 Thank you very much. It's really great to be at such an extraordinary event with such a great mindset. I'm going to kick off by telling a story about, I think, the environment out of which Linux grew. And I think it's important to remember kind of how bad it used to be. But this isn't a story about software. It's a story about chickens. And a researcher, strangely enough, at Purdue University, I think that was a coincidence, who did research into chickens and specifically into productivity. And what he really wanted to know was, what was it that could make the chickens he worked with more productive? And it's a kind of interesting subject, because of the several organizations in the world is really interested in how can we make the people that we work with more productive. But Muir, which else working with chickens, and of course, he had a great advantage because you can measure productivity in chickens very easily, which is, you just count the eggs. So Muir designed a really beautiful experiment. He put together a flock of just kind of average chickens, perfectly healthy, ordinary chickens, about a dozen of them, and he put them to one side in his farm yard for six generations to just do whatever it is chickens do all day long. But then he produced or created a different kind of flock. You might call it a super flock, because he went around trying to identify the individually most productive chickens. You might call them super chickens. And he put them into a separate flock, a kind of super flock. And each generation he identified for breeding only the most productive, and he did that for six generations. And at the end of his experiment, what did he find? When he went back to the average flock and what he discovered is they were more productive than they'd ever been. They were all really healthy, plump, fully feathered, and cranking out more eggs than ever. The super flock was a completely different story, because the super flock, all but three, were dead. They'd killed each other, trying to be the superest of the super flock. And when Muir revealed his research to many of his researchers, their eyes lit up and some of them said, we know those super chickens. We work alongside quite a lot of them. And as I've gone around the world talking about this, I always see this little flicker of recognition in people's eyes, and they'll say to me, that's my company, that's my department, that's the team I used to work in. They've all had these experiences where fierce competition between individuals, between departments, between functions, between companies, turned their working life into something more resembling the Hunger Games than a creative enterprise. And what's so interesting is that the theory that underlies that, the notion that if you get everybody to compete fiercely somehow, the best will stagger to the top, kind of bloodied and with feathers hanging out, has been for a long time the prevailing ethos and mindset that's underlaid our education system, our political system, and many, many corporate environments. And against that backdrop of that prevailing mindset, of course the open source movement arrived with a very, very different perspective, saying actually wouldn't it be interesting if instead of this fight to the death, we created systems and an environment in which who won wasn't the person who was the biggest thug or the biggest title, but just the best idea where knowledge was the leader, not power, not heft, not title, just the quality of the idea. And at the time, 25 years ago, of course, many people thought this sounded absurd. It was so simplistic, this idea that you could just get a lot of people to pile in together and collaborate and it would all work out wonderfully. How idealistic, how utopian, how ridiculous, how doomed. But they're not saying that now. Now what's so interesting about this is that anybody ever imagined that working in a different way, working with high levels of collaboration could ever be simple. Nobody in this room imagines that it's so simple because anybody who's done a high level collaboration knows that actually it's really hard. And we've all had experiences of working in fabulous teams where things just seem to roll and we've also probably all had experiences of working on really grinding teams where the gears didn't mesh and there was no oil, there was just friction all the time. So those of us who are really interested in getting the full capacity of collaboration are endlessly fascinated by what makes some collaborations more productive than others. Muir was interested in chickens, we have a slightly different take on the world, but the question is fundamentally the same. It's also the question which a researcher at MIT asked, which is why is it that some teams are so much better than others? And he designed a beautiful experiment too. His name is Tom Malone and he brought in hundreds of people and he tested their IQ and he gave them really hard problems to solve and he discovered no surprise to anybody that there's a rough correlation between IQ and problem solving. No surprises there. But then he put all of these people into groups and got them to solve very complex high order design problems. And he discovered what all of you know which is some of those groups did brilliantly and some of them could hardly keep going. But of course what he was interested in now was what were the characteristics that defined those really outstanding groups and it came down to just three things. First of all, then there was nothing about the high achieving groups that correlated to IQ. The great teams were not those with the highest aggregate IQ and neither were they the teams where you had one or two IQ superstars or super chickens. So IQ wasn't that wasn't the explanation. Instead what he found was the really outstanding teams did score very highly on a test but it turned out to be a very different kind of test. It's a test called reading the mind in the eye test and it's roughly considered a test for empathy. It's about how connected MITU. How aware am I if you kind of duck out? Or how aware am I if I start to dominate the conversation? It's a kind of connection to the whole and the really outstanding teams were packed full of people who did really well on that test. In addition they found that the second characteristic of these great teams was that they tended to have nobody who dominated and neither did they have people who just checked out. That when they looked back at the tapes of all the discussion that led to the problem solving they discovered they were getting pretty much roughly equal contributions from everybody. So they were getting contributions from across the board of all these different minds and experience and intellects. And the third thing they found about the really exceptional teams and I know they weren't looking for this because they were surprised by it. They found that the high achieving teams had more women in them. Now this has been a bit of a facer for them because nobody quite knows what that means. Now women typically score more highly on the reading the mind in the eye test so it may be you're just doubling down on the empathy quotient or it may be that it's just a representative of diversity and actually diversity of any kind might yield the same outcome. But what is so striking about this research into collective intelligence is that it's not about IQ, it's not about the individual, it's about what's happening between the individuals. It is if you like much more about the mortar than about the bricks. So that really changes the way you start to think about how you design and execute really outstanding collaborations. It means you start looking for different things in practice. One of the things that you start to notice in really outstanding groups is a very high level of helpfulness. Now I always think helpfulness is a kind of anemic word it doesn't sound particularly dynamic or brilliant but actually when you start looking at companies and teams and labs that have extraordinary achievements under their belt the one characteristic that stands out is helpfulness. A tremendous piece of research into Bell Labs probably the most creative lab in the history of the world looked at why was it that this particular group of people had so much success had won so many Nobel Prizes and had done so much to transform our world and when they factored out all the things that all sorts of other labs had what they discovered made Bell Labs historic was the quality of helpfulness between the people who worked there. In some instances they could track vast numbers of inventions back to one guy who sat in the lunch room and just helped anybody who was stuck. One guy helping everybody. I'm guessing that sounds kind of familiar. So helpfulness characteristic of these great creative teams. Another thing that you always come across is that these teams require what I think of is high levels of curiosity which develop well stocked minds because of course as a great contributor you have to keep refreshing your knowledge your understanding your languages your ability to keep up with the technology up with the technology you're working on and one of the key factors that's coming out of the open innovation platforms that are now running all over the world is how often people will solve problems outside their areas of expertise. If you look at an open innovation platform like Innocentiv you see this really clearly so for example one of the problems all posted on Innocentiv was to do with a biomarker for Lou Gehrig's disease it's a human medical problem. It's solved not by a doctor not by a medical researcher it's solved by a plant biologist who has an idea about how his knowledge might map to this problem. Similarly how to clear up oil spills solved by a cement engineer that part of the value of openness is putting to work the diversity of a very large number of people who may be able to solve things that nobody else would think they would solve because it lay outside of their expertise and yet the wider the expertise your team draws in the more likely it is that you'll have the intellectual and creative capacity to solve some really hard problems and the third thing that is always characteristic of these great teams in practice is that they spend quite a lot of time together and it's really striking when Malone went back and looked at his work on collective intelligence one of the things he thought about was well what about virtual teams what about teams that aren't in the same room and what he discovered doing the same sort of experiment but with people who were not meeting was the same characteristic still mattered were you capable of thinking about the other people at the on the team even if you couldn't always see them were you capable of seeing that the differences between each of you was where the value of the team was created now really to develop that value even in virtual teams does mean that getting together spending time together can deliver results so I went to a breakout session earlier today about meetups incredibly important not just to solve problems because the more you get to know people the more you trust them and the more you trust them the more you're prepared to speak your mind candor is frequent and it's easy because conflict is safe and it caused me to reflect when I was running one of my first software companies in Boston years ago I hired lots of fabulous people of course who wouldn't and I gave them lots of fantastically hard problems to solve and they all worked away at them and I remember thinking we're not really getting anywhere it doesn't feel like much fun I would now say there wasn't actually a lot of social interaction between people so finally in desperation as a young entrepreneur I thought well let's just down tools every now and then and spend time talking to each other about who we are where we came from and why we're here and what we care about and it was then and only then that the business really took off similarly when I study really high achieving science labs what do I always find huge investment in time to get people to know each other because if you're going to do breakthrough work that really matters sooner or later you're going to be in trouble you're going to be somewhere where you don't know if you can ever find the answer and what will keep you going will be the support and the encouragement the trust and the faith of other people what has what we have all learned not just in the software world but in the business world and in any world that deals with high-level collaboration is how profoundly productive it is when we recognize that the variety and difference in teams is what gives them their huge advantage and I'm really struck by the way that the different way of working which the open-source movement in general has promoted and which Linux has proved the value of that this way of working has not just changed people it is changing entire corporations I don't think there's a company I'm working with at the moment that isn't undergoing some kind of cultural transformation and if you're really superficial about it you'll think it's because they're trying to adapt to technology but actually what they're trying to adapt to is this deeply challenging idea that when you get people together who are very different and you give them quite a lot of freedom and quite a lot of autonomy they become immensely creative that when different kinds of people can work well with each other they can solve more problems for different kinds of people and different kinds of companies and I don't want to mention any names but I'll mention one just because I know it's been talked about a lot today but when I was running software companies in the 1990s if Microsoft was interested in you and came looking at your company you had kind of mixed feelings about it because the one thing you knew was the reason they'd want to buy your technology if they did was to kill it everybody knew that so you had to kind of figure out well you know is the price high enough for me to give up my baby really Microsoft doesn't do that anymore now when Microsoft buys a new business it says what can we learn from you come tell us what we look like to you from out there come help us grow and learn what I'm watching in companies around the world in industries of all kinds is that instead of building huge fortress proprietary walls they're trying to tear them down and replace them with porous membranes where new ideas and new stimulation and new inspiration can make those organizations sustainable the open source mindset has changed the way they think of themselves now there will always be naysayers there always have and there always will be and there are still naysayers out there saying well this open source jazz is fine but when it comes to security oh no we're going to need very high defenses it'll never work and there are certainly companies and organizations insisting that now is the time to build walls higher than ever if we're going to build be safe if we're going to build really safe technology the barnyards of history are full of this argument dead and bleeding like the super chickens because evolutionary biology requires variety it derives its safety and its creativity and its sustainability through the through variety diversity and openness many historians looking over the last 25 years think that they're looking at a big tech story and of course they are but i think they're looking at a different kind of story too they're looking at a story in which we have rediscovered that actually what motivates creativity and human ingenuity in people is each other that the kind of capital that's most productive of all is social capital which routinely outperforms financial capital and that the most sustainable creative and innovative resource we have that we have ever had is human thank you very much so you have the distinction of being the only speaker at this entire conference who did not use slides very impressive very impressive see i like to look at people so i want to ask you a quick question you we have about 650 companies who participate in all the projects we're working on and what you said i thought was interesting the number one impediment we have isn't that the ceo doesn't know that he needs to be a part she needs to be part of this innovation economy it's not that the engineers don't want to use open source it's that cultural shift yeah you describe yeah how how when you talk to leaders in different organizations are they rocking onto this and do they need a rulebook do they need an instruction guide what are they looking for it's really interesting i mean it's undoubtedly the case that a lot of executives fear losing their power and especially if they've come up you know if their whole educational and life experience has been the super chicken model right where they fought to the death to get to their big desk right then they think oh my god if we let people collaborate you know where's my power where's my carpet where's my window you know all the stuff that appears to matter to them a great deal right and i think what's interesting is i think the success of linux has made has really challenged that because if it had flopped the way that people thought it would 25 years ago then there you go fine but it you know it's so spectacularly not a flop that that challenges them and they can see open source happening and other things you know open source drug development and stuff like that is solving hard problems that big pharma companies couldn't solve so it's gradually seeping in right and sometimes you know to be honest they have to try it because the old stuff doesn't work for them right so it's like any port in a storm but it's you're right it's it is very hard because we do have i think of it as a sort of permafrost layer of people who have you know that's how they've always won they just were the biggest thugs in town and they won't thrive in that open source environment you know as you know right but what's interesting is if they're kind of you know willing to let go a little bit what they will discover is it'll make them more successful and this is a shocking idea but you know it might be more fun right you know maybe work doesn't have to be a fight to the death of the day that would be worth and that's kind of you know that's that's tempting yeah well i think there's a lot of people out here who have ideas about it shut a little light on that permafrost yeah great thought wonderful thank you so much thanks so much bye bye