 And it's one o'clock and we have a fantastic thought leader panel here today with amazing People and I'm going to use this microphone as an Indian talking stick when I ask the audience some questions or the The thought leader panel some questions and then after some time I will pass on the mic to you so that you can also ask questions to These people on stage So in we involve you as well So the first thing that I would like to talk about is the theme for this conference 17 years later individuals and interactions over processes and tools Looking back on this time since the agile manifesto was created How come we still did not change most organizations way of treating people and Appreciating them more than processes and tools Would anyone like to start to elaborate on that? Yeah, a lot of the resistance to change has to do with the thirst for power so Neuroscience tells us Ian Robertson wrote a book called the winter effect how power affects the brain and Apparently when Individuals exercise command authority they get a shot of dopamine in the brain become literally addicted to power so how do you overcome biology another researcher docker keltoner at the University of California Berkeley has done a lot of research on power politics and power Neurology and there is a lot of biology around this and it's really hard to change, you know a basic human behavior So one way to do it is to introduce what Dave Snowden talked about which is constraints if you can't exercise command authority in an organization then You can't do it. And so you have to figure out other ways to work with human beings I think part of the problem is our job is actually all about Egotistic individuals processes and tools Yeah, and it's forgotten about the interaction. I think that was one of the issues I think the other issue is it exactly followed the fad cycle of all of the management movements I find it amazing that it people never look outside their own discipline They keep thinking they've discovered novelty. Yeah, and I've been through business process re-engineering What we can fondly call six stigma? Blue red ocean strategy I mean and they just come and go right and each one starts off by promising the solution to life the universe and everything Which is every intelligent person knows the answer is 42 anyway so we got that one out of the way and of course they case huge illusion that's everything will be Transformed and then of course they can't deliver it because they fall back into the previous patterns and people want to make money out of it So they start to codify the structure and it becomes highly structured All right, and we got a stop and it started in the 80s with systems thinking which was a disaster Because systems thinking took an engineering metaphor of society. It assumed the society could be engineered Yeah complexity assumes it's organic and in an organic system You start with where things are and you see what you can change and you move things You never ever say what you want them to be because that guarantees that won't happen Mm-hmm Okay, well, um, so my background is more people so I'm coming from a more psychotherapeutic background and organizations and there's two things I wanted to talk about one is reasonableness and common sense and the other one is around power and I think I'm repeating myself from the panel last year Doug but I Worked for some years with children at risk and there was two categories broadly speaking one was those kids who Were they've been so downtrodden by power that their strategy was to never own it for themselves So they were like victims and they perpetuated that victimization and on the other side There were these kids who Had made the choice to disown vulnerability and identify with power instead and the basic rule was be power more powerful than Anybody else so as to never feel the pain of whatever wounds they experienced and what I found was that Those children that were identified with vulnerability was so much more able to have a conversation about how it might serve them to be More powerful were they to have the courage to do so in the safety an environment where it was safe And on the other side with the kids identified with power And it was very difficult for them to conceive in any way Why it might ever be useful as a human being to be vulnerable And so they they remained in a state of they were out of relationship There was no intimacy and no no contact so I think that was one thing and the other story is with my son He's seven years old and from since he was very young. I'd say to him son I'm gonna tell you some really some crap sometimes, you know I'm gonna suggest you do this and that and sometimes there's a good reason and sometimes there's not and I'm just repeating some RK ideology that I brought into So I said ask me why if you don't like what I'm telling you and now he's seven years old And I can't tell him a thing without him saying give me a reason if in any way it doesn't fit with his needs And I think that says something. It's like reasonableness. It's like people are willing to change when there's a good reason Yeah, but there's a bloody good reason by people don't want to change sometimes And it's important to remember the humanity behind some of these strategies And of course when we talk about HR and leadership for decades and even centuries We've been trained that certain things are gonna get certain results and other ways of doing it are not gonna get a start result Just think about the carrot and stick approach. We've been trained. We need to give the carrot We need to give the stick and then we're gonna get get the results if we don't do that We're not gonna get performance. We're not gonna get results And now in a natural and other ways of thinking we say no We challenge that if you tap into the intrinsic motivation of people you get far more than just ticking off the boxes and Giving you something so we're challenging the way we're supposed to look at things But we're still looking at it from our existing Context from our existing and way of thinking and behavior and we are asking people to actually change that and of course in hindsight It's very easy having emerged been emerged in the actual Movement it's easy for us to see why it works And that's the only way it can work But it's more difficult to look at it when you've not had that immersion and not have the experience of actually living and breathing breathing actual values For me I look at it in terms of the fingerprints of history. So going back to The industrial revolution going into scientific management and Taylorism going into Globalization there are certain organizational patterns that allowed for scale by treating people as resources as as Swappable commodities now we've always lived in a VUCA world. All right, but True I hate the word but I will use it innovation occurs through individual interactions through scientists through through through actual people Coming up with something that's new but those who follow and those who scale do so through the the Muscle power whether it's the mind muscle or the physical muscle of just a large number of people and The easiest way not the best but the easiest way of getting that done is Not through individuals interactions, but through strict process and dogma and and everything else We see that in agile today where the innovation around agile. Yes in the software world, but also in Business and in other domains as well is very much Following by rote what has been done. So the innovation is coming in pockets and then everyone else is going oh, I'll take some of that. Thank you very much and When they do that They're just they're just following and there's nothing wrong with following But they're not allowing the those individuals and interactions to occur in their organizations I think we need to be careful here. I mean agile people sometimes remind me of evangelical Christians at the Extreme end of the spectrum. All right They they basically believe if everybody came to Jesus or rather came to the agile manifesto Then the world will be transformed and their job is to talk about that and not actually do things Yeah, and sorry. It's a good Catholic Marxist here We need more justification by works not by faith alone, right? The reality is agile as largely failed It made a difference for a period and now it's lapsed into things like safe and less and Certification schemes and now the coaches are trying to do the same to HR Because that market is drying up because agile has now become highly commodified And when something becomes commodified is at the end of its natural life cycle Which means there's space for new things to come in right and that that's actually good news in some ways The others need to be careful here and when I taught leadership with Peter Drucker, which was a huge privilege Yeah, one of the things we agreed on is that scientific management and complexity have one major thing in common They valued human judgment Systems thinking tried to get rid of human judgment Yeah, it did you basically if you look at scientific management the assumption is you will join a company You will go through an apprentice scheme Yeah, you will be part of that company and yes, some people will have sick jobs But actually they've got other chances in that but there was a respect for human judgment with automation of physical processes What we saw was systems thinking was actually the attempt to get rid of that to remove human judgment completely And with regret HR has been one of the major dead hand influences on that Yeah, I mean when I ji was started off in HR that confessed my sins here But it was run by an ex-major from the British army with three people and He kind of like knew about rules and regulations He knew about people the whole thing work people took responsibility Then it became a profession and we ended up with 35 people in the HR department You know our salaries allocated by spreadsheets You know a profession which had no connection with business whatsoever. Yeah in terms of the way it worked So I think one of the issues is the responsibility issue, right? The minute you create a function for something All the other operational managers think they're no longer responsible for that function because they can delegate it, right? Yeah, so what will be the role of HR in the future then? Yeah, we don't have HR so Hopefully it goes away Yeah, I mean HR came into existence because Managers want to get rid of the term personnel is in personnel departments because they thought that sounded too soft and fuzzy And they wanted to lay people off in the re-engineering craze So we have human resources and what what's happened is that we have this language That's so deeply embedded in our culture that it's very Dehumanizing and we've got to change it Henry Minnsburg said I'm not a human resource. I'm a human being That's his battle cry. We talk about people as direct reports like their pieces of paper We talk about headcount as if people don't have bodies We talk about FTS as if people are acronyms and the list goes on and on and on and It affects the way we think about human beings so is it that HR management and consultants are Necessary waste is that a good term for these groups of people one of those words was right Necessary waste. Yeah, because the world is not perfect so Let's look at America for example one of the most litigious organization Countries in the world. So what is the role of HR in America? It is to stop the company from being sued It's not to look after the staff. It's not to look after everything else. It's to put in place the all the all those all the fine print so the company is not going to get sued now I I Suspect there's a culture. Well, no, I'm not I'm not American. I'm Australian. So that's a there's a cultural thing there, but The waste that occurs in an organization Comes from in many cases handoffs. All right managers became lazy. I don't want to do that so I'll delegate right and There's nothing wrong with delegation in its own right if you're delegating an outcome If you're delegating an accountability, but if you're saying okay HR is going to take that responsibility from me and the project managers will take that responsibility from me and all that's left for me is 16 30-minute meetings every day to coordinate from A to B to C to D and all my job is is to handoff Then once the organization Simplifies Once the organization removes those lines in that In that flow then yes, it's not a necessary waste. It's just a waste There's an old British joke about this because we founded Australia in its modern form by sending them all our criminals And we found in America in its modern form by sending them all our religious fanatics, all right And kind of like you know, it's like the arch ship for those of you know, there's you know, there's agile comes there I was all the way through in that sense. I think We need to be very careful about this consultants in their modern form arose on the back of business process re-engineering Yeah, and until that time consultants were generally fairly experienced people in retirement in Partner to consultancy ratios of one to three one to five which is effective in apprentice modeling to help people out What BPR did is it drove the market for a large team of what I used to be called a newly retentive pole cats But IBM got upset when I did that You know large amounts of you imparted a consultant ratio one to 50 doing mathematical techniques in companies Which meant we had a manufacturing model not an apprentice model of consulting and the big consultancies have seized on our job Because it's the next thing they can run that model on that's why I say when the big consultants take it It's over guys. Yeah. Yeah, you've got to move somewhere else All right, I think the other thing which worries me deeply is I like many people thought that when HR HR was the only department in a company which grew with effectively a promotion route for women And many of us thought that would change things But if you wanted any evidence that context determines things more than gender it's HR This HR has become the most only retentive control based camp part of any organization Despite the fact it's largely populated by people with female gender And I think what that teaches us is context determines the man's for a woman We need to change the context yet more than the people And I think HR needs to become a distributed nodal function not a centralized function Oh, and by the way, they don't like HR anymore. That's unfashionable They now think they're organizational change designers or something like that. It changes every two or three years So what then should HR's role be in an agile transformation? They should be midwives not consultants Yeah, the midwife goes into your home helps you give birth and then slings that afterwards the consultant throws you onto the operating table Produces the baby and claims the credit Yeah So start to think of yourself as a midwife not a consultant Okay So obviously coming back to HR. Yes, HR is not going to exist in the form it is today But there is definitely a very valuable place for us in in the organization But of course it means we have to redefine ourselves I mean if we look back at the history, it was all about empowering corporations Now it's about empowering people and of course we have to strip HR of a lot of the stuff That is hindering us today to actually be the champions of people and help them Really tap into their their passions and their intrinsic motivation And I think it was you darker said, okay self-management tapping into the hearts and minds of people And that's what we have to do We have to create those environments that actually help people to do that But I absolutely agree the way we've run HR in most organizations today That's not going to get us into the future. It's not going to make us successful So you're touching on intrinsic motivation and How do we really create that how do we Tap into people's intrinsic motivation then I think our most of our processes and tools and I deliberately come back to processes and tools are all set up to actually say We trust in your passion. We want to tap into that We trust in your intrinsic motivation But everything that we are doing all the processes all the tools that we have set up Actually show that we do not we do not trust you and we need to micromanage you need to control you And you only work if we get that carrot and stick out So for my sins, I also used to work for IBM and I was conscripted I volunteered I lasted the two years so so not very long So so it's interesting you join IBM and they what's called blue wash you right They they indoctrinate you into how IBM is amazing. They hire the IBM These fantastic great wonderful people and And they attract people who who fall for that I'm I'm good. I'm intelligent. They hire great intelligent people and then they put them in the box A tiny box and says that's your job. Do not step out of that box Now to their credit IBM right now is trying to change that they've taken the box away But it's been there for so long that It's still there Yeah, I mean as I was conscripted they bought the company I work for Um It was the best of times and the worst of times and it was actually fascinating I became IBM at those days. This is before Jini Rometti. It was been a disaster in my view, right? Um, and Sam was as well. I mean I worked directly for Lou Um, they bought us to create IBM global services. They needed a service-based business And my job was to try and make that transition And I had a really good boss because he basically worked at my targets at the end of every year And if we were okay, then we wrote it up retrospectively and we played the game All right, and he caught doing it one year. So we thought right so he said something said We're going to get the buses. They said we got to get your targets upset, right? And there's an IBM corporate strategy which says the shift to a service organization will cause disruption We have to protect people doing it from old fashioned IBMers who won't like it So he said right you're going to do that. So he said your bonus scheme is three thousand dollars Every time a director of IBM demands in writing you're fired And five thousand dollars every time a vice president does it? And he put it into HR and they went ballistic But he pointed out it was empirically measurable. It was linked to a strategic target and he had the authority to do it, right? And there were some brilliant people like that in IBM The thing which appalled me is they had to apply their brilliance to work around an over constrained system And I sat down and got drunk one night with I won't say who because it was a lot of Pinot Noir And you know, which That they made me experiment in New Zealand and South Africa Because IBM doesn't regard them as countries. They're too small And I'm Welsh, which means I'm fanatical about rugby and wine All right, so to send me to New Zealand and South Africa is you know, please don't throw me in the bribe patch You know, it's it's one of those all right. So he sat down one night got drunk We added up all the IBM's acquisitions and we worked out what their value should be based on organic growth And actually they'd only just destroyed value the big companies acquire things And they destroy value to maintain their pace and the skill in a large organization is the ability to play games with the system You know, so there's a huge amount of energy going into that which is deeply problematic I got a stand innovation at a nurses conference recently when I set up and said there, you know Two things about you guys, which I had permission to use beforehand In Britain, we stopped nurses washing patients Because it was a routine task that could be outsourced to somebody cheaper And I said that was a disaster because when you wash the patients you add intimacy with them So they told you things they wouldn't tell a doctor So you're becoming second rate doctors not first rate nurses And I said the second thing is all the work we've done shows that you break the rules every day to provide empathetic care to patients And you risk your jobs because you care about your profession And I got stand innovations for both which rather upset some of the NHS bureaucrats in the room But I could take you to similar examples in large corporations And the issue is how do we make and but I think the key thing is we can't change this overnight Yeah, if you're starting from scratch you can design something with the right constraints But that's a rare privilege If you're starting from where you are you have to relax some constraints and you have to create pockets of change Which effectively act like I mean we do this all right It's you you need to create retroviruses Yeah retroviruses infect the host and change the DNA To match it and actually that's the model for change Because you're not going to change these organizations by telling them they're wrong You're going to change them by gradually and then occasionally getting punctuated shifts where the moment is right You can push the thing. Yeah, and it will change faster. Yeah, that sounds like a very good approach to change Can I just briefly try to pull back the last three points? So Small experiments that respond to organizational needs that the current behaviors and strategies don't address adequately creates evidence for change So that was one thing but you mentioned about what's the future role of HR if there is one I mean I heard the the laughs and and and the other thing around intrinsic motivation and It strikes me that the only reason we cooperate in any way at all as human beings is In service of our needs right so there was the reason for You can disagree in a minute Dave, but what I mean by this is As as people we learn to cooperate together because it created value and enabled us to achieve things that we couldn't achieve alone And and so when I think about HR It's like I've been flipping it around recently to resourcing humans Right because I think resourcing humans to be able to better resource themselves So if the purpose of organizations is ultimately to resource ourselves and From one simplistic perspective to just live as well and as long as possible And from an egocentric self maybe me over you but from a world-centric perspective Like for us as a species to better ourselves Right, then it seems to me that the future role of HR is about Enablement of people to be able to do that better and the thing that they've said about That's not a centralized function. That's a nodal function. I think ultimately it's an individual responsibility Right to look at what what do I need in order to be able to deliver value to the thing I say is important and then to be committed and responsible for doing so And I'm very curious why you shook your head, Dave I agree with the motivation behind it, but I profoundly disagree with the underlying construct Yeah, one of the problems we got in northern europe and north america and it's it's called social atomism philosophy Is the belief that all society is an aggregation of individual self-interest If you go to southern europe latin america africa the Celtic fringe of northern europe Yeah, then actually those are commuterium cultures individuals are defined by the communities into which they interact and bring up And the primary identity interest point is is actually the the plan or the extended family not the individual Yeah, and if you look at that we evolved not to be brilliant individuals, but to be brilliant in extended network communities So it's not about changing the individual. I think that's one of the key things It's also what is called neo darwinism. I mean darwin himself rejected this but the neo darwin is picked up and you get idiots Like richard dorkin's who pick it up And they believe everything is about selfishness. Yeah, the reality is human beings evolved to be altruistic Yeah, we're very altruistic provided we got physical proximity and a degree of empathy towards the system Part of the problem with the virtual world is people but cruel or in a virtual environment in the physical environment because for example the um the The scent traces which allow us to determine trust are available to us in the verbal in the virtual community Whereas there are in the physical community And there's a brilliant book by some colleagues of mine alborus with university called neuro liberalism And it's an attack on the nudge based behavioral guys Because it says what neuro what neoliberalism has done is trying to subordinate cognitive science To a neo neoliberal ideology and that's still the dominant ideology of organizations So I think the fundamental thing we've got to change. I think we're agreed on the objective here You've got to change the unit of analysis from the individual To different types of nodal entity. Yeah Uh, let me give you To to to amplify what they're saying It is highly cultural Um, uh, Gert Hofsteder did his uh, oh no iBM, which is a cultural I know it is indeed It's been continuing for the last 30 years, so it's grown since then He has his cultural dimensions one of those is into individualism Um, uh, but you can see that play out in particular behaviors Um, let's take some negotiation for example You put an average american and an average australian across a table from each other to negotiate something like a contract The australian will quite often come out with a better, um outcome because australians are highly individualistic We operate As one unit very easily. I don't think it makes us overly selfish. I don't think so But it does mean that's our unit You put a table of australians and a table of americans across from each other All right, the americans have learned how to form a collective Well in this case a collective negotiation Approach so they're playing off each other. They're reading the social cues. They're engaging and the australians are just five individuals Who are they have a common goal? But they don't know how to play the community game or at least nowhere near as well And so a collective of americans will will beat a collective of australians on average And there's no difference between us just the way and the culture that we grew up in Interesting there is actually a biological difference. So one of the most scary things in biology at the moment is called epigenetics So we now know that culture inherits and we know the biological mechanism of it through rna So over two to three generations culture can actually change your underlying biology All right, so don't underestimate this because it's actually very scary I mean the classic case and as if you give bright mice the children have done mice to bring up The children of the dumb mice are bright Yet now just start to think through the implications of that and you start to say we're in training these cultural Pabets at a biological level not a sociological level, which is the other reason why change is difficult I would like to ask an entirely different question and I would like to have your view On what is success? What is a successful organization? And how do we measure success? What are your thoughts around that? Well briefly i'd say that we fulfilled our objectives in our collaboration in a way that we Believe at least is adequate to fulfill the need And for us it's really having engaged people So people who align with our purpose who enjoy the challenging work They've been given and who have that social network within their team within their organization And are engaged because if they are engaged we're going to have better results as a company We're going to strive to achieve our our goals our vision So is success linked to survival? Maybe it's getting nervous here Doug do you want to comment on that? Yeah, I think so. I look at three pillars of success. I look at happiness harmony and prosperity happiness is individual contentment and a feeling of achievement and validity We talk a morning star many years ago about a smile index, you know We'll measure how many times a day people smile and we'll create a happiness index Harmony is teamwork. It's how well we collaborate with each other to get stuff done And we can measure that in some ways and prosperity is a financial success Are you creating more value for the society and for the world than you're consuming in the creation of the value? And if you're doing that that's what society calls a profit and if you have that then you can sustain The ongoing happiness and harmony. So those are kind of the three pillars How do you know that you create more value just because you're profitable? Is it is value linked to profitability? That's the that's that's your p&l. That's what the profit is what That's the the the applause society gives you for what you do And if you're creating product goods and services and and society is paying you more For those than the consumption of of resources So value to make those then you're creating a profit. So value is a concept that is individually It's it's in the heads of different people, right? What is value? It is always the customer who decide what value is. Okay, so I this is just from a memory of a distant article I read it was about renewable energy and and wind power Yeah, and there was all this like championing of wind power and there was these organizations It was super successful and this article was headed by a half-page photograph of this green lake In china somewhere and talking about the devastation To the local communities and the kids and the toxicity and and I just saw what the hell is that about You know because here we are from one side of the planet celebrating and champion this sort awesome success and And on the other side causing devastation So this brings me back to the thing of human need I was saying about if organizations are in service of human needs and Like to what extent or scope do we consider the effectiveness of that operation or the successfulness? Is it here now in our geographical location and according to our figures? Is it global currently? Is it global thinking hundred years ahead? I don't know I don't know. I think it's a difficult question to answer, but it's probably one that should be asked. Yeah So I'm going to let Dave sit for a bit longer. He really wants his microphone So, I mean No pressure, okay Two two two thoughts So so number one very practically financial success is an indirect measure of of success or financial health is an indirect measure And and my talk in an hour half an hour or something is going to focus a little bit more on this where we look at You're not in business to make money unless you're like a hedge fund. All right. You have another purpose now If you can't measure that purpose because it's it's Indistinct then we use of we use an easier measure All right a boring measure such as financial health to indicate That we are achieving our mission, but the two are not the same And companies that conflate the two IBM Struggle Second point and to your earlier question My organization is the business agility institute. We are a community or an outreach. We're a think tank We provide advocacy for business agility and all these new ideas Success for us is to go out of business like success for us is to no longer be needed. So so Does a company have Companies need to earn the right to exist. It is not a guarantee For us, we have a mission if our mission is successful Fantastic, we no longer exist and that's and that is success Shouldn't that be the goal for all consultants all managers and all HR people to kind of Disappear and make yourself superfluous. It's a platitude. They all say that but they don't mean it, all right So come on. Let's get let's get real about this. All right. Um, I mean a couple things first of all apologies for this But there isn't a new zealander present, right? If you don't know wales new zealand and Canada have one thing in common a large arrogant next door neighbor So I have a duty for my new zealot my kiwi columns will have an australian next to me to deal with this, all right Um, a couple of things to make a point. First of all Um market regulatory mechanisms were fine in the 18th and 19th century when we thought we had infinitely available resource But we don't anymore Yeah, and they're actually, you know growth growth metrics profit metrics market metrics are going to destroy the earth within 20 or 30 years If we don't do something about it and that's the horizon there I mean I used to worry about my grandchildren and I started to worry about my children. I now actually worry about myself Yeah So the market mechanism is something we got a challenge and things like minimum wage actually don't do that because they fall within the same That the means of exchange becomes more important than the thing exchanged Yeah, some of the work we're looking to do at the moment is to look at the way that gifting works in so-called primitive societies Because in gifting it's not an exchange of gift. I used to have this argument in massachusetts all the time They couldn't get the they thought favors were put into a bank So you put favors into a bank so you could draw them out later, right? Yeah, and that was the market mechanism gone insane. How many sagas with larry prusak all the time Right if in the gifting culture you give provided you give something like a minimum level to the community you're part of The community looks after you if you don't gift you're excluded and of course that's death within a hunter-gatherer community There's absolutely no reason why we shouldn't provide free at the point of entry healthcare and education in all societies over the world It's just that we choose to ration it with money It's because we impose a rationing technique in terms of the way it works I think one thing if you've got to look at and it links with the organizational changes you're talking about in effect, right? You've got to look at a different constraint based interaction basis and we have got a limited time to do something on that In terms of success, I think you know, there's no one criteria I mean success at the moment for me in world politics would be a blue wave in america and the second referendum in britain Yeah, and I have hopes of both of them All right Those are campaign-based goals Yeah, if you look at an organization, I think there are two goals. One is continuity of identity over time That's very different from survival It's actually it's continuity of identity over time is not thing as survival The other thing is, you know, I'm 64 now. The other thing is a good death Yeah, I mean it's always Silicon Valley. You've got people who want to live forever I mean the reason they're investing in AI, I mean they believe in the singularity Because they want to live forever and if you you know If you believe in the singularity your brain is ossified to the point where a computer transfer may be possible for you, right? But the idea that there isn't a cycle of things by which organizations die to allow something new to emerge Is a key thing we need to do so success can actually be death It doesn't actually have to be survival So should we then stop to do um agile transformations and let all traditional organizations die instead? Is that what you're saying? Well, you can kill them faster with an agile transformation I was going to assume you Yeah, that's great Okay, so shall we let the audience come in and talk a bit also anybody has a question down has a question Who do you want to ask? Yeah, okay, uh, when you talk about the future of HR. Yeah, I I changed my career from engineering to human resources 10 years ago And I have heard that HR people want to be a business partner and I still Hear about it. Yeah Like I want to be a business partner But in the US now many HR people they talk about they want to be a business leader So what do you think about it? Yeah, you think like with or not HR people can go there You're putting me in a difficult situation here So most organizations have spent decades and tons of money and resources into building that business partner partner model To varying degrees or and varying success So, of course, it's how do we define being a partner for the business? Are we still embedded in our HR silo and I'm the liberty using the term silo or are we embedded within our tribe? Are we sitting with our tribe? Are we connecting with our people on a daily basis? So that's what makes it fly or not So we should try to think about it in the in different terms And redefine who we stand for and we've spent so much energy on getting that seat at the table That we actually forget about delivering value because if we deliver value Then people are going to fight for us. They want us at their table They want us in their communication and that's how we show that we create value not by talking about it But by connecting with people and doing things Thank you for viola Anybody else who has only would anybody else like to yeah, of course just sorry Just a quick one. I think you made the really important It's not what it's what you do that counts Not what you say you're going to do And a massive problem in organizational change and agile transformation is people keep talking about what they're going to do Rather than going to do small things and talk about it afterwards, right? The other thing I think which is critical on leadership is I was a general manager before I being bought us and then strategy director I wasn't allowed on the general management program till I'd done a year in sales a year in production a year in in in Support and hit my targets And at the end of that I knew what it was like not to be able to pay your mortgage Be sure I can close the sale that month and you can't know that knowledge in abstract And I think part of the bottom with HR is all of their knowledge of an organization these days is abstract not concrete And we desperately need a new generation of generalists And all we're doing is creating more and more specialists Anybody else who has a question Over here is one question Can you say your name, please also? Sure. Hi sarah is my name Uh, well if I have information and then uh, I rely on those information to make decision then I'm thinking analytically and I may call myself analytical thinker And if I don't have information and rely on my emotions and intuition, then I would call myself Intuitive thinker if I'm good at combining the two then I would call call myself a design thinker What I'm wondering about is In the middle of complexity the complexity that Dave Discussed in his in his talk What would be a good thinker? What would be a good style of thinking in complexity? Is it necessarily the case that if I am a good design thinker, then I'm a good thinker in complexity or not? That's the question. Can I make a comment? Thank you. Um humans are very good at putting ourselves in boxes and It's why horoscopes are wonderful. Whatever star sign I am Wow that they got me because we put ourselves in a box and we identify Taurus um So so so first of all analytics analytical rational rubbish, right? Um, we'd never use data Right, we get data to make ourselves feel good. We uh, a good leader is someone who can synthesize A whole bunch of stuff and just come up with an idea and half of it is just they were they lucked into the right one So I'm I wouldn't go and and hr is really guilty about this Maya's Briggs and psychometric profiles and and what is your color today and what is your acronym and it's ridiculous And I think being able to say this is the style of person who is best in this environment is I think it's highly limiting Yeah, it's actually worth going to read the origins of Maya's Briggs both in young's rejection of it, which they're suppressing Um, and also it's founder who was really upset by the compromise the hay group made a do to make it into a test All right, so it's worth going back to some of that. There's a recent book being published on it Which is worth reading. I think the answer to your question I think if you want to be a complexity thinker, you don't create primitive dichotomies Between analytical thinking and emotional thinking, right? It's like that left right brain stuff, which is really bad cognitive neuroscience We don't have a left brain which is emotional and the right brain which is rational. Yeah, it's far more complex than that Right, um, but we love dichotomies in western society. We like to make things either or Yeah, so if you're and and we're doing a huge program We just finished a year-long program on a complexity based approach to design thinking Because design thinking has become commodified like agile Yeah, and it's now a highly structured linear process with certificates and god knows what else and the scaffolding I mentioned has come out of that process Yeah, design is a you need distributed ethnography distributed ideation. You need nodal the ability to coalesce Interactions between ideas and problems. Yeah, which can then go into a more conventional design process So if you're going to be a complexity based thinker, you need to be a generalist You need to have a wide diversity of intellectual backgrounds And read him because you need thousands of different patterns that you can bring to play Does that answer your question? Yeah, can I add something to it? Yeah Yeah, okay, so I gave a whole talk on this last year at brewing agile It kind of blew people away because it was a really off the map of what people would expect at an agile conference But it was my so my background young in kind of background working around psychology of selves And it kind of confronts the dichotomy of living in a dualistic universe and deluding ourselves into believing We're one thing and not the other and you know, they're kind of all human Human kind of conflict emerges out of that as does falling madly in love with people, but that's another story and um in So I work with sociocracy and and co-developer of sociocracy 3.0 And there's a pattern in there called proposal forming and what proposal forming does Basically is bring people together And through contract agree not to fall into our polarized opinions and positions But to share them openly with one another in response to a need that we want to address together And we often we often say in s3. It's like it's not either or it's both and more And that's like a simple statement on one level, but when you really dig into it What it's inviting is that we transcend this dualistic world view that we have and through learning to embrace Inconsciousness apparent irreconcilable opposites something new emerges novelty emerges And um sociocracy has got its background in quakerism and quakers had this crazy idea that there might be some divinity in all of us And so they've learned to sit in circle and not only to kind of espouse their own position But to listen deeply to one another and listen for the collective narrative Listen for that novelty that emerges through everybody being able to put on the shelf Their particular position honor it but recognize that as ken wilber said and there's so many problems with ken wilber But one thing he said that I think is valuable is nobody's smart enough to be 100 wrong But some people are more correct than others All right, and so it reminded me you've mentioned this in your talk this morning, davis Well, it's like if we're going to be coming together to work with one another Then how to really maximize the potential of the collective intelligence and how to learn to really step forward and bring our own perspective But at the same time to pay equal diligence and and respect to others as well and be open to something new emerging That's Where the hole is greater than the sum of its parts as we say, right? That's beautiful. James. Thank you for that I have a final question to all of you because we need to round off this panel discussion Although it's so exciting. I'm sure you have many more questions, but there is just not more time right now We have a speed talk schedule in a few minutes So we just like you all to answer the last question It's what is your most important message to the audience here of this conference The most important message that you could give them um I think is to respect The wisdom of crowds We look at the james suriwiki And his book the wisdom of crowds We have collective intelligence that can make us dazzling and and find solutions and responses that are absolutely superb And achieve greatness And much greater than we can as individuals There's a lot of uh case studies examples of collective intelligence gathering He talks about the Sinking of the scorpion submarine and and how he put together a number of different teams and they were able to triangulate and find a submarine that sunk and it was No, no single individual could have achieved that particular result. So We have to embrace and respect and honor collective intelligence And respect intuition um to the earlier question We all think we're creatures of logic And brain science tells us and and they've studied people with brain damage to the to the emotional part of the brain People can actually think through logically through tremendous Problems and but they can't come to a final decision Without the emotional side of the intuitive side of the brain And so we've got to respect human intuition human emotion And the collective intelligence of crowds in order to achieve great. Thanks great. Thank you dog and Evan No pressure, um remain skeptical and Uh try and do good If you can keep those two in mind, then you're going to get individuals and interactions. Thank you and Dave I think we're more distributed intelligence than collective intelligence And if you look at the scorpion, they it was a highly constrained distribution of partial data And a probability distribution. So it's not just crowd sensing It's actually a constrained based distributed intelligence. So think of ourselves more as distributed nodal intelligence Yeah, and that actually means you map the present you identify what you can change you make changes If they start to move you in a direction, which seems sensible you reinforce them And stop talking about how things should be and change things now And by the way avoid wilbur and young and people are up because I'm sorry we've moved on I mean young was hugely valid in his day, but he profoundly influences HR practice Yeah, but we've moved on so far from young in terms of our understanding of psychology and everything else That the concept of ideal archetypes is actually holding a lot of stuff back And I think all the things you want to achieve can be better achieved outside of that So Fabiola Yeah So listen to your gut and be gutsy. So if your gut is telling you there is a better way out there to connect with people There is a better way out there to engage people There is a better way out there to inspire and lead people Go with that gut and be gutsy to actually do something about it Start small don't try to change the whole system start small make small changes Have successes and build on that be gutsy to do it Thank you and James last I would say like just to come back on what you said Dave I would say do listen to young do listen to wilbur do listen to everybody and everything And consider there might be some small grain of truthfulness in that and at the same time I'd say listen to Dave because one of the things that strikes me about you Dave is It's not it's not just some hypothesis, right? It's like Dave has committed decades to really doing the research and what he says stacks up on the basis of evidence And I think that's really really important empiricism in what we do like really take a look at what's happening Continually re-evaluate what you believe you know on the basis of what happens next and be prepared to continually evolve and adapt that And finally on that it just strikes me companies are spending billions and billions Investment into developing agile operations with more and sometimes less success actually But what about agile governance? What about iterative and incremental decision-making because you can't Predict all of these things up front things are continually changed And we need to be continuously evolving and developing how we respond to things and when we make decisions that guide what happens next It's really valuable to come back to them again and again start small with experiments You can afford to fail and build your kind of strategies processes and habits around things that make sense You know based on what actually happens not based on your archaic ideology and hypothesis Hallelujah Thank you. Thank you so much