 is the Rex check-in call for March 2019. It's Wednesday, March 13th, and we will kick off with a poem called Carrying a Ladder by Kay Ryan, and it goes as follows. We're always really carrying a ladder, but it's invisible. We only know something's the matter, something precious crashes, easy doors prove impassable, or in the body, there's too much swing or off-center gravity, and in the mind, a drunken capacity, access to out-of-range apples, as though one had a way to climb out of the damage and apology. Let me read it again. Carrying a Ladder by Kay Ryan. We are always really carrying a ladder, but it's invisible. We only know something's the matter, something precious crashes, easy doors prove impassable, or in the body, there's too much swing or off-center gravity, and in the mind, a drunken capacity, access to out-of-range apples, as though one had a way to climb out of the damage and apology. I'll post the link to the poem in our chat. That makes me wonder if I should bribe my children's way into good colleges. I think that's a play to do now, now that it's kind of out in the open, and the early perps have already done the perp walk now. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a crazy thing, isn't it? They never expect a second wave, yeah. That's right, that's right. They never expect a second wave. It's a bit of a crazy time. Yeah. It's great to see everybody. Matt, welcome to the calls. Nice to have you here. You are muted. You are muted. Thank you very much. Excellent. Excellent, thanks for joining. Hi, Kelly, tried to explain it to me a little bit, so I was interested in joining and seeing what it's all about. Cool. It was very interesting and mind-expanding and mind-opening. Well, we'll try to live up to some small piece of that. The Rex thing really goes back to relationships, really goes back to observations about the loss of trust across lots of parts of society and the fact that we've broken relationships in many ways, which I attribute a lot to consumerism and the fact that we're all being treated as mere consumers and no longer as citizens or neighbors or even necessarily people, because consumers are kind of gullets with wallets and eyeballs to train up to get more, to buy more stuff. So the relationship economy is a way of studying and maybe implementing all different kinds of things that come from an assumption of trust and assumption of good intent. So from the open source community, you've probably heard the saying, assume good intent, right? Or assume good faith is another way of saying that. That's a principle of Rex. Like, it doesn't mean everybody has good intent. It doesn't mean that at all because you can't be naive to sort of walk around in this world being trusting, which may sound weird, but it's true. But if you start with an assumption that other people are trying to bring good and do good, much better things show up. And I think notably, you build a very different system in reply because if you assume that everybody coming in could damage us, could hurt the system, you're gonna build a system that immediately tries to control their behavior and make sure that they all do the same thing and put them in lock steps so you build kind of controlling institutions. And if you assume that people have good intent and are pretty smart themselves, then you'll build systems that try to release their genius and allow them to collaborate with other people. And yet find out where the guardrails are so that everybody's aiming toward the same goal in some way, right? And I think open source communities do this a whole bunch because on one sense, it's a free for all because anybody can take the code and run with it and fork it and do all kinds of chaotic things. But on the other hand, we see progress and we see the building of some common shared asset, which is super interesting. And then, which was also interesting is we see a whole bunch of companies building businesses and making profits on top of these shared assets in the new commons. So the idea of the commons and the new commons is really important to the relationship economy as well. So those are just some of the dynamics and some of the inspirations behind why we're in here talking and the check-in calls are just a way for us to share what's been on our minds and has something to do with these notions. And we start kind of loose anywhere and it turns out like in 20 minutes we're busy like we're down at 500 meters and then like after a little while we're busy decompressing, trying to come back up and it's pretty cool that way. So I just wanted to, maybe we just go around and check in and say like a word or a sentence about what's been going through your head recently. Just, it can just be one word if you'd like but let me go to, I'll just call names as we go. How about Bo, April, Dave? Bo, do you want to start? Come on, Bo, one word. You're muted. So you could even, you could pantomime the word. How about that? What kind of word do you want me to guess about? Any word, a word, a rexy word that's been bouncing around on your head lately. Responsibility? I like that one. Responsibility, good. April, and you're muted. Yeah, everybody's muted coming into this call by default so you have to unmute to talk. And you're still muted, huh? Do you want me to unmute you? Yeah, unmute her. Okay, here we go, go ahead. Okay, thank you. My word is, good morning everybody, my word is collimate. Collimate, I like it. Do you guys know what that means? No, I do not. So it's a column, I'll send the link and it's actually thanks to Jerry, but to collimate means to focus, like you would collimate energy or light. If you're developing a laser, you're going to collimate it so that it aligns perfectly. And it's not about the perfection or the alignment as it is the focus. When you collimate energy, that's what allows you to like burn a hole through some material you couldn't do before. So I like it a lot. That's my new favorite word. I like that word. That's a great word. Yeah, it's a collimating energy is just my favorite phrase at the moment. So here we go. Dave, Susan and Matt. The replacing trim tab there April, it's good. I've been pondering live online participation. Which is still a thing. I mean, it's still a puzzle, not a solution, right? Exactly, it's not quite a thing. Yeah, we used to call it online community, but... Yeah, exactly. We may come back to this and that's how I know you through four and one, right? I think so. A couple moons back. Yeah, it's been a while. Susan? Work-centric thinking. Can you say just a tiny bit more? Yeah, when we talk about work, when we talk about work, we talk about the workplace, workforce, the work, everything except the work itself. Interesting. We've seen there's an essay recently about how work aid our world. Not sure I've seen that one. I will hunt for it when we're done sort of going through, but April, if you remember which one it was, it's super interesting. Basically, we've made work completely central to our lives. We take the best hours of our lives, we put them into work, we think of everything as relating to work, education has become training for work, everything feeds work, and it's not made room for actually our normal lives. Except that the work has been making everything work. Yeah. Not the work. And total work, exactly. Workism, all those words, exactly. Matt? Value of demand, but as it relates to sharing knowledge. Kelly and I had a discussion yesterday that made me start thinking about our demand models, but for knowledge and information, and not consumerism, that popped back into my head when you were explaining kind of the relationship economy and the demand of knowledge versus a consumer product, driving behaviors. And by demand, do you mean how often things come up as requests in a query system? What sorts of demand do you mean? When people are looking for knowledge, do they understand the knowledge they're looking for? Do they understand the demand they have to grow and consume more knowledge? Obviously a lot of our work is around knowledge and sharing knowledge and how that impacts services, but based on discussions that I've had with Brad and Kelly, it's making me think about kind of those words differently than maybe I did before engaging this community. That's very cool. And sometimes coming into something, we don't know what to ask because we don't know the shape of the thing we're coming into. And so we don't know how to phrase even our request. Partly, we may not know the lingo of the domain we're in if it's aerodynamics or finance or whatever, it's got jargon and language, but then there's always sort of nuance underneath it. Like under the hood, it's always more complicated than we think it is sort of looking in. So there's all those aspects to it. Cool, love that. Todd, Mark? Theme of responsibility has come up a lot the last couple of weeks. And particularly re-envisioning corporate social responsibility. I'm not sure that responsibility is a tricky word. Responsibility is a lovely word. I think for some reason, I think of responsibility as a bipartisan word. It's like a word somewhere in the middle space that's not highly politicized by either side and that attracts discussion about important issues from both sides, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm putting it in a political framing because it has lots of other framings as well, but it's kind of a middle of the roadish kind of word that matters to most everybody, I think. Cool, thank you. Mark, then Brad, then Kelly. Distrust. And maybe for context, I've been kind of noticing that quite a lot on, like I'm in Canada, so there's been this whole thing with Prime Minister Trudeau and his former Attorney General, and there's been considerable erosion of trust happening there. And actually very interesting dynamics, which some of which I've watched. On a local level, working with this organization called How We Thrive here in Nova Scotia, last year it was a program and there was, I thought, fantastic participation by the indigenous peoples, by some of the other early waves of immigration to Nova Scotia, such as the Scots and Gaelics and so on. But in preparing for next, this coming session, there's this whole kind of pushback from some communities saying, hey, who are you, white privileged people? To be doing this. And so maybe the closer you come to something, the more opportunity there is to get bitten by this. And so there's this kind of paradox. And I could say more, but that's enough. There's just tons under that subject. Thank you, Mark. Yeah, that's a really rich topic. Brad, what's on your mind in this realm? Well, I kind of share with you my recent reading. So I would have to say behavioral, future's market. And the fact that more and more we're scraping human experience as a raw material, so that you can plug it into machine learning to predict what people want, and then also to influence what people want at the individual level and at the societal level. That's kind of scary, especially knowing that I, hands-on, helped contribute to this new found industry over my career for the past 25 years. So it's kind of a, oh, a shock, moment for me. Damn it, totally understand that, thank you. And those of you who've seen me at the consortium know that one of my favorite phrases is stock or serve. And I think we're at a moment where people don't realize that a lot of what they're doing is in fact stalking behavior. And there's the term the stalker economy, Shoshana Zuboff just published, Surveillance Capitalism, all of this is basically the machine that we're in up to now. But to be of service, and I think this is big for the consortium, to be of service, I need your info too. Like, I need to understand what your configuration is, what we talked about last time, I need to be able to pick up the thread so that I can very efficiently do the work for you. And that requires me to hold some info. So how do you, and the difference between, you know, stalking and serving is one of trust and intention and relationship and responsibility, and a lot of the other words that are showing up here. So I think that's a really, that's a lovely place to poke. So thank you for that. Kelly. I've been thinking a lot about curious or critical. Those are sort of the words that I've been noodling on lately because I can either be one or the other in any given situation. And I can't be both. And if I'm being curious, then I'm able to see connections and be in the moment with people and just be curious about things. But if I'm being critical, then it's sort of a fear-based shut it down sort of that will never work kind of mind frame. And so I'm sort of playing around with, I think that's true. I think I can either be curious or I can be critical. I don't think I can be both at once, which is not to say that there isn't also a time for good judgment, right? I don't mean critical in terms of assessing rationally, but that's what I've been thinking about. That's cool. Curiosity is an underrated word at work, I think, right? We sort of want people who are gonna stay on task and do the thing and meet their OKRs and all that kind of stuff. And we're sort of trying to fence people so that there's a known, high thing they have to jump over for the next time box. And if they start wandering from that, we get a little worried. And curiosity is about the wandering in some sense, right? Right. So I think there's not a lot of room made for that. It's an observation made by someone, Jeff Nenberg, for those of you who follow NPR and Terry Groos. When he got to work at Xerox, that there was lots of technology for writing and then for reading. Interesting. Super interesting. Let me ask a question that's kind of in the middle of some of these topics. And Susan, you were saying that we sort of don't see the work. And I want to absorb better what you mean by that, but is one reason we don't see the work that maybe sometimes it runs against our values, the work we're supposed to do? It's like, eh, I have to do this thing, but I don't really want to look at it and inspect it and unpack it because I'm busy contributing to the stock or economy or whatever else. Is that one of the things that play or do you mean something completely different? I think I mean something completely different. Okay. But I have, and I don't know, I don't have good words. So I'm just, I'm working on this work. I think it's the, what I'm thinking about is the shape and the structure of the work that we do and whether we think about it as a task or whether we think about it, whether we actually, when we're thinking about, I think the focusing on the works means that, you know, when you're designing a facility, you might actually try to figure out what the work people are doing and what the dimensions of that work are. So five or six of them, but one just for an example is, is it something that one does on one's own? Is it something that you're doing in a team? Is it something that you're doing? You know, where are you doing it? All of those different dimensions. Is it, you know, does it have purpose in that sense? You can put that in there. And those dimensions then draw, should be driving some of the design decisions or for actually how we structure the work for actually how we build it with the technology, particularly the technology. Yeah. And I think I'm aiming in the right direction to add the complication that you're interested in physical workspaces as well as virtual workspaces. And so the shaping of the work online is as important to you as off. To what? I happened to have brought a book. No way. What's this book thing? I don't recognize books. This one says how designers and architects created the digital landscape. Architectural intelligence. And it's starting to cross over between the physical and the virtual, which I've decided is a false dichotomy in the way we usually think about it. So that's part of the, absolutely part of the picture. Who are the authors? The author is Molly Wright Steenson. Oh, Molly. Okay, that's right. You know her? Yes, I met her. And the architects are the usual, there are three of them you might, I recognize. Christopher Alexander, Nicholas Negroponte, Richard Saul Werman, and Cedric Price. And they're, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's thorough. You know, it's thick. But that, yeah, because I am, yes. And I'm supposed to give a talk in a few weeks about this idea. So I'm, I'm, I'm grappling with it, trying to run it to the ground. Interesting. So here's architectural intelligence. Here's Molly. Yeah. In my brain. She and I both spoke at Reboot 2008. So that's where we first met. Yep. Her Twitter account is Maxi Molly, and she's at the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. Yeah. Which is one of many design schools. So it's Cameron Tonkin-wise, I didn't realize that. And here's a bunch of design schools. A whole bunch. Yeah. I collect. Let's, I think it might be useful to go back to curiosity for a second and just Kelly and April, if you don't mind riffing a little bit on what your intentions are in your quest into curiosity that I think we could maybe help with those. Am I unmuted? Yes, you are. Oh, good. So I've just been really fascinated by work I've done recently around the future of work. But also last weekend, Jerry knows this, I gave my first keynote to a group of educators. I've really wanted to reach K through 12 educators. So I've really wanted to speak with younger audiences. I've done some work at universities, but really looking at, you know, not to make it all about work or total work, but you know, what we need to be preparing for starts young and the world of work, the different options available and all of that. And so I sort of start backing up. And I think all of us on the call would agree that, you know, curiosity is one of the skills that the current education system is extraordinarily good at stamping out. And yet we've never needed it more than today. So if you're training, if you're building a system that's good for factory workers and soldiers, you want them to obey orders, you want them to not question, you want them to not be curious, but we've really got ourselves in a bit of a mess at the moment. And so I started exploring it and looking into it. And basically, and this isn't, you know, by no means rocket science. For me, it just felt like a very simple aha, which is we focus on so many people as like, well, what are you curious about? What are you curious about? And then follow that through. And that's important. But I'm realizing like the super skill is simply curiosity itself. I care far less about what you're curious about than that, you know, how to identify what fascinates you, follow it through and nurture that over time and do that again and again and again. And then it's relentless. And so that led me to kind of start peeling back the layers of the onion, looking at the etymology of it, looking. And so the piece that I'm teeing up to write is like it's this word that we throw out almost like a tagline these days, which I'm not gonna, you know, I'm glad that it's showing up more in conversation, but like, do we really know what we're talking about? And what did it, you know, what's the Latin? What, how is it interpreted in medieval times? When we hear about, you know, curiosity has these days in some conversations, you know, it's a very alluring, fascinating, neat topic. People who are curious in the past were usually, you know, another version of curiosity or being curious is that like you're odd, you're a bit of an outsider, you're a bit eclectic. It's sort of stigmatized. Then we think about things like curio cabinets. So if you were curious, you had a curio cabinet of like interesting eclectic things. And so I'm just sort of at this point doing research. I'll just sit back here, here in my office. That's your curio cabinet, sweet. Curio cabinet. Well, and then, you know, in the digital world, we can, we still have obviously digital collections, but a lot of the ways in which we might have thought about curiosity manifesting in the past isn't happening to the same degree, you know, museums, but fewer of those such things hanging on your wall. So anyway, I'm just in research mode and you know, obviously I'm gonna draw some practical recommendations, but like going down that rabbit hole has actually been really, really fun and candidly quite comforting because it's a skill that we all need that I think kids, people of all ages need it, but like it's gonna be table stakes for kids to succeed. And so how do we, how do we just sort of get people to understand the concept? Cause in my experience, it feels like it's a term that people throw out without really understand or without having developed, how do I say, like a black belt in curiosity itself. So I'll pass there. I'm sure you've seen and read the, I had it right on the tip of my brain. A more perfect question, a more beautiful question. And I don't know if you've dove into any of the stuff that the Right Question Institute is working on. They are formed very much like the consortium and are all about helping people ask better questions, but they are very focused on the K through 12, they do a ton of resources for educators. Yeah, okay, that's great. I'm familiar with it, but from before I was prepping for this keynote. So it's actually really good to back from a resources perspective. Yeah, awesome. We have tried, so they have a sort of facilitation method which I can't, I think it's called the, I call it something different when I do it. It's called like the questioning methodology or something like that, but we've done it a couple of times with consortium groups in which we, you state a question focus and then you spend five or seven minutes going around the room, asking all the questions you can think about it. And it's taken us a couple sort of iterations to figure out if this is sort of how this exercise can be the most helpful. But it turns out that when you spend five minutes just asking questions and writing them all down, it has a tendency to sort of, once you look at those questions afterwards, they kind of organize into kind of meta categories or larger, we end up getting sort of four or five interesting collections of questions. This is about these sets of questions are sort of more about how we might approach this problem and these sets of questions are more about who's gonna be impacted by this problem. It's been a really interesting thing to play with, which is when we, I think we've done it maybe two or three times and this a little bit gets back to the curiosity piece and from my own personal perspective in which it feels a little scary because we had that when we first did it, we'd never done it before and are people gonna, is this gonna resonate? Is it gonna work that whole piece? All we're gonna do is sit around and ask questions and people are like, I don't understand what we get out of this. And then to have it turn around and be like, oh, this completely organized our thinking about sort of this focus that we laid out at the beginning was quite gratifying. And so then to kind of like loop this all the way back around, right? I just saw a tweet from Adam Grant that was basically like we, something about we really lose an opportunity to aim for excellence when we're worried about how good we're looking, right? If we can just let go of sort of whether or not we look good, then we can get some practice in the things that we really wanna be doing. And so that's, that for me is also kind of that baseline of the curiosity and being open to not looking good all the time which happily I'm fairly comfortable being a goofball. Letting go. Right. Yeah, no one, I love this. This is great. And I'm also in the moment you say that as well I'm immediately reminded also of, sounds maybe a little bit hokey, but the yoga mat which is all about this where it's like, and if you aim for perfection, like the whole point of the practice, I shouldn't say the whole point, one of the points of the practice is you know to find that balance between ease and effort but like to just let go because you will never be everything that you want to be on that mat. But and if you keep thinking I have to get perfection again in this case in a pose, you're never actually gonna get to excellence. You're never gonna get to that next step of, you know flexibility or strength or whatever. So it's, I like it. Yeah, super. Thank you. Anybody else thoughts on? It's a metaphor. Yeah, exactly. Anyone else with thoughts on curiosity and the way we're intending it here? Go ahead, Brad. I was reflecting on being, you know, always curious and I recognize that it's actually a key element to, I think, tenacity because as you're growing up K to 12, you know, I've been blessed to raise two generations of kids at my one-dotto family and my two-dotto family and the first generation, Noah, my son, was a super bright, could grasp concepts very, very quickly. So school was always easy for him. New things were always easy for him. And as soon as he hit a roadblock, he would decide I don't wanna do this, this isn't for me. And then his mom would swoop in and save the day through helicopter preparations. So now he's 29 and, you know, he's got a real fulfillment challenge in his life because he's never truly accomplished anything on his own and never really pushed through and pushed, pushed, pushed until finally achieving this thing. And, you know, it dawns on me that there's a delta between curiosity and boredom, you know, filling the vacuum of stuff versus being truly curious and wanting to master it, figure it out and kind of see it through. So I think there's a thread there. And if I think to my own journey, if you live a curious life where you're seeking out multiple curiosities, let's say, it kind of gives you the ability to live your life on multiple narratives, right? There's work for ad and there's church for ad and there's second time parenting for ad and there's, you know, particle physics for ad. And these different curiosities allow me to explore things at a different time cycle. And oftentimes, you know, and for those of the consortium to know me, you know, I'll jump into a new job opportunity fully knowing this is probably not a good fit but I'm here to figure out this very particular thing and I'll run this job as long as the job will have me but my real pursuit is to actually understand and master this particular thing because I know future Brad's really gonna be grateful that President Brad did this thing. And it's a great way to survive, you know, the drudgeries of a shitty job and to be able to, you know, deal with swarms of antibodies that you're undoubtedly going to, you know, trigger as you try to do new and interesting and provocative things. So I think curiosity is absolutely a life skill and it ought to be nurtured early on and it ought to be explored. Yeah, this is great. And I fully agree. And what's interesting is I feel like it's never, it's not that society generally has been like, don't be curious. Like parents want their kids to be curious timelessly but the education system has like systematized that out of being a priority. And from my point- It's hard to set a standardized test against, right? Exactly, but we've now gone so far overboard and now everyone's trying to figure out how do we claw back some of that ground that was lost? And just from the perspective of, I know many of you have seen this as well where, you know, not just the pace of change but like how fast are skills possibly going to become obsolete? And I'm not talking, you know, I don't want to be a doomsday, like we're all going to be replaced by robots. We don't need to go down that path even so far as to say it is true that a lot of skills that are deemed important today weren't deemed important five years ago and skills that are important today will be, you know, off the radar in five years. So that sense of curiosity is being just such a necessary part of one's DNA because I, like you, Brad, I'm, you know, naturally curious but for those who aren't or for those who haven't stamped out, it's something that we need, we've always had this skill, but we need to find it again. Yeah. Well- We need to have some time. We need to have time. To do that. To do that, yeah. And it's not like, be curious at four o'clock after school. Precisely. Right, yeah. This is not the time slot for curiosity. The bell rings. During Russian math before swim team, but after volleyball, that's the sign. Yeah, exactly. The irony that the bell could ring and curiosity times over would be like, yeah, the end to it. This is one thing I will bring up though, and this was in my research for the keynote. It was just very fun to see how schools are tackling this in different countries around the world, and in fairness, I found it fascinating. This was in Europe, not surprisingly, but schools that had actually created student-led units on curiosity, so that they actually study the concept, and then they do apply it in different ways, but they're being deliberate about learning about it as opposed to a term that we just throw around and don't necessarily explain. Yeah. Interesting. Maybe a skill for parents is curiosity-spotting. So a little bit, I'm sort of like, yeah, but have you spent time with a four-year-old? Like, this is not actually a problem for four-year-olds. But something between the ages of four and 10 and 15. So yeah, for sure, what do you want to be when you grow up? You can be anything. By 10, that window has just narrowed, and by 15, 95% of those early options are gone. So you're absolutely right, but there's something that happens the moment they start, I think, roughly primary school. Yeah, no, I think you're totally right. Totally done. But so it feels like a system in which we are naturally inclined to be one way, but we went ahead and built a system to go ahead and stifle that, right? Which is exactly, so the consortium's about to release the Intelligence Swarming Framework for Collaboration, which is a way for support agents who have always naturally collaborated, but we've put systems and processes in place to make them not do that. The Intelligence Swarming Framework is gonna provides the path to build a collaborative support environment, right? And so I'm pretty excited about kind of getting some words around. Lots of companies who participate in the consortium have been playing with this idea in which we can get swarms of people to work on a problem instead of going off and trying to hammer this out ourselves and then escalating it and then never finding out the answer again. Everybody can be on the swarm and listen to what the answer is as we discover it all together. It's a great way to upskill people. It's a great way to have people feel like they're part of a team. It's like all these things in which we've finally maybe are attempting to build a system that reflects how we are naturally wanting to be in relationship with each other, which feels exactly sort of parallel to this problem. We totally come out super curious and then we have gone ahead and imposed a structure that beats that out of us. And now how do we block it back? I often wonder, does this man in the business environment and the corporate environment is this stamping out of curiosity also manifesting itself in the fear of failure that people have where I'm afraid to fail so I'm not willing to try and push boundaries because curiosity is about attempting and failing and attempting and correcting so I'm interested if those two things actually are very related in manifesting themselves in these corporate environments. No, I think you're on to something there Matt. I know I've spent a lot of time with my customer experience clients over the past couple of years trying to build customer-centric cultures where every touch point owner from the marketing to sales, the service to renewal to repurchase whatever that continuum they're all persistently curious about the customer experience wanting to know more, learn more, be more insightful and more intuitive, more thoughtful and then also create curiosities on better behind the curtain backstage work processes to make the work easier and better to do all that backstage work highly influenced by the work of the consortium, as you could imagine but building curiosity, a persistent curiosity about the customer and understanding that if you're gonna commit your company to the pursuit of customer experience you're gonna always be running up a down escalator because the experience is always getting incrementally better for everyone all the time. I think there is something there and it's a really tough thing to grow into a culture because everybody's held accountable to the strategic plan, to the shareholder expectations, to the current business objectives that you're granted in your annual review and you wanna measure that with precision and you wanna have clarity of when I've crossed the finish line but curiosity is never ending pursuit. So I do think you're on to something there. One thing I used to say this in speeches long ago but beware the customer centric company because often that means that they have the customer centered squarely in the crosshairs of an elaborate and expensive device designed to shake more money from their pockets and this goes right back to stock or serve which is like the intention behind customer centricity. So we're busy trying to maximize customer CLV, customer lifetime value by which we mean the value of that person to us the business. We don't mean the value of our service to the customer. We don't mean that. That is not actually in the maths, right? Well, so that's a really interesting, I had not ever gone down that road because as we come from a perspective of support what we actually want is our customer actually to be successful, right? We have no skin in the revenue game with some exceptions around the actual customer success and retention and renewals and blah, blah, blah but from sort of a traditional support perspective we would really like them to be successful in part so they stop maybe calling us so often, right? How can we set them up for success? Truly so that they can be successful. So I have not, you're totally right and I can totally see how that perspective in the wrong hands is it's all about getting all your money. Yeah. Not about their success. All your money are belong to us. Yeah. No, no, no, and I take your word to heart for sure. A lot of the work that the consortium has done and inspired me is around the understanding of what is value, what is the nature of value and value in the eyes of the customer that you want to support. And if it's a B2B then how do I help that business help their customers realize more value? And then understanding that value is a virtuous cycle that it's almost a physical property that always has benefits from all parties that are sharing in the invoking of value to be realized. The business benefits will be the backside of the pursuit of what a customer truly values. So trying to drive a value conversation and how well do we understand our customers and what they value and what's the job they're trying to get done and the past they're trying to get done and what are all the different options and how hard is it to realize that value and how are we contributing to value realization or value erosion? Like that's where I lay down a lot of my thinking which makes me an outlier because I'm not just going straight to the bottom line. Is it hard to find time for that conversation? You know what's funny is that it's my opening sale though. I do my best to spare the children right up front. Nice. And you're going to hire me. I'm not a censured KPMG, you know, KWC. I'm Brad and I have the lessons learned through my incredible life and you're doing it wrong. Let me explain it to you. And I put a link in the chat to the value stack. There's a real short paper about the value stack and sort of the things that from the consortium standpoint we think enable companies to move up to the value stack. And the value conversation is super interesting. I mean, I'd love to hear any stories you remember from these conversations over time because value, wealth, all those kinds of words are not words we consider very often. So it's like the word trust. I've discovered since I've realized I'm focusing on trust that most people think they have an understanding of trust but the moment you kind of scratch at the idea, it's like, not so much, you know, not really happening. Well, something that there was a great story. There was a working session at the consortium I think two years ago up in the hinter region of Maine during the summer. And we asked all the participants, tell us the greatest proactive, predictive outreach service experience you've ever had, right? And we had a lot of fails. We had a lot of examples of the stocker economy and that sort of thing. But one of the best stories was, and I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but she- Libby Healy. There you go. She owns a farm, a small little farm in a tiny town 45 miles west of where we were. And she was out there tossing hay, which is when you harvest the hay and you roll it into bails. And it's dirty, dirty work because there's a lot of critters that kind of use the hay for a good many things. And so she's out there, it's about 4.30 in the afternoon and she's hot and dirty and all of a sudden her cell phone rings. And so she looks at her cell phone and she answers the phone. And we'll call him Al and Al called and said, hey, I see you out there tossing hay and I'm wondering if you've thought about dinner yet. And she says, no, I haven't. She said, well, would you like me to make you a pizza? You know, you're the regular and I can have it sitting there ready for you to go at 6.30. How's that sound? She's, oh my God, that's amazing. I would love that. That's fantastic. Thank you so much. And she hangs up the phone. But as you break down that story, right? The first thing is, why would you answer your phone if your hands are literally full of, you know? And so first you had to recognize who it was and the relationship of her to him motivated her to answer the phone at that particular time when it's highly inconvenient for her. As soon as she answered the phone, he rewarded that relationship by saying, I'm driving by, I'm seeing you. I know exactly what it's like to do what you're doing. I know you probably haven't thought about dinner and sitting close to dinner time. And out of courtesy, I'm gonna offer you this thing that I know you value. And then she's overwhelmingly, yes, oh my God, that would be a fantastic. Thank you so much, right? But what does this entire thing require to do at scale? And it requires trust, it requires relationships, it requires relevancy, it requires understanding her and her journey and what's next in her journey. I mean, the intimacy required is massive, but that intimacy was granted over years of building a relationship, you know? So if she got a call to refinance her house at that moment in time, would you have answered the phone? Probably not. Exactly, and the piece of this that I'm wrestling with these days a bit is in the face of GDPR and other sorts of privacy protections and the tech lash against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica and everything else, which is completely justified. Are we walling off companies' abilities to hold our information in trust with an agreement that is being used beneficially? Are we sort of somehow breaking that ability even because we're busy passing a whole bunch of laws that will prohibit that kind of thing? And then in the middle of that comes this big, complicating, interesting factor of the decentralized web, which is an attempt to take all that personal data and store it so that we get to hold it and release it only as we want to need to, which is super complicated. Like the moment you pull the tarp off that one, you're like, oh, geez, that gets really complicated really fast. So are you guys walking into the decentralized web part of this as you go into KCS and other kinds of consortium applications? Not yet. Yeah. We've talked a lot about, we've talked a lot about talk circles and, you know, but no, we haven't done any experimentation and innovation in that neck of the woods just yet. Cool. I'm sure it's on your horizon somewhere. But I think going back to what you were saying earlier, it is this dichotomy that we're setting up where I need you to know things about me in order to make it easier for me to interact with you electronically. And where is that boundary of what I'm, and the problem is today, I don't get to decide what I give up or don't give up. Like I have almost no control over how much I'm willing to let you know about me. You know far more about me than I probably even realize you know about me. But I don't, it's, and I think this is what you were saying, you don't wanna peel back this layer of, well, if you know nothing about me, every time I come into your website, I'm gonna have to go through lots of hoops to get back in there. And it's a very interesting making my head hurt to think through how that might look in the future. One of the best applications I've heard today about smart contracts and blockchain was a Asian insurance company and using their smartphone app and blockchain, they give you an instantaneous transfer of funds for a payment of a claim for a particular hospitalization policy they have. So if you're in the emergency room and you process your claim on the cell phone, which is nothing more than taking a photograph of the receipt, it maps who you are, your user ID, the app, your geographical location, the date, time stamp of the sequence, it maps it directly back to your smart contract, it pays the claim and transfers the funds instantly, right? And so that type of customer experience is profound. It's a massive disruptor in the insurance market, as you can imagine, where you know, it doesn't require fax machines, but it does require this safe and systematic logic that's lockstep through the blockchain and the different technical attributes, right? So when you sign up for that account, you are forfeiting known fields of information, but the benefit is so massive, the value proposition is so massive and the value realization is so huge that you're happy to do that every time. That's interesting. Todd, I apologize. I think I didn't come back to you for what was on your mind and I also wanted to ask right now, do you want to describe USO? Sure. So I've been working with this startup that came from a colorectal surgeon who while practicing in Southern California just got fed up with the insurance system, time being taken up with billing, not treating customers well. And so he started an inquiry into what are ways that I could help customers pay for surgery without, well, bypassing insurance. And he came across the age old concept of risk sharing pools. And built a model that is subscriber based and is all cash pricing where if you need a procedure, you have a guide that looks at national and regional averages and you can pay cash on the spot for whatever procedure you need. And the way that the money is dispensed is by concentric circles of groups and then the whole network being able to absorb that cost. So if somebody has surgery in Houston and it's a very expensive surgery, I might pay two cents next month because that might be shared across the entire network. And one thing I love about it is the incentives that are built in. What it means is that all USO is a platform that is helping determine lower costs, but there's no incentive to take a cut because they only make money on the subscription fees. And they're really thinking now about what are other ways that people can share risk across a network outside of health insurance. Right now they're doing community-based pet care. The human health insurance is still probably a year away, but they're seeing all of these potential applications of essentially de-institutionalizing risk, making that appear to peer or peer to many. And they just play the role of facilitating it. It's a really interesting model. And they're doing pet care now partly just because they needed some less controversial space than trying to replace normal insurance for humans to try this out and to see if there was a market, to see if people understood the concept, to see how the moving parts would fit together, et cetera. So right now you can assure your pets. But in doing so, you join a group, you this, you that, and you know, it's really quite interesting. And the larger picture is risk pooling for anything. I haven't looked this up, but I feel like some time ago, I heard something about there were like mutual funds in Italy that were experimenting with the same thing in which you invest with a group of 10 people who you don't know, but it's not mutual funds, retirement funds or like their social security net or something like that. And so because most likely all 10 of you are not gonna live the same amount of time. And so every rate as sort of people are passing away, then the pool of money that you've invested into remains or something like, like it was sort of seemed like the same idea. But boy, you better hope that you really don't know who those other people in your pool are is what you mean to me. It seems like there's got to be a risk pooling problem in here somewhere, Todd. I mean, insurance companies have some wisdom to them, so, yeah. Well, I mean, the original insurance companies were mutual aid societies where people just pooled some money, right? And then there was the demutualization of most insurance companies so that they became big corporations. And then what happened to them is what happened to education and other sort of domains, which is the administrative part of it and kind of ate the rest of it and then profit making took over the parts of the margin. So part of I think what we're seeing in peer-to-peer insurance is the deconstruction of insurance back to some of its roots. Then the question is, what are the algorithms in the middle there? How big is your pool? What is your group? How do larger risks get shared out? And I don't know the technical answers to those for you, so, or any of these other players, but the devil is in those details because that's a few bad experiences there and you go under. So what other things does this put any of us in mind of? This puts me in mind of, and Kelly may have already read this, but there's a paper done in the service science world in 19, I mean, 19, listen to me. In the last millennium? So in 2012, by Irene Ng and a woman who, L.A. Smith, whom I don't know, and Steven Fargo. Anyway, it's an integrated framework of value and it's probably the most mind-changing paper I've read in weeks, months maybe, but it does try to unpack the notion of the co-creation of value. Customer experience and all the rest of that and it does so by borrowing a concept from some branch of psychology I'd never even heard of, which was about p-consciousness and a-consciousness and Kelly, does this ring a bell? I have not read it. Well, it, anyway, read it. I don't know if that's right now. The reference again, yeah, we'd like to research it. Yeah. I was just trying to, this one. Okay. And basically the idea is that there's the, the co-creation of value in the moment of using it. So there's that part of service science, right? That's been for a long time. Then there is, they're sort of on both ends of it, something else could be part of the customer experience as well, but it's distinguished by not having the thing in front of you. And it's about anticipated value. I think I talked about the distinction between value and worth before. So anticipated value and whether or not it meets your expectations. And then on the back end, whether it's sort of my, this is my shorthand, about evaluation, sort of what was that, was it worth it? Ooh, yeah. And that those things are temporarily distinct, of course. I mean, it seemed like such common sense and we don't talk about it, but the implications it had for metrics, for actually designing the customer journey or experience seemed to me profound. Oh. And, Brad, they already wrote the paper. And they already wrote the paper. Yeah. And it's like, wow. You know, they wrote it like what? 2012. Yeah. Years ago, I just caught up. So anyway, in my one, because I'm a real sort of aficionado, I think. Maybe stronger than that of the idea of value co-creation in use, no matter whether it's virtual or physical or any of those other things. So I just think it straightens out a whole lot of puzzles that seem not, so it's called an integrative framework. And it pulls in a lot of the design research. It just sort of pulls in worlds that I know that never have been pulled together before. Nice. Can you riff a little bit on the kinds of things that untangles for you? Well, I mean, in particular, what the customer, well, the details of how the value is co-created, okay, the fact that it's temporarily limited, that it exists independently conceptually, right? It's one of those distinguishable but not separable things. So it was just, and sorting out that and co-production, which is co-producing value or co-producing a document or co-producing all of these different things, which is not the same thing as the construction of value, which is the co-construction of value, which is in that discussion back a little bit ago, in terms of customer help, all that whole space. That phone call, if you think of it as being the co-construction of value together, the two people in the conversation, then I think the conversation goes a little bit differently. So my research, my curiosity, passion, projects over the past five years, I guess has been this whole notion of, the only way value is understood or realized or appreciated is in the moment of the interaction. So it definitely has this co-creation element to it, and that interaction could be need to a device, need to a service, need to a person, right? But it's this active intention that allows, this stuff to unfold. And what I've done is I've built a map that you have to navigate through these, I call them value gates, right? And when you're confronted with a value gate, you take a moment, you pause, and you consider the situation, and you decide to go through that gate and act on what's being presented to you, or you decide to bail and don't act, or you might even decide to react and tell the social media universe, this is a really crappy experience and I'm not gonna stand for it. But this idea of, at the very beginning of that journey, I am using everything I know to be true about my personal experience, about my Yelp scores, whatever, to even go through that first door, and then once I'm through that first door and I'm in the lobby, now I'm considering the value proposition of all the different interaction choices and paths I have in front of me, and I'm gonna pick the one that I feel is best for me, based again upon my psychological scomas that have been tuned through all of this. This is a nice way of bracketing that experience. And then finally I navigate through that next door, now I'm in the moment of the interaction. I'm in the doctor's waiting room, waiting for the doctor to come in, right? And in this interaction moment, I get the payload of both the tangible value that I've been seeking, the physical thing that I can hold, see, touch, whatever, as well as the emotional value of I'm exhausted, I'm excited, I'm tired, I'm frustrated, whatever, but both that tangible value realization in the moment of the interaction, and the emotional memory in my head that builds the basis of what I think about you or if I'd ever refer you again. And then finally after the whole episode is over, if I'm asked to consider what I do this again, what I recommend, it's only then that I truly appreciate the value perception that's been generated and whether or not I thought that was a good or bad experience. Because oftentimes it just falls into my intellect. Well, and that's because you're also very present in the moment. And throughout this entire interaction, right? There's two clocks going on, there's chronos time that's measuring, I can't believe I've been on hold for seven minutes, this is the worst experience, I cannot, Britney Spears again for the love of God versus Kyra's time, which is like, you think back five years ago when United bumped you off that flight and how pissed off you still are about it, right? And it's more of that life moment time. And this event was so extraordinary, whether positive or negative, that it's still memorable, it's in your conscious, ready to tell the story about. Well, there's, I mean, there's a... Value gates has been a procedure of mine for a while. Right, this, I like that expression and it seems to fit what they're trying to point out. I think also that interactional space for a while, what I called it was value diminishing patterns of interaction and value creating patterns of interaction. Because I think then you can start to model if you want what's going on in those interactions over time. And to have it be between you and other people and as you said, between you and a machine. And I mean, all of those interactions add up, right? That's the basis of experience. Absolutely. And we all know what a value diminishing experience is like. Right, but what is it moment by moment? We try to track this through a client contact at IBM through a client engagement where in the end the client left the contract before anything bad had come out about it. So they hadn't really reflected on it. I mean, they reflected on it internally, but they didn't do that with the customer or the client at all. And IBM was sort of curious how that happened. And it's like, well, look, if you're tracking the interaction, you would have noticed. True. And one of the mantras that the consortium taught me early on was every interaction is an opportunity to learn and improve the next interaction. And you can only do that if you're writing stuff down. Yeah. Also, Exactly. Right, now we have things that have to fail, right? Also, every crisis is an opportunity to prove that you're trustworthy. And without a crisis, you're just another average runner, right? So I don't know that you're really trustworthy until something has broken, something has happened, and I see how you respond. Yeah. Right? Because otherwise you're like, hey, trust me, trust me, things are gonna be great, and then things break and then you don't. Right. And as you navigate through a value gate, right? You're confronted with an expectation. I'm perceiving this gate, I have an expectation of what's gonna be on the other side as I navigate through it. If my expectation doesn't resonate and match what I thought I was promised, then we're out of failure to continue the interaction. And the next gate has to be smart enough to understand and accommodate lost souls. I went down the wrong path. I don't wanna be here. How can I quickly and safely navigate to where I wanna go and what I wanna do? And if it doesn't accommodate that, and if I feel forced and locked into it, the emotional anger and frustration is gonna generate. And I'll have a 20X memory booster to this event versus only a 5X positive booster if you did it well. Actually, that brings up the notion of octopuses and octopi. Octopi and cognition, which a book or things that I mentioned before in this context. But I keep reading this in different places. Well, too, Carl Friston, the one I mentioned before. But it's this business of cognition being shared across species in terms of, I think consciousness bothers me, but sort of trying to unpack cognition doesn't. But as when your expectations are defied, right? Then you sit up and take notice and then you start to think and then you get disturbed or whatever. And that's a really critical moment. It would be interesting to know if, I guess that would be, I mean, that could happen at any point once you've entered the gate. Uh-huh. You know, I have- Will you say more about octopi and cognition? Because that is not, I am not familiar. It's not on your syllabus? No. I kind of need it to be because- It's on the menu, but not on the syllabus. That's the problem. You're having calamari, but you're not thinking about their intelligence. Right. Octopi share this problem with pigs. They're tasty and smart. Yes, yes. Now I don't know if I can eat them anymore. I know, it's so hard. I don't want to ruin that. Yeah, maybe don't tell me then. Okay, no, so there's a, well, I first became aware of this in a book by Peter Godfrey Smith, who's a philosopher. And I can't remember the name of the book, but I'll get it in a minute. But he asks the question, has evolution discovered consciousness more than once? Which is a nice question. Okay. And so he goes back way far in the evolutionary tree because to find things that animals, plants, whatever we think are really smart. And he lands in the species of cephalopods because we all know, we all think they're very smart and we're becoming more and more aware of just how they seem intelligent. What is that, right? And one of the things that we share is this visceral response to what's not expected and then take action. And when you think about that, at least as I've been thinking about that, even in its most simple form, it just starts to open up a whole different space of, we would need to understand our expectations, right? So what is the customer? Sorry, Jerry. No, customer's great. What are we? Consumers do what they don't like. Yeah, I know. But let's talk about this conversation. So we might go back to Matt, who is new here this week. And if his expectations are being met or exceeded all that rest of that stuff, as we go along, that's sort of great. And if he doesn't, then that could mean that could mean a whole lot of things, right? But I think expectation is something that is far more variable. A lot of people come to this conversation with different expectations, I'm sure. And I think expectation when, if I'm, you live your life on autopilot so much of it and you're just going through the paces or whatever, but if I'm in the middle of an interaction and suddenly, hey, let's talk about your expectations, what's the lead? Yeah, well, you can't because you don't. Beautiful conversation, right? Right, I think there's some evidence that in a couple of conversations that I'm in that the expectations are actually at a lower level of cognition. Yeah. Right, and that's interesting too, because we know how much goes on that we're not aware of and that we, we can reflect on our amygdala. That when the amygdala speaks, we can notice that it spoke and take action. But if you don't, it's just so fast and so fleeting. And to live your life in a conscious way that you're always listening curiously for, you know, the universe to wink at you. Yeah. And it's far easier to jump into that moment versus I just, I just gotta get through the day. I just have to get through the next three hours. Yeah. That has its own dangers. I tend to live my life now that I'm not working in a formal organization that way, a lot more. So, yeah. Mark or Dave or Bo or April, if you wanna jump in, we'll just go quiet for a second if you wanna throw something into the conversation. I mean, this one might be wrote, I don't know. Is that, have people already read Rushcraft's new book, The Teen Human or whatever it is? I saw him talk the other day and some of it had to overlaps, I think, with these ideas. But one of the things that struck me was he was talking about how in the old days stock investments were meant to help build the company. And now, you know, the company exists to pump up stock value. And I was thinking we've got a couple of times where we've, you know, like that feels like in this conversation, the premise is blocked, you know, and we're doing the reverse of what was originally set out to be. I just thought that was an interesting one. Well, and that's part of the danger of going meta all the time, I think. I mean, so when, you know, my question is, to what extent is, I mean, to go back to April's discussion about curiosity and what, you know, people trying to actually introduce children to the notion of curiosity and so on and so forth, where I think I would like it if somebody could figure out a way to assess that versus what it is to support and, you know, nurture curiosity as it occurs. I stuck a few links into, I don't know, I don't know April, the curiosity and creativity are the same or exactly what the relationship is, but I did stick, there was a conversation that I was involved in a couple of weeks ago that was interesting to me because he was talking about a creativity crisis and the decline in creativity. And I'd stuck some links to research and stuff in the chat, but it was, you know, the researchers from like 2011 to 2004. Yeah, because it was back a long time ago, it doesn't mean it's not true. Yeah, and I've heard, I don't have the answer, but at this point what I've mostly heard and how I prefer to tee things up is that curiosity and creativity are related but separate. So, you know, sort of hand in glove and you can be very, very curious. And I tend to think that if you have one, you tend to score okay in the other, so to speak, but when you think about people who are wildly, wildly creative, they also just have their gifts, their skills might be just as a creative, as a designer, as a, you know, how are we thinking about that? And it's different than being curious, but you know, I look at them kind of working together. Well, this guy was distinguishing between innovation and creativity, which I thought was like innovation, I think it was a little bit of marginal change, almost, you know, tweaking, where creativity tended to be more, I don't know, that was the distinction that I thought was helpful. Yeah, great. Interesting, long ago I did a presentation where I distinguished different kinds of innovation building from the innovators dilemma, where they talked about sustaining and disruptive innovations, but I invented, I think, a term I called defensive innovation, which is, when the disruptive innovation is on the horizon and you kind of see it and you're the legacy, you're the incumbent, you will do, you will innovate a ton to make sure that little sucker doesn't take you out, and often you fail, but you will innovate like crazy. And this, a lot of this is legal defenses, like IP over protection, you know, a whole bunch of other things, but that's a form of innovation too. So innovation isn't always good, right? Which is something I learned from Esther long ago when she was editing my writing. She's like, this is innovative. Okay, fine, great, stop using that word. Like, is it helpful? Like, how's it gonna affect us, whatever else? So on the topic of nurturing curiosity or creativity, I'm not sure which this does, but it occurs to me, years ago, I read the first 20 pages of how to talk so your kids will listen and listen so your kids will talk and got just enough out of it that apparently I put it down and never went back. But the tip here was, which I use all the time and has greatly improved tons of conversations that I have with my kids and without, the tip is when, so for example, it's like the yes and thing in improv. So my kids are like, oh, can we go to McDonald's for dinner, whatever? Well, no, we can't because I've got dinner in the oven or whatever. But instead of no, we can't, the response is, oh my God, wouldn't that be awesome? I think we should go to every McDonald's to get a milkshake at every single one, right? It's the yes and mode of saying, I totally hear what you're saying, that would be amazing. We're still not gonna do it, but what if we take it and blow up that idea, right? Maybe, oh, then then maybe we should set up a milkshake taste testing situation this summer or maybe like it instead of, it really made me think about how often I shut things down, right? Because it's not reasonable or not on the plan or not as opposed to being like, oh, right, this is a little bit, it goes back to curious and critical. Like, what if we did? What if we did go to McDonald's? What if we went and got fries from every single fast food restaurant we could find, right, like, it's not gonna happen today, but. There's a creative version would be what if we go build a better McDonald's or something like that? Totally, yeah. What would we, if we owned a McDonald's, what would we serve? Or would we be like, whatever? Kelly, you're just gonna be, oh, mom? Yeah, exactly. It always ends in oh, mom. Right. There's a therapeutic approach that does exactly what you're just describing, Kelly. It takes whatever's being presented and instead of pushing or denying or deflecting or whatever pulls and says, let's go with that. Interesting. Let's go with what you just said and then see if whatever is going on. April, you are unmuted. So the example that I used last weekend giving this keynote, it was more in the Q&A. I didn't, I knew that I was waiting into tricky waters, but I used the example of Fortnite. And I was like, okay, how many people, you know, collective grown amongst the teachers? Fortnite, oh my God, please know. But as Jerry had wisely advised me, like these Fortnite lobbies, like kids are actually hanging out in these lobbies and they're learning stuff. They're learning all kinds of stuff. So that's interesting in and of itself. It's its own little classroom which teaches about controller. But I said, you know, rather than bashing students for playing too much Fortnite, simply start by saying, what is it about Fortnite that you like so much? And then dive deeper and deeper. And not that the goal is for them to play more, but to acknowledge their curiosity is there, but you know it's gonna lead you to lead them into some greater skill set it ends. And maybe it's, you know, I like the graphics. Maybe it's, I like the social dynamics. I like the whatever, whatever. But like, that's one of those things. You need to flip it on your head, flip it on its head and recognize that it can be an angle in to learn about much, much more. So I'm sure that must be something that, you know, gets taught to teachers. And then like parents, they hit the situation, lose it. But yes, that's, that's lovely. We're getting close to our 90 minutes for we have another seven minutes by my clock. So any wrapping thoughts, you don't have to say them in rap, but just like any concluding thoughts or any questions for further inquiry for we can set up a separate call. I mean, the whole idea is that we have one check-in call per month, but anybody who poses a question on the Rex conversational list or whatever else, we can easily set up another call around some of the topics that come out of here. So just say so and I'll do it. But any thoughts as we near the end of this call? Well, this is mad. I was made just impression it definitely is interesting discussions and ones that make me think and does make it harder for me to think I should just go respond to all those emails this afternoon, even though I have to. But yeah, it was something I'll be digesting and probably talk to Kelly and Brad about a little bit as I digest it. Cool, welcome to the posse. And feel free to ask anything on the list and et cetera, et cetera, so that's how we work. But it's sort of, this is a lovely confluence of experiences and interests and all that and pretty much whatever we drag into the middle of the space we create, somebody's got something interesting to add to it or build on it or whatever, it's lovely that way. Any other thoughts, anybody else? Ways of sharpening our inquiry? I earlier had put the word inquiry up on the, I was actually trying to find the kind of therapy that pulls but let me just go over to inquiry because this is a word that's also right next to curiosity and creativity and there's appreciative inquiry, there's action inquiry is a thing. There's a, Len Kelly Chase uses action inquiry to work on complexity, this is a recent talk I think I just watched, which makes the question, it sort of makes the statement, the process used to get to the future is the future you get, that's interesting. So partly I think what we're saying here about curiosity is also about how we go about investigating the things that matter to us, right? And the process dictates in some cases the outcome because if you have a five-step model that you're always going to put everything through, chances are things that don't fit your five-step model are just gonna fall on the floor. They're just not going to make it out the door. So I think part of the question here is how do we manage process so that we maintain enough looseness and time for curiosity and exploration and still get the job done in an era post re-engineering and post the 90s and the knots where we basically got rid of all the assistants, all the middle managers, everybody's got 130% of their responsibility on their plate, too many meetings, too many reports, too much of everything to do and not enough time to look up and decide which third of all that to get rid of because it's actually not contributing to anything, right? We're just sort of doing a lot of these meetings and reports and things because we've done them for 10 years and somebody's must need them, otherwise we wouldn't have them on the list or what's that? And some companies take radical approaches to this, which is there'll be no meetings before noon on any day or all meetings have to happen only on Thursday or these hours are sacrosanct for everybody in the company so that people can actually sit and work on one task without interruptions like no calls, no whatever. So I think some of this points back toward process and how we approach things and organizations don't tend to reward these days anything that doesn't appear to be heading straight toward the bottom line. There's this insane pressure across management everywhere I look for, hey, that doesn't sound like it's gonna contribute to the bottom line right now. We can't do that. We don't have the slack to do it. You're not seeing anybody who's making decisions based on sort of their mission and vision. Just like one or two examples, Jerry. No, no, no. So I didn't say that they're not living up to their mission. I sort of was making the argument that they're not leaving much breathing room for curiosity and exploration. Oh, sorry, I've got the, let me get that. I'll be right back. Along with Jerry was talking about, is anyone, I'm always in the investing world. So Warren Buffett invested in this thing called 3G Capital which is a Brazilian private equity company who just lost about $18 billion in Kraft Heinz. What 3G Capital excelled at and what the raison d'etre was was the bottom line. They didn't innovate. They didn't invest in any kind of changes. They just did cost based zero budgeting. So if you want to look back, it's only in the last couple of weeks, Warren Buffett's sitting there eating crow about it. And if you really look at it, what you're looking at is a company that made no investments whatsoever, just did cost control. And Warren Buffett's got egg on the space for this stuff too. Wow. Is he admitting it? Yes, he's totally admitting it. So it's a great business case for anybody out there. Just look it up, 3G Capital, Kraft Heinz ketchup. And what they did, I mean, they were so obsessed with that, you think about it, you're going to a grocery store now, they were counting on everybody just wanting to have Heinz ketchup when millennials don't give a damn. I mean, people just want, so they missed organic, they missed all that stuff. So anyway. That's awesome. But there was a time when Heinz was actually better in quotes than some other things like ketchup. Well, early consumer goods and consumer packaging gave you standards, gave you a set of quality when before that, I mean, one of the first consumer brands is Cracker Barrel Cheese, because before that you walked into a store and there was a barrel full of crackers. And who knew where the crackers had come from or how they'd gotten there. You dipped in and you took some crackers and they wrapped them up in paper and put some stringer on it and you went home with crackers. So all of a sudden you have a label, a brand and the thing that looks the same from time to time, from each time you come and visit and buy it. So it was in some sense is a great leap forward to have processed, wrapped foods and all of that. It's at a bar. And then look what happened. So we've hit our time. Any closing words, closing thoughts? I'm super stoked to learn a new word, column eight. I love this word. It ties back to vector, which is the name of my company. So I like this whole idea of aligning the vectors and producing power for breakthrough coolness. So thank you for that. Part of what we're doing is seeking alignment on things, that's how we get work done. And then it used to be, you just tell everybody to go that way and then it turns out that for smart people doing complicated work, that doesn't work very well. Yeah, I know. So now it's like, all right, there's a hill we gotta take. How are we going to do that? And we've gotta find a way to get to agreement on it. Cool, thanks everybody. Thank you very much. See you on the list, see you next Monday. Thanks, bye bye. Bye. Bye guys, take care.