 Good evening everybody and warm welcome. End of a long day and we've got a great topic this evening on agile governance. I'm Nair E. Woods and I'm Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford and I'm going to introduce our speakers in a moment. But first I want to ask all of you, given that our topic is agile governance, put your hand up if you'd like to see more agile governance in the world. OK so those listening but not watching should know that everybody practically put their hand up. Everybody would like more agile governance. Tell me how many of you would like more inclusive governance? Put up your hands? OK so pretty much everybody would like more inclusive governance. But we have a little bit of a problem here because inclusiveness usually requires something other than agility. If you're going to really be inclusive and really consult a community and really seek their solutions, that takes time. And it's very difficult. The reason why many governments or firms are agile is because they do it quickly using experts. They dive in, they do their thing and come out. So let's start by thinking about what the tension might be. Now just one last question to our audience. When you put up your hand for agile governance, what was in your head? What was the first thing that was in your head? Don't overthink it. But what was in your head which made you all go, yes in fact most of you were smiling as you put your hand up. So what was in your head? Ease of living. Ease of living. Quick turning round on the situation. Quick turning round on the situation. Mix teams of public and private, government and private sector, yes. Speed and variety. Speed and variety, speed and variety, yes. Zeitgeist, finger on the pulse, yes. Regulation keeping pace with technology, there's a challenge. Any others? Yes, efficiency. Thank you very much. So I'd like to come to some of our panellists and I guess one of the first people I'd like to come to just so that we can all wake up thoroughly is Carlos Moedas from the European Commission. He's commissioner for research science and innovation, European Commission Brussels. I'm picking on you Carlos because most of the world looks at the European Commission or the European Union and says that is the opposite of agility, right? We have agile governance and then we have this huge lumbering European Union that's the opposite of agility. Is that why you go to bed dreaming of more agile governance? That's what keeps me awake at night, that's for sure. But I think that the way we live today is that problems have no borders. And so if you try to regulate at the level of a country, it's very complex and very difficult. When you look at health, cybersecurity, they are all global problems. So you have to find solutions to regulate at the European level and also at the global level but the European Union is a group of countries that decided to solve problems together. The problem is that was exactly what you said in the audience is how do you keep up the pace in between technology and regulation? And so far regulation has been something that politicians do normally with legal experience, so lawyers. It's static and it's about the past and it's about the products. The problem is that the products of today are not the products of tomorrow and you are regulating something that you don't know. And I think that one of the experiences that I've been doing, very simple in Europe, is creating something that we call the innovation deals. We copied that from our friends, the Dutch, that created this concept of the green deals. And it's about putting people around the table. So instead of being the politicians doing the law, it's putting the entrepreneur, the entrepreneur that has a problem with a national regulator, with a European regulator, with the lawmakers and looking why can't you go to the market with this product? And the most interesting result of that in Europe is that in the Netherlands, they got to the conclusion that in 70% of the cases, they really did not need to change the regulation. There was a problem of perception, of negative perception that the regulation was impairing that person or that company to get to the market. In the other 30% you had to change regulation, of course. But I think that's the challenge, is how do you co-create with people and I think that somehow I'd like to challenge you on that being inclusive and at the same time agile. You can be both if you co-create together and if you co-create with the system. And so I think that's really the challenge of the day for politicians. Politicians have to let go and to be inclusive to entrepreneurs to regulate that future as we see today doesn't happen in most of the countries. So somehow the European Commission and the European Union are a little step ahead, at least in the thinking of how to solve the problem. Eric, thank you. So even in the European Union, if I can permit myself there, actually everyone will accuse me of bringing a British perspective, so I won't. But you can, it's by bringing regulators and entrepreneurs together and helping sort out problems quickly that you're saying is already making breakthroughs. Absolutely, and there's results. So I'd like to move to Eric Rindolfsson, who's director of the MIT initiative on the digital economy, reasonably recently published a paper in Nature on these issues. Eric, surely there's a problem here which is that if regulation is constantly changing, it makes it impossible for firms to operate. There are business leaders that would say to me that they would prefer regulation to be predictable and stable than for governments to be changing the rules on them all the time. I think it's not a matter of stability versus pace of change. It's a matter of whether it's changing in sync with the needs of the environment, the customers, the business. Because as we just heard, technology has never been moving faster and that's going with artificial intelligence, particularly with digital technologies more broadly. We have rapid new business models, opportunities to create enormous value, more value than ever in history, but also enormous harm. And regulations do have to keep up with that. The issue, as Tom Mitchell and I wrote about in our Nature article, is that governments are flying blind. They don't have the data needed to understand what the opportunities are or what the risks are. Our data gathering infrastructure is really something that was a wonderful invention in the early 20th century, 100 years ago, Simon Cusnitz and others, but it's not keeping up with what we need today. There's a lot of digital data we could be gathering to give us the insights. The issue is that also a cultural one that both in a lot of big private sector companies and governments, there's been a historical mindset of trying to predict and plan based on that. And that just can't keep up with this pace of change. You have to switch to a sense and respond mindset. And the first part of sensing is gathering that data more rapidly. Let me give you one concrete example, and it will be interesting to hear from some of the others. The companies that are on the leading edge of this, many of the born digital companies, Silicon Valley companies, are companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook. How do they do it? Well, they don't try to predict the future, even though there's lots of smart people there and lots of data. They sense and respond, they do A-B tests, they do experimentation. Jeff Wilkie, one of the leaders at Amazon, he's an MIT guy. He came to my office a while back and I was going to have him speak in my class, but first he wanted to show me something. He brought up the Amazon screen and he looked at it for me and he goes, oh, you're in Group B. I'm like, what do you mean I'm in Group B? See the shopping cart is over on the right side of the screen as you check out. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He said, we're doing experiment right now on 100 million people and half of them have the shopping cart on the left and half of them have it on the right. And I'm like, why does this matter? And he goes, well, we're constantly testing little things, big things, our order entry process, and these A-B tests that they do is how they decide and how they learn what works. And it turns out, apparently having the shopping cart on the right makes you about 0.3% less likely to abandon the shopping cart and they close those sales more likely. 0.3% who cares? Well, actually that's an enormous number for a company that, you know, the cost of moving the bits around is very, very low. They are doing hundreds of experiments like that every day. So are the other digital companies to learn, again, someone being some small things, I think governments and other, you know, Fortune 500 companies, small companies can learn from this mentality of using digital infrastructure to gather information more rapidly, be much more agile in responding to the environment, not trying to sit back in a room and predict what the future is going to be, but constantly be learning and updating. Right, but it's a lot easier in the retail sector than in government. Well, that's a particularly easy one. So, let me push you to apply what you just said to some advice to Carlos Moedas trying to get the European Union's regulatory framework to respond to technology. Absolutely. So one of the things that the European Union does, the US government does, is there are decisions that affect hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars worth of the economy and sometimes they're rolled out and somebody in Brussels makes some decisions. There's an opportunity there to do, believe it or not, AB tests to roll them out. This was done accidentally in Oregon, one of the states in the United States. It turned out that they didn't budget and they didn't have enough money to give everyone Medicare as they had expected. So they decided we'll do it by lottery and they let some people have it and just completely randomly other people didn't get it. Economists like me were ecstatic because not because the people didn't get the Medicare, let me just be correct, but because we suddenly, for the first time, had an AB test control data. We could see how much of a business does this make to their health, to their well-being, to their care, but rather than doing that accidentally, every time you roll out a new program you could be thinking is there an opportunity here to do it in a different phased way. Maybe the first quarter we do it here and then the other quarter we do it there. Of course there may be interdependencies, you have to be careful about that and then you would learn, and instead of people in Parliament or Congress debating what they think is right and having their opinions, you would have actual facts about what works. And how many people died? In this case actually one of the surprising results was, it was a budget thing, it wasn't an experiment, one of the interesting results was that there was relatively little effect on mortality, there was a big effect on mental health and well-being and security. So that was something that people realized that this is an aspect we need to look at more carefully. Absolutely, Carlos, how does that advice sound to you? I think it's fantastic, I think it's that in reality you have in the political world and in governments you don't have data, you have very few and you don't have access to data. And so as a politician you struggle and that's why you come with opinions and you try to follow your instinct that sometimes doesn't work. So I think that one of the things that we really are doing also in the European Commission is to develop that scientific advice based on facts. So each time one of us around what we call the College of Commissioners, the Commissioners for Europe, we have to have from our scientific advice members which are the chief scientific advisors of Europe data that will actually lead us to a decision. Easier said than done because a lot of the times we don't have the data. We're opposed to the data driven data. Absolutely, any questions? Clarifications, yes. So the question is can we do simulations? At times I think that you'd be surprised you can get the data more often than you think and I think most people don't think hard enough about how to run these. We sometimes work with workshops and we get people to just spend a day brainstorming a lot of simple experiments that they can run. The other thing is you gather, there's a lot of digital data that's being gathered but not being organized, aggregated and stored in an efficient way. So governments can leverage company, the private sector, their own administrative record keeping. So yes you can do simulation but my first instinct would be to push harder on actually getting the real data. One of the lessons Eric has drawn our attention to is there might be effects of your experiment that you don't set out thinking you need to measure like the mental health consequences of the change. Yes. Common law jurisdictions with a federal structure actually have an advantage in being agile because some court somewhere makes a decision and then you look at the consequences and if it is bad like others do it differently and as you said, one jurisdiction can actually make a legislation and then you have almost a randomized controlled trial with the other state that doesn't have done it. I want to hear some of the other voices but they can but I think in practice they often don't. When the US federal system was set up many people refer to it as laboratories of democracy because different states have different opinions and cultures and some of them work better. In Kansas they cut taxes it turned out that it drastically reduced their revenues in other states they do other things. The issue I think actually is as much a cultural one in terms of moving, we joke about data driven decision making that the previous way of making decisions was something we called hippos which is the way decisions have been made for thousands of years and that is when you have an important decision you get a group of people sitting around a table and you all give your opinions and your judgments and then you go with the hippo which is the highest paid person's opinion. I guess it's worked tolerably well for a while but we can move beyond that but it's not so much a question of just having the data it's also this cultural thing and having those laboratories of democracy is useless if you don't actually learn from them. Great. Thank you very much. I'd like to turn now to Hermann Greff because if there was any ever an embodiment of agile governance meaning someone, a CEO who picks up the latest evidence and science and applies it Hermann it's got to be you at Sperbank. Can you share with us lessons about have you ever had to learn to slow down in trying new things in Sperbank? Are there lessons that you would bring to us about how to make governance more agile from your own experience in your own bank and working very closely with the Russian government to try to make it more agile? It's a very difficult task to bring somebody to agile practice before you agile enough. For me what does it mean for me? Agile. I think all these things which was declared here it's right but for me the first issue which is crucially important this is the customer satisfaction. And we would like to start of our agile journey from the customer and don't forget the customer every day we try to do the same start from the customer from his needs, from his experience and what you can do for achieving every day his satisfaction and if your customer will be satisfied you will be happy with all your business numbers and if you speak about the political results I think it's the social and political stability. The second one what's the most important resource for our customers? This is the time. We can have more money repeat the inefficient experiments but we can't turn back the time and the time is the most important resource in which we try to invest our money and our efforts and we say that now we are not only the bank which managed many of our clients we would like to save the time for our clients and how we try to measure our agility it's two measurements the first one this is time to market how fast we can produce the new products the second one time to decision it's the issues how fast we can produce our decisions and now we speak about real time decision making and data driven decision making and the third one this is the time to delivery how fast you can deliver to your clients your service or your goods what's the main problem? If you speak about the new organizations like the FinTech or the technical giants they were born in this environment there a jail by the birth but we are the big organization like Sberbank we have more than 300,000 employees and how we can turn ourselves to this way and I think that it's a very good issue to everybody we try to implement a jail in our organization during last more than two years and now we have around 60% of our headquarter in a jail now we started with the second process to go to DevOps and I can say that it's very very hard experiment for everybody by the first step normally we lose 20% of our good management team because culturally it's very difficult Emma, could you just explain for all of us when you say we've turned 60% of our workforce agile so what does that mean if I met one of those individuals what would be different about them to the other 40% of your workforce? It means that first of all for that we build a spatial building it's 100% different open space it's a very specific place in which we constructed all four agile procedures because the culture is very different all the procedures are very different and we divided the whole headquarter on the teams by 10-12 persons and we mixed the technological people, the engineers businessmen and the normal bankers what we call it and now we can't call these people as engineers or as bankers this is the we call it the technology producers now they're producing, every day they're producing technology and they're improving the technology and what it gave for us first results, it's 100% transparency because we can measure each team every day and the efficiency of each person inside the team and it creates a 100% different environment inside the team we don't want to manage the culture inside the teams because everybody competing with each other because they have open results and they can see every day on the screen how productive is his team and how productive is the team who is working on the same so you've got mixed teams you've got them working in a different culture in a different space coming back to your indicators of success has it surprised you are they really producing a whole lot more customer satisfaction and much quicker time to market, time to deliver etc or in some cases is it too soon to tell as a first result we have increased our time to market two, three times it's very good result but it's not enough to compete with Google or Amazon because they measure their time to market with minutes now we measure our time to market with weeks and it's a huge difference between bank and high-tech company but if you look at our previous results our time to market was between six months and for some of very difficult products it took more than one year now we can measure it with weeks it's a big jump and as a first results we get a lot of satisfaction inside the team because the people understand that now they are more mobile they are more agile and now they can create in the same period of time more services for our clients and as a second step it's also customer satisfaction level thank you, thank you very much Hirwaki Nakanishi you're chairman of Hitachi you're also the leader of the Japanese business association the Kei Danrin I saw you nodding vigorously during Hermann's description of agile governance is that working for you in Hitachi or across the businesses that you now represent? oh yeah not simply of the AI or big data analytics totally the digitalisation is a very very important base for the considering of everything you talk about some of the bankings or some of the services but now those kinds of digitalisations sometimes a destructive change of the business itself how to reach the AI the more smarter the social environment that's the kind of the target for the finally from the viewpoint of the business itself also that some of the nationwide the social problems or issues to be solved and to be utilised of those kinds of digital base that's the big issues for the current agile governance so that we're setting up the various activities from the viewpoint of business but not only business but also some of the total social problems so how can share the goal that's a very important point some sharing of the goal we're making more quick decisions and what's the real benefit of the through the digitalisation so we are now making a big effort to the how to utilise of the data how to making more clear goals for the futures those kind of approaches that's our taking and do you think so that's a lovely clear picture of the possibility of getting more information more data it's applying what Eric told us to decision making do you think that business can help government do that so to address for example Japan's social issues can business help with that can business help government be more agile in responding and how as for the other Japanese society that we have a lot of the social issues the first one is that ageing society degreasing the population and also that very much rapid inclusion of the social care those kind of things is how to manage the future those are really the big issues so the for example that ageing society currently that's a very long life but the most serious you know the issues the people's healthy life those are the issues not simply of the physical life that's a very very important point but now in this case what kind of data that's sometimes a personal one but sometimes a very statistical analysis to to making a more clear way to take care of the health to keep of the healthy life those kind of activities we can support it from the viewpoint of the health care business but also some of the social analytics based on the data so focus business on ensuring that citizens who are going to live longer live healthier as well that is a very typical example right, thank you very much could I say I think it's a good issue for the public private partnership we try to start with this program with the Russian government and we try to understand how many services the the public services uses the normal the normal citizen it's 48 services which cover more than 80% of the needs of the normal citizen a lot of processes we spoke about the processes how long it takes for the government to digitalize and redesign these processes I think it will take a lot of time but we are very interested on these services also and we would like to bring these services to our customers and we had a very interesting experiment with mortgages for example they mortgages from bank now it takes maybe one week but registration of your property normally takes one month in a good in a good way and last year we organized a small team together with this agency who is responsible for registration small team from Sberbank and small team from this agency and we have redesigned all the processes and for example if you look at Moscow and Moscow region now the registration process takes one day so that's a great example of what you were saying Carlos of bringing the private sector together with the regulators better explaining clearing out the thing points for an example of exactly what Nakanishi-san is suggesting to us about a partnership for more agile governance I'd like to turn to Kenneth Ross because Kenneth is in a different sector he's executive director of Human Rights Watch and how does this discussion of governance strike you Kenneth does it fill you with fear and anxiety or great hopes for the world of human rights it's a mixed bag let me pick up on a few of the topics that have been addressed first with data data is very powerful and so we shouldn't be surprised that powerful interests sometimes get in the way of data collection and just to cite one example you would think that in something like the United States where you could really have 50 different experiments in gun control state by state that you would want to know just as a public health matter which gun control regimes save more lives than others if you're the national rifle association you say we want to put guns in people's hands because it's going to make it safer so they can all stand in their house and prevent intruders and others say no you actually have guns all over the place and it makes us all more likely to shoot each other and it's actually much less safe well this is like a perfect thing for the center for disease control the leading public health investigative agency advisory agency to look at but they're precluded from looking at it because the key industry here in this case the key interest group doesn't want to know precluded by law so it's an example of how a public-private partnership can go awry because in this case the private interest has prevented the government from collecting data that actually would help address a serious public health challenge now just to give a couple other examples I mean I'm when we talk about agile government these days there's a tendency to equate that with deregulation you know that there's this sort of image put out there of these awful burdensome regulations that are just tying business down and government comes in and uses a meat cleaver to chop through those horrible regulations and let business go and we're all going to be better off when the stock market rises and people are happy you know and then you start is that some reportage of the last month last year shall we say we'll probably hear some of this tomorrow yep but then you start looking at some of these awful awful regulations that are being chopped and so I mean just to give two examples of areas where my organization has been interested in promoting regulation we've done Human Rights Watch has done a lot of work on child tobacco workers because if you are a kid picking tobacco this is a dangerous thing because you know one it's like you're smoking several packs of cigarettes a day just by ingesting the nicotine second you know there's pesticide all over the place which is poisonous so you know kids actually often will put on you know sort of rain coats almost despite the sweltering heat to try to protect themselves and it's obviously it's a dangerous thing for kids to do this is a big awful regulation that is being attacked right now to try to say no this is not hazardous work let kids pick tobacco you know or to give another example there is now in place a regulation that requires extraction companies to publish what they pay to governments where they extract minerals or oil or what have you and this is being fought tooth and nail today why you know because these companies want to be able to pay off the reason for the regulation in the first place was a way to avoid corruption it was a way to avoid funding highly abusive security forces but suddenly this is one of these terrible regulations that they are trying to pair back so I actually think when we agility sounds nice and the abstract but you really can't separate the speed of government the facility of government from the substance and you've got to look at what is being chopped what is being precluded and what isn't and you know some regulations are good regulations are often the main thing that stands in the way of industries that are harming our health or harming our safety and so we just have to look carefully what are your reactions around the room to this any thoughts questions yep I'm Francisco I'm a global shaper from Argentina we are facing this situation in Latin America governments are cutting regulations because they are trying to attract foreign foreign investment and because of this we are facing this kind of shopping situation where companies are trying to decide where to invest because of these regulations so I think that's is obviously a job for dicing human rights I think that was a comment any other comments around the room yes Thank you Aaron Maniam from the Singaporean Government I've been very struck by the attitudes to time that the panellists have talked about because rather than try to compress time in agility of governance what it seems you're saying is we need to actually oscillate between deep compression at some points really uncompressing time in taking the space to experiment to iterate and to slow things down so that we can actually be responsive I'm curious whether you think that's the right characterization or not Thank you very much I'm going to come back to you Eric there was another comment over here sorry one moment there was somebody else who had their hand up sorry yes I'm just struck by the contrast between public and private sector so all the revolution and customer focused agile, big tech and other industries that seems to be meeting customer needs well and yet somehow on the democratic front where we had an institution which was supposed to be very customer or voter focused we don't seem to be getting the same kind of performance out of the system I don't know it's a tough one but what's going on in that contrast and is there a way to take some stuff from the private sector and the public on this one Thank you very much and the gentleman at the back I'll be very quick on this in 1994 a colleague and I wrote an article called competitive agility and we argued that it wasn't good for every firm all of the time to be agile because there are expenses associated with being agile so there are situations in which you need to kind of slow down and there are some situations in which you can speed up in some situations you can have a lot of variety in other situations you may not be a good idea to have a lot of variety Thank you very much and down here I just want to pick up on the subject of why agility has worked in the private sector and perhaps not in the public sector and I think what the private sector has done well is it has looked at the consumer and their needs now if we look at the public sector a regulatory idea often comes from the public officials that are coming up or a bunch of academics or a technology company or industry group and they lobby and they try to get the thing going the politicians while respect that input they are focused on the voters and the technology company whether they are in the pharmaceutical industry or the tech industry are all focused on lobbying but they are not focused on actually demonstrating to the public that this is good for them and they start demanding so we don't close the loop so there is two sides to this is that we have to focus on the voters the consumers and the public who is going to benefit from this regulation and then the politicians are sandwiched from both ends and you will have the legislation so your point if I understand you is that the corporate sector's agility is actually may hit more difficult for governments to be genuinely agile they are lobbying and creating they are lobbying but they are not investing the same amount of effort in getting the public to understand that what they are lobbying is good for them whereas in their own business they actually listen to the consumer they are totally focused on the consumer in expanding their business surely sir there is a big difference and that is if you are producing things which customers can buy or not buy you have got a perfectly legitimate way of saying you can buy my iPhone or not if you are a government you are making a decision that will by necessity create some winners and some losers and if you are making that decision on the basis of some private sector lobbying that might not necessarily represent the public interest no and that is why you have to demonstrate to the public that actually it is useful for a vast majority of them this is an important point in other words a corporate lobbyist as opposed to a corporate marketer is not appealing to the public and it is in our interest to force that private lobbying discussion into the public domain because transparency would force there to be more of a conversation about what is in the public good whereas if stuff happens all in the back room it is about what is good for the profit what is good for the company but not necessarily what is good for the public so if we are setting up a system the more transparency the better so we can nuance this the faster the slower the better I don't want to nuance it I want to be really clear and say there is a false dichotomy to say that you have to slow down to experiment you can actually do experiments faster than the typical study is there are many experiments done in days even hours on some of these platforms and in many cases you are going to be doing the implementation anyways so I don't think that should be an excuse or that you should be at the mindset that oh that is going to be slower just on that sorry if you can don't forget the second thought but just in case where others are thinking with me when you say you can do it faster do you mean Amazon AB or do you mean the Medicare example because you might not know but if you are doing it fast the mental health problems might not emerge till six months later and you have already moved to change the regulation so first off more and more companies are digital and more and more countries and organizations are digital so it is not just the Amazon so digital my friend Gary Loveman is CEO of Caesar's Entertainment he went to my PhD program with me and then went to a different route that company is mostly in line they look at customer satisfaction they found indicators that drive long term shareholder value long term customer satisfaction that are much quicker they can count how people are when they check out how many times people were smiling in the pictures was an indicator so they are finding ways of using data driven methods that are predictive of short, medium and long term outcomes it is certainly not magic that if something mental health takes longer to discover that it instantly makes it discernible faster although I would say there is my colleagues at the MIT media lab are working on faster indicators of that but the question is would you slow it down even more than it is today absolutely not you can speed it up so that would be my first point the second point I just want to briefly get to was should everyone be more agile no it is true that this doesn't work everywhere but I would say that is the way to bet in my book with Andrew McAfee a machine platform crowd we talk about rebalancing but again I think for almost everyone in this room they should be thinking about how can we be more agile how can we be more data driven how can we be more expensive we have a survey with the US government partnership of 30,000 plants and we asked a bunch of questions about how data driven they were how agile they were how quickly they were making decisions and the companies that were actually these at the plant level that were more agile and more data driven were about 4-5% more productive than the companies that were that didn't mean that every single one that was agile and data driven had to change the technology is there and I think that the biggest barrier is that people aren't pushing hard enough as Kenneth was saying I mean sometimes there are the congress or other CEOs or regulators are not letting people use the data that's available so I would say unleash it get moving faster make that cultural shift to take advantage of an amazing abundance that we have what we could have if we wanted to that's a very important point data itself isn't talking a lot so the other it's not simply of the timing issues the digitalizations making it various social issues visible those kind of things is a very key point the how to manage of the time is a little bit different issues before that we need share of the issues how to setting up such a problems those kinds of very transparent open discussion can be done through the digitalization that's a very important point Carlos you had a response two comments one in fast and slow in governments and countries and companies countries are not companies and there's countries that go much more fast than companies look at Estonia because they had the opportunities to start from scratch today with one card with your ID card you can do everything I mean you can pay your taxes you can go to the lawyer you can buy a house but they didn't have the legacy of the past and that was an opportunity and so other countries that have that legacy have to adapt but they will go slowly but you know what I think if you look at in economy of the countries that do really well and that's why I wanted to go to the point of the regulation the tension that we leave now is that you're getting all these entrepreneurs that sometimes come to my office in Brussels that they're getting into very regulated sectors and you know what those sectors have to be regulated because if you're getting into health or education I want to be sure that those sectors are regulated the thing is that those entrepreneurs of these phase of the internet that was a phase where you could be successful without talking to government that phase is over and so we are still trying to speak the same language with those people and we don't speak the same language and so I think there will be from the governments a need to adapt to that new world but also I can tell you I mean most of the entrepreneurs that come to my office they have no idea about what we do they have no idea about what Europe does and by the way it's on data I think that with the new law that is coming into force from Europe on the protection of data we're giving a big step in terms of what you're saying we're giving to the people the power of owning their own data and so you have to give consent for people to use your data and it's not consent in a very long form where companies just put you in a very small footnote what they're going to do, they have to be clear and that is something that two years ago people were criticising Europe but you know what being in Europe or even if you're outside of Europe if you deal with Europe you will have to respect that principle and I think that's something that two years ago we were criticised and today we are praised for it So Kenneth raises take us inside your office for a moment Carlos right so Kenneth raises this issue that some private sector lobbyists are showing up at your office claiming that they want more agile governance but really just seeking a change in the regulation is going to advantage them perhaps over others or that will have children picking tobacco more cheaply at their own peril Do you see that? Are there some that knock on your door that you can see that that's what's coming how do we translate what Kenneth said to your world where entrepreneurs line up to come and lobby you So first of all everyone that comes to see me is on a transparency registry and comes to talk to me but one of the things I come from the private sector and so when I went into politics I thought that people would come to my office to tell me cut off regulation just don't do it let us go you know what is exactly the country most of the people come for you to create regulation to protect their businesses so exactly rent seekers and everybody comes to you and they never ask you to actually say no regulation is exactly the country but I think that's where you have to co-create in the future more with people to avoid people that come into lobbying you because they have their own interests so how do you make people participate in that co-creation a little bit like the movement of user innovation that was created by Eric von Hippel in the MIT which is about innovation that comes from the work of all of us before Schumpeter thought innovation was about just the push companies innovating it it's not, it's the user it's the people but you have to create the systems for helping them to co-create with you and I'm a big believer on that kind of politics so we're getting to sorry I was just going to add just to add a little complexity about this relationship between data and regulation because let me give an example of the use of bail in a criminal case you're supposed to get bail meaning you pay a certain amount and you just promise to come back to court unless you're a risk of flight or you're a risk of violence and what we found and I think it's widely understood is that judges actually look at the skin color of the suspect and in the United States an African American or Latino American is more likely to have a bail set higher than they can afford and therefore is stuck in custody pre-trial is under much more pressure to plead guilty they have a criminal conviction there's this series of bad consequences at result so there's been this effort now to introduce data into this which is I think positively motivated and there are algorithms that have been developed and the judges can look at the algorithm as a way of getting past their personal bias but then the problem is what data goes into the algorithm well in fact data from the last five years where the police have already been focusing their energies on African American and Latino neighborhoods and so you find that the data in some ways is just as biased as the judges and you need to regulate the use of that data constantly test the algorithm which is easier to do with an open public algorithm than a proprietary algorithm to try to pull the bias out of the data because overall I think the use of these algorithms is a good thing and subjectivity does tend to be racist or biased in various ways but so is data data isn't necessarily neutral so you have to by all means we should be data driven but you have to scrutinize the data thank you so we've got to I sat at the beginning of this session wondering to what problem is agile governance a solution other than the need for us all to call whatever we do by a new name that we all share and I think the discussion has highlighted three promises of agile governance one faster so the problem that our decisions whether it's in the private sector the 40% in Hermann's bank that are not yet agile getting them to move faster and as Eric points out to keep up with technology the second is the customer focus that you spoke about Hermann how we can be more customer focused or citizen focused and where I think being more citizen focused actually takes you a little more time that you don't want to use one off red for referenda to know what your citizens think to actually consult and know what your citizens need is a much longer exercise and the third is this idea of mixed teams which has come out in both Hermann Greff's comments of where you've got a problem and you need the ability to run it through every process of your government or your organization but to put your SWAT team on it to put a mixed team on it and to find a solution quickly is that where you will see agile governance is that the problem that we're trying to solve governance that is just unnecessarily cumbersome I think that's a great list I would add two other things to the list a fourth one would be personalisation and specificity of your recommendations without the agility you tend to have one size fits all solutions and sort of mass production mass marketing there's the potential not only in time to be more agile but also across individuals and different people have different needs whether they're voters or citizens or beneficiaries or customers and there's a promise to do that too the second one I just want to underscore it's sort of come out a couple times here which is that data and agility is the enemy of rent seeking and lobbying and that if it's done right you're able to make sure things are more transparent and that whether it's the voters or the customers or the people in the organization can bring sunlight to what's happening and that also is a very big part of the benefit I think very often the desire to slow things down or something like that is to preserve rents and not really to be more more agile but that just to challenge that a little that's not the experience of a lot of us in this room who discovered that the data the agility on transparent websites has led to us the fact that when I go on Bright Bart news I get different news to when you go on Bright Bart news I don't go on Bright Bart news but because their algorithm is telling them what we like and dislike that that's going on without us being aware of it the answer is more visibility not less visibility the answer is more data is for us to be able to own our own data to see what's happening for them to have to share the algorithms and for us to have some visibility into it so I think that's a good example of what I'm trying to describe here absolutely I think that the problem of having the good data that you referred to and having enough data and having the transparency of the algorithms is essential for the future because today you don't know it's like a black box and you kind of think that it's because it's a black box what gets out of there is something that makes sense and sometimes as you're saying Kenneth it doesn't make any sense Do we have anyone in the room who writes algorithms? Any techies? Alice, can you really explain an algorithm? If you would make that transparent to everybody else in the room would any of us actually understand any of it? Well I think algorithms are nothing but a set of rules put in a hypothesis with the data coming in and some outcome coming out and the trick question that we landed in this conversation is when government starts to get a ton of data about their citizen they become owners just like in private organisations are and then we have issues with Facebook and Google knowing way too much what happens when government knows way too much and crosses the boundary that is the trick of the counter statement around that so algorithms of data collections or algorithm decision making can effectively make the optimum decisions towards whatever the trick that you want it to be but that will be such a fiasco any which ways inclusiveness will be a non an outcome of it and of course governments are already making that argument in the name of personalisation but we're going to have all your data we're going to know what you're doing what you're thinking, what you're buying because then we can cater to you better so there is a real tension in that there was a comment here The issue is not about understanding algorithm because this is the company's comparative advantage they're not going to tell you how they do it but I want to pick up on Carlos point that you so you have said that you have now right to use information but we need more than that we need revenue sharing from platform companies with two-sided market that Eric has so lucidly illustrated in his new book now there are technologies appearing that will allow you to have a third party validate where the data that I used was used by a company without exposing their algorithm in a decision that led to some revenue for which I should get a micro payment okay now you don't have to legislate it but the right to use you have done that but that doesn't help because I still want to give my data to Facebook and like you know it's not going to stop me from giving the data but what we need in addition to regulation is technology that allows us to know that our data was used and I want a part of the revenue that the company did because very much and last question from Paul comment from Paul I think just two things and I don't know which direction will take this conversation on agility generally all citizens and all of us begin in a society appreciating being treated like a market so individualized, personalized and driver but soon now later we realize that we don't want to be treated like a market we want to be treated like human beings and human beings mean we are looking for cohesion and so for me what I'm not hearing coming out of here is what has happened to we all wanted Amazon to do this and it was so nice and river but before long they started tweaking the data a little bit and they started shaping our behavior and they started predicting what we should do and it reached a point where they now have the power to decide what we do and what we can do and we are stuck but we seem to be wanting to drive governments to that direction where is the place of the individual saying I still want to remain me I still want to be a market and where is the place of the cohesion where I still want to be us not to still be an individual treated like a market Can I come back to the audience for the last word on this at the beginning of the session I said how many of you want agile governance everybody put up their hands let's do the vote again how many of you want agile governance so still a lot of people and how many of you now want to put some if buts on it if and buts here are some conditions that I want to put on it so quite a few people wanting to put a few conditions around it can you all join me I wish we could continue the debate a last time is up but I'd love you to join me in thanking our fantastic speakers for taking a word that's been in Davos for the last three days and making sense of it for us so thank you so much to each of you