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In what ways do we participate with others in the arena? In this episode we dive into how we organise ourselves in groups, in the organisational structures that exist in our arena, and how that might be changing over time. Looking at the psychological, structural, and technological aspects of group participation as we try to adapt to the complexity that surrounds us.
An unfolding dialogue exploring how to think, act and be in a complex and uncertain world.
Matt:
Hello and welcome to Meta-Perspective with Matt and Andy, the show exploring how to think, act, and be in an uncertain and complex world. This is episode number 6. It's been a little while since we released our last episode, and that really is an understatement. So much has changed while we've been away. I mean, who would've thought Facebook would end up calling themselves? I did not see that coming.
We're really excited to be back and to continue this exploratory and unfolding conversational journey with you. Previously in the interlude we released, I gave a little clue as to what to expect. In this episode.
A theme that keeps popping up in our series is participation, how we engage with the world around us. Over the next couple of episodes, we're going to be focusing less on the internal elements of that participation, and instead looking more at the external ones. More specifically, in what ways do we participate with others in the arena? The environment we find ourselves in.
In this episode, as the title implies, we dive into how we organise ourselves in groups, in the organisational structures that exist in our arena, and how that might be changing over time. Looking at the psychological, structural, and technological aspects of group participation as we try to adapt to the complexity that surrounds us.
The conversation you're about to listen to is recorded way back on May the 11th 2021, and kicks off with a series recap. So whether you're a first time listener or you're a little rusty like me, you'll be able to get up to speed in no time. Okay. Let's begin and I'll see you on the other side of the episode.
So we are starting again. How crazy is that? This is the part where I always try to kick off with a recap, and I think that this time it's even more important because it's actually been almost six months since we last recorded an episode and so much has changed in the world. So what I'm going to try and do is rather than just a recap of the last episode, I'm going to, for both of our sakes, try and recap where we are entirely in the season so far. So let's give this a shot. You ready? Andy?
Andy: I am
Matt:
Okay, so we started in our very first episode by exploring the landscape of what we'd want to cover in a podcast series in the aftermath of the pandemic and through that exploration of themes and ideas, one theme that came up that we wanted to explore further was the relationship between us as individuals and the environment that we're in, and the terms we've been using throughout the show to refer to individuals has been ‘agents’ and the term for the environment, the world that we're in, we've been using the term ‘arena’ and talking about how there's a reciprocal relationship between us as individuals and our environment, - i.e one ultimately influences the other and vice versa.
So we spent a good amount of time exploring the agent/arena relationship. And from that, we went into exploring what we termed ‘legacy mindsets’, or in other words, ways of thinking and perceiving the world from the past that still influence our world and shape us today.
And the one in particular that we looked at, the one legacy mindset that we focused on, was industrial thinking. From there we jumped into our sense of self and how our arena today influences our perception of who we are and how we act in the world. Which brings us up to our last episode we deep dived into sense-making how we make sense of our world around us.
And we actually covered three quite interesting points in that. We started off by looking at the utility and limitations of metaphor for making sense in the world. Metaphors like the machine that came out of this industrial way of thinking, and then more modern and new ideas of metaphors, for example, software or source code, these new metaphors that we're using to make sense of our world and how, looking at the world using these metaphors shapes and influences us.
So we went from there with the metaphors and how we use them to make sense of the world into figuring out how to find the signal in the noise and how to build empathy with other people, and ended with how we might find meaning in the world today, by exploring novelty on the edge of the unknown. And the metaphor that you brought up at the end of that episode, which was really cool, was that of the surfer. And that really just made me want to go and pick up a surfboard and experience what it's like to actually surf.
But the concept of the metaphor of the surfer was. Surfing the new waves of this informational arena. So moving beyond the industrial arena. And really, if you think about it, we could actually do a whole series on sense-making alone, or even on legacy mindsets or sense of self or the agent/arena.
It's one of those things that we could continue to deep dive into, but I was thinking to myself, what is the aspect of the past few conversations that really sticks out to me, what's really shining out. And the question that's been on my mind is how do we participate? This came up about two episodes ago.
And I've been thinking about how do we participate as individuals in our world, as agents participating in the arena, given the dynamic coupling, the reciprocal relationship, between us and the world that we're in, and knowing that understanding ourselves and our world better leads to our own autonomy and sovereignty, the ability to take the reigns of our own lives in complex and uncertain times.
And when I thought about it a bit more, I really feel like sense-making choosing to sense-make is a form of participation. It's saying to ourselves, we want to overcome epistemic nihilism; a term you brought up in the last episode. ‘Epistemic’ meaning relating to knowledge and ‘nihilism’ meaning relentless, cynicism, negativity, almost despair. This idea that it's almost impossible to get real knowledge, to find real truth in the world, therefore we give up on it.
But by choosing to believe it's possible. We're making a decision to participate. And that decision is a form of empowerment saying, yeah, we can participate. So that got me thinking, what are the other ways that we participate in the world? Not just by ourselves alone, but more specifically this time, how do we participate in groups with each other? So I think this time we could shift our attention away from an internal focus on ourselves, more to an external one.
So how do we organise ourselves in groups? As this seems to me to be the frontier, the border, the boundary between the agent arena relationship, where its effects are felt and seen most viscerally. So maybe we can start there. What do you think, Andy? I know that was a super long introduction.
Andy:
No, that was great and it was really interesting to hear you sum up our conversations up until this point in that way and that's helped frame things really nicely, as you said, it's been six months so it's good to view our conversations a little bit from a distance, distil where we got to and then think about this, also with the benefit of a six months gap and quite a bit as changed and evolved in the world since then.
You raise a really important point, when I've been thinking about some of the conversations we've had, as you rightly said, we talked about the arena, the industrial thinking, the structures that have come to be formed and created out of that thinking, the way our institutions think and act, which as we discussed in previous episodes has largely been through a mechanical and industrial mindset, which tends to value things through increasingly a financial lens and seeing things as objects to be manipulated in the world for the benefit of the institution, which has its own metrics, which it’s optimising for, and this objectivization of us, in an ever more complex world, has made it difficult for us to make sense of ourselves and our conversations around how we deal with that how we sense-make has in part been a call for us to become much more aware of how our environment treats us, senses us, communicates with us because there's a lot of noise in that that can make it very difficult for us as individuals to not feel completely lost and alienated in the world that we've created.
And where we stand at history at this moment is that as we started to touch on our previous conversations, we stand at the dawn of the greatest changes in science, technology and medicine in human history. So whatever we currently experience is only going to become more complex. So it's a really important moment in history to reflect on these issues.
And part of this question of us in groups which you raise is really important is, I think, linked both to the individual - so we covered before a little bit about how we might find more autonomy, how we through sense-making get a better understanding of ourselves not to be hijacked and triggered or left as you said feeling nihilistic - it's all too complicated, I give up and I default to my lowest common denominator - but also, we know that through our previous conversations, that there's a challenge about how the arena and the institutions that inhabit it can evolve to be much more sensitive to us and our needs so that the arena and the institutions that comprise it are ones that are working to coordinate with us for our mutual benefit.
i.e - how does the arena support individual and collective flourishing rather than see us as objects to be extracted from?
So in that complex co-evolving picture of us evolving our own sovereignty and institutions evolving their mode of operation to become much more sensitive to the needs of us and our general and overall common good and flourishing, there is a call for us to extend our understanding, and collective enterprise to be able to more effectively develop and cultivate better relationships with others as individuals, but also be able to sort of participate more collectively and more insightfully within the institutions that we're all part of so that we can start to bring this transformation to bear.
So I think this is absolutely a really important point that we can focus on in this conversation, which is how do we through the noise that we've covered in previous conversations, see how we might collectively, cooperate, participate and collaborate with each other both in social and institutional context to start to transform the world into a better place.
Matt:
One of the things that you said last time that really stuck out to me when I was re-listening through episode five was this idea that innovation and toolmaking is now predominantly coming through institutions rather than just individuals and how their motives, or the motive of an institution, happens to be really different to that of an individual.
Which means it's even more important for us to understand how organisations are operating, how us as people are forming groups and working together because it does ultimately influence us as individuals when the arena is being shaped by these institutions that have their own missions that have their own purpose.
If we can understand how they're organised and the logic behind an organisation and us as groups, then we can understand what we're trying to innovate towards and also how that's ultimately going to influence us. And one of the things that came to my mind when I was thinking about this stuff is what is going on in the way that we are organise as groups? What is the logic behind us coming together as groups?
And I know that you and I off of the podcast have already spoken about this book by a guy called Frederick Laloux called Reinventing Organizations and this immediately came to my mind because I read this probably in about 2015. And I think the subtitle of the book is ‘a guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness’ so already it sounds intriguing. And what this book does, which I find really fascinating, is it maps out how organisational structures have changed as the levels of human consciousness have gone, let's say, higher or up a level. And what Frederic Laloux does is he maps and colour codes these different ways of organising in groups as society becomes more complex.
So to give everyone listening an understanding of this book and the colour codes, and even the metaphors that he uses, which is another reason why it really appeals to me because he uses metaphors to explain each organisational structure, which really made me think of what we were talking about with metaphors last episode, is a kind of progress from smaller groups to larger groups and how that complexity has changed the way that we organise ourselves. So think of it as a colour-coded system, the ones that I'm going to focus on when I'm talking are the five colour codes that I think are relevant to our conversation.
And the one that Frederick Laloux starts off with is the colour red which is symbolised by the metaphor of a wolf pack. This organisational structure has the alpha running the group, usually through power and through fear, ruling with a strong hand and if you need an example of what that could be like, that would be like maybe say the mafia, you have a really strong boss that organises the group, and everyone falls in line to the power and authority of that one person. So that is a really simple form of organisational structure.
So what Laloux does is say, okay, if that's like a basic form of organisation, how does that change as things get more complex?
So the second one in his colour code is amber and the metaphor he uses for the colour amber is an army structure. And here we move away from power being exercised through fear as being like the main way of governing and organising a group, to the main things that are important are processes and roles, formal roles and status.
So in this ‘Amber’ world, the thing that becomes the most important is the hierarchy, the pyramid, where you have a structure and a system of authority where people are grouped and organised according to rank. And I think that's why he uses the metaphor of the army in that sense, because really obvious examples of this would be the military, where you have a strict hierarchical system, or even you could look at the government as well as maybe another example of an ‘Amber’ organisation. And those kinds of organisations, those kinds of groups are driven by this idea of conforming to these roles and processes.
From there, he goes from ‘Amber’ to ‘Orange’, and ‘Orange’ he would say, I believe not to put words in his mouth, is the predominant colour worldview of today, and this is where it gets really interesting because it's really connects to what you and I were talking about in the legacy mindset episode. The metaphor that he uses for ‘Orange’ is the machine, when we organise ourselves in groups in the industrial arena we have a meritocracy and we have a hierarchy that is much more fluid that you can go up and down and move across.
So the idea is, if you think about a multinational company, for example, this would be in the ‘Orange’ world it's about your merit. It's about your skill as to whether you can go up and down the hierarchy, whether you can actually succeed. So in multinational companies, in this kind of orange zone, this machine metaphor, everything's about efficiency. Everything's about being profit driven and having incentives. But the key difference between ‘Amber’ and ‘Orange’ is that there's much more mobility up and down this pyramid up and down the ladder of the hierarchy.
So what's interesting about that is as the complexity changes, as the world changes, as it goes from, if you imagine the army metaphor in ‘Amber’, if you think what a pre-industrial arena would have been like pre-industry, it would have been an agricultural arena built on feudalism and the land much more heavily than the industrial arena, so when the industrial arena comes in, you kick up the amount of complexity, so a new way of organising ourselves is required.
So they're the three colours that he talks about from the past, even though the orange colour is really how he sees the majority of organisations and groups organising themselves today. And then he breaks away from ‘Orange’ and goes into ‘Green’ this is where his metaphors and our metaphors actually go two different directions. So we've been talking about moving into this informational arena, he talks about ‘Green’ organisations or ways that people organise themselves in groups in the ‘Green’ stage that already kind of exists today alongside ‘Orange’ as being a family.
So organisations feeling like a family, feeling like you can belong within an organisation. The companies that will be like this are much more values driven. There's an emphasis on culture over strategy. There's a focus on empowerment. So in the green zone, let's say, everything's about culture driven organisations and putting values first.
And then finally, and this is what he posits for the new paradigm, the new way of seeing the world, is the level beyond ‘Green’, the colour is ‘Teal’. So in the same way that ‘Amber’ goes one up to ‘Orange’, it feels like ‘Green’ goes one up to ‘Teal’. That colour I never quite know what it looks like. I had to look it up to really understand it, but it's really just another step up from ‘Green’, and the metaphor he uses here is a living organism.
So groups of people organising themselves in the same way that our living organism does. So self-organising in a way. In all the other stages, hierarchy is still really powerful and relevant to organising in groups. But what he posits in the book is that in a ‘Teal’ organisation and a group of people that are operating with a higher level of consciousness is that people are able to self-manage and that actually replaces the need for hierarchical systems and pyramids.
So, whereas in a ‘Green’ company, a ‘Green’ organisation, a sense of belonging is really important, a sense of being able to delight your customers through values and pushing that forwards into the world. What becomes more important in a ‘Teal’ organisation is your purpose. Is that understanding of having a calling and unfolding purpose that goes into the world, because your business is in living organism. It changes, it senses and responds to the world around us and what's interesting is what he's saying is that there's going to be a move away from hierarchies. That we're actually going to decentralise and distribute a lot of decision-making in new organisations, in new ways of us structuring how we operate with each other in groups.
And I think that's a really interesting thing to explore - Will the nature of hierarchy change? Will we move away from needing that? And will we be able to become more self-organising and take responsibility for our own decisions? And is that possible in groups? So I want to say in a nutshell, that was definitely not in a nutshell, that was a very long explanation, but that's kind of where he's getting to with the idea of, as society gets more complex, new models are being generated.
And if the ‘Orange’ was the industrial arena and that way is the predominant way that companies are organised now. Well, there's going to be a new metaphor for the new world. And we've been talking about it from an informational perspective as software and source code, and he's coming at it more from a sense of a living organism and something that can sense and respond to change and evolve.
Andy:
That's really helpful and what you outlined sounds very close to the integral thinking of Ken Wilber and it's really interesting to think about this deeply because what you outlined through that move from ‘Red’ to ‘Amber’ to ‘Orange’ to ‘Green’ to ‘Teal’ is a sort of growing consciousness, as you put it, about what we're here for and how we might organise better to achieve the aims that we have.
And this corresponds quite closely, I think to the personal psychology that accompanies the evolution of our thinking throughout history. So you talked about ‘Red’ being the sort of command or authority, very similar to tribes in pre-history and more recently, the idea that we together as a tribe can only understand and act together if we cohere as a tribe and have a leader who sets the rules and we abide and obey those rules.
What you described in ‘Amber’ feels like how do we scale tribes? How do we bring more structure to it? So the idea of armies, and so what are formal roles that exist within that structure? So I think as we've scaled societies, and as we start to think about coming together in greater numbers to be able to do things, we see that perhaps the beginning of the industrial revolution, as ‘Amber' the formation of states and governments and armies, as you said, and possibly even schools and things like that, that there's a way of structurally thinking about process as a way of augmenting our ability to act and coordinate at scale. So we're not just obeying the leader, we're formalising structures and roles that can extend and expand over a greater scale.
You talked about ‘Orange’ and this is something we've touched on before, but we may pick up again, it feels there that if ‘Amber’ was more about thinking about how we organise around perennial or long-term aims, ‘Orange’ brings into play the notion of what are we optimising for? And you talked about large corporations and I would agree, what we're optimising our coordinated structures for now is not necessarily a long-term aim, it could be maximising profits. So it's becoming much more dynamic, it has its own internal logic that facilitates its own development and coordination, but it's now coordinating and optimising towards some more abstract ideal like profit maximisation.
And this is interesting because there's a little bit of a bifurcation here because where ‘Amber’ may be focused on something that's agreed and held important, ‘Orange’ is now looking to optimise around an abstraction that we agree as a society is important, like, growth or profit and now we're organising the world around this ideological idea of what's good but it still carries a lot of that structured thinking as a part of how to do it. So the industrial logic pervades, I think, what you described as ‘Orange’. So we have huge amounts of silos, lots of metrics driven thinking that drives that kind of coordination model and the objectivisation of the world that we talked about in previous episodes largely comes out of that.
What's really interesting, you said there about ‘Green’, is this notion that there are other actors or other stakeholders is the term often used in business and economics who are impacted by the organisation. So we cannot just optimise for one metric like profit. If we're harming our employees or we're damaging the environment or we’re screwing our customers, those entities either through people or planet are also people who participate, they are beneficiaries or in some ways, stakeholders in what the enterprise is doing. Therefore their needs need to be accommodated into that. So we need to have a much broader conceptualisation of what we're collectively participating in. It's not just running the machine hotter. It's about understanding and addressing the needs of a wider set of constituents.
So it is more about shifting from metrics to values and starting to think through that lens, but ‘Teal’ is bringing all of those together, it's not about abandoning all the previous forms, it's about embracing them and extending them to a greater level of consciousness. That ‘Teal’ is about thinking of an organisation or an institution as a living organism that's present in the world for a particular purpose and can self-evolve, self-adapt, in order to evolve itself in service of a greater purpose. And this purpose is really, really important because what this ‘Teal’ thing does, I think is start to open up the opportunity, which we've talked about a lot about reconnecting our institutions in service of our individual and collective wellbeing. If the purpose is to maximise profit, then any benefits to the collective wellbeing of everyone is a secondary concern, we may or may not and it's an externality that we don't need to account for in our balance sheets. So why do we need to bother if it's going to get in the way of maximising profit?
I think what you've highlighted is that ‘Teal’ really opens up that no, we are here collectively to serve some kind of beneficial purpose in the world, which we need to understand and internalise, then guides how we act and behave and coordinate in service of that as a collective whole.
And this really starts to, to borrow a lot from, the language of biology when we think and look into the biological world organisms don't tend to exist for too long, if they're purely in an extractive mode, if they suck out the nutrients from the environment and have nothing to give back, then often those can damage the environment and in the act of damaging the substrate in which they act upon, they then themselves fail.
So what biology teaches us is that there needs to be some co-evolutionary development that the organism evolves in relationship with its environment, sort of co-evolves, co-adapts and I think that brings us nicely back to this point about how do we individually and collectively as agents evolve and co-evolve in a future, that's going to be quite different from the one that is now in a way that's healthy and fully participatory with the new institutions that come into being?
So I think there's something really powerful in this ‘Teal’ notion but as you say, there's implications in that that are worth exploring and one of them is the role of hierarchy and the role of who makes decisions and how are decisions made in this kind of organisation, which are quite challenging to the industrial way of thinking that still runs most of our institutions today.
Matt:
I think it’s a fascinating way of categorising and trying to make sense of the increasing complexity. I'm not sure if it was his intention to marry it to the idea of complexity and change and uncertainty, but it seems to me when I look at it, if we think about the idea of the arena that we've been talking about, when we kind of put that against what he's saying, there is this movement when we go from agricultural, to industrial and now to informational, there is a need now to reorganise and rethink how we come together in groups. Not because, at least in my opinion, not just because we're changing the way that we think and see the world, but because of the fact that everything's becoming so uncertain and so complex, that new methods are required in order to be effective in the world.
I'm not sure quite how that relates to this idea of purpose driven organisations, which I'd love to discuss with you. But what I can say about the purpose side of things is that that's not just a thing that's happening at an institutional level. A lot of us, and I know myself now, we're looking to do meaningful work, we're looking to find purpose, we're looking to operate within the world and say, how do we find meaning? How can I do something that matters? And what's really interesting is that's coming into the equation in this new way of seeing the world. So there's almost like two things that I also feel like are worth exploring. One is why are we moving towards this idea of having a purpose on an institutional level on an individual level, what's going on there? Why do we feel that that matters? So that's on the hearts and minds aspect of this thing, and then on a more purely operational basis, why is a strict hierarchy. Why are hierarchical systems not enough in an uncertain and changing world? They're the two things that I find really interesting from this.
Andy:
Yes, those are two fundamental points so they're probably worth us dwelling on a little bit. So my sense is that there is, you know, we've talked about the industrial way of thinking, the mechanised way of thinking, and the way that that portrays itself is that, anyone who's worked in the institution will know, that hitting quarterly and annual targets and trying to win budget for the next year, drives everyone into this very transactional, financialised way of thinking, and the net result of an organisation, creating a bureaucracy that becomes increasingly focused on these internal metrics and all the politics that then go on within an organisation, leads to an organisation that by virtue of its self-referential interest in its own performance in its optimisation loses focus on what it does in the world.
Now up until recently, as long as you were making money, business is business and that wasn't considered so much of an issue. It used to be that, I think if you go back several decades to perhaps in the post-war boom era, there was still a very moral sense within a lot of institutions, there were certain things that you wouldn't do, because that's just not right to do that kind of thing. There was very much a communal sense, I think coming out of the second world war, that we are one humanity and we mustn't go back to what led to the second world war, and that there was a consciousness that there's a new beginning and out of that came the United Nations and human rights and there was this sort of consciousness and sensitivity and sensibility if you like towards that, we are a collective humanity.
And so a lot of businesses drew from that psychology and were arguably to a degree, let's bracket that a little bit, more concerned about ethical questions, there were things they wouldn't do. But as we've gone through the second half of the 20th century into the 21st century, we've seen companies willing to take their ethical choices, right to the limit of the law. Since the 1980’s and 1990’s and the deregulation of markets and the importance placed on maximising shareholder returns, the incentives are all lined up for businesses to try, and organisations to try, and do as much as they could to achieve their numbers and to maximise their return, which meant that when decisions of the wellbeing of employees or the wellbeing of the planet, or the wellbeing of customers were concerned, it was like, how much could we get away with in our journey towards maximising our profits? Which opened up this extraction mentality, what can we extract from the world to deliver the best possible results?
And in the early 2000’s we've actually seen arguably more cynical examples of companies that are willing to break the law, because they can make more money by breaking the law and paying the fines for it than they would do of acting ethically and you can look at some of the law cases against, especially some of the big tech companies, where arguably they cross the line on purpose to gain market share, and extract from the market in ways that are unethical and harmful.
So if we bring this full circle, I think there's a growing awareness in recent years that this way of acting is doing collective harm and damage to the world. We see this with the huge damage being done to the environment, we're essentially stripmining the planet of resources in order to manufacture and deliver things which we use for a fraction of time and then toss away, which then turn up back into the environment as trash or pollution.
And we're stripmining the planet of its resources, whether it's fisheries or whether it's raw materials or whether it’s wildlife, in such a way that it's not able to be replaced and furthermore we’re then throwing the trash and the pollution back in when we finished with it. So we've got a double whammy there of extracting more than the earth can regenerate and also throwing in more pollution back into the environment than the biosphere can process itself. And we're now seeing the collective harm of that, but we're trapped inside a system that has its economic logic, the need for perpetual growth to sustain itself. And the exporting of this around the world, as the rest of the world wants to get up to Western levels of material well-being.
So I think as the consciousness of the world rises to see this can't go on in the way it is from the virtue of the planet, we've seen more recently, this way of operating is creating greater inequalities that now the world can see. We've seen that employees are increasingly disengaged in their work and there's lots of studies from Gallup and others that seem to indicate up to 85% employees are either partially or wholly disengaged with work.
So work itself has become a problem and us as consumers are becoming aware that a lot of marketing and a lot of promises are not to be trusted. So I think we've entered an era where especially the younger generation are coming in and saying this isn't right. It doesn't feel right. The institutions that our parents grew and bequeathed us are no longer fit for purpose. And this purpose then becomes interesting people want, or I think intuit, there must be a better way of doing this. There must be a way that the institutions that we built, the organisations that exist have got to correct themselves to not be in service of greater profit, but in service of creating a better world.
So this idea of purpose and its importance has come to the fore and I think it's being driven by a general awareness that the old logic just doesn't work and is doing collective harm, that's unsustainable, there's a kind of rational element to that. But also as younger people come into the work, they don't buy this anymore, they want to commit their effort, their work, their life, to something that goes beyond making profit and actually can contribute something good to the world. So purpose has arrived on the scene as a really important new idea around which organisations and institutions need to serve.
However, I think you rightly point out what does purpose mean and how do you organise it, around a common purpose? I think these are ideas that are still struggling to be clarified with enough precision to help organisations get off the old logic onto the new logic, that's something we can perhaps explore.
Just very quickly on your second point. In the midst of all of that, we have this technology revolution, we have this greater interconnectivity, whether it be complex supply chains or more interconnectedness born or made possible through the internet so we as individuals and the technology we have and the faster pace of life and innovation has created more complexity.
So yes, we need purpose, but we also need to address this issue of complexity and therein lies a really fundamental challenge, which I think Frederick Laloux is pointing to, which is the old ‘Amber’/’Orange’ ways of running businesses and institutions had at its essence - here's the stuff that we do and if we're going to make any decisions to change anything that we need to pass that up the line to our managers and eventually to the executives to make the decisions about anything we change or what else that we might do differently.
So the role of hierarchy was the arbiter of decision-making for what the organisation does, but as things become more complex and they move more quickly, there is too much change going on for the traditional hierarchical models of management to deal with. So if we are to truly move towards the ‘Teal’ organisation, which is sensing and adapting and responding in real time to changes in the world around it, framed in purpose, there's no way a few people on a governance board couldn't ever see and understand all the decisions that need to be made. So there is a requirement to think about how we do decision-making, what the hierarchies mean in this world? And how do we reorganise and participate in such a way that we can work at scale collectively at pace in a coordinated way that maintains the purpose that can bring about change and infuse the world with something better for that organisation existing? And that there's a whole set of really interesting challenges in there.
Matt:
The thing that comes to my mind is that it feels like we've really reached the end of the mechanistic, materialistic worldview. We've reached its limits. So people coming into the workplace now or coming into society now have been brought up in a world that has been heavily dematerialized. And we're going into a different space, which is still very undefined.
But that also means that I feel like when people are coming into the workplace or they want to participate in groups now, what they can earn and what they can have and what they can accrue, the material possessions, isn't necessarily front of mind.
Of course it is for some people, but for a lot of people that are trying to find something that has a sense of meaning, what we have with material objects and status symbols, like a car or whatever, as we've discussed on the show before, is not enough. And I remember we were discussing this, I think, in the legacy mindsets episode, but in one of our episodes about how we're replacing the material with the experiential, like what are the most valuable experiences for us? What are the things that we can do in the world rather than what we can have?
And I think that's heavily influencing us from a psychological aspect on the ground level as individuals, but then that's actually. Putting itself into the institutional world and people are thinking, well, what is the role and responsibility of organisations at scale? What is the purpose? What are we doing that is no longer just extractive? And that takes into account more than just our shareholders there are other stakeholders to consider. The planet is one that you've brought up. Customers is another one, whether you're able to adapt agilely and quickly to the needs of a customer. But there's also another thing that you need to adapt to, which is, the rapidly changing environment that you're in, that's driven by the complexity.
So all of a sudden you've got all of these new forces feeding into the arena, feeding into the way that we organise ourselves, which is making us rethink how we should be in the workplace or how we should be in groups. And what I kind of see with the way that different organisations are structured, because one of the interesting things is that all of these different ways of organising even the ‘Red’ organisational structure, the metaphor of the wolf pack, there are still wolf packs in the world. There's still people that organise themselves with a leader that exercises total power.
There are still ‘Amber’ organisations. If you look at governments and the way that they are, hierarchically structured, or if you look at the church, for example, maybe the Catholic church, where you have a very strict hierarchy with the Pope at the top, and him being ultimately responsible for the rest of the hierarchy, those things still exist today. And you can see where they are no longer sufficient for the rate of change in the world.
So what's interesting to me is that there's almost two things going on simultaneously. There's the psychological aspect of it, which is this material, industrial story is now no longer the right story. We've reached the end of it. It’s got its limits, but we don't know what's next. We don't know what the next story should be. But then we've also got this exponential progression of technology in a complex and uncertain world, which is forcing us to look at different models and ways of organising ourselves that break out of traditional hierarchical structures.
So if ‘Amber’ was a very strict and rigid hierarchy, that was very hard to move up and down of, in the ‘Orange’ world, anyone from any background, as long as you're extremely good at what you do and you work hard, the theory hypothetically is that you could become the CEO of that business. You can go up and down the hierarchy. There is a fluidity there. So those hierarchical structures have been really interesting, I guess in ‘Green’ the difference is that the customer, the people that you're trying to serve is going to the top of that hierarchical system, they are ultimately what determines your success.
And I think what Laloux’s trying to point out is - is a hierarchical system, something that's a necessity in a world that's rapidly changing? He kind of hints it not being something that is necessarily needed, I'm not completely sure about that. The thing that I'm sure of though, is that we need to figure out a different way of organising ourselves in a way that allows information to be distributed more quickly, because one of the problems with an older hierarchical system is that in a command and control organisation where there's one person pulling the levers - if you look at the mechanistic worldview and the machine. That idea of the information going from the centre to the outside of the group, and then back in, up and down that ladder, it just moves too slowly. And it's almost as if every progression that he's outlining or every different update or level of consciousness is not just how we see the world and how we think, but it's also, how do we process information in a quicker way that goes up and down, or is distributed more quickly to the environment that we're in so we can respond to change, which is why I think the idea of an organism, a living organism is a really helpful metaphor because a cell in a body will have to respond very quickly to changes in its environment, or it's not going to survive.
Andy:
Once you start to invoke the idea of a purpose, what you're immediately doing is indicating that there is a reason for existence, a value that can be created that lies outside of the organisation.
The purpose is to have some impact in the world through which fulfilling will allow the institution or the organism to prosper. So you're pointing to something outside the world. So outside of the traditional organisational or institutional boundary, there's something over the other side that needs to be understood and taken account for so we know that we're doing the right thing. And what that raises is the question of where is the boundary of the organisation? Is it the people who work inside the offices? If you take a factory, for example, work was something that happened inside the factory you had to go to work.
Now we're getting to the point where work can be done from anywhere. So where does the boundary of the organisation end? And covid has certainly thrown that question wider open, but I like to say goes even further than that, which is if you're fulfilling your purpose, as you said, there are multiple stakeholders and probably customers are the most important ones here.
How are you fulfilling your purpose for your customers? Do you understand what your customers really need or want? What is it that they need in their world that could lead them to have a better life than they otherwise would have if they didn't have you as an institution serving them. What can you practically or emotionally do to add value to the people that you're there to serve? How do you understand that?
Most of the conversations that I hear about focus, I think too much, on how do we rearrange the deck chairs inside this institution without saying, what is the reason for which we exist? How do we deeply understand that and use that knowledge and wisdom to then guide what it is that we do and how we organise and how we structure ourselves in order to be able to achieve that.
So what value are we creating for whom? Do we truly understand that? Because therein lies the keys to what we should be doing and how we should organise to do that. The question then arises that if understanding that how we create that value is something that's in a world that's changing more rapidly, there's a need to sense, to understand and to take action. Those three things. Can we sense and see what's happening? Can we make sense of it? The sense-making of what we perceive, and then can we act on that? And then can we turn that into a closed loop where we can sense the impact of what we've just done to see what does that mean, to inform new action, that then allows us to sense. So we become dynamic and sensing in that way.
And as we just outlined it's impossible for people in traditional ‘Orange’ hierarchies to be close enough to all of that insight and changing and evolving, sensing and responding to be able to make decisions from the top. So by definition, we have to devolve some more decision-making down the organisation, and that's scary for people who are in positions of authority, because they typically are accountable for the decisions of the organisation. And if they're not the ones making the decisions, they're now accountable for someone else making decisions to whom they may not have direct control.
So as we start to devolve decision-making, it brings into question, how do we maintain an overall coherence of decision-making that sits within a frame so that our institution doesn't fly off in different directions with each local team, making its own decisions that cause a fracturing of the organisation.
So we still need some form of hierarchy that can maintain the coherence, but isn't making all the day-to-day decisions. And that's something really interesting to explore. How do you maintain coherence in delivering value for the customers and thereby your purpose? There are many moving parts in there that represent, I think, quite a challenge to institutions to figure out how to reassemble and reorganise effectively in that more holistic way.
Matt:
Around the same time that I read ‘Reinventing Organisations’, around 2015, I started looking into how this was actually being practically implemented in the workplace because I was fascinated by it. And at the time I was trying to figure out alongside some friends of mine, how do you structure an organisation? How do you structure a business? So that it is purposeful, but also resilient, antifragile efficient at the same time.
One of the things that ‘Orange’ organisations do well is be very efficient, but what the pandemic showed us is that efficiency can sometimes be extremely brittle and fragile and you need to have resiliency built into your organisation as well, so that you can plan for unexpected events. The hypothesis being that as the world becomes more complex and uncertain, the more unforeseen events occur, so you need to be able to respond and change quickly. So around 2015, we were looking into this stuff and Holacracy came up and it was making an absolute splash at the time.
It was a really interesting, what should we call it, management practice? A method of decentralised management and organisational governance. Where decision-making authority was meant to be distributed throughout the entire organisation. Now, one of the interesting things that Holacracy was doing is saying they're going to no longer be job descriptions, like status roles.
So if you remember in ‘Amber’, your role, your status was super important. What Holacracy does is it separates roles from job descriptions. So instead of there being, ‘Hey, I'm a project manager’, it's ‘Hey, here's all of the roles a project manager does, and we need to tackle those roles’. So there's no longer a person attached to the role.
And the other thing that Holacracy does, which is really interesting is it actually modifies a hierarchical system. So if we take hierarchy to be the way individuals are organised and ranked according to authority, and you see that in a pyramid saying, okay, there is the person with the most authority at the top, and that filters all the way down. What Holacracy is, is a way of transforming the pyramid into circles. So they're still hierarchical in a sense, because they are almost circles within circles. So imagine an onion where the layer outside of the next layer is actually able to tell the layer within it, the circle inside the circle, what it needs to do, or set its direction and purpose.
So you've got this kind of, okay, let's transform the hierarchy away from a very linear thing into circles, the theory behind it was that you're able to dynamically respond to change quickly, and that the people within your organisation are feeling more like they have a higher sense of agency that they're able to determine things for themselves.
So a ‘circle’ can determine how to meet its goal. To make it more practical, let's say that your ‘circle’ has been tasked with the role of increasing customer satisfaction in your business. You get to, within your ‘circle’, you're able to, choose how you pursue that purpose and choose how you actually achieve that goal. One of the misconceptions around Holacracy, was the idea that it was meant to eradicate and demolish the hierarchical systems but the ‘circles’ are still stacked in an order of authorities. There's still that kind of top-down approach to how things are done, but what's kind of unique about it is that each circle is nested within another circle that is self-governing, pretty much. They can't change the purpose of the circle, but they can actually choose how they fulfil the mission at hand.
I think a couple of companies ended up implementing holacracy that are quite interesting. So there was Zappos that in 2013, I think they started implementing it, which is an online shoe store. Its CEO at the time was Tony Hsieh. And he was really into pursuing self-organisation.
I think they ended up selling the company to Amazon for about 1.2 billion, but then continued to implement it after, and Medium, another company that people might know, which is an online publishing platform also tried to implement Holacracy. But actually from what I read about it both times where they tried to implement this new way of modifying the hierarchical structure and empowering people in groups to work together more agentically, they failed and actually moved away from Holacracy.
And from what I've managed to understand from the situation, one of the reasons why it was so difficult for Holacracy to work in these organisations was that it was heavily procedural. So it was very internally focused on how each ‘circle’ related to each other and how they should go about creating consensus in a democratic fashion now that there was more responsibility on the individuals. And then the other thing I read was there was also no feedback mechanism from the customers because they were so internally focused on the admin that they needed to pursue to get the company to function in a democratic way.
There was no feedback from how to help customers and how to serve customers, which meant that in a world where your customers kind of decide whether you survive or not, if you're not listening to them and not bringing them into the process, it's going to really be difficult for you to succeed. I don't know if you heard anything of that, but that's what I had discovered from the whole Holacracy thing.
Andy:
Yeah. I've heard similar things that there are companies doing some really amazing stuff in terms of decentralised ways of working. And I think there's the white goods manufacturer, Haier, that's doing some great stuff. There's a Dutch insurance company Viisi, which is doing some really interesting stuff on decentralised decision making.
But there's another one that's worth bringing up as well, which is one I've studied a little bit called Buurtzorg, which is a Dutch care provider. And they're really interesting because this has profound implications for public services and social care in particular, they found that it's through the industrial thinking that we've been talking about in this series.
There is a sense in which a lot of institutions and certainly care ones as well. See the role is optimising the service they provide. So they developed a fixed sense of what it is that we do and what it is that we provide almost like a product or service. And then we send people out and they've got X number of visits to do per day.
And they do X number of things while they're there and how do we get people to be more efficient and seeing more people and doing the things that we see as our responsibility in our service. So there's the tendency to see each patient as an object who you've got to see so many of them and do this number of things to them to be able to tick the box to create, the efficiency targets that we need, that then drive the payment models that then create a profitable business and what Buurtzorg did was to say, ‘let's stop’.
Let's go and spend some time, allow each of our care workers to go and sit with the person that we're providing care for, and truly understand where they're at, what matters to them. What's important to them, where they are in their journey. What is it from their perspective that we could be doing for them that would create the best outcomes for them?
So Buurtzorg essentially created self-organising teams who took it upon themselves to use what is it that the person needs not, what is it that we're trying to force onto them by virtue of the fact, this is the service we offer, what do they need and give people the power and decision-making authority to pull together the right package of care, if you like for individuals.
And what they found is that through distributing this decision-making to people on the frontline, to take it upon themselves, to understand what is required and pulled together the right care, that ‘A’ people were much better in terms of their outcomes, the use of resources to deliver the overall outcomes were there to achieve was much more efficient because they would set up forcing stuff onto people that was pre-packaged they were pulling together the right things at the right moment. And the people who actually undertook the work no longer felt that they were just forcing a service onto someone that they actually felt that they were free and given the autonomy to take time, listen to, care for the person that they're responsible for and have some decision-making authority to bring the right level of care to that person and then have the emotional rewards of seeing that work and developing some kind of mastery of how to do that. So the net result is huge levels of improved social care at a lower cost with much more engaged workers. And it was a fabulous example of how to bring distributed decision-making into an environment like social care.
So there are definitely opportunities to adapt and think in this particular way, although there are challenges which you highlighted that some companies like Zappos have had to pull back a little bit from the full implementation of Holacracy. My take on that, which I think you pointed to, was that distributing decision-making to groups around an organisation, if there isn't a deep understanding of how we collectively add value to the customers we serve, because for me, that needs to be the source from which you draw the insight to what all these collective teams are doing. And if they don't have a common understanding of what that is, there is a risk that these self-organising teams will start to disassociate, if you like, from collectively working together in a coherent way to deliver the value and the purpose that the organisation is there to achieve. And then what you get is internal contradictions and frustrations, internal bureaucracy and politics taking out between these self-organising teams, because there isn't a clear, deep understanding of how we collectively, as a group of self-organising teams work together to deliver full value.
And there is just something really interesting to borrow out of biology to help us understand that. I think if you look at a human body we're made up of arguably 30, 40 trillion cells, we have a brain and we think, wow, well, our brain controls our body. Yes and no if we go down into what's happening in the cell, a self-organising element, scientists estimate through about a trillion metabolic events per second, going on in each cell.
So a cell is itself, a dynamic ecosystem self-organising system. The internal decision-making, the chemical decision-making inside that membrane that leads to a trillion metabolic events per second is not being dictated to by the brain, the boundary, the membranes, if you like, that then connect chemically with cells next to them are exchanging messages that allow the coordination of cells together to form tissues, that then form organs that play a role, whether it's the liver and taking toxins out of the system or the kidney regulating hydration, et cetera. All of these organs are doing their own thing in a self decision making way, but in coordination and cooperation with other parts of the body and what the brain does in the central nervous system is be able to provide the overall high-level command and control that provides coherence amongst all these self-organising parts of the body, such that you can wake up in the morning, get up and walk about with all these organs working collectively comprised of cells individually, working, collectively as well.
So there needs to be a combination of rich distributed decision-making in the context of a coherent whole that still maintains some element of coherence and hierarchy. And I think we're still trying to feel our way into what that model looks like inside an institution or organisation.
Matt:
I think from an individual level, let's say you're in a company today. There's something really interesting going on where, there's going to be an onus on you as an individual, not being a cog in the machine, but as you being an agent within an institution, or let's say a cell within the body, there is going to be an onus on you now to participate more fully, to take on more responsibility and to try and thrive in that world.
And I think it's going to maybe feel quite unsettling for people that aren't used to that way of being. If you remember, when we were talking about the legacy mindsets, the way that we've been brought up into the arena is through a standardised education system, which teaches us to regurgitate and to become a product of our world, rather than saying, how can we be more agentic? How can we adapt? and how can we pursue our goals and think for ourselves and, you know, critically assess situations?
And the example you gave with Buurtzorg is, okay, you are being given this kind of gift, if you like, of being more responsible for how the success of your role is determined. So all of a sudden, you're going to be treated less like a cog in the machine and more like a human being, at least that's how it should feel. So as a point for us as individuals to bring it down to us on an individual level, that's a point of optimism. I think it also brings a bunch of challenges with it too, which is like, well, how do we deal with that?
How do we deal with what would feel overwhelming to have to take responsibility, to take agency, to take decisions and to be comfortable with that. And I think that's something that we'll probably want to explore at some point on the show in general, which is from the agent side, how do we position ourselves for that?
And I think the other thing that I wanted to add is in the human body, in a cell, there is just an incredible amount of information that has to be dealt with if one single entity had to deal with it. Let's just say that the brain, I mean, it has trillions of connections, but even that can't handle all of the information. So it has a system. It has a way of handling the information that happens in a self-organising way from the cell upwards, even within the cell self-organising structures. The parallel that I see, and probably the reason why in Laloux’s book, Reinventing Organisations, he talks about the metaphor for ‘Teal’ being a living organism is the exponential increase in information and complexity requires a completely different way of organising ourselves in order to actually adapt and interact and navigate the world in a group, on an individual level as well, but let's say in a group.
One of the things I sometimes think we get confused about is that we feel like this is a kind of consciously directed thing, but it feels to me, especially if you look at the pre-agricultural to agricultural, to industrial, to post-industrial into the informational arena, there has been as technology and tools have increased exponentially, the increase in information has just naturally meant that as an organisation in a group. You're going to have to change. You're going to have to adapt. You're gonna have to come up with new mechanisms and ideas in order to sense and respond to an arena that will otherwise just spiral out of control. So this idea of decentralising and distributing knowledge, decentralising and distributing information to me, it's an inevitability.
And now it's just about us saying, okay, that has to happen because otherwise, it would just be overwhelming. A company cannot navigate. And we've pointed out in the past, with examples like Blockbuster, companies that haven't been able to navigate that change effectively and sense and respond to change.
And I think that's the message, right? It's if we want to organise ourselves in groups and participate effectively in the world, we need to be aware that this is where things are heading, there is too much information for the systems of the past to adapt to. And we've seen that. We've seen that in the ‘Amber’ government organisations, trying to react to the change in the environment with the pandemic, you see that in the ‘Orange’ organisations that are struggling to meet their customer's needs and are in an extraction world.
You see that in the struggles of ‘Green’ organisations that are so values focused that they lose sight of the other changes in the arena. They just pick one value, let's say and make that value their priority without saying, well, hang on a second we're in an evolving dynamic situation here. What could change? What do we need to take into account?
So each time we've got these limitations of each way of organising, which require us now, and this is what Laloux I think is saying, which is - your organisation needs to adapt and unfold its evolutionary purpose as it grows because the world that we're in now today will be different tomorrow. It will be different next week. It will be different in a year. And that change, that rate of change is exponential. So it requires a new way of organising ourselves whether we like it or not.
Andy:
Yeah. I 100% agree and this is why it's so unsettling and difficult, I think, for institutions to shift from the command and control industrial machine based way of thinking, which feels like I'm in control. I know what I'm doing. I know what products and services we're offering. I know how we offer stuff. We've got metrics to measure it. So can we not just make this run a little bit more efficiently or sprinkle a little bit of customer experience on the front of it, put a bit of lipstick on the front and make that hum as quickly and as efficiently as possible?
Moving from that model, which is quite rigid and fixed and internally focused to one which is about sensing and responding to the environment you're in and what does that mean for how we run organisations? It's fundamentally different.
A couple of reflections from the work that I've been doing that I think help point some of the ways towards that, first of all, I think there's a mixture of top-down and bottom-up, let's just take those one by one. So, I think top down, if we're no longer maximising profit by shifting product to something that's much more akin to ‘what is the purpose of this organisation?’ Yes, we need enough financial oxygen to survive, but that's a consequence of what we do, not the reason that we exist. This thing about purpose is really important and purpose, unpacked and understood in terms of how we create value for the people that we serve.
I think that starts to unlock a lot of what that purpose is. So I think it's really important and elsewhere very much pushed one framework to help thinking about that, which is this jobs to be done framework, which is quite a simple but elegant one, which is people don't buy or use products or services because they want products or services they use or buy products and services because those help them get something done that's really important in their lives, whether it's to keep well or to minimise pain or to manage my finances, they will use products and services to help them do that thing.
So what is it that we're in the game of? Our organism, our institution. What is the job that we're trying to help people do? And can we understand how we can create the maximum value possible in the job or the jobs that we've selected, that our organisation is there to achieve? Because that helps us to see what is it that we need our organisation, or organism if we use that language, to be able to do effectively? What resources do we need? What ways of collaborating, and collective structures make sense for us to be able to do that really well?
So I think ‘the top down’ that's really important that senior management in an organisation really understand that. And just to give you some stats on how far away most institutional leaders are on that, PWC did some research asking directors of large organisations. So this might not apply so much to small organisations, but large organisations.
To what degree do you believe you serve on a board where there is consensus and understanding in the board about how your own organisation creates value for the customers you serve? By creating value it's not just how much do we sell that we can see on the spreadsheets that get supplied to us every board meeting. It's why do people use our stuff? What value do we provide to them? Why do they even use us and buy us? And over 80% of all board members. Admitted that they served on boards where they don't even know why people use their products or service. They just know that they did.
So top down, if you don't even know how you create value, how can you even manage or organise your organisation to become better at doing that? If you don't even know what the value equation is. So I think that's shocking. It's incumbent upon anyone running an organisation to be truly locked in to understanding how does what my institution or business do add value in the real world? And what ways could we be adding more value or doing things better? Because that gives us the clue to what we should be doing as an institution or an organisation that sort of overall coherence picture starts to arise. How can we collectively at scale deliver this purpose? Now the real, sort of meat of this is how do we bring that to life in reality?
And this is where the bottom up piece comes. And one thing I would suggest to anyone who's listening to this is it's very hard to understand that by sitting in a room with sticky notes on the board and trying to design it from the ivory tower, what's a much, much better ways is to undertake experiments whereby you can take a particular group of customers or particular group of patients or citizens or whatever it is that you might be offering a service to, spend time with them to understand what is the job that they're trying to get done? How are they doing it today? How is our service working or not? What could we be doing in a really open way, not preconceived way of force fitting people into our product service, but how can we see what it is that we're doing and what else could be done to deliver the maximum value? And can we run some experiments to try and do that and see how it works? What is required?
Because that act of experiment will start to bring the reality of what we need to be doing differently. What is this ‘sense, make sense and act’? What does that ‘circle’ actually look like in this particular context? Because that will be the learning that will give insight as to how do we do this in a local area? What is required to bring that into being? and how can we use that knowledge then to extend more widely across the organisation, as we start to understand that at scale?
So you get top down framing and a bottom up experimentation, and as those two start to come together, there's a collective intelligence that starts to arise about how we through our distributed decision-making and our collective understanding, how it all starts to fit together into a new system. And that final word is quite important as well and anyone listening to this should also, I think, seek out some of the thinking that's being done in this space, because as we move from command and control to more of an ‘organism’ way of thinking, what it brings into being is this importance of systems thinking.
There's a lot of noise about this at the moment, but systems thinking brings some insights from how complex biological systems manage the complexity of decision and choice making and evolution and co-production and all of these elements that are so part and parcel of how the biological world evolves and co-evolves with its environment and starts to bring some of these ideas into how, they might be applied in more useful, practical ways in thinking about running departments or running organisations, or even as we may enter into this conversation now, or later how we run whole economies or politics. These are all complex adaptive systems that require these more systems thinking ways of working.
Matt:
What I love about experimentation and the outlook of putting that into practice is that it works from an individual level all the way up to an institutional group level at scale. So if you remember, when we were talking a while back about instilling a love of learning into the individual, this idea of now the world's so uncertain, now the world's changing so quickly, it's not enough to just absorb information and repeat it back to people. You need to put yourself out there and continually learn as the world changes.
And actually having that as a way of participation is really important. As an individual we want to keep learning. We want to keep understanding the world. There’s new technology coming out all the time. There's new ways of thinking. There's adapting to that and changing and improving ourselves based on - ‘okay, I need to be in learning mode. I need to be in the exploring mode all the time’. But what I like about what you said about experimentation is.. that can start on an individual level and go all the way up into an organisational level, into groups, whether you're a group of 3 people or 300.
We started this conversation by saying, what are some of the ways we can participate in groups with each other? And it seems to me like one of the takeaways is setting up environments where we can experiment and we can learn and where we can try and understand the whole instead of the part, which was one of the things that we've also spoken about in the past, which is in the ‘Amber’ zone, in the industrial arena, there was a focus just on things, on objects, but when you put yourself out there into the learning and experimentation and going out into the unknown, all of a sudden, you're trying to understand how everything connects. So actually bringing learning in and doing that from the ground up, for me, it's really important.
And it's also something that I feel makes working in groups or being in groups and organising yourself in groups more exciting because there's things to explore, there's things to discover that you wouldn't have known before. It's not you simply being the cog in the machine and just implementing an instruction from someone is going out into the world and saying ‘what's changing?’ and things are always changing now. So there's always something to learn, which I think is a really cool thing to bear in mind.
Andy:
You're absolutely right and it's really good that you brought that up because that brings a sort of psychological element to this as well. In one of our previous episodes, we talk about how bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. As institutions get bigger, often an organisation will create departments, sub-departments, sub-sub-departments, and we have work that each of those sub-departments need to do, and that gets set up through process work we accept in and work we hand off and we start focusing on tasks that we do to support the system that gave rise to it. So we become very internally focused and task driven and lose our curiosity, lose our empathy. We're not looking out of the window into the world of customers, or to be truly curious as to what is it that they need and want, and what is it that we're doing and how well are we meeting those needs?
What more could we be doing? And it's only with that curiosity. It's only with that in some way, compassion to care about what you're seeing, but what arises out of that is really valuable insights that can be metabolised if you like by the organisation as a way of helping it sense and respond. So it's really a call to break free of the bureaucratic shackles of doing the work that they have to do every day in a process driven way to be curious, why are we doing it that way? What ways could we be doing this better? And this becomes a continual orientation not to just deliver the stuff that we're there to, but to be continuously and collectively thinking about how can we do this better? How could we make this more meaningful for the people we serve? Do we even understand that first of all? Let's bring that gold back, if you like, from greater research and understanding. I bring our customers inside our institutions, we'd really know we're co-creating with them, the best possible experiences for them.
And using that knowledge and insight to inform a continuous evolution and development of what we're doing. That's an exciting living organism, not just an institution where you go in and do the same old, same old every day. I think that in itself is an exciting and more meaningful possibility for work than I think most people currently experience in their day-to-day jobs.
Matt:
By bringing customers into the process and having those people participate.. I think it might even be useful at some point to have a different way of speaking about customers, because you've mentioned it before on the show as well, and I think it's true, it's that human-centred, human first approach. It's not enough to just look at someone as a customer. It's about looking at someone as a whole individual being, and that's the shift that's changing as well and in projects that I've worked on in the past, that co-evolution of a product through the participation of someone that needs that product, that you're trying to serve, is just such a hugely rewarding process.
And having gone through that. It does feel looking back that it’s complete folly to think that you have the answers to a solution without including the very people that you're making that solution for. Seeing someone as a human first, seeing the humanity within someone and trying to block out all of the other distractions, all of those other categories that people use to try and navigate the world, I think is a really important thing for us to get our heads around.
Because if we can do that, if we can say, look, we're serving humans when you're serving people, this is actually something that affects people's lives that exist within the society that we're in. It's so important.
Seeing someone as an individual first as a human first and collaborating and cooperating with them actually reminds me of something that I wanted to bring up. This idea about breaking down hierarchies and distributing the decision-making process is really about us becoming more agentic. It's really about individuals taking on more responsibilities, but also in a way these ideas, these ‘Holacracy’s’ and ‘Reinventing Organization’s’ is just another spin on a constant thing we've been trying to figure out, which is - how do we do something differently to the hierarchical structures that have not worked in a changing arena.
And one of the groups of people from the past, one of the precursors to this way of thinking, was actually a group of people known as the Quaker capitalists and the parallel here, I find really interesting, especially considering we've been talking about human first and humanity and seeing the whole person. So for people that maybe have never heard of the Quakers. The Quakers, at least the businesses that the Quaker capitalists created, were around in the late 19th century. These are companies like Cadbury's, Barclays, Lloyds. So for those of you that are in the UK, I'm sure you'll know those, and probably in the States you certainly know Cadbury's I imagine, the chocolate company.
What was interesting about the Quakers is that they were a religious group that in the opposite fashion to the Catholic church, which was strictly hierarchical and had a system function where obviously, as we mentioned at the beginning, the Pope is at the top of this ladder, or top of the pyramid, and then the authorities distributed, linearly down. The Quakers were different in their religious beliefs because they saw everyone having a direct relationship to God as an individual. So to them, everyone was a priest. Everyone had the ability to say and be part of that conversation as a direct conduit of their relationship to God.
So for those Quakers, when they were enacting their principles into work, their reaction to work was we need to look into the world and treat everyone as a conduit of God. Everyone's a priest. Everyone is part of the same thing. There is no hierarchy here. We all have equal access to God. And what's interesting about the Quaker capitalists, when they created their businesses is they tried to live out their principles in their work, albeit imperfectly.
A really interesting example about how they tried to implement their values and live this kind of human first perspective more widely is you take Cadbury's for example, which originated in Birmingham, the founders of Cadbury's, they bought in a 120 acre estate for workers to change their working conditions so that they could all live on this estate. It was called Bournville. I think it still is around. So this whole way of working seeing the world, it wasn't enough to just satisfy your customers or your stakeholders etc. It was about actually, how can we make the lives around us better? And that for them started by seeing people as individuals, as humans first. And Cadbury's was one of the first companies in the UK to introduce pensions I think. So I just wanted to bring that up as an interesting precursor to a lot of the things that we're speaking about now.
Andy:
That's really important to bring up and opens up a whole bunch of new possible lines of conversation. I think there's two that I'd like to put on the table here. One is the personal and one is the systemic. So we start with the personal. What I love about that view, albeit a religiously inspired one, is that in the heart of that thinking was a recognition that there's something of a divine spark in all of us.
And therefore, each of us need to be treated with some care, and possibly even reverence, although I know that wasn't always lived up to, but that there was a duty of care that goes beyond seeing someone as just a worker whose labour we can extract for the minimum price for the maximum output. There was a sense that there was a responsibility to the individual beyond their work, to live decently, live well, be in a community in which proper education and some degree of health was provided such that there was a mutually reinforcing system in which people were able to participate in the Quaker businesses, but we're being looked after and supported in a much more holistic way to be able to function individually and as a community.
There was a kind of nourishing of the whole circle of life that came with the Quaker view - see the person as a whole and see them in their community as a whole, and their ability to nourish that entire lifecycle was a much more expanded view of the relationship between an organisation its worker.
There are some interesting examples of that in, for example, businesses like Tata in India, where there is, an interest, not only in the worker, as someone who comes and works for them, but also that the development of that worker through their own education and increasingly also through their family, is something that Tata looks to take on board as a kind of mutually reinforcing relationship, where I help you to grow as a person and in your growth, you help the organisation become more successful.
So it's a very much more expanded view of the worker as a whole person, rather than just as a deliverer of labour. I think there's something in that Quaker model and the Tata model, which is really valuable and really important to bring and it comes to your point, not only for workers, but also seeing customers as whole people as human beings, not just as consumers, which constrains them and reduces them down to a bag of meat that buys stuff that has behavioural properties that will try and manipulate through our marketing and communications.
No, they're a person living a life that has dreams and aspirations and we can play a role in helping that person in the totality of their lives by adding true value to them and their self realisation. That's a much broader view of how you see your customers and adds the potential for a more deep and authentic relationship to be nurtured and cultivated, which in turn will have a monetary component to it.
So seeing people as whole people I think is really, really important, but I think also the worldview that the Quakers had is something really interesting to reflect on at this moment, we have moved to a model which sees everything through an economic lens. And if we take the governance thing, we've been talking about institutions and go up a level and say, how does governance work at a society level?
I think what we increasingly see, and there may be people who back on this, but there's a sense of which even the government itself is not as in charge, as it used to be. As we see corporations and institutions play a deeper and greater role in aspects of our life. We have a combination of actors who are shaping the arena that we live in, that have a worldview that shapes the colour and experience of that arena, largely it's still industrially driven, which then creates the environment that we as individuals are having to engage with and find ourselves in and find meaning.
And as we've discussed in our conversations the transactional way of thinking that dominates the arena's worldview is becoming problematic for the world, for us as individuals, increasingly feel alienated, loss of meaning, there's a sense of which we need to take on that as a society, as well as the institutions that we've been talking about so far in this conversation.
And one of the things that sits right in the middle of that is economics. Economics is so foundational to how we think about what an economy is and if we look at what's the most important things that governments focus on its GDP. We still have our entire worldview dominated by economic thinking, which then leads to a cascading set of priorities that then drive how business works, how money and resources are divided up, whether we go into austerity or not, if we have an economic contraction that affects all of us. So economic thinking still dominates, not whole person or societal wellbeing thinking as the governing logic.
What's quite interesting is that economics sits at this pivot point or juncture between our worldview and the infrastructure and institutions that we build, which are increasingly being leveraged by more important technology. So what do we value? Economics sits as the intermediary that deciphers and decodes and makes apparent the things that we need to bring into being to deliver those values. So we parse our values through an economic lens, primarily, which is what drives economic decision and policy making and the way that our businesses and the regulation that informed them are constructed.
So I think that there's a real need right up at the, one could say national or global level, to start thinking about some of those ideas that the Quakers had about, human wellbeing and human flourishing, being the governing lens through which we take our values about what's important, parse them through that framework to look at what kind of institutional structures and priorities we should have in the world to bring into being, the coming together of the future arena and our collective wellbeing.
We've seen that the financial lens drives us further apart and is doing collective harm. We need a greater participation where our individual and collective development and that of our arena come together and we can only do that if we either evolve or dethrone economics as the central organising framework through which decision-making at the macro level is parsed. And I think that's a really big and important question that hangs over this entire space as a next order piece of thinking that needs to be done.
Matt:
With the way that the arena's developing and the different actors that are in the arena - you've got the governments, you've got the new institutions that wield lots of technological power. The world is changing and we need to figure out a different way of interacting with the different institutions all around us.
And one of the things that's really interesting about the Quakers is not just their worldview, but it's also how that worldview was organising groups, right? And how they came together. The idea wasn't that there was a centralised entity that was making decisions on behalf of the group. The idea was that that decision-making was completely distributed through all of these people that all had equal regard for one another. And when we talk about governments and other institutions, other organisations, especially the new institutions that have a lot of technological power, there's lots of things going on at the frontier of technological innovation, And I feel like there's two forces at play and we've brought this up. I think even as early as the first episode, one force is the force that centralises power. And the other force is a force that decentralises power, that distributes it.
So when we're talking about how we act on the highest level in a society where institutions are wielding power, we need to ask ourselves, what kind of institution, what kind of structures do we want in our world that are organising around us? And let's do a side-by-side comparison of centralising power versus decentralising power.
So a centralising power or let's say a centralising technology would be a technology that's able to give power to the hands of a few people, rather than the hands of a lot of people and that power being shared equally. So you might think of something like AI or facial recognition as something that could centralise power - the technologies that create surveillance. The ability to command and control through technology is still there. You can still operate in an ‘Amber’ or ‘Orange’ mindset with new innovations and they come in the form of things like AI, machine learning and data mining, all of those kinds of things.
With a centralising power what it does is it coerces you into participation. In other words, participation is forced upon you. You can be walking the street and be surveilled. There's no way that you can opt out of a centralising force necessarily.
So then on the other side, you have decentralising powers, technology innovations in the technological space that completely distribute that power that lead to cooperation that lead to collaboration, where people are incentivised to participate, where that participation is not forced upon you in the same way that maybe a centralising technology would be.
So if we think about what a decentralising power could be. One that comes to mind immediately to me is the blockchain and the blockchain is the fundamental technology that things like cryptocurrencies are run on. So everyone probably knows about Bitcoin now because that's something that's been very popular in the news, but blockchain is a technology that has the power to decentralise and distribute decision-making and power.
So I'm guessing some people are probably thinking, well, what is a blockchain? A blockchain is at its most basic level, an online record of transactions. And that online record of transactions could be for things like money or for goods anywhere where there's an exchange of information that is captured and tracked in an online record. As more people use this record, this online record, which is stored in a ledger, which is basically a set of the records. This set of records grows. And as it grows all of this information needs to be organised. The way that this works is that this information, all of these online records, let's imagine it's money for example, all of the transactions of money, get organised them bunched together into blocks, which are then linked together in a chain using cryptography, hence the name blockchain and the cryptography aspect of it is the encrypting of the information.
So it's all linked cryptographically together. So you have all of these blocks of information. Which are chained together, which are linked together. And as I was mentioning the information or these records are captured and recorded in a ledger. A ledger typically would have been, or still is a place where records are kept. So in a bank or something like that, you would have a ledger which records all of the transactions that are made.
Now with blockchain what's interesting and quite different is that this ledger, rather than it being held by a centralised entity, the ledger is actually distributed on the network, which means all of the records, all of the transactions can be held in many places by different nodes on the network, which means that blockchain technology, first of all, the records are permanent and immutable because they can't be changed by an individual in a centralised entity. And also in many cases, they're very transparent. So if you take Bitcoin, that cryptocurrency, everyone can see every transaction that's ever been made on the blockchain. So it's really an interesting technology in that respect and the other thing that makes it quite interesting is that with the network, with the blockchain, it's governed by a set of rules that are called protocols.
So if I wanted to give you an example of a protocol, again I'll use Bitcoin as an example, so Bitcoin has a protocol, which means that it will only ever have 21 million coins in existence. So that means that there's nothing that any centralised entity can do to create more of them. That is just a rule that's been defined. So a protocol, in this respect, is a rule that enables that blockchain to govern itself. So you don't need any middlemen to enforce the execution of the rules, the technology is doing that automatically. So it's trustless and it's distributed and decentralised. And in a way, the code is becoming the law, right? It's been predefined. There's no person interfering with that. And now it's actually going one step further. So beyond Bitcoin, beyond the blockchains that you may have heard about, there is now the ability with this technology to put smart contracts on top of the blockchain.
A smart contract is a contract that's expressed as code. So just imagine a digital contract, essentially, that is enabling others to carry out sets of instructions. So what this leads to now is loads more possibilities for us to organise ourselves in groups. So there's these things called DAO's. DAO stands for a decentralised autonomous organisation. And essentially these organisations, these groups, are companies that work together on these blockchain networks with no central management that coordinate them. And then instead, all of the rules are predetermined in the code and that's taken care of by the network.
So all of a sudden with this technology, we've got a load more possibilities and a lot more ways of cooperating together without having centralised entities involved in how we cooperate, who knows what the dangers of decentralisation could be. But just the very fact that, there are these two forces at play simultaneously, the ones that are trying to centralise and command and control that are built on the kind of industrial arenic thinking, versus the more informational arena, this new way of thinking, which is trying to distribute and decentralise. I just found it a really interesting thing to observe. Why are these two forces operating in the world today? And what are the implications of that, in society and in the way that we participate in the arena?
Andy:
It's transformational at a number of levels. I won't profess to be an expert in blockchain, but just from the little bit that I've read so far, there's certainly opportunities to remove a lot of friction from processes and transactions at the moment by authenticating people and transactions as quickly and elegantly - proof of identity, proof of contract.
So just even keeping the world as it is at the moment. Which is I know not what blockchain will do, but just look at the way that we do stuff today. Blockchain can release a lot of the friction out of a lot of processes that are undertaken today and secure identity and data in new and exciting ways.
But I think one of the things that is quite little bit more revolutionary is, and this is where I think blockchain could become much more challenging to the power systems that currently sit in place, is that there are many institutions that act as brokers, actors, authenticators of transactions, whether it's legal bodies or banks through which transactions are made. So for example, if you want to buy something across the world in a different currency, you have to go through banks to make that transaction who then scoop off some fee for doing that.
Once you start enabling peer to peer transactions to occur in a safe and authenticated way with no need for intermediaries, then you start to bring into question some of the roles of these large financial institutions, because there's an opportunity to ‘A’ bypass them. I think ‘B’ currencies such as Bitcoin or alternative currencies are by definition global. So they start to bring into question or challenge the idea of a national currency, because again, if money is moving across borders, then there are banks that will skim off some of the transaction fees for changing currency.
If we can now trade across the world buying and selling things in a single currency, you don't have that need for the use of translation between different currency values of fiat currency. So there's a threat to how trade is undertaken and of course, if more and more transactions occur in this currency of which it may be more difficult for national authorities to see and track, then the possibility for tax and regulation that normally are, appended to, or made part of the visibility that the current system provides of these international transactions or transactions of any sought, become a little bit more difficult.
So there is something quite radical and transformative at many levels of what blockchain can bring, so the idea of distributing decision-making in a more peer-to-peer manner has lots and lots of potential benefits, but I think what I would also add to this is that we can think about this, like any technology, it's an enabling technology, it's not an end in itself. So the question still remains. If this is a means to something, what is the ends that we want to bring about? What is the goal of all of this? Because if we still don't have a higher vision, a better vision of the kind of world that we want to create, where individual and collective flourishing and wellbeing is at the heart of that, then how can we most effectively mobilise these enabling technologies in service of this?
So that it doesn't become an alternative way of playing the old game with a new infrastructure that cuts out certain players. It becomes a more efficient way of running the traditional economic system. And that, that's the level of our ambition that would be a missed opportunity, I think. So I think blockchain is exciting, revolutionary, but it needs to be mobilised in service of a greater vision of what we can do to bring about an arena or a world in which this technology can be truly in service of all of us or not simply be used to extend existing business models or allow a new set of actors to come along and dominate the economic game, at the expense of the rest of us.
A I think blockchain speaks also to this question that I think is so important for this moment in history, which is, we've talked about how the values of society, are parsed through economics, an economic layer, if your like, which then affords attention to and resources to economically driven activities and institutions, which then have shaped the world in this financialised way, which we've described as often quite alienating to us. What these new technologies do and it's not just blockchain, but you can think of CRISPR and AI, and all these other technologies, is empower our choice-making, it extends the power in which we can make decisions. So if we're still parsing our values through the economic lens, and we now have even more powerful technologies, such as blockchain to do that, then what we do is take all the things that are causing problems in an economically driven world and putting them on steroids or standing them up on stilts.
So it's really, really important to before we commit ourselves down that path in a way that becomes very difficult to pull back from is to have this collective conversation amongst us, as individuals, within our organisations and within society about what are the values that we hold dear, which can guide us in the development of our current institutions, the development of the future institutions and how these technologies will be mobilised such that they hook back in as you've said to probably the nearest time in history where this was fully articulated, as you say, was in the Quaker movement in service of us as whole human beings in a collective that we seek to flourish in the future. I think that still remains a question that hangs above or sits over how we mobilise blockchain to fully realise its potential for all of us.
Matt:
I agree with you about what you're saying - are zero sum games just going to continue in a new technological arena? I worry about that too. And I don't know what the implications are of blockchain technology or new innovations that distribute power widely. I don't know what the knock on effects of that could be, but I think what's interesting about the idea of it being distributed and there being no centralised entity that can affect it per se, is that, that should lead to more resilience in the system. It should lead to more anti-fragility.
Now I would love it if someone has an opinion on this to let us know what they think could be the perceived dangers of these kinds of networks and how they can be gamed and that kind of thing, because I'd be really interested to hear about that.
But one of the things I like about it is that this technology seems to be going against the centralisation of technology. It seems to be saying, well, let's try and put the technology in the hands of people to pursue different goals, but like you said, what are the values that are driving all of these forces? What are we trying to do? What's the new story? And with blockchain technology or any technology that distributes power It's not concerned with a story. It's a neutral entity. It's not telling you how you should use it. It's just going and putting itself out there.
One example I can think of, of blockchain where it's being used for good, tying it back into the environmental thing that we were talking about earlier, is there's a company called the Regen Network. And how the Regen Network is using blockchain is to track, verify and reward positive changes to ecological systems.
So if you remember, I was saying a blockchain is a way of having a set of online records. So what they do is that they verify with farmers on land, whether a piece of land is ecologically viable, whether it's actually regenerating the land. And then they track this information on a ledger on the blockchain, on a distributed ledger. And then companies can purchase credits on the network that is verifiably regenerative land.
So the aspects of blockchain technology to be used in ways that can change the world and can help are there, it just requires, like we've been kind of hinting at, some seriously deep thinking around it.
Andy:
Yes and I think that's a wonderful pointer to the potential for these new enabling technologies. One of the things we talked about in our sense-making episode is the sense of which a lot of information coming to us, maybe false or twisted or partial and making it very difficult to make sense, and what you've just described as the potential for a blockchain driven platform to make available to the world, a set of information, a verified information source, from which we could collectively act upon or make decisions that's not controlled by one institution, but almost like a global commons of trusted information about what's going on in the world, around certain activities that are surfaced and exposed in that way.
And just one pointer to the full sort of potential that arises out of that is pulling together data sources from infrastructure and from businesses and health and other areas to make it available in a data store that's anonymized and made available for anyone, whether it's individuals, people in community or businesses to take that knowledge and data and turn that into value.
So if you take what you've just described and apply that on a global level, the potential to open up trusted sources of information about the environment, about ecology, about society, about economics, about many things, and have that information surfaced into a global platform from which no one organisation can dominate and own that data, but is available for us all to co-create new sources of value. I think this herald's a potential golden opportunity for innovation, but innovation that's not just focused on extraction, innovation that's focused on value creation. If we can democratise that through uses of blockchain to bring sources of trusted data to a worldwide community to build upon as insight then that's very exciting.
Matt:
Yeah, there's just so many new opportunities now, which means there's so many new ways that we can participate, as individuals of course, but also in the groups that we're in. And I think a lot of things have come up in this conversation. And it's quite hard to summarise because we've gone through a lot of different themes today, but I think what's going to be an interesting thing to think about is how organisations are changing over time as the world changes.
And one of the key themes that we've discussed is hierarchies, how they've evolved and changed. And we've also suggested that hierarchies might be actually becoming flatter, but that's not always the case. Sometimes hierarchies are valuable and are useful.
One of the things about hierarchical structures, if we consider them to be ‘the way groups are organised and ranked according to the amount of authority they wield’, typically a hierarchy has a kind of negative connotation because people perceive it as the blind pursuit of power. Like the ability to get up the ladder, as quickly as possible is kind of like a pathological thing. I know that when I read Reinventing Organisations, the first time, my thinking around hierarchies was like, it was almost like a game of snakes and ladders apart from the snakes were at the top of the ladder you know, that's how I remember thinking about it.
But my thinking has actually changed on that because if you think about your own work situation, everyone's come across people that they admire in the workplace. People that are very competent, people that maybe have mentored them or that they've wanted to imitate and move towards, and within an organisational structure, everyone's at different stages of their life, there are lots of people with experience, some people that are completely new to the hierarchy within which they sit. So, although we've been talking a lot about the distribution of power and how hierarchies are necessarily changing in a new world, I don't think it's right to say that they're on their way out. I think hierarchies are always around with us.
And I think the onus is on us to understand whether the hierarchies that we sit within are poorly functioning and pathological, maybe based on power or highly functioning and based on competence. And we needed to be able to discern the difference. And I think we can discern the difference by paying attention, by paying attention to the world around us, by participating in it, by focusing more on what matters to us and discussing these ideas.
And also we can do that by becoming more competent ourselves by increasing the level of competency we have. And I think that that happens by discussing these ideas, thinking about them openly and challenging ourselves with ideas that come up. So I think the question I would want to leave everything on this episode would be, how do we raise ourselves and each other up to be more competent? What are the ways that we can do that for each other so that we can live a good life? I don't know if you have any kind of concluding thoughts Andy on that.
Andy:
Yeah, it's important to think about these questions, especially with regards to hierarchy and systems of control.
I always find it quite helpful to go from one extreme to another, to look across the spectrum, to help understand where across the spectrum something might find its greatest harmony and to smash all hierarchies, and have us all individually acting on what we want to do individually or thinking that stuff can be done individually is, if you think about political terms, would be like extreme libertarian or an anarchy, and it doesn't take long to see that extreme individual freedom to do what we want when we want, soon causes problems when we butt up against what others need and want. And certainly with regards to institutions, we now find ourselves in a moment of history where we need to come together to collectively address really pressing problems like climate change, which has bearing down on us unless we do something radically we're going to cause untold harm future generations and potential viability of the human race in, its worst incarnations.
We've got these huge new technologies that could be put to use in ways that are highly destructive, as well as highly constructive. And none of those big questions of society will get answered by individuals working by themselves. So there is a need to collectively mobilise for institutional reasons in so much that we need collective answers to some of these questions, but we also need to ensure that the arena functions for us in a way that promotes the common good and our collective flourishing.
So we do need, whether it's education systems or infrastructure, that by definition, as we've been exploring in our conversation, requires decision-making and collective action at scale. And that collective action at scale does require the joint understanding of what any particular institution will do, what its purpose is and how it maintains coherence through all its functions and bringing that to bear.
The old top down tyrannical ways of working are probably dated and past their sell by date now and need to be replaced by much more informed, dynamic distributed decision-making. But this need for collective coherence means that there will always be some degree of hierarchy so that the overall direction and coherence of any institution is maintained. That can't be done just as a swarm.
There needs to be some coordination and collective action that's being driven at that level, as well as what's being done at the frontline. So hierarchies are necessary in that respect, but you're right to point out that they can be gamed. People within particular places can leverage their situation or their privilege to find their way up to the higher parts of hierarchy, not through their competence, but through politics or gaming or even corruption.
And it's important that we don't find our institutions being run or led by actors who do not have the collective interest of the institution and our wellbeing at the heart of why they're in that position and then competence to do so. But all of this points to the importance and I think this is where we've kind of explored in this conversation that yes, we need individual autonomy and agency, we need to make sense of the world and be vigilant and capable of finding our way in a more complex world that enables us to realise our potential, our individual flourishing, but we can only do that collectively.
And therefore our skills and our capabilities of working collectively, both socially, but also in the forms of collective enterprise that formed the institutions of the arena that we create is through this collective coming together in service of purposeful institutions that can serve the common good in which our future depends.
And I think that's an area that we've explored today and we'll need to explore further because this is core to our ability to build the kind of world that we want to in the future.
Matt:
There's just so much more to explore. It feels like every time we talk, we open up a whole can of worms for another episode.
As a final thought, I would say, to use another analogy to the blockchain, and the idea of nodes - a node is a point of intersection or connection within a network - think of it as a kind of gateway where you can receive, store and send information. That's what a node is. Well, in a way, we are all nodes on the cultural network. So something that is worth thinking about is how do we strengthen ourselves and therefore strengthen the network? And that might be something worth exploring further.
Andy:
And one final, final point to add to that is of the things that's been learned from looking at nature and also fundamental to systems thinking, which builds on what you've said is that yes, we are all nodes, but it's the relationships between those nodes that make possible collective action and therefore our relationships with each other, both individually and collectively, how good those relationships are, the quality of those relationships, is what mobilises and makes possible the collective power of all these nodes together. So this participation and collective participation and how we find new forms of bringing that into being is the key, enabling energy that makes possible all of us as nodes to act as a collective whole for the greater good.
Outro
Matt
So that's the end of the episode. For me it's been really nice listening back to the conversation this time with the benefit of quite a bit of time passing since we recorded it. Whenever I do this, listen back to an episode, I'm always looking out for the things that capture my attention anew, and it seems to me if we are thinking about how we participate and organise ourselves in groups, three things stand out. The psychological, the structural, and the technological, as I alluded to in the intro.
And it's interesting to think about how those three things play a role in how we cooperate and come together in groups. And they also bring up some questions to ponder over.
So let's start with the psychological. The thing that really stuck out to me was this idea of a sense of purpose. Why is it important to have a sense of purpose on an individual level, on a societal level, on an organisational level? Where does our desire to be a purposeful agent in the world come from? Where does that core drive originate, and what's the driving force behind it? And on the flip side, how can this sense of purpose potentially get hijacked by forces in the arena to ends that aren't necessarily beneficial to an agent or the arena?
Then there's the structural and the value of hierarchies in the world today and going forwards into the future. I'd actually be really curious to know how you consider things like hierarchies. For me, the more I think about the idea of them, the more I see them as part of the fabric of reality. I know we've been looking at them solely in terms of how groups organise, but before we even think, we're already perceiving and judging and forming a hierarchy of what's most important or what's most relevant to us.
Every time you make a decision if something's good or bad, better or worse, there's a hierarchy there of value. You wouldn't be able to act in the world otherwise. And this seemingly scales up all the way into how we participate in groups. It works on both the micro and macro level. Does this mean that they're inevitable when it comes to groups? If they are, what role will they play in a rapidly changing arena? How might hierarchies evolve as we distribute decision making to handle the influx of knowledge and information and ever increasing complexity we're faced with?
Finally, the technological. The theme of centralization and decentralisation and how technology impacts how we come together in groups has been something I've been wrestling with ever since we had that conversation. But in this episode, we discussed only one actual concrete technology, that being the blockchain, and its potential transformative effects on group organisation. So the question on my mind is, what are the other ways that technology can influence how we participate? How might it augment and expand our ability to make choices and decisions as well as hinder them when we participate with others?
So that's what I'll leave you with this week. Next time we'll continue the theme of participation, but looking at it from a completely different angle. As always, if you like what we are doing here, the best way to support us is to subscribe to the show and share an episode with a friend. In the show notes on your podcasting app, you'll find links to the things mentioned in this episode and on our website, meta perspective.io you'll find a full transcript of the episode in case you want to read through anything discussed, and if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to hello metaperspective.io to continue the conversation. That's it from me. Until the next time, take care.