Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
We are skilled guides helping teams turn big thinking into impactful doing. By creating engaging, fun, and transformative experiences, we bring people together to connect deeply, work better, and grow more innovative.
During this podcast series we will explore programs to make collaboration meaningful, fostering cultures of alignment and continuous improvement that drive lasting results.
We envision a world where teamwork builds trust, drives growth, and creates lasting impact. Through carefully designed workshops, we spark positive, lasting shifts that unlock the full potential of teams and businesses. Serious work doesn’t have to feel heavy—we make it enjoyable and inspiring.
We value teamwork, continuous improvement, and meaningful connections. Great ideas and success come from bringing people together, thinking differently, and building something bigger. By staying curious and people-focused, we help businesses thrive through collaboration, innovation, and a culture of growth.
Henry Coutinho-Mason: [00:00:00] Now you can rally very passionate individuals around that. Right? And actually, you know, as I say, maybe change industries around that. I'm, I'm not saying every small group of people is gonna change the world for the better, but how do we find an edge in the, in the era of ai. And I think it's gonna be
Podcast Host: the world is changing. For most human beings, change is uncomfortable and challenging to address. Whether you are a startup working on agile processes or a mature organization, navigating change within existing complex structures, the mindset and skills to adapt has never been more vital. The team from the strategy table want to help the wider world understand the need and approach to meaningful and impactful change management, helping organizations navigate disruption and make change accessible to everyone.[00:01:00]
This is Accessible Disruption.
Anthony Vade: Welcome to Accessible Disruption, the podcast where we explore change and how organizations can build resilient, adaptive, and collaborative teams. Before we jump into today's episode, I wanna remind everybody out there listening to this to subscribe and share this episode. Uh, we see you listening in the analytics 'cause of course we're looking at the data, but only a few of you hit that subscribe button.
So we'd like you to take that next vital step 'cause it helps us know that you are part of this community. We'd also love you to head over to our website and take your. Seat at the table and join in this conversation with us by that medium. Two. So those of you who don't know, I'm Anthony Vade. I'm one of the co-hosts and co-founders of Strategy Table, and joining me as so often is the case on these podcasts.
Uh, my fellow co-founders to here and Dean and [00:02:00] Ryan Hill, welcome team.
Tahira Endean: Well, hello, always happy to be here. And once again, we have Anthony, a very exciting guest today. Henry Catino Mason.
Anthony Vade: Yeah. Talking about something I'm pretty passionate about, uh, playing in this space of digital transformation futurism, looking at ai, and we we're gonna hear from Henry in just a second, but I.
I I wonder, Ryan, when we say AI to you, what's one thing that gets you excited and one thing that makes you a bit nervous or a bit anxious about artificial intelligence?
Ryan Hill: It's a good question. So I, I read a really great book called Super Intelligence a couple years ago, uh, that really explored like the consequences of unchecked ai.
So I think what gets me excited about. The concept of AI is being able to augment or upscale our production capability as humans, like kind of offloading what I would consider to be the mundane or [00:03:00] rote tasks. What concerns me about it is if we go the opposite way, where we start to offload the, the creativity or the, uh.
You know what would be the more human aspect of the positions and then we keep the mundane and rote positions for humanity. I think in every positive science fiction spin AI is doing the work that we prefer not to be doing. I. Uh, giving us freedom to do things like create and experiment and try new things.
Uh, and if we go the opposite direction, then I think we're, we're missing the point.
Anthony Vade: So with that, what better time to introduce Henry Catino Mason? Now, you refer to yourself as a reluctant futurist and a provocative optimist, Henry. Before we jump into this, just this deep, deep waters of understanding what the future could and couldn't be.
How did you end up a reluctant futurist and a provocative optimist? Like, how did you get to this place where you're exploring this kind of thinking?
Henry Coutinho-Mason: Oh wow. What, [00:04:00] what a, what a place to start. And firstly, thank you for having me on. It's a, it's a pleasure to, uh, see you all again. I, I've met certainly you and Tahira before.
And I guess that's, you know, that, that's how I got here, right? You, you asked, so physically how I got here was we, we met in Vegas where I was speaking at an event hosted by Tahira. And, but, but really I fell into it. I mean, my, my dirt, my dirty career secret is that after I graduated at university, I, I became an accountant.
I mean, I have no idea what I was thinking. I, I should preface this by, in the uk I'm, I'm based in London. It's not abnormal to go from, I did politics and international relations as as an undergraduate degree, and then kinda KPMG came calling to my university and I didn't really, I mean, this is before a financial crisis.
I didn't really think I was very naive, right? This is another reason why I call myself a reluctant futurist. I'm terrible at planning my own future, and all the most interesting things that have happened to me have been essentially complete accident. But I went to become an accountant and, and I don't know what [00:05:00] I was thinking because I was a terrible accountant, possibly one of the world's worst accountants ever, because I realized I, I just kind of didn't care.
Now, that's not quite totally true, but you know, it, it didn't flick my switch. Right. And I was looking at some of these numbers and you know, we were working on banks and they were talking about mortgages and subprime and all the juicy stuff in 2006, 2007. And I just realized I was way more interested in the stories beneath these numbers, you know?
And, and there were guys in the room sitting around having these esoteric conversations around what these numbers meant as a mathematical problem. And I was like, but there's shopping malls here. You know, there's, there's apartment blocks, like what happens to these things? And by a complete accident. KPMG.
If they did, they did, they did one amazing thing for me, which is they had essentially the kind of furlough scheme that was, you know, popularized in the pandemic, in the great financial crisis. So I, they asked for people to take a, essentially a little sabbatical and me aged [00:06:00] 26 with essentially no responsibilities and no income was like, oh, you mean you're gonna pay me to take three months off, essentially, or pay me a reduced rate?
Like this is the best deal ever. And. I used that time to set up a nonprofit, a real estate charity, which just turned 15 yesterday. So that was, that was exciting. But you know, as always, these things take way longer than you think when you're 26 and you're like, we're gonna take over the world tomorrow.
And the other accident that happened to me was a couple of my friends sent me this job posting for a blog, which I'd been reading as a student, which was this blog called Trend Watching, and incredibly fortunately. It was run by this, basically this individual Dutch guy. And I had loads of time on my hands because, you know, I was, I was on this furlough scheme and so I applied for this job that I was completely and utterly unqualified for.
You know, he was an advertising for a senior strategist. And I, I think I imp it with saying I'm not senior and I'm not a strategist, but here's what I think. And I wrote this kind of 5,000 word report. 'cause I just thought it was really interesting. [00:07:00] He essentially said to me, you're absolutely not what I'm looking for.
You're right, but you've clearly put a lot of time in this and I guess I feel compelled to at least meet you for coffee. And we had like a two hour coffee and then he was like, well, you're still really not what I'm looking for, but I. I, I guess you, you know, you, you seem to be interested in this and I'll, I'll keep looking for someone else.
Uh, can you do freelance part-time? And I said, well, this is great 'cause I'm setting up this charity. And, uh, you know, essentially that was the accident of, of history, right. I ended up, well, I ended up eventually like running a business and we grew it from three to 35 people. And, and I spent 10 years. You know, I said growing that business, building a team eventually, like, and, and I fell into this speaking and, and wrote a couple of books with it.
But I, I guess the reason why I can tell that story at some length is because, look, the world is changing faster than ever. We know that, that's the kinda biggest cliche in this industry, right? You know, the world, the pace of change will never be slower than it is today. Uh. I guess look, I was incredibly fortunate, but there are many [00:08:00] people listening to this podcast, I'm sure, who have no, no idea where next and will come on to.
I have some answers about where, how to think about this, but I guess in a very visceral personal. You know, experience. Right? I, I, I'd made no plans to end up in this space, but I was extremely fortunate. But I, and I think it's the same thing has happened with speaking, the same thing has happened with the second book I wrote.
You know, I really do believe, and I'm aware that it was a huge amount of privilege kind of wrapped up in this statement to be able to have the opportunity to see things out there. But, you know, many of our listeners will not be doing the things in five years that they expect. Right. And, and I think, again, bringing it back to your, your question.
Which is, why am I a reluctant futurist? 'cause I can't predict the future. I have no idea. As I always joke on stage, and Tira has heard me say this a few times, look, if I could predict the future, I, I probably wouldn't be standing at the encore stage in Las Vegas, which is where we met, you know, telling a bunch of people who are sitting there, what's coming next.
Because, because I would be [00:09:00] lying in my hammock having traded Bitcoin for the last 15 years. Right? So, so I guess I start from a position of the future is unknowable. Uh, and we are seeing this, you know, and I think people in the AI sphere who are building this, you know, and, and you hear this again and again in podcasts, right?
If they're honest with themselves, they don't know what's coming next either, right? The people who are closest to this technology, they build it and they put it out into a world and they kind of need. Us, the world, the people on the front line of jobs, of tasks, of organizations to explore it and to, and to play around with it and to think about, you know, and to experiment.
And, and I think, you know, as I said, that historic parallel that I've had, that this ideology of, this way of looking at the world that says it is unknowable. And especially in the context of the AI question, it, you know, it, it really is on a knowable. We have, we can see trajectories, but ultimately it's up to us as.
Innovators as entrepreneurs, as business leaders [00:10:00] to explore and experiment.
Tahira Endean: AI has been around for a long time. You know, I was, one of the roles I had along the way was organizing a technology summit. I did it for three years with the government of British Columbian within, inside of, working inside of an innovation council.
And our very first keynote speaker that we ever had was Ray Kurzwell, which people who knew were so excited and people who didn't know were like, who? But really the father of AI at Google. And that was 2016? Yeah. So you know, when chat GPT came out and everyone was so excited about it and so, oh, AI is gonna be the next greatest thing.
I was just, in my head, I was a little bit like, where have you been? So all of a sudden we have AI at scale, but the, the reality is ai, machine learning, quantum, all of that has been around and being explored for decades. And it's just now that it's, you know, it's just out there so much more and it's more accessible and we can use it to do more [00:11:00] task oriented things or pull up reports faster, or analyze things like.
Even this podcast afterwards to pull at our highlights like we're doing with, you know, how we're using Snap side at imex and getting key takeaways from sessions that AI has determined what those key takeaways are, instead of humans taking notes in the sessions. So we have all of these opportunities to Yeah, minimize those, those task oriented things to open up space.
But you're right, the future is gonna be, it is. It's not even that, it's uncertain 'cause we're definitely living in uncertain times. We are. But it's also I think, a time where we all need to be stepping up and taking a little responsibility as individual humans to say, what is going on out there? What do I want for myself?
And to look at all of those signals around us to start to map out what would our desirable lying in a hammock or [00:12:00] not, slightly more productive perhaps future be.
Henry Coutinho-Mason: Yeah. And I think you've touched on something, you know, very profound there in terms of, you know, we need to step up and, and, uh, and the second part of, I guess, Anthony's question was, you know, as well as the, the reluctant futurist, the provocative optimist.
And, and you know, it was a question you asked Ryan at the start as well, you know, what, what are you nervous about and what are you excited about? And, and with Rohit Bava, my, my, the co-author of my second book, which is that the Future Normal, one of the main criticisms of the book is that it was. Very optimistic and it is fascinating to me the level of pessimism both around the future in general and also around ai and, and I think that, you know, to unpack that, I think there's a few things going on here.
I think, look, number one, I. We were probably naively, we were naively optimistic about the last kind of technol technological paradigm shift, or whatever you wanna call it, social media. Right. And we, you know, you think back to 15 years ago and the Arab Spring and [00:13:00] connecting us was gonna solve the world's problems.
And Anthony, you, you said, move fast and break things at Facebook. And then we realized, oh. Damn, we're kind of breaking our societies, right. You know? Yeah.
Anthony Vade: Stuff our brains.
Henry Coutinho-Mason: Exactly. So I, I think part of the pessimism is extremely justified, you know, in the sense of we've, we've had the experience of overshooting optimistically, and, and you know, I think that for all the reasons that we can kind of know and feel around AI and automation, you know, there, there's.
Look, there, there are good reasons to be pessimistic, and that's about ai. And then there's a wider conversation about, you know, the future, right? Which is, especially in kind of Hollywood and the media is almost universally, fairly dystopian and we know why, of course, right? Because it's, it's outrage cells and fear cells and you know, if it bleeds, it leads again, we are hardwired as people to to be alert to threat.
Having said all of that. You know, in the [00:14:00] context of, and this is what you, you referred to Tira, we need to step up in the con, you know, in, in the world of entertainment. Fine. Let, let's, let's scare ourselves. You know, let's be fearful, right? Because it, it excites us. It gets our highest on back of our neck standing up, and it's entertaining in the kind of weird way.
But when it comes to business, the question that me and Rohit always ask is. This is problematic. You know, if all we're focused on is the downside, we will create. The future that we imagine, and if all we're, if we are fearful of that future, you know, if the people in charge of big businesses are scared of technology and are withdrawing from the opportunities and we're shutting out that part of the conversation.
Then that's deeply problematic because we won't be aware of the possibilities. Uh, and we used to say, you know, we wrote the, the book initially before the bigger, you know, the AI boom, we were writing it kind of 20 20, 20 21, when there was a lot of pessimism [00:15:00] about the future. Uh, but even in those, those, those darker times, we were still, you know, when we would spoke to entrepreneurs on the frontier of.
Synthetic biology or you know, it doesn't have to be tech as well. It could be social impact organizations, you know, organizations fighting for more inclusive workplaces, you know, and all, all of these. Things that are important to us. We were hearing these great stories, actually, these great stories about how we can change how we live, how we work, how we travel, you know, the things we consume make them more sustainable and more, as I say.
And we felt it's really important to tell those stories to a business audience because if you're talking to people in charge of. The nation's largest banks, the, you know, the late, the, the people who are serving the food on our plates, you know, the people designing the spaces that we live in. They need to hear those stories, right?
Because otherwise we, as I said, we, we will retreat from technology. And look, [00:16:00] I'm not a complete techno utopian, clearly. I mean, I'm not, I'm I'm European, right? I'm far from techno utopian. I mean, you know, that, that's, that's our first, uh, concern is, hey, you know, how do we regulate this? Equally, we, we, we have to look for the opportunities in this space.
Otherwise, you know, we, we will, we will leave it to the Hollywood script writers. And I guess the other kind of fascinating thing I would say again. Look, I, I sit in the uk, you know, working with a Dutch guy for, for, for 10, 15 years. It had a profound impact on my worldview, which I think, you know, sometimes, he always used to say it's the, it's the one advantage we have over the Americans.
You're bigger and better than most, uh, than us at most things. But the thing we, we really have from much more hardwired interest, I guess, is more of a global perspective, you know, and I think it, it is fascinating to me. If you look at the data, if you, if you look at. You know, on the, the rest of the world is a kinda horrible term, right outside of the US and Northwestern Europe, optimism around technology is much more pronounced, right?
And amongst younger generations, you know, the next billion. If, however you want to, [00:17:00] however you wanna phrase it, people are, you know, if, if, if society is growing and, you know, wealth is increasing and, and you know, the future is seen, whether that's the Middle East, whether it's Asia, whether it's Sub-Saharan Africa.
These are people who are hungry for technology because they see, you know, the systems that they have today, perhaps not working as well as they could, and they see a brighter future. And again, celebrating those stories is, is so important because, you know, we, as I said, we will create the future we can imagine.
And so let's, let's let our imagination run free.
Ryan Hill: So you mentioned a lot of good comparisons between Western Europe and and North America and our perspective on sort of the doom and gloom that we can imagine behind ai and then other parts of the world, particularly developing countries that see AI as a, as a means to an end to finally close the gap on development.
And I think some of that has to do with maybe justifiably where we see the [00:18:00] applications going, right? In a developing nation, they see. AI being applied to help with very tangible, direct problem sets. You know, uh, maximizing harvests, uh, or, or agricultural or industrial development, like very, very systematic machine learning oriented, what we consider to be the origins of AI initially, you know, what do we apply it towards?
We applied it towards manufacturing and, and that production oriented role. But on the western side, uh, particularly in North America, we, we start to see the fear of, of ill-defined AI ethics. Right. And I think that's where a lot of our fear is coming from is not so much can we imagine the doom and gloom, but how realistic is it?
And I think shows like Black Mirror are great examples of this. The reason those shows are so palpable is because they aren't too farfetched. Like they're off, they're, they're in the future, they're. Possible, you know, to use the futurist term of, of plausible possible, you know, preferable. They're, they're plausible, they're possible.
Uh, it's very easy to see mentally where, how we could [00:19:00] get there if we are not careful with how we're managing this. And that's where I think gear pick's lead on, you know, hey, they're immediately talking about how do, we can put some oversight on this. But I think those fears are founded. I don't know, thoughts on the, on the, on the ethical side of it, I guess.
Like how do we. Prevent corporations from putting profit before the purpose on AI to, to quote a previous podcast. Guess we had.
Henry Coutinho-Mason: Well, it, it is funny tying the point that you're making with, with something Tahira said earlier. I remember, you know, the, the, the pre gen ai, it kind of phase one, if you like, bubble around ai, and again, AI purists might dispute this, but kind of 20 16, 20 17.
I remember reading a fascinating article in the New York Times about attitudes in, in Sweden versus in the US towards automation at work. And they were saying, you know, if, if you are a, a kind of blue collar laborer, I think we were looking at at miners in Sweden. You know, workers welcomed automation because they essentially had faith in the social contract between employer and employee, and there was, you know, social safety net, et cetera.
So, [00:20:00] you know, more automation as, as you touched on, is, is doing the jobs that we don't want to do today and freeing us up. Right. And that that is a, you know, a much more, much more visible and much more easy to imagine plausible future for, perhaps for a European right. And whereas of course in America where perhaps the, you know, the working culture is, is.
Less, you know, in that direction. Right. And, and employees are much more mindful of the fact that if their boss, as you say, can put profit above purpose, you know, they will. That they, they may well do so. Right. And there aren't a social, you know, and the, and the employment safety nets a slightly more optimistic take on, on where AI and purpose are coming together.
And I've been fascinated about this for, for, again, a couple of years and predating the AI era. Is around what it means for small teams of people to be able to have an outsized impact. And, and so the, the trend that I said, I've been looking for a number of years and, and, and to give you an idea of, again, why I love my job is [00:21:00] because, you know, these, these stories and when we're looking at technology, but ultimately these are bigger questions about humanity and about, as you said, about business and the future business, that, that actually don't change year on year.
Right. So. There was an example that, that triggered this was, um, I saw Allbirds, right, you know, the kind of purpose driven sneaker brand, right? And you know, the kind of Patagonia of shoes. And they had a really interesting initiative where they, they had a sugar cane based, um, sole for their, their shoes, right?
So it was not petroleum based and they partnered with Brazilian chemical company. But what was fascinating about is. They said, we're gonna open source this, we are gonna apply it under an open patent because, you know, we are a tiny challenger brand and we think we need Nike and Adidas and, you know, Reebok and p to be, to be using this method.
And I just thought this was a fascinating way of kind of punching above your weight as a small brand. Right. And I kind of was talking about this in 2018 or whatever, and, and then I, I, I watched a TED talk from one of the leadership team at OpenAI or, or I forget who it was, but now, um. [00:22:00] And he said, look, you know, we we're gonna see a similar thing happening in, in the AI sphere, right?
And, and actually we're gonna see unprecedented collaboration by these small teams of people on the frontier because, you know, as essentially a way of kind of protecting humanity. I was reminded of this when Deeps seek came out, right? And, and if you read the interview from the Deep Seek founder, he, he writes about executives, you know, he said, look, we have a couple of hundred employees.
But those of you, the listeners who aren't familiar, deeps seq was kind of arguably the spinoff from this Chinese hedge fund that created this open source model with a couple of hundred people that, you know, for a brief moment knocked, knocked a trillion dollars off the US stock market, you know, rocketed to the top of the app store.
And when I was thinking about this, right, I think there's a wider lesson about the future of the economy and the future of business and the future of purpose, which I'll come to. And what it is is, right, what does AI actually do? And we've touched on it, right? It increases people's leverage and it allows these small [00:23:00] teams to have, and again, obviously in the world of building frontier AI models, that can be really extreme.
But I think it's true in the wider economy, right? You can have a, you know, a small podcast like this, you know, a small strategy consulting, and you can now do more with three people. That would've taken you 15, 20 people, right? So small, very focused groups of people in the next 10 years will be able to. Do things that previously took hundreds of people and maybe scale to thousands of people.
Now, where, where, how does this tie to purpose, which is what I, I was originally talking about. We know that small teams of focused people, right? What's that? There's that famous quote, right? They can change the world. They always have done. But of course what's happened in the world of business is as you grow, you kind of naturally dilute your purpose, right?
You know whether Patagonia obviously has less people than Nike, and of course, you know, it's a much more purpose driven brand Scale dilutes your purpose, and so what does it mean? The optimistic reading that I'm taking away from this is that actually if we empower small teams of people to, so, you know, to, to stay lean.
They, they [00:24:00] don't have to dilute their, their sense. They only need 30, 40 people. Now you can rally very passionate individuals around that. Right. And actually, you know, as I say, maybe change industries around that. I'm, I'm not saying every small group of people is gonna change the world for the better.
Right? Of course, you empower the bad actors at the same time as you empower the good actors. But I think it's actually, again, I'm not hearing people have. This kind of conversation and say, what does it mean if you can attract, is it 20, 30, 40, whatever it is, brilliant people who are completely committed to a mission and using technology, enable them to do the work that would've taken three or 400 people.
What is the second order implication of what this actually means? It means they stay pur to their vision, right? And they can, they can actually do things now. I think that's an exciting future. So I, I think, you know, again, looking at some of the, the. Stories around innovation that we're seeing outside of the technology space.
You know, that's what led me to this. Then hearing about, you know, again, I, I'm always alert to joining the [00:25:00] dots between like, when I hear the deeps seek founder talking about, you know, the, the ability to attract a grade talent by, by giving them a freedom to essentially give the product away, right? He said, we're not worried about money, like we make the money in the hedge fund and it allows me to do more creative things.
I, I'm thinking, wow, I've, I've kind of heard that story before. In the fashion industry around sustainability. Okay. That's interesting. And, and, and, and so it's really joining the dots between these disconnected fields and thinking about what does that mean for people? What does that mean for their motivations?
What does that mean for their ability to do things that tho those are stories that I love to tell,
Anthony Vade: what I love most about this conversation, there's so much to explore, but often when you talk. Any form of futurism, especially when you start talking artificial intelligence, we rush to the technology.
'cause we love talking about technology as humans. Uh, and we miss connecting with talking about human beings, societal considerations. I mean, all we've done up to this point is talk about those elements, which makes me in incredibly happy. And I know Tahira has got another question [00:26:00] bubbling away there, but we will take a.
Quick short break at this point and come back and hear that question that that Tahira's got. Of course, if you want to listen to this podcast ad free and wanna hear extended versions of this, and I think most excitingly check out some of our artificial intelligence experimentations. I. We've been doing.
You can get a seat at the strategy table on our website, head over to strategy table.co. Sign up for your seat and check out some of the things that we've been exploring. Uh, but we'll be back after a really short break.
Tahira Endean: So when we think about AI and the future and global uncertainty, resilience is something that is becoming more important than ever at the moment in the various industries that we're working with, people are finding jobs that they'd expected to have aren't existing. We're finding that people are [00:27:00] thinking that their innovations that they had expected would be the, even in AI, would be the thing that was gonna change the world.
Aren't changing and we're having to continue to be resilient and figure things out. So what are you seeing out there, Henry, with the organizations and the people that you're talking to around that feeling of resilience?
Henry Coutinho-Mason: It's a big, big question. And look, I'm gonna talk about a tiny slice of it. One of, one of the graphs I often show in my presentations is about the.
The spreadsheet, APO apocalypse it was called. And it was a graph I saw in the Wall Street Journal and it was talking about, you know, this, this automation and, and, you know, change in, in job roles. And they said, look, we've, we've been here before, right? You know, spreadsheets came into the finance function again, you know, as an exac accountant, this prick my ears up and I said, yeah.
Basically overnight it completely transformed that function. Right? You know, the, the tasks that would've taken a bookkeeper a week could now be done in a spreadsheet in minutes. And actually, if you look at the data, you know. Business went out there and essentially [00:28:00] within a matter of years, you know, every business had a computer because they wanted the spreadsheet program.
Right. Because it changed the nature of a finance function very profoundly. And this graph, it kinda shows, you know, the number of bookkeepers in the US was rising, rising, rising through the seventies, you know, kind of into the late seventies when the first spreadsheets were released. And it. Basically, as soon as spreadsheets came out, the number of bookkeepers starts to fall, right?
And, and as I say in the presentation, so if, if let's not shy away from a fact that if you are a 50-year-old bookkeeper in 1978, that is a deeply problematic position to be in. And it's, it's deeply painful, right? And, and of course we have to, as a society, think about how to manage that transition. But again, the optimistic macro narrative around this and what graph shows is.
The number of accountants and auditors, you know, through the eighties in the US just climbs up and up and up and up. Right? And, and I joke in my presentation, how many people sit in an organization that employs no one in their finance function, right? But what happens is the nature of the work changes and, [00:29:00] and the most interesting part of this graph is it shows.
The number of accountants, of course, accountants existed, you know, long before spreadsheets and auditors. You know, we, we had, but the job that the US government, I mean, it wasn't a job in the, in the kind of, you know, employment census was financial analyst, financial and management analyst. It didn't exist before spreadsheets came along because.
Companies spent all the money they had in, you know, could, could dedicate to a finance function on just getting numbers in the books. That was what bookkeepers did. And of course now we don't need bookkeepers, but we need analysts and we do a lot of financial analysis. Right. And, and of course, you know, we're seeing the same thing with ai, right?
We, you know, it allows us to create content and we create more of it. Right. You know, you, you know, people create videos and as you say, highlight reels of podcasts because they press a button and it gets spit out. So we, we, we do more. So I think that is, that is part of the resilience is, you know, we will find new things to do.
Right. And, and you know, in the context of a finance function, you know, these are often. More intellectually, more, you know, historically they've been more cognitively demanding roles, right? I think [00:30:00] resilience might look something very different in the context of the AI transition, and I think it will be a transition.
Of course, the speed and the, the impact of that transition are very much up for grabs and and need to be managed. But I think in terms of, you know, one of the things that I'm very excited about when it comes to this, again, trying to paint the other side of the coin that we always hear about, and when I talk about this.
I, I refer to Gary Kasparov 'cause he talks about this, uh, the, the chess player. And he's very funny 'cause he said, look, he said, I, I am the first knowledge worker disrupted by ai. He said, where you guys are today? I, that's where I was 20 years ago. You know, I was, when I was getting beaten by deep blue in the, you know, the, the late nineties.
That's what's happening to you guys. And he says, you know, two important takeaways that he has from this. He said, number one. Pe uh, you know, I hear you hear this on podcast all the time, right? People still watch people play chess. There is no market for, for, for robot versus robot Robots are better than humans at chess.
But we don't watch 'em 'cause we don't [00:31:00] care about 'em, right? So, so the resilience comes in in our humanity, right? The fact that we care about humans, we want to engage with our humans. And of course there's a swat of the economy where that's not true. It is just about a functional, you know, job to be done.
But that's not the entire economy. It really isn't. And it, and it never will be. Right? Um. The second thing, which is I think much more practical for everyone 'cause we're not all professional chess players, is he said the big mistake that people make is when you're thinking about human versus machine, is we imagine ourselves staying static and the machines get better and better and they crush us under this, you know, this technological progress.
And he said, look, I, when I look at Magnus Carlson, he's a far better chess player than I ever was. Because he's grown up with AI and he's used AI to play more chess at a high level. Right? He can play all the time. Right. Uh, you know, against, essentially better than ever hu any human in the world. And, and the, you know, the, the takeaway that I bring back, back to the business world is, is yes, AI will disrupt many of the tasks we do [00:32:00] today.
And just like Ryan said earlier, the optimistic cases, those are the tasks that we really don't wanna be doing anyway. They're the. They're the kind of bullshit tasks. And I use the, the term technically that there was a book, a famous book that came out again long before AI by a guy called David Grabber who spoke about the crisis in, in employee engagement in, in kinda most of the western, you know, white collar world is because too many people have what he calls bullshit jobs.
They're kind of pushing information around internally and we, and that's not. What gives us meaning, you know, we wanna be in the field, building things, connecting with people, learning and developing. And I think the optimistic side of this, this resilience question that you, you asked about is AI will disrupt many of the tasks we do today, but it will also be.
The ultimate co-pilot in helping us learn these new tasks that we have to do faster and better and just in time. And I, I talk a lot about just in time learning. You [00:33:00] know, having AI co-pilots, if you like, coaches that are with us that can see and hear what we are doing, whether that's on our screen or increasingly in the future, out in the real world, and can say, it looks like you're trying to achieve this.
Here's how you might go about that. Right? And that's a design question. You know, that if we design these ais to give us answers, then as Ryan said at the start, will our creative skills, will our learning muscles atrophy? Yes, it will do. And that's problematic. But what about if we design ai? To help us learn better, to learn faster, to learn at just the right moment.
What if we design AI to help us connect to other people, again, the right people at the right time? You know, as I said tho, those are product questions. Those are design questions, but those are the questions that we need to be asking ourselves. How do we help people engage with their jobs, engage with each other?
You know, and to be more, be more creative, be more connected, and, and that is, is [00:34:00] exciting to think about for me.
Ryan Hill: So you hit something a couple times, so I'll zoom the conversation out from the AI piece because you kept kind of alluding to this. And I think it's important for our listeners to, to consider that when we talk about. Design and we talk about futurism or thinking about the possibilities of the future, we need to understand like systemic design versus, you know, design in a bucket.
This cause and effect design. And what comes to mind is the canfin framework of looking at the world. And you know, you have the simple where A plus B equals C, it's very linear. Then you have complicated where A plus B more likely than not will equal C. But really where our world is in that complex.
Where there is no linear causality, we can always predict, which makes futurism hard. Which I think leads to your point of, you know, being a skeptical futurist, you know, or, or a, a cautious futurist of like, I can't predict the future. I can predict likely outcomes, but the reality is something could change the entire system [00:35:00] and AI is doing that, but it's not all doom and gloom because we can look back at Uber as a great example.
The system for public transportation before was, was centrally managed. You know, you had taxi companies which had to buy a fleet. We tended to consider that things like maintenance of the fleet, you know, keeping up with, with, with vehicle services, Uber comes out and it passes all of those challenges onto the driver, you know, and it, it reinvents the concept of mobility as we understood at the time.
And there was a lot of pushback from, from the establishment, I guess from the taxi services to the point where even states like you, New York, still run and manage Uber at like, you know, a city taxi level. Like they have taxi tags, they. You know, they're managed by these companies, but at the broader scale, it took and reinvented the system.
It said the system as we knew it has changed and now we must adapt and did it kill some problematic things and maybe low end functions like the maintenance side. Potentially, but it introduced new, new [00:36:00] opportunities, new pathways. Now there was, you know, an insurance angle that could be played into it.
There was, there were other opportunities that emerged out of that platform. And I think AI presents similar opportunities where we don't know necessarily all of the things that will generate out of this, but as they emerge, we can jump on them and we can, we can take advantage in that, how did you call it?
Just in time, uh, adaption or learning, right? Where we see, okay, we didn't predict this as an outcome. But we're able to take linens and make lemonade. Right.
Anthony Vade: This question goes out to everyone, not just Henry. I definitely wanna hear your opinion. Bigger change. Do you think this is for our society? What are we about to go through? Uh, given that, you know, to, to, we've said this. Pretty much the whole way through this, we're not good at predicting where things will go, especially technologically.
Uh, the example that's often given is the Wright brothers thought that the plane would be great for military purposes. They would never have predicted [00:37:00] international travel. And that becoming what it is. Today says the guy that this time tomorrow will be halfway across the Pacific Ocean. Uh, and, uh, I'm able to do that twice this year.
Amazing. The Wright Brothers, you told them that they think you're absolutely bonkers and that wasn't that long ago. Um, similarly, if we look at, you know, some, some earlier, I'm, I'm a history nerd, so the further you go back, you see these pivotal moments. That come up, that change society in big ways, from simple agriculture to the printing press, to the industrial revolution, to the rise of the internet and the personal computer.
Um, so I'll start with you, Henry, but is there any moment of change from the past that you think is similar to this? Is there anything, is, are we at, are we installing looms or are we becoming sedentary farmers? How big is this change?
Henry Coutinho-Mason: I think. It is very profound. Do I know what that looks like? Yeah. As I said, the honest answer is no.
And, and just to, you know, [00:38:00] some of your listeners might be amused. You're, you're talking about, you know, accessible strategy, right. One of the analogies, I, I, I often use one of the, the quotes. There's a good, you know, the engineer can predict the car. The sci-fi writer predicts a traffic jam. Right. And you know, because I'm, I'm British, it's like you, you mentioned travel, right.
You know, you can, low cost airlines, you can predict that. Can you predict the, the, the British Stag Weekend in eastern Europe Right. Which is kind of the bachelor party in, in Mexico would be your equivalent. Yeah. I often joke in, you know, in, in my talks again, you, you, you know, you look at GPS, you look at mobiles, it's quite easy to and obvious to predict Uber I would.
Position to most people, it's much harder to predict Tinder and Grindr, you know, that. And, and there's knock on cultural implications. And so when I, when I'm talking to the executives, I, I use them as a kind of semi joke, but I, but I do think there's a kind of profound lesson in there to think about, as you say, those, those second order ripple effects.
Of what might that be, and because often they're not in, you know, the, as I said, the, the technologists and the [00:39:00] engineers can predict the obvious implications of, or the obvious use cases of these technology predicting the wider behavioral and cultural patterns that will emerge from that. As I said, you know, from mobility to hook up culture, you know, and GPS to hookup culture much harder.
But yeah, you know, it, it feels to me that you would be a brave person to suggest. That this will not be a profound shift in the way we operate, you know, on the level of the internet and globalization and as you say, the printing press. Um, I think the more interesting question is, is going to be how fast it hits and how we manage that.
You know, as I said, I think from a business point of view. Businesses are, are, are very agile these days. I mean, not all of them, but you know, the, the, the, the capitalist motivation and system is extremely agile. The thing that I'm far more [00:40:00] concerned about is a great quote from Billy Wilson. We, you know, we have.
Primitive emotions, medieval institutions and God-like capabilities. Yeah. Were along those lines and, and it's that mismatch between, you know, I think as I said, the business world, the, the professional world, we will adapt very quickly. Uh, what worries me, you know, far more and we're seeing it, right? We, in, in the political challenges that we have in many parts of the world, or the polarization and the fractures is how our slower moving institutions adapt to this.
Anthony Vade: It's that whole adaptability, which moves us into the, you know, the second point. It's, it's, it's on our homepage. We talk about resilience. We've touched on that. We talk about adaptability and we talk about collaboration being some key human. Innate traits that we have that have made us hugely successful species on this planet.
Ryan, what are your thoughts on those last statements, where we're at, where you Well, I
Ryan Hill: think that it's, it's the tale is all this time, right? And I think, Henry, you hit it on the head when you said that we would be naive to think this isn't gonna have [00:41:00] long lasting, you know, global implications. And I'm, I, I think back to 19 0 3, 9 weeks before the Wright Brothers achieved flight at Kitty Hawk, the New York Times published something to the effect of it will take another 1 million to 10 million years for mankind to achieve flight.
Right nine weeks prior and when they first chief flight, it was for less than two minutes, like I think it was like 30 seconds of flight. But fast forward, you know, that was in 1903 by World War I and 1917, there was long-term flight, and in the period between in 1910, it was stated that flight would only ever be for the rich.
Now we have, you know, it's, it. All these things happened in very in rapid succession. All it took was someone breaking that door down op, you know, that first step, right? And I think we might be in the Wright Brothers era of AI right now. We've achieved flight. It's impossible to say how quickly and how dramatically that's going to alter the next 100 years of human history.
But it's safe to say that we've we with, with chat GBT [00:42:00] and like the ubiquitous nature of AI as we're seeing it now, versus before it was very proprietary, very managed at a industrial or you know, company level. Now it's open market. It's open source. So what is that gonna lead to? It's hard to say. No one would've predicted in 1903 when they first chief flight, that by 1940 we'd have Rolls Royce engines in the P 51 Mustang zipping around, you know, setting land speed or air speed records.
You know, landing planes on boats, building planes that were large enough to sustain flight for multiple people like this, this change that directly led to globalization. 'cause now we weren't separated by months, we were separated by hours. You know, and it, so it's, it's, I think that's where we're at in the ai, in the AI conversation is we are somewhere.
In that Wright Brothers era of flight right now, we've achieved it and now we're gonna start seeing how rapidly it expands and evolves. And
Henry Coutinho-Mason: look, you know, your, your entire business is focused on strategy, right? And, and when I open my presentations, I always start, I. With, with a, with a quote from the pre [00:43:00] AI era, and it was Jeff Bezos.
And he said, yeah, everyone always, always asking me what's changing? And he said, you know, hardly am I asked the other side of that question, which is what isn't changing? Right? And this was essentially the whole first book that I wrote on trend driven innovation. Our whole model at this trend watching company that we, we built was to say, look trends, you know, as in change and, and you know, new behaviors are of course interesting and where opportunities lie, but they have to be rooted in basic, fundamental.
Universal human needs and wants. Right. And, and you know, they don't change. And that's, that's flowed through into my second book. You know, that's why we call it the future normal, right? Is is this kind of trying to get away from and reject this, this kind of magical unicorn land that futurists love to paint, whether that's, you know, utopian or dystopian depending on your predilection.
But we always want the future to be radically different. And on some levels it will be. And, and as Sam Altman, I, my newsletter this week, I wrote about, he wrote a piece. You know, in the past few, few days called the gentle singularity and I kind of [00:44:00] latched onto it, you know, classic confirmation bias because I said, look, this is essentially echoing what, what we've been saying for the last 15 years.
Yes, we're all, you know, as business people, as strategists, you're always looking for what's not changing. But actually the reality is, and he's got some, some beautiful lines in the opening this, you know, he said, look, we live, I'm reading it out. We live with incredible digital intelligence, but after some shock, most of us get pretty used to it.
You know, we go from being amazed that AI can generate a beautiful paragraph to kind of wondering why it can't do a whole novel. You know, it's, it's, and we talk about this, the, the opening chapter of my first book was the Expectation Economy, and it was essentially this, you know, a kind of rewriting of, of the, you know, behavioral economists would call this hedonic adaptation.
You know, we have things that are magical. And, and very quickly we become completely immune to them. Again. We spoke about Black Mirror earlier. I often joke. Strategy tip for your listeners. Watch comedy. You know, because actually Comedians South Park, you know, stand up comedians, they see [00:45:00] emerging points of tension between how we live now and you know, where we might live in the future.
And obviously they pull it apart and blow it up. And, and many of you will have seen you, the, the famous Louis CK clip about wifi on the plane. You know, he's. Sitting next to a guy that turns on the wifi and it goes down and he's cursing, you know, and, and how quickly we kind of are completely, completely immune to the fact that you say, you know, we've, we've gone from being wondrous, that we can, we can fly.
And now we're like, why can I not stream YouTube in a, in a metal tube, you know, 30,000 feet in the air. Uh, and the same is happening with ai. Like, everything new is old, and everything old is new again. You know, it it, it's that thing that, you know, we, and, and going back to the Sam Altman article, he says, you know, look.
This is how a singularity goes. Wonders become routine, and then table stakes, you know, and we will have this magical transformation and our kids will kind of look back and, you know, complete disbelief just like we do to our, to our parents that like, how did you survive on a mobile phone? How did you, how did you run a business without computers?
And the internet completely inconceivable to us. Our, our kids will have different, you know, different, you [00:46:00] know, curiosities that we, how we, how we possibly ever managed to live. But the truth is we will, and you know, the truth is, we will still gather with people who are important to us, still break bread, right.
You know, we'll still wanna have a good meal and, you know, we're talking about travel, right? We'll still have a desire for new experiences. If you're leading a business, you, you know, you're working with, with strategy leaders, it, it's thinking about. Yes. What is changing? Yes. Some of the magical things that will soon become table stakes.
You know, this, what, what is, what is the expectation economy look like for your business? And what, but, you know, and, and I suggest the foundational pillars of that, and it's kind of such, so obvious, it barely is worth saying, but it's, it's so often lost in the conversation about technology. What are, what are the North star?
For our customers, you know, and Jeff Bezos says, we know with absolute certainty, no customer is gonna come up to us in 10 years time, whatever, drones, facial recognition, biometrics, all the sexy stuff that we love to talk about, ai, they're never, no one's gonna say, wish you had higher prices in slow delivery times.
Right? It's never gonna happen. [00:47:00] So let's start with that as our, our North Star, because it's the customer's North Star. And understand what that looks like. And you know, if you're a bank, your customers have some, you know, trust, security, whatever it is. If you're a fashion company, it's gonna be much more about status and identity and standing out to fit in, you know, all of these things, right?
Which, which ultimately have been the same from 1960 to 1980 to 2000, and will probably be the same in 2040. Right. And, and that is, that, that, that, mixing those two, what is changing profoundly and what is, is not changing is the secret, I think to, to every winning strategy.
Tahira Endean: When I wrote our KPI is Joy. The really the, it goes back to just exactly what you said, every business needs to have a North Star.
People want to be together. They want to communicate, they want to do things together. We have all of these organizations that want to. Have more customers. They want those customers to be happy. We want to host events where people can be together and can find [00:48:00] connections and dialogue and joy together. It all just ties back to no matter how much technology we have and how many planes we can fly, and how many places we can go, and all of those things, it all comes back to that one simple thing really doesn't it, that at the end of the day, we have all of this technology, but we're all still human.
We want to be human and we are not gonna have to adapt and be resilient to this.
Anthony Vade: I always think we're still, we're still homosapiens sitting on a rock sharing rocks and chipping them away until they turn into a little blade that we can use to go hunting with. Like we haven't, like that was our first tool.
That stone tool that we first had was a tool. And I think AI in many respects is just another tool. A very complex, highly complex and potential. We didn't even get into a GI, but potential to be. Even more complex than we can even fathom with our simple biological brains. I don't wanna go down that hole 'cause we're running out of time.
We are gonna need to [00:49:00] continue a conversation at more depth, but I'd like all of you to give us some closing thoughts on that third leg to our stool around collaboration and tehir, your point, set us up so beautifully. The idea coming together to share, I think as there's more agentic AI going on and less humans involved in.
Mundane transactions. We're gonna seek out more of that human connection in the form of events and other meetings and gatherings. What do you see as being the future of. Technology enabled collaboration,
Henry Coutinho-Mason: Henry? Yeah, so I, I wrote a big piece on this actually, which again, is, is something that I'm not hearing enough people discuss, and I think it's, it's, it's really important.
So when I used open AI's deep research and it, it essentially produced an article that I would've been more or less happy to write myself. And that was a bit of an existential moment because I'm like, you know, I'm a writer. I always just like, you know, I thought I had a few more years Yeah. As a research partner and Wow.
But then I realized it was something that I'd thought [00:50:00] deeply about. And so my, you know, my prompt was good. Right. And my insight from this, and I'll try and be as brief as possible, was that, you know, everyone assumes that actually, you know, in the era of ai, humans become less important 'cause the AI does the work.
But the other truth of trends is, is we, we flip between kind of scarcity and abundance and we always value what is scarce, right? And we devalue what is abundant and easy. And we're seeing that with content already, right? AI content kind of feels hollow and, and I actually, you know, think about how to get an edge.
Which is what we're all looking for. You know, whether you're a caveman that you just discussed, right? You know, the edge in the hunting, you know, packed. So you can be top of a tribe and you know, ultimately if you're a young man, find a mate. And if you're an older man, protect your, provide for your family.
That's kind of, you know, again, deep rooted for what we're looking for. Hasn't changed, but how do we find an edge in, in the era of ai, and I think it's gonna be. From other people, you know, it's going to an expert. And, and my my insight was that what [00:51:00] AI does is I think, quite something quite profound historically.
You know, if we have wanted to get something done, doing the work took a long time, right? It was hard. And so, you know, it was, you had to think quite deeply or you had to pay a lot of money so you could only do a few things, right? And, and you know, it, it was, as I said, it took time and resources to do that.
And that was why we built firms and to collaborate, right? And reduce the cost of collaboration. Now what is happening is, is experts, like really people who have a, have that edge, have profound insight, can use AI to essentially like create a lot of value in a very short amount of time, right? And what I think this means is that people, instead of thinking about what the work is to get done, they should start thinking about who to ask.
Because that person can help them in like half an hour or maybe an hour. Right. Whereas it would might have taken 'em a week before. So it was inaccessible to them. It's like Airbnb. Airbnb turned your spare room into an asset that it previously wasn't. And, and now AI kind of turns your time into an asset that previously was much [00:52:00] more limited.
Right. And, and I think this is again, a deeply optimistic and quite profound shift in the way we think about how we get work done. Because most people think about what. It is to do rather than who it is to ask. A, and ai, as I say, will increase the ability to ultimately get help from the people who can help you the best.
And, and so, you know, being the person, so strategy spoke about resilience, being the person who someone knows and thinks about to ask about something. You know, if I wanna, if I wanna understand how to create an event that. Creates joy. I go to Tahira because that's what she does. Right. And she's, you know, that's an amazing, you know, brand is the wrong word, but expertise around that.
Right. And again, hopefully for me, you know, around accessible people first, AI people know that, that, you know, I can, I can talk to them about that. And of course, you know, again, you can help more people faster. So I think. Community, you know, collaboration is actually, the non-obvious insight [00:53:00] is that it will increase in value, not decrease in value, because the work that the AI does for, for you, if you're not that world leading expert, will be generic, and it, we won't, it will be the same as everyone else's.
And so you won't get an edge. Whereas it will be that the, the, there's a great quote about liquid super teams. You know, the, the world's best. When they come together, they create magic. And it goes back to this point. We're talking about a purpose, you know, it's, it's increasing leverage of individuals. Now, of course, that, you know, there's a whole conversation around inequality that we, again, we're not, we don't have time to have this about, will have like, everything good and bad impacts, you know, positive and potentially negative impacts.
But I think that is a really much more, again, an optimistic take on AI that I, that I don't hear people talking about.
Anthony Vade: Okay. I'm gonna throw to my liquid team, uh, Ryan, your thoughts. What does, what does this mean for collaboration? What are your hope, uh, this, this kind of futurist mindset and technology can provide?
Ryan Hill: Well, I, I'm right there with, with Henry on this one, in that I've learned over the last several years that I find there be much more value in [00:54:00] knowing who to ask than, than knowing what to ask or what to do myself, right? I, I surround myself with good people. Because they, they allow me to focus on what I'm good at.
And I think the more complex society gets, the more specialized we become in these, you know, understanding these areas across multiple industries. Uh, we need to just have a strong network and AI can help build that, network it up. So identify the what that needs to happen so that we can ask the right people.
You know how it needs to happen. You know,
Henry Coutinho-Mason: all these co-pilots that sit in your, you know, when you're writing, how cool would it be? I want something that says, yeah, you are writing about this. This is the person who in your network who you should ask about this. I. You know, I've, I'm constantly scanning everyone.
You know, who you know, and actually this person just worked on this last week. Like, how cool would that be? That that's what we want. You know, we want products, technology that brings us together to perform better and to, you know, to craft richer, richer experiences, richer narratives. I don't want just something to do the work for me.
I don't want some of the work to be done for me. [00:55:00] Bits that I don't wanna do, I'll file my taxes. Yeah, great. You know,
Anthony Vade: I'm gonna jump into Ripple and get some coding done to make that happen. That's a great idea. We just came up with a new business and this little, uh, liquid team could probably launch that within the week to hear.
Are any thoughts on the future of collaboration and, and what does this mean for Strategy Table?
Tahira Endean: So, I, as you know, uh, this is my life, right, is I've spent three decades bringing people together in collaboration. Let's invite people to take their seat virtually, or, you know, live at the strategy table and whatever iteration that looks like.
And let's just keep collaboration, dialogue and humanness rich and open and build future narratives that are the narratives we wanna live.
Anthony Vade: That's it. What more perfect way. To wrap this thing up. Then with, with, with that statement, I mean, this is, this is a very, very deep topic. We're gonna have to revisit it.
I look forward to being in the same room as Henry again, and we can really, uh, jump [00:56:00] into our futurist conversations. But of course, it can't end here. We want you to join this conversation after you've listened to this episode. Please jump on over to strategy table.co. Take your seat at the table. And comment on this episode and our other episodes of Accessible Disruption Strategy Table believes that the collaboration side of what we do is what will then foster the, the agility and the adaptability that teams need in order to be truly resilient.
And maybe be a not so reluctant futurist as the world continues to move. Henry, wanna thank you for joining us. It's been an enlightening conversation, and thank you to Ryan and Tahira as always, and we will catch you on the next accessible disruption.
Podcast Host: Accessible disruption is written and spoken by Tahir and Dean Ryan Hill and Anthony Vade. All content is developed in collaboration with the team at [00:57:00] Strategy Table Podcast Production by Experience Design Change Inc. An association with the change lead network. Find more information@strategytable.co.