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Today's guest is Tom Goodman. Tom Authored the book digital Darwinism and he's the cofounder of all we have now. Tom Regularly speaks and writes about technology and its role on so society, looking backwards and time as well as into the future. Tom's also got a new book coming out called Digital Darwinism. To Tom and I pontificate around the frustrations of technology and why it gets in the way of the improvement of society. Why do we get distracted by it? You know, I think you'll learn that while we might both voice frustration, sometimes it's always fueled and empathy and optimism on how we can do better and what we can do better, and it should lift society as a whole. So please welcome Tom. This is a really fun discussion. You're listening to see sweet blueprint, the show for sea sweet leaders. Here we discussed nobodys approaches to organizational readiness and digital transformation. Let's start the show. Hey, Tom, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure looking forward to this. We seem to be in an age where we have more information at our fingertips and ever before, we have a rearview mirror that gets clear and clear and we have folks like yourselves and others that that are publishing books and content that that connect the dots between these major milestones of change that we've had and extrapolate into the future as far as what will happen next. Yet it feels like we're getting worse at learning from history, and I don't know if that's just me and my own frustration. Do you think that we're getting better at learning from histery? I think I forgot agree with you. I say I think we're us with this idea that everything must be different, you know, obsessed with the fact that we live in these completely chaotic, you know, volatile and certain fast changing times, and I'm not entirely sure how true that is. I think the strange thing about twenty four our new cycles and literally consuming news like this with an algorithmic feed, is we lose any sense of perspective, we lose any sense of time, we lose sense of geography and you tend to get more famous by making outrageous proclamations about how extreme things are or how different things are. And I think history is a wonderful teacher to us, that we can look at things like the first or the second industrial revolutions and realize that pretty much all of the patterns that we have, the sort of social disconnection, these fear of the unknown, people making vast sums of money, battles with regulations or the struggles to deploy technology, distractions about things that we think are going to be big and not like this is all very much repeated through history, and I'm certainly not saying that things are identical. You know, the advent of electricity is not a perfect representation of what we have now, but it's a very good one and we'd be really wise to learn from those past movements and take a lot of reassurance from the match they I mean the when the bicycle was introduced, everyone thought it was going to change society and women we're gonna flee man and run away. When the factories were introduced, obviously various people thought they would lead to massive job losses. You know, people talked about how everyone would be bored because they wouldn't be any work to do. So time and time again we see very much the same themes coming up and we should absolutely be learning from it and we should also be focusing on on the few things that are different, because there are. There are things that are different this time. Yeah, it sounds all a lot of that does sound familiar and it feels like, you know what you just said, a plas of society as a whole. But then there's this bubble within the technology world that it seems like it's that much even worse. Wanting to create the wheel. You know, it's it's you know, I can't tell you how it's funny. I feel like we share this. I don't correct me if I'm wrong, but I end up coming off maybe a little salty to individuals that you know in my view. But it's really just fueled by optimism and empathy and the fact that, like, why are we wasting our times with these these silly distractions when we could be, you know, doing better and honestly, like getting back to the roots of... |
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...what we're trying to do? I mean, I can't tell you how frustrating it's been to see, you know, all these software vendors and marketing companies. They keep talking about, you know, reinventing how you're going to talk to the consumer, but yet that you get farther and farther away from the consumer, where it's like going back to the very first time anyone sold anything, when there was no technology. You who? Of course, you listen to your consumer and you listen to them, and it seems that we're just technologies getting in the way. I mean, it's incredibly true and I agree with your own friends. I mean the first thing is you. You one does end up coming across apparently quite grumpy or salty or pessimistic or you know, people think I'm a sort of contrary or something. They are all these negative emotions that come up when people try and question these things. What, for me, has happened, like you say, is we've become so in love with technology, and technology companies in particular, I've got so much power. Like we've really forgotten what it's like to be a human maybe you forgotten what the real problems that people face are today. You know, we've forgotten what it's like to be a normal human being in this day and age, and I think it's vital that we are incredibly informed about technology, but we need to sort of layer through that understanding across people's lives and then work at the intersection between the two. You know, I love what technology makes possible, but I think something like the Meta verse is a complete distraction. Like I think this idea that we can replicate all of the faults of physical retail, you know, almost perfectly within the metaverse is a good example of the sort of lack of imagination and the lack of empathy that's out there. Yeah, and the fact that's so much of the Tark is that and seeing these virtual shopping out shopping aisles and nonsense, when there could be real talks about virtual reality and its application to therapy and to education and all these other things, and it just gets distracted by this nonsense. It feels everything has to be simple these days. I think that's the hard thing is. You know, we do live in this world where people want to become a bit notorious or where people want a bit of fame, and you tend to get that by saying, you know, the mets of verse will change everything or disrupt or die. And if you try and lay it through the nuance of you know, what is the mets of verse, something like Virtual Reality is a big part of it. Where can that be used? How is this interesting? You know, you end up with headlines like, you know, the mets of verse isn't quite defined but virtual reality has some application somewhere and we should focus on those. And that doesn't make a good tweet, you know, that doesn't get that doesn't get you a speaking slough to that on a stage. It doesn't. And and you know, I just wonder what can we do to to improve this? Because you studied architecture, right, yeah, yeah, and I mean that industry has suffered a lot of the same problems. Right, there's such great designs that are out there. You can make people's lives so great, but then you have these developers that are out there just building these awful monstrosities that no one wants. And it's a similar pattern that's happening tick tet technology, which is also funny because since the Beginn of time everyone in technology like any time you bring a pattern from outside the technology world, it seems like this crazy new thing that the no one's thought of. So so the same thing happens in other places. It seems like a very human, human block that's getting in the way and I don't know if you've thought about ways that we can improve it. I think we need a time of nuance debate and we need a time on focusing on people and challenging conventions, and I think I mean construction is a good literally example, but also a met of for where. The World of construction is full of chronic labor shortages, it's full of Arkanic planning processes, is full of, you know, really difficult problems to solve with zoning and various different unders, sort of fundamental underpinnings of it. And as a result, like you say, we're making buildings that don't really work for people and we have problems with the location of buildings, we have problems with things like parking. So we have all of those very pragmatic sort of real messy, dirty human process governance... |
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...problems. And then we have this sort of wonderful distraction of things like d printed homes or laminated timber construction, which represent the sort of future and how things were one day be. And in reality those, those sort of future technologies are probably not going to be here for a really long time and the skill, I think, is actually taking a lot of the technologies that we have now and using that to rethink the more fundamental and boring problems we have to do with things like zoning or financing. But somehow no one really wants to do that. Like one of the projects I'm working on the moment is to try and introduce myself as a sort of nowist, you know, because the world is sort of all the futurists and future is go around saying, you know, one day drones are going to deliver everything. You know one day Nano robots will crawl through your veins. You know one day you'll have brain computer interfaces, and it's helpful to know a bit about that. And it's quite easy to have a career as a futurist because you sort of go around saying you know, everything's going to be amazing, but it's very unh helpful, you know, for the most people, in most people's jobs, you know, to think that you know robots are going to do everything and drones are going to deliver things. You can't do anything about that. And I think people quite like having presentations that you can't do anything about because it relieves them of the guilt of not doing it. You know, means they can leave that presentation and go back to them monthly planning Excel spreadsheet and sort of forget about it. But they've been entertained and what I'm trying to do is is a sort of movement called now is m where we're actually aware of the broad trend lines in what's changing, aware of the profound technologies that are on the horizon, but very much to focus on the now. You know, as a take an industry like ECOMMERCE. You know, how can you make the how can you how can you buy clothes that fit? You know, how can you reduce the return rates, because everyone's into vanity sizing and sizes are different across countries. And you know, how can you take the products that we've solved before and make them in a way where the packaging is designed for any commerce environment? Like there are so many really exciting problems to be solved with all the technology that we have now. But somehow I think that area in the middle. You know, my hope is is commercially viable for me to be in that space, but I'm slightly worried that. You know, people like today and they like the future, but tomorrow is a little bit more challenging of a people. Yeah, I mean it's the macro version of what happens in a lot of our households. As you know. I'll admit of myself I've got my boxes of gadgets that are just sitting and then I've never really used because new gadgets are really fun right and it's exciting and you don't want to solve those. There's a media problems that we have and you know, I it's funny. I also I feel like, you know, in art, in the our technology world, there's not I don't know, I think there's not enough philosophy. And Ironically, use myself as an example, you know, for the you know, I'm twenty plus years in now. It probably and I've dabbled in philosophy and SISS sociology, but not until the last let's say five six years if I really started to take a broader view. And there's probably a lot of that repeated within this this little bubble of technology and I but I think people seem to think the studying something like philosophy or psychology or how society changes is a bit frivolous. Especially in Americas. Even the act of thinking is somehow considered, you know, like time that's not productive. and I tried to spend a lot of time really simplifying things, like I tried to spend a lot of time looking at how people behave, like talking to people, listening to people, and that seems to be quite unusual ready. Like, I don't think it's that hard really to predict many elements of the future, you know, like if you bought a voice speak it, like if you bought a sort of Amazon echo or a Google home, within about two weeks of using it, you could quite quickly realize it wasn't a particularly good way to do most things. You know, you could realize this idea that you're going to walk home and be, you know, Alexa, book me a holiday my Beth the next week. It was. It was never going to happen, because we need to see things, I. We need a sort of read things. I. |
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We need to digest things. We to explain the size of a sofa on voice commerce was never going to make it a plausible way to bias O for for example. And I really think that the thinking will get us everywhere. Like thinking and being truly empathetic, being not not negative but being discerning, not being contrarian but having the guts to ask the difficult questions, not being skeptical but being scenical. These are the sort of areas where we really, really need to sort of focus and I think somehow it's about unfashionable to do that and I don't really understand why. Yeah, yeah, and I keep looking at like I keep coming back to the human have. I've recently started exploring just different frameworks for addiction recovery, because I'd find many times people are addicted to their own thoughts. They're addicted to the way that we've done things. I mean, Jesus, we yeah stuff, facts, machines, but you know, I even looked at the the framework of it goes from a first you have to have awareness of the problem, then your acceptance of the problem and then responsibility for it and then you start taking action. And it kind of feels like now we're in this point work, whether you believe it or not. People are writing about the fact that we're in a fourth industrial revolution, and so it feels that were more aware than we ever have been, I think. But I don't know that the responsibility in the action is really weaving its way into society is a whole. I don't think so. Until that's a really useful framework to use. Actually, I've ever thought about it in that way. I think in a way we're so aware, like we're given so much information and we're told there everything is different, and I think the motivations behind people that say this stuff, you know they're not people with bad intent, but it goes back to I said before. You know, you get much more famous if you make outlandish predictions. You know, today, if you were to tweet the you think oil is going up to three hundred dollars, you wouldn't do as well as if you tweeted it went up to a thousand dollars. And I think we're almost in this sort of arms raced to get more attention by being more outlandish, you know. So if you can be the person that talks about the fact that disruption is definitely going to destroy your business sooner than you think, you get a lot more interest coming your way than if you're reassuring and say, you know, you know what, there are probably ninety percent of the world's industries that don't need to change that much, or the ways that they need to change dire actually based on better data structure and they're based on better exhale spreadsheets and they're based on better data governance and they're based on better conversations about the data they need, like somehow that's not sort of sexy enough to get people's attention. You almost feel like you're in this world of this sort of status quo, full of people saying, Oh, you know, we've seen this before and it didn't really change that much. And it's full of people saying, Oh my God, everything you know is useless. You know this will change everything. And finding a way to bring those two hemispheres together. I think it's really hard acting. I think sort of finding a practical implication of some things out there. It's not an easy thing to do commercially, no, it's not easy. And and and I guess what folks do instead is the the wonderful approach of staying exactly the same way they are but then just getting an expensive powerpoint presentation for strategy every year or so and then that ticking action. Yes, I see a lot of the sort of veneer of change. You know. So if you are a massive and I say you're a bank as a good example. We are retail bank with tens of thousands of ourlets across the country, you know you probably have a core banking system which is built on technology from the fifty somewhere. It probably fails sometimes you've probably built this whole system of middleware and protocols and backup systems to manage the fact that your core, you know, is pretty archaic, and you face two choices. Either to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to completely redo the whole system, or you can kind of do a press release about how you're the first bank to open the metaverse, or you can have one of your branches in, you know, mean near San Jose, has like a pepper robot in the foyer,... |
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...or, you know, you can do these sort of gestures of innovation that you can use to put in your shoholder presentations or your investment decks. But actually the real change in these and happen is it doesn't look as good. You know, it's it's something that you can't really describe to people, but that's the change that really needs to happen and it's a little bit frustrating actually. It's a little bit frustrating to realize how slow these companies are to adopt more profound technologies in deeper ways. If yeah, and I just a little frustrating. Very fast and you know, when I was preparing for us to talk, you know, I was thinking about the rate of change and I for one, I know I'm guilty of talking about the rate of change getting faster and faster, but now I'm kind of thinking about it from the lens of is it the rate of distractions that's getting faster and faster versus the rate of change? And I'm curious your thoughts on the radar change. And I think that's that's exactly the words to use. We went through this remarkable period. I was lucky enough to work very closely with Nokia around about these two thousand and six to two thousand and eight, and in that time the smartphone came into a life, the APP store developed, g wireless kind of spread very quickly across the globe and that had a profound effect on some parts of our life. You know, it sort of led to the pliferation of sites like tinder that changed how people met their life partners. It led to the creation of APPs like uber or sort of WHATSAPP. If fundamentally change the ways that telecoms company made money from Dayton not from voice. It was a huge sort of shift that happened, you know, between our two thousand and six and two thousand and eleven. Pretty much every celebrated company that we talk about today, you know, whether it's Alibaba or ten cent, or whether it's air be and B, whether it's door in, a prettymature of those exploded into that time. But see that in two thousand and twelve we've kind of seen nothing thing, and I really do mean nothing. I mean, you know, snapchat was just about the end of that. You could say that tick tock is a big deal, but tick tock is basically social network, a bit like vine or snapchat. We've seen nothing. So this idea of that somehow everything is different today and there were behaving in extraordinary ways just isn't true. And I liked what you said about the facts machine before actually, because again, a lot of the simplistic discussion is based on the idea that these new technology comes along and it changes everything and the old thing dies. You know, it's basically the idea that we have voice interfaces and then we abandon our keyboards, or we have sort of g and then we sort of abandoned, you know, fiber to the home and actually pretty much every technology ever out there is very much sort of a cumulative you know, we still live in an era of coins and notes and checks and credit cards, as well as having, you know, Venmo and paypal and as well as having sort of bitcoin and other slightly extravagant ways to pay each other. And I think in our need for simplicity, in our absolute need, it seems, for everything to be black or white and binary, we presume that the new thing comes along and it kills all of the old things and it happens very quickly. It's just not true. I mean, we live in a world now where there's I think there's seventeen different types of electrical plug socket in the world. If you go to a country like Brazil, even Brazil doesn't operate on the same voltage and the same sort of frequency for its power supply. Like these things take a long, long, long time, I'm to becomes less simple and to become uniform. But again, you know, it's hard to get noticing things are complicated. You have to sort of say you know this is going to happen and therefore do this. Yeah, and it's funny about that era where there you're talked about that that when mobile really started kicking up. That's when I heard so many executives they said the equivalent of Oh, we need to buy mobile right like, like we need mobile in our strategy and and it's kind of like right now and people are saying, let's buy a metaverse. The go down of the store and go buy me... |
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...some metaverse for my strategy. And it's the same pattern that gets keep it keeps getting repeated. All of these technologies around there. I say, I think, you know, they're very profound, but they're quite vague. You know, people talk about artificial intelligence as if you can sort of go on you know, Amazon, Dogcom and buy a box of artificial intelligence and then you sort of open it up and give it to your staff or something. You know, everything from artificial intelligence to automation, to cloud computing to, you know, the metaverse or web three or whatever you want to call these things. They're all sort of philosophies really. They're always of thinking about the way that you construct things. They're all, you know, environments in which things are possible. They're not. They're not sort of very specific bits of technology you can use. And I say, I get very, very frustrated, just like the mobile thing. You know, it's the year of mobile. was every year for about ten years and no one really knew what it was. People just took their existing print ads and they'd sort of stick him on a add server that served it to mobile and I genuinely believe we live a really fascinating period of time and I think that we have all of the tools that we need at the moment to do incredible things, and it would almost seem like a sort of a gesture of comedy to go to a company and say, you know, what's your mobile strategy today, because the assumption is that they've already nailed it. But actually, you know, if you want to get a mortgage today, it's almost impossible to do it without meeting someone facetoface or having a phone call. You know, I'm surprised that they're own companies that realize that chat applications exist and maybe that's quite a good way to triage people's inquiries. It's impossible to extend your car rental period through most mobile APPS with most car rental companies. We really need to get very excited about the things that we've already moved on from, because we still haven't made the most of them. Yeah, you know the and I'm surprised that we haven't seen a little bit more learnings over the past couple years. Back to your black and white point, you know, there's this, you know, are our office is dead. You know, where is everyone going back to the office and there's no or what's you know, how do we get back to where we were versus what's next? And you know, we got a remote company for Sixteen, no, eighteen years or so at this point, and people were like, oh, so nothing, nothing changed for you guys. But like, we met all the time, we met our clients all the time in person, we collaborated in person, we had actual workshops rather than Muro well, muros wonderful. Like it. You know, not having a in person workshop is killing me, you know, like being in front of a white board with people. I don't think it's going to change. And I love that Lens that you use, which is what's not going to change in the yeah, sure, you know. And and one thing that bumps me out a little bit, and when I think about what's not going to change and people talk about decentralization, that's happening, whether or not that's going to happen, one thing that's not going to change. I feel like are certain power structures and and certain, you know, consolidations of that power, and that worries me when people that they're almost getting too optimistic that things going to be fully decentralized, the power is going to be on our hands and like, you know, what's not going to change. So, you know, I'm curious, you know, if you can expand on things that are not going to change. I mean essentially the things that don't change. I mean, human nature doesn't change. We think somehow the because we have a smartphone, we've rewired the way that we think, but the core elements of what it's like to be a human are not in any way different. I think in many places technology exaggerates them. You know, said the behavior of people on social media is a sort of exaggeration of tribe building, you know, dating websites and exaggeration of need to sort of procreate, and I think quite often what we should be aware of is technologies kind of amplifying human faults in a way. So we're I often think, if you does not that hard to predict, because human natures quite easy to predict. I mean the other thing that doesn't really change, you know, legislation and regulation doesn't change that quickly. Government, it doesn't change that quickly. Education doesn't change... |
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...that quickly. We may have taken schools and put ipads in every kid's hands, but the things that were teaching kids are in no way a reflection of the skills and the knowledge they need for the future. So, you it's almost easier to assume that nothing's changing and then find little moments where it is. And I think the tendency is for people to go the other way around and, you know, fill presentations full of all the things that are changing without recognizing what's not. I used to have this idea with my company. Could a change the fiery? You know, there was this whole movement to go out to Silicon Valley and to meet in a people from facebook and Google and talk to them about the future. You know, the change the fire is the opposite where you just, you know, get out of your house and cycle or drive down the road and go to a shopping mall. You know how of retailers changed since the Internet happened? Most of them haven't done anything. You know, some of them will have a little decal in the window saying you can also shop online from hmcom. You may go to a store and see like a price tag and at the bottom of it is says, you know, also available and x x xl, you know online, but no one's no one's done anything beyond that. You can go to hotel and check in and you realize they still need to sort of swipe your predic herd about three times every time you do anything. You can fly with an airline and see that they're still using a dot matrix printer to print out the flight sort of dsalls. And when you say things like this again, even my tone it sounds quite miserable. It sounds like I'm sort of full of the fact that life is APP but I'm just saying like, in everywhere you look are these amazing opportunities to improve things. Go to a school. How can schools be rethal? Go to a parking garage, everything while parking garage could be go to a gas station and think about the future of gas stations in the world of EV's. It's very, very exciting when you look at the things that could happened. No, yeah, you know, if I if I come back to that whole like the frameworks for kind of personal improvement, it's what you're talking about sounds a little bit like just mindfulness. Right, mindfulness as a society and as industry is just it's kind of take that breath to say what is good. You know what, what what is strong, that I'm going to be able to build a paw rather than just frantically being distracted by things and and to your point of the the the safari and back to your point of people. And maybe it's worse here in the states. People don't leaving the time to think and feeling like that's okay. I know I for one. I've I've had to tell folks on our team go for a walk during the middle of the day, you know, to think. You know you can think about this problem. You don't need to like and it's not just your exercise time, but like if you need to go, like be in the woods to think about the problem. And and I feel like that it almost feels foreign to a lot of people to do that and maybe we just need a lot more of that across the board. I think. So it's some rude of me to make this generalization and my career as mainly been in the US for the last ten years, but I think the wonderful thing about America is. It's a country based on productivity, it's based on hard work, it's based on sort of grift and increasingly based on Hustle, and I think action is incredibly important, as is optimism, but it's almost society which is so much based on either people being very proud of what they've accomplished in terms of ours or also quite defensive mechanisms where people, you know, especially in a in a sort of corporate environment, people are very, very keen to show how busy they are and sometimes they came to share busy are when they're not and they're just sort of sending emails at five clock in the morning for no reason. And sometimes it's that there is this genuine sense that a good day is one where you were in nine zoo meetings, where you replied to fifteen emails, where you added seven new items to the status report. And I used to sit in meetings with status reports and it would have sort of, you know, fifty four different line items and maybe twenty four of them would be future projects. I haven't happened. Ten things would be sort of proactive initiatives and at no point did anyone really go through that and go you know which of these things really matter, you know. |
| 00:28:00 - 00:32:00 |
Do we do we have to sort of design the party invite for the annual sales meeting and to turn it into seven different projects about finding designers and briefing them, you know, or could we just make do with an invite which is a fairly custom one in in the right font? And I think I mean you mentioned this if you times, but we live in a world where there is so many things that are possible and there's so much stuff that can be done to things happen. One is we prioritize things that are really easy and quick to do. The Dome matter, you know, so making a mobi, making a smart watch APP, you know, used to be the sort of classic. Briefly, I would get it's pretty easy to do, you can do it without a much risk, you don't need damage departmental buying, but it probably doesn't matter. So we tend to focus on things they're easy to do. The Dome Matter, and we also sort of focus on things that, and I just give the illusion of progress, like anything that results in a kind of a todam moment is prioritized. And often these companies are actually dealing with one or two projects that maybe we take a little bit longer, maybe a little bit more risky, maybe require a bit more capital investment, but they would profoundly change the future of that company or their clients. And those are always the ones that never happen because you know, it's a bit daunting and because it may require some thought in me and may require six months of not actually producing something, because you need to talk to people and listen and think. And I think this sort of reflexive need to sort of demonstrate productivity is very damaging. How dare you attack my country? You go back to the Queen and you tell her that we won the revolution? I mean, I don't you say England is the opposite, and England is full of level of thought and self doubt and procrastination the means that nothing happens. So they're definitely is. I think a place like, you know, Scandinavia, is quite interesting. I think they do a good job of balancing the thinking and the action. So maybe we should rejoin the empire and then the balance of philosophy and actually getting fixed done. But I mean, people do like that's the talk about human nature and I feel like human they do want to we do want to do things that matter, we want to accomplish things that matter. Maybe the problem is that were out in the Zakeist things that we're told things that matter don't really write. Like people think that, you know, working on social media is changing the world. Writer. Like, yeah, I mean, you know, maybe Zuckerberg feeling that he's changing the world for the better is is a good example, but I am salty towards him, so means it now. You're right. Actually, for some reason things have become very sort of fashionable. You know, I view if you work on a content marketing campaign or you work with influences or you work on a newsletter or something, that's considered to be sort of, you know, exciting, sort of techy work. You know, if you're someone that redesigns the packaging, or if you're someone that helps create a product that last longer, if you're someone that helps with the sizing of clothes being more accurate, if you're someone that creates a supply chain which is more dynamic, if you can find a way to, you know, check on the provenance of items that you're procuring, and I that's all considered a bit unsexy at the moment, and I think in a way that's our problem, is we were so keen to demonstrate the world that was sort of techy and the we get you know, mobile and we know what blockchain is, that we end up doing quite a lot of fanciful things that don't really matter. And in this age now where everyone is talking about, you know, do we work from home or do we work from the office, it seems like completely the wrong question. Actually, where we work should not want be the most important thing about our job. If you talk to people who sort of study the psychology of work, the biggest factor in job satisfaction it's not actually the colleagues you work with, it's that you sense a sense of progression towards a meaningful goal. You know, for most people, if they are trying to come be something that matters and if they make a clear sign of progress, they feel great about their jobs. And I think that feels true when you hear that. So we be much better off framing these conversations about how do we... |
| 00:32:01 - 00:36:00 |
...make sure the people feel a sense of progress. I had a people feel that they're working towards something that matters and that doesn't necessarily need to be that they're changing the world or that they're, you know, stopping climate change. It could just mean that they designed, you know, a really, really good newsletter template. It could be that they were responsible for developing a new product which made millions of dollars, and I think that's a much better lens to look at our sense of satisfaction. In a way, we've almost gone the wrong way where people seem to be satisfied because they've got no commute anymore, or people seem to be satisfied because, you know, they don't have to talk to people from accounts anymore, and that seems like it seems like a sort of backwards me to go about it's me absolutely does. Can Not agree more. So I'd like to finish on something positive. But the reason that's, like I said, this is all driven from optimism, in empathy right in. And so if we take a kind of take our own medicine and we look back in history, you know there's from the printing press to water to electricity, to mean, for what are the steam to electricity, there's always been strife after after change. There's you know, there's been loodytes. Maybe there's a new generation of bloodyates these days, but ultimately there I think that the chart goes up into the right and you know, I'm curious. You know, do you agree with me? You know, it is this we're going to get through this period of change and in or a period of distraction and kind of find our roots and find what's important. There is a very, very clear trend line that shows every time a new chenlogy comes along, people worry about the social effects. People think they'll lose their job, people think that the ruling classes will abuse them, people think that what they held onto from before we'll be taken away from them. And every single technology, from the printing press like you mentioned, to the loom, to the ATM to the Laptop, has generally made people have jobs which are far better than ever before. The sounds a little bit obnoxious, especially at this time, but generally speaking we have luxury problems, you know, like a bad day in the office doesn't mean that you know, kid got trapped in a coal mine. You know, bad dad the office doesn't mean that we lost an arm in a loom. Like a bad day in the office today is normally that a project got canceled or someone says may mean to me in a meeting, or I thought was mean. So I think the more that we progress, the more we focus on a similar number of problems that we think are as big as they've ever been before. But the reality is have in having automation, generally speaking, will likely move us to jobs where we can think more. Having more information processed by computers will probably give us more insights to work with. Having an environment where it's easier to do prototyping because of d printing will probably lead to better designs. It's really hard to be negative about it, I think, when it comes to the world of work specifically and when it comes to all of these tools that we have, it can only mean that planes fly more, you know, efficiently, and that more people are sat on them, which means that they do less environmental destruction. Like it can only mean the cars root themselves to locations in ways that reduce the the missions. It can only mean that hospitals can process people that are sick faster. It can only mean that we have more data to make better decisions with. I think there are societes or things which is somewhat different. I think our relationship with technology and how we consume news and how we have learnt to distrust and not like each other. I think that's a huge problem. But when you apply technology to the world of work, all I can see a positive things. There are there, you know, quats new problems. It creates problems to do withoutsourcing and global workforces, like it creates problems to do with sort of so much data that we don't know what to do with it. But all of those problems can be downe with, I think. Yeah, I mean, if you take a step back, we've gone from having blacklong to like, Oh, I sit in a chair too much other day. It's the big problem we all my glots are kind of take because I sit in a chair first in the day. I get it... |
| 00:36:00 - 00:39:31 |
...sounds quite hard, you know, as a sort of white straight man like give, you talk about these things in a dismissive way. People are quite quick to say that you say these things from a position of privilege. But the reality is that people did used to die in minds and people did used to die of lead poisoning and people did used to lose limbs and people did. US to sort of desert dyeing and Victorian workhouses and generally speaking, our worst days today are still better than the best days that most people on the planet ever lived. So Hey, can not agree more and I'm looking forward to your next book. I loved your first one. So I love to finish on what's the best advice that you've ever received? That wasn't expecting that question. All the better. I actually two bits of advice. One is there's a huge thing called cultural permission. Some my probably my favorite boss I've ever week with a guy called Kevin Allen. He would basically set you up to be the biggest and the best person you could be in a meeting. So if you create an environment where you expect people to thrive and where you give them a sense of support and you expect them to be brilliant, they probably will be. Like almost everyone is brilliant, they just may not realize it. So expect people to be brilliant and give them the room to do that. And the second thing is just really think through what it's like to be in other people's positions. You know, quite often in meetings people are talking too much because they're nervous, not because they're arrogant. Quite often people have a sort of a sense of boisterousness and arrogance, and actually that probably just means they're a bit uncertain with themselves. Quite often you may show people creative work in a meeting and they hate it, and it's actually because they're worried that their kids being bullied in school. So the actor of just spending a lot of time thinking, you know what's this person really thinking about? How important is this meeting to them? One of their fears? You know, how can I help them through their day? That way of thinking will get you far further than the quality of the work you present and how well you present it. I think often that's great. Back to the empathy and to anyone out there that they might hear Tom or myself that we come off a little saltier contrarian, it's because we can. We could do better and we could do it now and then. We don't need nothing should be in our way right, we could do it. Everything could be amazing. We have all the tools that we need. We are a remarkable, ingenious, inventive sort of species of people with the most amazing tool kits. We can connect with anyone on the planet. You can give an ipad to a kid anywhere on the planet and they'll be informed with everything that's ever been written. We live in this amazing age and any sense of pessimism or frustration or saltiness just come from the Delta between what we see and what we could be seeing. But I'm really confident that we'll close that gun same tom thanks so much for being here. I really enjoyed it. My pleasure. Thanks for having on the show. Technology should serve ICIENT. That said, it intevity we design clear blueprints for organization readiness and digital transformation that allow companies to chart new paths. Then we drive the implementation of those plans with our client partners in service of growth. Find out more at deb wwvcom slash podcast. You've been listening to see sweet blueprint. If you like what you've heard, be sure to hit subscribe wherever you get your podcast to make sure you never miss a new episode. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could leave a ready. Just give us however many stars you think we deserve. Until next time. |
