Bill Fischer:

For me, the beauty of ecosystems is surprises and opportunities. And we’re gaining access to unfamiliar expertise through casual liaisons that might become if we do it right, might become more reliable in the future, but not so reliable that we get locked in permanently. So that focus shifts from the larger organization to the small unit, which then becomes a locus of activity for an ecosystem. So you have many ecosystems within ecosystems networks within networks. My sense is that the future will focus on smaller, more local, more transient types of relationships. 

Lisa Gansky:

For me, everything is temporal, and part of the No More is this fiction that we live in, that something can be permanent, that builds our pathetic obsession towards being able to pretend to predict the future. And I think that all of what we’re talking about nature is our gym, is our kind of way of getting fit and moving towards these other models. Because when you look at murmurations or mycelium, these are models that say, you know, visitors come in and out and they make contributions, they become part or they don’t, it’s very like, come-together-go-apart in a very dynamic way.

Simone Cicero:

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the Boundaryless Conversations Podcast. On this Podcast, we meet with Pioneers, Thinkers, Doers, and Entrepreneurs, and we speak about the future of business models, organizations, markets, and society in this rapidly changing world we live in. I’m Simone Cicero, and today I’m joined by my usual co-host, Stina Heikkila. 

Stina Heikkila: 

Hello, hello, everyone. 

Simone Cicero:

Today, we’re also joined by two returning guests that were with us when we recorded the closing episode of Series 1. With us today, we have Lisa Gansky. Lisa is a Board Member at Bango, guil Ventures, and Boson Protocol, besides being an internet pioneer, investor, and a researcher into things such as radical instability and trust. Lisa, great to have you back at the Podcast.

Lisa Gansky:

Thank you so much. I’m, of course, delighted to be here and speak with you guys.

Simone Cicero:

Thank you so much. And we also have Bill Fischer. Bill is a legend of management theory, Professor Emeritus at IMD, Senior Lecturer at MIT, and a good friend of the Podcast and myself since a few years. Ciao Bill, great to have you back at the Podcast as well.

Bill Fischer:

It’s great to be here, particularly with Lisa and Stina as well. I’m looking forward to it.

Simone Cicero:

Where we can start this conversation is trying to peek into your own context and situation. So Bill, you are of course working with so many management leaders and companies all over the world. Lisa, you have been advising so many great companies and institutions. If you look into how change and technology is impacting the products we build, the services we bring to the market, the organization we develop, the way we work, what are your highlights in the last two years, but most specifically with regards to the moment we’re living in the house. Lisa, maybe you can start.

Lisa Gansky:

I think on the organizational design and leadership, I’m certainly seeing there’s a lot of synchronized head scratching as a new Olympic sport. I think people, in general people meaning leaders, if they’re confident, are actually standing back and declaring that they really don’t have a clue. And I think that the idea that you’re leading an organization and at the same time candidly confessing at least to yourself that “I literally don’t know what’s going to happen next” is a pretty unsettling place to be. So I think a lot of what we’ve been discussing and Simone, you and Stina have been focused on in the Podcast and Boundaryless has been doing for years is this whole idea, and in fact, it’s where we left our last heroes. When the four of us were together several years ago, we’re between “no more” and “not yet”. And the “no more”, what’s growing on the no more side is everything, right? Like we have technologies, we have governance, trusted, formally trusted institutions, standards of practice, social expectations, climate, like pick a thing. And it’s what was once at least in our mind and we made ourselves feel more comfortable that it was stable or at least moving slow enough that we could anticipate the general trajectory. What’s happening now is not that. And so it’s much more of a staccato pace. You’re a breathless introduction. If we take that in, at a central nervous system level, will we all need cardiologists? So I think part of what is happening here is for us to accept that what we knew as normal is literally dissolved. A question then is like, well, what can we count on? Who can we count on? What are the standards? Where do we go from here? For me, I think that one of the things I’ve seen is leadership at the level of anyone in an organization or anyone with an idea is able now with technology and tools and also a bit of chutzpah and courage to step into a space and make proposals and try to get some followers, engagement, momentum, prototyping, learning to happen. In a way, that’s made me optimistic because I feel that there’s a wide open space for people to come with proposals and to get support around an idea that has a little bit of legs. And on the other hand, on the no more hand, I think if people are, there’s a lot of us that want to be able to depend on something. And I think on a daily basis, that becomes more and more difficult. So at the organizational level, I feel that when we look at new models emerging, like Web3 and DAOs and these kinds of… we can play the blockchain bingo game, but all those ideas, they much better provide bones and systems or ways of thinking around old ideas like cooperatives. than platforms did. And I find for me, a kid of optimism because there’s an opportunity to allow for whether it’s the sourcing energy in terms of electricity or sourcing water or other resources or sourcing ideas that we can get more surface area and more collisions to happen through a lot of these open architectures that are emerging at least at the level of lots of people banging on them and testing them. So I find that creates both confusion and hope. I think at the product level, product market fit is a really is like, I feel is an old idea now, because the idea was I know who the market is, and I’m going to bring I’m going to bring this thing that we’ve designed for this market to fine tune it by engaging, but more and more I find that people are after solving a pain point and the pain point is moving because the market is changing or the circumstances are changing. And so this rapid prototyping and doing things in public, testing in public, more rapidly designing in public, like being less concerned about who owns what and more concerned about solving a pain point. It seems to be something that I’m seeing little sprouts of. I’m seeing the old model of define, refine and scale, something very linear being disrupted by something that’s much more turbulent and at the same time, much more community-oriented and engaging.

Simone Cicero:

Yeah, I want to make a connection with Bill, because Bill, you are well known, and Lisa spoke about a few things that maybe are worth highlighting, difficulty in anticipating what’s happening, difficulty in reading markets, generally faster markets, more customization needed, more building in public, less design, more prototyping. That’s essentially something that I read in, of course, in new models, essentially this change in posture towards the market. You are well known because of your longer relationship with Chinese management that we share because we work together with Haiger as well. And I want to quote Mao Zedong, when he said, everything under heaven is in utter chaos, the situation is excellent, right? So my question for you is, do you feel that the management community, the Organization Development Community is really in this mood, or they are more panicking than anything else?

Bill Fischer:

That’s a great question. I think any question that’s sought out with a quote from Chairman Mao, it’s got to be provocative. And I think what you see is that. So historically, if you look at how industries have evolved, what’s brought formerly successful incumbent market leaders down over and over and over again historically has been not their unawareness of new technologies and not their curiosity, but it’s largely been the inability to get their present organization to be fit for a new purpose. And I think that what we’re seeing today is that that’s never been more important than it is now. So when you think about why that might be, I think a lot of it it’s inertia, right? A lot of it is the overwhelming complexity of modern organizations that just stop people in their tracks and think, I can’t do this. And I think that what we’re seeing today that was different from only a few years ago is that the change is coming more rapidly, the so-called S Curves are getting shorter, and the unknown, the script that goes with the new S-curve, the story behind a new S-curve is so profoundly different than what the present has been that people not only have to deal with their organizations, but they have to deal with a lack of expertise. They don’t understand how to react. Part of that is that leaders are probably two decades out of touch with what’s going on at the cold face, at the customer experience level. And so they don’t appreciate, I think, the pace of change. They don’t appreciate how different the customer is today from where it was. And their organizations reflect that. So every generation thinks this is the biggest change of all. I think we have a legitimate cause to think that that’s true and present. And I think that the problem starts more with our organizations than anywhere else, that gap between organizational fitness and the problems, the challenges that are going on around them. When I look at what’s happening, the organizations that I admire, I’m seeing efforts to give more autonomy to people lower in the organization, efforts to create smaller units that have more authority over what they’re doing. I’m looking at people who are not trying to decentralize, but people who are trying to un-centralize and in the process of doing that, they’re creating new organizations that could take us in the future. In the long run, I’m optimistic. In the short run, I think we’re going to have not only technological challenges, but also social challenges in terms of employment impact, in terms of merit and who gets to move upward within an organization. Maybe there’s no upward anymore. Maybe the way we build organizations in the future will escape that legacy thinking about the pyramid and how you build a career. But all of the people involved are overwhelming. Complexity, I think, of… We talk about sustainability, the complexity of trying to sustain a career trajectory is overwhelming I believe today. To be honest, we’re not preparing people for wealth. We still prepare people, I think, for a past that is no longer present.

Simone Cicero:

You said something that resonated with me a lot, this idea of un-organizing, which carries a message not only of delegation, autonomy. but it carries a message of the crisis of the corporation in itself. So it’s like, we feel like the idea of bureaucracy, it’s really ending crumbling, especially in some parts of the market, I would say. This may be an effect of the great resignation and the push to remote work that we have seen in the last few years. So maybe it’s more like a structural crisis of trust inside the corporation. For example, you spoke about, we don’t have a concept of career that stands the time at the moment, right? Because the idea of career itself was maybe rooted in an idea of organizations that live for long, that have a very much hierarchical structure that with your career, you can climb, right? Which is not something that works anymore as soon as you look at the organization as a set of loosely coupled units where there is no hierarchy to climb. And then the responsibilities about you figuring out what product you want to bring into the market, right? So I feel like there is a real crisis of scale, a crisis of bureaucracy, a crisis of operations, right? Yesterday I was reading an account of the impacts of Large Language Models on products and organizations. And somebody came up with this idea of LLMOps, which is essentially the idea of operationalizing Artificial Intelligence. And I was like, what is the point of having Artificial Intelligence and having ultra customizable experiences if then we want to operationalize it because we’ve tried to industrialize even the technology that is supposed to put the crisis into the very model of hierarchies and bureaucracies. So can you maybe expand a bit into this quest towards unorganized?

Bill Fischer:

I’m a great fan of Lisa’s no more, not yet spectrum. And I think that no more is pretty clear. I mean, I think we look around and we can see in our own organizations with great clarity where we want to do no more, but it’s not yet that is absolutely, I think it’s a moving target. I think it’s vague. I think it’s changing day-to-day. And I think we all have a sense of where this is going, but that sense is not convincing enough for me to take the first try. I’m not going to be the first one to do this. So I think what we’re seeing is a great deal of hesitancy born out of a lack of clarity of what’s possible. But I think AI, for example, We’re on the board of an AI startup, and I think that what we see is where this could go. But, the gap between no more and not yet is insufficiently clear to build a groundswell of support for trying something. For me, that’s the gap that has to be addressed in some fashion, and it’s hard to do when the technology is moving so fast, but the organizations are remaining so still.

Lisa Gansky:

I would say… So all those sentences, super as always, from Bill. I think that the organizational models, given that they were built on military models, and education likewise it makes sense that they’re breaking, right? And the whole idea of a career going to Bill’s point, or one of the points, was the whole idea of a career was absolutely like you enter start here, it’s like a video game. You start at the bottom and you work your way up and then you get lots of a high score. And I think that the game that we’re playing is unclear. If you’re just starting your career today, the idea that you’re after a title or that you want to enter into a large corporation is absolutely not the case. I think people are depending on who we’re talking about, artisans versus somebody who’s very into business or science or something else. Often, I would say that as a business person, I’ve moved through my career as an entrepreneur and as an author, as someone who has a portfolio of projects. And I think that increasingly, that’s the way that people are seeing their careers, that you’re intrigued by someone, you stodge with them, you take a fellowship, you learn from them, you snuggle up to them and try to understand their perspective. I think that we need to be multilingual, metaphorically speaking, that we need to understand a lot of different industries, models, ontologies, perspectives. Empathy is something that’s missing and fundamental to learning, and often missing because we grow up or have historically grown up inside of a school, a community, a corporation that’s been an indoctrination of how we see the world. When that capsule breaks, we’re free radicals floating around and need a decoder ring. So I feel like, at an individual level, I see a lot of people in that place. I don’t know, organizations, I think are, institutions are not trusted. Right now, I think that there’s a real challenge if you’re sitting at an institution. How to take it apart in a way that doesn’t kill the value that is created or captured, but at the same time allows you to port that model into something that will attract and retain talent, will attract and retain customers, that gives you a better chance at having more surface area to be able to create more collisions, prototypes, experiments and products that actually make sense in the market. And it’s true for universities and it’s true for hospitals and it’s not just business like the way that we think about corporations, but I feel that institutions in general are going through this fairly massive transformation, but it will maybe hopefully make sense when we look back, but living through it, for a lot of people, it’s just a big head scratcher.

Bill Fischer:

One of the things I agree completely with what Lisa’s saying, and one of the things that I think it affects… is the way in which people not only advance in their profession, if you will. but also the way in which they’re seen, socially. I think for the last I don’t know, two or three decades, there’s been… an emphasis on specialization on becoming what used to be called I-shaped individuals where the depth of knowledge was large and the breadth of knowledge was narrow. But I think that over the last 10 years, AI is accelerating this, but it didn’t begin with AI. I think that there’s been an ability to access expertise in other ways than going through university and the like. And so I think that what we need are more and more people who are T-shaped, who are able to speak these different languages or at least be sensitive to the different languages that Lisa spoke about so that they can identify talent that needs to be brought together, attract that talent by appreciating what it brings to the mix and serve as hubs within ecosystems of individuals and organizations. And that leads, I think, to a very different form of organizational format, right? One that’s based more on interaction than on economies of scale. And so a form of organization where surprise and the ability to recognize surprise and capitalize on it is seen as more of an advantage than the replication of something that’s been done repeatedly in the past. So I think that what we’ll see is not only will careers change, but the organizations that provide access to the complementary expertise that individuals need will change. And we’ll have more of a reliance on partnerships and relationships than we’ve had in the past.

Stina Heikkila:

I think this ties quite neatly with some of the conversations we have had around these cloud-based teams and that you actually, you can have part of the team working like outside the organization and part inside the organization. When you were talking, I just got this funny memory from a future work event that I was a couple of weeks ago in Paris and they had made a survey on what to ask, I don’t remember the age group, but children on what they want to become in the future, right? Before, a common response was like an astronaut or something like that. And now, if you can guess what the response was, YouTuber. I mean, that makes me think that technology is already pervasive, right? So we are living on the internet and this is just one of many signals of that, right? And we had also discussed that idea in a few of our recent podcasts, like, to what extent will it become impossible to separate the organization from the software on which it runs? And management as well from being programmable to some extent. And that links into the conversations around Web3. And I think I find that quite fascinating when you think how much power you actually could give to developers, to design what can happen in decision making and so on. And I don’t fully grasp the details of it because I’m not a programmer myself, but I start to see that there’s potentially a lot of power that can be embedded in different protocols and so on, which shifts a little bit the responsibility and the power. in the organization as well. And probably that becomes difficult. Like Bill, you were saying that… manager might be a couple of decades behind in that. So how can they work then with developers who might have solutions to problems they don’t even know in a way.

Lisa Gansky:

Or Stina, someone builds something with the expectation that it’s supposed to do X, but because the leadership doesn’t have the expertise and relies on and like you said, the power sits with… programmers or DevOps or other people, then they’re simply like in a way left in the dark and that the power actually is is not represented by the organizational hierarchy, but rather by in practice who controls the systems that we’re running on.

Stina Heikkila:

Exactly. 

Bill Fischer:

So we talked about top management and the people below with Google management have spent the last 20 years trying to get to the top. They’re not looking forward to giving up power. Their whole goal has been to amass.

Stina Heikkila:

And I’m curious to see Lisa, because you were also talking, you sit on the board of Boson Protocol, and you’re obviously looking into this Web3, and you mentioned that those new technologies are also, in a way, might have more capabilities to deal with governance compared to platforms, for instance. So what do you see there?

Lisa Gansky:

Well, the protocol is a programmable governance, right? Or it can be. And so you’re basically explicating a general purpose version of, in the case of Boson, commerce and loyalty. So you’re enabling and providing an infrastructure for something without having to reach in and specify every little detail. Then developers or brands can come in and say, we want our currency or our interactions to operate like this or like that. But the idea, for example, like one of the things that using Boson as an example, one of the things that happens in commerce in general is there needs to be a mediation because I thought I was going to get this, it was built to me as that, I paid for that and what arrived was this other thing. And so there’s built into the protocol is an arbitration that allows for settling. And if you imagine like we were talking about increasing surface area, opening up organizations, increasing therefore collisions between workers, between customers, partners, everyone, right? More surface area, more collisions, then you’re having far more transactions. And if you’re building in fundamental aspects of engaging like settlement and arbitration, that’s huge. So as an example, and so yeah, I think in the case of car sharing. Car sharing was invented in Europe and Robin Chase told me this years ago, though he’s the founder, one of the Co-Founder of Zipcar and a friend. I think it’s like 60 or 65 years ago in Switzerland, two women came together and decided that it was a good idea in a community to do car sharing. Well, but it was like a closet at the end of the street in a community and sometimes people would forget to put the key back and there was really no schedule. And so this friction associated with this good idea of car sharing was outrageous. Technology has allowed us to find the car, to know if it’s available, to disappear the need for the key in some cases and all sorts of things. So it allows for those kinds of hints. My book and the work that we’ve done together with Simone and lots of other people around the sharing economy and we share and all of it over the years was this opportunity of the collision between technology and these ideas of collaboration. And our view, our movie version was in our heads was that the social impact would have played out in quite a different way. I think a lot of that is probably the topic for another conversation. But fundamentally the technology of Web3 is allowing for taking old ideas, whether it’s collaborative related or in the case of cooperatives, cooperatives tend to not scale hugely because it’s complicated. You have a lot of owners and there’s a lot of voting and a lot of coordination. And doing that across huge distances with different backgrounds and languages and expectations makes it even more challenging. On a Web3 scenario with some of the ideas that are floating around and this idea of a Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO, you can program an organization. So if the four of us want to start collaborating and we invite everyone listening to this Podcast to join us, we’re not controlling the organization per se, but we’re together designing the framework or the program that the DAO operates on, if that makes sense. I think that we’re at the very beginning or a tipping point. I also agree with Simone’s comment that the, I don’t know the AGI, but certainly the Large Language Models that are emerging and ChatGPT being a good example is it could be helpful when you’re doing research to quickly have a survey of what’s available and what’s out there. But it could also be hugely operated as a fog machine because it creates an amplification. It’s using what’s already out there as a way to bring back to you the current latest whatever and whether these things are generative in terms of ideas and thinking on its own, remains to be seen but it but, certainly at least my concern is the lack of governance so that we have these models out there. The speed at which they potentially can be adding to the volume of information available is frightening and potentially helpful, but also on one side frightening. And so if it’s skewing or biasing stories on the basis of volume, it can actually promote and accelerate a lot of what we’re seeing as fake news or and a dissolution, a further dissolution of trust. 

Simone Cicero:

What I’m perceiving here is when Stina brought up this idea of the impossibility of the rising complexity of separating organization from software. I think this is a great point, it’s an important point. I recall when I was with Bill at the Drucker Forum three years ago now, in 2019, it was four years ago. I was listening to the CEO of Buurtzorg, Jos de Block, and he said that Buurtzorg is transforming bureaucracy into software, right? So they cut the middle management of the organization and transformed the processes into software, which is a little bit resonating with what’s happening with Web3. In another conversation previously, we had Chase Chapman on the Podcast, who is one of the most acute observers of the Web3 movement and part of Metropolis DAO. They have this way to separate what they call Trustware from Socialware. And Trustware is everything that gets put on Chain. So it’s recorded in a way that is un-tamperable, it’s public, it’s the information we share essentially. And at the same time, they call Socialware all the wet part of organizing, the way we relate, the processes, the bureaucracies, the habits that we run inside our organizations. One of the things that I’m perceiving here is that we are seeing even more a shift between Socialware into Trustware or in general into software. So more of what we used to call an organization is being encoded into software. And this is happening at all levels. And this is also exerting a strong pressure towards organizations because organizations feel the pressure, for example, of opening up their interfaces. Bezos has become famous for his mandate where he basically said all teams need to expose their interfaces. And he was a pioneer, he probably perceived that the world was moving in a direction where software would have played a much broader, much more important role on how we organize and move up resources and connect capabilities, right? What happens if we bring these to the limits? We have much more modular markets, much more modular society where we have small teams, small units capable of having large impacts on society, much more reconfigurable capabilities. As an individual, I can connect pieces, I can create value. But the question is, at the end of the day, for whom I’m going to create the value, and what is the market that is going to buy this value? And I think that Web3 somehow is trying to use these new capabilities to solve large systemic problems where there are tragedies of incentives, try to convince everybody that the protocol we’re going to use, the rules we’re going to set together and govern together, are going to make everybody happy, and we can organize, and everybody can get their own incentives and be happy, but this is not happening. What we are seeing in Web3, in reality, is even more diversity, even more complexity. So the transition of technology is becoming so fast that we couldn’t update our culture. We couldn’t update our institutions in the background. So we’re left with these tremendous modular capabilities and software technologies, and we really can only apply a competitive cultural mindset and the traditional win-big, compete, make-money mindset that has run the market for the last decades. What is the culture we are left with as we face these massive transitions?

Lisa Gansky:

Couple things, first of all, in your last riff, Simone, one thing I wanted to just say or add or ask is about the network effect. One of the things in culture is a great carrier of the network effect or the reverse is also true, right? meaning that if we’re connected, if we’re part of the same community or culture, are spreading of that, it happens within the trusted organization or the loosely organized connection of the community or whatever we’re calling that. But the network effect for me right now, because of the no more not yet and where we are in, as Bill said, the not yet, hasn’t, it has scaffolding, but there’s this still giant abyss between dissolved expectations of the last however many decades and what’s going to emerge. And that matches with what you’re saying, which is where we are in the life cycle. In my opinion, in this transition we’re in the radical instability piece, we’re in the holy crap, we don’t have a floor. Everybody starts thinking of ideas, everybody starts trying to talk to other people and test stuff. It’s also the other thing is, as everyone that’s engaged with Web3, or trying to grasp their head around the blockchain Web3 bingo, is trying to understand what it all means. I think that one of the best ways that people are trying to understand what it means is by getting in, trying to create something or to solve a problem using that mentality by joining a DAO or buying some coins or jumping into a discord or something. But there’s a lot of people that I know that are in their 20s and 30s that are trying to figure it out. It’s not just people who are at the end of their career, they grew up in a corporation. A lot of people say things like, wow, I don’t know what the rules are. And I don’t really know how to play. And so I think that the fear is benefiting from the network effect. This confusion is benefiting from the network effect. And what I’m wondering is, in order to make the to shrink the chasm between no more and not yet, how do we create, and I’ll do a callback to Bill’s comment, most of us have grown up in an education system that’s broken and people coming through for their career education are lost because it’s no long, it maybe was never but it’s certainly no longer a path. How do we use this space between no more and not yet to create breadcrumbs or or a flip path. And I think that a lot of what’s happening in the Web3 space is massive hyper experimentation and ballsy, perhaps crazy, but ballsy courage of people who like trying ideas and seeing if it works and if it doesn’t move on. I don’t think that we’re at the consolidation phase yet, because we’re early and I’m not even sure that people know yet what they’re solving for because a lot of it is like holding up the microphone and trying to figure out which end you’re supposed to talk into. Oh, this is cool. I don’t know what to do with it exactly. 

Simone Cicero:

How do we see the consolidation phase happen, the convergent phase during which we, we or I don’t know, I don’t like to use we, but essentially society converged into trying to enact some solution to the chaos that we are living or some coherence in the chaos, in the creative chaos that we are living. Is there any sign that you see or at least is there any signal out of the noise that we can capture and see, this is a seed of a more coherent future? Bill, you spoke about S-Curves, right? So where is the end of this S-curve or at least is there a plateau where we can aim at reaching coherence back?

Bill Fischer:

As Lisa was speaking, I thought about it. She said, if we’re part of a common network, what if we’re not part of a common network? Okay, and I’m trying to get to where you’re asking, Simone, but it may be a little bit indirect. As I understand it, ecosystems, the beauty of ecosystems is that they spotlight opportunities because you bring in other expertise that would be unfamiliar otherwise. And those people, those organizations come with ideas. And usually each of those organizations that you’re partnering with at the moment have very different aspirations, very different objective functions than you have. They’re orthogonal to what your organization is, but passing in the night, you’ve got an opportunity to seize and you seize it. And the ecosystem that we’re talking about, more of them than not is transient locally, but maybe more durable on a larger scale if nobody tries to control it very tightly, if that makes sense. So it seems to me that maybe the focus on convergence at the moment on a grand scale is not as desirable as focusing on a local scale and recognizing that the transience is where the attractiveness is rather than the permanence. So unlike a value Chain where we know who’s doing what and they’re in their tier and they’re in their box, they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, and we’re trying to reduce variance, for me the beauty of ecosystems is that surprise is an opportunity and we’re gaining access to unfamiliar expertise through casual liaisons that might become, if we do it right, that might become more reliable in the future, but not so reliable that we get locked in permanently. So that focus shifts from a large organization to the small unit, which then becomes the locus of activity for an ecosystem. So you have many ecosystems within ecosystems, networks within networks. And the portfolio that Lisa spoke about. The portfolio is lots of small bets that are being placed in parallel. As Mr. Zhang told the two of us, we’re going to win in the long run not because we can figure out what’s going to happen next, but because we’re taking more chances. And one or two of them are probably going to be acceptable. Now, how you build an organization that tolerates that degree of confusion is another matter. My sense is that the future will focus on smaller, more local, more transient types of relationships. The organization will be smaller, so it’ll be less difficult to make that work. And maybe the governance system is both in the software that we employ and the modules that we construct to be able to assemble an offering in this complex, ever moving target market segment. And if I can make this a little more realistic, one of the things, Simone mentioned that both of us have done work with Hire. I’ve had the good fortune to be involved with them for a long time. One of the things that I’m fascinated by is that you have platforms that are populated by small, what they call micro enterprises. These platforms have really global views of what they’re doing. So they’ve moved from building washing machines to managing laundry, now to manage your clothing. There’s no limit to the globalness by which they talk about what they’d like to do. But the way the workers performed is by small micro enterprises that have a very narrow target market, like doing a washout on the balcony. And as a result, they’re much more focused on what they’re doing than they would otherwise be. They can be more entrepreneurial. They can be much more entrepreneurial, much more engaged. and probably much more governed, much easily governed than otherwise, but they can also flourish with variety, the likes of which most of their rivals don’t have.

Lisa Gansky:

I have to say two things, Bill, to what you just laid out. First of all, I mean, maybe three. First one is thanks. The second one is I absolutely never said permanence. For me, everything is temporal. Everything is 100% temporal. And part of the no more is this fiction that we live in, that something can be permanent, that builds our pathetic obsession towards being able to pretend to predict the future. But that is a problem that we have to get over and I think that all of what we’re talking about and the nature is our gym, is our way of getting fit and moving towards these other models. Because when you look at like, murmurations or mycelium, these are models that say, yeah, they are exactly what you described in your Haier example in a way, which is, visitors come in and out and they make contributions, they become part or they don’t. It’s very like coming together, going apart in a very dynamic way. Our legal systems, our laws, our tax codes, our everything, our educational systems can’t keep up with that model. But all of those things have to implode and get reimagined in order to create something that’s going to make any sense, given the speed with which things are being invited to be reimagined.

Bill Fischer:

Yes. Yeah. And I stand corrected. You never said permanent and I took advantage of that.

Lisa Gansky:

No, I just, I just, because it’s no, no, no, take advantage of me anytime, but I never think anything’s permanent. 

Bill Fischer:

So a few, a few sessions ago, in this season of podcasts, Scott Brinker spoke about customers getting relief. I’m relief, he didn’t say that, but I’m saying it. They get relief from the reliability of the customer experience, some reliability, perhaps a brand. So I do think that part of the governance mechanism is vested in these interfaces where if you have a smart kitchen, you’ve got to use the same connectivity system. You’ve got to use the same voice activation system, just so that the customer experience makes sense. But I think that that’s up for grabs in the long run. I think experimentation and getting close to the customer so you understand what the customer’s interests are could change that. But I think there has to be some deference paid to the consumer’s need for reassurance that this is going to work, that it’s going to work the way you want. When it doesn’t work, we’re going to come take it off your hands. And so I guess the piece that was missing in what I said earlier was that one of the legitimate members of the ecosystem is the co-creating customer who enters into this relationship because they have a customer need that’s gone unfulfilled, and they have an idea about how it feels, what it looks like, where it’s going, something like that. And then they become a shareholder in the outcome of that idea, a shareholder in the value created.

Lisa Gansky:

You know, one thing also, Bill, that you just reminded me of is these two characters did an interview with Joe Justice a while back as well. And in that conversation, Joe talked about the role of DevOps in how governments should act like DevOps, which I thought, by the way, was really bloody genius. And I’m going to steal it, Joe. But, I recommend Stina steals it too. But besides that, when you were talking and giving your example, I was thinking, that’s the role of brands. that brands, if brands can host, many, many experiments, many, many collisions, and create the verification process for this lives up to our promise. That allows a whole new model for product development and distribution and IP sharing and retains a value for a brand whilst creating a current model that doesn’t mean that they have to control everything quite the contrary.

Simone Cicero:

I feel it’s going to be hard to wrap such depth, but I think one thing that is worth underlining is suggestions that markets and society, but mainly markets, I would say, are going to be increasingly diverse. Variance is going to be much more important in markets of the future. Bill, you spoke about small bets and optionality. That was great because I was actually literally taking that same note as you were speaking. So this idea of individuals, employees, now having to deal with building much more optionality into their careers, companies distributing their products across different ecosystems. Lastly, when I was thinking about protocols as ways to agree and converge, your conversation made me think about protocols instead as essentially ways we can use to agree on how we disagree. So essentially thinking about protocols more like enablers of variance instead of creators of coherence. And I was reconnecting this with something that I’m doing, some work I’m doing with the customer these days, where they are creating a protocol internally for their own teams to build modular products. And I think this is something that I want to really underline. Maybe we don’t have to converge, but maybe in the future of markets, we have to agree to disagree. And I agree about the ways we create more variance in the market. And that’s something that I want to bring home.

Stina Heikkila:

Before we leave the conversations today, we want to ask the two of you to leave the listeners with some of the breadcrumbs.

Bill Fischer:

As I think about what we’ve just talked about, the tagline might be, exciting times deserve exciting organizations. And most of the organizations that I see on a day-to-day basis are anything but exciting. And so I think we need to rekindle organizationally and through leadership as well. Leadership should be a verb, not a noun, and we should begin to rekindle excitement around the work being performed.

Lisa Gansky:

One big orientation for me is peripheral vision. So I try hard to look at weird scenarios, cookbooks, nature, strange conversations in other languages. And I find that the intersections of things that don’t normally go together are fertile ground for seeing something new and that I’ve been struggling with. A book that I’m really enchanted with these days. Friends of mine have what’s called the Near Future Laboratory, Fabien Girardin. And the book is called Design Fiction. It’s a really fantastic handbook for thinking about modeling the future. And the second thing is this woman who’s a researcher in British Columbia called Suzanne Simard, who wrote a book called Finding the Mother Tree and does an amazing work about the relationship of mycelium and trees and communities. And I find that a lot of that work really inspirational and really thought provoking when it comes to. these topics, DAOs, organizations, trust, community. It’s a good little pot to stir for me anyway.

Stina Heikkila:

Great stuff. So more excitement and leadership as a verb. Yeah, checking out these references. So well, thank you both so much for time with us again, coming back. It doesn’t feel like so long ago, but it was really great to have you back here. Hope you also enjoyed it.

Lisa Gansky:

Yes, it was lovely. It’s always fun. Thanks to you guys.

Bill Fischer:

It was great.

Simone Cicero:

Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. I mean, I think I need to really listen to the Podcast and surface some more insights for our listeners, but I will definitely do so in the coming weeks.

Stina Heikkila:

Yeah, and for our listeners, as always, you can find the links and references to both Bill and Lisa’s work and what was mentioned in the conversations @boundaryless.io/resources/podcast. Look out for Bill Fischer and Lisa Gansky and you will find everything you need. And until we meet again, remember to think Boundaryless!