 And good afternoon. Ethan Allen here, your host on Likeable Science. Welcome. I'm glad you're able to join us today here on Likeable Science on Fink Tech, Hawaii this Friday afternoon. We're going to be taking a little bit of a side step today, a very interesting branch of science. Organization Dynamics is what we're going to talk about today. And I have with me Diane Barboli. She's a consultant from Australia, she might pick up. She has a Master's of Applied Science in Organization Dynamics from RMIT University in Melbourne and has worked on a wide range of large-scale projects and helped nonprofits, particularly in Australia, working on this subject. So maybe start with just a quick, what is Organization Dynamics? Well, Ethan, it's a few years since I studied this, but at the time, three years part-time Master's degree, and there were a number of similar degrees in Australia and some here in America, and they're trying to come to grips with how organizations could be more flexible and adaptive. You know, we'd had IBM with issues. They'd had to reinvent themselves. And so, I used to work on big information technology projects, and I ended up being a middle person between the technical people and the user community. And I really liked it, but I had no idea why what I was doing worked. So I found a course that might be able to teach me some techniques. So if I'd gotten a hold, I could actually do things a bit more professionally. So over a three-year part-time, we looked at lots of different models of looking at the way groups work, small groups, medium-sized groups, large groups, large organizations, and I was in one large organization with 35,000 people. It was really interesting to observe. And then, with my husband, who's a South Asianist, we've done some research in India and Pakistan, and we've looked at how states operate. So taking a micro to macro view, which I'll talk about in a little bit more detail later, just looking at how these principles from the lower level could be taken up to a much higher level. So all sorts of levels. So we looked at things like just the study of the human side of any kind of collective brought together to achieve some set of tasks. So we looked at, and as I said, that could be a project or it could be a small or large organization, private, governmental, not-for-profit, just a whole range. So the human side, we looked at group dynamics, and there was a lot of research came out in Britain about how people that come back from the war had issues and how they could be brought back into society, and they were observed self-organizing leadership emerging. So there's a lot of research material came out of Britain. We looked at models of leadership, so typical sort of hierarchical, down to flatter sort of structures and distributed leadership, network leadership, lots of different leadership models. We also did just general systems approaches, so organic systems, general systems theory, so basic open and closed systems, all that sort of analysis, which was really interesting. One of my favorites was having a brief look at chaos theory, and I'm not a mathematician or a physicist or anything like that, but I just loved it. For some reason, complex adaptive systems really appealed to me. The whole idea of the macro and the micro view being reflected through fractals and self-similarity, I just loved all of that, and I still use that in my daily practice when I think about my own life. So that was a good one for me. We also looked at the elements of organizations, so how do people think about strategy, purpose, values, what the culture of an organization was going to be, and looked at structures and why structures fail and how people hang on to those structures no matter what when they shouldn't be. We also did a little bit on futurism, which I thought was fantastic. Just to open up your mind to a whole different idea of looking at the broad environment, looking at all the data available, all the information you can, and then not using a crystal ball and saying, this is going to happen, but saying, here are the possibilities of what could happen. Yeah, fascinating. I'm amidst of rooting geodiamonds collapse. It really has the same kind of thing. It takes us rather big views. We always look at all the different factors that influence cultures and says, which of these factors is most important where, how have they played out in the past and then we can look forward a little bit and see what it says about the, our potential here. Yes, you were talking about Australia and saying something about water and the water shortages, and yet we heard the other day that there's somebody discussing whether we should export water to somewhere in Asia that doesn't have enough water. This is a climate with drought. What's going on here? So it's interesting, isn't it? The different perspectives you get on all of this. Exactly, exactly. But you know, it's very funny because people have been organizing in the groups ever since probably our various, even before our very early ancestors, right? Animals organized, non-human animals organized, well, predators organized, hunt prey, prey organized to defend themselves against predators. Schools of fish are a very classic defensive organization to make it very hard for predators to select out a single fish to go after. Likewise, of course, predators will set up elaborate multi-pronged attacks on groups of prey to do this. And people have been organizing, obviously, but the study of how people organize, I think, is probably relatively new. Yeah, this is 15 years ago, but it's interesting because things get rediscovered in a different format or by some, you know, there's a different need issues and so people look at things differently. You know, with leadership, we've had things like what do you call them? We've had vocal intelligence, we've had emotional intelligence, focusing on the individual more and how that person can be the best person they can be so that they can then look after their organization better. So there've been all sorts of different ways of looking at this, but it's just different language to the same sorts of things that I think have been discussed for probably half a century. Sure, sure. And it's always been important for groups of people to get their jobs done in a reasonably efficient and effective fashion. And perhaps we're facing new challenges today because of rapidly changing technologies, the very nature of what we do. More and more, I think, asks people to work in groups and work very flexibly in groups. Absolutely. Sometimes the one group, sometimes another group, but bigger groups with smaller groups, whereas maybe in the past we worked more in a one-set group. In silos. Yeah, in silos or in a small one. Yes, and hierarchies, we know hierarchies still exist, but now there's just so much data pouring into organizations from everywhere. So if we come back to the environmental issues, so you've got what's happening inside the organization, the internal dynamics or environment, but you've also got the external environment and in this age of just overload of data and changing technology. You know, people talk about the Fourth Revolution. It's just, it's a huge revolution in data. And Fliggy mentioned flexibility, flexibility and adaptability are the keys. And so what people are focusing on now is how do you actually get your organization to be flexible? So, you know, an old hierarchy where everything gets decided at the top is a very slow, tedious process. And my, it's a personal opinion. I think it's, it diminishes the effort of the people on the way up. People can feel disempowered on the, on the way up through that press. On the flip side, though, is you look at a country like China, which has very much a top-down hierarchy. And when China is going in the future to be faced, for instance, with issues of coastal inundation, they're going to be, they're a country where they can just turn to 20 million of their people and say, next week, you're moving 20 miles inland and 20 million people will move next week. We couldn't, in this country in the U.S., we couldn't do that. Don't be tied up in law since we're decades apart. No, not in Australia. The lawyers would make a fortune. So there's some, a strong central leadership in that sense. It gives us some flexibility to a big estate. Yeah, that's right. So, one of the stories that I tell is working in one of the big professional services organizations, the big international law and accounting firms. Well, I did a short contract in one of these places and I was there to support some of the staff in developing themselves and their training ability. And it was funny, they were running an audits course. I ended up running a section of the course and I had no idea about accounting and auditing. So you just pulled together all the reserves that you're teaching other people and just do it. It was, it was fun. But people were, to an extent, disempowered because they'd write a report on junior manager and it would go up through layers and layers and layers of managers to be approved. So this could take quite a while. It was disempowering for the person. And now we would call that bullying in our workplaces because people would come in with expertise. They'd expect their expertise to be acknowledged. Everybody wants a voice. They're all on Twitter and Facebook and whatever else. And they all want to be noticed and they all want their voice to be heard and they want to be understood. So their identity is now bound up in who they are. And I remember when I first went to work, people would say to me, just leave your personality and your personal stuff at the door and come in and be this other person. I mean, well, that doesn't work for me ever. But that was some way it was that's just gone. And now people do share things about each other. And interesting, I could, I might come come to this report a bit later on. There's a fantastic report that I want to refer to. So I think that the world has changed a huge amount and people, as you say, are looking for answers to how they can be flexible and adaptable. Right. So many people now have either multiple jobs or their jobs force them to be sort of different people at different times to do more, more kinds of different things. You're not just sitting here with adding up columns and numbers or whatever, doing one repetitive task that that kind of job is largely gone or at least outsourced, if not taken over by a machine somewhere. And instead, you're having to make decisions and judgment calls. And yes, in the face of this, you know, flood of data coming in at you, surges of it coming from different directions at different times. Yeah, having to figure out when to switch directions, when to persevere on your course. Yeah. I know you and I have talked before about starting something. We were talking about starting a project. And you asked me what the key elements were. And so some of the issues go right back to the beginning of the organization. And so people get in consultants to help them rethink their whole organization. So they talk about it in strategic terms. My, after finishing this course, I came out of that thinking, the key thing is, what's the primary purpose of this piece of work on this organization or this community? What's the primary purpose? And secondly, what are the values associated with that? Why, why do you, what good can this piece of work do? Is there some value to society or is it simply about making money? If it is, then define even what that means in real terms. And all of that before people put structure together. People, I know, people used to just want to put a structure in place. Oh, we've got to put the team together. Okay, well, we can put a team together. But what is it that you want to achieve? And why are we achieving this? And what does it look like? And how many of these widgets are we going to make? And, you know, just talking about it. But importantly, what the value system will be of the organization? Yeah, and the values, I think are very critical. What is it that drives your organization? What sort of business? The heart or the soul of the organization? What do they exist, as you say, to bring, to contribute to the world? Presumably it is something besides money. I think we're going to get to that after a short break here. Absolutely. And I hope you'll stick with us and join us when we come back here. Think Tech Hawaii, Diane Barbley, and I'm your host, Ethan Allen, here on Likeable Science. We'll be right back. Hello, this is Martin Despeng. I want to get you excited about my new show, which is Humane Architecture for Hawaii and Beyond. We're going to broadcast on Tuesdays, 5 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii. Aloha, I'm Kauai Lucas, host of Hawaii is my mainland here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday at 3 p.m. We address issues and importance for those of us who live here on the most isolated land mass on the planet. Please come join me Fridays at 3 p.m. Mahalo. Aloha, my name is Richard Emory, host of Kondo Insider. More than a third of Hawaii's population live in some form of association. And our show is all about educating board members and owners about the responsibilities and obligations and providing solutions for a great association. You can watch me live on Thursdays 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. each week. Aloha. And you're back here on Likeable Science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Diane Barbley. She is a consultant from Australia on organization dynamics and has had vast experience in a number of different groups. And we were just talking before about some of the issues, the underlying values and sort of purpose and larger contributions to society that sort of help drive organizations. So I want to just give an example. I know politics is interesting in this country. I've been riveted by what's going on in your election process. I did pick up a book by David Ploof who ran Obama's first campaign, President Obama's first campaign. I read a book for a dollar called Dare to Win. And it was really interesting that when they were setting up the team, they knew what the purpose was. But one of the things that President Obama insisted on from what Ploof says is the values that they were going to work by. Were they going to be critical of other people, how they were going to handle criticism, all the values that the organization stuck in my mind. I thought, well, that's really fantastic to find that somebody is actually practicing that. And I know that lots of organizations are working like that now saying what is the value instead of just assuming. And then once you've got that value right and going through all the other steps, pulling the team together, ensuring everybody understands how that value fits into the overall mission. Communicating all of that. Yeah, that's interesting. I'm working on a project right now. It's a National Science Foundation funded EPSCORE project at the University of Hawaii. And I was very surprised. The leadership, they are pulled together a very clear set of five values that have to permeate everything they do. And they keep coming back to them and referring to them again and again and again. I want to be sure that everyone on the team understands these values that are driving us. And this sort of gets us to I know what the thing you wanted to mention a little bit about this project Aristotle, right? Oh yeah, the Google project. Yeah. I was alerted to the report in the New York Times magazine February 25th this year. I mean, it's just a report on the report from the project. But it's really interesting for a couple of reasons. It talks about... Do you need to maybe say a little background? Yeah, they were trying to figure out what the perfect team was. Right, in Google. Yeah, Google. So they've got their distributed sort of leadership and they've got their network leadership happening. How can they be flexible? How can they be quicker, more productive, more creative? Because with the flexibility comes more creativity. So they're trying to find out what the ideal team was. Well, you know, good luck with that. And it took a lot of time. But interestingly, they came to the things that we were taught 15 years before this report came out. It was about people acting more collaboratively, talking about data saturated age. But there's some wonderful quotes and I'll talk directly to it. Profitability increases when workers are persuaded to collaborate more. It was interesting. If a company wants to outstrip its competitors, it needs to influence not only how people work, but also how they work together, which comes back to even small teams within our organization deciding how they want to work. It talks about really what they found was that if people sat down and said, well, look, I really like to just stick to the agenda every time. Can we just stick to the agenda? I don't want to talk about what I did at the weekend when you and I, before we came in, I said, so, are we sticking to the agenda? And you said, I'm flexible. I said, that's good. But that's not everybody's cup of tea. And I can remember being in the IT world and having a big project group of about 20 people, and the programmers hated it if I went off the agenda. They just, they wanted to step one, step two. We're sure computer programmers, computers run on programs that must run on the agenda. I was one of them once, and there's no surprise I thought anymore. So it was very interesting. And I had to manage that and assure people that we would do everything on the agenda, but we might actually move them around a bit. And as they got more comfortable with that, and we all understood each other and got to know each other better, it was a very productive team. And so that's what they're saying. They talk about the establishment of a trusting environment. That's exactly what they say. You're psychologically safe. Yeah. And I said, once you've got these teams understanding that, well, psychological safety is the big takeaway here for me. Huge thing. And then understanding and influencing group norms. So they've set their norms, how they're going to behave, when they're going to meet, simple things about how they're going to treat each other, what sort of respect levels they're going to be, who's going to, everybody's going to speak us an equal amount, or no, no, no, you're going to take turns this week it's his turn, next week it's her turn. So understanding and influencing group norms were the key to improving Google's teams. So I thought that was really, really interesting as well and sort of fits in. And then of course, here we are, page eight, psychological safety is a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up, which is the anti-bullying thing, isn't it? Exactly. Again, it makes perfect sense. You've got to, in order to be creative, you've got to be able to express yourself freely. And if you're worried that things you say will come back to haunt you or be used against you later or will appear in a report criticizing you or will get people laughing at you or whatever, you won't say them. You won't open up and you won't be creative. No, that's absolutely right. And they're talking about team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves, which is exactly what you've said. So people these days coming with the, you know, pretty good idea of their own identity. Right. And they want to maintain it. Right. And you've got to then get comfortable with this idea that you and I may have very different ideas and we may be very different people. We may have different political views or whatever. And that's all fine. We can still have a common rational discussion about this project that we're on and the common goals we share and how we're going to get there, even if our viewpoints, our context, our backgrounds all differ radically. Indeed, those differences, I think, are often what bring real strength to teams, right? Yeah. So it comes back to back to basic general systems theory of an open environment or a closed environment. So we're not talking about a clock that just tick tick tick until it wears out entropy sets in entropy. It's about an open, open society, an open conversation. So it's open within a team. It's listening to influences from the environment and not blocking them. And it's respecting everybody's abilities, which I think is important. Now look, I know some of that's idealistic, but I guess where that's working, it's working extremely well. And of course, I've worked in the not profit for profit industry, and I've chaired a couple of boards. And that's very hard work when people come from different parts of the community. They come with different educational backgrounds, different understandings of the world and the environment. But you have to find some way of getting them all to work. You have to find something that you can all aim at. So it reminds me actually of Oliver Sacks, the man who was took his way for a hat. Yes. And his story of his gentleman, he runs into it in a mental institution. The guy is, has various severe psychological problems and is not very functional. But what he discovers, what Sacks discovers is that this guy knows a tremendous amount of music. And he starts questioning about how does he know about music. And it turns out his father was a musician and his father read him an entire encyclopedia as a child about music. And this guy knew everything in this encyclopedia. He basically just memorized this. And so he had this vast encyclopedia, acknowledge of music. And so Sacks puts him in touch with the local theater group. And his life becomes much enriched by this because he can help advise this group on staging any opera because he knows all the operas. He knows the music in them. He knows what the stage thing is supposed to look like. He just knows all this stuff about them and was able to sort of get uninstitutionalized and really integrated into the society much better because they could take advantage of his particular strength. Yes. I think too, if we come back to leadership, fabulous leaders are sort of visionary people and everybody quotes Elon Musk as having being one of those visionary people. They're pretty rare, I think. So most people have to learn how to be good leaders, I think. You can come out of university with a master's degree and something, but my friend Dr. Louise Mahler in Australia who's dealing with vocal intelligence, she finds people in very senior roles who struggle with public speaking, dealing with staff. Oh, I've got to give a report to 300 staff. I don't know how to do this. So taking them right back to basics of their voices, their breathing, their posture, finding out what the best is that they can be and opening them up and freeing them up and being brave enough to let things go. All right, right. Having enough confidence to say, oh, he knows what he's doing, we can let him get on with it and make the decision. But that's a long process. But there are an increasing number of people who understand they have to do that. Right, right. More and more of us are called on to at least trends when you take that kind of role. There are lots of sort of organizations and processes around that actually help do everything from simple things like being a member of a toast master's group. So it's a really great practice. That's the same sort of thing for at least a minute or two, suddenly you're in charge. Yes. So in the organizations like those in Silicon Valley, just the resilience to changes in the market and they have to be able to jump so quickly. And so, you know, you've got to have that distributed or network kind of leadership to be able to respond really instantly to things that are changing. But robots are on the way and grandson who wants to be CEO of his own robotics company and he thinks that families and people are going to need these things in their houses and that's what he wants to do. I'm thinking, how do they know about this? But that's their vision of the future. That's their lives. The technology is what's just going to take over. It is, it is. And the technology is going to do it, but it's not ever going to eliminate the fact that people are going to be in organizations, they're going to be working together on projects. And this is why we need to keep studying this whole business, right? We need to understand our own mental processes as well as how when individuals get together in the groups, how those groups begin to impact and interact with each other, right? Yes. Yes, that's absolutely right. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Diane, this has been great. It's been great fun talking with you here and getting your insights on things. I appreciate you taking the time to come and join us today here on likable science. And thanks for having me on the show. You said it's been wonderful. Thank you. You're very welcome. And I hope you will join us next week again on likable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Ethan Allen signing off.