possibly. Yes, Matt: absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s good Snyder where we’ve drawn the lines here. Isn’t it? It’s, you know. Excellent. Chris: Yeah. Good to know that you’re spending some time making your space livable in a different way. I think we have to do that. Don’t worry. I have to try and take some some time to make it a little bit more Appealing. If we’re going to be there all the time, you know, even if it’s perfectly nice to start off with, we tried to find ways to incrementally make it slightly nicer. Don’t we? Yes. Julia: I think I’m, I, I think I’m one of what I’m called the 1% of the 1% during this lockdown, you know, to have space, to have. Different rooms for every member of the family to have large shared space, to have a little bit of outdoors, to be near in my case, hamster teeth, which is a large, huge sprawling piece of land, which is never boring, very near me and so on and so forth. I really can’t imagine what it’s like. And feel pretty wretched whenever I’ve read. Christina Lamb articles in the Sunday times describing or statistics like for some people, I mean, it’s beyond imagining really the level of stress and hardship of being locked up. There, my kids are not little tiny people anymore. They’re teenagers and young adults, which also makes a difference. So yeah, but, but I think actually wherever you live. Luxury or otherwise you’ve had to sort of zone it a bit like your own regional planning officer, you know, Where does so-and-so do their work, their school work, where do we do this, that and the other. And that, that has been quite interesting, you know, the inner architect and all of us has, has this. Chris: Absolutely. So, so I’m not unlike Julia, I do have strong demarcation. I, I reached Friday afternoon a bit like a cross channel Sumit climbing out of the water. It’s that kind of. Staggering towards the finish line. What about yourself? How has this week been? Matt: If I can manage to get that particular visual image out of my head?  It’s, it’s been a week of getting stuff done and particularly on Friday being able to do the first big piece of going out to tender for big new project, he stuff at work, which is brilliant. And There’s been an awful lot of work with the team over the last four or five months. And with some external people helping out as well. And we’ve now got eight weeks to see what we can do to be able to start to replace some of their core systems, but also try to be able to use this as a lever, to be able to help the organization get a bit better at Joining itself up behind the scenes, which is very exciting. And I’m very pleased that we’ve got to that point and it feels like I’m at now doing stuff that is, well, I think we should be doing as opposed to clearing the backlog of the stuff that was in flight when I joined, which is a great relief part from that, I learned how to cook ramen, which is very exciting following on from my learning, how to cook Goza a few weeks ago with Yuki’s kitchen, which is the most fabulous thing. The only thing was though I was supposed to have an online course except I’d managed to get the date a month out. And so I had all the chicken and noodles and soccer and everything else that I needed for producing this wonderful ramen dish, but unfortunately no zoom class to do it. So I had to go on my own with the recipe that was that had been sent through. And then I’m going to try it again next month with Yuki giving experts the position and see if I can do better next time. So that was very exciting. I was kind of, I was in cookery classes, a thing to behold, and I think I would do more of them in the future. Julia: I’m having zoom exercise classes, which has been a bit of a revelation. And tomorrow morning I’m going to be joining a dance class in Tel Aviv or a dance movement class in Televiv. Don’t quite understand it. But that’s the plan that has been interesting. That’s been a revelation, actually that you can just sort of join a live stream. Anywhere in the world. I mean, of course you always could before, but somehow this moment has made us experimental. Did you ever think you’d made wrong? Well, Matt: maybe. But what I wouldn’t have expected was to be doing online. That’s definitely the, the bit that’s changed around it also. I mean, this is the other thing that the the continuing exploits of my friends in the capacitor and ventilator, which is the virtual public we’ve been running on and off through lockdown. There was a group of people who now desparately spread across from Galway in the West of Ireland all the way through to, I don’t know who the furthest flair is, probably somebody in Stockholm. And we’re seeing each other more than we have done in 20 years, which is fabulous. But all from the comfort of our own seats, we should probably have you reached a certain ages. Probably a worrying tendency cause with we ever leave the seats again, anyway, fantastic stuff. We’re going to be talking about some athletes, some of the things allied to that. Thinking about how organizations are fairing through this, which is a theme that we keep coming back to. Cause I think it’s really important and to look at it from, from your lens as somebody. Julia, who’s been doing an awful lot of thinking around networks and groups and organizations and how to make our life simpler. So let’s get on with it. Main interview Matt: So we’re now entering into the second year of this mass experiment into dramatically disparate working practices, flexible working practices, homeworking not being in the same physical space as our colleagues and so on. And I actually interested to start off with . All that you look at and study around how organizations operate in networks and, and collaboration and so on. How do you think it’s going at the moment? Why do you think we’re at? Julia: Well, I think we’re sort of in the middle of nowhere. It’s the name of a paper I’ve got coming out called the nowhere office for demos. I’m the chair of the work shift commission, a new. Exploration of what the world of work is going to be like run by the think tank demos. And I think we’re in the middle of nowhere because we’re, well, I want to pick up on the, on the beautiful word liminal that was used with Rhode Island last week. I mean, we are twixt in between. A place of fixity and certainty, which was the office where even with some flexibility and some work spaces and, you know, ultimately it was still an old system that people went into. A building with regularity. And we are now transitioning in this space, which is currently nowhere where we just don’t know. Where we will end up because the pandemic has surprised everybody by proving how versatile work can be thanks to technology. So all the big companies started really effectively offshoring their work to home as early as February last year, you know, long before. Mid-March when the ax came down. Actually, if you talk to, as I’m sure you have done facilities managers and CEOs and tech, and what have you, I mean, it was all set up for the very big companies at home and lo and behold it works. And so then you had the question about, well, if it worked so well, what does that mean? Economically socially. And so there’s this enormous sets of questions has been expelled like a volcano that was rumbling and rumbling and rumbling for 50 years, which it was in the world of work with discussion around flexibility, with discussion around presenteeism, with discussion around all sorts of things. But it. You know, the, the volcano never erupted while the pandemic is that eruption and it’s still spearing out all sorts of things, but when it sets goals, the big question is where will it settle? Will we be going back to that more or less fixed routine and pattern in place? Spoiler alert. I don’t think we will. And what will it feel like to the people doing that work? So, so where are we as we are in an exciting place we’re in a place that could potentially be an awful lot better than it was before, because I take the view that work wasn’t a great place before. I mean, certainly if the metrics on stress and absenteeism through stress and. Productivity or anything to go by which is not to completely dismiss and rubbish the office, but it is to say that change was probably wanted and overdue, but wasn’t felt to be as possible as it is now. So that’s my position as kind of an optimistic pessimist really. Matt: You, you gave us some, a bit of a sneak preview of the work, the demos. And I think one of the things that struck me and it was the you identify that there’s two sets of people and there are people maybe who are either newer into their careers or newer into an organizational, both. And then those who are further into their careers and sort of maybe. In their own minds, learning less. Although I think anybody who thinks they don’t need to learn anymore is in deep trouble. Julia: Yes. I’m going to call them learners and leavers. I mean, I think that when we think about the place of work and the idea that we will go back, there’s a real question Mark, about how often and why, and fundamentally as you say. Kind of specialize in organizational behavior around networks and the way people. Form networks which is actually a rather more interesting way to look at it, the networking, which is perhaps being pedantic. But, but I think if you understand the science of networks, which is tremendously interesting, not least in the middle of a pandemic to understand the epidemiological spread is really quite similar to the way ideas spread, for example yeah. But in terms of networks, we are of course, a social species and we need to connect in order to share information and knowledge and ideas and creativity and warmth and love and passing on risk and passing on news about danger and all sorts of things. And so that is how we organize ourselves as a society. And it’s how we organize ourselves in work places. And so not being able to be in a workplace. Does present a real problem for those networks, which I don’t believe, you know, the Trello’s and slacks and what have used the productivity platforms ha quite meet. I’m sure they would say otherwise, but I felt quite clearly that Well, I know from my research that we’re going to see a rather interesting new generation of social networks around work, but at the moment, going back to this idea of learners and leavers, what you’re then left with post pandemic is once people have realized it might be more possible to choose. The frequency with which they go back to an office and, and indeed the bosses, if you like might decide, it’s cheaper to have people, some people stay at home some of the time and so on. Why will anyone want to go to an office? It will be to collaborate and to connect and to be social and to gather in those networks face to face. And then you have one group that has a greater need than others. And that’s the youngsters. That’s the young people, because fundamentally they want to hang out. They want to learn. They want to gossip. They want to watch, they want to experience, whereas the leavers, if you like the baby boomers and I mean, I’m born in 1964. What does that make me? Matt: Definitely gen Julia: X, gen X. Okay. Our source of generation. We. We quite like having what they used to call work life balance stamp. We were quite enjoying some of the new found freedoms. And so we might want to go in and dip in back to the office, but I don’t know about you, but the idea of going back to an office nine to five is, is, is about the last thing I would want. So that’s really interesting because then you say, you think, well, what’s that going to be like for the property guys? What? So that would be like for the it guys, what’s that going to be like for the HR guys? What’s that going to be like for the C-suite generally, what’s that going to be like for the building, the office, the experience. And of course the other trend that we’ve seen, that again has been bubbling away, all this, all this time and never really agonizing is this thing that they call purpose. The P word, which is the meaning, the values, which Jen Zed, the newest kids on the block care a lot about purpose. They care about two things. Fundamentally, actually one is mobility. So they, they want to be able to go into an office, but they also want to have access to absolutely everything on the move. But the other thing is they want to have meaning and value in their lives. And so work has got to fit that. So suddenly purpose, which had been gaining momentum for the last three years, things like the British Academy, future, the corporation purpose stuff, which I’ve been a little bit involved in last year, 200. Of the world’s largest companies effectively signed a declaration of purpose in the summer, suddenly something that was sort of seen as almost nice to have, you know, next generation CSR has actually become a really live issue now, which is when we get back from all of this, where are we going to do it? How are we going to do it? And why are we going to do it? Matt: You think then that will be maybe one of the other things that we’ll have learned out of this is that we can actually be able to control things a bit more on our own terms. And so is there the purpose part, part as much as anything about how do you actually attract people to become in any way? Part of an employer anymore because you don’t have the physical space. You don’t have the places to go. The signage on the walls, all of that stuff. If you’re stuck in your own home at all times, then there’s no sense of being part of the greater thing. And that’s, that’s a You know, that’s really quite a significant challenge for organizations who probably over the last few decades have started to, you know, we individually have started to question, what is the purpose of us being part of a big organization. If the, if the return for it is three months, notice is all you get and we won’t be loyal to you, but we expect loyalty in return. I wonder if there’s something there that could be quite existential for the, the big corporation. Julia: Oh, I, I agree completely. And I think that the philosophy of meaning attached to work is what the purpose agenda means in practice for employers, which is, and, and to your point specifically about the Dispersal of, of a culture because people work remotely. I, I think it’s going to become the number one priority for brands and businesses and organizations is how do you create and nurture cohesion if you are not United in effectively a skyscraper or the emblem of it? I mean, what was fascinating to me writing this report was I was. I had a flashback really to just a few years ago in 2018. I think it was the Bloomberg’s new office building opened in the city of London and Mike Bloomberg really began the era of the office as Citadel to attract talent. It’s in fact, when people began to be described as talent, rather than just employees, you know, really when Jan. Gen Zed began to, well, the millennials, when the millennials began to enter the workplace and suddenly offices began to compete to be really like sexy with, you know, all you can eat bars and bean bags and what have you. And that trend continued. All the way through the decade, which saw the arrival of, you know, the triple revolution of the internet, social or mobile Island broadband and all of that, the apex of which could be seen to be the opening of the gazillion square foot building of Bloomberg in the city of London, which was, was going to did briefly pre pandemic house 4,000 people. You know, it was the most sustainable building on the planet, blah, blah, blah. Well, it what’s going to happen to that building is my question. Is it going to just snap back, like pre pregnancy weight to its former full occupancy or not? I don’t know. So, I mean, it’s really a, it’s a really interesting question. And if not, how can you have on a distributed basis?  Culture and a sense of belonging. And that’s the thing where the tech that you chaps are really interested in becomes suddenly married almost for the first time to human behavior and human need. It feels to me like for the last 25 years or so, it’s been almost. Separate in some respects, certainly in an office environment, it’s been about productivity. It’s been about documents. It’s been about sharing. It’s been about uploading. It’s been about not really connecting people and suddenly that’s becoming more and more and more important. So it’s a, it’s a proverbial tipping point. That’s going on. Chris: That is a good point. And it’s, which is, it has been a lot about technology has been about sharing golf stuff rather than connecting people in some way to share thoughts and ideas. And but I wonder whether the, yeah, the, the, the, the city has been exaggerated a little bit in as much as. People are, people are saying, Oh, here we go. You know, one of other landlords and the cities are going to be empty and nobody’s going back to work. And I think from my point of view, I see different, as you say, different types of people that are there. There are definitely people who are, are absolutely delighted to be away from the office. And maybe that includes those of us who got to a certain age and, or maybe became. You know, in terms of knowledge workers or whatever, you’re kind of vulnerable enough or or confident enough in your own body, you just say, actually, I’m going to work from home today, or I’m going to go and work from that coffee shop or whatever. And you don’t fear the, any reprisals because they can take a run and jump ball, get another job if you don’t like it and all that. But I also think there are some types of work and sometimes the people for which the elastic pulling us back to. But how it was before is stronger. So yeah. As you, as you say that a lot to those with younger people, those people who are trying to climb the greasy pole at the end of the day, if you’re nearer to the people, making the decisions, you have a better chance of influencing them and being seen and being noticed and all of that kind of thing. So we are a competitive species and as we. Compete for the attention of the people that I’ve got, the money, we will go back. You know, those people who want to do that, we’ll go and be close to those people. It’s it’s inevitable, I think. And I think there are some businesses who. Make the decision that they want to work in that way, they want to work close to people. They want to work in physical proximity and they will go back to those cities and those organizations who believe that they can. Sure. Well elsewhere. Another, another way of working. Well not, and they’ll say, okay, no fine. You do. You go for it. You know, you take all the, all the costs and all of the, all of the risk of, of, of having all this real estate and, and all these assets. And we, we won’t do that. And I saw that when I, I was, I was running a project on a team, building a cryptocurrency thing a couple of years ago. And all of those people are all over the world and they were all young and very, very articulate, very intelligent, highly valuable people in as much as they have really good skills and they were, they didn’t need to be close to each other. It was, it was Google Hangouts or meet or whatever. And we met, you know, a time where the one hour of the day where the people in New Zealand could talk to the people in Chicago and all of that kind of thing. But do you know what every single. Yeah. When the sort of Ethereum big international networking thing came around, whether it be in Prague or in stock on whatever they wanted to be there. Everybody wanted to be there because it was that moment where you got to sit down and have a beer with the person you’ve been coding with for the last you know, six, seven, eight, nine months online. So th I, I do think, I think there are lots of people who will do this and they will definitely be work apart. But I do think some of the gaps, maybe all of the gaps will be filled by organizations and people who do just want to get back together and they want to work physically and this, but they are just those kinds of people in business. Julia: I think that’s completely right. I think it is Not the case that the nowhere office, the remote office is going to eradicate, you know, patterned working in the same place anymore than, you know, fundamentally manufacturing requires a production locus in order to. Assemble the parts and so on and so forth. But what I do think going back to the, you know, the old volcano analogy is that there have been rumblings of discord and discontent and efforts for change that have really not surfaced for about 50 years. So if you just take flexible working, I mean, just to, you know, just to burnish a few feminist credentials at this point in a row, in a, in a, in a digital room full of blokes, I mean, You know, women by and large champion, the idea of flexible working to be better at having a balance and childcare and sense of well, and it has been pretty hard. One BC was very much an early adopter. The phrase work-life balance being. Used in response to a paper that they published as, as long ago as 1987, but flexible working has never really completely caught on and of course, lockdown. Now when a lot of men and male executives suddenly understood it and got the point a bit, that’s when this whole discussion about possibly not working in the same way has has. So I do think that Certain genies are not going to go back in the bottle is what I think. And one of those genies is that if you don’t have to, or don’t want to work in a fixed immutable way, you will be able to argue convincingly that you don’t have to anymore. And even if your boss thinks they can keep a lid on it, legislation will follow. And from that point of view, I don’t think it will be the same again, but what I think is that in exactly the same way that all humans let’s face, it are on a spectrum of all sorts of things at any given time. I think the work is on a spectrum. You know, the learner at one end and the lever at one end is a spectrum in which your needs and the needs of your organization change. And so. Some organizations at certain points are absolutely going to need everybody and all the time, a bit like, you know, there’s no leave in a police, you know, in a, in the police force or poor, poor law in the NHS at the moment, you know, all leave is canceled kind of thing. But that doesn’t mean the norm is going to be presenteeism anymore. I think that, so, so I think there’s a separation between the hard economics of the way individual organizations need to run on a re-organized and therefore, do people need to be in the same place in order to get it done? Is it just too complicated, even with the best software? So run different schedules, not in the same place, you know, debate. Arguably that might be the case, but culturally it’s another, another master entirely. And I think that a number of shifts that were beginning from around about 2007, which is roughly speaking, when you started to have all the, all the mobile brands and mobile light, you know, The Facebooks and the Instagrams and the Airbnbs, for example. And you had a very particular book published that year called the four hour work week. Did you ever read that fantastic book? Did you ever increase your look? Oh, it’s the most marvelous book. I mean, it basically says it’s the four hour work week, not the four hour work day. And it says it was on the bestseller list for seven years. That’s how much of a nerve it touch and it effectively argued. That emotionally and philosophically and intellectually and logically, there was a case to do your work anywhere, but in a presentee way, and to keep your bosses happy. And that touch a design Geist, which I think a pandemic is going to re re-ignite. That’s all I’m saying. And it brings back in that whole kind of big purpose piece, which is why we all working anywhere and what do we want with our lives? And there’s capitalism. Everything is cracked up to be blah, blah, blah. That’s what I’m really interested in is those big questions. I’m not denying at all that of course, city centers will reopen with the, with the latte stalls and the dry cleaners and the. Restaurants and the bars and the, all that sort of stuff, because that’s, that’s, that’s society, society will resume, but I do think these big questions have been unleashed in us. We hadn’t had a pandemic in this kind of connected industrialized, modern society for a hundred years. At this scale, Matt: it would have been a very, very different experience. If the pandemic had hit say 20 years ago, as well before the connected nature of how we work now, it would have been a completely different. Completely different experience two decades Julia: back. Although I know an architect, a guy called David Katz in New York pointed out that, of course, a lot of modern building design from netball busier onwards was in fact informed by the, the, the aesthetic of the last pandemic of the Spanish flu, which I hadn’t even realized. So, so these shifts in the way, the world functions. Around our safety and our mobility and our meaning, you know, we’re experiencing mass death, mass threat of death. That is making us question meaning isn’t it? Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you got to think that there are going to be people who. A few years ago would think to themselves, well, the chances are they’re going to look to 70 plus and there’s going to be a retirement and all of that kind of thing. And I’d even had my pension and all of that. But maybe one of the things that this does to everybody is to take that question and shake it about a bit and say, you know, is life too short? You know, are we. How are we wasting our lives when we’re young and if this kind of thing is going to happen again. And you know, it’s a valid question, isn’t Julia: it? Yeah. Especially when you marry it with, with, with the whole climate discussion and that sensibility and the fact that what you’ve now got again, as a consequence of the pandemic and as a consequence of the seriousness of the situation is that. The purpose of agenda and the ESG environmental sustainable and governance agenda is curiously and alignment for the first time, arguably in a hundred years between the bosses and the worker, which is everybody wants the same thing for the first time survival. And that’s really interesting. So they might be coming at it from different. Physicians, you know, how do you retain and attract talent and have social cohesion in an office that isn’t really an office anymore? How do you do, you know, drinks and secret center and that if everybody’s on shift, but at the same time, if what you’ve got is the boardroom in embracing purpose principles, which are really different too. You know, stakeholder capitalism, then that could also create all sorts of change. So just in one case alone, I’m really interested in what’s going to happen around the use of time and the spending of time. I, I think when you asked me at the beginning, how my week was, I used to be a very much champion of switch off at six o’clock on a. Friday, for example, and demarcation and practice what I used to call a technician bat and no technology for 24 hours and a sort of screen wide. And I don’t know if I think I would advocate that anymore, partly because we’ve become so embedded with the tech, but also because. More and more, we want to choose our own patterns and our own presenteeism around our work is a form of freedom and choice. And so if I could both wave a magic wand and maybe even future a little bit, I would say that I also think we’re going to see not just an uncoupling from that place of work, but also. The fixity of saying you’re paid for this number of hours and you’re paid to show that you’ve worked those hours rather than have you given meaning to this organization. What does success look like? What have you contributed? Have you brought your networks into this organization? Have you been a good team member? Have you, you know, time I think could become much, much less relevant or differently counted. Matt: That’s what interests me. Yeah. There’s definitely something in that. And I think that the I mean, from my years of working as a, as a consultant and trying always to be able to work on the principle of. Being able to charge a client for the outputs or the outcomes of what I was doing rather than the input of time and that working sometimes, but mostly not because most people couldn’t equate. Yes. But how many hours would he. B because that’s how we’re used to paying for people. And I think that shift away from the inputs is going to be, there’s definitely potential there, but I think it’s really hard. And I think the other bit within this is if we think about this as the idea of gaining, making gains in productivity, I think traditionally the, the organization, the employer has always expected that the primary recipient of any productivity gain should be the organization that was power industrialization, whether, so you put machines in, you can get rid of people and then you can, you know, and so on. And I don’t think that works with knowledge work. I think there’s a lot of claims at the moment that, you know, artificial intelligence, et cetera, will. Get rid of the need for currently highly paid knowledge professionals. It will get rid of some anthroposophy and there’s, you know, some traits like within healthcare or within say the legal profession where a lot of the Drudge work there there’s currently reasonably highly paid. We’ll just go because you don’t need to do it, but. Maybe this marks the point at which for certain types of work, more people are able to be in a position of greater power over the people who are contracting them to do things. Maybe this will give an opportunity for them to be able to start to take the rewards of that productivity. If it is, if I can do the work in four hours a week, but I still get the outcomes you expect, don’t expect me to fill in the other 36 as we stuffed, just because that’s what a week is. Julia: Yes. I think the whole productivity question, by the way, it’s just so fascinating. I’ve never understood why people just go, Oh, There’s the productivity factors again, aren’t they terrible, you know, productivity is always obviously, or it seems to me index linked to creativity to purpose, to meaning whether you are on a factory floor or an office floor. And actually what I think is coming out of this phase is a sort of alignment again, thanks to technology and thanks to the trend where. We’re not really going to differentiate between the factory floor and the office floor work is all going to have to tick similar boxes, which is, is it first of all, is it ethical? That’s a big issue, more and more, is it sustainable? You know, and. Does it provide a good environment for the people doing the work? One of the, one of the most pioneering examples actually of purpose driven work which I was surprised to come across extraordinary case study of, of, of the Kellogg’s factory, the cereal factory, and In production in the 1930s, which is a Kellogg instigated, a six hour day, a flexible working shorter working day in 1929 in order to give more work because after the great depression. You know, there was such a, such a, an economic crisis and it proved incredibly popular with the men and women leading those lives so much so that they campaign to retain it all the way up until the 1950s, when it turned out that the workers wanted more hours, because there was so many white goods they wanted to buy and rumor has it that the wives got, you know, and see that the husbands were under their feet. A few extra hours a week, but that may be just an urban myth, but actually in the end it lasted until the eighties, but it was done over by management management, wanted to control the hours. So the other question, so, so many things to talk about here. Hope you can come back and have another conversation, but I think what’s really interesting is burstable of course, productivity is linked to meaning and whether we value the time we are spending. And that should, in my view a much more valuable than what time we’re spending, you know, is there a point to what you’re doing and are you being treated well for doing it? But the second issue is really what, what is the work itself, if you are in fact producing, you know, I don’t know, toxic products made with slave labor. That’s just not cool anymore for anybody anywhere. And increasingly those values, I think, are not going to, they’re not going to be put away even when people fear that there’s not enough jobs going round. I think that, that that issue is live for large organizations, you know, we’re in a  very self-conscious era. Are we not where certain values and norms are popping up a fresh,  and that  makes me think that some of these shifts might actually stick. That culturally, there’s going to be a lot more force than there has been before driven by, beyond, but also driven by the market. The whole ethics question is, is actually now got commercial T that’s really an interesting moment. So productivity ought to go up. If those interests are aligned. And if it doesn’t, the question is, well, what is it? Bad management. Is it presenteeism? Is it lack of skills? Is it the wrong technology? Is it? What, what is it? Outro Matt: Well, thank you to Julia for fascinating discussion into themes that we continue to come back to. But I think we still need to explore them. Anyway she’s had to shoot off Chris, you’ve got another week ahead of you. Chris: I mean, I Matt: hope that’s why I, yeah. Tell me to give you this note. I’m sorry. This is a very harsh way to break it to you, but yeah, Chris: the if I’m spared, yes, I’ll have another week in front of me. And it’s well it’s again, another busy one and. I mean, luckily we’re in that time of the year where, so this is how it works with IDC. At the start of the year, we have these things called directions events, which are essentially predictions and all that stuff, sort of all that good stuff that comes out. And then I’ll do some a turn on one or two of these events. And I think like I talked about last week, recording them and things like that. So, and then we’ll talk to people and now that might be something to come to some conversations about. How about how we might be able to help people and things like that. So that’s some of that’s going on in the next few weeks with some of the people that were at some of our events. So that’s good because that’s me talking to people that I’ve not talked to before. And it made me think about actually without opening the can of worms, about what we were just talking about and, and about the fact that the funding part of the funding for me of this job and it’s valuable to me is it helps me expand my network. And no doubt I bring my own network to it. Right. So that’s part of my buddy, but it is valuable to me too, because I’m meeting people and learning things that I wouldn’t otherwise have done. And I think, especially when you’re young, that’s part of what you go, but you’re opposite. I think that’s something we should maybe, maybe as we employ people, you know, we should be bringing up the things that you do get out of a job when you’re in it. But anyway, sorry, I didn’t want to you know, continue the debate. But it just made me think about it and it made me think about what I’m doing this week and all of those kinds of good things. But yeah, it’s going to be a bit like that. A few conversations with customers, few with new, new, new connections, I think, I think that’s about it. Really. Matt, what about you? Matt: Well we continue to track how many people are going to be sending their responses to the tender that I mentioned at the beginning of the show. Very exciting. You can watch it live on the digital outcomes on gov government, UK. It’s it’s like watching the football on tele techs back in the eighties. Very similar. Are Chris: you are you going to share the link in the on the web page? Matt: I might. Well do it’s that Chris: exciting when you go to the web page? Is that it is something involving like Nora orange on the page and you have to wait until it turns over to get to your Matt: that’d be great. No, it’d be late new Orleans procurement for a new set of spanners. And then, yeah, it’d be fabulous. And then other than that it, it’s actually a bit of a week of relative Relative quiet, contemplation and comparisons to the last few words. And then the weekend, I’ve got to try to think of things to do with the kids next week during half term, because it is half term and I will be spending most of the week with them rather than working. So I’ve really got to come up with some plans of stuff to do cause otherwise it will be a as a day of video games, which will not go down well with anybody. Chris: Ah, well, you ought to get one of these little microbit Rover things that I was programming and that’s where, again, it’s, it’s a really cool thing. I’ll send you the detail. Matt: That’d be good. Yeah. We’ve got a microwave. So I think we’ll play around with a bit, although we’re trying to get away from screen time as well. Cause it would be good, especially cause the kids are basically on the laptops. Most of the day is they’re doing schoolwork, trying to be able to do things that don’t involve. Any sort of computer Chris: technology for awhile, then weeding the garden. It would be a good thing. You know, you have lots of little weeds that are start popping up. This is a great term. Great use for tiny Hunter. Matt: Yeah, that, that may well be it. Next week show we have got yet another guest and if I remember correctly, it’s Ed Qualtrough. Who will be joining really? I believe so. If it isn’t then, you know, there we go. So it, the, the former editor of CIO magazine somebody who I’ve spent many hours locked in a room, judging CIOs from across the nation with, and he’s now working for a subsidiary, the new statesman. So it’d be great to catch up with ed and find out what he’s up to and his view of the world at the moment. And before we get to that, Enjoy the week between now and then, and look forward to joining you next week.

On this week’s show we speak to Roland Harwood about liminal things and places. You can find out more about Roland’s business Liminal here: https://www.weareliminal.co/ And his podcast On The Edge is here: https://www.weareliminal.co/ontheedge Transcript This is an automated transcript, so there may be errors, some of which might be hilarious. That’s just the machines taking the rise… Intro Chris: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of WB 40. And here we are, again another recording and as the nights are well, not exactly getting a great deal. I too, it’s pitch black now, but it’s starting to creep in as it was starting to get a little bit more of a, of an evening. And it’s been one of the, one of those weeks where basically the same things happen that happens every day, but not how’s it been for you? Matt: Hey was quite last week launched a new website, which had been about five years in the making. As far as I can tell it predated me. It was good to get that one done. That was exciting. Hung a mirror. I hate DIY. I keep seeing these things on the internet. I know that it’s probably because everything I do is tracked and deeply processed, but there’s this thing, this device that keeps getting advertised to me on Oh, that yellow Twitter, the yellow magic. And so I hung this mirror and of course it starts off by being, not quite plastic ball, but not a solid wall. It’s harder than plasterboard. I don’t know. I think it’s the original construction of the building. And then trying to put things into play. And then of course, one of them’s about half a millimeter lower than the other one, and it’s a 1.2 meter mirror. So by the bottom, my wife, nice, this, these things. So that’s a skew and then trying to work out what you do cause you’ve got plasterboard holes, but it’s just it’s my idea. Chris: When you bought that for a company, you knew what you were getting into. Matt: I didn’t realize it was a hollow waffle. I work in software for reasons and, mostly my crashing competence than anything physical.  Yeah, that was stressful. And then apart from that yeah,  it’s just one day forms in Tim for another one, much like any other in this endless repeating cycle of. Sunrise and sunset had some scaffolding put up around the front of the house, having a bit of roof replaced. That was exciting. That is exciting.  Haven’t bought any shares in a failing. On a physical shop business, and now haven’t bought anything in sh in silver, either which apparently where all the cool kids have read it and are plowing their money. It’s better to turn over the global financial systems, not involved in that. Haven’t got any Bitcoins. There wasn’t any the wiser, when. Elon Musk said that then it Chris: was after. And then that’s which has been a fairly a, been a bit of a backwater for a long time. And suddenly it went up like 200% or something like that. Matt: Yeah. I’m glad to hear that. I’m just, I’ve not been into that new iOS only. What was it called? Social club or something? Shop club chat house. Chris: Yeah. How many 20 Matt: nos? I feel I might be letting myself down in terms of being on the cutting Chris: edge. Yeah. And olden, like the whole thing about what I w I once was I was with it and then what it was changed and now everything’s scary and I don’t know where I live or something like that. Matt: Yeah. Anyway, so this is now turning into the bit and the Muppets. So that’s two old Chris: boys has really upset it. Really? Yeah. Anyway, look, come on. Let’s stop this. We’ve got a guest. We’ve got it. We’ve got an honored guest. Somebody has to talk sense in between all this nonsense Rowland hall with how they Roland. Nice to see you. Hi, Chris. Nice to see you. Roland: I didn’t realize this was mostly DIY podcasts. Chris: Yeah. Yeah. The home improvements. It’s mainly drywall and things like that, but yeah. And how’s your week been? Roland: My week’s been it sounds similar,  the trudge of lockdown, I think But we’re getting that it’s February that psychologically means something I’ve survived dry January, which I feel quite smug to that, to be able to say that I think we’ve Chris: all survived. I genuinely, I’ve never been tempted to touch a drop. It’s not, it was no hardship. I was just notice the height yesterday Roland: and I have downloaded clubhouse and I’ve tried using it, but I don’t think I’m cool enough or. Yeah, I haven’t seen why I really should use it other than it’s a new thing and Elon Musk is using it. And yeah, no, I’ve made a few, maybe big decisions, which I might talk about. We’ll see how it goes in the last week, which I’m quietly confident and excited about.  So yeah, it feels like there’s lots of bubbling away below the surface, but above the surface, it all looks as it did the week before. Chris: So some sort of, as a bit of a draw is a win at the moment. I think in the, Matt: how about you, Chris? How’s your week been? Chris: Oh, it was it was quite busy. I see quite a lot going on various events with work and trying to record try to record a keynote for one of our events, but I am still not at the point where I’ve reached that kind of Oneness with doing video events, because one, when you speak at an event, normally you, your just stood there and you can see the audience. And even if half of them are on their phone, looking at their email, they’re not really paying attention. You can find somebody who’s got, who’s desperate enough to listen and then you can get some sort of feedback trying to deliver that sort of thing to a camera. As my dead screen is really hard. I find it very difficult. But yes, I was thinking about that last week and yeah, as always, it was some really great conversations with different people. Lots of interesting folks to talk to I work with but what those room looks like the other, I was just reflecting on your mirror. Tie in, cause I was doing something similar not last week, but a couple of weeks ago. And I always forget this in my house is I get my spirit level out and I’ll get it all level. And then I step back and I realize that there’s no point in what I put up being level because my balls aren’t straight and the floor isn’t. So it just looks bad. You have to make it. Yeah. Deliberately skewed just to go with a house, just to go back onto that deal, I think. But yeah, it was fine. No, in many ways I can’t really complain. Not Matt: good. Okay. That thing though, about having to present to nothing but the. The lens of a camera. I think, I don’t know. Maybe people are starting to appreciate a little bit more of the skill and talent. There is for a good television presenter, Chris: Richard Baker, up in my estimation, Matt:  And Richard Attenborough. No, David Attenborough. I reached out when he was good as well, of course, but it’s not been around for awhile. But the the ASAM Bruce, they were able to be able to do instead all in one case able to do this whilst surrounded by marauding wild animals. So it’s be able to do all of that is. Quite remarkable. Really? There is something that actually, and I don’t know if you’ve talked about this before, but, so I’ve talked with other people about this recently that the presenting to a group of people, even if they are there, that alone, if they’re displaced by time and doing that is so much more hard work, I knew using a tool like zoom or whatever else, and it is to do in-person because the emotional energy you need to drive out of it. The ability to make yourself feel deeply uncomfortable, because you are trying to do something with an energy that isn’t coming back at you. And I think it’s massively difficult. Roland: I was on a session last week with a relatively small group of people and the instructions at the beginning were stay off mute, which is the opposite of what you almost always get told for the very reason that. You want a little bit, if possible, obviously if your child is running around screaming in the background, then use your mute button, but otherwise stay off mute. And I actually thought that’s quite good instructions. Isn’t appropriate for bigger events and what have you, but just so you get that audio feedback, if nothing else, if you tell a joke and you don’t hear anything, it’s soul destroying. So I thought I might try that as well in the Matt: future. Yeah. That’s an interesting thing. And it’s one of the challenges actually. And one of the, I think the biggest. Single challenge with the technology at the moment is that audio does not allow people to talk over one another. Because you get the thing where one dominant audio channel will mute everything else in an ability to be able to, this is why you have to stay on mute, because if you’ve got a loud noise, it stops the speaker from being heard completely, not just, riding out over the top of it. Now, being able to get to a point where we have technologies that enabled us to be able to talk over one another, a little bit, or even, maybe even a lot. It’s one of the things that Liz stocker was saying when we spoke to her at the end of last year, About how the actually talking over each other is part of the way in which we communicate with one another and losing that makes everything that much harder, the technology to be able to do that will be monumentally difficult. Chris: I don’t think it’s just the tech guy. I think it’s our ability  to focus on in-person you can tune one person out and listen to another, or you can it’s. It just seems to be easier when you’re surrounded by people and maybe. It’s to do with your brain being able to say, okay, I can kind of position that person over there and I can position that. And you’ve got a 3d effect. It’s not the same when you’ve got a 2d effect in your ears. Somehow your brain is just not possible. And so the tech might be able to get us there in terms of. Processing the input, but I don’t think we can process that here with headphones Roland: on none of it. It’s funny. I’ve been playing with some tools recently just because of zoom fatigue, because it’s not even if locked down and soon I think we’re still going to be having to use these tools a bit better. And so I’ve been experimenting with a bunch of new tools recently. The latest one I’ve been using is called bonfire, which is 3d audio. And it, it’s quite simple. You just move yourself around a room or there’s different zones. And so you can hear people spatially around, around the space and it’s very different to a mano kind of webcast zoom experience. I dunno, I think people are playing experimenting with that. Aren’t they? But yeah, it’s by no means perfect Chris: right now. Okay. Oh, I hadn’t heard about that, but that sounds like the kind of thing that might be necessary in order to suit. Hi, you might set up with the visual clues then to get you all to work in the way that we’re used to. I don’t know, but you maybe we’ll evolve, our minds and our brains will evolve in, new ways  of capturing all this stuff and processing it. Matt: I think we are ready. You don’t hear you’re on mute quite as much as you did this time last year. Anyway, let’s let’s press on with the show. We’re going to talk about the things between things. Cause that seems like a good place to be.  Should we crack on. Main Interview Matt: Last year, we had an episode which is entitled liminal. And one of the reasons I know that word is because of this week’s guest because he introduced me to the term. And the conversation we were having last year was about how, one of the things that we seem to have lost through lockdown and this mass experiment in working remotely. From one another physically has. Being the loss of the spaces that exist between the things that we think are important. So the loss of the space of commuting that, that space and time between home and work, the loss of the space that exists at the beginning and the end of meetings, when you’re chatting with your colleagues before you get to hit the agenda, because everybody’s now obsessed with having meetings that only focus on the agenda items as if those were the things that you couldn’t do through things other than a meeting. Anyway, Which is a whole other story.  The loss of places like the water cooler and these slightly turgid ways to try to be able to recreate them. They’re all just a little bit awkward and how maybe we finding some of the working from home and some of the everybody distant from each other harder because we’re losing some of those places, which were never seen as being necessarily the important bit of work. And we’d get factored out if you’re allowed an accountant anywhere near it. But in fact it probably how human organizations, businesses and what have you, or work does that resonate in any way? Roland: Rolling. It absolutely resonates. Yeah. I think, and I’m biased for reasons I’ll explain, but I think the most interesting stuff happens at the edges of organizations or places or yeah. Times whether it’s meetings or what have you. And so I think it’s important to go there. And I think know we are missing some of that in some ways in our new lockdown lives, as you describe Chris, but at the same time, liminal just quickly. Can I just define it because most people know the word subliminal, but they just, they don’t realize that liminal is it’s the same word. So subliminal is usually in relation to your thoughts. So subliminal thoughts are your subconscious or unconscious thoughts, but liminal just means the kind of surface or the threshold. That’s when a thought goes from being unconscious to conscious. That’s where the, that’s the sort of the Latin, I presume origins of the word. But so it just really means transitions or boundaries. And I think that’s where there’s a great quote by JG Ballard, which is my fate. One of my favorite quotes, the future reveals itself through the peripherals. So in your peripheral vision, the new opportunities, new technologies, whatever it might be, make themselves known often quite quietly at first. And then, more forcibly over time. And so yeah, I think that’s an interesting fertile ground and, by definition overlooked, Matt: How do you explore this bit that people overlook? What had, how do you even find it? Some of the times, Roland:  By accident probably is the short answer or inadvertently just by trying to pay attention. Yeah, the idea of liminality comes from anthropology originally, and I’m not an anthropologist, but it was introduced to me by an ethnographer where they study amongst other things, rites of passage in life, whether it’s births or deaths or marriages, or the example I remember was The bar mitzvah in Jewish culture, where you go from being a sort of boy to a man. And there’s a phase in that sort of ceremony. I’m not Jewish, I’ve never been to a bar mitzvah actually. So I’m not speaking from firsthand experience, but where you say goodbye to your boyhood self and a little bit later you welcome in your adult identity and there’s that in-between bits when you’re no longer a boy and you’re not yet a man or girl or a woman, of course. Where there’s a lot of, potential for reinvention, and so that’s where the idea originally comes from, but  I’m a physicist by background and. I’m fascinated by things like superconductivity and weird stuff that happens at the transitions between solids liquids and gasses in that example. And just, I think at the transitions, that’s where it’s possible to reinvent or recreate. So yeah, I’m just being fascinated with this concept for years. And I feel as a, without wishing to be too grandiose as a world and a society for the last few years things have been very fluid. Old certainties have been. Cast aside and new certainties have yet to be picked up and that’s probably magnified more than ever in the pandemic. So I think it’s, yeah, for me I’ve become completely obsessed with it as a concept and an idea there’s Chris: something, yeah, absolutely. Something that has. I’ve often used as a metaphor when looking at innovation and organizations and trying to help people to find where the innovation is this idea of that, which was just, I think the other bit related to what you’re saying. And it is it’s it’s I think, or the edge effect in a way where you have two ecosystems that meet and that’s where evolution happens faster, because you’ve got. Maybe, where the land meets the sea or whether it, where the edge of the rainforest or wherever or whatever it might be, where you’ve got two different ecosystems meeting and then they have to adapt in order to, and that’s where you get the most adoption. And also that happens in terms of organizations where two organizations working with each other, is that kind of related to what you’re talking about, that forced adaption, that place where you have to meet the challenge of whatever is Roland: coming next. I think absolutely they slightly cynically. The first thought that pops into my mind is, but by that analogy, then mergers and acquisitions should be some of the most kind of fertile ground for innovation, which, obviously well frequently, they’re not lots of evolution fails. I guess I used to run a little company that specialized in open innovation, which is basically just connecting different companies, usually large and small companies around new products and new ideas. And. The best new ideas are basically just two or more old ideas mashed together, maybe in a new or interesting way. I think things like innovation get quite okay. Overly theorized and mythologized, actually. It’s just, yeah, it’s just bringing to two things, two people, two ideas or two or more together to create something new and different. And yeah, it’s there in that in-between space where something new can emerge as well. And it’s not just the overlap between, it’s not just the yeah. W where two ideas overlap as well. They the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, yeah. Or maybe even collide collect. Yeah. Matt: But where you’ve got stuff where actually it’s causing problems, because you’ve got two different disciplines and sometimes that leads to. Problems. So that can also lead to people having to better work through new ways of being able to operate or do things or think about things differently. Roland: Yeah, absolutely. It’s quite uncomfortable,  being in transition or yeah. Being between two cultures or whatever it might be. It’s not always a very comfortable state of existence. But I think it’s a fertile and it can be a fertile and a creative one. And I think it’s also, if I can just get back on my hobby horse for a second, I think it’s one that we all need to get better at, in our, in previous generations, those periods of transition, you change jobs every,  depending on how back you go, never, you leave school and have a career for life. And, as time goes by our lives and our attention becomes more and more fragmented. So the sort of transitions between. Previous more staple periods of our lives. And then, reinventing yourself for the next phase of your life is happening with much greater speed and frequency for all sorts of reasons. So I think we need to get better at navigating some of those ambiguities and gray areas and transitions. At least right now, maybe that will change, whatever happens post pandemic, but. Matt: So you’ve built a new venture after the thing, a hundred percent open, I have called it liminal. In terms of the actual things that you are doing to go from this theoretical discussion about the idea of the liminal space and whatever to yeah. W how are you stopping the debt collector coming around? And, Roland: So we were basically a sort of distributed agency or consultancy. Don’t really like the word consultancy because everyone’s a consultant these days, but yeah we’re hopefully a bunch of smart, creative entrepreneurial people who. Come together and support each other and share learning. And in various forms deliver projects together. So the main ways in which we keep the debt collector from the door are we’re running a big challenge in South Africa at the moment where we’re finding interesting startups over there and matching them with startups here in the UK, around a bunch of different. Particular challenges. But we’ve done that with a very distributed team, both here in South Africa. We’ve done a bunch of research for various organizations the Wellcome trust and Facebook and various other people in organizations. And and yeah, we facilitate a kind of toddler workshops, I think for me, the most interesting and important problems.  And the biggest one. Current pandemic notwithstanding would be around kind of climate change and climate emergency require weird hybrids of governments and corporations and startups and academics and citizens to come together and collaborate in some shape or form. So at our most kind of pompous and ambitious, we want to occupied or not occupied, but just connect the dots a little bit between unlikely bedfellows and try and solve. Interactive or very challenging problems. That’s where we, I think we get most excited. It’s hard to craft a sensible business model around that, but so far touch wood we’ve done. All right. And and it seems to be resonating with people as well. Matt: That idea of having to bring different groups together. I look at the. I dunno, micro level, of the world in housing, where I’m at the moment and thinking about some of the challenges around targets, the social housing over the next 30 years, where by 2030, all of our homes need to be, have an energy performance rating of a C or a B. Bob will seal better. And then by 2050 carbon neutrality, and that might be, I called earlier. And if you’d look at the the number of different professional interests that are involved in the designing and building and delivery of homes, let alone retrofitting old ones, which is a whole other thing. Ballgame of nightmares, the houses are places where a group of different professions come together and often fail to communicate or collaborate in any way, shape or form. And I know Chris, you’ve spoken about this in the past, around your. The experience in the world of facilities management, where the people responsible for different systems within buildings ended up actually creating a complex systems that just fundamentally don’t work with one another, because nobody’s talking to each other. And the challenge, there are very interesting challenges. This is just sociological and cultural. One of being able to get different groups from different worlds and different professional experience, to be able to not only just talk to each other, but also start to think about how they need to be able to actively work together, to be able to get things that, that work, that, that sounds like a really important challenge and also quite. A Chris: pick. That’s why I think also the problem is not necessarily that yes, they all come with from different backgrounds with different worldviews and different experience, but they also come with different agendas and they have very different views on how things should be done. And they also have often very strong views on how the other party should be doing their job, which is different from the way they do it. That’s just so I can, I think back to my time, working in the criminal justice sector where you’ve got people like police magistrates, Probation officers, prison officers and every single one, every single group would regard the other with disdain and dismay and as much as probation officers who police polices the just Bali boys and thugs. And they’d say the prison officers is ketone as an policeman. We’ll see the probation people as. The soft Nancy kind of, encouraging the,  the wrong diverse to, to misbehave and prison office would see the mall as hopeless because by the time they’ve finished with them, they have to deal with them at their and actually working together in a multi-agency way to achieve an outcome, like a societal outcome, which is a reduction in crime reduction in victims, an outcome for society to. So to to rehabilitate people, it’s really difficult because just, it’s not because they don’t actually all have that outcome in mind. They do, but their views on how you achieve it and their views on the reasons for it completely different. And I think, you see it often. Roland: Yeah. I’ve definitely, I relate to that massively. See that in so many different ways, my wife actually used to work on the sort of fringes of the criminal justice system as a social worker. But and yeah why is that? And we all we’re a social species. We there’s a tribalism. We sort of cluster birds of a feather flock together.  We cluster with people we like or have something in common with, and other people that are different to us. And. I think that’s a natural part of our behavior as a species, but at the same time, I don’t know if you’ve read Yuval, Harari, his book sapiens, and the work around it, but he talks about our super power as a species is our ability to cooperate at a very large scales, through telling stories predominantly, stories like money and brands and things like this, which create a more macro identity.  But yeah. How do you get people to, I don’t think they know what you don’t want to do is just get everybody. And this is maybe where mergers and acquisitions go wrong. They try and absorb and squash. Usually this, the culture of the smaller organization by the larger organization, that’s taking it over. Whereas really you want to preserve I, in my last company, we were nearly acquired by a much bigger company. And we were saying, it’s going to be great. We were in pitch mode, but we were saying, it’s going to be great. We, w we’ve got all this agility and creativity and you’ve got all this reach and infrastructure and investment. And then what, one of the people there just said yeah, but obviously we want it to be that the he had a great little expression. I’ve forgotten it now, but it was basically like, we want it to be the best of. What you do and the best of what we do not the worst of what you do in the worst of what we do. Chris: Yeah. Oh, you have to do to my brains and Roland: not something like that. Yeah. It was that check. Yeah, exactly. And it was like, yeah, you’re right. Absolutely. That’s but often that’s the way it ends up. Isn’t it? You you adopt the creativity and agility of the bigger corporation and they adopt the sort of the lack of whatever that you might bring to the Chris: table. I was thinking, actually, when you made that you made that point about mergers and we talked about the edge effect in the desert meeting, meeting the rainforest or whatever it might be. And I was thinking actually the reason why mergers often fail acquisitions, certainly acquisitions often fail is because the jungle, which is the desert and the desert says you’re a desert now on the jungle. Doesn’t know how to be a desert, but it’s suddenly, Oh, you’ve got to behave like us. And. It’s just, you’ve lost the opportunity to say, okay, what’s the grace of the happens in between was that what’s. And, but that’s not how we work, because as you say, people they fixate on being successful in the way they always have. And often it’s a ego driven thing to think I was successful because I was like that. And that’s why you often see. Managers or people being bought into an organization, then they go, okay. I was successful over there and I did a, B and C, and now we’re going to do a, B and C or B, and I’m going to be successful. And they obsess about doing a, B and C, but they don’t realize that somebody else was doing D somebody else was doing E effort happened before they turned up, and all of these things made that circumstance happened, but they just concentrate on the things that they did. So it’s that it’s ego driven process. Isn’t it where people think that they were in control of their situation and that’s why they were successful. And that’s why they’re going to make this change happen. And they don’t appreciate that. Actually, there was a whole complex then going on around them. That was part of their success or whatever. But you Matt: don’t get the next job if you say. Yeah, no, but that last one, it just, obviously I’m going to change to me, do stuff. And I, my, my great hero in all that I’ve done in the second half so far of my career is gently the the. The Douglas Adams character who basically just randomly does stuff until things eventually hit into some sort of mode. And whilst I don’t completely follow that train of thought approach, that there’s a little bit of actually needing to be able to let some randomness and serendipity happen and then pick out what’s working, which is completely unacceptable as a way to be able to sell a. Business service, but it’s probably what’s happening in most cases. Anyway.  So w we talked about these groups and different groups and the challenges of them working together because, culture and power and all these, but what are the ways to overcome that? What are the things that we do to be able to allow magic to happen at the boundaries, as opposed to the bad stuff? Roland: So if I can just introduce another kind of buzz word into the conversation. So collective intelligence, which is, the property of groups to be greater than the sum of the parts essentially, or the individuals within them, the sort of the core principles are wet, and most groups let’s face it as we’ve talked about are yeah, not necessarily smart or intelligent,  least not not it’s not guaranteed to be the case.  Diversity and independence, two interrelated concepts, but first of all, When faced with any question or problem you want to hear from different perspectives freely, without too much influence from each other, at least to start with, you want people to answer the question in the way that they’re able to answer the question that requires and sorry to be a bit fluffy here on a technology kind of podcast, psychological safety people need to be able to say if, if they disagree with, the direction that we’re going, or if they think a different technology might be a better technology or whatever it might be. And so these cultural things are really important, but also, so having those diverse perspectives, probably getting people to work maybe individually together. So this kind of concept of working alone together, I think is quite powerful. And then. Synthesizing aggregating and banking the stuff that you agree on, and then really spending time on the stuff where people have different perspectives. Sometimes you just need to agree to disagree. Sometimes you need to hammer it out and see who wins the argument. And, there’s a number of different approaches. I think there’s some very practical methods. I think a lot of it is about, yeah. How are you tee up the conversation or the, the culture, some of it is about how you facilitate the process. And some of it is just basic rules and behaviors that it’s okay to say. I don’t know, that ego thing that you’re talking about, Chris, that, or, being honest, Matt, about that, your successes in your last job where, you know, largely down to a flute, if indeed that is a modicum of truth, I think we can all relate to that. Somebody said to me recently, vulnerability is an ability. So the ability to show. Weakness or uncertainty or is, can be very powerful if done in the right way. Obviously some cultures, some organizations will completely hammer down and crush that, but I think that is ultimately self-defeating so. If you’re interested, we wrote a 220 page collective intelligence handbook with the United nations in Nesta, which has a whole bunch of tools and techniques and methods, which hopefully is pretty practical in amongst some of this more conceptual stuff that I’m talking about here tonight. Matt: So some of the stuff you talked about there sounds like it might be easier in some. Cultures than others. And that the particularly if you take  the us individualistic and the UK individualistic business style, which I think is prevalent in a lot of organizations in the UK and the U S and maybe a bit less. So in parts of Europe, maybe in some of the forest in particular cultures, much less. So because do you see different abilities Roland: within this? Yeah, no, absolutely. My last company, we worked in about 25 different countries and we definitely brushed up against some challenges in a couple of different countries, just based on predominant culture. There’s I think it’s a Malcolm Gladwell book. I can’t remember which one where he talks about a plane crash that happened where. I think it was like Indonesian pilots were being told not to land the plane by bolshy American air traffic controllers. And the, I don’t know if it was Indonesian actually, but it was, they were so deferential the Korea. Yeah, they were deferential. And they bloody crashed the place and they knew they were running out of fuel and yet they couldn’t quite bring them back. And, thankfully in the world of air crashes, they document this stuff and they try and learn lessons from that. But too often, those sorts of mistakes happen and they just get buried and forgotten about. Yeah, there’s definitely massive cultural differences.  I’m trying to think of a personal example. I’ve done a lot of work in South America and Columbia in particular where I didn’t speak terribly good Spanish, which didn’t really help, but also Yeah anyway, sorry. There’s a much longer story there, which we probably have time for tonight, but anyway, yeah we can, I’m up against some cultural challenges, shall we say? Which which took us a long time to iron out. But yeah, I learned so much from that in quite a painful way, but but it was yeah, it was a kind of brilliant lending experience in the most painful, possible way. If you catch my drift. Chris: But even in the UK and America and that’s, it, there’s a hierarchy. There’s a kind of, there’s a way that people are used to working and being comfortable, working at a different slot. The kind of way that you’re talking about maybe a higher state of entropy in, being happy and happy to work at that level. That’s quite rare. And it’s, people drift back then don’t they, to break the, to be a metaphor, but I do, they they want to return to more structured ways of working often. If you if they’re not supported and don’t feel safe or they don’t have that next place to go to in those less structured environments. Roland: I don’t know if it’s relevant, but my dad’s American, my mom’s German. So I’ve grown up in a mixed household with different cultures. And I think that has informed my fascination with this in-between space because I am by definition, a product of a sort of in-between culture. Yeah. Having grown up in the UK. So there’s a kind of third culture to throw into the mix there as well. And, British and German cultures, aren’t that different compared with, career than American, for instance. But there’s still plenty of room for misinterpretation and misunderstanding.  But yeah, within that, it is something amazing as well. Matt: So you talked in the introduction about some. Big decisions. Oh yeah. And then you teased us. I come on. Roland: One was I was toying with, I know we’ve spoken about this, Matt, I think, but one was, I toyed with the idea of writing a book a couple of years ago, and then I actually hooked it around a few publishers and had some interest, but anyway, I turned it into a podcast rather than a book and I’ve been enjoying doing the podcast, but I think I’ve actually been writing a newsletter to the community that I’ve helped to found and build over the last two years that I send out every two weeks and actually not every week, but some of those are pretty good. So I’ve actually started pulling those together. Thinking maybe there’s some something I could pull together here. I don’t know if it’s as conventional as a traditional book, but that felt quite exciting just to think, Oh, maybe I can do something with that. The other thing, which is a bit more tangible, but I was actively looking to merge my company with another company. And once this podcast go out tonight I’m G I’m going to say it. So I’ve decided not to do that. I was toying with that idea and I’m not going to do it. It’s going to be announced tomorrow too. So you’re getting a scoop. Not that I think anyone listening to this will particularly care, but yeah, no, it was an interesting opportunity. It’s a company I’ve worked with for a number of years and we were just flirting with each other. Should we do something more meaningful together? And for various reasons, we think now’s not the time. But that, that for me personally, and for my tiny little organization is actually a big. A big deal and a big decision, not least what do I do next? Cause I was, we’ve spent a number of months exploring this opportunity and I, as you tend to, when you’re making a big decision, you talk yourself into, this is the future that you’re designing for yourself. So yeah. But I’ve decided not to do that, or we’ve collectively decided not to do that. And so I now need to figure out a slightly alternative future, but, we’re all in that situation to a greater or lesser extent. So that’s not necessarily, you mean deliberately Matt: creating liminal States for yourself. Cause that’s what that sounds like. Roland: I think there’s something in that actually. Yeah, I think there was something in that I think I’m not quite fully pro I haven’t fully processed it. There’s a fascinating guy called Dave Snowden. I don’t know if you know him. He’s developed this complexity framework. Super smart guy. They’ve got this technique, which sounds really annoying, but I think I can see how it’d be really useful, where they run workshops, where people are discussing a problem or a challenge. And naturally what we all try and do is try and solve that problem and come to some kind of solution that’s inevitably in our nature. And they deliberately poke people for longer than feels comfortable. So they don’t jump to solution mode, but they sit. Uncomfortably with the the lack of resolution for longer, because it’s, I think the theory, as I understand it is the longer that you sit with that kind of discomfort, the more deeper insights or better solutions that ultimately come from that, I think you can take that to a ridiculous, extreme, so you need to, that needs to be balanced, but yeah, I think to some extent I may be doing that to myself as well. Yeah. Do you do that? Sorry. Is it just me? Matt: I think the idea of being able to create different futures. I don’t know whether it’s the lack of completer finisher in me or whether it’s just the sense of boredom, but the idea of being able to have. You did it. It’s if you, I don’t know if you go for a job interview to be able to be successful in a job interview, you really got to be able to imagine yourself in the job. I think, I don’t think it’s possible to be able to, you’d want to worry about a job interview process where you go in thinking, I don’t really want this and come out of it have a few days. Yeah. But still not really wanting it. But yeah, no I’ve, I, one of my least successful jobs today has been exactly that But there’s a. Th there’s something about being able to get yourself into a mindset where you go, no, this is where it’s going to be. And I think particularly the whole thing about what is an entrepreneur and what is it to be entrepreneurial? Th there’s the the kind of Elan Musk model, which is the single, I’ve just got one idea. And I’m going to follow that, whatever, even if the whole world thinks I’m an arse Roland: I, he doesn’t just have one idea though. Does he sorry to cut three ideas. He’s got three. Yeah, but Matt: he’s got three ideas and he’s a prolific arse.  That’s true. But the th but I think there’s actually a much more Yeah, it’s the thing about massive growth type entrepreneurs, which is, do you want to be able to do this just to make the thing as big as possible, which is the Ford or the Musk or the Zuckerberg or whatever. And then there’s actually the, what most entrepreneurs are, which is people who get by. And I don’t think you get by having one massive idea and then rigorously following it, you do that by constantly tinkering and adapting. And does this work or that work and it’s not about, and success shouldn’t just be measured. I don’t think, especially, I think coming back to your point about how do we fix the longer term issues around climate change, wherever it doesn’t come through. Massive growth. Roland: Yeah. There’s definitely something in that. Sorry, Chris, I don’t know what your thoughts are on this. I just I personally, it w it’s a cliche, but,  it’s it’s about the journey, not the destination, isn’t it. I much prefer to have an interesting journey. And certainly when it comes to job or work stuff, I quite often get bored quite quickly. Once, once everything is fixed and certain that’s not where I. I’m at my best, I totally get that’s necessary and needed. And other people maybe prefer that kind of certainty. That’s just not the sort of where I like to spend my time. And yeah, just sitting with that kind of discomfort for a little bit longer, other interesting stuff, just can emerge if you pay attention to it. Sorry, I’m conscious that I’m sounding a bit cryptic, but I’m also still processing the decision that I’d been making as well.  So yeah, Chris, what do you think? What are your experiences of good or bad job interviews and the journey versus the destination? Chris: Oh, I haven’t done that many where I. Haven’t really wanted the job one or two and you’re right. It’s completely different. You shouldn’t be it. You shouldn’t really be there. You’re doing it for the sake of it. I think what I tend to do is I will put off a decision, not because I don’t know what the decision is likely to be, but because I don’t like the idea of something being settled  and options being closed down, even though in reality, the passage of time will make that decision. For me. I like to think that I’ve still got all the options. I like to think that I could still become, a space man or a fire firefighter if I want to. Even though I’m getting rapidly older and fatter and I’m less likely to be any of those things. But also I think absolutely being in those kinds of places where you’ve done, you’ve got things settled and everything’s ticking along and that’s the last place I want to be. Oh, and also frankly, once I’ve done a job, I don’t want to do it again often. I’ll say, okay, I’ve done this and now I’m going to go and get another job, which is the same and I’ll think, Oh, I don’t want to do that anymore. I’ve scratched that itch. And that’s why I think I’ve moved around and done different, never completely different because you can’t do that. We’re not, I’m not some kind of poly polymath who can jump from one, one, one completely differently, do things or another. But I have found myself very much not wanting to do the same kind of thing again, because. What is there to do? What’s the challenge or what’s the, where’s the itch. That’s a scratch. Roland: I’m totally the same. I, I’d probably make more money if I, Oh yeah, just repeated the same thing again and again, and optimized for efficiency, but that’s and I saw a guy, Roger McNamee. Have you heard of him? He’s one of the early investors in Facebook and he wrote a book called very critical of Facebook a couple of years ago that I read. And he’s one of these kind of Silicon Valley insiders old timers and on the boards of lots of different companies. And he was saying the whole, Silicon Valley mindset is to optimize for efficiency. It’s all about squeezing out inefficiencies. And so you cut in a way you can’t blame people for for what the outcome is. Cause that’s what is valued by, the investors and the whole culture. But he was saying, what if he’s also a sort of amateur keen musician, I think, and he was saying, you don’t. You don’t value a piece of music just because it’s brief. Cause you got through it quickly, it’s about enjoying it in the moment, the best bit of a piece of music normally isn’t just cause it comes to an end,  as quickly as possible. So he told that anecdote more, more eloquently than I did, but but it’s true. What if we optimize for optionality? What if we optimize for creativity or curiosity? I think that’s ultimately more fruitful and interesting. And God knows where we’re having to redesign. I read an article today saying the pandemic is a portal to a different future. Again, rather high faluting language, but. We need to redesign things in new and different ways. Whether we want to return to some kind of normality that went before, or whether we want to design, a radically different world that is net zero and all these kinds of massive challenges that we face. And it, the solutions that got us to where we were, aren’t the ones that are going to get us to where we need to get to. So I think that’s why I think liminality is a very sort of timely and interesting concept because I think we’re all in different spaces, in different ways and different parts of our lives in transition almost all of the time. And so it’s, I think it’s part of the skillset, even though it’s it’s a pretty hard one to describe and codifies, as you can probably tell from. My somewhat incoherent ramblings on this podcast. Outro Matt: So that’s the end of episode, 180 more or less. We’ve got through it all without any references to dance. I think I’ve just blown it. Nevermind. Roland, thank you very much for joining. It’s been fascinating conversation.  What does the week ahead open up for you in the realm of possibility? Roland: So I’ve got some Some planning to do in light of the kind of bigger decision I made last week which I’m quite excited about it frees up some time in my diary to, to think about that on a more mundane, but I’m quite excited about this level. It’s my daughter’s 10th birthday. So we’re going to have a now obligatory zoom birthday party, so need to come up with some vaguely fun party idea so that I’m also recording my own podcast with a guy called I think it’s Christian bushes. I need to double check his surname around serendipity. So that’s linked to some of what we’ve talked about. So I’m looking forward to that and and yeah, we’re planning the final showcase of our South African inclusive innovation accelerator that I talked about briefly which is coming up in a couple of weeks and that’s going to be quite a big deal for us. Work to do on that as well. So a busy old week, one way or another. Matt: Wow. Yeah. We’ll put links to liminal and to your podcasts and stuff on the WB 40 podcast page for this Chris how’s your week ahead Chris: looking. Yeah this week is actually quite an exciting week because I shall be checking the mining rig in my garden because I think I’ve just about reached the oil and I expect to get about 10,000 barrel. No, I’m not doing any of that, but you say the same thing every week. So I thought I’d say something different. No,  live in times where basically the same thing happens every week. But so I’ve got a new customers that onboarding this week, which is always exciting cause he gets to learn about another company and what they’re trying to do and how they’re trying to do it and all the characters within that. So that’s great. Fun. And and also I’m looking forward to receiving, I’ve got I was doing this weekend, actually. I was building a robot kind of thing that I’d got for Christmas for my daughter as a present. And it’s like a little got, I might BBC micro bits in it and you program the micro bit and it’s got all sorts of ultrasonic sensors and light centers. But it needs it’s all been tethered to the computer with cables because it didn’t have a battery, so it needs a battery. So that’s coming. So now this week we’re gonna have it skidding around on the floor and all sorts of wonderful self automated things. So that’s going to be good fun. So that’s this week, but Matt, what are you going to be doing? Matt: I am going to be tending the service design committee of my organization. Because we’ve got to a point now where we’re understanding that doing service design probably involves having oversight from the committee. That’s responsible for the services that we offer, which is a good step forward. And I Also going to be kicking off a data modeling exercise, which I’ve puts a supplier in place to do. And I am. Unbelievably excited about, because I basically worship at the the church of VF card. And if it ain’t got a conceptual data model, it’s dead to me. So actually being able to go through the exercise of working out what the data is we need as an organization to operate and where it currently sits is actually gonna be a massive step forward. And it makes me very happy. But there, again, lockdown could be getting to Chris: me one of the other, I can’t imagine anything more to do, frankly, but  good for you. Matt: Good data modeling is a beauty to behold. It really is. I think it’s a very underrated thing. And with all this nonsense about data scientists and what have you we lose sight of that data today. If you don’t know what your data is, you can. You can drown quite frankly in a data Lake not literally. So yeah, that’s the week head. Good. Roland, it’s been a wonder and a pleasure. Thank you. We have Julia Hobsbawm joining us next week, so she’s going to be talking about simplicity. Which is going to be, I’m sure, fascinating as well between now and then you can catch the the back catalog@wbfortypodcast.com. And don’t forget. Now there is a full index of all the speakers that we’ve had and some cryptic information about what they might’ve spoken about over the last four and a bit years.  Wonderful resource to be able to idle the way. The hours that you spend staring at your windows, wondering when it will ever be that you’re allowed out again.  Between now and then have a lovely week and we’ll see you next week.

On this week’s show we are joined by Richard Sage to explore the murky world of IT strategy. You can subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at https://resage.substack.com/ And there is more about his IT Strategy course here: https://howtoitstrategy.com/ This week’s show transcript: Intro Matt: [00:00:00] So once again, we find ourselves on the precipice of another show. It’s been a week. How was it? [00:00:09] Chris: [00:00:09] Hi, it’s been a, an interesting week. Lots of going on. Again, I, me pretty much, like I say, every week, actually new customers to talk to and getting ready for what’s coming this year in terms of our events and things like that. [00:00:23] I think one thing that I’ve noticed this week is that if I wanted to a meeting’s postponed and I think more, the story of this month is that it’s taken people a bit longer to get up to speed and to hit their straps than maybe they had considered. I think the the impact of, of lockdown, the reality, and everybody could go away for Christmas and, and and pretend it was, it was. [00:00:47] No, everything was normal. And then just the impact of coming back and starting uni a year in a very different way to last year, like the events that we’re doing now, obviously our, our, our virtual, which is which we’ve been doing that for a long time, but this time last year, they weren’t. And the fact that is that, that we’re, we’re still doing this round differently. [00:01:10] And I think everybody’s a little bit.  Discombobulated and not deciding, not just us, but everybody. I talk to you. So yeah, I’d say it’s been a slow staff for everybody that I’ve, unless they’ve been there a hundred, some insane deadline, which some people are unfortunate to have to do, but yeah, it’s been a, it’s been a funny putting, wondering how about yourself? [00:01:30] Matt: [00:01:30] Yeah, I, I think it, I can relate to that. It feels like people are just exhausted and nobody’s really willing to say. No, well, you know, year or this knackered and people need to start saying that, I think because otherwise people are going to seriously burnout. So yeah, it’s I think, yeah, it’s, it’s been a weird, so although on the same token with is week four of 2021, and it feels like about month four, but you know, that’s the way it goes. [00:01:59]My week has been How’s my weight been. I’ve been doing some discussions and writing a little bit about the difference between people who think in terms of maps and people who think in terms of lists, which is kind of shaping, it’s sort of thinking out loud, working out loud around how I go about influence within my organization and a realization that whilst I like to work mostly in a. [00:02:22] Two dimensional realm with space and diagrams and watery maps and all that jazz. Quite a lot of my colleagues and quite a lot of my senior colleagues are very list driven. I also realize that my wife is as well she’s program manager. That’s what they do. And I, I’m starting to perceive this world where there is a difference between people who perceive things in terms of relationships on two dimensions and those that see them in. [00:02:50] A list form, maybe a bit more, one dimensional, but very much more sort of task and forward focused. And the challenges there are in being able to allow both of those groups to better communicate with each other and come to agreement on things. So that’s been interesting. I also learned how to make Ginza. [00:03:07] Which is very exciting. A birthday present that I got bought by difference breached and Caroline was to Yuki’s kitchen. She did yesterday evening went to the the Asian supermarket in Kingston on Saturdays, prayer. It’s great fun. You go through shelves. You’ve got no idea what most of the things are and learn how to make those little Japanese dumplings Goza which is surprisingly easy and delicious. [00:03:33] And it’s one of those things where like the, the, the, the The covering for a geezer, which is sort of a noodley type thing. It’s not like a dumpling, like our kids spend these aren’t dumplings, dumplings are things he put on Stu, but it’s one of those things where it’s been like, it’s very much like pastor actually, but until you know how to make it, it feels like magic and voodoo because it’s so unlike anything that I’ve normally cooked before, and then you learn how to do it. [00:03:57] Oh, that’s clever. And I feel empowered. So I’ll be making more  and Yuki’s kitchen. If you want to do something of an evening cookery class is doing things like sushi and Goza and ramen and all sorts of stuff. And it’s a really nice way to spend 90 minutes in your kitchen, but with a group of people, all learning has to do something new, which is It’s fab. [00:04:20] So there you go. Anyway, this week as well, joining us at Richard Sage, how’s your last seven days been? [00:04:25]Richard: [00:04:25] Hi yeah. Interesting. I’ve sort of a lot of what Chris was saying was sort of resonating with me in terms of I’ve had a lot of conversations. In the last seven days about people feeling like they’re not making any progress, I’m like, Oh, bloody house, nearly February. [00:04:44]And I don’t know. It almost makes me think that, especially in the company I work out, you know, January is the start of the new financial year as well. I guess this is full of other organizations, but it’s almost like this is a period of aligning the iron filings. Like, so, you know, a lot of my colleagues are like, Oh, I’ve just seemed to have spent loads of time talking to people about stuff that we want to do and not doing the stuff that we want to do. [00:05:07] And I think my reflection that is actually that’s, I think the natural ebb and flow of the months of the year, and it’s quite natural to sort of have a bit of a reset post-Christmas. And. And take some time to maybe agree what we’re doing for the rest of the year. So yeah, lots of, lots of conversations. [00:05:25] And I think the other point Brown, the sort of fatigue I think is definitely there. I sort of had quite long break over Christmas, but actually you know, I still feel fatigue. [00:05:37] Matt: [00:05:37] A business you work in is in the, in the the holiday world.  Is this normally a very busy time as well? Yeah, as you’re basically selling. [00:05:46] Richard: [00:05:46] Yeah. Basically it normally goes boxing day through to pretty much the end. The affair is peak booking period. And then obviously summertime is your peak staying period. And you know People seem to be reasonably optimistic. So bookings are okay because I guess people are thinking, okay, we’re all going to be faxing up the wazoo soon. [00:06:06] And then it’s partly time and holiday time in quarter two and onwards. And you know, who knows that might be true. Here’s hoping. [00:06:15] Matt: [00:06:15] Yeah, very much. Yep. Good. Well you’re joining this for the show this week and we’re going to be talking about themes around strategy and technology strategy and digital strategy and, and business strategy. [00:06:27] So I think we should probably get on with that. Main Interview Chris: [00:00:00] So this week, as we said, we’ve got Richard Sage with us. And I’m really looking forward to this because I’ve been reading Richard’s newsletters for awhile because which is your doing it strategy. Right. And you’re, you’re, you’re, it’s something you’re obviously passionate about and you’ve been publishing. [00:00:20] Kind of interesting snippets and thoughts on how to build it strategy for a while. It’s something that I do you know, kind of professionally, it is working with organizations to figure out often how they’re going to form an it strategy or what, what they’re going to put into it. And therefore I have read a lot in, but just a few weeks ago, late last year I did another research piece where I read loads and loads of it. [00:00:44] Strategies now is. Amazed at how little common ground there was really in sort of that kind of sections they had or what they thought was important. So it’s an interesting subject for me. And I wonder given that you’ve been doing this for a while, how long have you been doing it? And I, Richard, what’s your, how long have you, how many emails, newsletters have you published? [00:01:05] So [00:01:05] Richard: [00:01:05] I started in in my that was the, the first sort of newsletter. And you had been doing roughly about three a month on average since then. So yeah, I mean, so. I mean what my background was, obviously, as a, as a CTO at the moment, I’m responsible for the, for the it strategy previous to that, I was a consultant doing it strategy as well. [00:01:31] And then previous to that, I was in organizations helping create it strategy as well. So it’s a, yeah, it’s an area of interest. I find it really interesting thinking about strategy and thinking about long-term owl. It can, you know, No challenge and enable businesses. So I figured it would be a useful area to sort of, to delve into I had a bit of a wreck recognition that I’ve got some knowledge and experience in that area. [00:01:59] And so maybe, you know, and, and I’ve also made some mistakes in that area. And so maybe some of that learning might be, might be useful to people. And and I’ve also sort of recognize that it’s a. Bit of a learning exercise myself, you know, by writing stuff, I’m sort of reconfiguring how I think about things and challenging myself. [00:02:18]So that actually, it helps me be more effective in my role when I do, you know, formulate or refresh strategies as well. And my other sort of thinking around. Why are doing suffer and it stretches a bit of a serendipity engine, I guess. I can’t remember who used that term, but have that at somewhere in terms of putting something out there, creating something and then good things happening off the back of it, such as coming on this podcast to talk about it strategy. [00:02:44]And then the, I guess the final sort of reason behind One is to talk about like strategy as a purely mercenary. One of, you know putting this newsletter out, hopefully it provides some value. I’m also in parallel creating a course. Hopefully some people will find that valuable and pay for that and that will get some money in the kitty. [00:03:03] Chris: [00:03:03] Okay. Well that makes a lot of sense. So so when you, when you started and what made you want to do a blog, what made you want, want to. Was there, was there a particular thing that you said, right, I’m going to do this, or was it maybe the end goal of creating a course? Did that come first and think about, well, how am I going to get there? [00:03:21] What was the, what, what prompted you to actually start? Yeah, [00:03:24] Richard: [00:03:24] I mean, I’m, I’m sort of interested in in just thinking about, you know, my career and, and and Joe, where I’m always sort of thinking ahead of where, where am I going? What am I doing? So in terms of, you know, Doing a blog to help cement. My knowledge is just beneficial to me right now, but also potentially in the future. [00:03:43]And also thinking about other potential revenue streams. So I’ve got other, you know, once I’ve completed the course and hopefully sell it, if that works well, then I’ve got some other ideas. Which might provide which I might build on, on that which might provide, you know, another revenue stream at some point in the future alongside my my job. [00:04:04] Okay. [00:04:04] Chris: [00:04:04] So one of the things that’s always interested me about about a strategy is how many times especially in, well, I say larger organizations, but I think it can happen in many organizations when somebody is asked to write a strategy, It’s almost as a kind of maybe it’s a to trust you. So we feel comfortable that you’ve got a plan, but once it’s done, it’s kind of a, it’s about a theater and then it can be put to one side or if it’s you know, KPMG or something like that. [00:04:34] It’s a, it’s an enormous piece of you know, lots of, lots of pages that get put in a drawer. And it’s just there to show that you’ve got one. When the auditors come round, what is the. What’s your feeling on that? You know, how many it strategies are really valid or useful documents and what can we do about the ones that are, [00:04:53] Richard: [00:04:53] yeah, I mean, I’ve, I’ve definitely, you know, hands up, been involved in creating lighting strategies that probably fall into that quite sort of I don’t want to be negatively or sort of cynical view of what an IOT strategy is. [00:05:07]You know, and I guess those are. Ones where it might just be a reaction of Oh organization, doesn’t have a strategy border asking where it is going often, you know, probably because they’re unhappy with where it is going. And certainly when, when I was a consultant that was often the story you know, the consultants, including myself, were brought in to help. [00:05:32] The incumbent create an it strategy because the board weren’t comfortable that they were getting the value from it that they wanted. And that’s never, that that scenario is never a particularly positive one. Certainly often for the, for the incumbent, so involved for that. So that’s certainly a scenario for me like the, the value. [00:05:51] Yeah. Where it strategies are valuable is around your polyps about influencing but also being able to influence, influencing near the board or investors and about clearing a path. So by setting a direction, you’re, you’re, you’re saying what you are going to do, and obviously very either implication or explicitly what you’re not going to do. [00:06:14] It can unlock investment as well. And it gives you a guidance to be able to say no to stuff, which I think is really important. And from a, an it team perspective provides a direction for the team. So I don’t quite know how you would provide direction for a team without having a clear strategy or something masquerading as an it strategy. [00:06:34] Matt: [00:06:34] There’s something quite interesting about that. That point about where you get people in to do strategy about whether it’s done in house. And I’ve never really made this link before, but I’ve always found it a bit odd that senior leaders don’t create their own strategies because surely if senior leadership is about anything, it’s about being able to define, set and execute strategy. [00:06:56] But actually is something that you do for a bit. And then it’s the definition and the creation of it is one part, the selling of it is another. And then the execution of it is the bit that usually takes the time. And actually those are quite different sets of skills. So I can see actually, maybe. Externally delivered strategy is not as daft as an idea as I’ve maybe thought it has been. [00:07:19] Richard: [00:07:19] This is just the one I actually, one of my first newsletters was about, you know, do you need a consultant to to create an it strategy? And my great answer in summary was it depends. So, you know, if so, if, if you’re an incumbent it leader in an organization and actually the reason why you’ve got a consultant in is because the boat don’t have confidence in youth and you’ve got bigger problems. [00:07:41]And you’re probably going to be gone within a very short period of time. If however, your an incumbent it leader in an organization and and your proactively going, actually I need some expertise bringing in and controlling that expertise to help you craft a better it strategy to help challenge your thinking. [00:08:00] Then that’s a really positive and more likely to have a positive outcome approach. Yeah. So, yeah, I guess that’s sort of two simplistic distinctions of, I guess, you know, that there’s one where actually outside help probably is a sticking plaster over a more fundamental issue about the relationship of the it leader with the stakeholders. [00:08:24]And then there is one where a surgical use of experienced people. Controlled by that incumbent leader. So it’s not, you don’t just end up with a load of you know, big four slideware. That’s just recycled from company to company. That can be a really positive thing. [00:08:45]Matt: [00:08:45] Probably a useful point at this let’s define strategy because I think it’s a term that has many. [00:08:53] Interpretations for you? What, what’s the core elements of a good strategy it or otherwise? [00:09:01] Richard: [00:09:01] Yeah, I guess it’s funny. I was literally quoting this stuff to someone today in terms of there’s a I can’t remember the name of the book. Something like how to play bass by Lafley and Martin. And it talks about a. [00:09:13] Cascade of five connectors and reinforcing choices. So it talks about w w what’s our winning aspiration. So you might call that the strategic vision you know, where will we play? How will we win, what capabilities need to be in place for us to win. And then fifthly, I think it’s what management systems are required in in the broadest sense of systems and measures. [00:09:37]So that you can monitor the, the capabilities of delivering what they need. I think that’s quite a nice, succinct way of thinking about it. Yeah. And then I guess there’s the sort of remote sort of strategies coherent has coordinating actions and policies and resources. As you know, is another good way of thinking about it so that when, when people say strategies to me, that’s immediately where my, my mind goes. [00:10:01] Chris: [00:10:01] There’s something along those lines that just before we started recording, we were talking a little bit about how you about business strategy and IC strategy, and often what you do when you go into an organization, you find that. They wanted it strategy, but they don’t really have a business strategy or not something that you can work with. [00:10:20] So then as a consultant, you end up essentially drawing out that business strategy in order that you can then provide a technology strategy that supports it. And my, one of my questions has always been. People always say that they’ve got, you can always get some kind of group run the idea, whether it be we’re going to grow this business, you know, everybody wants to grow their business. [00:10:42] Okay. So that’s a, that’s a nice, simple one. Or we’re going to be more profitable or, you know, we’re going to diet, we’re going to get, we, we currently do this. We’re going to add this and this and this to our portfolio of services, whatever it might be. But then I say, you’re going to grow right. [00:11:00] Generally speaking, I’d just say, okay, fair enough. So you’re going to grow. And the market is the market growing particularly well, no market. Yeah. Unless you’re in a very unusual place. Your market’s probably about the same as this year as it was last year. So if you’re going to grow, you are going to have to take business from somebody else. [00:11:16] And that’s how that’s, that’s a, that’s a truth. So what are you going to do? What are you going to say to their customers so that they give you money instead of them? What is it? And when you get down to that and people say, Oh, well we’re cheaper or faster, or where we’re, you know, we’re cleaner or we’re nicer, or, you know, whatever they’re going to say to say, well, why should that guy give you his money rather than him just carrying on using the last guy? [00:11:46] Makes a big difference. Just, just that simple question. [00:11:49] Richard: [00:11:49] Yeah. And that’s where often you. If people haven’t thought enough about it, you get the sort of the party stewards of, Oh, well, we’re, you know, we’ve, we’ll have the best people and, you know we’ll we’ll understand the customer and Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting because there’s that point isn’t aware of sort of, you know, it’s important to have aspirations, but they need to end up with being coherent and being actionable, you know? [00:12:14]You had the, I can’t remember who said it, but if your strategy is making statements where the opposite of the statement, isn’t also a really good idea, then you’re maybe not making a decision. I don’t know whether that makes sense. [00:12:29] Chris: [00:12:29] Yeah, that’s a bit like this. You know, if, if somebody says something and the, and your response is waltz or duh, you know, or that’s not really something, yeah. [00:12:42] Richard: [00:12:42] We’re going to deliver great customer service really. Oh, right. So the alternative that is a valid, valid strategic option is that you’re going to deliver really shit. So attended with three alerts where what’s on your podcast, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s yeah. It’s yeah, it’s delivering a really bad customer service, a strategic decision that you want to make tonight. [00:13:04] Yeah. [00:13:05] Matt: [00:13:05] Yeah. I suppose there’s Maybe not at that extreme, but for some organizations that there are those choices to be made. It’s the worst is when the platitudes take over. And they’re all saying, they’re doing one thing, but the reality is another. So if you take, I don’t know train operators, for example, I remember my old mate of mine. [00:13:23] Dan is worked in the train industry for all his career and yeah. I think it was the Welsh railways and the they’d got to the state where the customer service was being talked to wear it as a thing. But the reality was that the trains were being held up mostly by customers because customers would do nasty things like hold the doors when the train was about to leave, which was meaning that the train would get delayed, which means that they all get penalized because of the fact that they then had fines to pay because they weren’t meeting. [00:13:52] Occasions as a franchise operator. And it was a despised ruling circle of despair where the, the, you know, the, the staff thought that the biggest single problem where the passengers and the passengers thought that the staff bloody awful, because they’d been treated by. Them terribly because they were viewed in that way. [00:14:12] And so, but all of that came about because I’m sure there was somebody, some somebody for the wealth rowers were say, we pride ourselves in our passenger service, but they weren’t actually doing anything about it. And at that platitudinous statements, if you just got there aspirational thing without any, any real indication about how you will execute it, it actually can become very self-destructive. [00:14:36] Chris: [00:14:36] Yeah, I’ve got a client at the moment. And we were talking about the fact that they’ve got they need to make some changes to their it structure and the way they deliver. And partly it’s because I think they’re doing too good, a job. Everybody gets their problem fixed in no time at all, but it costs too much. [00:14:51] So how do they degrade it in a way that can save them money, but is also manageable from a [00:14:59] Richard: [00:14:59] that’s pretty, pretty interesting is the, is the CFO like responsible for it? [00:15:04]Chris: [00:15:04] No, it’s, it’s a bit more complicated than that in this organization. But yes, I, I know where you’re coming from. [00:15:11] Richard: [00:15:11] Yeah. Is it just, just that it it’s just a cost center, is it? [00:15:14] Yeah, it’s not it’s not revenue generator or, you know, that, that sounds like that’s the sort of narrative that seems to be at play [00:15:22] Chris: [00:15:22] that. Yeah. I mean often when you get a CFO’s in charge of it, that that’s, as you say, it’s so much of how, why should I pay for this? You know, w w tell me, tell me what this is costing me and why? [00:15:34]I think often the question they’re asking that question, and you’re trying to do those things. Part of the question you’ve got to ask yourself is what is the value of getting this stuff done in, within, you know, an hour and what is the cost of not doing it? And then, you know, in some businesses. So if you’re the NHS, for example, you might be, you might have all been, we’re gonna drop the call time from 10 minutes to 20 minutes. [00:16:02] But if somebody can’t see patients in that time can have a serious effect. So you’ve got, you know, it’s a, you’ve got to think of the value in the ho in the round, rather than, rather than just in the, you know, we have to employ two more. First line staff or whatever, it’s not, you know, these things, but then again, when a business is, is under pressure and it’s under pressure, right. [00:16:23] It can’t afford for the money to go out the door. So something has to give [00:16:29] Matt: [00:16:29] there’s sometimes also though I. I’m sure I’ve spoken about this on the show before, but I see it as context of Trump cards that get played in organizations that can also be good indicator of the, the underlying tacit strategy. [00:16:45] Maybe you should think about this, like culture or other things. You’ve got an explicit strategy and a tacit. Yeah. Strategy and where the Trump cards are played. So I’ve seen and worked in organizations where the shareholder is the Trump card. And if somebody says that we need to do this because the shareholder value, that means just do it. [00:17:04] There’s no real debate to be had about this. I’ve seen it in privately held companies where the, the chairman the design agency I worked for for a few years, the, the chairman there, if, if Gary said something. Not if Gary actually said, but if it was said that Gary had said something, then Gary, the chairman that, that flow, if Gary said the client Wanted something then that really, that was a double chump I need to really actually have, should have already done it twice. [00:17:32] You know, it shouldn’t be waiting around, hanging around for anything to happen. And I wonder how many times actually, in organizations, people we use the Trump card of one of the key strategic imperatives for my experience tends to be much more actually Trump cards are people and people with power. [00:17:51] Then they are, we have to do this because of profitability and actually being played in that kind of way. It’s interesting as to whether the, the explicit strategy really is what’s going on implicitly in day to day operation. [00:18:05] Richard: [00:18:05] That’s interesting in terms of, because I’ve definitely seen scenarios where the, you know, the Trump card has been a person. [00:18:12]But also when the Trump card has been like the concept of a person, like, you know, when you’re like, Oh, well the business wants this to happen. Like I’d always imagined, like there’s some sort of Jabba the hut, like creature. There’s called the business that exists. Then it’s just our and you know, dictating things. [00:18:33]But equally, equally, I think sometimes organizations can fool themselves into, you know, what we’re really customer centric. We do loads of research. And then that becomes the sort of dictatorial voice of like, whoever owns that relationship with your, you know, your, your use of your researchers or whatever, then owns the the new Trump card which. [00:18:56] You know, maybe it’s slightly less problematic. If it, if it’s grounded in, you know, in good ethical research but maybe it can also be used. I guess what we’re talking about is about power. Isn’t it. And, and that can be held in wielded in various different ways. [00:19:15] Chris: [00:19:15] So, okay. Let’s just think about them a little bit about. [00:19:19] Formats and how who’s going to read it and why it’s right. So I, when I was doing my research last year, and, and this plays a little bit into Matt, Cohen’s early on about list people and map people. When I did my research, I looked, I saw all sorts of things in it, strategies, some of which, some of which were more common than others. [00:19:42] And what I started to think of. Okay. Who’s the audience for this document? So it might be shareholders. It might be the managing director or the board. It might be the customers might be interested up to a point. It might be the supply chain would be interested because they want to know how we know how you’re going to evolve your tech so that they can interact with you more efficiently and do their service. [00:20:06]Your it team would, should be interested in it because they should be, they should be involved and interested in, you know, even if they’re not involved in creating it, they should be in it directly. They should indirect, indirectly informative and they should be interested to know what on earth is they’re heading towards right now, because you’ve got all these different. [00:20:29] Audience is they need to be spoken to in different ways and they need to be spoken to it with, with different words and different styles. But often we just write one document and that’s it, that’s the it strategy got on with it. And is that the right thing to do? And how do we, how do we break this up and make it? [00:20:45] So it’s actually relevant to lots of different people with lots of different, you know, some people are just interested in that bit and some people are interested in this bit and some people are interested in the same bit as those people, but they want to see it in a different way. So how do we deal with that? [00:21:01] Richard: [00:21:01] Yeah, that’s it, as soon as possible, I think. Right. In terms of those, those sort of stakeholder groups that you talked about, I guess there’s, you know, simplistically, there’s the up ones, whether that’s board or shareholders, there’s the internal ones as in like your team, whereas your it team going, I guess, you know, suppliers potentially as well. [00:21:20]And yeah, and across, in terms of those, you know, What am I doing for my marketing team? What am I doing for my, you know, for like HR team? What am I doing for my finance team? And I guess for me, like you do need to be able to boil down something into a, into a single document that at the very least addresses the needs of those stakeholders to a greater or lesser extent, like I’m going to be more interested in pleasing, you know, my board than I probably am. [00:21:51] My opposite number in, I know the team, you know, I still need to cause, you know, cause that might undermine something that I want to achieve, but but there’s a, I guess a priority order there. The approach I’ve taken is previously is if there is one strategy document, but then there, there is engagement that is absolutely tailored to, you know, to draw out and summarize. [00:22:16] That you know, Hey marketing guy, I have addressed your needs and you th this is how this is how I’m going to address them. So I guess there’s, yeah, once I guess it’s I was going to make some sort of really bad biblical analogy of like, there’s, there’s one Bible, but maybe various different additions. [00:22:32]I’ll stop there before I plus feed. [00:22:36] Chris: [00:22:36] Yeah. W we’re going to have the church on a bucket for not getting the truth and various yes. [00:22:48] I think it’s a, I think it’s a struggle because you know, you think about it is digital strategy and whatever that is and it strategy and business strategy and they’re, so they’re becoming so merged now. You can’t make a decision in business anymore. Once upon a time, we used to say, you know, You’d have the, the great and the good say, well, you must have your it director on the board and never all it directors them were banging on the door saying, I must be on the board because you can’t possibly take a business decision without understanding the technology implications. [00:23:20] But that now is not just about the technology implications of a business decision, but it’s also. Why should you make this decision? Because these are the options you have because, because technology right now, some of that technology, maybe isn’t, or even shouldn’t be owned by the it department and the CIO, maybe, you know, maybe some of it should be in the marketing team and somebody, it should, some of it should be in the procurement team or whatever, and therefore, Maybe the it strategy just has to get, it has to be boiled down to a much smaller thing and everybody else has their own technology, part of their own strategy. [00:24:00] Who knows? I don’t know the answer, but we’ve got to be a bit more aware that this isn’t, this isn’t like 10 years ago when it’s not even like five years ago, this has got to evolve really quickly. 10, [00:24:13] Matt: [00:24:13] 10 up. Technology works. I think a number of different levels now that isn’t it, because you’ve got the traditions, which has been like machinery, the kind of plant, the capital investment that you make for stuff to be able to produce things. [00:24:27] And it used to be the most of that production was about the back office. So it was about producing numbers of finance or the payroll, or document. But increasingly the last 20 years, it’s been starting to become machines to be able to deliver. The front service that the, the actual things that the customers use in some cases it is what the customer consumes in many cases is mediated through, but then there’s also a whole sway the technology. [00:24:56] And I think this has been really brought home in the last year that there’s, there’s the machinery stuff. And then there’s the, the technology, that’s more like language. That is there purely as an enabler to enable people to communicate with one another. And that, that, I don’t think they actually, traditional I-Team models are very good at managing any of that stuff because that isn’t, it doesn’t fit with type process. [00:25:21] It doesn’t fit with the machine model of the organization. It’s much more about the organism of the organization and it would be like saying, well, we need a centralized team to be able to control language. Which of course, any comms team where they’d put their hand up and go that’s us and go, no, no, no, no, no, no normal language. [00:25:39] And the, you know, the, the different modes of what we do, I think too much, actually we thought that the, the two modes of therapy, the bi-modal stuff, but gardener. Pumped out that was all about, you know, old fashioned technology and new fashion technologies or framed in technology, not in the use of it, but I think there’s, there’s definitely distinctions between technology that is used to be able to manage and control process, which could be old or new. [00:26:03] And that, that is used to manage the communication and the collaboration between people, which is again, old or new from email all the way up to whatever the latest plug into Microsoft teams is. And. So actually the breadth of what we need to do within a technology strategy, if technology strategy itself is separate from the organization, strategy is massive because it’s not just like it was, which was put servers into server room, turn servers on keep servers. [00:26:35] Cool. [00:26:37] Richard: [00:26:37] Yeah. And I think the thing for me is, is it’s going to. The crap analogy coming up again, you know, the, you know, for every organization is, is a jigsaw puzzle, the actual demarcation of, you know, where the, where the it strategy, a jigsaw puzzle ends and the digital one begins. And the business one begins, I think is different depending on the organization. [00:26:59] So someone’s asking you the other day. Oh yeah. My organization I’ve got digital strategy. How does my it strategy fit in? I’m like, well, I can’t answer that question. Like generically I’d need to understand, you know, what is the scope of your digital strategy? You know, what is the landscape of your organization to be able to really answer that? [00:27:20]Cause it, it may be, it may be different. And because the breadth and depth of, of what it is now does touch so many areas y’all can think of areas of. Yeah, the organization I work in where actually it’s a, it’s a customer service team that own a particular bit of technology. And what I need to do is be cognizant of where I add the most value. [00:27:41] So is that working for people? Is it working for the, you know, for, for my colleagues and their customers now? Yes. Great. That can, that can continue. I’ll focus my air, my tensions on other priority areas. And I will keep, keep an eye on that area. And if it’s not working because something changes strategically or or we, you know, I’m thinking, you know, there’s a, there’s a channel management bit of software in my organization. [00:28:07] That’s primarily owned by customer services. Actually, if our strategy changes and we need to, you know, Do something new with channels, then actually that’s going to be a new area of focus. So yeah, I go, yeah, I’m answering a question really about by saying, you know, it depends, [00:28:26] Matt: [00:28:26] but in that actually, maybe there is also one of the big challenges that the industry has, which is because of its, its tradition in engineering. [00:28:36] Do we have people who can think ambiguously enough and cope with the ambiguity of all of this complexity. When, if you look at the tradition, it’s all been about best practice models and that certainty of follow the process and the way in which, you know, the whole agile movement over the last 20 years, which supposed to be about being able to cope with complexity and ambiguity has been railroaded into, if you just follow this method, everything will turn out. [00:29:06] Right. Which we all know is nonsense. And so there’s something there about actually. And in comparison to other support services where, you know, finances w with putting aside that, you know, the black art of of management accounting, And if you just look at the basics of it all, it’s, you know, it’s fairly, you know, what’s going on. [00:29:28] It’s fairly routine. It’s all about following Lauren, you know, process with HR very much. Similarly, I think for it to a great extent, we’ve got this thing that is so ambiguous. [00:29:42] Richard: [00:29:42] But I think that that’s where actually, you know, you can bring some Ang you know, some, you can try and bring some clarity to the ambiguity from lighting strategy perspective by, you know, you know, I’m just thinking about your previous strategy. [00:29:56] I wrote, I talked about it needing to be a competitive weapon and that was you know, it’s a potentially a meaningless phrase, but what it meant was. We are going to focus on areas where we can help the business compete. We’re not going to focus on areas where there isn’t, you know, the, the machinery stuff, the, that you mentioned, actually, we can get someone else to do. [00:30:16] We’re not going to sell more by doing that ourselves. And then it helps yeah. Making some mistakes. I think some distinctions like that help simplify the decisions that you’ve got to make, I guess in some way, I don’t know whether that makes sense. I think [00:30:30] Chris: [00:30:30] so that what you said earlier about, it depends by some of the top of the organization you are, but made me think a little bit about technology companies. [00:30:37] So maybe even software companies where you’ve got you’re producing an ERP system or, or, or whatever it might be. And in that, for instance, if you think about some of the people now, and I’ve met some of the people who are CEOs at big technology companies, and you think they’re going to be like the greatest CIO that ever lived and actually. [00:30:59] That their, their role is quite limited, right there, computers on desks. Are they working? If the software that’d be, people need to do their jobs, working, all the, all the cool stuff is, is what the business is. Right? So in your it strategy, in that role, you would be talking about keeping people working, and you’re the person that gets called when the broadband doesn’t work or the. [00:31:25] Or the phones don’t work or whatever. And maybe that’s where, where a lot of it is heading because actually the, the technology is just now out there. And it’s not a, it’s not the responsibility of a CIO or an it director anymore because it’s necessarily owned elsewhere. And maybe we’re seeing that kind of. [00:31:47] Well in some industries and maybe, maybe a growing trend that will be for the, it remit to sort of go back down to the basics and just keep everybody working. [00:31:58] Richard: [00:31:58] Yeah, it’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah, there’s a, there’s also an argument for actually yeah. That CIO role to be the, the architect of, of an ecosystem that might, you know, that some parts of that ecosystem might be being owned in different areas. [00:32:15] But you’re the one with the holistic view, making sure that actually, how, if, if there’s an investment here in a certain system that it feeds the, you know, the feet of the data flows that need to be over here for the other system. So I think that that role of you know, architects, but equally at the same time, it could just be that CIO role is a you know, is just a procurement and contracts manager. [00:32:37]You know, which is thought that. Fills me with dread. [00:32:43] Chris: [00:32:43] I think for a lot of people, it would, but for a lot of it directors that I’ve known of, but that would be perfect. [00:32:51] Matt: [00:32:51] And for a lot of organizations today, actually, maybe that’s what they need. But again, as you say, it’s much more about context. Outro Matt: [00:00:00] So we are at the end of episode, 179, which of course, apart from the inevitable Sid Waddell impersonations for next week’s show, which I know Chris you’re particularly looking forward to. , what occurs for you now between this point in that? [00:00:21] Chris: [00:00:21] Well, I’ve got an event that’s coming up, so. And as I said, at the top of the program, we were talking about being different this year, from last year. [00:00:29] So that last year I was doing this event in in. Well, we did Kevin Hagan one day and we did start her in the next day. And that was, yeah, it’s always nice to visit those places today, tomorrow. No, rather Wednesday I’m doing an event, which is ostensibly in the Nordics, but also in the Benelux looks at the same time. [00:00:46] So this is covering, you know, Belgium and Holland, as well as Sweden and Denmark and all those places. But of course, I’m doing it from the comfort of my little room here, so everything has changed, but we can. We can not cover them more places from, with one event, which I guess is which I guess is progressive assault. [00:01:04] So that’s what I’m doing this week amongst other things. What about your [00:01:09] Matt: [00:01:09] email? So I’m bringing actually some data consults people in, into the organization over the course of the next week or so to do some work, to be able to as just through, you know, the form filling stuff of new suppliers, very exciting. [00:01:23] And a Thursday and Friday this week is Paul Armstrong’s TBD event. Which I’m hoping my diary won’t be completely cut out. This is the problem with these online event. Things, is that because you’re exactly the same place as you would be as if you were doing work in the virtual office, you find that buckers keep putting meetings in, but a hope to it make some of the TBD event. [00:01:49] I can’t remember what the B stands for, but it’s technology and the D is disruption and he has a remarkable. Wide range of speakers. I think Rory Sutherland is speaking. I think he’s got people from all of the big social networks there and various other bits and bobs as well. So I’m looking forward to being able to make as much of that as I can. [00:02:11]And Richard, what’s your week ahead looking like, [00:02:13]Richard: [00:02:13] So it’s interesting. You mentioned data consultants cause that’s a conversation I’m having as well. I think, yeah, there’s some opportunities to get some expertise. Into help us with, with some of our identify other opportunities for, for our data and doing some work around some more investment. [00:02:32]And we’re doing some interesting work around obviously as with everyone last year was And opportunity for learning. And we’re, we’re sort of taking some steps to sort of cement some of that stuff, whether that’s around, how, how we’re helping people remote work or or how we’re taking some of the learnings where we’ve challenged some assumptions about how we can operate our business. [00:02:54] And we’re, we’re making some changes off of that. So I’m trying to frame the last year in as positive way as possible, but yeah. Yeah, that’s sort of my week. [00:03:04] Matt: [00:03:04] Excellent. Well, thank you again for joining us. This is a great conversation out this very confusing world of of technology strategy and yeah. [00:03:13] So help me, which is good. So I thank you, Dan, Chris, you and I will see each other again next week. I believe, I guess next week is Roland Harward. He, of Liminal. Which should be very good. So between now and then thank you for joining us. And we will see you next week.

On this week’s show Chris and Matt talk about why big tech social networks have been in the news again. Chris is also quizzed on his tech company history knowledge. This week’s transcript: Introduction Matt: [00:00:00] So just the two of us this week very sadly Charlotte G who was supposed to be joining us. Isn’t able to we’ll be getting on to getting her onto the show as soon as possible. But it’s just you and me this week. How are you Christopher? [00:00:14] Chris: [00:00:14] Well, very well, really. I mean, it’s been a, it’s a shame that Charlotte can’t join us, but when I’m looking forward to when we can get her on, because that’s a good conversation. [00:00:24] And other than that, it’s been a week. It’s been a funny week. Really? Actually, I can’t remember much has happened last week since we spoke. I mean, It was fine at work. Lots of lots going on. Today was one of those days where nothing went right. In terms of average, just about every call or meeting that I had planned got canceled or moved, and other things came in as kind of, well, we really need to do this now to to fill it. [00:00:51] So it was a bit of a. That one of those days where it was quite good actually then the day I got quite a lot done, but it wasn’t what I expected to get done. And. Then later this afternoon I was going to take my California OT because I forgot to do the MIT because it got extended during the last lockdown. [00:01:12] And then, because I took it out of my calendar, I’d kind of forgot about it. So it’s quite egregiously passed or it hasn’t been anywhere. So it was not really been a problem. And when I went to get in the bachelor of flight and so that was a, that was a disappointment. So so that was all exciting, exciting for, you know, five to 10 minutes, but then that’s all resolved now. [00:01:31] So now tomorrow will be fine, but yeah, one of those days today, how about you? [00:01:37] Matt: [00:01:37] I can’t believe that it’s only the end of week two last week of 2021. It feels like we’ve been back at least a month. It’s yeah, it’s a strange time. The continuing challenges of homeschooling. I got into a very interesting conversation with Michael Rosen on Twitter last week after having a day of Oh God. [00:01:59] Adverbials, which is well, I say it’s a branch of grammar that I was never taught in school. I was never taught grammar at school children in the seventies and eighties. We weren’t taught grammar. So I needed the level that my ten-year-old seems to be being taught at the moment. [00:02:12] Chris: [00:02:12] I agree with you. [00:02:13] Right. I don’t remember. I remember learning about I’d know. And, and Oh no. See, my vocabulary is is, is fighting even now, but That there are things that my kids learned with primary school that I didn’t learn until, well, probably I learned them myself, you know, as I got older and I didn’t, I never learned them at school, but I remember, I do remember vividly being in primary school and there’s teachers about nouns and verbs and adverbs and all that stuff. [00:02:41] I’m thinking to myself, I have no idea what all this is about, and I have no interest in it as well. It’s not, it’s just what it’s just, I never learned it. You know, one of them is a kind of action word. One of them describing [00:02:54] Matt: [00:02:54] words, describing words, herbs are doing nano verbs. Is it, is it [00:03:02] Nothing. So anyway, the interesting bit from Michael Rosen was his, his take on it. And he’s somebody who is a, he’s an author, a poet, someone who studied English is that it’s basically cause there’s all this stuff came in and Michael Gove, God rest his soul if only he were dead. And the, the, the trouble with it is that these sorts of rules of grammar were designed for being able to study dead languages, particularly Latin. [00:03:26] And if not ancient Greek, and it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because they are generalizations. They’re not rules, they’re not equally applicable. I found out relatively recently that the split infinitive, the the thing at the beginning of star Trek that people get so uppity about, if they’re into that sort of thing, to be able to go in, no man has gone before or whatever it was. [00:03:46] Actually that’s not a law. It’s just, it’s a stylistic suggestion. And you’re quite willing to be able to break it. Spent the only bit of grammar I’ve, I’ve learned how to be able to do for reasons that Farsi detail to go into now. But. The, I mean, Michael was basically saying that this is all nuts because their teachings people really boring things at a very young age, which made no sense at all. [00:04:10] So just continuing with the the homeschooling and the English grammar is, is an interesting thing. Also being experimenting. And I might, well do a bit more experimenting on this very show with a piece of software called descript. That I was pointed out by Ronan Harvard. Who’s going to be coming up on a show in a few weeks time, and it’s basically a, a visual and text-based editor for audio that enables one to be able to do things at the click of a button that otherwise it’d be a monstrous pain in the bum to be able to do in particular, removing all of the. [00:04:46]Filler words, words that would say B U M or E R. And I’m going to spell it out because if, if the experiment goes to plan, I’ll have pressed a button and all of the, the filler words like that will have been removed from the speak show and we’ll see how it goes. Very [00:05:03] Chris: [00:05:03] exciting. Oh, yeah. I look forward to that. [00:05:07] It’s one of those chores that having does it a few things over the, over the years, removing earth, arms, Audi. I’ve said them now. So we’ll see if it takes them away, but removing them from somebody’s speech, which actually can make a, an interview sound a lot better. But it is a chore. You have to kind of look out for them. [00:05:28] You have to cut them out. Bit of a NL magic to get rid of those will be fantastic. I think I do, I’ll also take a little bit of exception to your dead languages thing. I think because Latin is the root of so many languages. If you do learn Latin, I believe it is easier to learn other languages that are Latin based and it can be useful. [00:05:50] Not [00:05:52] Matt: [00:05:52] in Latin. No, it’s not. It’s it’s dead. As in it’s it’s frozen. It doesn’t change. In the way that the English language is constantly changing, got through true. And that’s the point? It’s the differences between a language that is a museum piece that can be very valuable as museum pieces are, but you, you know, you wouldn’t want to make your lunch on something in the British museum. [00:06:13] Chris: [00:06:13] Well, indeed. And then the point about languages, as you say, does change. And it’s important that we recognize it changes. And as somebody who. Despite my lack of mastery of a couple of years earlier now, he’s always been really interested in the language and the different ways it can be used. [00:06:30] I you know, it’s nice to be able to see language values, but language languages is one of those things that you have to allow to change. And if you are one of those people that say, well, you must never use language in that other way. You are inevitably going to be drowned out by, by history and people do that with Americanisms. [00:06:49] They are, they say, well, you know, trashes and Americanism and garbage and all these kinds of things. Well, of course, these are all the reason that I made with my organisms is because they were taken to America as commonplace words in, in England. When, when the settlers went to America and they just moved on here, they hadn’t just had, they hadn’t moved on so much in America. [00:07:06] That’s it? And that’s the crazy thing. It’s a fascinating subject. [00:07:09] Matt: [00:07:09] It is bill, Bryson’s got a book which is all about the difference between English, English, and American English. And one of the really surprising things from reading that book is how many words that I thought were from English. [00:07:21] English actually were originally from American English and we’d adopted them. So it’s really not that clean cut at all. Anyway, there we go. That was, is a massive, great filler word I used. There’ll be interesting to see whether that one comes out. We are now I’m really conscious of it. And now I’m trying to be able to not use them in case they get cut out. [00:07:37] Who knows Liz Stoker would have a field day with this stuff. Wouldn’t she? Because actually you’re taking out context of the conversation that might actually be valuable in this conveying something without us knowing about it. [00:07:46] Chris: [00:07:46] Yeah. We could be boiling away. The very essence.  it wouldn’t take [00:07:51] Matt: [00:07:51] much. So what we will be doing this week, we’re going to have a conversation about social networks and how they’ve been in the news a fair bit recently for one reason or another. [00:07:59] But before that, because we haven’t had one for a while and because I think you look like you need your brain stretching a bit we’re going to have a quiz. So you ready for that, Chris? [00:08:08] Chris: [00:08:08] I was born ready, man. You know that. The Quiz! Matt: [00:00:00] Okay, here we go. Christopher. I wanted to be able to see what you knew about history of technology companies. So I’m going to give you a list of six technology companies, a couple from the United States, four of them from Asia. And I’d like you to tell me the in chronological order of when they were founded. [00:00:23] Hmm. Okay. [00:00:24] So first one, Casio. [00:00:30] You better write these down because fighting memory happens to people my age and younger. So number one, Casio  Casio yet, number two. IBM. Yup. Number three. Samsung. Yeah. Number four. Yamaha. Oh yeah. Number five, Fox com [00:00:54] Chris: [00:00:54] Fox who. [00:00:56] Matt: [00:00:56] Come home, the Chinese manufacturing company that make stuff for people like Apple. [00:01:01] Okay.  And two NS. And then number six is Apple. So Casio IBM, Samsung, Yamaha, Foxconn. And Apple start the oldest first, [00:01:12] Chris: [00:01:12] please. Right? Okay. So I want to say too, I remember going to what’s that place near Winchester that, Hursley or something I remember going there and seeing that little tiny museum downstairs of the all IBM stuff and weighing machines and God knows what. [00:01:28] And so I’m guessing IBM is probably 1930s or something when it was, when it, when it might have started something like that. Casio. I know that’s that to me seems like an older business. That’s not older than IBM, maybe, but it seems I’ve got a feeling that’s quite an old business. Yamaha is quite old because it’s machinery and motor motorcycles and got, and all that sort of thing. [00:01:54] Fox com no idea. Never heard of it until you mentioned it. Apple quite young. So I I’m going to go for really, this is just going to be a gut feeling. I’m going to go Yamaha, Casio. IBM, Samsung, Apple Foxconn. [00:02:11] Matt: [00:02:11] So Yamaha. IBM [00:02:16] Chris: [00:02:16] Castillo some stuff. Yeah. I’m going to go Fox com and then Apple. Sorry. [00:02:23] Matt: [00:02:23] Okay. So the answers are, you had the oldest as Yamaha. [00:02:32] Yamaha was founded in 1887, jetting. It is the oldest. The, if you’ve ever noticed that their that logo is three tuning forks that they put on the motorbikes and all the rest of it it’s because they started off as a piano manufacturer. And they still make fantastic musical instruments to this day. [00:02:50] Okay. Next up you had IBM. IBM is the second oldest founded in 1911. Oh, [00:02:58] Chris: [00:02:58] there we go. I knew it was in fact now I think about it. I remember something to do with them. Yeah. 100 anniversary. I just didn’t. I just didn’t think it was that old. I just thought [00:03:09] Matt: [00:03:09] so you’re next up you had Casio. Casio was founded in 1946, just after the second world war, but unfortunately Samsung was founded in 1938. [00:03:25] Chris: [00:03:25] Okay. I got a feeling that Samsung was, was, was also older than That obviously it wasn’t making TVs and smart phones, but those you know, these companies, it’s quite hard to build a highly, you know, massively scaled manufacturing company from nothing. [00:03:43] Matt: [00:03:43] No. Yeah, absolutely. And Samsung was actually founded in the time when Korea was passed the Japanese empire. [00:03:50] There you go. Next up you had Fox con correct? 1974. Founding of that company. And then 1976 for Apple, which is the youngest of the loss of them. It’s very well done. No, it’s [00:04:03] Chris: [00:04:03] not, but for a stab in the dark, but I think my, my reasoning, so me through [00:04:10] Matt: [00:04:10] absolutely. It’s interesting. I find it actually, how old, so many of the companies that are so central to modern technology actually are. [00:04:19] I mean Casio falling away a bit. Yeah, I’m a horror, a massive in the music industry, but that they’re not ready now. So they used to Haifa and stuff. I don’t think they do much of that anymore. But you know, IBM still there 110 years old. [00:04:33] Chris: [00:04:33] It’s interesting. Isn’t it? And I guess a few of them, they came to our notice, you know, Casio probably in the 1970s and Samsung in the 1990s, probably the fact that they came to Western notice at that time, my colors are. [00:04:47]Perception a bit. And Chinese, I mean, there is not, I, I put Fox come later, is that there aren’t that many Chinese companies that, or that do that kind of thing, because it really wasn’t a, you know, China’s economy really wasn’t based on that, on manufacturing at scale of any sort really until. No well into the well into the second half of the 20th century. [00:05:09] So yeah, it’s it is interesting that the question is, you know, what happens next and what happens to these manufacturing companies and where do they go? And do we see the India or other places start to start to come through? [00:05:23] Matt: [00:05:23] And how many of the companies that are leading newer today will be around in 110 years time. [00:05:31] Chris: [00:05:31] Well amongst things for certain, we won’t be that to to notice [00:05:36] Matt: [00:05:36] might be anyway, pressing on. Social Media in the News… Chris: [00:00:00] So that I’m not, we’re going to talk about social media because it’s been a funny week for or a couple of weeks for social media and the way it reacts and sensors the output of various individuals and probably various individuals. We are essentially talking about Donald Trump and the people in his little retinue as they spread there. [00:00:25]Most the best way to describe it, the sort of lunatic ideas about the U S election, et cetera, for which they have, we ought to point out, give them this is responsible podcast evidence of to support their claims. Twitter, big girl spice because they Bund Donald Trump and they said, right, you can’t use Twitter anymore. [00:00:45] And then they, I think they actually banned him completely haven’t these are lifespan or something. Facebook removed him for something do achieve of bundle for two weeks or something because that’s the policy or whatever. And that’s then opened up a whole bunch of conversations about whose responsibility it is to send to people. [00:01:02] Was it right for them to do so? Should they have the power to do so? How does this fit in with a government regulation of social media, especially some of that which is being pushed through right now in the UK, as in other places that’s the online harms bill or I think they call it it’s it’s quite the kind of worms. [00:01:23] Isn’t it? [00:01:26] Matt: [00:01:26] Yes. Yes, it is. There’s, there’s, there’s a bunch of interesting things at play here. There’s the thing about if social networks for a long while social networks and, and others in that sort of space have argued that they are not publishers. They are merely platforms that the people who. [00:01:48]Put their content out on social media or the publishers, and therefore they have less responsibility for the content that goes out into their channels than say, a newspaper or a television channel would, and therefore leave us alone. It’s not us. It’s all the people using it. Even if what they do is hateful and incites violence. [00:02:07] And all of this is it’s a really neat media model because not only do you not have to really pay for your content, but then also you don’t get held responsible for the content, even when it goes out. And so it gets over a number of legal hurdles out and they keep saying they’re technology companies. [00:02:23] They’re not media companies. So when then Twitter and Facebook remove Donald Trump from being able to use those channels as a means to be able to speak directly to people slightly unmediated by the traditional media channels. There’s massive outro outcry by the right. There’s a bit of outcry for free speech people. [00:02:48] There’s a bunch of. Gnashing of teeth and wailing. And a lot of it seemed to be around how this is terrible, that these unregulated things we’re able to be able to exert power, to be able to describe who had the right to a voice and who didn’t. The thing that I find it a little bit ironic about that is that. [00:03:10] The traditional media have always had the right to be able to say, who has a voice and who doesn’t. And whilst they are having in the UK television and radio is regulated by a government sponsored regulator. I’ll come and with the BBC is regulated by Ofcom yet or not, but certainly there’s been rumors about that for a while. [00:03:30] And the BBC board of governors have regulated it before then. And newspapers are. Regulated by themselves, which is why the phone hacking scandal uncovered so much dirt within that world, because basically they weren’t being regulated whatsoever. The ownership of media is a bit dubious. The political affiliation of ownership of the media is mostly biased towards. [00:03:56] One side of the political spectrum and exert certainly control over setting agenda in UK politics. And that you, what you see often in the TV press is the T sorry, the TBN, the relationship with TV and the traditional press is that TV follows the agenda. That’s set by the newspapers and this close workings between the press and. [00:04:19]Political parties in particularly between most of the press and the conservative party. So the whole thing is basically there is no such thing as free access to speech at the scale at which networks are currently operating. Social networks are currently operating. This is unprecedented that we do have this, but it’s, it’s a complete anomaly in many ways. [00:04:38] And so it’s throwing up questions about how should they. Be regulated. Should they have the ability to be able to take people off air? And I think actually it’s interesting. Nobody really is talking much about that. Are they publishers or are they mainly plateau forms and there has been a little bit of thing going, particularly with Twitter in my head because I, I might occasionally have, you know, Thoughts that maybe people aren’t acting in the best of interests. [00:05:05] I’m wondering whether the delay in Twitter actually getting to this point, it was nothing to do with politics, but it was much more to do with the fact that Donald Trump was top. Top dollar box office for Twitter in particular. And he was a massive drawer and I who don’t follow Donald Trump and kind of missing the ability to watch what the raging ramblings are at the moment, because it’s not there anymore. [00:05:27] It’s a bit weird. And so there’s, there’s a whole bunch of dynamics at play within that. And it’s a bit of a muddle really, because. I mean the, the, the regulation of the press, I’ve just started listening to Ian dumps, listening and reading in dunce latest book, how to be a liberal. And he starts off with the the, the history of the philosophy of liberalism. [00:05:47] The idea that we as individuals have rights because we have sentence effectively and. How within the the, the formation of the three pillars of government, there was a central facet of the, both the American revolution and the French revolution. The idea of the separation of powers, particularly America, the separation of powers between judiciary executive and legislature that the, the free press was a vital fourth part of this. [00:06:13]And. The way in which traditional media has changed under the world of social networks is also leading to weird things because we don’t have a press quite like we used to. And we certainly don’t have things like local press, like we used to and the how holding a political activity to account, especially at a local level in the UK now is massively massively impacted by the fact we no longer really have local newspapers. [00:06:41] So, and all of that is it, all of these things are interrelated. So it’s a bit of a mess. [00:06:47] Chris: [00:06:47] It is, isn’t it because it’s really, it’s tempting to try and boil it all down and try and figure out where it all came from. But I think. I’ve been, as you’ve been talking, I’ve been going through that in my mind and I’m not sure it goes anywhere, but I remember the once upon a time when people started blogging and then you’d get a lot of journalists saying, well, of course, you know, you’re not proper journalists. [00:07:07] If you’re, you’re a blogger, you’re not a journalist. And and then over the years that’s become a little bit less. Easy for them to say, because some bloggers get enormous readership, or maybe now they’ve moved on to being vloggers or, or, you know, the podcast is even right. But there are people with them, an audience who have got that audience through various means whether it’s through fermions or foul. [00:07:32]But as you say those, those same the journalists and, and certainly the, the media companies have every single option they can take, they take to, to bash Facebook and Twitter and all those sort of things. They take done it because they see them as a massive threat. And just as once upon a time they saw blogging as a, as a kind of a threat or also it was a cheapening right. [00:07:54] Of what they did because the barrier to entry. To putting your thoughts down and publishing it for anybody to read had gone to zero and also the cost for anybody to read. That was also zero. So they were there, they were publishing what they were considered to be researched, high quality nuanced balance, whatever you like and charging a premium for that. [00:08:17] And. People were saying, well, why should I buy that? I can get this for free. And often let’s face it. You can look at all the bloggers and you can, you can say, well, okay, 70% of them are adequate or less, but the top that it was, if you can curate a list, you can get a lot of very good information. But the question is. [00:08:38] Who does that curation, who does that? Who does that work? And when it’s us, actually, maybe one day, we’ll like you and I both subscribed to tortoise, for example, which is I think is, is a decent efforts. Got some very good news news sources in it. I think they do a very good job of research into their stories. [00:08:55] Some of their stories have been extremely well justified, and, and, and you can see the level of effort that’s going into it. I have a, I also have a problem with tortoise and as much as it seems to me to be very, it’s kind of written by journalists for journalists. And then in a way that seems to me, there’s lots of, it’s kind of, if you read it in a metropolitan kind of educated mindset, it’s gonna make sense, but that’s, that’s the only thing that makes sense too. [00:09:25] And I, and I, that jars with me a little bit, so. The question about who you’re writing for, what are you trying to achieve? What’s the, what’s the, what’s your plan? Is all, they’re all valid in terms of what blog, whether it’s bloggers, whether it’s news organizations, but as you say, that ability for news organizations now, because, because, because the barriers of entry have come down completely, like we can do this. [00:09:50] I mean, it’s. There’s nothing, something that’s doing this, or we could go on YouTube. Right. And it would be even easier almost. And we could spare to crap to the, to the world and anybody could watch, nobody might watch, but anybody could watch that that’s that stranglehold, maybe that the, the media companies had on who could ask a question of the government or the prime minister has gone away. [00:10:15] Right. Knock us Rashford is a really good example. Right. So he’s got. He’s got a platform because he’s got followers and he’s famous, right? It’s not the most famous football by any means. He’s kind of, he’s a decent player and he’s played for number. This is not, he’s not probably charting or Gary Lineker or, you know, whenever these know gas going on, one of these players that would have been massive. [00:10:36] He’s a, he’s a good player with a decent audience, but he’s managed to get. Well, I not the prime minister to do pretty much everything he says, right. I’m waiting for the thing that he asked that the government to do that they don’t do, but I’m wondering what it would be that he would ask for that they, that they could deny. [00:10:55]And maybe it’s because of the power of his argument, or maybe it’s because of the subjects he chooses, but everybody is now in a position where they can sort of pick into their new source and they can pick and choose their influencers. And the question for the big. Those big aggregators. Cause that’s what Twitter is really. [00:11:13] It’s an aggregator. It’s an aggregator of 12 feeds from people. Facebook is an aggregator of conversations once upon a time, the BBC or the guardian or the Telegraph, might’ve seen themselves as an aggregator of information and, and, and they would go out and interview people. And I know it brings all this information together and it, the question is what are they doing there? [00:11:36] What’s that question? Those Benz five questions. You know, what part have you got? In whose interest do you exercise it? How can we take it from you? How did you get it all up? There’s another one as well. I can’t remember what it is, but if you were in a position of power, like Twitter, those questions apply to you. [00:11:54] How, you know, since, since you have this power, what, what, in what position do you exercise this power and on what we give them? What can we do about it? [00:12:06] Matt: [00:12:06] I think there’s tape. Two elements of it. And you talked about journalism and you also talked about opinion writers. I think one of the things with the era of Trump in particular, what we’ve seen is that there has been a move from journalism where people who are trained to be journalists are trained in being able to report not necessarily objectively, but based around truth. [00:12:34] And people who have opinion there to be able to spout opinions. So we’re speaking opinion. This show is about opinion. It’s not about necessarily objective truth. When we bring people into the show, it gives us an opportunity to find out about other people’s opinions, but it’s just opinion. There’s, you know, apart from the fact that we know that Yamaha is older than Apple it’s not often that we bring you hard edge facts within this, but we’re not proporting to the blurring of the lines between fact opinion and fiction that’s happened in the last 10 years and the accountability for that amongst social networks. [00:13:15] And the impact that social networks, because of the way in which they work is having on traditional media. So that the big hitting journalists now on the big titles, mostly aren’t journalists, they’re opinion writers. And actually at the moment we have in Michael Gove and in Boris Johnson, two opinion writers who’ve then got to the top of the political part as well. [00:13:41] And I wonder even actually, if they could have even begun to imagine, to have become in that sort of position of power in an era before social networks changing the way in which we perceive the difference between news [00:13:53] Chris: [00:13:53] and opinion. Well, that’s true. And we, we always see the end of people like that as some, some sort of glorious day where better, better will come, but we could have a prime minister and Alison Pearson or or Toby young or Julia Hartley brewer before you know it, right. [00:14:05] This isn’t, this is possible. Let’s, let’s hope that doesn’t happen. But these are, these are all possibilities. I think, I think there’s something, what you say is absolutely. Right, right. And that’s remember that Boris Johnson was ostensibly. Okay. He’s writing opinion, but apparently it was sent to sensibly. [00:14:22] He was writing it in an informed capacity about the European union. But once, once upon a time and he’s recorded her saying, you know, he, he would make this stuff up and then people lumped it up and it didn’t matter what nonsense he made up about the inefficiency and bureaucracy of the year. It would be seized upon by readers and they would love it. [00:14:41] And that’s why it was published. And when you publish those things in a, what you might call respectable paper, newspaper, then that has an effect. But then I guess, There’s always been this [00:15:02] tendency to believe what’s in the newspaper in a, in a, in a respectable newspaper. And you read the, the column by the health correspondent or the law correspondent or the motor and correspondent or the legal correspondent or whatever. And you. You say, okay, these guys know what they’re talking about. [00:15:20] And the only rejoinder to that would be maybe in the next week, that’d be an editor, a letter to the editor published saying when your correspondent talked about this, actually he was, or she was mistaken, whereas now they can be challenged and. Corrected very, very quickly by, by a whole sort of swarm of people say, you know, they can contact and publicly contact the journalist or the newspaper concern. [00:15:48] And I think what, you know, we will both have seen technology, for example, stories in the newspapers in the last 10 years that we look at and go there this down. Well, it’s talking about, and that’s because we happen to know maybe. More than the journalist who’s covering that because that they’re trained in journalism, not in tech, for example, and doctors will probably look at medical stories and go, they’d end up where they’re talking about because they’re trying to medicine and the journalist isn’t trained in medicine. [00:16:17] They’re trained in journalism, but happened to be covering medicine that may be of color to come to for many years, but they don’t have the depth of experience and knowledge of a doctor. But with me and you reading that column, we’ll probably take it as that was fine. We believe that because we, we don’t, we aren’t a doctor, but what we don’t realize is actually it’s all good kind of half, half baked, and it’s all educated kind of guests kind of stuff. [00:16:44] That’s been thrown together at the last minute for a deadline by somebody who has three or four facts and knows how to spin them out into 400 words. And maybe this is the right thing. Maybe, maybe it’s, it’s a good thing that we’re able to challenge. And we, haven’t got this powered vested in a small number of journalists anymore. [00:17:05] Matt: [00:17:05] So let’s think a bit then about the other side of what’s been going on with social networks and big tech companies over the last few weeks. And. Yeah. I mean, this is an ongoing story, but it’s particularly been highlighted with the news a week or so ago that Facebook we’re going to start to link data between WhatsApp, which is the messaging service that they have owned for quite some years now, but actually starting to link its data into the broader Facebook. [00:17:34] A world of data, and they’ve done this in the past with other things that said Oculus the virtual reality thing, you have to use a Facebook identity now to be able to log into that. And the gendered station is together. And the the WhatsApp news for quite a lot of people prompted a a level of soul searching about whether they should continue to use WhatsApp as a platform for what is described as being. [00:18:01] Secure messaging because the, the, I think that the thing was, well, how can it be secure if they’re then going to start to increase any tie these things together? And in fact our very own WB 40 WhatsApp group has now migrated on to signal as a result of that, a democratic process. And we’re now using a different platform and I’m one that proposed to not one, to have the ability to build lots of data about its users. [00:18:27] In similar sort of working models of that Wikipedia, I guess. W w how are you feeling about Facebook having all your data? [00:18:37] Chris: [00:18:37] Well, as somebody who doesn’t use Facebook really very much these days, I, I, I kind of soap in self-imposed or that a year ago, because I was just so depressed with everything I was reading on it. [00:18:49]But I haven’t deleted my account. And I, and the reason why I guess is because. Yeah, there are lots of people, or maybe I know for people who care about where, who I am and where I am, and therefore might want to be able to see that. But Oh, I have been extremely, I guess, concerned about Facebook for awhile and if I could delete it and it wouldn’t cause anybody else, any problem, I probably would the whole WhatsApp thing, I guess I’ve. [00:19:17] The one thing about WhatsApp, which is very good is that there’s always had that end to end encryption. You can, you can have a pretty good certainty that nobody not, nobody wants to read my stuff. Right. But at the end of the day, As that data is collected about it as an aggregated over years and years and years, who knows what that might use for today in future and whatever. [00:19:40] So if you can chip away at that a little bit, I think that’s nice. That’s worthwhile. So you think, okay, it’s good. Also what’s up really is useful. It’s usable and a lot of people have it, so it’s a good tool, but when it loses that intern, the encryption and say, or the, the. The trend is towards them, moving away from that. [00:20:02] And maybe, you know, we’ve seen lots of pressure from home secretaries in this country, for example, and, and, and elsewhere, you know, the security organizations around the world saying, give us a back door, et cetera, anywhere that leads to the potential for that happening. Ah, it just makes me feel uneasy from a, should we allow this kind of thing? [00:20:21] Should we just stop and let this happen? Or could we do something about it? Could we. We vote with our feet and go somewhere else. And that’s why I was very happy to move to signal and the WB 40 group, I’m not going to do what delete WhatsApp, but it’s still too useful for me. But the more traffic that can move, maybe that’s you know, it puns a flag in the ground and makes people think slightly differently. [00:20:43] So it’s, it’s hard to be absolute about these things, right? Because we live in a world where data is collected and shared and, and. Exploited in good ways, as well as negative ways. And we kind of have to get used to that, but it’s, I guess you just have to make value judgments each step. What do you think in that? [00:21:07] Matt: [00:21:07] I think it’s all about being able to understand value exchange and what things are worth. And for me, Personally. And I don’t think that this is a view that this isn’t a view that I think everybody should agree with because different people will have different views on it. I have data that is about who I am, what I do, where I go. [00:21:30] And if I were to go to a technology company and say, here’s all my data, would you like to buy it from me? They would say no. And if I say, please, and they really wants to get rid of me, they might give me a couple of quid. Because my data on its own, I don’t believe has any gray value where the likes of Google and Facebook. [00:21:54] And to an extent, Twitter, I still come back. I have Twitter has any sort of commercial model. I love it as a platform, but I just don’t understand how it could ever make any money. But where those platforms are where their wealth comes from. Is through the data of their users. But the key point for me is it’s not, they’ve bought my data so therefore, or they have my data and therefore they can make money from it. [00:22:16] It’s the fact that they have all of my data and all of everybody else’s and that the, the way in which they can make value from that is only an aggregate. And most that might mean that occasionally I get a bit weirded out by an adverse it’s put in front of me. It also means that when I start to search for something I’ll Google, it gets me to where I want to be quicker than I can even think about it. [00:22:40] It means that I have the ability to be able to communicate with people across the entire planet for free in terms of, you know, no paid for cost at the point. And for me at the moment that is a value exchange that I’m happy with because I know that there is nobody sitting, pouring over my data, particularly because it’s just machines and it’s machines and algorithms. [00:23:07] And there might be a point at the future where somebody or something happens, sorry, and I will then go, Oh, I was such a naive fall, but I kind of think that’s unlikely. And the benefit that I get from all these remarkable bits of technology that my exchanges for data, that if I were to sell on its own would have no value whatsoever is worth it. [00:23:30] I get far more weirded out by the fact that people are experience. Have access to all that data about my financial history and I have no ability to give them permission and they have sought no permission from me to be able to monetize that information. And I get nothing back from it. Other than that creepy feeling, whenever you’re applying for credit, somehow that they might say no, which is a really, that’s a really, that for me is way more dysfunctional than the value that I get from a Google or from a Facebook. [00:24:01] Chris: [00:24:01] Yeah, I guess the only thing that worries me slightly is that this could come, it could become a kind of diabolic pact. You know, there’s kind of sold their soul to the devil. It all seems fine until the point at which you’re being load lower testicle first into the, into the molten lava lakes of Hades. [00:24:21] Matt: [00:24:21] Sorry, you bought me a cream for that. That’s [00:24:22] Chris: [00:24:22] good. I did. Didn’t I say you’ll be well-prepared you be moist. And I. I guess I understand what you’re saying. I think, I think you can venue one person to stay too. I think the people that, that did that quite a long time ago were people like Sainsbury’s right. [00:24:38] And who would give you essentially money or money off your shopping or? Well, [00:24:45] Matt: [00:24:45] yeah. And my point exactly is that was worth about 30 quid a year. [00:24:49] Chris: [00:24:49] Oh, well, because equity is to equity here. It’s not [00:24:52] Matt: [00:24:52] cause that could have, they could have just dropped their prices and not bothered with all that nonsense because they wouldn’t have had to spend all the money on the technology [00:25:00] Chris: [00:25:00] for the next year. [00:25:00] Yeah. Well, but the reason they did spend the money for the next card is they sold that data. They used it for their own purposes. Absolutely. But they sold a lot of it as well. And as you say, it wasn’t useful because they hadn’t that Valentine’s shopping to. They hope it was useful because they had. [00:25:15] Thousands and millions of people who shop shopping data and then they could sell it. So they made more money on that data. I remember somebody telling me who was working with Sainsbury’s then that then they did on Viceland, fruit and veg in a period of time in the nineties. So or maybe the early 2000. [00:25:32] So you can, I don’t know for the value of somebody’s data and you can recommend some for that. The question really is, as you earn a little bit, like you stay with experience, I mean, that experience aren’t getting the data from you. Aren’t they experiment getting data from financial institutions that tell them that, Oh yeah, you’ve got a mortgage and you, you know, you generally pay off, but generally speaking around Christmas when you go out in that bender, you you know, I forgot to pay it. [00:26:00] And the question is, Who owns your data? How can they use it? And GDPR comes along to try to regulate that. And it’s actually really, I mean, GDPR let’s face. It is not, it’s really worthy. And I support the of GDPR and I think it’s very important. But as legislation. It’s rubbish. And as much as nobody really knows what’s going on, nobody really knows whether they’re acting inside GDPR or not. [00:26:24] If we’re completely honest with each other. And therefore, if you could find a way of saying, well, actually, no, we’re not going to do it like that. We are going to prohibit anybody from holding personal data about you, but you will have, you will have a personal data store that you can give organizations permission to. [00:26:41] Access for the period during which your, your you’re working with them or you’re using them, and then you can turn it off. And at that point they must by law delete any information they have on you, but that, you know, but don’t worry company eight, if you ever need months data, again, he can press the button and open it up again. [00:26:59] That model is probably something that we need to get to, frankly. Yeah, it’s technologically very difficult and culturally quite difficult, given all the things that have gone before, but maybe we are, maybe we really are selling us all to the devil. Well, maybe we really do need to fix it in a way like that. [00:27:20] Matt: [00:27:20] Maybe the experience recently of what has happened with politics coming about in the first part of this conversation though, is maybe that’s the faster, the impact. Actually, what it does is it enables us to have Despicable individuals being able to speak until far too many people at the same time. . Outro Chris: [00:00:00] So that was an in-depth conversation. I was a bit old school. We haven’t done that for a little while. [00:00:05] Matt: [00:00:05] Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. It [00:00:07] Chris: [00:00:07] was. But nor shall we, because we’ve got a stellar lineup of guests, you know, you did a, an amazing thing this week, where you listed all of our guests for since the day we started this Merry little podcasting and there were 122, [00:00:23] Matt: [00:00:23] is that 122 people have appeared. [00:00:26] Well there’s, some of them are the same person. Cause a few people have appeared more than [00:00:29] Chris: [00:00:29] once. Well, you know what I mean? And we all, we all move and grow. Right? We’re different people in the future from the past. I reckon they’re all different people. And going through that list is really, it’s kind of eye-opening because every time I, you know, I was always sort of scrolling through it and you sent it to me and I looked through it and I thought I could remember the conversation. [00:00:47] Most of the time I can remember the conversation. And it takes you back to a time and a reason for having that conversation as well. We went, Oh yeah. Everybody’s been brilliant on the show, right? [00:00:59] Matt: [00:00:59] Yep. And we’re continuing that trend. So we all get Charlotte’s on at some point in the near future. [00:01:03]Hopefully everything is well with you, Charlotte. If you’re listening we next week have got Richard. Sage coming in, [00:01:10] Chris: [00:01:10] which is Sage. Who’s going to talk about it. Strategy. He’s got a a mailing list and a website that he runs that is co it turns out some regularly, really, really good stuff on it. [00:01:22] Strategy. And makes you think about, you know, how you’re going to manage different parts of an it organization. So, yeah, looking forward to talk to him about that. [00:01:32]Matt: [00:01:32] We’ve got, I think this is the right article Berlin Howard. Coming in to talk about his business liminal. We talked about liminality a few months ago, but he’s coming into to give us the full SP on it. [00:01:46] We’ve got Julia Hobsbawm coming on to talk about the simplicity principle and how within the world that we’re in at the moment, it’s a massively complicated world when he was things we’ve just been talking about now, how do you make your life manageable? We have got. Anthony, slumbers coming in to talk about, yeah, [00:02:05] Chris: [00:02:05] property what’s going on in what’s going on in the property market, you know, this business of moving to remote, working and how that’s affecting the, you know, the landlords and, and, and things like prop tech and what we can expect to see in future. [00:02:18] Matt: [00:02:18] And we’ve also got Edward , who is the head of the computer. I can’t remember the name of the publication, but apart the new statesman group, he’s formerly the head or the editor in chief at CIO magazine. And he’s going to come in and talk about what he’s up to now. And I think I’ve also got somebody to talk about the world of insurance tech in the next few weeks as well. [00:02:41] So I’m quite a lineup. Hey. [00:02:44] Chris: [00:02:44] Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, we’re going to have guests after guests. We’re not going to have the the chance to indulge ourselves with a conversation like we’ve just had for a wall Mount. So I hope you made the most of it. [00:02:54] Matt: [00:02:54] I did. And the quiz, I forget the quiz. [00:02:58] Chris: [00:02:58] No, they’re good. [00:02:58] Queers. I enjoyed that. Chris, what have you got coming up this week, Matt? [00:03:02]Matt: [00:03:02] We have got Oh, things, staff there’s a group of housing association peers. So CEO’s and other housing associations who meet up every self since we’ve got a meeting of that group one evening I have we’ve got, of course the risk panel. [00:03:19] And one of the things that we’re gonna be talking about is the housing white paper, which was published just before Christmas. One of the things in there is the the commitment from the government to introduce level of freedom of information. Similar to that within the freedom of information act for housing associations. [00:03:34] And one of the things we need to talk about in emerging risks for our organization is the impact of that. Because having seen freedom of information in government organizations the, the aim is good. The the way in which he gets manipulated by. People fishing for stories in the press and people trying to be able to do weird stuff with commercials is a little bit of a downside of it. [00:03:59]So yeah, that’s going to be there and the thing that’s yeah, that’s, that’s about main things that are in my head at the moment. How about you? [00:04:09] Chris: [00:04:09] Well, it’s another, another week back at work and gearing up for some events that I’m doing some presenting out. And of course these are virtual events that I’m going to be sitting in the same place as I am talking to you. [00:04:21] But I was just thinking about this time last year. I’d I’d already been to Vienna. I know there’s so much year I was in Istanbul. And if you remember, we recorded a podcast where, when I was in Istanbul and some people reported the most terrifying noise that happened during that. Do you remember that? [00:04:38] Matt: [00:04:38] Oh, yes, there’s a big motorbike or [00:04:40] Chris: [00:04:40] something, but it was that kind of out of context, but yeah, so that, so the, the world of the wilderness shrunk for me a great deal. So I’ll be presenting in Or rather I’m preparing for one event in which is ostensibly in Sweden and one which is extensive, but in Austria, but they will be doing the, from here. [00:04:58] So that’s, that’s, that’s my weakest is preparing some of those and doing the usual rally. So I’m looking forward to it. It’s it’s always good to be talking to people, even if it’s virtual. [00:05:08] Matt: [00:05:08] Absolutely good. Well I hope you have a good week. Thank you, dear listener for listening in hope you have a good week and we will see you again next week. [00:05:18]Bank here on WB 40.

On this week’s show we are joined by Adapt2Digital‘s Mel Ross. More information about the online networking session for people looking to provide online access to people can be found here:https://accesswy.org/digital-access-national-network-meet-up-thursday-14th-jan-1830/

We’re back for a new year and a look at what technology leaders might need to be concerning themselves in the 12 months ahead.

On this week’s show, the last of the year, Chris and Matt review the top 10 shows by download of 2020. You can find the originals here:10 – (160) Liminal 9 – (136) Homeopathic IT 8 – (146) Designing Home Schooling 7 – (139) Meetings, remote meetings 6 – (143) Socially isolated 5 – (155) Ducks on Wheels 4 – (134) Looking Back 3 – (158) Psychological Safety 2 – (135) OKRs 1 – (137) The Internet of Gnomes

On this week’s show Chris & Matt discuss the recent controversy around Microsoft’s Productivity reporting in Microsoft365, and also we see the (un)welcome return of our snappily-named feature The National Anthem of the Country whose annual energy consumption has just been surpassed by Bitcoin Mining. On December 16th we are having a party to celebrate the end of 2020. You can join us if you say hello over on twitter.com/wb40podcast

On this week’s show we are joined by Sarah Weller and Jemma Jackson who share their experience of starting up their new business https://www.weareelement.com/ in the middle of a global pandemic.