 I'd like to honour the land that's holding us, to honour the kaitiaki of the past, and to honour the kaitiaki of the present. Today I want to talk a little bit about the context and the framing of the work that I've been doing recently, to share a few stories about some of the recent experiments over the last couple of years, and to talk a little bit about the edge of my learning, so like the next five, ten years, a few decades, the stuff I'm seeing there. So, I'd like to start with an exercise. Can you hold up your hands? Just have a look at your hands. There's a few hundred billion cells in each hand, skin cells, muscles, blood, nerves, fingernails, hair, billions and billions of cells, all really different to each other, and all those cells have got something in common. Each one of those cells can trace back a lineage and ancestry to the first life on this planet, unbroken, mother-daughter, mother-daughter, mother-daughter, all the way back to the origins of life. And it's been quite a ride. Anyone know what this is? ATP. So ATP, if you remember from like biology and science and so on, it's the money of cells. This is how cells store energy and transfer it with each other. It's like a bank meets a truck that you can send stuff and energy along to other cells so they can do work. And in our bodies, there's about 250 grams of ATP at any time, but we consume our body weights of it each day. So in a whole day, our cells are creating ATP, using ATP, moving around. And it was discovered by life three and a half, four billion years ago. There's this thing called the last universal ancestor, Lua. And that is the cell a few hundred years after life emerged, which every single living cell and life on this planet can trace its ancestry back to. And so it was the... I didn't know about that before researching this. But that was about three and a half billion years ago, the last universal ancestor of all life on Earth was this little cell. It was not much different from the others. About three billion years ago, life discovered photosynthesis. And before then, energy came from chemical reactions with minerals. And then all of a sudden, through mutations and reproduction and evolution, life started to get energy from the sun. It was quite a breakthrough. Still in use to this day. One point two billion years ago, life discovered sex. Still in use to this day as well. And what happened with evolution was before this, it was asexual reproduction, mutation and repeating a pattern and changing it slightly. But now two patterns could emerge and they create something novel, something new. And it profoundly sped up the pace of life, the pace of evolution. Four hundred million years later, the first multicellular life emerged. So life which was not just a single cell. And this was trippy, like all of a sudden, cells which are still evolving and changing as they go diverge and it's the patterns of cells which evolve and change as they grow as well. So evolution diverged into multiple streams. Five hundred and fifty million years ago, eyes were discovered. This was quite good technology at the time. Scientists think that they adapted really quickly and in a couple of million of years, a wide spread or photosynthetic or photosensitive perception spread amongst the population quite rapidly. And it was a huge competitive advantage to have sight and to be able to see the world. Teeth were invented about four hundred million years ago. Hundred and fifty million years after eyes, the first teeth were found in fish. The first recognizable primates about sixty million years ago. This is probably when modern hands would be visible and understandable. Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, anatomical humans, recognizable as us, took about two hundred thousand years for humans to displace previous hominids around the world. And about ten thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Holocene, we discovered agriculture and we started to cultivate life. And then rocket ships. And so in the last ten thousand years, something's happened and over this whole trend of evolution, you can see the pace of life, the pace of it's growing, the speed is increasing. Every word I'm saying now has a lineage that is traceable back to the first grunts of our ancestors. And so the ideas we say, the combination of our words, money, legal structures, governments, all of those concepts and ideas, they have a lineage as well. What I think has happened as humans have evolved is that evolution has kept going and it's moved beyond cellular life to multicellular life to knowledge, a world which lives only inside of our heads, which is free from the laws of physics. And that I think is a huge part of the story of the rapid evolution of ideas because it's just patterns which are evolving and changing. It's like footprints in our consciousness where if all of a sudden all of our minds turned off, that whole realm of existence would just disappear. It's held by us living and breathing. Languages live, languages die, ideas live, ideas die, they evolve. I think in some sense it's less of us having ideas and ideas having us. And at this point it feels like humans, us fallible grown up creatures, have become partners with evolution, partners with life. We are no longer just the products of evolution, we are co-creating it, which I think is kind of scary because we're not very good at it. But I think we should also be generous with ourselves in that we've only been at this for a few hundred thousand years and life's had a few billions so give us a break. But when I look at human design systems and compare them to naturally evolved systems, they are horrible, ugly, ineffective things. And that's the context of my work because most of my work is in designing and implementing organizing systems, so groups of people working together. And I think of this and I imagine this work as multi-human life forms, social life forms, organisms which have traits and attributes and so on. And my work is I'm trying to understand this, trying to design this, trying to contribute to this collective evolution of ideas. So one thing I found is really useful in this work is to categorize it because a small group of people is really different to a big group of people and at some level the scale of things really matter. So one of the things this year I started to do is to talk about individuals, pods, communities and networks as levels of organizing and I use them to categorize thinking and ideas for different organizing systems. At the heart of any organization or organizing system is people and it's such a, if you can take one system and replace all the people in it with another group of people, it's a completely different dynamic, it's that you can't separate the two so our individual growth is deeply entwined with our collective growth. We can't have one without the other. The people who build the house are built by the house. And I don't think you can separate personal work from collective work and organizational design. This pods, the idea of small teams between three to twelve people or so, this has been one of the most effective practical strategies for me in the last year. Whenever there is something wrong in our systems, in our collective organizations, strong pods is a really good way to fix it. Whenever there's someone who's struggling or needs support, getting them in a strong team is a really good way to fix it. And a lot of the processes and social tools and technological tools at this small team level are really useful ways of doing things. And that's not that revolutionary, right? Like most organizations do stuff in teams and organize them and whatnot. And so we're starting to play with things around how can you use pods as like the cellular structure of an organization so that there's a lot of independence and autonomy. One of the things we've been experimenting with at Dev Academy is the idea of you have pods, three pods, teaching, consulting, support, but then we have a product agreement. So every piece of revenue that comes into the company is structured by an agreement between the pods. So money is automatically transferred to the pods control. So you can start to decentralize to pods quite strongly and then have a very emergent system which removes whole levels of management, whole levels of structure, whole levels of energy in the system just by devolving decision making and money down to pods straight away. And there's a whole realm of stuff to explore in this space. Community is probably where we've done the most research at Inspiral. And when I think about community, I think about groups between a dozen to a few hundred people that have a permeable boundary. They're easy to join and hard to stay. And it's quite important to structure communities that way where anyone can show up and say hi and get to know you and so on, but there's this gentle tug, there's this gentle current, tugging people out of community so that they need to expend energy, they need to decide to be there, they need to choose the community actively. And quite often I've had a lot of people say, wow, so many awesome people are at Inspiral, that's the reason why. It's because there's gentle tugging away from community so people have to actively decide and choose. Another thing I found that works really well at community is structuring it with the idea of contributors and kaitiaki or stewards. And the idea is that anyone can show up and start participating and it's quite open and transparent, but then there's a group of people who hold that community, who are the stewards of it, who protect it, who nurture it, who care for it, who dream about it. And this idea of kaitiaki is when people have been around for a long time and they actively choose and the community chooses them, it's a really powerful ritual to welcome someone and then say, will you care for this community alongside me? Networks are sort of where we're starting to explore our thinking now. And the idea here is having permissionless protocols where you can start to engage with groups of people at much more scale because community is such a human experience, it's such a close experience, but it's also a small experience. You can't double the size of a community and have the same experience. The only way to organize that bigger scale is through networks and connection between communities and individuals and pods. So we're starting to explore a lot of things now about how we grow. And when you look at the natural world, there's sort of sexual reproduction and asexual reproduction and I think there's a real place for both. So when we look at Lumio, for example, that was the occupied movement and culture and people meets Inspiral and tech entrepreneurs and something new and novel is born from that. We both contributed quite a lot to that. When I look at Dev Academy, that was Dev Boot Camp in San Francisco and Inspiral in New Zealand, collaborating and deeply entwining our information patterns and our habits and our culture and our people to create something new. It's a really powerful way and I think it's a faster way to innovate. But likewise, you don't want your liver cells experimenting too much. You kind of want them to do what they're designed to do in their system. So there's a role for asexual reproduction for just follow the pattern, mutate it, adapt it, evolve but evolve slower. And so we're really starting to explore as new communities come into an Inspiral how can we have a relationship with a small group of people where there is a power, information and resource asymmetry and say how can we have a generative co-creation with you which involves us holding back a lot and us leaving them space and sharing but following their lead until they get stronger and we can have a more robust relationship. And then there's also a place for when we take our patterns and they sort of get followed quite closely. So this is a real delicate area of research. I haven't mentioned legal systems or finances at all. That's because I think they're largely immaterial. And for example, when I think about legal systems in organizing they are not the essence of our organization. They are an API we need to follow to engage with a wider network. We must have legal structures, we must have bank accounts but we interface with them on our terms not on their terms. We tend to use brands as clothes that we wear so we have pods that work across multiple legal structures. Pods that wear multiple brands. It's that engage across quite a fluid organizing. Because when you look at the history of traditional organizations they tend to have their information system, their financial system, their legal system, their social systems all stacked on top of each other. So you're in one system or you're out of... you're in all systems or you're out of all systems. Whereas I think there's the opportunity for a much more fluid organizing structure where you can be in the financial system but not the social one or the social one or the financial one. There's a collaboration which emerges and this is a really nuanced and interesting area of exploration. So this is my favorite slide. Matthew says this is where I get to talk about anything with just no justification at all whereas the other stuff has to have some sort of experience behind it and so this is a bit speculative but it is also the extrapolation of what I'm seeing so it's not completely unjustified I think. When you look at the role nation states have played in the past couple of centuries and the role has been diminishing over time. I would suggest that the power of the nation state reduced in the last century as the power of corporates and business group, the power of the economy group. The economy was really powerful and it's starting to influence our democratic processes quite a lot. And those are the two dominant global organisms on our planet, governments and corporations. And I think that like many species that they will be outpaced, that something else will replace a lot of their core functions in the next couple of centuries. There's a few reasons for that. One is I think that the internet is bringing everyone closer together. This picture is Pangea Ultima. It's a scientist prediction on a possible future supercontinent about 250 million years in the future. It might not look like this but it could. And there's something about the internet and information. It's brought people closer together because when you look at the dominant organisational paradigms, they're mechanical ones. We have designed our human systems like machines and it doesn't work very well. It's very inefficient and it has lots of problems and consequences. And I think that the process of the internet and people organising means that this whole new evolutionary space has emerged for organisations and it will look nothing like our current ones. It will look very different. I think that we will see an evolution past nation-states and corporations as the dominant forms is because I think both of them have deeply betrayed the trust put in them by society. I think they have failed in significant ways to care for people and to care for the planet, which is why they exist. I don't think it's because of the people in them. It's because of the systems. The systems were flawed, not the people. I think most of us would have done the same thing in any of those roles. Those systems are no longer adapted to our current society and challenges. Climate change is the best example. Strong action on climate change was in everyone's interest apart from business and it didn't happen because of the power that business and government hold. We have made mistakes which will affect generations for years to come and there's lots of examples like that. So what I think could be emerging in the space is things along the lines of transnational collectives. So communities of people, entrepreneurial communities, education communities, housing communities, groups of people in the hundreds, networked together in the thousands. Thousands of communities connected together in networks which operate businesses, steward brands, own land, grow food, harvest energy that start to provide many of the functions that our current businesses and government structures do. And the reason I think they'll do this is that you can out-compete business. We can out-cooperate business. It looks really efficient but there are huge inefficiencies in those structures. When you look at the cost of health care in the US, it's not because it's that expensive to deliver health care. It's because the system of delivering it is so inefficient and I think this is rife in corporate world. So I can envision networks of communities running businesses out-competing publicly traded extractive companies on their own turf and I think they can use this to harness resources which they control to care for their people and their constituents and I think they can care for them better than governments can when it comes to education, to health, to ageing, to all the sort of main things governments do, I can imagine them doing it better. And so I don't think we'll see the end of governments. I think they'll be around for centuries but I think their role will be reduced and I can imagine the last thing that they'll cling to is security, the rule of law, policing, democracy, those are good things. You know, we didn't stop using wheels because they're old, they're great, we still use them. We still use ATP and it's four billion years old. We'll have governments for a long time but I think we'll have something else and I think it will be along the line of transnational collectives running businesses together and caring for their people together. So that's all quite speculative and I don't know if it's going to happen but I think it's possible and it's the area where a lot of my research and thinking is going but one thing I do know is that I think both the past and the present is alive in our hands.