Stina Heikkila:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast, where we meet with pioneers, thinkers, doers, and entrepreneurs and speak about the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in this rapidly changing world we live in. I’m Stina Heikkila. I’m co-host of the show alongside Simone Cicero. Ciao Simone.

Simone Cicero:

Hello, everybody.

Stina Heikkila:

And today we are joined by very special guest Geoff Mulgan, who is currently professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at University College London. Many of our listeners probably know you, Geoff, from your role as former chief executive of Nesta, the UK Innovation Foundation. But you’ve had many different roles in your career. And it’s also interesting to mention that you have a PhD in telecommunications, like many of our audience working in these types of fields as well. And you have written many books. The latest one being just released called Another World is Possible, where you write about reviving social and political imagination. I’m sure we will talk about all of this in our conversation. So, Geoff, great to have you here with us.

Geoff Mulgan:

Hi there. Great to be with you.

Stina Heikkila:

We found recently a sort of concept or position paper, what we can call it, that you had published on your website called Organizational Architecture – Ideas for an Emergent Discipline. And basically you make the case for somehow a gap that I think you have perceived in how we think about designing organizations compared to, for instance, other disciplines where we have a lot of theoretical knowledge combined with practical, let’s say, practice. And so we want to start a conversation with hearing more from you about your motivation for writing this paper and where you are with this kind of work at the moment.

Geoff Mulgan:

Okay, well, the motivation for writing the paper was partly the slightly strange career I’ve had where I’ve been involved in setting up lots of organizations, some within government, some public organizations, some commercial. I’ve worked in the sort of startup scene and as an investor for many years and also creating charities, social enterprises, NGOs. So I’ve sort of been involved in the practice of new organizations. But I realized I didn’t have much of a theory to necessarily make sense of what kind of organization fits for what kind of task. And so the specific motivations this year were really two: one was, I have a feeling that we’re missing many of the institutions and organizations we need for the next 10 or 20 years, particularly for the transition to a zero carbon economy, to cope with aging, to cope with the regulation of AI. All sorts of tasks have sort of holes in relation to appropriate organizations. And then at the same time, there’s the extraordinary creativity around things like DAOs and Blockchain and so on. But having talked to the people involved in that over at least a decade, I’ve repeatedly been struck that they almost were lacking a kind of framing, a set of tools to help them make sense of how their ideas fitted into thousands of years of human history creating organizations, learning what works and what doesn’t work. So as a result, I think many of their ideas aren’t very practical and won’t work very well and so they came together in the suggestion or maybe we need a bit more of a discipline and a bit more like what architecture does for buildings. There’s an enormous variety of buildings and you don’t have a sort of one-size-fits-all approach to architecture but at least there’s a body of knowledge about what works, of ideas, what fits in different contexts and so on. And I felt we were missing that for the organizational challenges of the 2020s, 20303, and so on. And so my paper was just an attempt to put in one place the thing I would like to have read to help me partly to encourage people to criticize it and show me better alternatives of how to conceptualize the design of organizations to fit 101 different tasks.

Stina Heikkila:

You had a quote from Buterin saying that if you reduce organizations to sort of their minimum layer of what they actually are, it comes down to contracts between people like – or he’s talking more about the corporation. You think that such a perspective can be a bit misleading and maybe that we need to have a more diverse view on what organizations are? So maybe if you can touch a little bit on that friction before we go further into the content.

Geoff Mulgan:

So I thought it was very interesting he said that and he’s a very smart guy but in a way that’s a symptom of a pretty serious problem that an intelligent person can say something so clearly wrong. I mean, what the world has learnt through say, thousands of years creating running organizations and 150, 200 years of the industrial revolution is exactly different to the idea that a corporation is just made up of people and contracts. Businesses, certainly successful businesses over time involve a whole set of cultures and values and norms, relationships to the outside world to supply chains and universities like the one I work in, governments and so on. And exactly what’s often gone wrong with corporations is when they thought of themselves solely in terms of, as it were, the legal form or the organigram and lost sight of that much more complex ecology which actually drives all real organizations. So that’s the reason I quoted Vitalik Buterin that seems to me a symptom of a field which is clearly lacking some really basic understandings of how organizations work. And if you could combine the creativity of people like him and inventors and DAOs and so on with a bit of that learning, a bit of that history, a bit of that sophistication maybe they’d be much more effective in helping to solve the many, many problems we have around us at the moment.

Simone Cicero:

That’s super interesting, because I feel like this kind of blockchain Web3 community is having a particular perspective on the organization, which is that of reducing it to the primitives that we have, right, for example contracts or treasuries or grants, things like that. To some extent I believe it’s very interesting and very useful and I’m sure it’s part of your organizational or needs to be at least part of your organizational architecture. When you say I want to help, we have to help organizational designers and institutional designers coming up leveraging on the history of organizing, so I guess that this practice that you are trying to midwife into the world it’s about avoiding, for example, reinventing the wheel of organizing or it’s about avoiding the traditional pitfalls. How do you see this social practice, let’s say, of institutional creation? What are the elements of your organizational architecture theory?

Geoff Mulgan:

Well, in a way these questions have been part of all of social science for the last 200 years. And if you’re creating any kind of organization you have to in some ways mobilize, motivate people to do things. You can do that by paying the money. That’s what contracts basically are within a company or for services. You can do it through force and fear. And in much of the world still traditional hierarchy based on fear is an incredibly powerful force. Or you can do it through love or care and sort of the motivation to give. And almost all real complex organizations are a little bit of a mix of all of those and anyone’s which only rely on a single thing just rely on coercion or just rely on money, or just rely on love and care, they tend to fall apart. That’s one of the sort of common lessons of history and of experiment. So that’s the first point I would say to anyone interested in things like DAOs. The second thing is just look around you, look at the incredible diversity of organizations probably within a kilometer of where you’re sitting now. There will be small corner shops, there will be self employed people, there’ll be people part of multinational corporations, there’ll be a primary school, a park, a library, all these different things. There’ll be a church, a mosque, a temple. Why are they so diverse? And they’re diverse because of really the complexity of human societies. And it would be very implausible if a single organizational design like a DAO would work for all those different tasks. So those are just two sort of preparatory thought processes I would encourage anyone to go through before they then offer their perfect design. And fairly quickly then you get into a question what actually is the task of your organization? This is perhaps where it gets interesting and this is what I spend a lot of my time working on. Let’s say a very live issue at the moment is energy, energy management in neighborhoods. So at the moment with my neighbors there’s no organization which helps me coordinate with them, collaborate with them on how we maybe reduce our energy bills, reduce our carbon emissions and stuff like that. Now there are actually a range of organizational options which could help do that task or very few of which actually exist anywhere in the world. Many of which will involve quite complex management of the data. Because if the data is too carelessly shared then it can be used in all sorts of abusive ways. At the moment you can tell through energy data when people are having sex and you probably don’t want your neighbors to know that but there are good ways of organizing it which are truly empowering. And at the other end of the spectrum, in the last couple of months I’ve been working on global science, what would be institutions at a global level which would help us organize the brain power of the whole world to be better directed to the things which really matter, things like the sustainable development goals or cutting carbon. And that takes you to a completely different set of institutional designs which have to have some credibility with the scientists, some credibility with the government, some credibility probably with big companies and it’s quite a subtle, sophisticated design task which we can go into more detail if you’re interested in, to create things which work. And as soon as you get into the detail you go pretty quickly a long way from any one size fits all thinking, whether that’s one size fits all thinking which thinks everything should be a publicly quoted company or a DAO or indeed the thinking that a cooperative is the answer to everything. Those ladders you walk up, you climb up. But you have to discard if you’re getting into the serious business of designing new institutions.

Simone Cicero:

When I hear you, I hear somehow this idea that the organizational challenges the 21st century requires some kind of careful taxonomies and modularization. As a designer, you don’t have to go for one or another approach. You maybe want to pick aspects of a diversity of approaches and combining them carefully. Also this availability, let’s say, to integrate ideas beyond the traditional belief systems that we have some kind of objective what I would say or wise way to approach the organizing problem. Of course, the challenges of organizing for the 21st century has so many dimensions we have to keep in mind. So for example, interoperability the different scales, subsidiarity the creation of shared the protocols would interoperate and change data, information and so on. And we come from a century of very clear distinction between the players in society and basically a century where everybody knew who was supposed to do what the public is supposed to do. Public services, the private is supposed to optimize for shareholder value creation, maybe the open sector. Let’s say that the social enterprise, open source, whatever, was the most unclear and indeed it was the place where most of the innovations have been coming up. So how do you imagine that we can untangle this mess of organizing and this massive challenge of reorganizing for the 21st century across the spectrum of public, private, open? And as a kind of follow up or another side of the question is what kind of process you believe we have to build so that these new designers and these new institutions will be coming up? So what are the forces, the enablers and the forces that will kick this new process of let’s reorganize for the 21st century in motion?

Geoff Mulgan:

So I think it’s wrong to think there was a time when everything was neat and simple. And it’s also wrong to believe this is the first time in human history there’s been a need to massively reinvent institutions. So I see some parallels between where we are now and let’s say the 1880s, 1890s, which was in many ways a much faster period of a technological change than now. If you were born in about 1860, then in your twenties, you get the car, the telephone, mass education, modern warfare, all sorts of things. Electricity transforming life far more powerfully than anything we’ve seen in the last generation. Alongside that, there was an extraordinary rapid urbanization process, which at first was miserable, slums, high crime, ill health, et cetera. And that forced then the invention of a whole set of new institutions. The modern corporation came out of that era. Before then, there really weren’t any really big private companies with highly complex tasks like running railroads. Governments introduced a whole host of new organizations running energy, running schools, running training of all kinds. Mass democracy came in pretty much in that period, and civil society was incredibly innovative, developing everything from insurance and microcredit to libraries, at trade unions, et cetera. So if we look at that period and ask what might be the parallels now, it certainly wasn’t that anyone had a single plan, nor was it that anyone had a single organizing principle to apply to everything.

But there was a lot of fertility, there was a lot of innovation, there was a lot of experiment. And many of the new organizations which came out of that era weren’t trying to use the then prevailing technologies, and they were more managerial, they used new administrative techniques, they use electricity for their factories and so on. And this is, in a way, the sort of thinking mode which I guess I’m encouraging is not a sort of deductive model, but more awareness of what’s happening, of the different forms which organizational design is taking awareness of. The frontiers of technology and then something much more like physical architecture, which is why I use the language of architecture, which, at the moment, if you’re building buildings, how you build them has to be different from a generation. Or two ago because you want your building to be low carbon, much less energy intensive, much less waste, much more, perhaps integration of living things into the building. And that’s the kind of complex craft knowledge which you may want to then apply to very, very different examples, whether you’re building a factory or a supermarket or a university. And that’s the sense in which I think we need a field, a discipline, which is kind of self-aware in that sense, but it’s not a single theory which will tell you how to do everything that would fall apart almost straight away.

Simone Cicero:

Maybe I’ve been a bit simplistic in saying the public had some kind of tasks, the markets have other tasks. Do you expect these kind of fields to merge more and overlap a bit more in the coming decades? Or what’s your feeling about this mix of perspective?

Geoff Mulgan:

So I don’t know. It’s a short answer, but I would expect there to be co-evolution. That is to say, different organizations and sectors evolve in response to each other. So let me give one live example. In pretty much all the cities of the world, transport is going through a series of quite dramatic changes. So where the mix in the past was perhaps cars, walking, trams, light, railway buses, we’re moving to a future where on the one hand, there’s far more micro mobility tools, electric bikes, scooters and so on, there’s also many more driverless cars and probably for health reasons, a desire to encourage walking and running and cycling. So you’ve got this sort of different picture. Now, one of the things that will lead to is a completely new data environment because many of those forms of transport are generating data and some cities are looking at whether it’s useful to try and create some guardians of that data, data trusts and so on, which can help with the management, the flows, the interconnections of these different transport forms. So, for example, so mobility as a service, so you can easily get a single purchase which allows you to take a journey, some of which may be on a rail, some of which may be micro mobility, some of which may be walking. And this is technically quite poorly feasible, but it will require new kinds of entity, probably public bodies, which are the guardians of that data, the guardians of the interconnectedness. But that then in turn allows the private sector to innovate in all sorts of different kind of offerings of driverless cars, micro mobility, maybe drones to carry you to the airport and so on in the near future. So you’re exactly right. I think what you said earlier, it’s the design often of the protocol, the interconnections becomes key, but this is a kind of coevolution of public bodies, publicly accountable and profit maximizing bodies. And perhaps there will also be some which are runners, social enterprises and community organizations around, I don’t know, maintaining your bicycle or looking after the walkways to keep the city pleasant. I mean, I hope that gives a flavor of, I guess, how I see this task, which is not a classic top down design task which you can put as a blueprint. It’s more helping to reshape systems ecosystems which then evolve with their own dynamic. It’s a much more open, creative process in that respect.

Simone Cicero:

I feel you’re speaking about essentially some kind of Cambrian Explosion that we can expect in terms of variety and experiments. What is the new aspect that you believe organizational architecture practice can bring to enable this Cambrian Explosion? For example? There is a practice somehow of organizational design. There is a community, but it feels like what you say, maybe I’m wrong, but it feels like you’re saying we haven’t been ambitious enough in developing this practice. And another question that I bring with me is architecture has never been like a very open practice, right? So it’s been about architects. So how we are supposed to have organization architecture theory open to everybody.

Geoff Mulgan:

I was probably very shaped by having been around the kind of pioneers of the Internet and the World Wide Web back in the which point it was kind of assumed this dramatic new technology of the Internet would automatically lead to a flowering of entirely flat, democratic egalitarian organizations. There was endless conferences and speeches and books about this and instead we basically ended up, well, yeah, a strong open source movement, but massive traditional companies like Google and Facebook and Amazon and Alibaba and so on. So a completely different pattern emerged to the one which many of the pioneers expected. And in retrospect, I think far too little work was done on organizational architecture. What would it actually take to use platform models for other tasks, whether within the public sector or civil society, rather than this default to very traditional capitalist ownership models? Now, what I say in the paper in answer to the first other part of your question was that actually there are some emerging, almost approaches to organization which are quite different from 20 or 30 years ago. So I use this language of the mesh which obviously comes from the Internet. How do you design organizations where embedded in them are these flows of data and knowledge both inside the organization but also outside to its ecosystem? That’s certainly a very fresh way of thinking for government and public organizations. I talk about taking from physical architecture this idea of multiple centers and this is from having seen far too many consultancy organograms where they are asked to design an organization and it’s all very neat and pyramidal and structured and yet all real organizations, successful ones, have these multiple attractors and centers. And I talk about this drive to have the outside in to have and it’s partly involvement of the people who’ll be affected by decisions to involve them in the design and the shaping. And that’s, as you say, sometimes architects, physical architects are good at that, sometimes they’re really bad. But also things like open data, things like making a lot of the internal workings of the organization, visible and modular, et cetera for others. Now these are probably very familiar concepts to your community, but they’re still actually very novel for most of the public sector. They’re novel for lawyers, they’re novel for accountants, they’re definitely novel for bankers. And yet they’re a different mindset, which I think we do need to embed in our next generation of institutions.

Stina Heikkila:

You’re right that for our community these are things that we are talking about, like designing a fit to the ecosystem to try to work backwards towards the organizational structure that you need. So we are looking at that from different perspectives and I think you’re right. I work a lot with the public sector, a lot with cities and there is that mind shift that is somewhat needed and I’m not sure exactly how we will get there. And maybe it’s something that you also think about because when we talk about this outside-in principle for instance, or the meshes – the level of readiness for people to engage in being one of the multiple centers or plugging into what is happening, is this a shift that you see is accelerating or moving forward? So I’m thinking also about what we were talking about, this kind of mixed setups that are, to quote our podcast name, like boundaryless in that sense that you have the public sector maybe as some custodian, but you also allow multiple entities to plug into it. I’m wondering if you are seeing that thanks to technology, the barriers for creating those meshes are lowered and what else can we do to make them even lower to allow citizens to become in charge? There are still no easy way to set these things up.

Geoff Mulgan:

So I think the conditions are better. Let me give one example, a very real example which I helped design about 20 years ago, more than 20 years ago. Then we coined this phrase of government-as-a-platform. It actually then got redefined a few years later, but we were using it back in the late nineties. And one example of that was an organization we set up called Learndirect. And this was set up by the government as a platform on which would be a whole host of different training courses and training offerings from private companies. And then citizens could use these with credits and there would also be navigation tools to help them know the quality of different training courses, to help them know which jobs would need what skills and so on. So the idea was a very boundaryless platform supported, run by government, tapping into literally thousands of private sector providers, but also colleges, NGOs and so on. Now that actually became at one point the second biggest learning organization on the planet. Had about well over half a million students on it. But what’s interesting in retrospect is the bureaucracy didn’t really understand the thing they had, and they tried to sort of squeeze it back into a much more traditional provider model and then a later government privatized it because they could only think of a traditional private ownership as the right model for such a thing. And essentially, it’s been shrunk back dramatically. But actually doing a similar platform now would be much easier because we have dramatically better data tools about labor markets. And this is a topic I’ve worked a lot on in the last four or five years, how you scrape the web for data on jobs, what skills they’re looking for, what pay levels they’re getting. It’s much easier to create navigation tools or self assessment tools, whether for school students or people who’ve just lost their job at 40 or 50. And it’s much easier also to visualize these patterns and have a whole sector conversations about where they’re going. I’m working on this again next year in Bangladesh, as an example, 180,000,000 people in Bangladesh, many of whom face a big threat to their jobs from automation of the garment industry, furniture, textiles. But they’ve got a very agile digital team there and may well leapfrog ahead of what’s possible in Europe in integrating, orchestrating all these different kind of digital data tools and then leading those to guide a platform, which then is the intermediary between all the training providers and millions and millions of people. So that’s the sense in retrospect, our Learndirect back in the late 90s was probably too soon, that the technologies, the habits, the understandings weren’t there. But this notion of platform organization seems to me so obvious for fields like skills, also for the organization of things like care. And my big surprise has been how slow it’s been for these to become just part of everyday life.

Stina Heikkila:

You mentioned care and education. These seem to be, let’s say, yeah, the most applied use cases when it comes to more sort of public value thinking in platforms. Right? And then we have many examples, of course, of platforms that have been creating more private value, but maybe just touching a little bit on those 21st century challenges. What do you think could be the next big thing where this kind of it’s not only platform thinking, but this outside in, meshed, multicenter way could help? Is energy the next thing you see, or do you have other horizons?

Geoff Mulgan:

I still think we got a way to go on care. So, again, nearly 20 years ago, we introduced platform models for disability. Starting off actually with learning disability, which people thought would be the most difficult, and their disabled people were given credits, given purchasing power, personal budgets, and then on a platform would be a whole array of services they could choose to tailor to their needs, which might be a carer, might be activities, might be anything. And that actually worked pretty well. But again, it was against the grain of the culture of the professions and the bureaucracies and in fact of the large private providers who are much more comfortable just providing a care home rather than empowering the user in these platform models. So although they exist at a reasonable scale, as far as they’re not normal. Across most of the developed world. Health is the other field where we’ve worked at various times on we call health knowledge commons, where you would actually orchestrate all the essentially the knowledge about diet or cancer or heart disease in such a way that it’s much easier for the citizen or the family again, to tailor what kind of services and supports and advice they need, all the way from very formalized surgery in a hospital to a chat with some other people who suffered from a similar condition and may be able to give them advice on how to sleep or manage pain. So I think we’ve still hardly started the serious platform thinking about these fundamental public services. Energy, in a way is a bit easier in principle because it’s not nearly as sophisticated and subtle and intimate as care. But at the moment, and this is a question for all of your listeners every now and again I do a kind of exercise just trying to find out if I, as an ordinary citizen can find out what’s going on in my area, what’s happening to energy, what’s happening to food, what’s happening to health. And although we think of ourselves as living in a data rich, transparent world, it’s incredibly hard to get that most basic data about the flows of essential things in your area. And in the case of energy, the simple reason is that it’s proprietary to the electricity company. They own the data in my smart meter. I don’t own it. I can’t access it, I can’t share it with my neighbors. So this is again where we need legal changes, changes to rights and new institutions as well as then a system shift in terms of how our energy is organized. And at the moment we’ve got these barriers because we’re stuck essentially in 20th century corporate models as well as 20th century legal and regulatory models.

Simone Cicero:

You nailed the point here when you say we’re stuck into some existing models but I believe that we are stuck on those because they are legible. One thing that we are struggling recently is this idea that it seems like on the future of organizing and institutional development we are going to deal a lot more with systems for which we need many more architects, let’s say. And this is, I think, also one of the keys of your work, right, creating the practice of organizational architecture because we need more architects to jump in, more people to play this role. And at the same time, I think the incentives, let’s say, are not clear because it seems like the systems we have to build the architect, we’ll have to design it and kickstart it. And bootstrapping it. But then there’s no place for them to extract value like in the corporate, traditional capitalistic, corporate approach. They are just supposed to be a participant after the system is created. How do you deal with this radically different change of perspective? And at the same time, how do we ensure coherence at a systemic level? Because maybe to make this possible, we need, for example, somebody to step in. It could be a public body, it could be some kind of player that makes it enables these architectures, these architects to step in and design for participation. What do you think about it?

Geoff Mulgan:

Yeah, I think there’s two or three different things in there. So the first one, in a way, probably the starting point for this conversation is if you are, let’s say, a city wanting to design institutions to help you get to Net Zero or manage your future transport or energy or care, who do you turn to for advice? It’s not obvious at the moment where you get the right expertise. And that’s the kind of the missing field so often their default to setting up a committee or getting big consultancies. But what comes out of that is often very suboptimal. You then need your architects to be working with the grain, with the reality, with the communities, and they have to be paid to do that as they’re doing the physical architecture of a new landscape design or a new school. So I don’t see a big difference there. There is commercial, there’s payment to be made for specialized expertise in institutional design just as there is in physical design. And then, as you say, you’ve got to try and ensure at least some coherence, maybe not too much coherence. Again, there’s an analogy with physical architecture. Some places have very strict planning rules on what color the roof should be and the windows and so on. And others, like London, where I am at the moment, has always had a pretty much anything goes approach to physical architecture. It’s a mess, but it kind of works as a mess. But I think this is where mutual transparency becomes a key part to enable some coherence and alignment. And going back to the examples like energy at the moment, because all of that data is secret, because there is no transparency on food flows, energy flows and not much on transport flows, it’s hard for the system to coordinate itself. So I think we need a shift in terms of rules on transparency and then we will need light touch, public organizations and authorities which do take a system’s view, which can see the interconnections, the contradictions and can help nudge systems to resolve them. This will be absolutely vital in this decade as part of net zero plans. It’s a missing piece pretty much everywhere. It’s the institutional capacity to play the kind of role you described. And one of the things I do in my work is training for officials in governments and cities and so on, essentially on how to think and act at a systems level rather than just in a linear sort of policy and legal way.

Stina Heikkila:

You have just published a new book which is about new ways to imagine the future in politics and in social organization. And do you see that link to the conversation that we are having now? And do you have a call to action regarding the key messages of your book?

Geoff Mulgan:

So the prompt for the book was really asking lots and lots of people, which began with talking to Friday’s school strike teenagers a couple of years ago, is most of us find it very easy to picture ecological disaster in the future, and many people at least have some sense of technological possibilities of AI and robots and drones and so on. But if you ask people to imagine or describe their welfare state, their health system, democracy a generation or so from now, they find it very, very difficult. And my argument is we’ve lost this capacity of social and political imagination. We need to regain it. And my book is full of methods you can use and was any level to prompt creativity, imagination, more radical, more fundamental ideas, many of which are in line with what we’ve been just talking about now. And what I’m trying to do with the book is then encourage philanthropic foundations, cities, universities and others to create new places, new capacities for doing this sort of work. So what would a really zero waste economy actually look like? What would the organizations, the tax, the regulation, et cetera? What would a future of really empowered elder care look like? And getting that sort of detailed design work done seems to me essential if we’re not going to be really fatalistic about the future and victims of the future we don’t really want.

Simone Cicero:

I wanted to ask you if you can add some of what we call the breadcrumbs. So anything that maybe you want to share with our listeners to complement the things that you share in this conversation and bring more inspiration for them to move on and engage with these questions.

Geoff Mulgan:

Well, what one little set of breadcrumbs, which I’ve been trying to encourage as well, are museums of the future. So we have thousands of museums of the past and I love many of them. We’re beginning to see the creation of museums of the future. And there’s one launched in Dubai this year. There’s one in Rio, Barcelona, Berlin have small ones, so I would encourage you to check them out, but also maybe feedback to them what you think would be a fantastic museum experience where, let’s say, a 14 year old would go and come away with a flavor of what their world could be like 40, 60, 80 years into the future. What might be the objects which would prompt a different way of thinking as well as the software and the tools and the VR experiences, I think these could be wonderful institutions for our imminent future to help us better shape our longer term future.

Simone Cicero:

I think one very interesting point that you raise is this question about data and transparency. And I wanted to complement this by bringing two perspectives on data and one is Nora Bateson’s approach to warm data, what she calls warm data. So this idea that data alone is not enough. We have to socialize them, we have to look at them through complex lens and sometimes it is complexity lens goes through relationships. Another piece of work that maybe I wanted to bring up is the work of Salvatore Iaconesi that recently passed and his work on what he used to call data meditations. Right? So ways for data to be presented in ways that we can empathize with things that we can feel about data. And I think this is going to be a massively important point if we really want to generate this motivation for hoards of organization and institutional architects to engage with kind of acting on top of what the data is telling us, what we have to put in place.

Geoff Mulgan:

Maybe I could just say one thing on this. So the reason I work a lot in the field of collective intelligence, I’ve written a book on it and I’m involved in many projects, is nearly all the things we’ve been talking about today. The future designs have to be some combination of mobilizing human intelligence and experience and feelings and love and care, as well as machine intelligence and data. And much of the really exciting innovation is on the boundaries of AI and CI in that sense. We have a new academic journal just launched on this a couple of months ago with biologists and physicists and economists and so on. And I think it will be absolutely conventional wisdom in ten years time that everything important has to be of some synergy of human and machine, collective and artificial. But at the moment this isn’t widely understood and a lot of errors are being made by data tools and computational tools which ignore the human dimension of this and therefore don’t quite work in human terms.

Stina Heikkila:

Thank you. And yeah, I think that is something that we’ve touched upon before, that the machine thesis and the human development thesis are they have different rates and different pace as well. So we need to reconcile that somehow.

Geoff Mulgan:

Exactly.

Stina Heikkila:

So thank you so much for your time for joining us on the podcast. This was really great and bringing also some level of order to our thinking around those different ideas for our listeners. You can find all the references that we have been mentioning in this conversation on our website so boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. You will find Geoff Mulgan’s episode there and you will find all the links.

Geoff Mulgan:

Thank you very much. Yeah, great conversation. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

Stina Heikkila:

So, again, thank you very much. And to our listeners, remember to think boundaryless.