Organization, Collective, Decision - Dave Snowden at USI

foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you for the introduction and apologies in advance um I am Welsh not English that's really important yeah that means I have the possibility of becoming European again which could be even more important um but the problem is that the Welsh speak English about 30 faster than the English do so if I start to do that or the translations translators beg for mercy feel free to slow me down and the title of this talk comes from a book I strongly recommend by Terry Eagleton called hope without optimism um the first time

I ever came to Paris was in the 1970s as a British representative of the Catholic Marxist group um that was the 70s um Terry Eagleton was also associated with that and for those of you know your Catholic theology you'll know that to abandon hope is a mortal sin but it doesn't require you to be optimistic about the future and I really want to make that a sort of theme of what I want to talk about today which is how can we do things in the here and now which increase the possibility of a sustainable and

survivable future so that's that's my focus for those who want to know more about things like Canadian agile we're doing big stuff at the moment on what's called rewild in agile I rebalance in the system there's loads of stuff on YouTube and documents on that today I'm much more focused on organizational and Society design so that's the focus there are two free books you can download on this um a big theme Here will be this which came out late last year which is the European Union guide to manage an incomplexity in a crisis of which

I was the principal author um you can download that for free or get a copy sent to you for free from the European Union there's a website for it and also something which came out last week and this is going to be a theme where I'm going to go to the whole power of narrative in understanding Civil Society and that's a book by Oxfam and other agencies on the last 10 years work they've been doing with us on how to understand the underlying dispositional aspects of human society either basic underlying patterns from which behavior arises

so both of those are downloadable and you can move forwards I want to start here with a metaphor this is a place called come Ivy in Wales in the Gower peninsula um I actually walked across that wall um a few years ago when I did a walk all the way around Wales there's a lovely phrase by the way of from one of our leading journalists he says Wales is a country small enough to know him one lifetime and I and I really like that idea and I have walked all the way around it yeah um

this is an interesting phenomena you can see what used to be a sea wolf and that was built in the 19th century to effectively allow the land to be drained on one side and I'm going to make a big metaphor now around this a sea wall is extremely effective it's highly robust it's stable you know what it is it allows you to do lots of good things it allows you to focus on efficient use of land and it's wonderful until the day it breaks and then it would be better if it hadn't been there in

the first place and that's what actually happened here the sea wall broke and what the National Trust did was to allow the land to regenerate in what's called a salt marsh now salt marsh is a good example of a highly resilient system it's a complex ecosystem it's constantly changing and adapting to the flows of water and critically even when it's saturated it doesn't release the water so its failure isn't a catastrophic failure the failure of the sea wall is catastrophic the failure of the salt marsh is not now there's no agreement on robust resilience all

of these words are used differently by different people so I really want to get that metaphor in your mind are we building a salt marsh or are we building a sea wall yeah if we build a sea wall we better be damn sure we understand everything in advance because if we don't the design conditions will be exceeded the Thames barrier in London is now no longer adequate to the level of flooding that we expect to get and there's other examples as you go around I have friends in Netherlands who say they're going to live in

Brader by the sea in their own lifetime which is quite a depressing concept A Brenda is quite far in land so I want to hold that metaphor because the whole of the EU Field Guide doesn't say you should it's all about getting ready for things that you cannot anticipate it says you have to architect businesses architect companies architect Society so it can respond like the salt marsh to an anticipatable events and actually forecasting and scenario planning may be contraindicated because they give you a false sense of security or narrow the perspective of what you're seeing

too much so that's the underlying metaphor of today the field I'm in is called naturalizing sense making my first degree is physics and philosophy as a joint major which gives me a philosopher's Delight of Concepts and a physicist despair of social scientists they never have enough data to form any ballot conclusion anyway and you'll see that come through in this the naturalizing comes from philosophy sorry sense making I Define as how do we make sense of the world so that we can act in it this is one of five distinct rap schools of sense making

recognized within literature so anybody wants the reference you can have it are you sense making with a hyphen because that's a verb sense making without a hyphen is a noun and that distinction is actually quite important it's about continuously trying to understand not only what we can understand but the limits of our understanding and taking actions compatible with those limits naturalizing means to base what we know in the Natural Sciences not in the social sciences now one of the reasons for this if you look at most social science and certainly all of the management literature

it adopts an inductive approach to learning somebody goes away and studies a whole series of organizations or societies which are held to be successful they identify elements in those societies which are common to all success and from that they create a recipe do these things you too will be successful now this is deeply problematic for many reasons one of the books which is very popular is called Lean Startup the guy goes and studies a whole body of companies in Silicon Valley who've succeeded identifies things they did and creates a best-selling book with a series of

recipes you know do these things you will be successful then when I was in IBM research we did the same research with Dorothy Leonard at Harvard but we also studied companies who failed not just companies have succeeded and what we found is they all did almost identically the same things it's just you were dealing with a huge number of Agents so some of them were Bound To Succeed anyway so that false imputation of causality is common the other problem is the confusion of correlation with causation if France wants to increase the number of Nobel prizes

it wins all it has to do is increase dark chocolate consumption I mean this is good news you don't need an educational system uh dark chocolate consumption behead of population directly correlates with Nobel prizes per head of population for the last five decades on a much bigger data set than any management textbook I've ever read yeah and the other one by the way which I think is causal and there's many of these is that attempts to commit suicide by Drowning peaks in that directly correlate with the release of Nicholas Cage movies but I can see

a reason for that yeah there's a whole site of false correlations it's worth looking at on the other hand if we go back to Natural Science there are things which have been subject to peer review multiple experiments and these act as what in complexity is known as an enabling constraint we say if we know these things about systems if we know these things about human beings then we have to design on the basis of that knowledge not on the basis of how we would like things to be complexity is materialist and it is realist and

it is pragmatic in terms of its approach so that means and there's a phrase from the 70s people remember we used to talk about Praxis the fusion of theory and practice to go back to Aristotle's to fear and parnesis without practical wisdom everything is useless we're without theoretical wisdom nothing scales you need a balance of the two and in the 70s we used to joke about this Praxis makes perfect which is kind of like a pun so let's go through some a few key science certificate facts which we need to base on this is from

a famous set of experiments run on Radiologists Radiologists have deep training you know they're dealing with limited data sets you give them a batch of X-rays and ask them to look for anomalies and on the final x-ray you put a picture of a gorilla which is 48 times the size of a cancer nodule and 84 percent of Radiologists will not see it even though their eyes physically scattered and the 17 percent who do see it come to believe they were wrong when they talked with the 84 84 who didn't this is called the inattentional blindness

the reason for it is the most anybody in this room will scan of available Data before they make a decision is about three to five percent it's that low if you're Chinese it doubles and there are reasons for that linked to language Evolution but for everybody here three to five percent that then triggers a whole series of memories cognitive body-based socially based through Collective narrative and that it triggers those in nanoseconds and you fuse them together to form patterns and the first pattern which fits you apply you do a first fit pattern match not a

best fit pattern match now we can see why this happens in evolutionary terms if you think about the early hominoids on the Savannahs of Africa something large and yellow with very sharp teeth runs towards you at high speed do you want to artistically scan all available data look up a catalog of the Thora and Fauna of the African vault and having identified lion look up your company's best practice notes on how to deal with carnivores you know by that time the only document of any use to you will be the Book of Jonah from the

Old Testament which is the only example I found of how to escape from the digestive tract of a large Carnival written by a survivor we evolved to make decisions very very quickly based on a partial data scan privilege in our most recent experience now this is absolutely fascinating because it means there's an awful lot out there to discover which could make a difference if we just learned to look differently but it also says we can't get individuals to see things in that way it has to be Collective so I'll talk later about our work on

distributed decision support where for example of an executive of a company can consult the whole of their Workforce in five minutes in real time to identify dominant subsidiary and outlier patterns before they make a decision and we're now doing that at Society level I'll talk about that later as well in using children in schools as human senses to actually give us real-time feedback on what is possible and not possible in society overall and that's actually quite critical given the growth of populism a lot of my early work was on weak signal detection working for DARPA

in the U.S the earlier you spot a negative or a positive trend the lower the cost to dampen or disrupt or expand so weak signal detection is key so that's important to realize second one and this came out of evolutionary biology with Gould uh dinosaurs feather is a good example all dinosaurs had feathers we now know that and they were very colorful now the fossil finds in northern China are fascinating and from everything we can see feathers evolved primarily for sexual display and then a small breed of dinosaur developed skin flaps under its full limbs

so if it's still in its hind limbs it could better display for sexual purposes and those dinosaurs had to run very quickly because they were more prey than predators and when they ran very quickly they started to Glide and that's how we got flight a trait which evolved for one function and when it was stressed coming back to the stressor concept from nassif's conversation yesterday it accepts it doesn't adapt for something completely different the cerebellum at the base of your brain evolved in higher Apes to manipulate muscles in fingers it then accepts in humans to

manage grammar in language the huge sophistication of grammar can't develop in a linear way it requires a non-linear exactive shift if you think that isn't relevant to the modern day in 1945 a Raytheon engineer maintaining the Magneto of a radar machine realize the significance of the fact that a chocolate bar had melted in his pocket so he put a metal box around the Magneto and we got microwaves the whole history of Technology Innovation and certainly pharmaceutical Innovation is about noticing side effects early realizing the significance in adapting them now this is absolutely key for Humanity

what we call it in the you feel guide is radical repurposing we haven't got time to create Technologies from scratch to deal with global warming we need to find Radical repurposing of existing Technologies in order to meet novel threat and that ability to manage for acceptive Discovery is something technology can help us do that's been my work for the past two decades is how do we associate existing capability with new threats in such a way that people will pay attention to something that they would otherwise ignore so acceptation is a key concept and then we

get to complexity Theory now this is election in its own right there are various ways we can Define complexity but the one I like is this really comes from Alicia Gerardo she says a complex system is like Bramble bushes in a Thicket a Thicket is a small dense Woodland and bramble bushes are those things you see on the screen everything is entangled with everything else although you know there are separate plants you can't identify them no pathway is ever the same and the only thing we know for certain is unintended consequences the key thing to

understand about complexity and this is really scary for anybody brought up in northern Europe and Northern America is a complex system has no material linear causality you can never say if I do X it will produce y result complex systems have dispositions which we can measure and propensities that we can understand but they don't have causality and therefore the future is uncertain by definition so what matters is in complexity is not to Define where you would like to be and try and close the gap has been the dominant approach of systems thinking but to more

accurately describe the present and start Journeys with a sense of direction open to novel discovery on your pathway yeah and I'm going to build on that in a minute or two so complexity theory is key the other thing to understand about complexity is complex systems scale not by finding something which worked and repeated it but by breaking things down to their lowest coherent unit and allowing them to recombine it's like DNA if you think about it the whole of organic life form comes from four different chemicals in different combinations the work we're currently about to

announce which is a collaborative open source project for the agile Community is to break every single agile method and framework down to its units and allow those units to be combined across Frameworks in novel ways to deal with uncertainty so scaling complexity is not about copying what somebody else did remember I talked about inductive logic in complexity we talk about abductive logic abductions no sometimes known as the logic of hunches it's what's the most plausible connection between apparently unconnected things and starting to think abductively is going to be a key survival system key survival need

for companies in society alike uh just to give you an idea complexity is a large field it is absolutely not systems thinking please don't confuse the two um I quite like this because it's got me on it it's got nasim's main collaborator also on it up there this you can download from Durham University and it gives you an idea of the richness of the field within that field we've started to identify a field called anthro complexity which is a study of complexity in human systems or as I sometimes put it if I'm not stand to

fail it upsets them human beings are not termites yeah you can actually model termites Behavior but human beings have multiple identities we have agency we think in different ways we can change our identity we're pattern-based intelligence is human complexity requires a transdisciplinary approach so to give one illustration and I'm not going to go to this in depth part of our work is to be taking the concept of strange attractors in complexity Theory uh one of the best name phenomena because they are to be honest bloody strange in that no agent actually follows the predictable pathway

but the overall patterns of the agents follow a pattern which is itself predictable you can actually exactly match that with delusion concepts of assemblages so delusion epistemology matches to that and with a narrative concept of a trope and once we put those together we had a way of mapping dispositional States in human systems which I'm going to come on to in a minute yeah so I say realizing this is important is not all about mathematical simulation we actually need to bring into account cognitive neuroscience material engagement theory if you don't know about it is really

important which is the way that tools influence cognitive development and also things like Duluth I've said I've actually introduced Dera there I'm quite proud of this nobody in the history of humanity has got American Executives to quote Daryl during day-to-day discourse until I managed it I'm really proud of this all right but we took deroda's concept of aperia and for those of you don't know your French philosophers um Wellings Derek has said is a question to which you know the answer isn't a question it's a process the only useful questions are the ones which you

do not know the answer and they force you to think differently so we've actually developed linguistic aperia aesthetic aparia physical Apria to engender change in organizations not by saying what you should be but by forcing people to think differently all of that is in an open source Wiki now key to understanding human systems is narrative now this is from Aleister McIntyre a British philosopher he and I studied in the McCade together in Blackfriars back in the 70s fundamentally and you'll find a lot of people now talk about Homo neurons with the storytelling ape most meaning

in human systems comes from stories and I don't mean elaborate stories I mean fragmented anecdotes casual conversation we were all at the art exhibition yesterday and people were standing around having drinks with strangers and everybody was dropping their favorite anecdotes into the conversation yeah the stories that matter in organizations are the stories that people tell around the water cooler the stories that matter in society are the stories of the pub after work or the schoolgate and that's actually where you understand people's attitudes and beliefs and dispositions is not through questionnaires or focus groups where people

know what you're looking for and they gift or they go it's also critical and there's a key concept here from the feminist literature which was driven our work for the past 20 years which is called epistemic Injustice the way you describe things can control people Beth who is a colleague of mine who's also Welsh has a wonderful way of saying this she says where you understand epistemic Injustice in language is that old men are called philosophers while old wives tell Tales and if that's how you describe it you can see the Prejudice which goes with

it sir and I'm not going to go with this in depth but our Focus for the last 20 years is to forgive people the power to interpret their own narrative rather than have it interpreted by experts or by algorithms because power comes from interpretation of content not from the content itself and say that's described in the Oxfam book and elsewhere this is actually an example of young girls in a project we did on genetical mutilation yeah actually acting as ethnographers into their local community without anybody from a western background involved yeah we've done a lot

of work on this which I'll talk about in a minute by using children as ethnographers to their own environments so it's people from the community interviewing other people in the community rather than people from outside and the autonomy of that Community to then come up with localized Solutions so this is a key aspect and the same applies to organizations as a society say this has been going on for some years now this is from work we've been doing our patient Journey this is in Northern Ireland and that quote is from the chief medical officer he

actually slated the Health Service that said there was one positive light and that was ten thousand voices and that was where we collected Narrative of patients as they went through Journeys back to or away from health allowed and empowered them to interpret their own stories and use that to complement medical advice in another project where we got patients with identical physiological conditions on chronic pulmonary care but variable oxygen take up we can account for about 90 percent of the variation in the oxygen take up by the journals they index on a day-to-day basis this is

now starting to move across into clinical trials which is the ability to measure human attitudes at a micro level and that actually is a critical missing element in the role of machine learning are refused to call it artificial intelligence by the way we should all start to call it machine learning then we might get a realistic assessment of what it is what really matters is the training data sets not the algorithms if you haven't read the Scholastics parrot paper by people who after they published it became ex-google employees which basically talks about the radical Prejudice

of Black Box AI because it builds and reinforces society's prejudice one thing I worked on for the US government was the ability to generate balanced training data sets and that's still a lot of what we actually do this is completely novel now all of this has consequences and the best way of understanding this is to go and watch Frozen 2. you weren't expecting to be told to go and watch Frozen 2 today you now have a good excuse even if you don't have grandchildren or children it's a great complexity movie a frozen one is classic

Disney stereotypes but it made so much money they could employ the good script writers for Frozen two all right and in the middle of Frozen two the real heroine of the movie series who's the young girl the youngest sister without magic that's important to realize she's the heroine yeah and in a state of despair when she thinks she's lost a sister she's lost a mentor she sings they're absolutely beautiful song which is subsequently to be made famous by Ukrainian refugees which is all I can do is do the next right thing right that in complexity

terms is moved to the adjacent possible in a highly complex system you can't know where you should go but you can understand where you should step next and look again remember I said you start Journeys with a sense of direction you don't try and Achieve goals so that is actually what you see on the screen is a fitness landscape that's the result of us present in a situation to two thousand employees getting them all to interpret it within the safe five minute period into a non-gameable quantitative semiotic framework semiotics are really important here you can't

afford if you want to understand complexity to be able for anybody to be able to influence the outcome of the survey by understanding what you're looking for I'll give you a simple illustration of this um you all at some stage have done an employee satisfaction survey never done one of those or filled out the hotel survey your net promoter score is a classic example of a measure which has become a Target and lost all utility so we had this in when I was in IBM and the question came out does your manager consult you on

a regular basis scale of zero not at all 10 all the time everybody familiar with that sort of question it's deeply hypothesis based all right it assumes the manager should you consult you so I phoned up HR because I was in a mischievous mood and you need to understand I was on a watch list in IBM HR because I've done a control study which approved Myers-Briggs was less accurate than astrology and predicting team behavior and they were really upset that they'd been combed into paying for that and it has actually less base in science and

astrology as well but that's another story so either way so I got through to our Monk and I said how I meant to answer this question yeah I said first of all I've got several managers nobody has a single manager in the modern organization now I've got several managers and they've got people who are quite powerful and I said sometimes they consult me and sometimes they don't and sometimes they should and sometimes they shouldn't you're asking me a context-free question in a context-specific world and I'll come back to that point it's a key one nearly

every management recipe you see assumes a context-free situation when actually everything is context specific either way she said average your experience over the year and stop causing trouble and slam the phone down before she heard me say and you call yourself HR in the research group right we take a different approach if we're doing that we'll ask you to tell the story that you would tell your best friend if they were off the job in the company no hypothesis in that would Gather in Rich narrative material then we get you interpreted on a series of

triangles there's a whole bunch of cognitive Neuroscience behind this by the way and on the trial one of the triangles is labeled in this story the manager's Behavior was altruistic assertive analytical three positive qualities that actually triggers the brain into a different pattern of response if you don't know what the answer is you go into what cardamom called thinking slow not thinking fast it triggers a change and balance in three positives means you can't say anything negative but then the manager looks at the results and it's all our choice it's all assertive analytical no altruistic

and they realize the pattern of their behavior is problematic but then they can click on the triangle and look at the few altruistic stories they've got and say how can I create more stories like that and then click on the negative ones and fewer like those this is a whole new theory of change how do I create more stories like these and fewer stories like that is engaging if I look at our work in the Health Service if we go to nurses and say how do you have a better focus on patient safety they will

get defensive if we've got patient stories gathered over the last year and we say we need more patient stories like those and fewer like these they can engage in that because it's non-judgmental and the stories trigger context so that's kind of like what I mean when we talk about high abstraction metadata on that pattern this was designed to look at the culture of a company now you can immediately see that there's some overlap but there are some big differences different parts of the company see the world in very different ways they've all had the same

indexing structure and the same input data but they see it differently so if you want to change this well kind of like trying to move those people in the bottom blue is going to be difficult because they're an outlier but you can possibly move them to the purple more like this fuel like that but equally you might say that's actually fairly healthy as a key phrase in complexity I use a lot is we need a system to be coherently heterogeneous we don't want homogeneity homogeneity can destroy creativity and the way I normally explain this is

I'm Welsh right as I've told you in Wales and I live halfway between the rugby grounding Cardiff and the Opera House in London this is a nice oscillation between the two and when I go to watch the rugby with Cardiff who are my team yeah uh we're a highly civilized team with Spectators who understand rugby we follow the rules we don't cheat you know we applaud the opposition if they do badly you know we're nice people all right yeah we're there and then there's bastards simply arrive yeah West Wales all right they bribe referees they

can't be trusted they cheat they're supporters of part two partisan but when the English arrived we're Welsh that's called coherent heterogeneity the ability to be different but also to come together and most organizations don't realize the importance of that if you try for homogeneity you get the wrong sort of patents so say more like this fuel like that the other thing we can do with this is we can give a manager well let's take the hospital example a chargedness can look at her Ward for the last two weeks and a disease specialist can look at

everybody in our disease group for the last three years all from the same Source data so people look at a map in the areas where they're competent to do something not where they're not competent and all of that is called fractal engagement but it all comes together in a very different Way in real time and that's also the other work we're doing at the moment I have an intense dislike of Behavioral Science and particularly nudge Theory because generally nudging isn't nudging it's yanking it's manipulation actually at this point we're now talking about what's called micro

nudge is you work at when the system is ready to change and then you allow the system to do small changes to it much more sustainable lower energy cost and to give a couple of examples on that one of the things we did in South Wales and we did a big project using Children's ethnographers to capture stories in one of the post-industrial areas this is the Ronda Valley most families are in their fourth generation of unemployment with all the consequence which is go with that from what was originally a hugely Rich Society you know with

the miners libraries which gave rise to the Health Service and everything else so we gathered the stories we drew the map a minister said I want more stories like these and fewer stories like that and then we put teenagers together with people from their grandparents generation and they came up with ideas for change and that was deliberate young bright in you know with old wise and networked and if they came up with a good idea we put them into a trio with somebody from government who can make the idea work so instead of a grand

government project we ended up with about 500 micro projects developed in the community by the community which was sustainable we're doing the same with refugees in Malmo and elsewhere and in companies the same thing put some of these joined the company with some of you is about to leave the company with somebody on your executive leadership program and throw half a dozen of those trios at a problem you're bringing diversity into the system in software development we put a bright young coder straight out of college with a systems architect who sees the systems as a

whole with a user trying to talk to it people um it's a lot easier to train users to talk to it people than train I.T people to understand users I'm repurposing books titled um so your child has Asperger's syndrome in order to develop the training course yeah instead of saying that assistance analyst to interview people we throw two dozen you know 20 trios at a problem for a month and see what they come up with that's a complexity intervention we know that 17 will see something that other people haven't seen so we build a method

for that sort of discovery that also has other utility which I'll come to in a second real-time feedback loop the big thing we talk about in the you feel guide is build your employees as a human sensor Network so you can actually consult them in real time you can't afford to wait for a linear process in a crisis you need to have immediate feedback and again I've given that actually has come from that sort of process the other big thing in this is the work we've been doing with the European Union on how do you

handle false data is actually what matters is not creating better algorithms to tell you what's true or false but doing more work to actually identify where the data comes from now what we're now looking at and we've now done this in five countries we're looking to funding to do it worldwide is every child at the age of 16 and this can be part of a buckle area becomes an ethnographer to their own Community every week for one year I now know what's happening at a local level and I know where the data came from and

I know it's reliable and again that's coming from that sort of scientific principle um and then that also allows us to what are called anticipatory triggers um I was one of the two principal designers Peter Schwartz was the other for the Singapore government's risk assessment arising scanning system one of the things we said is scenario planning is plain bloody dangerous if the situation is complex you do have forces and factors analysis you do a two by two Matrix you identify your scenarios the trouble is you're only seeing what you expect to see and therefore you

can be caught Blindside you're often better without those scenarios and having a more responsive system one of the things we focus on now is what's called micro scenario generation in context so if something happens you trigger the workforce to create micro scenarios and you draw the maps from that to identify what's more or less likely again it's that real-time feedback loop from a cognitively diverse group and that's that's the big area of work coming on to the field guide this is it um it has three key things that you should do first of all build

a human sensor Network your employees or your citizens are an obvious candidate they can also be customers this is a whole different approach to panel based yeah it's creating panels at large scales if you've got a human sensor Network and they got the ability to feedback that's good news well means I'm currently working on with one of the big Pharma companies is a Gamba system if you know the Japanese concept of Gamba the workforce though what's going on which will replace all of their reporting systems because people will do micro recording as things happen so

we give people a benefit ideas generation for r d you know things which we call things which make me feel nervous that's weak signal detection lessons learning and so on so we have one system capturing all of that sort of stuff we remove a burden but now I've got a network that I can think so something happens I can ask that Network a question and they're familiar with the process the way we say this is you build networks for ordinary purpose that you can activate for Extraordinary need you don't scramble to create a network after

something has happened you build networks in anticipation of the unexpected not in response to the unexpected the second thing is informal Networks remember I talked about entangled trios putting three people together from different backgrounds that was designed to build the density of informal networks across silos you've all heard people say we should get rid of silos everybody heard that okay the first time I can find a trace of this complaint is Zeno the Tyrant of Athens so people have been complaining about this for centuries and nothing has changed so maybe it's about time to realize

that silos have utility if I'm at a conference of complexity scientists I can say something in three minutes they will take me 10 minutes or half an hour here the reason silos exist is they lower the energy cost of knowledge sharing based on expertise the key thing is not to break down the silos but to build the informal networks across the silos it's rather like the fungal roots that connect tree roots that make a soil healthy and actually with things like entangled trios within two years everybody can be within two phone calls of everybody else

if you built that Network density you focus on the channels through which knowledge will flow rather than trying to capture and codify the knowledge and that's more flexible yeah and of course you can see the importance if you look at the Singapore government uh all of their informal networks which were extremely effective come from the fact they do national service so they all have spent time in the Army together and that breaks down barriers if you look at the English government all of their informal networks come from three elite private schools and two Elite universities

and that's perverse and I could go on to Grande Coles but I'll be nice being as I'm in Paris or in terms of the way things work so what you actually need is your informal networks that distribute across the organization not be confined and I've interviewed over a hundred CEOs and principal actors in government over the last couple of years all of them during covid fell back to their informal networks not the formal systems because informal networks carry trust automatically so building informal networks is a way of creating a healthy ecosystem and it's not too

difficult to do I pressed the wrong button there and thirdly sorry I've gone through that yeah um Okay so and inform that where people know each other which is why I'm talking about empathy some of the work we're currently doing in the states on the sort of post-election Crisis is to increase empathetic contact between people from both sides that comes from work I did in the 70s in Northern Ireland where there were two approaches to peace and Reconciliation one was to get everybody in a big Hall together and talk about how Catholics and Protestants should

get on and wouldn't it be nice if we stopped throwing petrol bombs at each other yeah and that was very attractive and it always reported a huge success if you haven't seen a comedy on Channel 4 called Dairy girls you should watch it because in episode one of Series 2 the Catholic girls are forced into a peace and Reconciliation process with the Protestant boys yeah led by a trendy priest and they have a Blackboard for everything we got in common and a Blackboard for everything which is different and at the end of the episode everything

which is different is full and every the other one is empty I've been as a northern Irish they've actually put that into a museum now they're quite proud of it right in terms of the way it works we took a different approach we took two or three people from each community and we put them on teams into Latin America and we didn't talk about the conflict and they discovered pretty fast they had more in common than they realized and they had the conversation about their difference when they were ready to have it in their own

time again that's the epistemic Justice epistemic sovereignty thing and that's actually really important in organizational change throwing people together and getting them to work on something and not deal with the problem directly is far more effective and energy efficient than trying to tackle the problem head on anybody with teenage children right you all know this don't you yeah if you have teenage children you develop manipulative skills beyond your imagination and you never tackle the problem directly only indirectly um and then acceptation you need to map what you know at the right level of granularity so

it can rapidly reassemble in the context of different need and to give an illustration of this a project that had years ago we had a company a European company who thought it would be brilliant if people bought lights as a garden feature rather than the garden utility people bought lights to light their Garden they didn't see light as part of the garden itself so we gathered about three thousand anecdotes about people's Gardens and we didn't talk about light we hid that in the signification structure light and shade so it wasn't prompted then we took all

of the Technologies of the company and indexed them into the same index set then we mash the databases together and we got five clusters and so you went to Market and say why are these Technologies linked with these customer stories and the one highly project which I'm both proud of and ashamed at the same time is you can now in the Far East buy a plastic Rock which changes color based on human proximity and there are terrible colors yeah in your swimming pool and that's entirely based on a technology originally developed to handle urine saturated

staircases in football stadium you see acceptation find something you know and use it for something completely different and you get there and that's a mapping technique and that needs to be done continuously this for those of you want to download it is the whole process and we actually have a whole process on this what did we do during covert what do we need to do differently for the next Crisis I said some years ago that kovid was God's gift to humanity because there are worse things coming all right and we have to learn from that

and to quote Lincoln um famous quote from Lincoln towards the end of the Civil War as the times that renewed so we must think in you so we must act in you and remember it's think and that yeah it's both so three programs the Canadian Center is a not-for-profit center that's my main focus the city you can go onto the website you can download these the citizen engagement one is all about how do we use churches schools focus groups arts clubs effectively as ethnographers to their own condition to feed back to government and within that

we're now looking at radical new forms of democracy based on understanding attitudes rather than stated opinions okay so that's there that picks up some of the ideas health is massive the cost of the health sector for the world in Europe is out of all proportion to what we're going to be able to afford to pay so we've got to find Radical new ways of thinking about health in the context of families lifestyle life Journeys and everything else and that's where we're pioneering this concept of continuous patient Journey capture of narrative to understand those sort of

micro patterns and again there's projects in there which are welcome to join and then of course the big one which is climate change and that's where we're really applying complexity Theory we're saying this comes back to my concept earlier in another book by Terry Eagleton called radical sacrifice and P till people see climate change as a local problem they will never accept International Solutions when kovic came everybody could see the local impact so they accepted sacrifice but they will not accept the sacrifices which are needed for climate change so we've got to create a hyper

localized awareness of climate change if we're going to change the overall attitude and that is one of the massive lessons of complexity Theory it's why I myself Nora Bates and another the heavily criticizing things like the internal development goals we've got to start to get to the reality of people's day-to-day lives not the grand visions of people in a in an ivory Tower it's got to be practical for people to take it forward and that's kind of like where I really want to finish if those of you haven't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy every

red Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy okay remember that the description of Earth all right he gets it modified from harmless to mostly harmless that's the only entry that Earth gets I love that phrase right so there are things we need to be careful of one is algorithmic approaches to democracy the trouble with I.T people is they all think everything is logical ordered and structured and they can write an algorithm for it yeah it's kind of like one algorithm to rule them all and in the darkness bind them yeah we need to think about approaches to

democracy which are based on empathy personal contact and action and we used to use technology to support that but not to replace it talking about how things should be I mean it's very nice if you get with a group of people who all agree how things should be but the reality is you're not going to get there that's what I call Lotus eating yeah individual change and one of the key lessons of complexity is we're defined by our interactions not by what we are changing interactions is a much more successful strategy than trying to change

people yeah I've actually started to try and stop people using the word mindset because it's a meaningless statement we say instead ask three questions what has agency what are the assembly structures what the affordances because then you can do something about it and again you want to get away from those idealized States you can have the reference on this whenever people are working for explicit goals it destroys intrinsic motivation that's a matter study of all studies of human motivation there is no doubt in this in the scientific community where do we have the most amount

of explicit goals health education Social Services where do we most meet implicit motivation health education Social Services if you have explicit goals people focus on achieving the goals rather than the things the goals are measuring and that has unexpected consequences the only predictable Act of the only predictable aspect yeah of complexity neocolonialism is forming a new way I call it young white males trying to do good it's moving into African Asia on the basis that everybody wants to be a northern European Enlightenment culture from the 19th century reading camp so I've been a bit cynical

here but that's it right and that is actually a problem the reason we focus on this field ethnography is it allows people to generate their own Solutions authentic to their culture without that outside interference yeah the capital happy clappy is one of those rude phrases there's an awful lot of this that's all and just to be rooted you know direct about this people like Arthur Schumacher and Peter sengi are really good at this everybody comes together and agrees oh wouldn't it be wonderful if and then nothing changes right we need the far greater degree of

pragmatism than we're getting from that and the other problem you got in Western Society is manicures and the belief that things are either absolutely good or absolutely bad you've all seen those two column tables on social media the bad thing on the left and the wonderful thing I'm trying to study on the right yeah we've got to start to take a both and approach not an either or approach and start to realize a lot of things which we did 100 years ago are still valid today we just understand the context there's nothing wrong with process

engineering in an ordered constraint system and everything wrong in a service environment so again that context-specific type approach and kind of like to finish off this is one of my favorite quotes from T.S Eliot yeah the trouble with new things is people adopt the language of the new things but they don't change yeah it's kind of like fashionable and it's fun and then the real thing this is from friends of mine engaping void realize that all paths up are different all paths down the same right understanding how we move forward is going to be highly

contextual and to do that we need dense informal networks we need human sensor networks and we need to be able to repurpose our existing knowledge fast to deal with existential as well as non-existential threat thank you very much for your time [Applause] all right