Transcript – WorkTogether – Hidden networks and invisible systems

Benjamin Ellis
Welcome to the Work together podcast.
I'm joined today by Annmarie and well, I'm going to, I'm going to dive in because I'm excited to have this conversation.
So Anne, introduce yourself to the listeners for those who might not have heard of you before.

Anne Marie
Hi there Benjamin, thank you so much for having me. Umm me, Anne Marie Rattray, at a point in my career, I suppose, where many people are thinking of retiring.
And in fact, I thought about doing the same thing, but my interest really stems from see my doctoral work 25 possibly more years ago and where there was a big shift happening at that point in how work was organized and in how that work was organized.
It was a reintegration of, it's a philosophy of work that shifted from traditional managers that thinking people in the shop floor were the hands who did.
Yes, that's probably a gross misrepresentation, but that's how it was.
And then along comes clean and lean.
Really was this philosophy that said actually continuous improvement and problem solving is everybody's business, is absolutely everybody's business and there's a reintegration of learning through doing and thinking, thinking, continuous improvement and that for me was a real point of pivot.
So that's where I started and my interest really has really been around how do organisations create systems that enable people to be their best, to learn together, and to work in a way that is consistent with continuous improvement?
Umm, so that can be IT systems. It can be the actual workplace, the physical workplace.
It can be. What is it? What is it the organizations put in place that creates an environment for. performance. Basically that's it.
And so roll forward to know I was sort of disappointed, I think umm the to my mind the power of lean never really, in my way of seeing the world and never really transformed organizations the way I thought it could have and should have. It did piecemeal but not to the extent that I thought it was going to be.
And then particularly and the, the work that I was doing sort of in the 2000s, mid 2000s where I was working with senior people and we were doing masters programs, but they weren't courses at all.
It was again looking at what do you do in work?
What do you need to do?
Where's the gap?
All this stuff and people were getting academic credit for what they demonstrated they had learned, the skills they demonstrated, they learnt from what they've done. You'd think that was obvious, wouldn't you?
It's a sort of a pool approach to learning to education rather than pushing courses.
And I just sort of thought, oh, so much was possible and so little I could see, you know, it was happening in pockets.
But and then it gets to January 2023, when I'm just about thinking of retiring and then and then I read about Chat GPT and I think ohh my Lord, this is no time to go.
Seriously, this is, to my mind, another pivotal point.
Another point of pivot whether organizations take it and use the power of these technologies with what we already know or should already know from old knowledge about creating environments, performance environments, you get performance environments and have the tools and technologies we have just got huge potential in front of us if we choose to take it.

Benjamin Ellis
So I'm gonna take some of the different threads and weave them together and are gonna weave in some of my context as well.
So I think I'm gonna come back to lean for a minute because it's interesting that there, in the developer world and the tech startup world, there's a little bit of familiar familiarity with lean because of things like lean startup.

And I think it's worth coming back to that because that is a form of lean, but doesn't necessarily represent lean as it was.
And I think very few people have had a kind of introduction to what lean is or understand what lean is about.
And I was, I think somewhat fortuitous in that in my early part of my career, I got to work with Motorola quite a lot and got introduced to 6 Sigma, and that was more around quality management.
And then when I bumped into you a good few decades ago now, it started to make more sense into ohh no.

OK, I get what lean actually is and actually is about because as I think you would say, lean is and it's almost more of a philosophy in a way isn't it?

Anne Marie
It's exactly that.
It's exactly that.
It's not about, you know, it's not about maps or trends or I don't know techniques or, it is but it's much, much deeper than that.
I keep coming back to this philosophy of, you know, how we organize for customer excellence and it's about inclusion.
It's about everyone. You know, we all, we all have brains.
We all have knowledge. We all have experience and to waste that is, is, is well to my mind. Anyway, it's criminal.
That was always the appeal to me, and that's why I say I was disappointed because lean is a philosophy.
I felt never, you know, never really, in a whole scale way, this is just my feeling and as you see in the developer world, you lean the terminology became something else.
And so for me, I'm sort of quite simplistic in the sense of, you know, looking at this treasure trove of old knowledge that we had.
And really what I'm searching for is first principles.
You know? Can they be identified?
And I'm saying they can.
And you know, I'm saying that insight that was gained in a different time under different contexts doesn't necessarily mean to say that that knowledge is no longer applicable.
What can be pulled from it?
But to your point, I'm going off now.
To, linking back to your point about, you know the developer experience of lean and this sort of philosophical understanding of lean and having been a bit lost along the way, I would agree with that.

Benjamin Ellis
And it's for me.
Interesting at looking at a lot of the trends of how people view organization and organizational theory and practice at the moment that yeah, the core assumptions of lean and what drove the philosophy and minimization of waste, you know, in terms of people talk about net zero and those sorts of things, actually at its hearts was that thing about, you know making good use of resources, minimizing the waste and the external impact of thing that was kind of baked into the philosophy.

Anne Marie
Yes.
Yeah, baked in’s right. Mm-hmm.

Benjamin Ellis
And again, we're going back nearly half a century.
Here we go and again as you mentioned it was very empowering.

Anne Marie
Exactly.

Benjamin Ellis
It seemed that it, you know, everybody has knowledge to contribute and it was a very, very much assumed a systems view of business.

There's a lot at the moment in the narrative that assumes that an organization is made up of a collection of individuals and magically stuff happens, and so there's a lot of what I call focus on the dots, not on the lines.
Yeah.
The focus is on the individuals as opposed to the connections between them.
When we're going to come back to that again in, in a minute.

But lean and the knowledge that built up around it were all sorts of kind of systems theories of business.
And again, one of the things I think of is and it's something we use it social optic.
The hand-on-chord is something that we have stolen and this idea of like, you know, it's a production line and there's something goes wrong, you know, stop and apply all your resource to it.
But this idea that small things can have a really big impact when you look at them at a systems level.
I.E. you know, everything's connected. Everybody's dependent on everybody else.
Through the network of the organization and that idea is, is a very long way away from current thinking about organisations.

Anne Marie
Absolutely.
And relationships are so key and critical to all that.
Can I speak very briefly about two, old, and put into old in inverted commas here, thinkers who really, really influenced me all the way back then.
We're talking in the mid 90s and they were around well before that.
Do you mind if I?

Benjamin Ellis
Do

Anne Marie
Because they were fundamental and they're actually they speak to what you're saying, you know, sort of what is an organization?
I found myself very simply saying to myself, what is an organization?
What's the process actually I struggled with this for a long time.
What's the process?
OK, two people.
Russell Ackoff. I just, you know, you stumble upon things, don't you?
And he was the first person who I read who made me realize that you, again in organization, has talked about the simultaneous properties.
So he said that if you looked at an organization as a system on one way you look at it is divisible, you know you can you can analyse it and cut it up and put bits together.
You know, like components. Looked at a different way functionally, IE what it does, what it does in practice, it's dynamic, it's connected, it's interconnected at that time I hadn't really gotten into any knowledge of complexity, but the notion of emergence, it's not divisible in motion. In motion is interconnected and it flows, so that's that was Russell Ackoff and the second person was Carol Wake.

And I absolutely again stumbled upon this.
It was just the question.
I was in the library.
I started looking at what am I gonna do for this wretched Doctorate?
I have no idea get to the sort of bookshelves where I think I'm going to look at.
I'm sort of going to look at organizations, organizational design, all that stuff.
Anyway, pick out this wee book and it's only tiny, but it's, I still read it and I still find things that I didn't see, you know, 25-30 years ago and it's called the social psychology of organizing and in the social psychology.
You he talks about processes as flows and in this flows he talks about viscosity and different rates of movement and movement going.
Backwards and forwards and I just got this. I just got this vision of movement and that was my first thought.
Wow, this is, you know, this is great. And then secondly, the other thing that I found really interesting, but when you go to the end of the book, he does what I think is a great thing. He says, right, if you take a sort of micro and you know, he said if you can understand how nine people work together, you can understand how thousands work together. And I thought, well, OK, so he says when you get a dyad, you and me together, you change me. I change you and our relationship is never static.
You know, you've already got the beginning of dynamism in there.

Add a third person, he said. That changes the dynamics completely.
OK, so if you got a third person and dynamics that were there previously, competition cooperation, you know, power all sorts of things. The third person changes the distribution and what that looks like.
Then he says, if you take four people in theory, and this is without any sort of context at all, you've, you've then got a possibility of stalemate two on to two, you get a pair of a pair against the pair, and then he goes up and up and up.
So you can get you can get pairs and triads and he says, and when you get to 9 you've got the dynamics of three triads within and across. And I looked at that and I thought, wow, this is cool is coolest is cool.
And that's always stuck with me.
So those that gave me the grounding of what I you know, if I if I think about organizations.
So yes, it's this, this, you know, sets of socially relationships and action, but you also have, you also have the environment, the rules, the governance, the regulations, the, the workplace, the what you can do, what you can't do all that sort of stuff.
And you can map an organization out, can't you?
By looking at it and saying, well, so and so, so and so, you know sort of value flows if you like, that's the sort of Russell Ackoff you, there's you, you can look at something and divide it, but then an action.
So these two, these two thinkers were absolutely fundamental for me.
It's just like, yes, they're simultaneous. They're simultaneously dynamic, complex, emergent, interconnected flows, and at the same time, you can look at it another way where you can say, well, that department talks to that department.
And yeah, anyway so I find those two really, really influential in my early thinking about organizations, organizational design, learning you how organizations work all of that.

Benjamin Ellis
So I'm gonna take us to 2008 in that case.

Anne Marie
Yeah.

Benjamin Ellis
And you know this that umm, era plus or minus, I don't know. Five years Max was really when what at the time was often called social software, kind of predating social platform started to come into play and people got to interact digitally in the workplace, which was a whole, whole new and concepts and kicked off a whole new set of thinking.

So that let's explore that, because it does.
It's surfaced a whole set of things which I think organizations are only just coming to terms with now, aren't they really?

Anne Marie
Absolutely. OK. That's yeah.
So around about that time as well, I think you and I maybe started to get to know each other roundabout then 2008 and 2009, thereabouts, through the Johnson Controls.
Conversations that I used to do with a colleague where we would get.
Senior IT facilities, workplace.
You know anyone who got anything to do with work getting together for big conversations, and we'd have a topic.
One of the topics that we addressed was one of the sessions was knowledge management and enterprise social networking.
And in the course of doing that, what came out of the conversations that, that we convened with just the strength of knowledge and information gets passed around in the informal social networks that we all have both online and in person and that sort of linked for me back to Russell Ackoff, you're looking at the sort of simultaneous properties of organizations.
And one of the huge simultaneous properties is formal and informal.
Yeah.
And at that time, in preparation for this particular session, I remember, Umm finding and a McKinsey paper and this McKinsey paper was really saying that you social networks, were sort of dangerous because they could not be controlled that the majority of information in organizations according to their research and this particular paper, which I can source for you. You know, they're saying but, but it flies underneath the radar of management. It flies under management radar.
You know, it was. So around that time.
I think the realization of informal networks.
It was known before. I'm not saying that you know, this was a new realization.
It wasn't. We all know it. Anybody who's ever worked for 5 minutes in an organization knows that and, but I think with, you know, the digital. That that sort of really. Did it reveal?
I don't know if it did, but anyway we now had a new way of informal conversations to happen as well.
As you know the face to face by your desk, I bring my chair over to you. And you know, we have a chat about what we're gonna do about this.
And I think what I found interesting and by the way, anything that I'm talking about here is very partial and it's very personal.
I'm not suggesting this is the you know that this is the be all and the end all of everything because other people have come to similar realizations using different references.
You know, there's a diversity of approaches and this is just my sort of personal journey, if you like.
So then we move on to about 2010 and Professor Alex Penkland.
He was at MIT in the human Dynamics, Umm, School, and he wrote a book called Social Physics.
And what he did was he asked volunteers to wear badges.
That sensor movement and tone of voice and goodness knows what else, and he collected huge data sets on how information was passed around and, blow me down, what would you know?
Informal networks, that is exactly in organizations and how information is passed.
And now the digital element of it. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure that I can speak to that. You know, with any great experience, because fundamentally humans talk to each other, whether it's face to face or whether it's online.
And I'm, you know, I wonder sometimes if online, again speaking from my own, I censor myself you know I say things to people in person that I would never say online for various reasons.
I'm gonna be challenged. I'm gonna be told I'm a fool. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And this is phycological safety around sharing and saying something.
I think this is my experience, so that's why I'm saying that I personally don't feel like I can speak to that because I umm yeah, just because.
But yes. So I think there was something very fundamental going on around that time that, that, that really pointed to, you know, from various sources pointing to informal relationships and dynamics in the workplace as being the major. Conduit for knowledge and information being passed around.

Benjamin Ellis
And to layer some of the digital domain on that, I at that point in history I was very much into technology called wikis, which was like a very, you know a way of really linking information and have capturing it in a very informal way.

And what we're called Folksonomies, which was a way of letting people classifying group things, been in a very emergent fashion.
So rather than sitting down and trying to get the final right answer, you let people categorize things and saw what structures emerge from that.
To help you understand what was going off, but one of the things that hit me about those conversations was the intentionality of workplace design that I had been blissfully unaware of up until that point.
Even though my, you know my very earliest career kind of started with some responsibility for facilities actually for the first time really understanding that the intentional placement of rooms and physical structures in a building had an impact on how knowledge was shared and how knowledge was moved around.
And then, much later on, as I started to work with the pharmaceutical sector, which is very innovation driven, they're incredibly conscious of how you design your office to make sure that you get those informal collisions because that's where for them value gets created.
Those accidental conversations, like they've they're pretty much every major breakthrough, has been from a, you know, an accidental conversation, even if it was one that was created by building some structure. 

Anyway, so the digital domain and interesting thing right now, a lot of what we're working on is things like closed culture and identifying early on and preventing structural organizational failure.
So what that looks like is in healthcare, where you get closed cultures that that has an impact on patient care.
And when you look at the finance sector and that has an impact in terms of if you look back through the current history of financial failures, there's all cultural failures and actually a lot of that stuff comes from what you talked about that aspect or dimension of psychological safety that can be missing in the digital domain.

And in fact, the root cause of some of these things is the fact that where people have been restricted to just to operating online in one channel in a very formal way, the informal conversations to speaking up in the challenging that are required to keep a culture healthy don't happen and they're just as you have to be intentional with the physical office design for organizations that have gone hybrid or you know, choose your favourite word, virtual, offline, remote, you have to be intentional about building in the structures for that informal conversation.

It is recognizing that that.
That informal communication as a I think it's you've always said, is really essential for keeping the organisation functional.
It's not, and you know it's not idle chit chat.

It's not just social glue, it's actually part of the outer structure around the process.

And so I'm going to throw in the viable systems name here.
And so in in that theory where you have things and you have control structures and you have processes and again these can be very informal, it's not, not processes in the ICO sense, like this is how things work.
You have these outer loops and one of the most important biggest outer loops is that relationship between people in the organization, which actually is one of the expressions of the culture of an organization, how people relate together back to that idea of if I can see a team of nine people, I know how this organization works and that way of interacting is actually essential for the health of the organization and in a regulated industry, essential for the proper function of that as a regulated organization, because it's those outer loops, things driven by people feeling safe to speak up, which actually preserve the health of the organization and making sure that it's doing what it needs to do in the right way.

Anne Marie
OK. Yes to all that.
I think the OK, so you and I have talked long about the viable systems model and I'm a fan.
Umm, my initial interest. OK, so a system can be me.
It can be you, it can be the two of us together. It can be you define the boundaries around what the system is.
It can be a team, it can be a team, can be a department. To remain viable, a system has to be able to withstand shocks coming at it from the external environment.
What I found is a really esoteric you ohh the diagram just gives you some head.
Do you know what the first time I came across it?
I got it instinctively and then I read the words and when I read the words I saw I can't possibly have understood this and I put it down and it was about a full six months before I went back to it again.
I thought I actually I do get it. I do get it.
Essentially what I found interesting is that it's a set of umm.
What is that set of again? Principles I can. This is my view of it.

People can take issue with me, but this is how I see it.
That for me as a viable system, there are five things that I should have to be able to do.
I need to be able to coordinate, to control, to assess, to look out into my environment, to look into my environment.
And I need to do all these things.
All those things apply and it's like the viable systems model is like a system of Russian dolls where you know systems are embedded within systems are embedded within, but they're not embedded they actually talk across and link across.
But the reason that I found it interesting is that this was the first time that I saw something.
Where I saw.
So if I'm interested in empowerment people making autonomous decisions, it's really a way of seeing if these mechanisms are applied and there's a big if here, you know, because it's not saying that people function like this, of course they don't, but theoretically, theoretically, it demonstrates how it might be possible to have maximized local control of action and decision, with centralized coordination.
So we're back to simultaneous properties again, really aren't we?
And for me, that was the attraction of the viable system model. It has been severely criticised. It's very seldom seen in practice, but again, this is all just my view, but I still think for me there are principles within that that can be taken, pulled out, extracted, interpreted for the context, because the context becomes everything.
The context is first and foremost. You know, what are we looking at? What do we think we know? What do we not know?
And you know, get the shape of what we think our world looks like from our own vantage point, you know, from the point of view of being a one person, a two person, a three person, a team or whatever, whatever. 

You know, moving away from the critique and the criticisms of whether it's still relevant or not still relevant.
I personally think that there are insights contained within this very formalised set of processes that says if you do this you do that you do that, then this is possible.
It is possible to have autonomy with simultaneous coordinated control and flexing and changing among the different components. The different elements that make up the overall viable system and the viable system can be the organization. It can be the organization in an ecosystem, because of course now organizations don't function on their own.
You know if you look at healthcare, you know we've now got these ecosystems of independent but connected organizations, all sharing expertise, all sharing knowledge, resources, finances, you name it, to be able to produce something you know to, to bring something to the healthcare market.
I remember talking and listening to. I need to. Yeah, it was Phillips, you know, Phillips said.
I'll dig it out if you're interested.
It was a reflection between two people about how Phillips had changed from being sort of product focused to being equal, you know, driven by the relationships among we would have called it all those years ago supply chains.
It's not supply chains supply network, you know all the components.
Anyway, so that's the viable system model.
Yeah, you can go down rabbit holes with this.
You really can, but I tend to see it quite simplistically.

Benjamin Ellis
It's a useful structure I think, and one of the other things that I think thinking back to that, that kind of window around 2010 and there's social software came in and digital collaboration there was this view that pretty much wasn't much more complex and hierarchies - bad, flat network structures - good.

And it's interesting that just of late, I've seen that coming around again.
It's like, uh, if we move from a hierarchy to a network, all of our problems will go away, at which point you kind of go well know that there's half a century of theory that tells you that you're going to have a worse problem that you started with.

And again, it's it isn't a dichotomy.
It’s a false either or between those two things that both can coexist, because if you have network without the hierarchy, actually your power structures are uncontrolled, there isn't an accountability that it doesn't create psychological safety.

There's a whole set of reasons, but it isn't the case that if you have a very hierarchical system that that doesn't mean that the decision making is devolved and the people are, you know, autonomous.

Anne Marie   34:04
It's, I think as you were speaking there, Benjamin, I was thinking if there are younger people, you know, who, who you just sit at the beginning of the career listening to this.
I think for me the value of many of these old approaches, old thinking, old insight, is about the conversations that it starts.
What do we think we look like? What do we think is going on?
Again, it's back to the context and what light, if anything, can these olds thinkers, sheds on how we move forward, how we understand where we're currently at and the steps that we are going to put in place to, to move forward.
You know, not in a predictable way, but in a way that and then that brings us into, you know, another area that could get us into hot water.
You know it. It it's to me. It's valuable in in in it's the conversations, it's the.
This is what say the viable system model says and is it relevant?
Is it not relevant? If it's not relevant, then why not it is it useful if it's useful? Why? Why not?

You know, to.
To me, there’s a big carpet bag of stuff really isn't there that we've collected over the years in terms of frameworks and theories and research. Which of course has been superseded and built upon, and all of this sort of stuff.
But. But really and truly, I've always seen myself, in a sense, like Mary Poppins, you know, was a big carpet bag. Umm, full of things. And when I was working sort of moving on into the into the, you know, 2000 and 10/12/14 moving you know later.
And that sort of brought me into work-based learning and so forth. My view was always sit down with the team and nobody's more of an expert in their own cultural and operational context than the person or the team that you're working with. You know, as an outsider, as an outsider, I can ask nosy questions.
As an outsider, I can be a provocateur. As an outsider, you know, I don't have to bear the responsibility, but I do have to bear the responsibility.
But really what I'm saying is the expertise lies with them and it's then a question of “right here we go, we've got this bag of tricks, and here's something that I think you may be interested in.”
And the responsibility then is for them to say, well, actually that is useful or it's not useful.
And again, we're back to why is that? So the conversations and the reflections that around what are the pressures, what is it we're trying to do?
What are the pressures?
What's gonna stop us?
What are the constraints?
What are the enablers?
You know what, what?
How do we move forward and these tools this will, you know, the old knowledge, the old insights, the old theories become, they've become social objects, really they become things that provoke conversation and insight.
And I think this brings us right all the way now up to the fear around chat GPT, because I feel myself that this is, you know what we’re now offering, and you know the stuff that can be taken and because, what does Chat GBT know about the context that you're working in?
What does it know about your relationships?
What does it know about the people that you're working with?
What does it know about?
You know all of that and therefore to take something that's a starter for 10.
If you remember, Bamber Gascoigne, an old reference.
Yes, that was an old yeah program on television.
But you know, so you take that just started at 10 and then you say well build on it.
We amend it.
Is it useful?
Is it insightful?
And I see this accumulation of old knowledge and old philosophies.
Or philosophies that never really got off the ground.
You know maybe now is the time to take them out and re-examine them for the utility and insightfulness for helping us understand where we are and move forward.

Benjamin Ellis
There's a phrase in the data science world that predates it, which is all models are wrong, but some are useful and I think yeah, that applies to theories.

They can be a really useful lens for having a discussion about what's going on and that that pivots nicely, I think into that.

I think a general misunderstanding of how knowledge works that I think Chat GPT has really surfaced in that in a workplace where a lot of people have known nothing but the workplace being digital and that we're looking at now looking at nearly two decades where that's been pretty much the case, there is a misunderstanding.
That knowledge is what exists on the hard drive. And I was just trying to explain it to somebody this week and my explanation was it's a little bit trying like trying to, you know there saying well look, Chat GPT could read all these, you know the conversation logs from teams and the email threads and it can, it will have all of the knowledge of the organization and it can operate on it.

And for those people listening, Anne Marie really shaking her head furiously.
And it's a little bit like saying, ah, well, I've captured all the exhaust fumes from my car.
And so now I'm going to be able to make a car because I understand them.
Say well, yeah, no, what you've got there is exhaust fumes, and there's if a lot of different things kind of coming together.
So, I think one of the things in lean that was implicit, but I don't think ever explicitly stated, was the idea that knowledge is a social thing and that takes a second to get your head around because we've all been taught knowledge is what's in your head and you're doing exams on knowledge.

Anne Marie
No, that's not knowledge anyway.
Yes, sorry.
Didn't mean to interrupt Benjamin.

Benjamin Ellis
No.
See, because I think that's, it's that that thing, like particularly your perspective around organizational learning is the fact that that knowledge isn't a passive thing and that it doesn't whilst it does exist in people's heads, that's not where it's operable for want of a better word.

Anne Marie
Also, it has a shelf life.
It has a real shelf life, doesn't it?
I when I started, when I started with a couple of years ago, I started researching just for my own nosy sake around this whole skills agenda and there was a paper that I read.
This is at 2017 Universities UK, the body that represents.
I don't know 126. However, many universities it is. And they were looking at the skills that you know, in general, people are gonna have to have as technology, umm, presence before obviously, before what we knew about Chat GPT and so forth, and one of the things that this paper said was that if you start a 3 year degree by the time you finish it, your technical knowledge is going to be out of date.

So which begs the question and it's OK, it's a couple of things going around in my head.
Information and knowledge are two different things and information is what we get, isn't it?
And then we contextualize it and it becomes knowledge.
And I see knowledge as ‘know how’ ‘know who’ ‘know why’.
You know, so it's and that I think you know we now have information, you know the information hose has been there for, you know ever since we've had search, but knowledge applied knowledge of your ‘know who’ knowledge of your you know your colleagues, your customer, your you know the social thing,’ know who’, ‘know why’ you know what you doing this for you know and this sort of brings me around yeah so ‘know who’ ‘know how’ ‘know why’ sort of brings me around to so the skills agenda because I've always been really frustrated in the sense that say a university education.

And I heard somebody the other day there on LinkedIn saying that artificial intelligence can now be used so that we can now super quickly create courses. Courses? Oh, for goodness’ sake, no question of standing back and saying wow with this potential, how can we, how can we think differently? How can we be differently?
You know what, what? How can we use these things to augment what we are capable of? No.
Again, I fell into doing executive education at university and this was entirely different way. There was nothing about courses, so we're going to go into a company that got strategic thing it needed to do.
And so you go through the, you know, the steps if you get a team of the people inside the organization.
Umm.
Someone from the university and you get this thing and really essentially you're saying, what is it you need to do in scoping out, umm, a direction that you're going to move in. In order to be able to do that, if you look and you, everybody who's done either a bachelors or a masters degree at a UK university and I'm only talking about the UK because that's all I know about, there's a grid that has been determined at national level and every university takes it and reinterprets it for the, you know, for their own courses.
And essentially it's open source.
Everybody, everybody, anybody can ever look at it and it's all around skills, skills for complexity.
You know what are you able to do? Critical thinking.
How are you going to decide when you have different, so you have a situation and there are more than where there's several ways that you can choose to go, and they're all conflicting and you don't have enough information and you have to make a decision and you probably have to do it double quick time.

What skills are you needing to be able to do that?
And that's why you go to university. You go to university to develop skills to be able to think and act in complex contexts. That is what it's all about, and it just frustrates the life out of me that we still have people now saying that we can use artificial intelligence to create courses.
And I'm not saying that courses are useless. I'm not saying that at all, but I am saying that the whole reason for going to university where after three years in the current context, your technical knowledge may well be out of date by the time you finish.

So what else is there? What else is there? Is the skills that you've developed to be able to evaluate think critically, make decisions, make choices, defend them?
That's where it's, and this I think, hopefully, hopefully, and this is why I want to get back into the game.
This is why, this is why I don't want to retire, because I now think that with the tools that we've got at our disposal, we can now shine a light away from courses and onto these skills that are already out there.
That for higher, for higher thinking, it's social skills, it's creative skills, it's and it's thinking skills.
It's decision skills.
It's doing at speed, it's working with paradoxes.
It's working with gaps. It's working with, how do you trust the information that's in front of you? And that has been problematic for, you know, for a long, long time, really, isn't it?
It, you know, do those, I hope, I hope that the technologies and the direction that we go in now start to steer general attention towards these in the moment together thinking creative, doing skills.

Benjamin Ellis
I'm going to tie that back up with a real-life story and the that probably weaves these threads together and I think particularly for that relationship between learning and experience and culture in organisations and there is some work done looking at a particular systemic failure in a regulatory structure.
And one of the observations from that looking at well, what went wrong? Why did that happen?

And it was through the transition around Covid and what had happened was the meetings were done on teams and that's, you know, great or choose a platform for choice.
It wasn't specific to teams, but they were done online and then people hung up and that was that.
Whereas pre-pandemic people would go into the meeting together, they would come out and the senior member of staff would talk to junior member of staff and say hey, did you see this? Did you see that thing?
Or they could challenge them and say “ohh let you behave like a strange way there” or “this thing happened and I didn't notice it was that important?”
And those again, informal conversations were where a knowledge creation happened and B were the experiential learning that enable those people to develop, and also the other failing that happened was it also needed to have a culture where those conversations could happen where there were those relationships across the different levels, sometimes between somebody talking to somebody 4 levels above them in the organization.

So it was an interesting story that brings all of these things together.
It's like actually you need the right cultural surrounding the opportunities for those experiences of learning and the important knowledge isn't what's in the pages and pages of documentation.
It's actually that interaction between what's in people's heads that creates the value.

Anne Marie
Absolutely.
And actually what I, again I read something a while back that said that your idea that's in your head.
Is only an idea and when it's brought out in conversation, it's brought out and shaped, you know it's brought out in shown and somebody else will say you know what, will add to it, or you know and between you that sense of the knowledge has to be brought out and it has to be spoken it has to be you know has to be communicated and knocked around and tried and experimented with and so forth.
Yeah absolutely.

Benjamin Ellis
Exciting times.
It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you every thank you very much for your time and really excited to see what you get up to next.
And thank you for the learning over the years and for sharing your knowledge today as well.

Anne Marie
Ohh Benjamin, no thank you.
I'm delighted to just to have another one of our chats of old if you like.
So thank you.