This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Okay. Hello everyone. Tonight I’m here with my usual co-host Stina. And we are so pleased to have with us tonight — because we are recording on an overnight time slot — tonight there is Lisa from Canada, at the moment if I’m not wrong, right Lisa?

Lisa Gansky:
Yes, today I’m Canadian, yeah.

Simone Cicero:
So thank you very much, Lisa. And you are in Canada actually because we are into this mess, you know, this crazy Corona crisis and, you know, some are in lockdown, some are stuck somewhere like you, but what i wanted to use as an introduction for this conversation is really this idea that, again, we are into a crisis. And this time it is not just that the monsters are only the small ones — you know, because it is not just a very small virus — it’s also about what we could see in society these days, because we are living this age of where the old — Michel Bauwens a few weeks ago made us remember that — the old is going so fast and the new is not yet there. And quoting Gramsci, Michel said, “this could be the age of monsters”, you know, the moment of monsters. So how do you feel about that?

Lisa Gansky:
Well, Michel, who I adore and look forward to maybe having a conversation with all of us one day. I feel that “yes”, and I want to just say thank you very much to you and Stina for inviting me and for sharing your late evening. Here it’s late afternoon, but you’re after dinner so thanks very much. With respect to where we are in the world in the midst of a crisis, for me I think we are seeing something rather extraordinary. It looks extraordinary to us. But what I think is that we are in this very unusual moment for humans. Maybe it’s becoming more familiar to us, but I think also it’s something that we should treasure. Because we’re in this inflection point between “no more” and “not yet”. That the world as we knew it, what we depended on, what we trusted, who we trusted: institutions, governance, governments, currencies, safety. All of these things are fundamentally built into the invisible and built into our society, into our culture and part of who we are, and how we see our world. And for now, depending on when your personal clock started on this, it could be a decade or more that we start to see that the institutions that were once so powerful are weakening and/or crumbling. And that basically from the 20th century, a lot of the philosophy and notion was that this is a top-down structure. It’s very Cartesian as an approach and that we as humans are going to shape nature around production systems, around building cities and basically making the world work for us, as humans. I think in the “not yet” side, the part that we can see if we squint, many of us can anticipate how we can see these things coming together, whether they’re systems of trust decentralised like blockchain, clusters or collectives of people or ecosystems or teams coordinating and curious in interesting ways, collaboration with nature rather than having to try to overcome nature. We are seeing that, for me anyway, it looks like in the 21st century, our biggest challenge is: Nature is trying to shape us. And if we look at climate or something like a pandemic we’re seeing that, our will doesn’t just get manifest “because”. So I think we’re in a moment in time where we could either work together. I see, when I put a special kind of glasses on, I can see the world lineup where there’s a group of characters who are working really hard to Velcro together the “no more” and there’s a whole other group of us that are working to bring forward, to create a language around new metrics and to shape and realise the “not yet”. So a lot of how I’ve been thinking and the teams that we’ve been working with, within and around Boundaryless, has been looking at how value is being created in these kinds of almost uncoordinated — very organic in the way that they emerge — kinds of teams and structures. It’s going against a lot of the bureaucratic, very top down, “ready, aim, aim, aim, aim” kind of military model that was the 20th century. I think that we are in this — a year ago it looked much smaller — but I think we’re in a giant chasm between the “no more” and “not yet”, and we need to make a leap pretty quickly. So I’m very keen Simone to have the conversation with you because part of the work that has been happening around the PDT — platform design toolkit — and the teams and systems that have been discussed and articulated is really looking at — whether it’s the UN or corporations or startups or communities — trying to understand how we build trust and value and make risk visible in a world that’s changing so quickly.

Simone Cicero:
Well, one question that came to my mind while you were doing this quick first reflection is essentially the idea that, can the “no more” create the “not yet”? Can this bridge between the “no more” and “not yet” happen inside existing institutions? Inside existing markets? A few weeks ago talking with John Robb, he pointed us to this TIMN framework that we are using more often in conversations, in which basically David Ronfeldt made the point that essentially these evolutions between stages of civilization kind of layered on top of each other. And another contributor in our community made the parallel with Spiral Dynamics. My question is, how in practical terms, how is an existing incumbent organisation — if you see this possible — going to explore this “not yet” and somehow enable this organising as part of its way of being a brand and organisation? And that’s probably one of the key things we need to ask now. How does an existing organisation embody this new “not yet” way of organising?

Lisa Gansky:
I would say that probably 10 years or more ago I would have been extremely optimistic about the “not yet” being able to do both things at the same time: fix the old enough so that it continues to function and at the same time create new. There’s a Israeli researcher from years ago named Ichak Adizes who created a corporate life cycle and it’s just just a Gaussian curve — normal life cycle bell curve — but basically on the left side when you start off the life cycle and it’s birth, all the way to the other side of death, if you run a vertical line up the middle of the chart, at the peak of the curve everything to the left side of the line is value creation. And everything to the right side of the line is value captured. And what’s happened is, if you look at any of the stock exchanges or the way in which capitalism has come to work or not work, but function, is essentially that there’s an optimization of capturing value and the risk associated with creating value has kind of been skewed. So we have the companies that are the largest corporations and the largest market caps on the stock exchanges globally, are companies that in many instances haven’t actually innovated in a very long time, but they are just squeezing juice from the fruit. So a real example that I have is: years ago, we started a digital photography company and sold it to Kodak and I ran digital photography in Kodak. The chairman and CEO of the company at the time, a lovely human, and a really bright man named Dan Karp. He was what Kodak used to say about someone who had been at the company for a long time: “he bleeds yellow” because he was so into the company. Dan definitely bled yellow and he used to say to me “what’s the slope of the line?” Which was code for how far, how quickly do you think film is going to fall off before digital picks up. They really were wanting to speculate a lot about the slope of the line of that curve. And I would always take his hand and make it vertical and basically say “it’s going to freefall”; that as soon as people start to really be able to inexpensively acquire digital photographs and figure out how distribution on digital happens, that the cost of film goes to zero, right? That basically you can take infinite number theoretically of photos with your digital camera, whereas Kodak made all of its money on the film side. So, what does that mean? It means that from fixing the old Kodak invented the digital camera, they owned all of the intellectual property for digital capture. They could have easily been the leader, but for one thing, and it’s kind of what I think happens to a lot of large corporations that have so much profit margin in a very, very ancient business model is basically: they have a mature business model. They have beat their old competition, but they don’t see the new competitors coming and they basically are looking at profit margin as the only relevant metric. So they would turn down many, many ideas for new work, for new products, for new markets, that we would bring to them simply because the margins weren’t like what I refer to like “the Colombian drug lord margin” of like 85 or 90% that they made on film. And I think that that phenomenon — whether in banks or manufacturer or retailers — It’s very, very difficult for a big company, especially if the company is public, to try to maintain the “there’s nothing to see here we’re doing fine” kind of mantra so that they don’t lose their shareholders whilst building a whole new “not yet” model. I think that if established brands or established platforms or companies are going to be at all effective in doing the “not yet” side of things, it has to come through a highly diverse decentralised collection of ecosystems that allow them — and a culture — that allow them to invite and shape and support to whatever extent is necessary new ideas, new kinds of talent and new models that are actually going to end up competing with whatever they’ve been doing. And I think that the hardest part of all of that is culture. Culture is the great amplifier from a network effect perspective, you know, if you have a culture that is open and generous and curious, and reaches out, and that’s the sort of mood that people are in and that’s the orientation that you find companies in like Gordon and Associates comes to mind, or even Dyson, or you know. There’s a number of companies that I can think of like Arvind Institute which is an AI Institute in India, there’s a clear mission, there’s an orientation -Patagonia, you know — that are looking at, you know, “here’s our mission, these are our questions. We don’t really care where the next big ideas come from, we’re going to accelerate moving the world into solar or creating platforms that are equitable, or bringing awareness to the environment through waking people up about the clothes they wear, and the food they eat”. And those kinds of companies embrace diversity and ecosystems and curiosity. But bureaucracy… I know Simone that you’ve worked recently with Haier, it’s very rare to find a large corporation that’s able to maintain their existing models and systems and infrastructure and teams and culture whilst also trying to accelerate and shape the “not yet”. And so I guess that’s a very long winded way of saying I’m very sceptical now that the culture that’s required on the mature business side — when you’re squeezing juice from the fruit — is a very different kind of culture than the one that invites curiosity and provocation and experimentation and the things that are necessary to make our future, to pull the future forward.

Simone Cicero:
So Lisa, maybe that the ecosystem is this bridge? So basing on a reflection of what you were just sharing: it looks like this idea that the industrial organisation cannot invent this future — I don’t want to say the future because somehow otherwise we’re going to just self perpetuated this idea of future that brought us here — but it looks like the industry organisation cannot really imagine this future that is “not yet” here. So, maybe using ecosystems is this bridge between the “no more” than “not yet”. Of course we know the ecosystems drive different innovations, for sure they are “future sensing engines”. But my question is: is the ecosystem changing fast enough to inspire a new insttution to create a new type of enabling institution? Because sometimes my impression in working within ecosystems, especially entrepreneurial ecosystems that are for example citizen-led, is that there is such a huge gap between the skills, capabilities and potential in the ecosystem. Sometimes it looks like the gap is not just on the institutional side but also on the ecosystem side, in the entrepreneurs side; it’s a gap that is educational, it’s epistemological. So if the ecosystems are going to ask to the institutions to change and transform, from where are they leading? Where are they going, from your point of view?

Lisa Gansky:
I might ask you to rephrase the final question, but I think what you’re pointing to is the idea that we choose people around us, the ecosystems that are around any of us, are insufficient for making the transformation. That’s my conclusion from what I think you’re asking, which is that corporations that have a lot of assets, that have accumulated a lot of assets and appear to have a lot of value, confuse value with assets and accumulation. I think that the agility and the adaptability and the engine for innovation and change, the engine for learning. Because that’s the punchline, right? If the world’s changing faster than we can learn, then the key to everything is how fast can we learn. How would I organise my sphere of influence, my life and my work if my goal was to really immerse myself in the right kinds of questions and surround myself with the right kinds of people to learn. And if I do that at the level of community or a company, or mission, then that starts to answer the question of “how would we shape ourselves?” How would we navigate to discover new kinds of people, interesting conversations, new and better questions? And to me the root of a lot of that.. I want to just talk for a second about fear, because I think that what I’ve seen and also certainly what I feel, being one of the Earthlings as well, is essentially that when we’re confronted with the “holy shit” moment — things just like us, at some point, you know, I’m coming to meetings in Montreal on my way to Italy, and end up in Canada probably for a year, who knows how long I’ll be here. It’s lovely and the Canadians couldn’t be any nicer, and I feel really lucky to be here. But it’s a surprise. And it wasn’t part of a plan and it comes from sort of a realisation and saying ”Wow, the world’s literally changing fast”. It’s no longer a great idea to get on a plane and do these things. I’m going to just stay where I am. The choices are like we could either move to: we don’t know what’s going to happen next — like, wow, that’s really interesting, I’m going to talk to people, read some things, you know, be curious. Or I’m gonna be like: “holy crap”. This isn’t what I want. I don’t know what to do. Things are terrible. And shrink down, continue to shrink down. So fear is a closing off emotion that makes us feel that we’re basically being threatened. And curiosity is the opposite, it opens us up, and the thing that you’re asking, I feel is the piece about empathy which is basically saying that: if I grow my ecosystem out of fear or curiosity from where I am and who I am — from a tribal perspective — I’m going to continue to grow from, you and Stina introduced me to people who, you know, introduced me to people that they know. And maybe five or six layers out I start to have my reality shaken, but for the most part, if we just go within those kinds of spheres at a kind of normal exploratory process, I don’t know that necessarily I’m going to build the kind of very agile collection of ecosystems or immerse myself in the right kinds of conversations. Diversity is kind of what’s necessary to learn: the more shocking to my social reality, the more likely I am to have to lean in and say: “what do you mean by that? Or how does that work? Why do you distribute land in that way? What do you mean no one holds the title to the land? Well, how do you then distribute value? Well, who does the work?” And you start asking a lot of questions, then suddenly, I’m deeply into a whole other conversation when I look at indigenous communities or a cooperative structure versus, you know, a kind of listed on the stock exchange 100 year old Corporation. So I feel like I agree with you — I think you were making the point that the ecosystem is the bridge from the “no more” to the “not yet” — but I think whether we find ourselves in the community of people who are trying to, as somebody who has been in the “not yet” most of my life and career, I would just say there’s a level of kind of B.S. about that also, which is that even though I feel I reach out in extraordinary ways, I realised when things like this happen in the world that I haven’t reached out enough. That there are whole levels of society and communities and challenges and realities that are completely foreign to me. So I think that a big part of the business of building resilience or learning and agility is really the empathy of understanding how to listen to each other when we don’t understand any of the words. And I don’t mean English, Italian, Finnish, I’m talking about the ontology underneath what’s driving our point of view.

What’s clear is that we have “no more” and “not yet”. We have in each of those very different what I call social operating systems, cultures, ways of seeing things, and that I have yet to see an example of the “no more” that has also been the birthplace for the “not yet” in a way that is profound and sustains. And so even though I would be hopeful that the “no more” could be the birthplace of the “not yet” it looks like that actually doesn’t happen or has happened in real life. And then, with respect to, I would say, the idea of ecosystems and learning engines, the speed with which change is happening and the vastness with which change is happening both, you know, like biological mutations as well as, like, I hate to use this, but the Covid virus is a very, very powerful, and very effective as a virus. It’s very successful as a virus. And one of the things I’ve been asking myself is: how do we learn from that in terms of how do we become successful in that way, as in being able to, I mean, in a way like capitalism and humans have been able to spread different sorts of memes or ideas and have impact right now, because we’re dealing with one a pandemic and two climate change, with the opportunity to make the world, really make our world in sort of a hopefully a more regenerative and balanced, equal way. You know, we we can we can ask a lot of questions about who we need to bring into the mix to have those interactions but, but the reality, I guess, is that a lot of the power, the historical power, which is largely bound up in infrastructure lives in the “no more” and the power of the “not yet” is really the kind of the power of ingenuity and innovation and agility and learning, you know, fundamentally. And so I guess that’s where Stina, because you’ve worked with OECD and the UN and organisations that have been, you know, working in local and global ways. But have you — and don’t perceive metrics as economic, though economic is a portion of it, there’s there’s a very different perspective that’s taken about what effective action or success looks like, and who the customer or the constituents are — so I’m just curious when we start thinking about empathy and and vast ecosystems and trust across communities and cultures. You know, what have you seen in your work?

Stina Heikkila:
I was actually thinking, as we spoke about some recent reflections that we’ve had in our research and is a little bit about that idea of the fact that the communication structure of an organisation also sort of mirrors the way that it’s organised in a way. And as you were speaking, I was thinking about those — the big institutions like you mentioned — and how they are now suddenly forced to start to communicate and work in a very different way because of, you know, the restrictions that are being put on people’s movements. And suddenly you see this very interesting, almost shift in the way that things are being organised because of these new kind of ways of remote work and communication. So I guess what, what is interesting here from my perspective — and then I don’t know what you think about it — is that you think about this world of “no more” and “not yet”, like you were mentioning, and my question then in that context will be: could this have an impact on making that link between “no more” and “not yet”? Making these organisations that might have been put in place to actually serve a public good, to actually work in new ways that might be more efficient or more apt to actually face the kind of challenges that are ahead of us? So that’s maybe one reflection that I throw back from that, because I think when you talk about like connecting communities and having impact, I think that’s sort of a way that I see it. Probably in the sort of industrial model — where things have been very siloed and very sort of not systemic in the way of working — this might actually be a chance to rework some of the bolts and nuts of these organisations to actually make them more fit for purpose.

Lisa Gansky 6:35
Yeah, I mean, the organizations have, like you’re saying, I mean, I think a lot of these public good organisations that have existed at a global scale have been very slow and, you know, they have all they have all the bureaucracy and they have the downside of big corporations. Without the upside right in many cases and I think maybe if these organisations are effective at operating as, you know, kind of constellations of communities and local communities able to see each other and collaborate in more, you know, ad hoc ways, that gives the organisation a lot more — that gives the platform that the organisation maybe uses or or supports contributes to — a lot more capacity than the sort of one-headed monster, you know, 20th century one-headed monster that’s very klutzy and and laggardly. I mean, in many ways the ego and culture shape how organisations are structured but also how they operate, you know. And if there’s a community of peers, rather than, you know, “he’s the boss of him who’s the boss of her who’s” you know, up a chain. It’s a fundamentally different way to create and to test and to distribute ideas or solutions. If we think about, you know, when Simone was asking just about the question of how do we get from “no more” to “not yet” and is there a bridge, you know, can a company do that? Maybe it’s more sort of like a zip line, you know, where you have to… the kind of culture that’s required to be “not yet” is the antithesis of the culture for “no more” sorry, revert or the same, it’s the same thing. But the culture that works in one doesn’t work in the other. And so I think that what’s, I guess, for us right now the the most interesting thing to talk about or to try to solve for is: how do we, how can we — ourselves — act in ways within our communities and people we can connect to and engage with us — how do we bring the “not yet” forward in a way that that provides confidence, you know, trust and some level of peace. It’s not going to be like the fantasy that, you know, we understand what our future looks like. I mean, I don’t think that that will happen. But I think there’s a way for calling forward the people who are have been building experiments and playing with models and working with large companies or organisations and startups and, you know, whatever at whatever level there’s we have to find, like the mechanism that allows for us to understand how we’re how we go forward from here. Because we can’t unsee that the pandemic is possible and it could, you know, bring our cities and our companies and our economies and our healthcare systems to a halt. You know, we can’t not see it once we saw it. And it’s sort of now that we saw it, what do we do about it?

Stina Heikkila 10:55
Yeah, I mean we had some conversations with people like Michel Bauwens and Tomas Diez and of course, we talked about this global-local kind of interplay, and maybe what new kind of institutions — or maybe I don’t know if we’re even right to call it institutions — but the ways of organising that we are very interested in, right? Like, so you can connect to a global knowledge sphere and then have production of goods and the things that you need at the very local scale. So I think, I guess it’s something that you’re getting at here. So you can have a community of peers and that could actually be in the virtual space, whereas you also need this really going to the hyperlocal connection and really connecting not only with people, but also to the land and to the customs and the culture… in place.

Lisa Gansky 11:58
Yeah, I think that’s the dance that we have: that we have the capacity because the interdependence is clear, you know: we’re connected. Whether we like it or not, whether we understand it or accept it. The fact is that, you know, biology connects us everywhere in the world. And so, you know, these kinds of… that’s why I say, you know, biology or nature is shaping us in the 21st century and the fantasy that we’re shaping it, I think even with synthetic biology and other things it’s… you know, one of my favourite quotes is “nature bats last” that the reality is,you know, we can have whatever fantasy we want but in the end, you know, we’re living on this planet. So the game I think is really like you said, we live at a local level. And we have a physical, social — even socially distant or otherwise — a social relationship with people as a physical space. And then in the virtual space, you know, there, there’s the opportunity — whether it’s like a political that has a global platform connecting public servants all over the world — and there’s communities of people who are operating with policy and different programmes in South Africa or Canada or Italy and Chile, who are, you know, sharing their experiences and their data and stories and building trusted relationships to collaborate and learn in ways that will hopefully benefit not only their communities but all of us. And I think that’s the, you know, that’s sort of the little dance. There’s a thing that’s happening with respect to, like a lot of the work that we’ve done in the last 10-ish years is around trust and empathy is one of those things where we trust people like us. And people who aren’t like us, you know, are harder to trust because we don’t actually fully understand them, which is where the leaning in on empathy has to come from. Because like saying “we” is a kind of a declaration of trust. If “we are we”, then we’re all bumped into the same, you know, bunched into the same bucket. If it’s “them” it’s a declaration of like, “I don’t care about them” or “they’re not me”, or “they’re not us” or they’re, you know, they’re different somehow. And I feel like the learning that what drives learning is friction is, you know, like startup as a, as an entrepreneur, you You always say, or believe that if you’re not breaking things, if you’re not falling, if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not innovating, you know, you’re not really doing something new you’re doing something you understand if there’s no mistakes being made. And so I think the same is true, which is if we’re only talking to people that already agree with us, there’s really no learning. And so, whether we’re a company or a community or the three of us, you know, we have to be like pathologically committed to continuing to find the edges of our comfort level. You know, otherwise the learning doesn’t happen. And how we do that like as an ecosystem and as a scaling thing like, if we go back to “not yet”. For me “not yet” is: we have a bunch of ideas and there’s, you know, you you two have been doing these podcasts with very lovely bright people who have been working for decades on a variety of ideas and platforms and philosophies and we just saw, you know, Marc Andreessen and other people like very focused on, “okay, this is time for building”. And I agree it is time for building. It’s, you know, between “no more” and “not yet” is kind of the innovators dream. it’s not the innovators dilemma, you know, and I think that it’s a crisis, it’s a scary time, but it’s an opportunity to actually accelerate something that we believe, you know, it’s that it’s time for something new that it’s time for something more… Simone go ahead, you were going to say?

Simone Cicero:
Well, I mean, this conversation was so generative so it’s really hard to focus only on one of the points that brought to my mind and understanding that just as a starting point, but I think that I was thinking when when we was speaking that: first of all we spoke about the idea of working in new ways and how these new ways of working are gonna probably create different kinds of organisations, you spoke about ego, for example. And I was thinking about Bonnita Roy’s work on collective intelligence practice and teams and really, this idea of creating these organisations as places where these collective and learning can really happen. So at the end of the day is about building new institutions. So the question is, you know, in a world where the small, the individual powered by platforms is becoming more and more important, and so the question is: what makes the case for an institution? And most likely, I think this new institution that we cannot describe yet we need to build, you know, as Marc Andreessen said. It’s not just about big companies, it’s really about building these institutions. And they also need to be able to interoperate with the technosphere that we have now because — you brought onto the topic that is the pandemic now — so we also need to be able to deal with that. So how is this new technosphere? I think this is the question that we have now on the table, so I was gonna be like, is it gonna be like, more just more local or more resilient? Because I think if we believe that we can build a new technosphere a new way of organising globally and just, you know, trying to be more resilient is like, you know, betting that we can beat nature of being exponential. And so, therefore, maybe we need some epistemically different framing of why we organise. And Stina was talking about this idea to re-embed organising in the landscape and in the community, that is one of the topics that we also discuss in the past.

Lisa Gansky:
Yes, I mean, I think that the other question, you know, and both of you are having a lot of these discussions with people you have on the show is just: Are institutions necessary? Will there be institutions or, you know, is there… in order to have the governance that will kind of be the gating body or something — coordinating body — you know, are institutions necessary with with widely distributed… because the infrastructure, you know, the infrastructure is has the potential of creating a different kind of trust, in theory. I’m not proposing this, I’m not convinced of this, I’m just asking the question that, you know, I think yes. For example, like people who listen to your podcast are in the middle of watching their organisations be rethought. You know, a lot of companies, a lot of organisations are trying to figure out, like Stina referenced, you know, their people are working from home that’s changed the model in a lot of people’s minds. I’ve worked from home for a long time and so probably have both of you but most of the world hasn’t. So, you know, the value of real estate, the way people think about cities, the way companies think about the built environment and the way that they monitor, manage, oversee performance and work — many things change. If we are able to make the shift to distributed work as a function of responding to the current crisis, you know, doesn’t that change the way that we think about work organisations, the value of cities? Like I mean a lot of different aspects of our existence are in flux. So I’m just making the comment that I think the “not yet” relates to effectively infrastructure and institutional — or kind of a understanding of trust — whether that’s around, and particularly around, risk and value, you know.

Simone Cicero:
Lisa can I be provocative.

Lisa Gansky:
Please, I wish you would.

Simone Cicero 22:39
Because this looks like you know, I was listening to Zizek few days ago and it was talking about some kind of… identifying the Covid-19 as a moment where, you know, capitalism cannot proceed as it is, you know. Now it has two options: one is to become a neoliberal surveillance fascism, basically. And on the other hand, some kind of rational communism, let’s say, and what you’re talking about, you know, sometimes it reminds me this idea that Chinese government is trying to apply at scale of this social techno, technologically powered network that where everybody’s connected and everybody’s identified and trusted on the basis of real data in a collectivist vision. So what can we maybe learn from looking at China, for example, as maybe a harbinger of things to come in how we organise at scale if we want to keep modernity, I guess. Because sometimes, you know, the other options look like we just need to get rid of modernity and look for something else, because I don’t see how we can get stuck in a modern digitalized connected civilization and not deal with the need to maintain a certain coherence, like the Chinese are doing.

Lisa Gansky:
Yeah, so you’re saying that if you go down the techno path, you basically trade liberty for security — under the guise of security — and you use data and surveillance as a way to manage a society.

Simone Cicero:
Not just, you know — I want to add a nuance because I think it’s important — that it’s not just trading liberty, it is trading a certain worldview, maybe, that is less systemic than the Asian cultures worldview that makes that kind of society possible. And also another thing that of course, we need to keep in mind in the difference that between us Western societies and Chinese is that in China social media, the age of social media, so this explosion of exponential technology happening inside an existing political structure that could somehow make sense of the technology. And in the West, instead, we had this explosion, exponential technological explosion, you know, with political systems that of course, you know, they weren’t ready to, you know, to comply with it. I don’t know how to say, but they were clearly not adequate.

Lisa Gansky:
But also those examples are very culturally, you know, this goes back to the comment that the cultures are shaping what’s possible, right? That like the US sees everything as, you know, we’re individuals and sort of like “leave me alone I can do whatever I want”. So telling people that they have to abide by certain rules is for some people automatically perceived as like “you’re doing something that is against the fundamental aspect of being American”. The Chinese are basically looking at kind of “it’s for the greater good of China and we act this way because that’s kind of what we believe at a societal level”. The technology has the right to support that. In the UK or in Europe, you know, like a lot of the these tracker apps around Covid have been thought to, it’s looked at from the point of view of privacy, not taking away Liberty as in the US and not part of the better social good, like in Asia. So I mean, not all of Asia, but China in particular. And I just have been watching how, like, so I guess one of the challenges and one of the things I’ve been listening to people and reading and talking and observing over the years is just: how do we create, you know, global trans-cultural standards, at the same time respecting the biases of the cultures that are inherently different and will hopefully maintain that diversity? No, it’s not trying to make everything follow one solution. I mean, going back to your original, because I’ve taken us down a crazy path. But, you know, going back to your original conversation and question about: what does this mean for organisations? And how do, you know, from my view: how are we moving from the “no more” to “not yet”? You know, I’m really curious how do we accelerate the “not yet”, you know, what’s the mechanism by which… and if we look at history — you know, when there were other circumstances like this, where there was a break, anticipated break and a visceral economic break in the game in progress. It was an opportunity for something else to take hold. And so, you know, I think that we’re at that moment, which is why I’m saying it’s the innovators dream at some level, although at some level it’s a nightmare. But it’s creating a kind of, you know, opportunistic moment. And we know that it requires collaboration and so I’m saying, you know, I mean there’s a way to do it from an autocratic culture that says: “this is the way it’s going to be”. But in a more, you know, decentralised, open, let’s say, not so tightly coordinated society, it works in a really different way. And so in the West, I mean, does it mean that we’re the last ones that get the joke or? You know, is it possible to start to create coalitions between companies and governments and communities that actively begin to shape the scaffolding around the “not yet” realising that, you know, this is the opportunity to actually help shape the future?

Simone Cicero:
Lisa, can this happen inside the corporation? Can it happen inside the model of organisation that is based on the modern corporate, as we know it? Or we really need a completely different way of showing up and in the world, you know, interacting.

Lisa Gansky 30:26
I mean, it depends in my mind, it depends on what it is. I think that you know, when you were talking my first reaction is if it’s a publicly traded corporation, I think it’s very difficult because the — although again, now that the stock market is you know, more than wobbly and, and nobody will can be held, you know, no CEO or Board of Directors can necessarily be accused of creating the problem right, they’re responding — so, the opportunity in this kind of moment for a corporation is actually: we either take our assets and try to protect the part that we know, the thing that’s generating or used to generate a lot of revenue, like in a bank, you know, there’s opportunities to to protect the revenue models that are, you know, the favourites from the last 20 years. Or, there’s an opportunity to basically say, you know “let’s, let’s start to titrate a lot of whatever value we can rescue from there and invest it into partnerships or businesses that we know we need to be in”, you know, based on where the world is pointed. And it’s really a matter of, you know, are you trying to — and if you’re a publicly held company, I mean in a traditional in a normal circumstance, you know, quarterly reports and all of that drive the bus — but in this circumstance, it’s like I said, I mean there’s a few companies and few sectors that will do well, or, yeah, and probably will actually do well, in this instance. But everybody else is going to, is going to suffer pretty enormously. And so for example, taking a bank, you know, looking at banks and insurance companies, like, how much did the fact that this happened and the pandemic and the consequences that it’s had on the world thus far — and we don’t know what it will have, ultimately — you know, how will they perceive risk into the future? And what will that mean about what business they’re in or who they perceive as, as viable clients and not or as partners or not? And how will they build their networks and infrastructure and ecosystem, or do they just go away and something else takes its place? Like if insurance companies don’t want to deal anymore with certain kinds of issues and start writing pandemics and climate change out of all their policies, pretty soon the value of having the policy becomes zero. So then, you know, it’s like, in the old days in the shipping industry, where three or four shipping captains got together in England and created RSA, an insurance company that basically was the four shipping captains, you know, kind of self-insured and created a little association between each other. And then when the London fire happened, they decided that they would extend that model to others. So in, you know, insurance companies are interesting historically in the sense that they started off being mostly mutuals, or cooperatives, and over time have changed. Maybe it’s like you said, like I think there’s a cocktail here between modernity using tools and technology and our connectedness, but also linking to the understanding that if everyone contributes to value creation, but not everyone shares in capturing the value, then we have, you know, an unequal society from the start. And so there are really interesting ways to look at the “not yet” and to thoughtfully together test and build models that feel that we’re leveraging the tools we have, but we’re not disregarding each other. I don’t know. I mean, I’m more full of questions than answers.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, I feel like you know sometimes it’s like this crisis — in general the Coronavirus, but I would also say climate change, of which Coronavirus is probably an interdependent manifestation let’s say — it asks us to respond to so many levels that it becomes overwhelming. You know, you need to respond at the level of epistemological frames. You need to respond at the level of how you behave and you show up in the world, in your family, with your kids, with your friends with your colleagues and so on. How you communicate and also at the level you organise, at the level how you think about finance. We need to think about all these layers that makes it quite overwhelming. So that’s my feeling sometimes these days, but then Stina maybe you can close with your reflection that we were sharing before the call.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah. And I think that that resonates well with what you just said. And I was. I just thought about this — we’ve been exploring a little bit this initiative of Reporting 3.0 — and I think that kind of resonates with this “not yet” new kind of models that are acknowledging that even if we’ve gone to some extent toward something that is not only looking after shareholder interest — there are other models that go more towards the stakeholder capitalism and so on — but it’s more or less everything in the same mix. And I think what really needs to be pushed is that idea of, like you were mentioning, regeneration: you need to add something back and create a better society, it’s not enough to sustain or to restore and I think that’s sort of, I see that as a horizon that we’ve touched upon a lot in this conversation and it seems like that’s some promise that lies ahead. And what Simone was referring to was that, again, looking a little bit back in time, and I saw one of your slides that you had brought to one of the Ouishare fests — where we have also been involved in the past — and it said that “innovation can only be possible if you’re optimistic”. So I think that’s something that I felt in this conversation, that it shines through and I don’t know if you want to give any closing remarks on that to round up.

Lisa Gansky:
Well, I mean, I have to confess I have been drinking more since all this happened, so… But yes I think, Stina, I do think that if you see the world — we see the world — from a place of making it better, being open and being humbled by, you know, the complexity. But it can be like Simone said, very overwhelming. So for me, I’ve tried to practice, you know, growing where I’m planted, like start from where I am. And so I’m in, you know, I find myself in Canada, I’m learning I’m learning to speak Canadian, ‘ey! And I’m, you know, can’t really meet people but observing the world from here and it’s actually quite interesting. Weirdly I’m literally across the lake from where Kodak used to be — so that’s kind of weird and funny — but yeah I think the idea of growing where we’re planted because where we — and it goes back to your comment about the local reality — we are interdependent and we are all connected. And the challenges that we have are systemic, global challenges. But we have to start where we are, you know, and grow where we’re planted. I mean, yeah. And so I think that, I think we we do what we can, we start the conversations we learn and we just keep going. The idea that you guys, what you’re working on with 3.0, made me think about two different teams that I know: one that’s working with MIT on the Covid data Observatory, and another team that’s working with the WHO. And I’m really curious to see, because I was seeing that thinking the idea of a global observatory is an important first step. And that maybe on the “not yet” when we look at things like design of ecosystems, or building in what trust looks like? Or what organisations look like? Maybe there’s that kind of phenomenon where we begin to open a kind of observatory and build a coalition of participants and start to share what we’re seeing, and build — because we need to build a language — and an understanding of what we’re addressing, you know, what does infrastructure look like and in terms of where we’re heading?

Simone Cicero:
Well this model of observatory I think it’s a good image, you know, to describe and to close this conversation, and describe really what is the future of organising. What does the future of organising look like at the moment from here? It looks like an observatory because we really need to, I think, observe more of the coming months and years and really try to, I think, learn as you said, multiple times in the conversation, Lisa. Well, I’m really thankful for this conversation. It was very insightful for me. I have like a tonnes of notes on my iPad and I think our listeners will have enjoyed it as much as I did. Stina, do you want to add something, something else?

Stina Heikkila:
No, I echo you. Thank you very much and despite some technological issues, I hope we manage to piece things together.

Lisa Gansky:
Well, thanks to both of you for the conversation. I’m actually quite intrigued by the idea of, you know, creating an observatory together with you guys and maybe some of the listeners.

Simone Cicero:
That’s how it feels like to also record this podcast sometimes. So thanks again, Lisa. And see you soon!