Simone Cicero

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this podcast, we explore the future of business models, organisations, markets and society in our rapidly changing world. I’m joined today by my usual co-host, Shruhi Prakash. Hello Shruthi.

 

Shruthi Prakash 

Hello everybody.

 

Simone Cicero 

Great to have you here. And our guest for this episode is Lee Bryant. Lee is a strategist, an organisational designer and developer, and the co-founder of PostShift. Lee is widely recognised for his pioneering work at the intersection between technology, networks, and organisations. 

 

And we have known each other for several years, maybe more than a decade. I used to invite Lee to the conferences we used to organise. So Lee, it’s a great opportunity to have you on the podcast.

 

Lee Bryant 

My pleasure. Really great to see you both and looking forward to a conversation.

 

Simone Cicero 

Thank you so much. At PostShift and in general in your career, you have been helping organisations to move beyond industrial age hierarchies towards more adaptive networked digitally enabled models. So you have a very long experience now. And in the last few months, we have been following your work, and how you try to integrate through your writings, and also the work you do with customers like we do, you know, this crazy important technology like generative AI. 

 

So I think we would like to start giving you a space to tell us a little bit more about what your experience has been, you know, based on your multi-decade-long work experience as an organisational developer at the edge, let’s say, of the space. 

 

So what are your learnings, and how are you now looking into the opportunities and the challenges that are opening up in front of us as we rethink organisations for this age of AI and beyond?

 

Lee Bryant

That’s a great, very big question. I think the probably useful context is that the way I came to this is a little bit different. So, although I’ve been playing with computers since the age of 10, which is a very long time ago at this point, and programming and so on. Actually, I was involved in politics. My first career was in politics and diplomacy. One of the things that really fascinated me there was the different organisational templates – from bureaucratic international organisations to very hierarchical government organisations to what we’re seeing today in Ukraine, actually, which is a more distributed networked, agile approach to empowerment and self-representation in the face of big, powerful bureaucratic forces on the other side.

 

So I was doing this work – it was crazy work. It was very intense. And I came across the internet, in about 1994, I think, when I was doing this work. And I started using that to distribute sort of blog-like information to all of our journalists, politicians around the world who were involved in supporting what we were doing. And it was immediately clear that this was a game-changer in terms of giving people the power of self-representation. So our information didn’t need to go through the prism or the filter of, you know, the BBC or you know, somebody that would try and sort of in a way compress the information to an acceptable form, we can actually speak to people directly and we can build networks of common purpose and get things done. 

 

And we really got things done. You know, we got things done with very few resources that were, you know, defeating more sort of powerful opponents in a sense. And so when I, I sort of stopped that work initially myself and Olivia, my business partner, we were interested in working with developmental organisations, with charities and so on. 

 

And instead of them being sort of basically direct marketing companies, that do some good work, we wanted them to actually connect directly with people, capture that purpose, that energy and do things in a more authentic way. Quietly, we drifted into the world of business because we also realised that there was a sort of humanitarian question in all of these sort of battery chickens sitting at their cubicles having rather sad lives and then going home and, you know, having a gin and tonic and a cry, you know, at the end of an awful work day. So we became very interested in actually how we could improve the experience of work. And I think one thing I recognised was that from a historical perspective, the late 20th century, or really, actually, the late 19th century sort of factory model really came out of feudalism in a sense. 

 

This idea that there are, you know, lords and peasants, there are sort of managers and workers, there are different classes of individuals, and the role of the manager was to recruit all of these workers, extract value from them, and make profits and so on. And it just occurred to me that, you know, with technology, and also with the rise of, education and the fact that we’re not just factory workers anymore, we’re knowledge workers to a large extent – we could do a lot better than this. 

 

So from the late 1990s onwards, we started building web-based collaboration systems, knowledge sharing platforms, ways of bringing networks and connections to the work of organisations. And we were quite successful in doing that. I think we were quite early in doing that. And then we saw the rise of the first blogs, and we realised that that was another game changer. 

 

You know, this was a almost free in monetary terms, form of networking and communication that was largely open source and it did the things that we were doing for lots of money. It did it really easily and really simply. So we switched, we created a new company called HeadShift, and we were really focused on injecting social technology into the enterprise as a way of humanising the enterprise, but also as a way of reducing its cost base, making it more effective.

 

And sort of in a way, taking back a little bit of power from this amorphous sort of class of generic managers, who seem to hold, all of the control and all of the power, but in fact, were not technology aware and therefore were not actually doing a great job in terms of the transition, to the internet age and so on. 

 

That’s really where we began. We had a great time with HeadShift. The company was acquired by a bigger US group. And then we sat and reflected and thought, well, what we’ve done is we’ve used technology as a kind of Trojan horse to create these outcomes that we were looking for in terms of more human connection, more agile working, et cetera. But where are the templates? Where are the organisational models that can be like operating systems in the internet age?

 

And we did some reading, we looked around, there wasn’t a great deal. There were some very old, excellent books from cybernetics in the early part of the 20th century, to Peter Senge, all these sorts of things. But actually, the only way that the most visionary organisations were able to make this work was if they had a visionary CEO. So all of the case studies, whether it’s Morningstar, all of these sorts of things, they really relied upon one extraordinary individual giving power or sharing power. 

 

And we thought, well, that’s an edge case. How can we make this more popular? How can we make this easier to achieve? And so we became interested in organisational transformation, templates, models, and so on. And then we did a lot of work with some very big companies, helping them with that transition. I think the way they understood it to a large extent was about agility. But actually, our goals were a lot wider than agility. They were about a sort of human purpose, about being technology-led as well as just being more flexible and adaptive. 

 

And I think what was interesting was, you know, we felt we had a very good handle on how to do digital transformation at a fairly large scale. But what we’d really underestimated was the inertia and the resistance of, management as a group within these companies, taking a, often quite short-termist attitude, thinking about themselves rather than thinking about necessarily the future of the organisation. 

 

So that was our, I guess, our blocker to having a greater impact in that area. And then one of the concepts that I know we all share is this notion of the platform organisation as a starting point, as a basic template. And what I like about the platform organisation is that we get machines to do the machine stuff so that people can be free to do the stuff that they are good at. 

 

Whereas in the old model, we treated people as fungible resource workers, right? They’re just following a process. They’re not really having much input. They’re not using their brains or their creativity. So essentially, we built a machine out of sort of human meat. And what I want to see is us using technology to build a machine upon which humans can be human connected, express themselves, and do the brilliant work that we all know they’re capable of. 

 

So that’s what I like about the platform concept – it’s the separation between the service layer, the automation underneath, and the freeform, agile, connected lateral networks of people on top. 

 

And when we were, towards the end of our period with Headshift and Datris Group, a friend of mine, Dave Gray, who was a colleague, we were working together. He wrote this book about the platform organisation, which I found really, really interesting. Very simple book, but it was a really excellent observation. So that became something we championed, from that point forward. But where AI comes into the picture is that the things that we were trying to get companies to do manually, which is map your processes, map your service layer, map your capabilities, try and automate the services underneath so that you can be less bureaucratic on top. All of that suddenly became a lot more achievable because the whole idea of agentic AI is that we can build little, very simple sort of bots or software workers that can own a service, oversee it, improve it, connect it with other services, and then we can actually achieve that service platform layer much more easily than we could in the past where it relied on lots and lots of change work, lots of transformation work, lots of consulting, lots of technical development and so on. 

 

So for me, I’m sort of at the moment in two minds. On the one hand, I can see the incredible potential of agentic AI to create the platform organisation and therefore to really become a an organisational operating system that others can adapt and they can use for themselves. That’s my optimistic side. My less optimistic side says, you know what, maybe companies are like nurseries or high school. They’re fundamentally a social competition structure. They’re not really about value. They’re not really about work. They’re about people feeling good about themselves. And that’s why they’re dominated by this class of managers, in which case, I’m just going to give it up and go home and do some gardening. So I guess that’s where I find myself at this point.

 

Simone Cicero 

Right. I mean, that’s a lot of stuff. So let me try to maybe ask you a couple of clarifications. 

 

So first thing, I noted in my notebook, you explicitly saying that agentic technologies, which it’s also important to underline