WB-40: Recent Episodes
Matt Ballantine & Chris Weston
On this week’s show, Chris, Lisa and Michelle dive deep into Agentic AI, exploring how it differs from traditional automation and current AI tools. Chris explains that while regular agents follow basic rules (like a thermostat) and AI agents respond to commands (like Alexa), Agentic AI systems work autonomously toward outcomes – they’re proactive, learn from mistakes, and can collaborate with other AI agents. The discussion illustrates how these systems can take on complex, ongoing tasks that would be tedious for humans.
The conversation also tackles the significant challenges and risks of Agentic AI implementation. Key concerns include maintaining human accountability when autonomous systems make decisions, the degradation of AI quality due to increased demand and training on AI-generated content, and real-world legal issues like the Workday class action lawsuit involving age discrimination in AI screening.
On this week’s show Julia and Matt interview Matt Cockbill, an executive search consultant specializing in hiring tech leaders for over 20 years,
A fundamental challenge for organisations is finding experienced leaders to navigate the new wave of AI and generative technologies. While the possibilities are vast, Matt emphasises the crucial need for leaders to focus on the value case – defining what will actually be useful and deliver tangible business outcomes.
Finding leaders with proven experience specifically in generative AI is challenging due to its relative novelty, sometimes requiring organisations to be bold and partner with academia or research institutions. Leaders claiming extensive generative AI experience warrant careful scrutiny.
The discussion highlighted the evolution of tech leadership, with CIOs and CTOs increasingly focused on shaping strategy and enabling value for the business, a trend accelerated by events like Covid-19.
The rapid arrival and hype of AI necessitate leaders who can assess organisational appetite and marshal resources towards valuable activities.
Ultimately, succeeding with AI means balancing a compelling vision with a clear understanding of where the return on investment lies. This requires tech leaders to leverage essential skills like storytelling to build confidence and clearly articulate how technology, including AI, can deliver on strategic objectives.
On this week’s show Matt and Michelle are joined by Professor Nancy Doyle to talk about her new book, and what we can all learn about better leadership.
You can find Nancy’s book here https://uk.jkp.com/products/learning-from-neurodivergent-leaders
On this week’s show Lisa and Matt talk with community builder and poet Janice Whyne about her work, the need to understand culture to work with communities, and the power of peer mentorship amongst many other things.
You can find out more about Janice on her website here: https://janicewhyne.com/, and more about Luminary Bakery here: https://luminarybakery.com/
(The stunt bread in the photo is Matt’s own)
On this week’s show Chris and Michelle are joined by data specialist Tia Cheang to talk about increasing diversity in the field.
On this week’s show Lisa talks to Matt and Nick about their ongoing literary project, Random the Book.
You can follow the progress of their writing (or not) at randomthebook.com
On this week’s show, Matt and Lisa are joined by Tom Whitwell, the designer of modular synthesisers and synthesiser modules.
You can find out more about Tom’s work at https://www.musicthing.co.uk/
Tom mentioned this article from Andrew Chen about Vibe Coding: https://andrewchen.substack.com/p/predictionsthoughts-on-vibe-coding
And here is Lisarbie:
On this week’s show Matt and Julia are joined by writer and poet Rishi Dastidar. Find out more about Rishi and his work at rishidastidar.com
On this week’s show Chris and Nick meet with Ali Farahani to talk about how he coaches technology leaders, and the need to move away from anger…
On this week’s show we meet with communication expert Julian Treasure to talk about his new book Sound Affects.
You can pre-order the book here: https://geni.us/SoundAffects
At a time when a group of rich, white, middle-aged American men seem to be claiming that inclusion has gone too far, Michelle and Julia have a fabulous conversation with diversity consultant Liz Crutchley.
You can find out more about Liz’s work at https://diversityrocks.co.uk/
On this week’s show the full crew are together to answer listener questions.
Our shows of the year are as follows:
Julia – Paul Clarke
Lisa – Tim Plester, Timandra Harkness and James Eves
Chris – Mark Bjornsgaard and Martin Sadler
Michelle – Cat Barnard, Paula Brockwell, Tammy Watchorn and Katrina Collier
Matt – Alice Sherwood
We are back in January 2025 – Happy New Year!
On this week’s show Matt and Julia talk with critical futurist Johannes Kleske about how the future is as much of a way to deal with the present as anything else.
You can find out more about Johannes and his work at https://johanneskleske.com/en/
Matt’s small collection of historical visions of the future is here: https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2015/02/27/envisaging-the-future/
And the Walter Kronkite video is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7TUZ_x57d8
On this week’s show Matt and Lisa are joined by actor, film director and self-proclaimed folknographer Tim Plester to talk about folk traditions, saving archives, and Doctor Who.
You can find out more about the Doc Rowe film, and contribute to the crowdfunder at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/docrowe
You can watch Way of the Morris at
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wayofthemorris
Find out more about Tim’s production company at https://fifthcolumn.org.uk/
More about Tim at http://www.timplester.com/
and https://www.instagram.com/timplester/
And buy Tim’s collection of stage plays now available on Kindle at
https://www.amazon.co.uk/1-2-3-4-PLAYS-Zapruder-Highway-Longhair/dp/B08GLQNLS9?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAaYVqoW3dQKyNILmmp35fC91vD60zmQir7IE6orLJ05oeBKchP74eCXb5HY_aem_3vvfFvbptFEIwRJdb-PNzA
On this week’s show, Michelle and Matt are joined by Victoria Dioh to talk about personal purpose and how we are trained to not follow it. Find out more at https://www.victoriadioh.com/victoria
Michelle’s book is available for a few more days on Kindle for 99p – get it now here.
On this week’s show, Julia and Michelle meet with Clara Bettina Behrmann to talk about how psychological safety can become performative.
On this week’s show, Matt and Michelle meet Henry Oakes, co-founder of Pathfinder to learn how AI might be used to help project and programme managers to make connections they’d otherwise miss.
On this week’s show Lisa and Julia are joined by Gallup Certified Strengths coach (and, for full disclosure, Michelle’s partner) James Eves to talk about finding out what we are good at doing.
On this week’s show Matt and Lisa are joined by seasoned IT contractor Neil Millard who had written a book about how to work freelance.
You can find out more about Neil’s book here:
https://www.confident-contractor.co.uk/confident-contractor-the-book/
On this week’s show Michelle joins Chris and Lisa to talk about the experience of turning her book into an audiobook.
You can get Good Girl Deprogramming exlusively on Audible here: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Good-Girl-Deprogramming-Audiobook/B0D9MKBDBW
On this week’s show Cat Barnard joins Matt and Michelle to talk about the ongoing debates about the future of work, the UK productivity challenge and whether it’s all just a problem of BIG.
On this week’s show Julia and Matt are joined by Mon Dessert’s founder Samina Courtin to talk about her journey from kitchen to supermarket, and the challenges of scaling physical product businesses.
You can find out more about Mon Dessert at https://www.mondessert.co.uk/
Michelle’s got a new podcast, and here’s the first episode!
If you’d like to hear more, you can find all the details at:
https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/michelle-minnikin
On the first show of the Autumn, Matt and Michelle are joined by recruitment expert Katrina Collier to talk about her new book Reboot Hiring.
You can find out more about her book at https://katrinacollier.com/reboot-hiring/
Katrina mentioned Benchmarcx – https://www.benchmarcx.io/refrkco (this is Katrina’s affiliate link), and also Sue Ingrams Disrupt HR talk https://vimeo.com/254246171
Matt talked about a Venn diagram he posted recently – that’s here:
For the first time all five regular WB-40 hosts are in the same show! This week Chris, Julia, Lisa, Matt and Michelle answer questions about the IT job market, AI regulation, first jobs and more besides!
Here’s the chart Tony Harper shared with us…
That’s it for the Summer – we are back in September!
On this week’s show Michelle and Lisa are joined by polymath Minter Dial to talk about Artificial Intelligence, human self-awareness and the wonders of Padel tennis.
It’s Election Week in the UK, and so Matt and Michelle speak with digital news veteran Kevin Anderson about how the interaction between journalism, technology and news media has changed over recent decades.
On this week’s show, Michelle and Chris are joined once again by OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock to talk new agendas for Open with new governments, remote working, diversity and AI in the Open Source world.
On this week’s show, Michelle and Chris meet with Martin Sadler to talk about his new book about being a CIO –Aspirationally Idle.
You can get your own copy at https://aspirationallyidle.sumupstore.com/
Header image Roland TB-303. (2024, February 21). By Steve Sims – Steve Sims, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53932063
On this week’s show Matt and Lisa are joined by Ara Higueras to talk about her multidisciplinary background, her coaching and her book And how?
On this week’s show, Julia and Lisa are joined by photographer Paul Clarke to talk about AI, creativity, the value of creative work, art and taking great photos.
Continuing in our 8-year tradition of our Centennial editions of WB-40 not being an episode of WB-40, to celebrate 300 episodes of the show, here’s a totally different podcast for you.
Career on the Cards is a pilot of a new podcast that Matt dreamed up a few months ago. On this first episode he has the joy of interviewing Geraldine Sharpe-Newton about her long and fascinating career in the world of communication.
He does so through the magic of his Business Meerkat cards. Here are the cards that were drawn to help Geraldine tell her story…
What do you think? Please let us know if there are legs in this idea!
On this week’s show Matt and Lisa are joined by the multi-faceted Timandra Harkness to talk about her new book Technology is not the Problem.
On this week’s show, Julia and Matt are joined by Your Haven CEO and Founder Claire Barnett to talk about mental health fitness, technology and virtual reality.
Claire mentioned the book Pixel Flesh by Ellen Atlanta. You can find out more about Your Haven here: https://www.yourhavenapp.com/
In episode 297 of the weekly podcast WB40, hosts Matt and Michelle, and guest Dr. Tammy Watchorn delve into themes of change, uncertainty, and personal development.
On this week’s show, Chris & Michelle talk to Richard Clarke from Secret Source about the role that happiness has in high-performing teams.
On this week’s show Chris and Lisa talk with Tina Lee Odinsky-Zec and Simon Carcagno from True Advance about the concept of “Thinking Partners” and how we need get more intentional about our collaboration.
Lisa mentioned an article questioning the validity of Extroversion and Introversion – that can be found here.
Machine-Generated transcript
Chris: Hello and welcome to episode 295 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me, Chris Weston, Lisa Riemers, Simon Carcagno and Tina Lee Odinsky-Zec.
Let’s start with you, Simon. We’re talking about how we, how we get into the business of working with people and how we get, what we’d call sort of genuine Engagement from the people who work with when, when they come to us and they say, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re in a role where we’re trying to help them make change or to improve something or to understand their organization or whatever.
When, when does that conversation even start?
Simon: I think it’s important to have that conversation. , very early. So if you can set the norms for a good collaboration early, , you are building a foundation that will endure throughout that relationship. And that’s why it is, you know, critically important to have, , a good vocabulary and self awareness.
So you have a vocabulary to describe how you collaborate, the foundation you want to build, and you have the self awareness to know what it is you need, you know, where, what are your strengths, where can you use support and how you can partner with someone to get there.
Chris: And when you talk about vocabulary, often when you talk to somebody who’s a leader, they will say, okay, here I am.
I’ve got these things to achieve, but I am struggling to communicate that to these people. Or sometimes I’ll say I am communicating it perfectly, but those people don’t appear to be hearing me. What are the, what are the techniques that you might use to understand where the gaps in that vocabulary are?
Because often when we work with organizations, what we find is that we have some learning to do about, about how particular business talks, whether it’s the industry they’re in, whether it’s the, whether it’s the history of that organization and the way the culture has, evolved. Often as a consultant or an advisor, you will start to find yourself using the terminology of the business, for example, in order to be better understood. So from a, from a point of view of a, of a thinking partner or somebody going in to be a lever to, to improve an organization. Who do you talk to in order to make sure that you are using that the right language for the business, but also being able to give them better vocabulary and more effective vocabulary and collaboration?
Simon: I think the most important way to get those terms from a business is really to listen, to really carefully listen to how they describe their business, how they describe the challenges. To your point, , when they’re describing a business. Relationship or, something they’re trying to get across to their team.
That’s just not landing, you know, really listening to the words they’re using to describe that challenge and then reflecting those words back to them, , is, is a great way in. But once you’ve, once you’ve done that, , the ability to go in and work with a team, , and share some frameworks, for understanding these challenges.
That’s where you start to really be able to make some, some big, big strides.
LIsa: You both mentioned, or Chris certainly mentioned there, the term thinking partner, which I also saw in Tina’s job description earlier. I’ve never heard the actual phrase thinking partner as a, as a definite term.
Can you tell me a bit more about that Tina?
Tina Lee: It’s used sometimes. as a substitute for executive coach, which is more popular. But the reason why I think thinking partner is so special is that it really engages people to think together. And rather than,, one is helping the other, you’re helping people think through topics, issues, and sometimes people get a little lost and you can be Hearing them and cycling it back to them and it really helps clarify, , whatever’s going on.
So, you can make a deeper connection. One, one quote I heard from someone who is a proponent of thinking partners is, Is it more important what you have to say or what they have to think?
LIsa: Oh, I like that. And speaking of connection, how did you and Simon originally meet?
Tina Lee: So I was actually a client on the client’s side of, , we were, we were choosing a leadership development program for our C suite at a big IT company.
And we went with a company called Bleaker and Simon was assigned to some of the leaders that I worked with. So I got to be in some of his facilitated sessions and, , I just really loved the model, their assessment tool, the way they did it, the conversations that they had, the way they got the peer leaders to, you know, Kind of open up over topics that shouldn’t be very sensitive, but they were like, like Chris, you were saying earlier, issues of trust across, , the pond across, you know, regions, across mindsets, across divisions, and when you can get the right facilitator, , in the room to get people deeply thinking and sharing, and then you have, you know, that group session followed by one on ones with the thinking partner and the individual leaders, it can really move from what they think others think about a topic and then the true awareness when they articulate, that’s how I feel about the topic.
And I was convinced. And then when I was leaving that company, I worked with a coach, a career coach, and she said, Tina, you’re not going to get a job from LinkedIn or Indeed.
You’re going to get one from your network, so when I looked around and I said, Oh, I would love to work with Simon, I reached out and then it happened. So I was really very lucky to be in this position and that’s why he’s here with me today.
Chris: I remember Tina, I think you were either just about to start when we met a couple of years ago or you just started in that role.
And when we met, we were at a conference. in Croatia and you were at various sessions, but you, you kind of take notes in a very descriptive way, don’t you? You draw kind of little rich pictures. And so do you think that having that that particular way of gathering your thoughts and being able to communicate in that way.
Do you find that’s a help in this sort of situation?
Tina Lee: Well, I, I mean, that’s how we met Chris is because I really loved your presentation and I did what you call a visual harvest. Now I can listen to lots of presentations, but unless it’s interesting and organized well, I can’t do a visual harvest, which is, you know, these deep sketches.
But I brought it to you and you liked it and we had a great conversation about it. I focus my attention kinesthetically, so it’s very important for me to draw when I’m focusing, okay? And when I’m sorting things, I talk things through, but at the end, the visual helps me open up and that’s, that’s the way I like to communicate.
Now, interestingly enough, There are some people who get completely distracted when they see one of my visuals, and it actually repels them. So sometimes it engages them, and sometimes it doesn’t. So that’s the whole magic be behind this, , tools we use, because you start to learn, am I doing it at them, or am I doing it for them?
Simon: And I was gonna say with them, yeah. Is, uh, is another lens as well.
LIsa: I love, I love sketch notes. I, I’ve done them myself. ’cause I, I find it helps me remember things. I can touch type, which is increasingly a useless tool. Now you’ve got transcription things, but you could be talking to me and I could type up exactly what you said verbatim.
But because I’ve typed it, I won’t necessarily remember it, but if I was able to do a little drawing summary, . It means I remember it, and it’s funny, I remember going to a conference which, and I wrote sketch notes of all of it for my, mainly for my own memory, and then, There was a vendor that I did a sketchnote of their talk about and I ended up working for them a year or so later because they got in touch and said, You know, we had more attention from your sketchnote than anything that we’ve done in our own marketing efforts.
Will you come and work for us? And it was fantastic. , and it making something, it was, it’s one of those brilliant outcomes as well of making something that is useful for you. It might also be useful for other people. But it also, as you said, might not be because that’s not how people like to process that information.
I’ve never heard it called a visual harvest. What does that mean? I’m learning lots of new terms today.
Tina Lee: Well, there’s a lot of ways people are talking about it, but visual harvesting also is when people are doing it at the back of the room on a really large scale and sketch notes are usually kind of smaller.
Simon: One of the things that Tina and I really believe is that collaboration is a verb. You know, you can’t just rely on it just, just happening. , when it does just happen, it’s beautiful. It’s amazing. You might, , , step in it and, and suddenly be in a beautiful partnership.
But that doesn’t really, Work all the time. You can’t rely on that sense of luck. And so how can we be? intentional about driving collaboration That’s something that is really at the core of what we do and we do that Through a few tools that we use Really based on the the work of Donna Markova and Angie MacArthur in the book collaborative intelligence So it’s they take a neuroscience based approach to You understanding collaboration and providing a vocabulary there.
So they combine, , how we focus our attention, how we learn, how we communicate, how we move through the world with what energizes us. And they use that as a lens to really, , explore how to drive connection and collaboration and understanding. And a, and a big piece of it is how do we interrupt narratives that we build up about other people.
One thing about me is I’m most focused when I’m speaking. So I’m, I’m auditorily focused as opposed to Tina, who’s kinesthetically focused as she shared. So that means that I can talk off the cuff to large groups with a relatively high degree of comfort., it also means that when I’m really excited, I’ll tend to interrupt people or talk over them or build on their idea in real time.
And just to give you an example, when I’m working with Tina At the outset, I say, Hey, I want you to understand this is something I’m working on I don’t let myself off the hook for that tendency, but I’ll say, you know, if I start interrupting you, I want you to know that it comes from, , a place of excitement and intrigue and curiosity about your ideas, not, , from an attempt to, to own your idea or take it from you or because I’m bored with what you’re saying.
Um, it’s usually from a very genuine place. And so if I say that, that interrupts the whole dynamic that, that could arise. , if I’m not careful. I need to write that down,
Chris: because you’re describing how I often behave and, , and I do catch myself doing it and think, you know, stop interrupting people, Chris, but it’s often because, you know, absolutely.
I’m kind of working things out.
LIsa: I love that point that you said about, working with people to find out what energises them. Do you find when you start working with someone they’ve got a very clear idea of what that is?
And how true is it as you work with them?
Simon: I think the real challenge here is people can found it. What they’re good at with what energizes them. And so, you know, the things we’re very good at will often say, Oh yeah, I find that energizing. And so when I’m asking the question and trying to figure out, you know, what, what really energizes you, I ask people to really divorce it from what they’re really good at.
And I describe it like this. I say, , I’m really good at modeling and Excel. Like I’m really good at it. I get it. I get the answer we need. But I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy the process. It kind of burns me out. And so it’s very hard for me to, , not choose that kind of thinking when I’m trying to think about what energizes me because I feel like it’s very, very foundational skill.
But if I’m really thinking about it, no, it doesn’t really energize me. I just want the answer. I love learning. And so I love, I love the getting to the answer that the model provides because it’s an opportunity to learn but the actual doing of it, that, that analytical piece, much less appealing. And so that’s the, that’s the tricky part in, in trying to narrow these things down.
LIsa: I am generally consider myself to be an extrovert. I love meeting people. It’s been a very peoply busy week, but this week I’m now very tired because actually it’s quite depleting energy wise. It’s like you get the high of meeting people and being social and bouncing ideas off each other and All of that, that brilliant energy with being in a room with other great people, but at the same time, I now need a lot of time to recover after that.
And so I think it means I’m an ambivert, but at the same time, , I’m not sure if it’s just an energy thing as over the last few years, I spent a lot more time online and at home. So it’s a bit of a difference to my. my usual day. , it’s like a muscle that I need to start using a bit more of, or not start, continue using and see if I can actually build up some stamina again.
Simon: I think that’s a really interesting point. , you know, just the way in which our interactions with people have changed over the last four or five years, , as we’ve gone through all the COVID lockdowns, as work has shifted , to be each of us in our, in our own, , rooms staring at each other in small boxes.
You know, I think Our ability to have that stamina to connect fully when we’re in person, I think is, I think that’s a very important observation and I, and I, Lisa, I don’t think it’s just you. I think most people have, uh, have that experience now.
Chris: I read something recently about, about introverts and extroverts and about somebody saying, look, we probably need to abandon that description and just know that everybody has, , a particular.
Requirement for a kind of minimum number of interactions in, in a certain amount of time, and, and below which they start acting really weird and a maximum number above which they start acting really weird. , and it might be that you just kind of just tip past your maximum number, , Lisa at that point.
And now you, you need to let yourself sort of
LIsa: recharge a little.
But I think even that maximum number can be one event with several people in it. , last week should, I should have also gone along to the colour walk, but because I had basically seven days of group things, and the colour walk would have been my first one that day, I ended up actually staying at home and having a nap in between doing the work that I needed to get done.
Um,, because I was completely wiped from it all., and that would have been a tipping point to me not being very well, I think. afterwards if I try to do that as well.
Chris: I’d be interested to know, Simon, when , if you’re talking to somebody Who thinks their problem is they need to change culture because that’s often a, a common question, isn’t it? Oh, we need to change the culture here.
How often does that actually Translate into behaviors of the wider group and how often is it a leadership style? How much is it a understanding, how well you can measure something like culture? Is this good or is this bad?
Simon: I think good and bad are hard. I think,, different cultures are, are great for different people, , to a large degree. And I think that’s an important lens. The other thing that I would react to is I think cultures in organizations are very much a reflection of their leaders. And it has to start from the top.
So when you have a leader saying, we need to change the culture here, what they’re really saying is, I need to change my own behaviors and how I’m connecting with the people in my organization. And that is a, that is a level of accountability and ownership that I think is, is really hard for people to take on.
But if you actually want to change the culture, you know, it has to start at the top.
Chris: So in terms of, active collaboration or intentional collaboration. What are the behaviors that you sometimes see in leaders , where culture does need to change, or you can see that there is a, there’s a disconnect between them and the people that they’re, they’re trying to lead and serve, et cetera.
do you see any patterns around that in terms of personality types or in terms of behaviors that are, that are unhelpful?
Simon: I think this is actually a great question for Tina. She has been, , an L and D specialist for. Um, and has sort of looked at it from the internal HR side. I can give you my perspective as a, as an outside consultant, which is, every situation is different, but the themes are often quite similar.
You know, it’s often a lack of, understanding, a lack of empathy, a lack of self awareness that drive a lot of these challenges., and then how open is it? How psychologically safe is the organization? I know that’s a term that sometimes turns people off, you know, when you talk about psychological safety, but it is so important to high performance because people can’t take risks.
, when they don’t feel safe, when they think they’ll be judged, people don’t take risks. And so, you know, you really have to assess where you want your culture to grow towards , and really, think through the best ways in which to create that change.
Chris: So, Tina, what, in terms that question then, I mean, in your experience, are there things that you can see often that are red flags, or maybe things that you’re almost welcome, because it’s like, okay, I’ve seen this before, I can see what this is, and this isn’t that difficult to change, or there might be things where you say, actually, this is a kind of thing that actually is going to be a real difficult situation.
I can say it very soft and gentle, or I can say it like rough and brutal. So I think I’ll go with the gentle side. , if you rip the bandaid off, it’s a really sometimes, denial, and the fixed mindset, and not willing to grow, right? So it’s very unfortunate. What got them there won’t get them necessarily to the next level.
Tina Lee: And they, they don’t know that. There’s like a lack of awareness. And that’s why a coach really is so critical because they cannot show that vulnerability with their peers. They’ll lose confidence where they think they will in, , their leadership persona that they built, right? While actually in reality, people like a little bit of vulnerability and humanness.
, to their leaders. So , for me as, as a thinking partner, I think it’s absolutely so exciting.
You have to be really careful so you don’t push their buttons. And make them feel more vulnerable, and also I, I’m not taking people’s vulnerabilities and turning them into superpowers.
I don’t really like that either. Just be human about it. Just be realistic about it because most likely the people you work with. will like you more as you become more self aware and you give them permission to be self aware about themselves. And that means you can build trust that we are not perfect, but we’re better together because maybe what you’re not good at, I’m good at, and then we’re actually puzzle pieces
because if we’re all trying to be the same thing. We get in the way and reduce productivity. So how might we find the missing pieces and the combination of our teams and that’s leadership teams too, not just the leaders and their teams. And that’s really the special, , things that can happen when you let people not try to be everything to everyone, but what, You know, are you really energized by and what drains you might energize somebody else?
And boy, will that be a great dynamic duo or a deep team complimenting each other?
LIsa: I love what you’re saying there about the complimentary skills and skills and personality types, I suppose, that can make up a good team or a good executive board. , It’s trying to facilitate that environment where you can all come at it with your different viewpoints, but get to a good resolution that’s better because you’ve debated it.
And it’s not one of those things that everyone just feels like they’re hitting their head against a brick wall because nobody agrees with them. I remember an early, early in my, in my communications career, um, my first one to one with a boss. I didn’t know what a one to one was. I’d never had one before.
I had no idea what the expectation was and I was completely floored when my boss said, well, so what are you working on at the moment? Have you got a list? I did not know I needed to prepare a list, but sure. And he said, well, one of your colleagues has said that you’re quite difficult to work with. I was like, well, actually, I was going to say, I found her quite difficult to work with as well, but I’d like to think I’ve got a lot of respect for her.
And if we’re able to have If we’re able to have the conversations that we have when we’re coming at things from two very different viewpoints, we’ll get a better product at the end of it. And it’s, it’s trying to get that balance, isn’t it? Between it being a destructive, cyclical, argumentative environment and actually something where you’re able to move forward from it.
Simon: Such an interesting point. You know, the, the difference between productive and unproductive conflict. is something that is, , incredibly interesting to explore. And if you can recognize that, you know, we don’t always need to shy away from conflict. , often the, Best ideas are sort of forged in that crucible of, of disagreement.
As long as you’re coming at it from a place of respect , and collaboration, you can have those conflicts and they’ll actually improve the, the outcome. But it’s very important that it doesn’t fall into that sort of unproductive, personal, destructive, Conflict that we, we’ve all experienced in our careers.
LIsa: And I think that’s something that’s potentially also in this hybrid world that we’re working in. It can be exacerbated further because tone doesn’t travel if someone’s typed something very quickly. Or, you know, there’s the joke that there are no nuanced arguments on the internet, because someone will post something and then it gets taken out of context.
and either people are blocked, they block each other or they move on with their day and it’s being able to not necessarily resolve everything in that moment but being able how do you do that when everybody isn’t co located when you can’t just go and quickly have a coffee or on the way out of a meeting room together say is everything okay can unpick it a little bit if you’re in back to back online meetings, how do you do that kind of, it’s not a softer thing, but it’s a, maybe it’s a less formal way of being able to sort it without it being a catastrophe.
Is there anything that you’ve seen that works well when people aren’t co located, how they, how they manage that?
Simon: That’s where we really need to be intentional. You know, when we are not together, when we’re, we’re together, we really get the full sense of one another. You know, we intuitively learn things about one another that we, we don’t even realize. You know, so if Tina and I worked together, she would know that,, if I interrupt her, it probably means I’m excited, but since we’re talking heads on the screen, she can get off that call and, and stew about it and, and be alone with the narrative that she creates.
And so that’s why these tools around self awareness are incredibly useful and the maybe somewhat awkward conversation about our preferences and tendencies that we can create that, that foundation to avoid some of those, negative aspects of hybrid and remote work.
You know, where we’re. Alone with our thoughts for so much of the time or just stacked in meetings back to back to back to back to back to back.
LIsa: At the beginning of 2020, I was working on a contract where we were predominantly in the office. And then suddenly we were all trying to get our heads around Microsoft Teams and how to manage that.
And. Most people weren’t in the best headspace at that time. It was quite a scary time to be working and people had, families with illness. And , There was a lot of uncertainty and I know at a micro level, one of the things that we did in our team was, we had a weekly catch up, but I forced it and made it a little bit awkward if we needed to, but I modeled it myself to say, how are you?
And actually giving some space , even if it was a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling today? Okay. , as we modelled that and practised it and the weeks went on, actually making that time to have that conversation as part of the agenda and not just while you’re waiting for everyone to join, was helpful for us at that time.
I don’t think I’ve had, I don’t think I’ve explicitly done that since, but I found at the time it was definitely what our team needed.
Tina Lee: Well, you know, Lisa, I think one of the really key things is, what are the phrases we use all the time, but we just say them automatically?
And when you say, how are you, really, and you want to hear someone’s answer, and you leave the space for it, that makes all the difference. And, , I think that’s also a sign of a great leader when they can ask it and mean it and give you the time to, to say it and share it. And I think one of the things that we’re talking about here is a level of emotional maturity.
If and when we were in COVID times, you’re so much alone, alone with your thoughts that you, you do not only just make up stories. Stories. But everything is very one sided. It’s your side. And when you have to get back into a space of empathy, emotional intelligence, being more aware that someone may be having something else going on and their reaction isn’t To me, but to some other factor, then that really gives space for people to give everybody a break.
Don’t overthink things. Let it go a little bit easier and, and then if they’re not explicit in telling you their style, you’ll learn it if you’re patient enough. Don’t just turn people off. Don’t just unfriend them, unfollow them, shut the door, turn off your camera, whatever it is that’s you. Saying no, give him the hand, no, I’m not going to listen anymore.
That leaves no room, and we definitely have to make room. Chris? You, you look very contemplative.
Chris: I am because I’m listening to that and I’m thinking about, I’m thinking about the, the term intentional collaboration and it’s almost coming full circle for me in terms of, as you say, how do you make space and, and through intention, improve that collaborative work and make it happen rather than, as you say, almost, Retreat into more of a comfort zone.
And I guess, , as we come up to time on the, on, on the podcast, I’m, I’m asking myself when you’re in an organization or when you, are working with a team and thinking about intentional collaboration, how do you know when that’s being achieved? You know, what does good look like? Is it always different?
You know, is that something you can measure?
Simon: I think it’s really hard to measure. I think, I think it’s one of those things that when you’re participating in it, you know it. Chris, if I were to ask you, tell me about the best teams. That you’ve been on. What were they like? You know, I think you could, you could give me a good answer for that. And if I said, what are the worst teams?
, you could give that answer, but I think it, you know, what it comes down to is, what is the output? Like, are you, are you getting more done? So one measure is, are you achieving your goals more easily with less effort? Now, measuring that’s really tricky, but when you’re participating in that, you know it, you can feel it.
How much energy, are people bringing to work? How much engagement? do they have time to explore? You know, I think those are, those are some of the ways you can really measure these things on teams. and it, and it has been measured. There’s a, MIT, , Media Lab, article on energy engagement and exploration as they measured in a pre COVID company , by outfitting members of teams with little trackers that would, measure tone of voice, measured, how long people spent talking to one another on that team.
And, they were able to have a methodology that would predict. Whether a team was highly effective or not, just based on these sort of very, , interesting, social metrics. Yeah.
Chris: But of course, you know, the few of us can go to that level of detail. So what we’re saying really is it’s a subjective thing in many ways, and it’s something that we have to feel that’s happening.
But I think also that goes back to that question of psychological safety that you mentioned earlier, you know, I read a pretty good report That the in the British government the Ministry of Defense produced a report on psychological safety Which is kind of an unusual place to be talking about psychological safety in many ways because The culture is often would seem to be not Not to not to be embracing that sort of thing but actually It mirrored a lot of what came out of Google a few years ago where they measured it, you know, there’s lots of very,, let’s say subjective, but still, you can still measure outcomes and you can measure productivity or you can measure, you know, the way that teams work together in different ways.
You don’t always have to be measuring it. You know, it doesn’t have to be. The thing, there are proxies you can use for this sort of thing, aren’t there? So, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, you know, we, we can measure it subjectively, but, but if we need to, we can, we can use some of those proxy measures.
LIsa: Most organisations will do an annual or every couple of years employee engagement survey.
I say employee engagement survey, an employee survey which asks people questions ultimately to try and find out how engaged they are, how happy they are in their job, how likely they are to leave. They probably Matt’s favourite MPS questions, would you recommend working here to somebody else? And then people get really hung up on the scores.
, and to a lot of people, particularly in internal comms or HR, the scores that come out of that survey really get fed back into managers. And whilst it’s ostensibly anonymous, , it’s still broken down so that different leaders can look at the state of their team. Their senior leaders will look at the areas that scored quite lowly and actually hopefully take some positive steps to address it.
, but I think something, something that I think Tom Geraghty said in the WB40 chat a little while ago was that, , once you start trying to measure psychological safety, actually it goes down in the organization. He cited a really interesting example that I’m struggling to remember the specifics of, but it’s, it is one of those things that once you start looking at it in too much detail or people feel like they’re being measured or monitored, it’s got a negative impact.
And when you hear about like the big consultancies who are saying that we’re going to get rid of the bottom 10 percent of people that score in their end of year metric surveys, the whole people being a metric feeds into quite an awful lot. An awkward narrative, I think. So, yeah, I agree with what Simon said, that you absolutely know if something is working or not.
usually, or at least historically. At the time, it might feel like you’re too close to it. In a couple of weeks time or a couple of months time, or even when you look back a couple of years ago, you can spot what worked really well and what didn’t. And sometimes you need a bit of distance. And that distance is something that an external pair of eyes can give you much more quickly.
So if you’re working with a, with a partner, a thinking partner, , they can help you work out if things are working or not. Cause sometimes you need that external perspective.
Tina Lee: I think you, you know, if it’s going well, if leaders can say and honestly say, I am growing. So if the leader is still growing, then that’s a priority and they can make space for their team to grow. And if their team is growing, that means it’s a healthy organization. It’s when everything shrinks, which is the concern.
What would you like to leave people with in terms of, when they go back to work tomorrow, when they, when they think about the organization they’re in, whether they’re, whether they’re leading it or whether they’re, , the part of a team or whatever, are there any things that they should be, , bearing in mind or sort of keeping close to their, you know, close to their heart in terms of what they are, how they’re going to achieve, what they want to achieve and what they want to get out of that, their particular role?
Tina Lee: People are pretty basic, you know, and I think the key is if you say you’re listening to them and you hear what they want, then the last thing you should do is not figure out a way to give it to them because you asked and they answered. So listen and act, you know, and when you do that over and over consistently, you build a lot of trust.
Simon: I love that, Tina. I think one of the biggest things I would, I would tell people is don’t be afraid to talk about what you need. Don’t be afraid to talk about your tendencies. Don’t, don’t be afraid to ask. You know, I think we often feel like doing so would be awkward. It’d be awkward for me to, ask how, to ask how you work best or what you need from me.
You know, I’ll often ask, how can I be a better coach for you? That’s a, that’s a, that question. Like, how can I be a better leader for you? , how can I be a better employee for you? You know, I think these are, these are questions that we often don’t ask, but the answers are really, really valuable.
Simon: Really, really
Tina Lee: important.
Chris: Well, thanks for that, . That was a fascinating conversation. Lisa, , we’ve got a week stretching out in front of us today because it’s Monday when we record this podcast. What’s going on for you?,
LIsa: this week I’ve got a couple of kickoff meetings for a client who need, we’re doing some user research and they’re based in all sorts of time zones, which is brilliant because I’m in the UK.
The office that I’m working with is in Australia and they’ve got clients between the UK and the Middle East. So the next few weeks are going to be Interesting in terms of calls at all times of the day, I think. , so that’s kicking off this week and I’m really looking forward to that. And then this weekend I’ve got cox training.
So,, I am going to be learning about how to cox a rowing boat on the Thames. The first and only time I did this was the very first time I went out on a boat and I found it all terrifying. I’ve spoken before, I think on the podcast even, about all the terminology that comes with a boat and that there’s a very specific difference about left and right because it depends on your perspective.
Because if you are the cocks, you are at the back of the boat facing forward and everyone else is facing backwards. So left doesn’t mean anything. So, yeah, I’m not stressing about that at all. I’m looking forward to it. , how about you Tina? What have you got coming up this week?
Tina Lee: Well, , I have a friend being picked up from the airport arriving from London to Zagreb.
And, , it’s a friend from, , my first career in Major League Baseball. And she was working for, , How to Grow the Game of Soccer in the U. S. So she’s coming in and doing some workshops here. So I’m going to be having some fabulous lunches and things like that. But on top of that, I’m, , writing the first chapter or finishing the first chapter of my new book.
, that’s going to be on mentoring called Mentoring Agents of Change. So I’m really excited that that’s moving forward.
LIsa: That sounds super interesting.
Simon, what have you got this week?
Simon: Sure. Actually, I love that topic. I think there’s, , there’s so much that sport gets right that business gets wrong. , and so that’s, , that’s just a foundational piece of my approach to my work is, is looking at it through that lens. , and Lisa, it’s funny that you’re talking about coxing.
My background is in, in, , collegiate elite sport as a, as a rowing athlete. So I was a world champion in rowing. back in 2008. , so I spent a lot of time in that world. , so, , what do I have coming up this week? This is a big prep week for me. I’ve got two, , really fun facilitations next week that I’m getting ready for building the decks and, , getting all the decks in a row.
And then , this weekend I’m actually going to be, , announcing, a large collegiate. rowing race. So it’ll be broadcast on, on the ACC network. Or just, ESPN, if you’re familiar with them. So that’s, , that should be fun too. So I’ve got to do a little prep work on that as well.
LIsa: Oh, fantastic.
Chris: Great stuff. So, , first of all, what I’m going to do this week is, , tell people that we’ve got a world champion rower. You didn’t mention that before, Simon. We don’t have world champions on this week. The people, the only people we have world champions on this podcast generally are world champions that sell publicity.
So, , for you to hide your light under a bushel for this long, I can applaud you. No, and, , and, and this week for me is going to be, , we’ve got a. In the Midlands, here in the UK, we’ve got a thing called the Midlands Tech Review, which is taking place in the middle of this week. So I’ll be going along to that.
Essentially, it’s a focus on the tech industry of this area. So that’s something that I’m looking forward to and I’m going down to London on Thursday. But other than that, it’s going to be another week of head down and try and get things done before the summer, when everybody seems to go on holiday and we can’t get anything done for several weeks.
, but, , yeah, once again, , fantastic to have you guys on the podcast. It’s been a really interesting conversation. I hope we can talk again, , in the future. , so thank you to Simon. Thank you to Tina. Thank you, Lisa, for being a splendid, co host today. And we’ll see you all next week.
Chris: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can catch us on all good podcasting platforms and on the internet at wb40podcast. com.
On this week’s show, Matt and Julia are joined by enough.store founder Paul Keaveny to talk about his design-led mission to reduce plastic waste in retail.
You’ll be able to find out more soon at enough.store
Matt mentioned two books – Wasteland and Material World.
On this week’s show, Matt and Julia are joined by Georgina Shute to talk about her business KindTwo and how she is helping leaders with ADHD to avoid burnout.
On this week’s show Chris and Michelle are joined by BillionMinds‘ Paul Slater to talk about organisations, leadership and delivering change.
On this week’s show, Lisa and Matt are joined by author Alice Sherwood to talk about what “In Real Life” means in 2024.
Alice’s book Authenticity was published in 2022.
You can read more about the Vice closures here.
On this week’s show Michelle and Chris talk with Paula Brockwell on her approach to helping organisations to better cultivate their own cultures.
You can find out more about Paula’s business at https://theexproject.com/
It’s another episode of Ask WB-40, this week with Julia Bellis answering listener questions alongside Matt for the first time. Views on the year ahead, AI, leadership mentoring, mental models and what really happened when Julia got left adrift in the Pacific.
A special bonus episode for you as Lisa and Nick Drage host a conversation with Matt who has a new set of playing cards to flog. We talk about his Business Meerkat deck, and more broadly about the power of playfulness in work.
Order your own set of the Business Meerkat cards at https://theplaycards.myshopify.com/collections/business-meerkat
You can also get the Deckible version at https://www.deckible.com/card-decks/3Ny-business-meerkat-tarot-inspired-cards-to-spark-conversations-in-organisations-matt-ballantine
Normal service will be resumed on Monday.
On this week’s show we are joined by Matt Webb to talk about taking his Poem/1 clock from idea to the bring of manufacture through a Kickstarter exercise.
You can read more about Galactic Compass:
On Ars Technica:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/new-app-always-points-to-the-supermassive-black-hole-at-the-center-of-our-galaxy
On Matt’s blog:
https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/15/galactic-compass
And download from the App Store
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/galactic-compass/id6451314440
You can find the Poem/1 Kickstarter:
https://poem.town/ks
And read about it on Fast Company:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91015583/this-whimsical-clock-is-the-playful-gadget-ai-needs-right-now
And finally you can find out more about Matt’s studio, Acts Not Facts, here:
https://www.actsnotfacts.com
On this week’s show Matt and Michelle are joined by Natalia Talkowska to talk about the importance of “the hook”, telling stories, creativity and other tales.
You can find Natalia’s business at natalkadesign.com
Matt mentioned his Business Meerkat cards (pre-order them here) and also the TBD Conference he is speaking at at the end of February (tickets available here).
He also talked about Marcus Brown’s Presentation Canvas which you can download and explore here.
On this week’s show, Chris and Julia interview Mark Bjornsgaard about his fascinating renewable energy and data hosting business Deep Green.
From next week, there is a new sound to WB-40. We are delighted to share that Julia Bellis, Lisa Riemers and Michelle Minnikin will join the team to share hosting duties with Chris and Matt.
On this bonus show we share the thinking behind the changes, and the wonderful Nick Drage asks all of the hosts some probing questions about who they are and what they think. Particularly about crisps.
On this week’s show we are joined by psychologist and author Michelle Minnikin to talk about her new book, Good Girl Deprogramming.
You can find out more about Michelle’s work at https://michelleminnikin.com/
On this week’s show we speak with Lisa Riemers about challenges of digital accessibility, and what to do about it.
You can find Lisa’s collection of useful links here: https://lisariemers.com/index.php/2023/05/12/accessibility-resources/
and you can book to attend her talk here:
Register on EventbriteWe spoke with AbilityNet on Episode 208
This week’s guest is Equal Experts Psychological Safety Lead, Julia Bellis.
We talk about the misconceptions associated with psych safety, building safety in client-facing teams, and the challenges of hybrid and global working, amongst many other things.
A couple of books were mentioned: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer and The Fearless Organization by Amy (not Adrian) Edmondson.
On this week’s show we are joined by Equal Expert’s Lewis Crawford to talk about his experiments in building autonomous teams of AI agents.
AI Generated transcript follows…
Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 281 of WB40, the weekly podcast with Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Lewis Crawford.
Chris: Well hello everybody, welcome back. We’re here for another episode as we helter skelter towards Christmas. We’re nearly there, aren’t we Matt? But here we are, we’re going to finish off the year, I think, tonight with a With this episode after last week’s, , Just you and me, Matt. We did an [00:01:00] Ask W40. Well, that was a good fun last week.
But this week we have a guest, do we not?
Matt: We do have a guest and we’ll be talking to him very shortly. It’s very exciting. , 281. , just, you know, passing reference, the first of the two bus routes that go past my house. And we’ve got another one in the new year as well. Very exciting. , I, uh, yeah, these are the sorts of things that increasingly, , intrigue me as I get older, which is basically a sign that I’m not long for them.
for the world, quite frankly. , have you been having an enjoyable week in this run up to the festive festivities?
Chris: Very busy. , Work really. It’s just one of the, I think, I think we talked maybe last week about the fact that this is the last week where you can get anything done. , and then everybody goes away for essentially until January.
, So yeah, it’s been pretty busy. , I can’t say I’ve been anywhere exciting, at least nowhere I can remember. , So yeah, not too bad. What about yourself?
Matt: What have we been doing? Wedding anniversary last week. Very exciting. , [00:02:00] managed to get to 15 years, which is, Congratulations, Matt. Thank you very much.
We went for an enormous meal at an Italian restaurant in Richmond. We went on for nine whole courses, and then I didn’t need to eat for the next day. , and to be fair, I didn’t really sleep much that night because of the fact I’d eaten nine courses. Quite small, but still, you know, cumulatively, a lot of food.
, took the boys to see their first ever 1 1 victory at, uh, Vicarage Road at the weekend. Which, if you understand football, you’ll know what I mean. And if you don’t, it makes no sense at all, but, , that was very exciting. And then the start of the youngest’s 13th birthday celebration. So, as of Wednesday, we will have two teenagers in the house.
I can barely contain my excitement at that prospect. I took some of his friends and him to an escape room on Sunday. And it’s the first time I’ve been to an escape room. And I guess, it tries to be something a bit like the Crystal Maze, but it ends up being like, for those of you of a certain vintage, you’ll get this.
The last bit of Ted Rogers 3, 2, 1, where quite frankly none of it [00:03:00] made any sense whatsoever, but at the end you were just glad it was over, and , there was no dusty bin, sadly. So that was , the weekend.
Chris: And are they still there? Is that, is that the, I mean that would be the reason to take the children to an escape room, wouldn’t it?
Matt: So, so, sadly, sadly not. It was an interesting place though, because there’s a university in Kingston, and I, I presume that many of the staff are drama. because they had to put on very hammy performances when they call into the various rooms over the , tannoy system to be able to give clues or just to be able to tell people to stop bashing that thing because it’s not supposed to be bashed in that way.
We got all of the, all of the children out successfully. And , Then made the meat pizza which you know again this into tonight It’s amazed though the propensity for 13 year olds to be able to talk endlessly about computer games and nothing else and a group of them together whoever invented roblox has pretty much systematically programmed an entire generation of people as far as I can work out It’s quite terrifying.
There we go. [00:04:00] Anyway lewis, , welcome to the show. , how’s your last week been?
Lewis: Oh, Mix, to be honest. I mean, you’ve been talking about escape rooms there. It was about three weeks ago we went to a virtual reality escape room. So, how about that? Wow. It’s literally where everyone has their headsets on and various different puzzles.
But in virtual reality
Matt: basically. Were you in the same augmented reality? Yeah, were you in the same physical space to be in the virtual reality
Lewis: there? Yes, yes, we were. I mean like it’s, there’s a kind of like a demarked area and , I guess it’s more augmented reality because you’re aware of walls around you and you’re aware of where And the people are around you and yeah, it was very exciting.
I was thinking it was called a bank heist and we had to escape out of a vault and Stop a robbery that was also going in progress as well.
Matt: Oh, very very good How did you find the experience of wearing?
Lewis: Better than I thought it was going to be. I have to say, I mean, I’ve played computer games since ZX Spectrum days and things, [00:05:00] and I’ve been aware that virtual reality headsets exist, .
But, um, it was a lot better than I was expecting, I
Matt: It’s pretty immersive, isn’t it? It’s, um,
Lewis: yeah. Well, it’s, it’s, you know, not to give too much away, but, um, they start off by giving you a little training session where you go up in a lift and the lift door’s open and you’re literally on top of a building with a plank in front of you and you have to walk along the plank and it is remarkably difficult.
You know exactly what it is, but, you know, it was, it was, yeah, I didn’t want to jump.
Matt: No, I can understand that. What’s the end of the plank? Yeah, absolutely. I think the first time I ever tried one was with the sort of first generation of the Oculus and the HTC headsets about seven or eight years ago when they were like firmly tethered to a fairly powerful PC.
And one of the first things I did was go into Minecraft. And one of the first things I managed to do completely unwittingly in Minecraft was dig a hole underneath myself. And that, just immediate [00:06:00] vertigo, was terrifying. I’m amazed I’ve ever put one on ever since. But, it is, there’s, there’s a, yeah, just the experience of it, we were talking about it a wee bit last week, and the, the, the magic of the experience is really quite something.
The, whether that actually translates into anything useful or not, I think is going to be the interesting thing, and it seems to be another one of those. Well, maybe the year after next it will hit the big time and people will find a use for it But we will see we continue to watch it with interest anyway, 2023 has been a year very much focused in the world around ai so we thought we’d finish the year with a bit of a conversation about some experiments that you’ve been doing, Lewis, with some AI.
So let’s crack on.[00:07:00]
As I mentioned, this year has very much been a year of artificial intelligence. And there’s been a lot of hype. There’s been a lot of people using generative tools like ChatGPT. There’s been a lot of Whiffle, I think is the polite way of putting it. There’s been an awful lot of things generated that may or may not have been true, but you know, who needs truth in 2023, let alone in 2024.
, but in, conversations over the [00:08:00] last few weeks, I picked up on something that, you’ve been, , doing Lewis, which felt really interesting in a way that kind of cuts through some of the. , Ridiculous hype that there has been this year around, particularly generative, , AI, in that you have been Building an experiment, and it is, from the outset, very much an experiment, , to be able to get generative stuff to be able to produce, in, , core code, one sort or another.
But the way that you’ve been doing it is not by just sitting in front of a chat GPT and saying, please could you write me a BBC basic program to play Doom, please. I might try that later. , but instead you’ve been creating virtual teams. You’ve been setting things up in a way that’s been about having,, relatively autonomous agents acting in roles to be able to perform tasks.
So not just a single prompt, but something more complicated. , can we start with a bit of [00:09:00] background as to, , how this came about? What the, the original genesis of this idea was?
Lewis: So, ironically enough, , Minecraft figures in it. So when, when ChachiPT sort of first came on the scene, , last year, , one of the early papers that was using, , ChachiPT was a, thing called a Voyager, , which was I think some folks from NVIDIA and, , some folks from a university in the US, but essentially they, they were using, , agents in Minecraft, but using, , GPT, so originally it’s had GPT 3.
5 and then GPT 4, , to control, , the, the players, if you like, in Minecraft. But what was unique is that, , these, these agents could have skills associated with them. So they would have like a daily rotor of activities that they would have to cycle around and they, they’d be able to plan tasks like I need to, I want to cut down a tree because that’s on my rotor of activities and things, but I don’t have the skills to cut down a tree.
[00:10:00] So we would use the generative AI, so GPT. To essentially, , grab some code and put that back into its own code base. , and again, the way they were doing that was, was quite innovative as well. , so using a thing called vector databases where you can essentially, , have a, a text description of, , an activity and then store it in a vector database.
So rather than it being like a. a normal database that you would just search by keywords or terms, , this is based on similarities. , so again, using embeddings is the phrase to, to calculate these vectors. ,
Matt: , so the vectors being the, the distance between different things in the database?
Lewis: The words, essentially. So, , all sentences and things, like, as the words are hung together, , you can calculate, , the relationships between the words, , and then store those relationships in the database. So those are the vectors. So that if you then use completely different words, , you can find out what the closest sentence is that would match it.
And this underpins. Yet another one of the big hypes of this year, which is this whole idea of [00:11:00] RAG. Now, we don’t need to go down that, but RAG is Retrieval Augmented Generation. So it’s this idea that you can do a search, in a vector database and get various different results back and then generate text and context around it, , so that it appears to be, , like a human sentence that’s returned.
, but rather than get too, , embedded in, in RAG search terminology, just to Minecraft thing, this idea of having different agents which were able to use GPT to essentially enhance their own code base. So pull down the Python script required to be able to build an axe, to cut down a tree, and then store that in the database as a tool for cutting, say.
, now then another agent, , also. has access to exactly the same database and it may need to kill a spider. So it’s going to try and look through its database of all of the skills it’s got and it could say, well, that’s close as much because I don’t have many skills. So I’m going to try and see if I can use this axe to kill the spider.
And [00:12:00] it would either be successful or it would fail. And if it was successful, then it would put that back into the database to say that the skill is now applicable for that activity as well. Intelligent agents or autonomous agents have been a dream for, for many, many years, but this is the year that I’ve definitely seen that , these things are real and can individually, , empower themselves, but really , the main power is when they collectively work together.
, for, ,task planning, execution, and, another way of, , building in guardrails towards the end of, , a process as well is to use these agents. So you would have someone who plans, someone who actually does, and then someone who checks the work of those previous stages as well, , to ensure that, , for guardrails for all kinds of things, but bias particularly, and ensuring that the result actually matches to what the original target was.
Matt: Interesting. So essentially these are code things that are learning as they go through. They are able to be able to spot what they might be able to do and then they can work out if they can do it or not by testing. And then if they [00:13:00] can’t, potentially they can go away and find a code library to be able to fill the gap of the skill that they don’t have.
Lewis: Exactly, yes. So, moving on from the Minecraft example, there’s been various frameworks, so LangChain kind of came on the scene as a way of being able to, have sort of sequences of activity using a large language model to then be able to query a database or maybe pull down a website or all kinds of other , tasks.
But then, , superseding that, although it does actually use our chain as well, , there’s a particular framework from Microsoft called AutoGen, and that is currently the best framework for these autonomous agents, basically, you can create an agent, give it a specific persona, if you like, like, you’re an intelligent agent that can, understand French or, or it could be, anything that you can use live language models for, , and build a number of these agents, which can then have a group chat facility and interact with each other, not through some API, but through [00:14:00] English as the, as the actual, or any language for that matter.
But. Literally text based communication between different agents.
Matt: , so you then had a piece of work you were doing for a client and you had a particular challenge around generating synthetic data for the client?
Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit more context. I mean, the client , has had cutbacks as, as many, organizations have had, and then like in the recent months and things.
And so, the team that I was working with will let go. And, not long after that, we also had to, have like a celebration of all of the work that we’ve been doing. So, a little bit tongue in cheek. I built, a bunch of agents, but I, I named them individually as members of the team that had departed.
So we had like a concept of a delivery lead. We had a concept of the ba, a concept of a, , a Python engineer and a concept of a DevOps engineer. And so I’d labeled them as, as. You know, the team that had gone, and one of the things the team had been working on was synthetic data. So the task I gave all of these [00:15:00] autonomous agents was basically to , create a couple of tables, a customers table and a transactions table and , the populated with realistic synthetic data, but also link the tables so that if you go, , a customer ID and the transaction table, and it had to link to a customer in the customer table.
So it was kind of like a non trivial, I mean, it wasn’t just, you know, so generating random, data sets or anything like that. And to my surprise and slight horror, it worked incredibly well. So, , the, the planner agent, which I’d labeled as a, as a business analyst, , essentially set out, each of the tasks quite to do it and also which agent is gonna be responsible for it.
, So it would say that, engineer Joe had to write the Python code using a particular library, sort of phaco in this case, to, to generate the tables. We then had a persona of a data scientist who was gonna analyze the output of, of the, . Synthetic data and ensure that it fit the business rules that we’d established , which is that you know In [00:16:00] the transactions table, they had to marry back up to the customers table and things , so and then You know, what’s really clever as well is that the execution environment?
It can actually run docker containers in the background and populate these docker containers with all of the libraries necessary to execute the code , and it went ahead and Um, and generated two tables, , the data scientist read through those different, , tables and ensure that, actual referential integrity was there.
, and then essentially sign up was given that, these tables had generated exactly what was required. So, by trying to celebrate the fact that this team had gone, I actually proved that we didn’t need them. Well, which was not the intent, but, ,
Matt: I had to say just as an aside that the, the line, it was a little bit tongue in cheek.
Sounds like the perfect start of some sort of sci fi disaster movie where it’s that, that, that’s how it all started. , but that, I mean, creating data like that, the., I’m presuming this is used for testing or to be able to, to
Lewis: yeah, I mean, I think [00:17:00] a synthetic data would be a podcast on its own in terms of, the amount of use cases and things for it and like how, incredibly useful synthetic data can be, because if you think of, , data sets, which have been anonymized, there are many, many cases where it’s actually quite easy to, de anonymize them, um, either just by the fact that they haven’t been thoroughly anonymized you can use extra data sets from outside of that to de anonymize.
But synthetic data by its actual nature is, it’s, it’s fully made up. However, there are very complex rules in terms of, how. The data is produced so that, statistically, it is almost impossible to distinguish it from a real data set. And this opens up huge amounts of, potential for, , what they call, code low, deploy high, in terms of security.
So you can code in relatively low security environments using huge amounts of synthetic, highly realistic data, , and then trust your deployment pipelines so that your code goes through to a highly secure environment. , which very few people have access to [00:18:00] and that’s the environment where the code will execute against the real data But you have full confidence that the code is going to function because you’ve been able to test it with highly accurate synthetic data going back to the team They they they did various different sort of statistical techniques for generating this data by analyzing the source systems and calculating but then another approach is to actually use generative, , techniques, , for generating an entire row, , at a time of, by basically giving it samples of, , what a, a data set could look like, and then using generative AI to just continue that pattern down.
, and then bring on the statistical analysis of the data sets to ensure that it actually conforms to the original data set in the first place.
Chris: This is all extremely interesting. I think we’ve talked about, obviously this year, we’ve talked about AI and generative AI a lot. And I do remember thinking to myself in the early days of the tools that were coming out, these are all kind of first order things.
And we’d see more interesting applications. Once we got to those second order
processes where you’re using the [00:19:00] AI to Then deal with the output of previous AI. Are we doing this so that we can make it more like our own interaction so we can understand it more easily because The thing about a Gen AI tool is that it hasn’t got any particular skill, but you can ask it to, , mimic a certain thing, absolutely, you can say to a prompt, act like a business analyst and, and go through this, this set of requirements or, think like a estate agent, how would you market this building or whatever it might be, but when you do that, what you’re really doing is you’re constraining it down to a certain set of ideas.
Are we actually just saying to these different tools, right? You do this thing, so forget everything else you know and just do that. And then you do this thing, so forget everything else you know and just do that. Lifting them up into a, no we’re not training them up to a, to a standard.
Actually what we’re doing is we’re carving away all the other parts and leaving, leaving the, [00:20:00] what’s left. Just so that we can see the interactions.
Lewis: I think it’s the interactions that I’d like to sort of focus on here because, um, that’s the really crucial thing about large language models is that the innate knowledge is the language.
, they happen to have consumed the entirety of Wikipedia, but we don’t trust them to give us honest answers because of the hallucination problem and things. But what they do have is innate knowledge of the language. And so therefore that allows you to build interactions.
Using just simply language. , so, previously, if you, if you wanted two systems to talk together, you’d have to have like a very watertight contract through an API or some mechanism like that. But I can see in the not too distant future, actually, you’re going to have large language models, which are.
, using things like the, the RAG that I mentioned previously. So, , it’s knowledge base is an actual knowledge store. It’s not built into the model itself. So there is a capability of, , understanding what I’m asking for converting that into an actual request, whether that’s [00:21:00] SQL, whether it’s Cypher in terms of graph network or any other retrieval technique, pulling back real information and then processing that, , again, using language, , as a result.
So if, for instance, , like the many organizations invested heavily in terms of APIs so that you could have like an enterprise service bus and, going back 20 years in terms of how, , different departments could communicate effectively with each other. So rather than having information being spread around, I can see, a future whereby you, you simply say, don’t talk to my API, talk to my wise language model, and then whatever you’re requesting, , it will be able to deal with and then process and then respond accordingly, which means that the different kinds of interactions will become almost infinite.
I mean, it’s anything you can ask for, , it is able to respond to and then find the appropriate, , information and return it back. And this doesn’t need a human in the middle, but the advantage is that a human can actually see what is going on, , with these interactions, but you know, the interactions will [00:22:00] be frighteningly fast, so far, far quicker than we could possibly speak or read or anything like that.
Chris: Not maybe as fast as an API designed to do one thing.
Lewis: Uh, yeah, maybe. I mean, they’re, they’re getting faster all the time. I mean, like the APIs run on normal hardware, whereas LLMs are having dedicated hardware built for them. So Chips designed specifically for this use case?
Chris: Yes, indeed they are. Yeah, I, I’d say I, I agree.
It’s a very interesting set of experiments, and I think it is, it’s all about where language fits into those things, isn’t it? Because, you know, as you say, the LLM doesn’t know anything. It doesn’t have any knowledge. It doesn’t have any. Anything at all other than a statistical likelihood of this particular word will fit in this particular place.
So if we throw enough computing power at it, we are definitely getting some, some very smart seeming answers out of it. The [00:23:00] question is, is where we use it in the most, maybe we’re using it to learn about the actual tasks that we’re setting it. You know what I mean? That we are able to, as you say, because we can see the interactions, we can understand the interactions.
It gives us a better chance of actually understanding what, what question we’ve actually asked rather than the question we think we’ve asked of a, of a, of a task or a process.
Matt: I’m interested in the way that language between bits of technology works because there’s an ambiguity in human language.
Which is part of his wonder, you know, humor is often based on the fact that words are ambiguous the, the, the way in which we interact is, you know, there’s inherent wonder in the fact that it isn’t absolutely logically tied down at all points. Lawyers wouldn’t have a job if it were, let’s be honest. , but there’s a difficulty there , , I was doing a bit of writing this morning, about how humans.
Might have some barriers to be able to adopt the use of generative [00:24:00] AI if we are to think of them as assistants to us, because humans have barriers to adopting collaboration with other people. And there’s lots of work that’s been done around collaboration in teams. And there’s a particular thing, a guy called Morten Hansen, who’s a business professor in the US, originally from Norway, I think.
And he talks about there being four systemic Barriers to collaboration in organizations and the one of those four that I find the most interesting is thing called the transfer barrier and the transfer barrier is where people find it difficult or often even actually impossible to collaborate with one other, one another because they have different language and that’s not that one speaks French, one speaks German, although obviously That, that would be a big inhibitor to people being able to work together.
But more that we have different lexicons, we have different vocabularies, different professions have different sets of language that we use. And the example, I’ve probably used this on the show before, [00:25:00] when I went to work in the housing industry a few years ago, I had about three months where I was utterly confused because I kept hearing the word developer and I thought people cutting code and everybody around me was thinking people with bricks.
Because developer in housing means people who build physical items. Very, very confused. Had to rewire my brain to be able to stop sort of subconsciously hearing that. I’m interested if though, if, if we create agents on the basis of large language models and say you are a I don’t have a product owner and you are a project manager and you are a developer.
Might we start to see some of those confusions coming in where the different agents, because they’re working within the constraints of their individual professions, we’ll start to have some of those. , Barriers to interacting effectively because they’ll interpret words in the wrong way.
Lewis: These are very nascent technologies right at this point in time. , but. , With the, the size of the context windows that are being able to be [00:26:00] processed on every iteration, , means that you can throw an awful lot of context into every interaction.
So, by that I mean, I what is it, Claude 2. 1 has got 200, 000 token context window. Which means you can put an entire PhD thesis into it every single time you ask it a question. So that’s a lot of context to be throwing every single time. , so I do believe that prompt engineering will disappear as, as quick as it’s come about.
But right now, prompt engineering is, , essentially the, before it was called prompt engineering, it was few short, , examples and things where you give it, you know, a few examples and then it would be able to continue. But it’s not really few anymore because you’re giving it up to 200,000 tokens, every single time.
To give it that context so it can come up with an idea so that it knows it’s a developer that knows Java as opposed to a developer that looks for building sites and, other, opportunities. but another kind of like frightening source is that, , language models could be used to, I mean, English.
isn’t [00:27:00] exactly the best, , or, or the finest communication technique, despite the fact that we’ve got Shakespeare and Griswold and all the rest of that kind of thing. The language models themselves will develop over time far more efficient ways of being able to explain exactly, , what it is.
And I’m not talking binary streams, but there will be an evolution of language models into a language that we Cannot comprehend because we don’t have 200, 000 token context windows or 2 million token context windows and won’t have an ability to understand, you know, 64 bit encoded tokens as they get thrown around.
But the amount of preciseness that will be in future versions of language models, , will be, , I mean, I think that’s another interesting philosophical thing to think about as the evolution of language is going to be taken away from us.
Matt: And increasingly the vocabulary that will be developed to be able to be more and more precise I guess will be interesting within that
Lewis: German like words
Matt: Long [00:28:00]
Chris: Not you realize this this context problem that you describe is kind of, it’s been around for a long time, right?
All the old, , speech recognition programs would always have a problem if you said court and it wouldn’t know whether you meant court, like court of ball or court as in where you go , , to face the beaker about your speeding fine and all that kind of thing. , but the context issue has been attacked very, very well, , as Lewis has said.
But it seems like, and it was kind of one of those things that says, you know, how can we. Make computers more intelligent. The more intelligent they are, the more able they are to understand context. Whereas you spent three months not understanding that a developer could be more than one thing.
Matt: Yeah, no, absolutely.
No, this is
Chris: my failing. I think this is a, you know
Matt: But it was the subconscious thing. the computer’s problem. No, no, no, but it was the subconscious. It’s the heuristics that we use to be able to be the most super of supercomputers, which is people to describe them as bugs. They’re not. They’re heuristic models for the way [00:29:00] in which we’re able to process far greater amounts of information than otherwise we’d be able to do.
And it just takes a bit of reprogramming and unfortunately it took me quite some time because my, you know, brain’s less plastic than it used to be and that’s the way it goes when you get older. , so Lewis, when you, if you, if you look at the communications that are going on between these agents at the moment within the, this, this experimental thing that you’ve created, can you By looking at them, do they make sense?
Lewis: Yeah, I mean, it literally looks like a transcript of a Teams, as in a Microsoft Teams conversation, or Slack. Essentially what you’re looking at is literally the agents spewing out English, very interpretable as to, you know, what they’re processing, what they’re doing, and then the next agent in line picking up that and continuing with it.
Matt: And in terms of the language that’s used, this isn’t as That’s a sarcastic question as well. I’m just fascinated by it. Are they polite to each other, or is it just all very matter of fact?
Lewis: Oh, very [00:30:00] polite. And in fact, in certain circumstances, if you’re not using GPT 4, like the GPT 3. 5, because it’s slightly cheaper to use, it gets into loops where they thank each other, continuously.
And you have to, like, actually break the program because they are. , literally caught in that loop.
Matt: Oh, that’s brilliant. I love this idea that we will be safe from the , the coming supercomputer menace because they’re all being too polite to each other. It’ll be like the road system in Guernsey where there’s a thing called filter in turn and you can have people reaching what would in any other place be around about and they sit there for days waiting for each other to go first.
It’s brilliant. , and that sort of interpretability at the moment that’s something that you think Language will be used, but you could see how it would just devolve away from stuff that we understand.
Lewis: Yeah, I mean, even talking about language models themselves is now, , you know. So, last week, , with the release of Gemini as a multimodal.
So, LLMs are out, MMMs are in,[00:31:00] , so it’s not just language anymore, it’s actual visual representations, it’s audio, , all kinds of different, , sort of forms of communication are being bundled together into these multimodal models. And to be honest, I’m, I have no idea what’s next, I’d like to claim, you know, some kind of insight to it, but the pace of change is absolutely astonishing at the moment.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. And then if it’s sort of left to their own devices, because presumably you kind of trigger this, and then they start working away to be able to, it starts working away, let’s not anthropomorphize it, it starts working away. And the sorts of approach that it takes, is it recognizable as a You know, is it an iterative agile type approach that it takes?
Is it a command and control approach that it takes?
Lewis: Again, there’s various different, , constructs that you can put these agents into. So, , you can just, you know, simply have two agents where one is demanding and one is responding. continuously. The more [00:32:00] interesting ones, from my perspective, are literally called group chat, where you have different personas that you set up and, , the central message bus, if you like, is accessible to all, and they will decide if they need to respond at this point in time, given the context given their own role and given the context of what has previously gone, and they will literally either respond or not, , in those group chat scenarios.
Matt: That’s amazing. And having done this so far, , has any of it left you concerned or worried or?
Lewis: No, not concerned, because again, I obviously see the one time it works, but the 200 times it didn’t. I’m still seeing that at this stage. , but I’m really interested in, the implications moving above just, coding, if you like.
, so as I say, I’ve taken on this idea of, , business analysts and solution architects and, , a whole [00:33:00] chain of, knowledge workers , that can interpret a requirement can determine that, , things like NFRs are missing. So it could go back to users and interactively request more information until it believes a requirement is fully known.
It can then pass that on to the next, , item in the chain, which will then, break down all of the tasks that are required and propose a, potential solution architecture. Where it gets really interesting is if you have, , encoded your solution architecture in such a way that it is machine readable.
So there are various different YAML tools that , can be used to generate solution architecture documents. These multimodal models can actually interpret. , the images of the the solution architecture, but , i’m still at the stage before that which is that we will have a library Of solution architectures in some kind of machine readable format such as yaml And you’ll be able to take that and modify it and and check it back in And so you can do as is and a 2b Architecture that is auto generated based on all the requirements which have been gathered up [00:34:00] front And so I’m literally, I mean, some of my background is, I guess, sort of sleuthing out to chill and then distributed computing before that.
So I’m desperately trying to work myself out of the job.
Matt: I’m also fascinated by the idea that being able to use it from a management. Theory kind of perspective being able to say well What if you make that person a bit passive aggressive or what if you make that actor? Somewhat unsure about themselves because they’ve had a bad week at home or and then how does that start?
You know, you could do some really interesting things there about being able to do kind of attitudinal modeling within it just to be able to see the impact as if you were thinking about being able to make changes to team structures and whatever
Lewis: I hadn’t considered that from a kind of , psychology perspective almost, isn’t it?
And trying to understand how, how these things would interact. , I’m not sure that the different types of psychologies that people have would be encoded within the model itself to, , necessarily come out with something really unique. So, by that I mean, , The fact that it understands what a requirement is [00:35:00] and then it can produce tasks to, provide a solution to that.
, I don’t think there’s necessarily enough, in there because this particular, , robot’s having a bad day or, or whatever. , that it’s gonna produce a particularly bad design or, that kind of thing. , but I mean having like some kind of, , element of randomness in there. I mean , this leads to the big philosophical question that, you know, is it, , actually an AI in the general sense of, is it really an intelligent?
And my firm belief is no, absolutely not, you know, and we’re nowhere near the, , AGI despite, I think it’s Elon Musk saying it’s three years away. , I still, , despite the fact that every week I am constantly surprised, , I still don’t believe we’re anywhere near that. , I, do think where we are though is, , absolutely being able to automate the mundane.
So every aspect of human life that we think of as, you know, mundane and maybe a bit boring, that is, you know, going to be wiped away by, um, the ability to interpret, task, plan, and then execute.
Matt: [00:36:00] Fantastic. Thank you. What a way to be able to end this year’s cavalcade of podcast marvels. I was going to try to alliterate and fail miserably. That’s where you need a GPT, [00:37:00] isn’t it? You can come up with alliteration like it’s coming out of your bottom. Lewis, thank you very much for joining us this week.
Have you got an exciting few weeks ahead?
Lewis: I think there’s, as Chris said at the very beginning, this is the last week of actually getting work done, and then next week I think there may be quite a few lunches.
Matt: Yes, we’re into lunch season. , How about you Mr West?
Chris: Well, I’ve got to go to that London on Wednesday, which will be interesting, so I’ve got quite one or two interesting conversations to be had, bit of a catch up with some people I’ve not spoken to for a while, including , you know, some people who’ve been on the podcast in the past.
So yeah, that’ll be nice. It’s, we’ve got a little Juma festive gathering, you know, in the office on Thursday, which will also be nice. And yes, then a whole bunch of things to close down and finish off and, and submit and get done before we get to next week when there will be [00:38:00] things going on, but hopefully it’ll be a little bit quieter.
Matt: Well, it’s actually, it’s the, it’s the Equal Experts London party this Wednesday, but, sadly I can’t make it because happily it’s my son’s 13th birthday and priorities. , but I will be seeing some people in town on Wednesday. . Tuesday, tomorrow evening, , although probably now as you listen to this if you listen to it when it’s come out, , is, , TBD, Paul Armstrong’s, , mini conference taking place over in North Greenwich, so we’ll be going over for that.
The last one was fabulous and it included, , the author of the book Wasteland, which is probably the best book I’ve read this year, all about the way in which our Rubbish gets dealt with and fascinating terrifying book And so we’ll have to see who Paul has in store for us. And then next Monday It’s the WB40 signal group annual Christmas shindig Which Cy Cornwall has been there actually marvel in being able to do all the organization for so, [00:39:00] There will be some of us meeting up if you’re not a member of the signal group You are welcome to join if you drop us a line on LinkedIn or we still got an account on That x thing, but we don’t really use it anymore or , if you go to the website You’ll be able to get details on how to get in touch with us and you can be added to the signal group and then About one in five people survive the initial fire hydrant and stay on I think is about the batting average there So that’s , that’s good fun.
And then it’s into the christmas festivities season. So, Various things. And then we’re busy planning what is happening with the show in 2024. I’ve got the entire month of January already sorted, which I feel incredibly, , doesn’t happen very often. Does it? I know it’s great. Um, so we’ve got some fantastic guests, , and more to come.
So, , with that, , wish you all a very, , happy. end of the year break depending on how you choose to celebrate it and we will be back on the 8th of January into our eighth year my goodness of this [00:40:00] mad crazy thing that is WB40. So until then have a good break and we’ll see you in 2024 which is technically the future.
On this, the penultimate show of 2023, Chris and Matt answer audience questions about the year ahead…
Automatically created transcript…
Matt: at the beginning of 2023 on show 248 no less if you want to go back and listen to it. We did an episode where we thought about what might be the things that a CIO or a CTO might be being asked about in the year ahead.
So we’re going to start with a question from Mr. Chris King, who in his inimitable style asks, Review your predictions for 2023 and own your poor judgments, you cowards. Not so much a question as a statement. We’ve all seen those ones when people stand up at the bit where they’re supposed to be asking questions at events.
Anyway, Chris, we are going to go. Step by step through what we said in that first show at the beginning of the year that we thought would be important topics for Technology management in this year and see how well we did First up artificial intelligence and we said that you should probably start really playing with it with some seriousness How do you think we did on that Chris?
Chris: Well, I think we did pretty well in as much as everything is now, , AI, crazy, isn’t it? I’m not entirely sure we knew that LLMs were about to be launched upon the world and create such, , havoc. But, do you know what? I’ll take that as a win, Matt. You know, I think we were right.
Matt: Yep, I think so. The next one hybrid working,, and our conclusion was that this was something you just needed to be able to work out how to do.
, because if you hadn’t by now, then you’re in real trouble. Interesting one, this, with , continuing calls from large organisations to be able to return to the office. , but I saw some, , analysis that was from the US market that said now that return to office is pretty much flat lined. So as much returning to the office is going to happen has happened.
What do you make of it?
Chris: I would agree, you know, that’s, it’s kind of, you know the pendulum’s going to swing back. , but I’m going to, I’m going to mix my metaphors horribly as usual. So the, , genie was out of the bottle after COVID, wasn’t it? A lot of the things that stopped us working from home or working remotely, , because it just wouldn’t work, , actually did work to a, to a point and people found ways around the problems.
And I always. said that it was, it was like the elastic would pull back, but the elastic has been overstretched. He’s never going to go back to his original. point, but, but it always feels like it’s going back because you, as you, as you head towards the, what was the status quo, everybody then decides it’s going to go exactly that way it came from.
Well, it never does. So I think , the Hooke’s law, if that’s the thing that I remember from my physics in school, I think the Hooke’s law thing has been, tested and, and the hybrid thing is really important because guess what? We aren’t. All in the office all the time.
More of us are at home or working remotely. And more of us are working from locations other than a head office. So, finding ways to combine those people who are in the office and people who aren’t in the office, or aren’t in, you know, a dedicated company office, continues to be the challenge. And I don’t think we’re far wrong with that, Matt
, The next one that we were talking about was the looming recession, and how do you recession improve yourselves? So, what do you think?
Matt: It feels like we’ve been waiting for the recession all year, and whilst it hasn’t arrived, it certainly doesn’t feel like it’s gone away. And I’ve seen from a number of points, and particularly talking to freelance people, this year has been absolutely horrible.
, actually just in the last few days, I’ve seen people who were very successful freelance consultants, thought leaders in their world and all that, and talking about how they’ve run out of savings. , so whilst technically two consecutive quarters of contraction of the economy might not have been met, it does not feel like a strong and, growing economy in which we’re operating in the UK at the moment.
It feels like nobody’s making decisions. I think that there is, in a public sector, we’ve I’ve seen a lot of, , retrenchment in spending from departments that we’ve been working with. And I think that’s a, common thing. , and it also feels like there’s a kind of waiting for the new government thing.
And, and I don’t think that’s just public sector. I think in private sector as well, there’s that kind of. Something’s got to change, but we don’t know what it is, but we’ll just wait for a bit, shall we? And it’s a very, very hard market to be in.
Chris: ,
I’d definitely reflect that in terms of, I think, at the start of the year, one of my, , strategic planning Axioms was to say, look, everybody’s going to want to do more with less.
Everybody’s going to need to save money, be more efficient. I mean, of course, we all try to do that all the time, right? But this is going to be really important because I thought a recession was almost certain. , as you say, technically it hasn’t happened, but I think the way I would describe the business, , outlook this year and the market generally has been soft.
So projects have started or they’ve been mooted and then the budget has been approved in organisations and then it’s been unapproved. So you’ve seen quite a lot of people, and I’ve heard from quite a lot of people who, I’ve applied for jobs this year and got the jobs or I got through to the next stage or whatever and then everything goes quiet and then it turns out that the job has gone away.
And that’s really frustrating as a, as you know, if you’re a job seeker, especially if you’ve kind of mentally checked out of wherever you are or maybe you don’t have a job, it’s Really terrible. So I, I’ve seen a lot of that and I’ve seen a lot of people blaming recruitment teams or whatever. But guess what?
Recruiters don’t get paid until they play somebody. And for recruiters to have to go through that process as well, to interview a whole bunch of people, put people forward and then suddenly the job goes away. It’s just as, it’s just as annoying for them. So yeah, the market has been soft. The, the ability to make decisions of organizations has been kind of questionable.
And I really can’t see that changing in the short term simply because as you say, there are some unknowns going on, , in terms of the political landscape. So, so yeah, I think we’ve still got that. How do we keep costs down? How do we change our business models? How do we, , just act in a more, you know, faster and leaner and more effectively?
I think that that’s just going to be a continuing pressure for.
Matt: So the next one that we had was about the metaverse. And we concluded at the beginning of the year that 2023 was probably going to be the year when the metaverse didn’t really do very much. That feels like a reasonably prescient prediction.
Chris: The what a verse was it? What was it? I mean You bought , a headset didn’t you? And they are really cool, right? The, the, what was it called?
Matt: The, um, Oculus. Well no, it’s the, uh, the, oh dear, see I can’t even remember the name of it. It’s the, the, the Oculus, but it’s not the Oculus, it’s the Meta. Because they re branded it.
Chris: Whatever, it’s, it’s, but, but, do you know what? It’s really good, isn’t it?
Matt: It’s great.
How much have you used it in the last three months?
Every so often I will put power into it to be able to update the software on it. And then I’ll put it on my head for about half an hour and then I’ll take it off again.
Although, actually, interestingly, one of my coffees in the last week, 131 and counting, , was with somebody who works for Mural. And he was talking about some of the work that they’re doing with Meta around platforms for collaboration and collaborative working and what you would do on a whiteboard, but in virtual space.
And really interestingly, what he was talking about was one of my big criticisms of the whole Meta collaborative workspace in virtual reality is it’s just like, And what’s the point in having just right reality when you don’t have the constraints of things like gravity? From what he was describing that they’re doing at the moment, it sounds like some of that is being worked on and bankrolled. The question will be whether enough will be able to be continued to be able to put into that for it to sustain without any revenue from it whatsoever.
Because I can’t see revenue coming in 2024 either.
Chris: Yeah, it’s a real gamble, all of that, because people’s habits are hard to change. , and even though the technology is really cool, it’s not compelling enough in terms of what you can do with it. wHether that changes in the next 12 to 18 months is another matter.
I don’t think so, but I think we were right last year, Matt. Indeed. And the last one was, we, we were talking about China, Matt. We said that, , that should be on our risk register in terms of, I guess, um, I’m trying to remember why we thought China was going to be on our risk register, but I guess through either, use of intellectual property or, you know, the expansion of the Alibabas and, , you know, the Baidus and those kind of organizations.
Matt: Yeah, and I mean the other big thing was the way in which the U. S. banned the use of American technology by Chinese firms, so people like Huawei who, I was reading their latest smartphone, the P60 or something, has, satellite calling built in. You know, the Huawei make incredible mobile phones.
Unfortunately, they’re not allowed to use Google software. So therefore they have incredible phones with no software. And that’s their problem at the moment. , I think, China is as much of a risk and a threat and a challenge. And is this, massive, manufacturing base of all sorts of stuff.
It’s interesting how you’re seeing increasing things like, , Chinese brand, , vehicles on the roads. It’s the way in which Chinese stuff is increasingly creeping into our day to day life as opposed to Chinese manufactured stuff with Western brands on it. And, , I think really in the last year, the combination of the continuing conflict in Ukraine and then what’s been happening in the Middle East has To some extent, diverted attention away from China, but it’s still a big lumbering threat to who knows what.
, because everything that we seem to consume is made there these days.
Chris: Yeah, that’s right. You know, as you say, the world, , geopolitics has changed, hasn’t it? So, we probably missed out on that one as much as it wasn’t the big issue that we thought it might be. But as you say, that may be just other stars have shone brighter, , this year.
Matt: Right, so having hopefully shown, , some credentials in not being able to make complete arses of ourselves, , for , the year that has gone, let’s have a think about the year ahead and maybe some of the things that might be happening there. With obviously the big, big illuminated caveat that past performance is not an indication of future performance.
, so the first question we’ve got comes from a friend of the show, Lisa Remers. And it is this. I have heard some horror stories of people using LLMs to fill out job applications, which look great at a distance, but lack the specificity needed. Real examples or well, any sort of reassurance is not a pack of lies.
But with applicant tracking systems also auto rejecting things without the keywords, how can we fix the job application process?
Chris: Well, okay. You know, this is, comes pretty much straight to that point that you often make Matt about us heading towards a time when we’ve got AI writing stuff for AI to read and there’s nobody in the middle of it.
But I think this does hit another point. And again, I’ve talked about, just talked about recruitment, a lot of recruitment, especially the kind of cheap and nasty recruitment does use tools, applicant tracking systems to then just. Whizz through keywords and figure out, you know, which app, which application should be surfaced to the top.
And if you are using pretty dumb systems to do that, then people will game it. They’ll know that that happens and they’ll just game it. So it’s kind of not surprising that people would then use tools to make that easier. The question we’ve got to ask ourselves is when we And I would like to think that our recruitment team is, , a better recruitment team.
Focused on outcomes more than just lobbying CVS at the wall until one sticks. , and I would hope that what that will do is it will drive out the, the bad recruitment and the bad recruiters and the people who don’t add any value beyond. Having a portal that people can apply to and the real recruiters that understand the market that can give advice that can really help to get the right person to fill a role will actually maybe be more valued, right?
So,, to fix the job application process, we’ve got to be just got to value the job, right? If you don’t value the role enough to try and put the right person into it. And if you think of it just as filling a gap, I think , that’s part of the problem. But maybe, , the way that AI is going, the way that LLMs are going and that these tools are heading, they’re actually removing some of those roles that actually could be filled by anybody.
And it’s the, experience and wisdom and knowledge and analytical ability of people that, that will be more valuable. So maybe, yeah, maybe this comes full circle and it, it all works out. Or maybe I’m just a hopeless optimist. What do you think?
Matt: Possibly the hopeless optimism. I think that the, the year ahead in the next few years, this, so the thing, and I’ve written about this recently actually, that the, , the idea that we have a world which is consisting of interactions and transactions, and the interactions cannot be scaled in anything other than a linear .
fashion because they represent interaction between two people and transactions can be scaled in a exponential way because they are purely mathematical constructs and and so on and so the example i’ve always given is that if you go to tiffin is to buy an engagement ring that’s a good example of a very high touch interaction and if you buy that same ring on the internet that turns it into a transaction and what you lose along the way is a bunch of social and cultural significance And if you’re getting married and you choose the latter over the former, you will notice the difference in cultural, , and social value.
At the moment, it might change over time, but people don’t think about this stuff. Anyway, what I think we’re starting to see with the way in which, natural language processing and, the generation of content through, , Artificial intelligence type technologies is actually a simulation of interaction.
Now a CV, the point of a CV was never as a data transmission protocol. It was part of the dance of recruitment and it was actually something that somebody gave to somebody else. But what has happened at scale already is the applicant tracking systems and all the gizmos have been stuck into those have removed much of the interaction and it’s led to a world where people think that you don’t need those interactions for people to be able to recruit.
I can think of one of my clients in particular this year who believed that and thought they could just do their own recruitment with one HR person and LinkedIn. And they have spent months and months and months and months not finding candidates because it is so much more than that. But this isn’t just a question about recruitment for me.
I think that we will see loads of examples where, because it’s easier just to automate the existing process and to be able to actually think about fundamentals, we will end up with AI talking to AI and madness will ensue. And we will see this in all sorts of places. And for the year ahead, this is where it’s going to start.
And I just hope there are enough of us saying this is insane. Stop it immediately for us to not get into a world where it won’t be that we will have, , a super intelligence that we can’t control. It will be that we will have mass loads of stupid that we can no longer control. And we’ve already seen that, you know, things like financial markets.
, we have mass loads through high. Frequency trading and whatever, and we’ve had a number of instances over the years now where stupidity at scale has almost collapsed the entire global economy. And it’s that stuff where previously it was only applied to things that were about numbers, but are now going to get applied to things that traditionally have been about interaction between people that we need to be really, really wary of in the next few years and in the next year in particular.
Chris: Cool. So. Having knocked that one , , into the basket. Let’s move on to the next one. So this is, , John Wilshire. We’re still talking LLMs here. Matt and John, , has got an example that he’s picked up from the internet, , about what It’s called an SEO heist, so search engine optimization heist using AI, where apparently these people, they exported a sitemap from a competitor’s website, they turned all their URLs into article titles, they created a couple of thousand articles from those titles using AI, so a bunch of thousand , worthless crap, I suppose, but you know, enough to then bend the, the, the light of, the search engines towards them.
And, and apparently 18 months later they’ve stolen 3.6 million total traffic, 490,000 k. Monthly traffic, I guess those are visits or visitors or something. So John said, in the light of LLMs being used to hack the web in that way, what becomes of the concept that we think of the web in 2028 24? At what point is it just bots writing for bots?
So
Matt: I think it has been for years. I think if you look at the whole world of search engine optimisation and the particular form of this that annoys me more than anything else. I don’t really look at recipe books these days. I go onto the internet and search for recipes and there are good reputable sources of recipes like BBC Good Food and Jamie Oliver and various other places where you start with the list of ingredients And then you can work out from that whether it’s worth looking at.
However, the internet is stuffed to the gills of recipes that start off with about 2, 000 words of preamble talking about what it is that they were doing on the day when they thought about this recipe and yadda yadda yadda and it goes on and on and on and you have to scroll through pages and pages and pages of absolute guff.
Before you get to the actual recipe because those pages and pages of guff are then loaded with adverts and those adverts are where this website gets his money from and that’s fine, except it means that it’s an awful experience because it is exactly this. It is nonsense content that has been generated Possibly by bots, or they possibly by people acting with the intelligence of bots following horribly algorithmic kind of ways of thinking to create content that is there to enable as much advertising space to be sold as possible, but not in the way that newspapers and magazines used to do it, which was to have compelling content, but just by having loads of swarth that you have to be able to try to pick through.
And the idea that the internet is not already full of this stuff. I think is quite preposterous. It’s been full of this stuff for as long as people have been selling advertising space at scale on the internet and it’s got worse and worse and worse and worse and will bots make it worse? Yes, of course it will.
Would it mean that we’ll get to a point where we can’t actually find anything useful? Possibly. And that’s where it gets interesting, because I think maybe what the search engines need to do to be able to try to help you get to content that isn’t just bot created swarf. Because if you want bot created swarf about a subject, just go to ChatGPT and ask for it, you know, at the time you need it, rather than going to a webpage that’s been published already.
I’ve gone into angry old man mode now.
Chris: You really have. , I mean, which is what I do with recipes actually, because I don’t, uh, I don’t go to recipes anymore. I, I look in the, in the fridge and say, okay, I’ve got half a, half a bit of garlic and some cheese and , some onions and, and then I’ll go to the chat and I’ll go, right, this is what I’ve got.
What can I make?
Matt: And it was like a trip to the supermarket.
Chris: It’s quite good at that. It will come up with something. And I’ve got a slow cooker and I’ve got these things. What can I do? I think you’re right. I think that it has been like this for some time, but it’s getting worse. And it just depends on the way you look at the web, isn’t it?
I think Google has got worse over the years. I think Twitter or whatever you call it now. It’s pretty much unusable these days. I mean, it’s just no fun. So, I think we just end up moving to different places, right?
So, I use Blue Sky a lot more these days. Probably as much as I use Twitter. And that’s quite a nice place to go. It’s still not got quite as much content as Twitter. And the kind of people, , that are on Twitter aren’t always on something like Blue Sky. But enough of the kind of people I want to hear from are.
Right? So that, that makes it a much more valuable experience now. And the only reason I go to Twitter is because it’s still where a lot of the sort of news organizations, etc. are post. But yeah, I think, you know, it’s, it’s an interesting, , proposition
we’re getting computers to write things for other computers to read. , but I do think when you do that, actually very quickly becomes obvious that there’s very little value in it. And then the people that. start to do something slightly different are the ones that get the value from it. My son, for example, who’s at college, he uses GPT all the time and he uses it as a kind of learning assistant really.
He’s doing his college course and the, the, the tutor will say, can you do this, right? Do a presentation about, you know, how marketing is used in business or whatever. And he’ll use GPT. But he’s seen daft people use GPT and essentially just copy and paste the output into a presentation and then come unstuck when they get asked about it.
He knows that what he’s got to do is use it as a structure, you know, for a structure, ask it some refining questions, ask it to explain some of the stuff he doesn’t understand, and actually use it. To learn, right? And, and sometimes you’ll come unstuck doing that, but then again sometimes you can come unstuck going to Wikipedia,
sometimes, even when you and I were younger, Matt, and if you had to, find something out, you might look in a book, , Sometimes you look at a book, and actually, the book would be 30 years old, and when you actually tend to talk about it, your, the knowledge you’ve got would be completely out of date because you just read the wrong book.
It’s, you know, it’s, it’s always been possible to be wrong. You just need to cultivate your judgement so you are less likely to be wrong.
Matt: So another question, I think, sort of in this field as well from Elias Williams, um, who asks about the commoditization of software.
He asks the barriers to writing software are getting lower and being accelerated. wHat do we think the impact that this could have on things like software as a service businesses, development shops, consulting and in house development teams?
Chris: I think it’s a similar answer as well, right, in as much as this has happened a lot in the last few years.
When I was, when I were a lad, what we used to call programming before we were coders, , you would sit down and you would write code from first principles, really. You wouldn’t have much to go on. You might have a manual or something, or a book of words we used to call it, which is like, you know, the function guide of the language you’re using and it would have little snippets of code to explain how the function works, so you might use that as your starting point and then build from there.
And then, one marvellous day, you get Usenet and you start to ask newsgroups, you have newsgroups where programmers would , congregate and you’d say, oh, how, does anybody know how we do this, or has anybody got, and some people might then supply a bit of snippet of code. And then, a few years ago. Things like Stack Overflow came around, and we got a lot more code that was being shared.
A lot more examples that could be used, and we were reusing software more, code libraries started to appear. We were, that’s, that’s accelerated coding, no end, right? And, but you’ve also, also ended up with people not really understanding how the program they’ve written works, even though it does.
They can compile it and sort of put the seal on it and then just run away and hope it never goes wrong because they don’t actually know how it works. And I think it’s just an extension of that. It’s great that some of the more, you know, the easier bits of coding, which are just a bit of a grind, can be taken away by things like LLMs and advanced software.
But if you asked an LLM or For an AI system to write a complex piece of software, you’d really want to look at it before you pass it off because, you know, that’s so risky to just give it to somebody else to do, who can’t explain how it works or you’re going to use it just to accelerate the, easy stuff and then, and then add your own value on top.
So for me. It’s just the continuation. Software gets more and more complex. So we’re barely keeping up with the increasing complexity of software, frankly. So I don’t think it’s going to change that much. What about you?
Matt: , I think I would advise you to listen to next week’s show when we’ve got Lewis Crawford, who’s a colleague of mine, who has been doing some experiments recently building virtual software development teams in AI environments.
So actually, just experiments is not to replace developers yet, but being able to set up agents that act as a team and being able to get them to be able to build things and what he’s been finding through doing that is absolutely fascinating., we’ll talk about this on the show more next week.
Chris: Okay, so we’ve got another question from , Nick Drage, who asked us about what technology will have AI levels of impact on common discourse in 2024, regardless of its actual effectiveness?
Is web 3 due a comeback?
Matt: , I think that the technology which will have aI levels of impact on common discord in 2024 is going to be AI. I think we’ve got another year of this at least. , I’m picking up on his point about, you know, the regardless of actual effectiveness, there’s definitely useful stuff that you can do with AI technologies that are around at the moment.
, but there are huge, great gaps in them becoming. properly operationalized and being able to put in to organizations to be able to do things that will deliver, large scale value. At the moment they’re delivering value to software companies because they’re being used as a way to be able to sell more software.
, if you think about how long it takes for organizations to be able to make change happen, the idea that LLMs and the like are going to accelerate the ability for organizations to implement change, I think is really quite. optimistic to say the least. , ,
Chris: I would say also, from my point of view, now, common discourse might mean, you know, down the pub, I’m not entirely sure we’re talking about that level, but I think automation is getting to the point where, and again, I think it’s the impact of the vendor, really.
I think Microsoft, that low code stuff, the Power Platform, what I kind of call tactical automation, where people can just automate a small bit of their process. The kind of thing that people used to call me up for when I was an IT manager, and 20 years ago, and they’d say, no, Chris, this is really, it takes me three days to produce this report.
Can’t we do something about it? And I would then spend. A couple of weeks working with them and then they would have a report that they could run in 10 minutes and it would save them, genuinely save them days and days of work. And that was great. Used to, I used to enjoy it, used to make their lives much, much, much easier.
, but they had to come to somebody like me to do it and we still kind of have to do that to a, to an extent. And the idea that you can then take to somebody, you know, here’s a tool,
, I read something, , around, , I think it was Austin, , who, some engineers who had to get an email and that is take the email and transcribe the email into their head.
ERP system. I think it was an SAP system before they could start work on something. And this was like the morning job and it was the job that they really hated it ’cause it was just a re-keying job. And then they automated it, , for a fairly naughty tool. And that to me is a nice, is, is a little bit of tactical automation.
It would never get automated from the top down. It would never be something as part of a big digital transformation project. But actually, if you are , an end user with a, a bit of drudge that you can automate away. With a few hours work and maybe a few pointers from somebody. Suddenly that’s massive because everybody can do it.
And will that happen this year? Don’t know. But I think it’s on the horizon. I think that kind of tactical automation thing where you’re not trying to solve one massive bottleneck, but you are continually Shifting smaller bottlenecks. I’ve just got to hunch that’s on, that’s what’s going to be big.
Matt: Also makes me think though, which year will it be where bad data becomes the public discourse?
Because a lot of this stuff depends on the idea that your data is reasonably in a good state. How many organizations data is in a good enough state to be able to leave automation to machines and machines alone.
Chris: Well, I don’t know. I think maybe it’s that big transformational top down automation that requires data to be in a good state.
Because when you’re getting down to that lower level, that’s where the people, they’ve kind of come up with ways to manage bad data because they deal with it all the time. They get an email from somebody, they kind of go, oh no, they didn’t mean that, they didn’t mean this. Right. And they, and, and they kind of build their own process in for managing that. Because at the end of the day. We can keep saying, oh, we need our data caught to show people to wear blue in the face, but unless there’s a really good incentive for lots of people to act upon that, it’s not really going to happen. We kind of have to accept that sometimes we’re just going to have to deal with it. And that’s part of the process, is dealing with the fact that we know we’re going to have bad data.
And at least if you understand what can be bad and what’s likely to be bad, you can put systems in to mitigate it.
Matt: I suppose that the challenge will be in a world that feels increasingly like it has become binary, that something is right or wrong, left or right, red or blue, , where you have that necessity to understand that the answers might be fuzzy, or one of my favorite things at the moment is when somebody says, is it X or is it Y and pointing out that it could be both at the same time and that’s a perfectly valid answer.
I don’t know whether the constructs in which some of these technologies are going to be placed, say like making a decision about whether somebody should have asylum granted or not. Let’s automate that, stick some data into it. Bish bash bosh and we’re away. Those kind of decisions are not simple, they’re not binary and if you’re just relying on a black box that pops out an answer at the end that’s where it gets worrying for me.
Chris: Yeah, so I’ve got a plan now for my next project, which will be my best selling book, Embrace the Purple. Right, so it’s not blue and it’s not red. Embrace the Purple.
Matt: I’ve got one question that’s sort of out on its own a little bit, but I thought it was interesting to be able to ask. It’s from an anonymous listener. , How do you go about shifting a broad company culture to one where people put their cameras on by default in remote or hybrid meetings? Our little part of the company does this by default, but in the wider group, large meetings are seas of avatars.
People want to work flexibly, but then don’t show up when they do. I know there’s a neurodiversity angle to this, but is there also a neurotypical argument to be made for most of the population? Am I wrong to pursue it? Should I just let it go? What do you reckon?
Chris: I think my, , opinion on this has changed over time, and once upon a time I was beating people up to put their cameras up and say, come on, just, you know, get with it.
And, we’re all, better off if we can see each other. And actually I think I’ve probably toned that down a bit recently , because I do think that everybody’s different and people do have, you know, reasons for not Wanting to have their camera on sometimes they’re good reasons.
Sometimes they’re not, I think it is down to the individual. I had a couple of conversations with somebody quite recently. Somebody I don’t know very well. , but they were quite in depth conversations. And when we started, he said, look, do you mind if we turn our cameras off? This is because.
I’ve been doing this , , face to face and , when I do it on teams, I find it’s just too distracting to be staring at the other person all the time. , and when you’re in a, in a physical location, you don’t necessarily look at this, like gawp at the other person all the time. So we did that and we did that on two separate occasions. Actually, I thought it was really odd at first, but I could see the value in it. And as much as I was concentrating on the conversation and the words, not trying to read the expression or the innermost thoughts of the person at the other end and looking for their reaction, and, you know, I think maybe let it go. But what about you?
Matt: See, I’ve gone the other way. I would have said each to their own and all that a few years ago. Now I’d say, would you allow somebody to walk into all meetings and stick a paper bag over their head?
No, you wouldn’t. Okay? So, I think that there is something more problematic, though, if you’ve got a culture where people default to turning cameras off. And You don’t have to stare at each other all the time. The one thing I would say though, is that often when you ask people why do you not want the camera on, it’s because I don’t like looking at myself.
And I find it really interesting that the tools that we have don’t make it immediately obvious how to turn off your own camera view. It’s quite hard to find that setting. And then there’s some tools, like the one that we’re using to record this, where you can’t turn your own camera off at all. And that’s a bit odd, because in a meeting room, I don’t know if you’ve ever been into a meeting where you’ve been sitting opposite a mirror,
so in a restaurant or places where there are mirrors on walls, I cannot stand ceilings or no, no, no, no, it’s a different thing. , but I cannot stand being in a room where I can see myself in a mirror. And that’s exactly the same thing that’s going on with being, on a teams or a zoom or a meet call and seeing your own image and the camera completely get that.
Turn your camera, self view off. But no, I, think that there’s, there’s something going wrong in a culture of people predominantly don’t have their cameras on.
Chris: That’s very interesting. I mean, some would say, I personally, it’s a bit of a bonus for me to see myself whilst I’m talking
Matt: to other people. But, um, I
Chris: could understand that maybe some other people would think
Matt: Think not, faces already.
Interestingly, we did try a tool to record this for a while some years ago, which didn’t have camera view. But we found it very difficult to be able to do this without being able to see each other.
And particularly when we’ve got a guest, we’re able, I think, to be able to signal to each other without making big gesticulations when it’s somebody else’s turn to ask a question or any of that. And I don’t think we can do this recording unless we’ve got video.
Chris: Let’s quickly move on to our next one. We’ve got a question from Steve Parks, our favorite marketing agency guru. And he’s talking about the fact that it’s election year in the US and the UK, and asks what part would the changed and changing landscape play in shaping the campaign’s coverage and results this time?
Some previous campaigns have seen a new generation of civic tech and entrepreneurs. And what might we see come back to tech from the campaigns this year?
Matt: So, it’s going to be interesting having election campaigns without a meaningful Twitter. , It’s certainly for me for the last, I, I, I’ve started using Twitter I think in 2009, so 2010 election it was very nascent, 2015 it was very much part of it, 2019 it went a bit batshit, , and I, I, I look at Twitter a few times a day now but I’m not posting on there at all now and to not have The political discourse on there is going to be interesting.
I don’t really look at Facebook very much anymore. It’s going to be interesting to see because quite a lot of my, social media uses now migrated into LinkedIn. It’s going to be interesting to see whether there is politics on LinkedIn for the elections. Politics generally. is reasonably frowned upon still, I think, on LinkedIn.
But when there’s a general election at play, it will be interesting to see how that one pans out. Politicians do use it, and you do get occasionally incredibly misjudged, , pieces of social media stuff going out on LinkedIn by politicians. , there is then the emergence of video. So for the last few years, video has been the big growth area.
I think politicians have got a fantastic opportunity to make enormous arses of themselves with TikTok in particular and no doubt many of them will.
And the other thing that I is going to be really interesting is the way in which so much So the social network stuff has gone more private and it’s gone private in groups in WhatsApp in groups in signal and so on and those are not penetrable by , traditional advertising mechanisms, political parties, and so will they find ways to be able to kind of socially engineer their messages into private groups, because I think those are going to be important places of influence in some instances, although they might just be, , groups of people who all have the same sorts of views.
I’m thinking of things like, you know, WhatsApp street groups and that kind of stuff. I think it’s going to be interesting because of the way in which particularly Shifter video and the collapse of Twitter and how that will play out for electioneering.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s now a part of the political game, isn’t it?
And are people out there who track the spend by political parties in social media. There are people like WhoTargetsMe, so that’s sort of an extension you can put on your browser, your Chrome browser, that will then, it basically looks to understand who’s targeting your feed on Facebook from political parties, and they sort of generate, they gather lots of data about that.
, When we had the by election here in Tamworth, , a few weeks back. I mean, I don’t use YouTube a lot, but every time I went on it, I seemed to get an advert from the Labour, , candidate. So I think YouTube and those sort of channels, Instagram, are being used, and will be used. I think Facebook is actually quite an interesting one at the moment, just because of the demographic.
It’s not really a channel that kids use very much, you know, I think if you’re under Probably Facebook isn’t a thing that you use. It’s used by quite a lot of people who are older and even older than you and I Matt. And that’s your voting demographic. So I reckon Facebook in terms of advertising and trying to target is still important.
But I do think that we’ve got over that kind of madness of the Cambridge Analytica and the idea that you can. micro target people and, and, you know, really, really make a difference in elections. I think, I think, going back to that data quality thing, I just don’t think we’ve got the information as much as we pretend we have.
I don’t think we’ve got the information or the tooling to say to make that much of a difference. I think the Cambridge Analytica thing personally was a bit of a beat up. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the next thing that will come along will be, will prove me wrong.
Matt: Yeah, it’s an interesting question, isn’t it?
Because, , being able to target micro demographics is definitely what the online advertisers or the online advertising platforms will claim to be able to give you. The question is, can you identify the right demographic to which you need to push your messages? The other interesting thing for me, I don’t get very much election literature through the door because we’re in a safe Lib Dem seat, the Tories don’t bother and Labour definitely don’t bother.
, will I actually see anything at all? Will I even notice there is an election on from the advertising that’s pushed in front of me? That would be a good indication about whether targeting is working or not.
Chris: Oh yeah. I do think that if you look at, like, that psychological view, , that the swing seats, you know, the, real kind of crunch seats are going to probably attract a great deal more.
Matt: You are not gonna be able to move for the stuff. ’cause although there’s a big minority, you know, that’s very much a swing seat that you are in.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. It will be. I mean, the, the, the conservatives will be ex hoping to win this back at the general election. , labor will wanna hang onto it, so there’ll be a few seats that get a lot more focus.
, it will be left down to the, , individual conservative associations or constituent labor parties or whatever the Libs call themselves. in the areas to do that. They’re, they’re individual. And it’ll just be down to how much money they’ve got locally. So, yeah, again, another, another interesting evolution of our politics.
Matt: And to the second part of Steve’s question, do you think there’s going to be anything that will come back from these election campaigns back into technology or into the, to the broader business world?
Chris: I think that’s a really difficult question. , I think what we’ve seen quite a lot of what Steve calls Civic Tech.
In previous election campaigns in the UK, but I cannot honestly say I’ve seen anything come out of it that’s, kind of entrepreneurial or made a, made a big difference. I might be wrong, but I might be missing something, but, but that’s not something on my horizon.
Matt: So, the last question of this, the last AskWB40 of 2023.
And, , from, , one of our recent ish guests, Jarnel Chudge. , There are many challenges and wicked problems that the world is facing, and more and more people raising questions about the ability of the current and prevailing, and or prevailing models and systems of commerce to respond to them, regardless of the belief by the tech bros in their domination of the technology landscape.
So, the question to you. Matt and Chris is, what do you think that each person could do that would make a difference from anywhere and everywhere in the world?
Chris: Well, difficult question. , short answer is, you know, we’ve got a massive problem in as much as there’s going to be mass migration on the planet in the next 10, 20 years. Lots of it driven by climate change. , we’ve got to do something about that. And it’s a big problem, but we can do something about it. In our own way, we can push for the things that we use, the things that, the services we use, the companies we work with to manage their impact on the environment.
So for example, We’re building in, , the green, , software foundation,, principles into our software development, , process, , low carbon cloud, things like that, where you run your loads at what time at which data centers around the world, it can make a difference. So I think.
You know what, we’ve all got our little things that we can do in our, um, in our roles and in our lives. And it is just about trying to find the thing that you can do.
Matt: Know what you’ve got some ability to be able to influence in whatever small sort of way you can and take that opportunity to do it.
, which, , I think you and I both try to be able to do our bit for what we can when we can. And, so stay tuned for a bit more on that for what we’ll be doing in 2024. There’s, , something afoot, but not until next year.
Chris: So there we are, Matt. We’ve made yet another rod for our backs for next year. Let’s see how that goes. but let’s think maybe a little nearer to now. What’s your next week like?
Matt: Uh, apart from the, the worky stuff as we start to close out the calendar year, , I will be attending, , Vicarage Road. to watch Watford play football for the first time this season.
I know I’m a total fair weather these days, but there we go. I’m taking both of my children to the, to the match, , assuming that they both,, hold true to their promise. And, um, so what’s been a very successful run over the last couple of months is almost certainly going to come to an end. Which would be fun.
Apart from that, we have, , we have a meeting, just picking up on the last point from the last question, we have a meeting Monday, a week today, which will be to explore some of these ideas we’ve got for the show in the new year. And, other than that, I have a relatively kind of calm week as we taxi, inevitably, into the Christmas break.
How about you?
Chris: Yeah, I’m not going very far this week. I’ve got a little few little things to do. , it’s going to be, it’s going to be another busy week with work. I’ve got still got to finish off some decorating. ,
Matt: And, but is it the actual fourth bridge you’re decorating? Is it?
Chris: Oh, listen, believe me, if I could do any quicker, I would.
I’m not an expert at decorating. , it does take me a while. And. , this week, there’s quite a lot going on, but it’s kind of head down, ass up kind of thing, so I think it’s going to be one of those weeks that goes by fairly quickly and then it’ll be on to the weekend again, so I don’t, I have a very boring answer for this one, this
Matt: time.
That’s fair enough, you know. , Well, we’ll be back for the last show of 2023, , next. Monday, , when we’re going to be all to plan, going to be meeting with Lewis Crawford to talk about virtualized software development teams in the world of AI, which should be fascinating if not slightly scary, , until then, thank you for joining us and we will be back next week.
Chris: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on always on the internet at WB40podcast. com. , And on all good podcasting platforms as ever. Tell your friends about us. We’ll go to your local park. Scroll WB40 on passing dogs. Anything you can do to increase our listenership will be well rewarded.
Not rewarded now, of course, but maybe spiritually one day.
On this week’s show we speak with Railsware CEO Yaroslav Lazor about moving from being a business building software for others to being a product company.
You can find out more about their BRIDGeS framework here: https://railsware.com/bridges-framework/
Yaroslav mentioned Railsware’s products:
Coupler.io: https://www.coupler.io/
Titan Apps: https://titanapps.io/
And they’ve listed some trusted resources to support Ukraine here:
Railsware Supports Ukraine
Show Transcript (produced by Descript, so potentially with a few errors)…
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 279 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Yaroslav Lazor.
We are back again. Welcome to the, I think three, but, but to the end of the year, because already we’re hurtling to 2024, which is a terrifying concept. , Chris, how has your week been?
Chris: I’ve been traveling around this week, Matt. Rather unusually, because it’s been quite quiet. A few weeks for, for travel, but I actually went to London this week and I went to the launch of the open data.
, The latest report on open source, the start of open source and, the invitation of Amanda Brock, who has been on this podcast a couple of times. And hopefully we can get back on again soon because that’s the open source world is, is one that needs, , , a lot of support.
. It was really interesting actually, they’ve actually created a little video of what’s going on in terms of open source and the kind of things that it’s promoting in the UK and they had the Shadow Minister for Tech and Digital talking there about, she seemed to get it, which was good, although I noticed in the news tonight they’ve had a bit of a reshuffle and she’s been shuffled off somewhere else, so they’ve got a new Shadow Minister for Tech and Digital.
And, and I also spent some time with, old colleagues and new colleagues. I saw, , a demo or not actually a demo. I mean, it’s a, it’s a product, , of a, of a service that uses, one of the LLM models, I think Claude or something like that to create training courses, right?
So you tell it you want a training course, you tell it how many , modules you want, you tell it you want. Questions at the end and it goes away and it does it and it builds it into a, what do they call them? Something like Moodle, LL, LM, LL.
Matt: Learning Management System, LMS. Yeah,
Chris: LMS. There we go. Uh, all those L’s and M’s are confusing me.
So, uh, and it builds that into AutoMagically and, you know, that’s quite an interesting use case. And I attended the, uh, Worship World Company of Information Technologists. Dinner as well. Lunch. That was, which was nice. Met, some new people there and, , had, , the company of,, a lady, , who works in the cabin office and also James Boar, our, , security, , guru who stalks the podcast.
So, yes, uh, it’s been a good week, Matt. It’s been an interesting and, and, and very, , varied week. How about you?
Matt: , I’ve had far less. , entertainment, by the sounds of it. , , we did the, , keynote karaoke last week, which was great fun. Seemed to go down well. , I think in the end eight people volunteered to be able to make up a presentation to unknown slides as they went along, which is, , entertaining.
And I’m now plotting to see if we can do it in, , other formats in other places. That’d be good. And just chucking away, it’s that kind of making sure that stuff is, particularly with clients, everything that we have needs to be done and dusted before the Christmas break gets done and dusted before the Christmas break, particularly making sure that contracts needed to be in place for the start of the new calendar year are in place.
I’m interested on the open source stuff. What is, what is on the agenda for open source in open UK
Chris: Well, they’re very keen on understanding how much people in the UK contribute to open source and how much influence we have on the development of those products. So they’re looking at these kind of mapping commits, mapping, things that have actually been accepted into the, the open source software around, around the UK.
, and trying to, I think from my point of view, what, The question is, how do you then take those people who are, imaginative enough and motivated enough to support open source projects, who could then become part of success stories in the UK and stop them just being hoovered off to, , you know, the Bay Area or something, because they, you know, they get a job with one of the American companies, right?
And that’s kind of the… That’s what the Take UK or Open UK are trying to achieve with this, I think is to, is to protect and, and nurture some of that, uh, talent for the uk, which I think is
Matt: reasonable. No, absolutely. Um, and is there any sort of trend within any of that? Is there more open source activity going on?
Less is it level or,
Chris: uh, that was something that we didn’t get any numbers on at the time, but they are working on that apparently. Okay. So that should be sort of a later thing. I did ask that question actually. Um, I was interested in how. relative to the code base, basically, that’s that, you know, it, is it growing, but are we falling away relative to the code base or, you know, but yeah, those numbers are still being
Matt: crunched.
Difficult numbers to calculate as well. Cause you do run into that risk of, um, working out on metrics that are based on number of lines of code created, which of course is well, exactly
Chris: how much is being used. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a bit of a. A bit of an art, I think, rather than a science, that one. Mm.
Matt: Absolutely. , talking of the Bay Area, , Jaroslav, , how are you doing?
Yaroslav: I’m doing pretty well. Thank you for asking. It’s not a Bay Area here. Los Angeles, and,
Matt: but… We’re a bit, a bit down the coast.
Yaroslav: Yeah, a bit south. , doing all right. , wanted to contribute quickly to the open source discussion you guys were having.
, , it’s interesting that UK as a government is thinking about it as it’s considered as, well, kind of a currency, right? You, you have, it kind of is, right? That there’s pounds, but there’s also like lines of codes that people contribute. And , , it’s one of the places where , engineers can, can be hyper creative because they are product managers within.
The product managers, product owners, engineers, , within what is it that they do, uh, in the open source. As it’s kind of used for this internal market, uh, engineering market, right? And then, and they are utmost creative and passionate about doing that because you’re not being paid. So, , it’s a bit tricky to monetize that or even to use that to some extent.
, but it’s a, it’s a great passionate energy, uh, for, for those folks who, who do. , those contributions, to to put them to good use. But we found that it’s very tricky to use that and turn that into productizing. From some perspective, like, I mean, you take people who are great at open source and then you put them on the products, but then they don’t have the same amount of ownership or passion or interest because it’s a very natural interest that they had before.
And now you kind of have to, you kind of have to use it. Um, in some, some other, you know, space and like my daughter is, uh, she’s an art student and she, she’s going to high school and she said, well, they making me do art by the deadline and this is not how I want to do it. I’m an artist and, uh, and this is a similar thing.
I love to persuade people to, to be productive. To be product oriented, to make products better, but they, you know, tend to feel that there’s politics involved in that. Oh, I have to talk to this person.
I have to make that person change their mind. And here I kind of didn’t have to do it because I’m, I’m an artist. To produce this open source. So it’s, uh, it’s tricky to take those artists and, proceed them to change humanity for the, for the better.
Chris: That’s, that’s exactly how I used to be when I was a, when I was a coder.
We weren’t even called coders. Then we were called programmers. And somebody would say, we need to do this by the end of the month. And I’d throw my hands up and say, you can’t ask. It’ll happen when it happens. I can’t be responsible for the. Artistic process. This is, this is a bad inspiration. I can’t be sure when it’ll hit me, you know, and, uh, in fact, I’m pretty sure there’s plenty of programmers out there just like that now.
Yaroslav: Yeah, I think people should surrender to this as well because when you’re a hobbyist, you do something for the hobby and you have this urge to do something, it’s great. But when you do something as a professional, you know, you show up every day. To turn on this, kind of inspiring process within you and actually be creative, within certain boundaries.
This is what like made human, human race evolve and survive, , throughout times. Right. And then, I think people should just try to try to do that. I will definitely persuade my daughter to, to be creative in, in a, in a calendar because it’s, uh, it’s just, , I think all the best things that we have in the world, uh, music that was created by, by artists who were doing it over and over and over again.
They definitely, uh, they were definitely doing it kind of on the schedule, repetitive, they were pushing themselves to do that.
Matt: . There’s also so many stereotypes on there about , , the tortured soul of the artist and it’s all to be incredibly hard and difficult and when the creative muse hits and again, I’ve worked with many developers over the years have been like that as well.
, but it’s, it’s a process. And one of the things that is. , it’s almost like a, revealing of how the magic trick is done is when people actually start to be able to talk about how the process of creativity works. There are a lot of people who find that very disturbing because they want it to just be some sort of magic thing.
And there’s, there’s a balance there and there’s, who knows when inspiration strikes, but actually getting the stuff done is often about being able to, as you say, being able to do it to the calendar. Learning those skills is really important. , so anyway, this week we are going to be talking about, , building software.
We’re going to be talking about transition of organizations from different modes. And so I think we should probably crack on,
, businesses go through different phases. They have to be able to adapt to the spaces that they’re in. They have to be able to spot where there are opportunities to be able to do things differently. And. Well, I think we’re going to find some interesting stories on this week’s show around exactly that.
So, Yaroslav, do you want to just give us a, a bit of a, um, a potted history of your business, a little bit of , um, the story of how it came to be and what you’ve done and how you got to where you are now?
Yaroslav: Our history is also a bit dramatic and artistic. , I think we gave people a lot of space and a lot of trust and a lot of, , stake in the game at the early days, uh, when we were not growing.
So the company is like 16 years old. And , we have been, , hiring and figuring out how to build software and learning from like really some of the best, uh, in the industry, , on, on the deep principles of building software. And we, we have a lot of frameworks where we would give people those, uh, ability to vote.
We call this thing a product fair and we would show all the products we have and then we ask people, you know, to vote what is it they want to work on and we gave them, measurements so that they don’t have to, , write comments, , and there would be like, really want, want. You really have to, don’t want, I’ll experiment with stuff and from that we’ll be, uh, data driven and, and to try to pack the best teams possible to work on the best products.
And I think we moved away from that a bit because, , when you give a lot of,, choices to people, they get confused without a lot of information, but then when you give them a lot of information, they get even more. confused. So now we’re a more driven company. So within our artistic times, we would be building products on the side.
We will be helping clients build their products. , we built some amazing software over the years , we were like pioneering some of the domains and, and doing some great, high quality, high performance software. We were building things on the site, our own products, but we were hesitant to deliver them.
You know, they still had bugs or maybe they didn’t have a website. , we, we built a CI server, a very nice CI hosted CI solution long time before there were CircleCI or the other like top tier products. Which are probably now billion dollar companies. And if we would launch it back then, I think we would have a billion dollar company.
But we didn’t because we were artistic about it and we wanted it to be great and we were thinking, we were trying not to put a managerial push into the process of engineering creation and so on and so on. That was really stupid. Then as we were helping other companies build their software and looking and watching how they grow and how it transforms,, using all the approaches and principles that we learned, , , we saw this kind of creative process.
, one of them, the cleanest out of them is Calendly, because it was started with us only by our team. , I was a product manager in there. , there was a lot of influence, , for , how the company was started. You can start it in so many ways. And we were using our product management principles that we, we believe in, , basically to, to see potential directions, what would those directions entail?
How hard is it to do them? How hard is it to start? , and Calendly became a flopping success, right? And then after that we were like, Oh wow, we definitely need to push our products further. And, , around 2019, 2019, we started being more serious about the products and we started to do basically the same thing we were doing, but we were doing them more artistically.
Right. And then to, to become disciplined about it, actually something I just talked about on an open source software, right. push ourselves to deliver them. And it was pretty hard because you, we had to hire a very different crowd of people than, than we had before. , so we, you know, typically we have product managers, engineers, , designers, and, , QA and , in order to actually deliver the products, we need support and, Sales and design and marketing, a lot of marketing actually, , and security, , to just keep, keep things, , up and running.
And, and that’s, , actually a very different crowd. , and then you don’t understand how those things should function. So we need to dive into those domains, understand how they function. And then you, only then you can start hiring people. So this process was. This process was quite a bit of suffering and, , and it’s like going to stretch artists who stretch.
Going to a gym is one thing. It’s, it’s hard. You, you, you kind of like, you push yourself, but going to a stretch artist is pure masochist activity where they basically stretch you and it hurts all the time and you know it’s going to be a huge pain. It was very similar, , to basically to gain knowledge into all those other domains and, and to become great at it and kind of to divinism.
So,
Matt: , Did you have to, , take a different approach to the things that you’d been doing before? So you have product managers and developers and QA’s as you went from building software for other people to building software for your own products. Did that mean that those core functions needed to change mindset as well as building the other services around it?
Or was it a similar sort of approach for the, for the core and then augmenting with those other skills and capabilities?
Yaroslav: Yeah, so it’s actually very similar, but in the same sense, it’s very different because when you have a Product owner or a leader of some organization and you take him and you persuade him into a certain way, right?
So we have this process called bridges or inception where we would take the domain of the product what we’re talking about It can be anything school system in US which is very different than than anyone would used to or In insurance space, , again in U. S., most of our clients are from U. S., , or Calendly, for example, , there’s a subtle, craft of booking events and closing the deals and keeping things tight, , and , we would use our bridges, , principle to build this massive board of, , who are the people that we’re helping?
What are their issues that they’re having on an everyday basis? What are the benefits that they want to, to have? , what are the risks that they want to mitigate? What is the domain knowledge of the people that want to build the software? What is it something you know that other people don’t know?
So basically, and you build this board of knowledge, everyone is looking at the same board, and everyone is reading the same cards. And… Our brain is not meant to read big pages of paper and be understanding everything from it. It would understand something from it. Our brain is more network y, right? It’s a network of connected events.
So this is what we did on this whiteboard. We were putting one card, which meant one thing. For example, that it takes six… Six back and forths to book a meeting with someone. And if you hit the, or a do knowledge that if you hit a spot, , of booking a meeting within the first 10 minutes, then you have like a 90% chance of, , securing the deal faster than the other people because you just got someone cut in front of someone.
So the, you know, there was something, uh, as a very basic, uh, important information about gallery and then for a salesperson. What do you mean? Everyone knows that. And then everyone doesn’t know that and they think there’s more important things to it. Like, you know, keeping settings of your meeting or, something like that. And, , when, when everyone, the product managers, engineers, and designers, when everyone takes time to actually talk about the things. and outline them into cards, they have those recorded clips, video clips in their head of knowledge , , that was connected to this one card.
So every now, every time now, when you look at this card, you remember this clip and you remember this knowledge.
So Bridges gives you this ability to literally be on the same page because you see this big sheet, big page of cards that, that we’re talking about, and then you’re pointing fingers to them when you make arguments. , and then we have another principle is called the heart, , which is you’re trying to figure out what is it that you need to build to, to make it’s like physical or digital appearance in the world so that everyone starts looking at it and say, Oh, this is what we’re talking about.
I had a couple of variations in my head and he had a couple of variations in his head. But now as you start to building things, not from what’s most clear to you, but from what’s most important for the product. What are the most important forms and essences that the product needs to take shape of right and then and and then people are like aha This is this is what’s happening, right?
Even after you had all those discussions So for example, if we if we go back to one of our products, which is a atlasian marketplace Add on, it’s a smart checklist So it’s a, it’s a checklist, , and it started from a super simple thing. It had a text area where you could write minus, , checklist items, plus would be a finished checklist item, and tilde would be in progress, x would be canceled checklist item.
So it had a text area, , it was storing this into Atlassian. , marketplace as a custom field, and then it would have a saved button that would render that into an H ml, which had check boxes, the appropriate check boxes. And when you check the checkbox, what we did is we resave the whole text. And if two people would , , refresh the page, one person would keep it for like few days and then he would go and check on the checkbox.
He would actually rewrite the old version of the checkbook. Which was fine. And we did it in just a few days. And then we delivered the product. And there was a product. And it, , it was like, you know, six months in the marketplace and about 700 companies installed it. And we just spent three days on it.
And that’s it. There was a software. It gives you a lot of stuff. It gives you the ability to search. It gives you the ability to do automations. It gives you, it opened up so much stuff that we had in our, uh, in our ideas, but in order to build it as a cloud software with APIs and integrations and so on, it took us like a year of four engineers, which eventually it took, right?
Chris: That’s a really good example of. Developers building software that they see a need for themselves, right? And they build something that other developers can use. But you talked about the fact that you had to have, in order to build products successfully, you needed all these other people.
These support people and marketing and all of these. Is that? In order to, to bring those other perspectives to the developers that they don’t have
Yaroslav: yes. Yes, and you do it in inception phase You try to do it in inception phase. It really depends what stage the software is on. And it’s called Inception, but it’s actually, it’s weird when you do Inception in a software that is 5 years old or 10 years old. So, we do Bridges Session.
And, I think we as human beings are like, generally perfectionists somewhere down, deep down, right? And we want to build it, like, we want to put all the information and do everything proper. And like, do it the right way. Which, which is like, whatever. And then if you put too many people in the room, you’ll kill the dynamics of the, of the team.
, so as a leader, you have to understand, do you need to bring those marketing folks, because they might be hanging in the meeting, contributing nothing or being very confused of what are we talking about, or they might, they might contribute. So you need to understand what the dynamics will be in that room.
And you’re, you’re kind of cooking a dish as a, as a person who runs this show, you’re cooking a dish and you need to understand what to add there, right? You don’t want to add the dessert, the soup and the main dish and all of that and put it into a blender and say, here, here’s a nutritious smoothie.
Please eat that. It’s not going to be that great, but so you have to be careful on a lot of those things. And specifically the most important thing, I think, is the team dynamics when, when team is not confused and they’re happy. Excited about the journey. This is like, is one of the most important things.
So this is what you start, you should be cooking from. And, you, you need to add just enough ingredients and then explain it to the team, explain them enough of vision. Not too much, because if you explain too much vision, they’ll go like, oh, you’re a lunatic. Or if you explain to little vision, you say, well, this is a copycat thing.
Like, you’re not inventing anything, right? So you need to be very careful. And once your team is healthy, you can start building around them the next layer of team members. Those could be in support and sales, , those could be other engineers and product managers and so on and that, that was one of, this is one of our most important, , ingredients.
The proper onboarding and appropriate dynamics of the team. Just feeling of people, and, and kind of like nudging them into certain direction. And for them to have their own ownership of, um, of how, how to, how to do it. You kind of say what, and they say how, and then you, you dance around understanding that.
Matt: There was a, uh, interesting discussion, , on the, show signal group, today about the, the description of building software as engineering and actually what you’ve described there is really, I think, really interesting because what you’ve described there is actually software is almost what comes out of the social interactions that you have between people with particular technical skills, but it’s, it is very easy.
You know, the software that is produced can be incredibly influenced by the relationships that exist between the people who are producing it between the customer and the people producing it and being able to understand the way in which that kind of social fabric sits together in the way in which software is built, because there are so many options that you can take, and there are so many ways that you can do things.
And there are so many, decisions to be made that could take you in a good direction or a bad direction. It all comes down to you. At the core, the people in the relationships between them.
Yaroslav: Yeah, it does. And it’s all very tricky. All those subjects are very tricky. There, there are some rule of thumbs, but basically, and there are like, there’s a negative and positive rule of thumbs.
If your team has good dynamics and they, they respect one another and respect them. very important, , element, then, then they’re going to get, they’re going to be better, but only if they only have respect and they don’t have knowledge how to build something. But if they don’t have respect and they just want to be mean to each other and crap on each other’s, , pull requests and, and, and so on.
Then, because people are big children, let’s, let’s face it, there’s, there’s no adults in this world. Um, looking at what the, you know, the heads of states are doing in, in, in the world. It’s like, well, I’m, I’m sorry, there’s zero adults. There’s no fast way of, of doing it. You got to, you got to force through it.
You have to, you have to slowly, , build the team from the proper people, proper leaders, proper dynamic, , and be very into it. And that’s why I, most of those 16 years where my learning years, , and like, I’m an engineer. I love to write code. I don’t get to do it that much nowadays because we have, you know, 70, 80 engineers in the company who, who, who are really great at it.
, but it was the, the core skill that I got. And then we learned the principle of T shape, , which is like expert generalist, right? And then only expert generalist can understand one another. If you put a smart product manager and a smart engineer in the room and you ask them to communicate, and then you like look from this like one side glass.
You’ll see how much miscommunication and, , struggle there is, might be, right? They might just work it out, but they might be so confused. And then the program manager doesn’t want to feel silly. And he would say, ah, yeah, I get it. But he didn’t, you can see it in their face. And then the engineer would say, yeah, sure.
, but he was like, well, I’m just going to do whatever. So I have this saying that I love, which is like, engineers won’t build what you want. They build what they understood. And they will basically do it based on their dynamics. Right. And then they, they think like they have all those weird rules and wrong dynamics and other companies and so on, where people said, like, you know, someone said like, don’t touch that, like, uh, don’t touch it if it works or why didn’t you touch it?
, it could be improved. And then, and then they live in this crazy world in between, , where they need to kind of figure out who you are and what is your management style? Are you like a bad manager? Do you really understand what’s happening? And they’re really trying to be productive. Like. Play it cool, don’t be a fool, and so on.
And then they start building some things like, you know, login screen or forgot password screen, and do some super great method of super authentication there, or some new way of doing stuff. And then the product manager will say, So are you, like, progressing? He’s like, Yeah, yeah, look, it’s… I already have three screens, three useless screens that no one probably needs.
Chris: But you’re talking about, , you’re talking about experience, aren’t you?
You need people with experience and, and as you say, , a view of more than one area in order to be able to make those judgments. And I’m thinking about the. Claims that we’re currently, being made about the ability of, , large, large language models and AI powered systems to write code and how that’s going to improve, , code of productivity by 40 percent or whatever it is.
And I wonder whether that ability to. Understand or to be able to judge whether something is understood and whether people because it’s all very well having an ability to increase your productivity by 40 percent if you’re 40 percent in the wrong direction. How important will that sort of human side be in future?
Do you think it become more and more important than the technology technological side because the commodity stuff is done by the computer or will we never reach that stage?
Yaroslav: So I, so basically I remember watching this movie about, the , band, super, super popular, Queens. And there was this time when Queens separated, right?
And then the, , the soloists, , just went the opposite direction and he hired the best musicians and he wasn’t able to produce great music with them who were like, supposedly be more professional than the folks that he was hanging out with., and I’ll explain where I’m going with that. And then basically he came back and they started to produce great music after that.
And, a lot of people say, well, I’ll… Programming is dead. LLMs will write all your code. They definitely can write a lot of code, a lot of hallucinated code as well. but who will make sure that it actually is the right code that they wrote? What, , some of the more popular thoughts, are that they’re not here to replace someone.
They’re here to speed everyone up. Those people are professionals who, who need stuff done. Very often you would say like, I just need to say, I have it in my head. I just need to type it in. It’s not necessarily type it in, you type it left to right, top to bottom. You try and then you figure it out, and then it might take you years when you eventually figure it out, right?
And then, and NLM is a pair, is a person that you kind of collaborate with, and you work with. But the software is being created, like there’s a saying, the best ideas, the best idea should win, right? But I find that the best idea is not a particular one idea.
The best idea is a Frankenstein of all the ideas that you had in the room that you break down and then you, sometimes you make a completely different thing it’s not like, you know, with, with people you, you cannot build it, but with LLM it will be like this perfect thing that will build exactly what you want. Very often you don’t know what you want. You have a feeling. Or like Steve Jobs was saying.
Keep on going. I’ll tell you when we’ll, we’ll reach there. What does it even mean? What kind of a product management device is that? Right? And then so, so there’s a lot of ideas and a lot of directions, but you have to evaluate them, verify them and think about them as a team. And LLM is just a member of that team.
Matt: I think there’s also something interesting about how, and this, I think in a number of industries, the idea of automating out the kind of the grunt work is.
, attractive because you can take out human cost if you can get the, the LLMs to be able to generate stuff that otherwise would be fairly tedious to produce. But there is something about learning the art of a particular profession through doing the tedious stuff. It’s putting, putting the time in to be able to understand how the fundamentals work.
, how will developers learn to do good development? If a lot of the, drudge work is taken away, which is the sort of stuff that you may give to a more junior developer.
So who is starting to learn the. I don’t know if there’s an answer to that. I don’t know if it’s an unfair, , fear, but it does feel that the stuff that is most likely to get automated will be the stuff that actually does serve a value in the same way that, I don’t know. Meetings in person in offices served a value, but it wasn’t the meeting.
It was all the stuff that sat around it.
Yaroslav: I think, you know, LLMs just can produce much more things in a shorter period of time, not necessarily the right things. , there’s a lot of discussions, and there’s a lot of speculation. There’s some principles, , like if you put a lot of compute into, a task and generate a thousand ideas and then validate them and then build on top of that, you can actually like for like a million dollar, you can make, uh, allow them to do amazing things as compared to just sending one prompt, which is not well, you know, , documented.
But this is the same with humans. , I tend to look at an LLM and then work with him and use the guidance of an LLM like I would be of a wise friend who doesn’t judge you, who generally has genuine knowledge on stuff, who is hard working and is not trying to just like, you know, look other way when you have a conversation with him, and he doesn’t…
Talk shit behind your back on you and then basically when you do that, and then you would you would you know Sometimes people say well, I told the left to write a book for me and it didn’t I was like, well Did you try it with a human to write a book for you? Then like you you have to show some respect you have to explain some certain things You need to explain the context and what’s happening and then where where you’re at Where are you struggling business like just you know, treat them treat treat the thing with respect I think, conscious approach is the center of all of it.
So if you consciously and genuinely are trying to do something,, with people or with LLMs, and then you really, consciously means you need to understand. , but the world will probably divide into people who genuinely want to do something and then LLMs will help them with that and the world will be just watching an infinite amount of Netflix generated by the LLMs in some kind of a virtual reality matrix.
Matt: Another theme for, , your business is you are very much a distributed hybrid global thing. And part of that is because you’ve had to be able to think, I guess, quite Uh, well, you’ve had to deliver quite a lot of change to how you operate over the last two or three years, because your business started based in Ukraine and you’re now working in all sorts of places across the world.
What was the last few years been like be able to have to re rethink how you operate?
Yaroslav: Actually, we, we, we think how we operate 10 years ago, when we allowed people to do remote work before it was cool. Way before COVID and people were, you know, traveling to Thailand or Bali before that was cool and, and, and spending some time there for months and working from there and just generally synchronizing their hours into around European hours.
It doesn’t matter if you’re like in America, like I get up at 4am to work with people. Or when you’re in Bali, let’s say you, you were up, up until midnight. And, and that’s the problem with the person that, that moved, that shifted. So you live in the morning and then, you know, you work at the night or in US, it’s the other way around.
I started very early. And then after 2 p. m. I basically have my, my life to, to attend to. , and we’re in 24 countries right now and in 79 cities, which is interesting. I’m sure his numbers, right? But it might be, there’s a lot of solo of people in just one city, right? We, because of this consciousness approach and because of this artistic beginning, humble artistic beginnings, we always were hiring people who are able to participate in this creative process and actually deliver products.
, And then we created this core, , principles and we saw what works, what doesn’t work. And, , we’re now, we hire about 0. 66 percent out of the market. And in the last three years, we reviewed 50, 000 candidates out of them, we hired 150. people. So it’s, , it’s a ridiculous amount. , I use coupler, our data product, just to pull the calendar data, calendar lead data and calendar data.
And we have, , 160 meetings in the past three weeks with candidates. Is it an intrapol or it’s a thing called the parent interview, or that was a full day where we spend, , time with the person or half of a day. It’s just a lot of, a lot of selection process. We, we really put a lot of efforts into selecting people and, , that’s why it works.
And we don’t care where you’re at. We just care if you are able to be this part of this process and then there’s enough people to onboard you. Um, you know, there’s enough people with 10 years of experience and then nine years of experience, eight, seven, three, two, one, and then we have been growing. Uh, we didn’t grow for most of the time we started growing.
And before that, we were pretty static, you know, we’re at the same size at around the same revenue for like 10 years. And then in the last six years, we started growing like 20, 30, 40, 60, 60 percent per year. Um, and, um, just using all those principles that we learned and everything that we practiced and, and.
You know, sometimes we were, there was a time when I was helping a lot of people and spending with them and holding them and trying to help them to deliver something. And then I looked around that I’m helping them to deliver like regular daily job. And the rest of the people are delivering this daily job by themselves with zero help.
I was like, wait, wait a minute. It’s not fair to those people maybe I help them to deliver the job better rather than how those people deliver their basic job And this is what’s our one of our principles. Is that a person has to be good at basic Work and if they’re not a good basic work, we cannot really help them because there’s a lot of help needed For that regard, and there’s, there’s no, you know, there’s no age, uh there’s, there’s no age or race or whatever that is a part of this requirement.
It’s just, can you do a basic job? And then, you know, and sometimes people complain, they’re like, you didn’t give me a great enough description yet. Maybe you didn’t give a perfect description, but those other 150 people are productive with this description and you’re not. And I’m sorry, but we cannot produce this description.
You have to be more dynamic in this. , you know, like just, just learn this approach and learn it for your peers. And, and then if you can, great. And if you cannot, then, then we will just have to move on to someone else out of the one of the 50, 000 people that we look through. And the other people are very, you know, they’re happy.
They’re, they’re productive. They, they enjoy it. They love the principles. They come to do it.
Matt: How many of the people that go through that selection process are then not a fit for you? So if you talk about that kind of the people who can’t do the basics there
Yaroslav: I would say people always can do the basics especially for the injury sake or for the first three months.
, But then they have their own Ways to look at things and then they they might kind of degrade their quality of work on a daily basis And say this is too much for me But we’re always very transparent and that’s why we have a full day and we were super transparent of what is it that we expect.
It’s more like 20 to 30 percent.
Matt: And in terms of being able to maintain a culture within all of this, you talked there about onboarding and having people who are able to support others coming into, what other things do you do to be able to establish some sorts of identity as an organization, when you’ve got such a distributed workforce?
Yaroslav: You know, there are distributed, but they’re still working a particular team, , on a particular thing. And we always make sure that we never start a project with a new person, just a new person. That’s it. And there’s no, like, even management oversight is too little. , You have to be a part of some group of, there’s so many factors that get slashed throughout daily work.
And we always make sure that there’s someone who understands our culture, who can pair. The person, I mean, if you pair the person for, you know, five days a week, uh, for a particular period of time, you, you exchange. Everything., thoughts, culture, the principles, comments on your code. There’s so much that happens.
And this pairing is very, very important for all, for all sorts of work. , and we do it, you know, in accounting, in recruiting, in support, in anything., and then this culture is kind of shared. Actually, McDonald’s is pretty good at it. Their, their pair teach their people. Um, you, you would come in and you would see the junior person and the other person explaining them and showing them, learn by doing, basically, , what is it that they’re doing.
And then this culture is being shared. Now this culture is, , , , everyone is a part of the culture and they were executed within the culture. I have no immunity. You know, if, if I break the culture, people can, can bash me and do whatever they want to me. So I’m, I’m, um, I’m the same member of the, of, of the s culture.
So, and then, you know, and then this culture gives birth to, to really great things and I think it’s, it’s an, uh, organism on its own basically nowadays.
Chris: Ah, thank you . , that’s a really interesting, uh, story, uh, around your business and the culture within, , what have you got planned for this week in the, in the week ahead? Is it an exciting week? Have you got plenty going on?
Yaroslav: It’s a very exciting week. , we have some product launches that I’m looking forward for.
They’re being in work for quite a while and when it’s a product that we launch in addition to our current product, we really try to make sure that our clients will get a great experience right on. So we’re going to deliver our second product to the Atlassian marketplace and third, I think, at the same time.
And that’s an AI product and AI products are very exciting, , nowadays. And then there’s, there, there’s some deadlines, some interesting deadlines that we need to meet, like, uh, the Atlassian event is coming out in Las Vegas in April and the deadline to submit a speech. To it is, uh, 1st of December that we just figured yesterday that it is 1st of December, so, uh, we need to, put it together.
What are you doing? What are you
Chris: doing here? You should be writing a speech.
Yaroslav: Yeah, I am, I am. Actually, I’ll just use the whole podcast as a speech. Ask the, the LLM to, to make a presentation out of it and I think it’ll work. And then there’s, there’s a lot of family stuff. I have four kids. I have four daughters.
Two year old, six year old, 14 year old, and 20 year old. And then each one of them always has a big drama and multiple medium dramas and a couple of small dramas. You know, after, after I seen 50, 000 people in recruiting, I was like, well, I need to make my daughters be great and then go try to figure that out.
Right. And we did like, I don’t know, 50 products, probably 50 software projects throughout our life cycle. And now I’m only starting to figure it out. So if I would have 50 kids, that would make sense. I would know how to raise them, but you never know how to raise them. And, uh, I think we’re getting a dog soon as well, so we need to figure that out.
So, that’s it. Every week, very fun week. Nowadays, life is very slow. One day is so much, is a lot. Like, it can change, it can make it or break it. So it’s very reasonable.
Chris: All right, you know, I don’t envy you, , four kids and a dog coming up. But, , then again, you could be, , Matt. What’s going on? What’s going on in your life, Matt?
What’s your, week hold?
Matt: , it’s going to be a relatively quiet week because a lot of my colleagues are up in Manchester for a series of events, , which I’m not going to be there for. A series of unfortunate events. No, no, no. It’s unfortunate I will not be at the events, but there will not be unfortunate events.
It’s all good. And then, , the weekend will beckon to the annual ceremony of buying the Christmas tree, which involves initial excitement and, , a sense of festive cheer. And then by tree number 76, which isn’t up to the standard that, uh, the, the matriarch of the house insists upon for symmetricality of trees, even though they are naturally growing objects that are not symmetrical.
, and then tempers afraid, shouting happens, and eventually we go, Oh, that one will do! And, uh, it gets shoved into the back of the car, and then we take it home to stick it in the corner of the house and… Stick stuff on it. , i’m looking forward to it even though and we were laughing about the fact that it almost invariably Ends up in in arguments and short tempers because the amount of decision making that has to be involved in the tree How about you?
How are you? What’s your week head looking like?
Chris: Well, actually, yeah, quite quiet compared to last week. , not so much travel. , but the house has been upside down for weeks because we’ve had the kitchen and I’ve been decorating all weekend. , something I enjoy doing and then no doubt it will be Christmas decoration time, but we, we have the annual, , tradition of getting me getting the tree out of the loft.
That’s, we have a, we have a, a You know, faux tree that, gets put up every year. It’s a perfectly good tree, and I, and I have done the real tree thing. And you think I’m dragging one of them damn things into my house, only to have to drag the damn thing out again after Christmas, shedding needles all over the place.
No, no, I’m not doing that. So, , the, , plastic one will do.
Matt: Oh, and who says the spirit of Christmas is dead? There we go. Anyway, , that’s it for another week. We have two shows now left until the, , The Christmas break. So, next week we have got a look ahead in a special edition of Ask WB40 to ask about things that might be happening in 2024.
So, , drop us a line if you have some ideas for that. And then we’ve got one more guest before the end of the year and then we’ll be taking a break over the Christmas festivities. , Yaroslav, thanks again for joining this week. It’s been a delight. Thank you. And we will be back, same place, next week.
Yaroslav: Thank you for listening for WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com and all the good podcast platforms.
This week we chat with Gavin Jones to talk through some of the challenges and opportunities when looking at collaborating and technology.
You can find out more about Gavin and his work at:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/MeeTime
Website: https://www.meetimeservices.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-jones-meetime
Episode Transcript… (any errors are the fault of the AIs)
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 278 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Gavin Jones.
Welcome back. Uh, we’ve had a week off. , it was a award ceremony last week. My eldest son won an award, which was all a bit surreal. He appeared to win the award for winning an award. There we go. , Chris back again. , are you well?
Chris: I am, thank you. , I think you should be downplaying that, uh, it doesn’t, you know, any sort of award is good, you know, at that age, when you’re, when you’re finding your way in the world, I think you should be a bit more, , chipper about an award, even if it’s winning an award.
Matt: Yes, you’re, you’re right. I think my big problem is that it’s a thing, it’s an organisation called the… Jack Petchy Foundation. And Jack Petchy is an East End boy, made good, , made a lot of money, I think in timeshares, I can’t remember, but wants to give all, you know, give stuff back and give other people a good start in life, which is a very laudable thing.
The only problem I’ve got with Jack Petchy, he was the first person to own Watford Football Club after Elton John sold up and he completely buggered us up. And I can’t let that go. And it’s like 30 years ago, but I’m, you know, this is the way football is.
Chris: That’s a really terrible reason to be down on your son’s achievement.
I mean, really, you do need to get over yourself.
Matt: Not only that, as the thing started up in the Rose Theatre in Kingston, so there’s hundreds of people there, and the Deputy Mayor of Kingston, , Council stood up and he said, I’d forgotten what it was that I knew about Jack Petchy. I’d forgotten that he used to own Watford Football Club.
He’s like, no, don’t bring attention to it right at the start. I thought he’d been able to put that aside, but no. So there we go. , how’s your week been?
Chris: Well, my week has been fine. My week has been essentially, , coping with the, the, an upside down house because we’re having some work done, which is, , extremely, , middle class, isn’t it?
It’s not something that, , happens very often around here. , I don’t know, I normally have the money, and I certainly don’t have it now. So my time has been spent either decorating to cover for the fact that everything’s, , in a mess or Having conversations with so called project managers from so called, , companies that do these sort of things.
, and messing about with electrics, which is what I was doing just before this podcast. Which is why my head’s a bit scrambled. Because you know where you’ve got, you know if you’ve got your switches with your, like your landing light, where you’ve got, like, You could, you could switch them up upstairs and downstairs as well.
I managed to take one out and then replace it and then put it back together exactly as it was before. Now it doesn’t work properly. And now I’ve got to try and figure out where these completely similar color wires come from, where they go, whether they’re neutral, it’s live, switch live. common. So, so yeah,
Matt: like, like online diary management, , that sort of thing is a special branch of mathematics that the normal folks like you and I will never understand.
Chris: I did understand it once I’ve done it. I’ve done it before. And once I understood it, it was like, I, I saw things from a completely different perspective. It was like being on a higher plane. But I’m not on that plane anymore and I need to re re ascend to that plane in order to figure this out. Which I am going to do at the weekend now because I can’t be bothered with it anymore.
But, uh, no, my week’s been alright, you know, it’s good. Been a good week, thank you very much. How about you?
Matt: , I have been doing lots of things. There’s lots of things on at the moment. There’s potentially a new client. There’s a, , couple of clients on the go at the moment with us thinking about what we do next and work involved in that.
I am involved in preparing for a, an event in Manchester, which is happening next week, but I won’t actually be there. So having to be able to prep everybody and make sure everything’s aligned and everybody knows what they’re doing. And I am also doing an event on Thursday night in London where we are going to be, Doing keynote karaoke, which will be fun and I’m hosting all of that.
So that’s entertaining and I’m sure that there are other some other things as well And so it’s just like lots and lots and lots and lots of bits I’m supposed to be writing a magazine article which is due by the 19th of December and that is reminding me desperately of the Douglas Adams quote about loving deadlines and loving the noise as they whoosh past It’s definitely feeling like that.
So, , yeah, it’s busy, it’s good, busy, good, busy. And, , and then trying to keep up with, you know, politics and what on earth is going on at OpenAI and, you know, that sort of stuff as well, which is of course easily distractible. That’s the thing, isn’t it? When you’re busy, you’re always looking out for something to distract you.
Ha ha!, anyway, joining us this week is, is Gavin. Gavin, , how has your week been?
Gavin: My week was, , good, thank you. Yeah. Work-wise, I was mostly trying to keep up with, , all of the renaming, I mean announcements that, , came outta Microsoft’s event, , last week, which had to re-watch things quite a few times to, did they say something slightly different?
Yeah. Is that paid for? Is that not? But yeah. Is it,
Matt: is this a good, , long tradition of Microsoft’s appalling ability to brand things?
Gavin: They even joked that they were bad at it, but then they also didn’t make it much better in the following sentence.
Matt: Oh, yes, it’s, from, from the time that I worked there, I think that there was a, there was a second release of the version of Windows that only ran on the underpowered ARM based tablet that they had for Windows 8.
And I can’t remember what they ended up calling that, but it was so ungainly, it was untrue. I need to kind of hark back to those days when at least they had a year to be able to Seems to have gone out the window We will be talking this week about , some of the stuff that you do So rather than trade it before we start talking about it.
I say we should probably just crack on
Chris: So Gavin joins us because today we’re going to talk about collaboration and we’re going to talk about how we do it or don’t do it, particularly in offices these days. And this also touches on some of the stuff that Matt’s been putting out into the universe around where do we work and what the nature of remote work really is.
And, , the reason we’ve got Gavin with us is because that Gavin teaches people how to use Microsoft Teams. , how to, not just how to use it, but how to get the best out of it and how to set up collaboration in a way that benefits an organization. So, welcome Gavin. Nice to have you on with us. , , you did this, , for one of your employers, , as I recall, and then decided it was worth, , branching out and doing it as a, full time job.
Is that right?
Gavin: That’s right, yeah. So I spent, , the last 15 years at Molson Coors, the beer company, doing lots of different jobs there, but nothing in IT. So I started in finance, business partnering, went into logistics. There’s some bits on kegs, some demand management forecasting, and then it ends up on some like bigger projects.
So like integrated business planning, which was like a, I have to run the business sort of projects. And then some it wants an SAP implementation, trade promotions, management system implementation. And my last job there was transformation manager working for the sales director. Who’s only brief when starting the job was, I think I was spending too much time on internal stuff and not enough time selling.
Go and do something and, , of course it was right because it’s, you know, a massive global company and like most big companies We’re just completely hamstrung by internal stuff, emails, meetings, and it’s very nice company to work for I should say, but With, you know, if you go too far on anything it turns into a negative So because everyone was like really wanted to, you know, never wanted to annoy anybody then that just turned into like bigger and bigger meetings to try and Make sure everyone’s okay.
And, we had some, , licenses from the U S business, which again, Microsoft renaming was at the time called workplace analytics, which to me was better named than now called Viva Insights because Viva Insights you get for free, but also you get Viva Insights that you pay for, which is confusing.
But this particular one, you could like, it scans everyone’s emails and meetings, anonymizes it. You can see how everyone’s sort of working together. So if there’s any pockets of brilliance or. Otherwise across the organization and you know how people work in and can link it to HR data and all sorts of stuff So there’s a good stuff But but basically proved that the sales director was correct with like spending lots of time on internal stuff and not very much time with customers from the data that Microsoft collected and Yeah, I’d use slack in a side project At the time, Teams had only just come out, which, and at the time, it was before the pandemic, so it wasn’t, they weren’t borrowing things from Zoom at the time, they were borrowing things from Slack, and so, , I thought, well, that seems like a good thing to do, there was some research come out from Slack saying that, If you move everything to slack, you can decrease emails and meetings and increase employee engagement.
So all the things that we were after doing and, led a 12, 18 month long project to try and get supply chain, marketing, sales, all working better together. reducing internal time on stuff, so reducing meetings and emails, getting more time for well being, and more time to go and sell stuff.
, and because we had the analytics turned on, sort of found out that my approach sort of saved up to three hours per person per week on average, and decreased after hours work by 30 percent. And I thought it was a good idea to go and try to help other companies do the same thing. , but my timing was probably off because I decided to do that in…
April 2020, just as everything was being locked down, but, , such is the nature of trying to set up a business, never a good time. And, here we are now, three years on.
Chris: , this doesn’t sound like it’s a damning indictment of anybody, including Molson Cause, because let’s face it, we all have those problems.
As you say, it’s, it’s a, it’s a common issue around the sales people in particular, you know, and I think. No matter where you go, we used to have a term once upon a time about salespeople being in the office, and as much as they used to almost applaud the work that they brought in through the process, because partly it’s…
One of the reasons we realized this, this is a company I worked for many years ago, is because they really didn’t trust that the work would be done and prioritized unless they were there. And, , so part of their service as they saw it to their customers was to make sure it got back to them in good time, you know, as they expected it to.
So that was something we had to deal with because having salespeople hanging around in the office where The sales almost certainly weren’t, they weren’t going to sell anything standing in the office. , , wasn’t a very good idea. So most companies I’ve been to since then have had a similar problem, around sales and also around other areas.
I mean, when I’ve worked in IT departments, you know, the amount of meetings we would have in IT departments where I think it was just to keep people from feeling that they hadn’t missed out on something. So everybody got invited to these interminable meetings. And then of course. Lots of people would decide these meetings were a waste of time, so it wouldn’t turn up.
And then the whole point of the meeting would be, it would be, you know, it would fall apart anyway because the , the only, only people that would be in them are the people who had paranoid that they didn’t know everything that was going on Called it. Yeah. . Yeah. And those that called it, you know, who, who, who really should have seen the light and C it by then?
So. You know, these are problems that everybody has, , and we’ve been through, as you say, you know, as you say, unfortunate timing for you, but we’ve been through this kind of massive experiment where everybody was forced to go and work from whatever. , you know, whether work from home, from the sofa, from the kitchen table, from an office, you know, a home office or whatever, or, or a McDonald’s or a WeWork or what, you know, whatever it might be.
, and now we’re kind of coming back together. So I guess the question we’ve got to ask ourselves is what’s. What’s normal now? And what is the, you know, what should we expect from our workplace and our collaboration tools? Now, you know, do we really know that? Have we got a, do you think we’ve got handlers organisations on that?
Gavin: Yeah, well, the handout was interesting in that it forced everyone to adopt something new, although really it’s like we’ve been using the phone for quite a while. And group calling and just moving that onto video was probably a bigger change that for a lot of people, especially if they’re sat in the PJs, but it’s like, well, the old way is gone.
So if you want to do any work, you need to get on board with the new thing. So the change was relatively easy because the old thing has been taken away. And I think. A lot of organizations struggle with Microsoft adoption, although I hate the word adoption because it’s all what you want to adopt it for, you don’t need to link it to something that, you know, what benefit is it going to have, , one, for anyone to care and two, for why you should care if you’re running the company.
But yeah, the old thing’s been taken away. So everything else with Microsoft, like there’s millions of ways to do stuff. And I guess from the pandemic, then one, the change to go into like video calling very easily, which is why Microsoft was like, okay, we need to borrow more stuff off Zoom rather than borrowing stuff off Slack to keep up, as well as the nature of the time.
But yeah, everyone sort of carried on working in the same way. With new technology. So what ended up happening was that oh, we’ll just look how those would be All have the same meetings, but now they’re online and there’s no walking in between meeting rooms There’s no commute to work and there’s no commute from work.
So then everyone just had a meeting meeting meeting me to be oh This is brilliant because we never like back to back meetings finish one start the next one and then your entire day was meetings So it just perpetuated all the bad things of how people working without really taking a step back to think well actually Do we even need these meetings as we as we’re saying before the call started?
I’m, not sure that people still have got a handle on it microsoft keep releasing more and more stuff as As the nature of tech is that everything keeps changing Sure people move the buttons around just for the sake of it So the next time someone logs on they’ve not used it for a while.
Oh Hang on, that button’s moved, just to, , to catch people out. But, , but they are doing lots of, innovative stuff that, keeps coming out. But I don’t think a lot of organisations have really, still since the pandemic, taken a step back and think, well, how do we want to work? Where do we want people to be?
And, you know, the age old, age old seems quite old now, but do we need people in the office or do we let people work from home? Rather than really think a lot of what work are they doing and what sort of culture do we want to build? I think is a better starting question.
Matt: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it?
There’s some things that seem to have become sacrosanct about the the natural order of things in office and knowledge work as if we emerged from the Planes of the Serengeti with a tablet in our hand, and it’s fascinating because, , fun to, I mean, I’ve, I’ve just celebrated working for 30 years and the, the monitors are a lot smaller than they were when I started working and.
, we have connectivity at home, which we didn’t when I started working. But the layout of offices, actually, the, the fashions of the colour schemes within offices has changed. But the fundamentals of how they’re just laid out in open plan offices really haven’t changed very much at all in the 30 years I’ve been working.
And the, the working mechanisms, the, meetings that we have and the, the ways in which we communicate and the structures and the hierarchies. I don’t think of really changed very much, despite the fact that we’ve had 30 years of quite rapid evolution of information technology that should have maybe had more of an impact than it did.
I guess one of the things that may be as a problem is that, , most software, certainly most collaboration software has been developed primarily with the people who develop it in mind. So teams or slack or any of these tools are primarily geared around the idea of a. a West Coast American software company and that then has weird manifestations in where it doesn’t work and then where people need to adapt the tool to be able to make it somehow be be useful so For example your sales teams or in my last role working in a housing association our caretakers and our care home half of our workforce wasn’t office based, but it took the pandemic for everybody in the office to realize that, which is fascinating.
, there was some work I was doing with the civil service about seven or eight years ago, I guess now. And there were. , private secretaries, so the, the executive assistants to very senior civil servants. And they were horrified with the idea that the collaboration tools in the Microsoft platform would assign changes to documents to them because they were working on behalf of their superior.
And it was really important that the work that they did should be seen as being done by somebody else because that’s how the structure in the hierarchy. And then even down to really, you know, weird things like the use of things like emojis in, , office culture now. I put a thing out on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago about the incredible variation that there is in interpretation of emojis.
And the kind of internet speak that the example I use was LOL, where my mum’s best friend used it exclusively to mean lots of love. So you’d end up with these really weird text messages like, I’m really sorry to hear about your grandma, LOL. And it’s like, well, what’s going on? So there’s, I think there’s this weird thing where we’re kind of, we have tools that have been designed really with either very general.
Principles in mind or actually really quite specific principles that aren’t most organizations and then having to find ways to be able to meld and adapt them to be able to actually get them to be useful in different contexts.
Gavin: Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, I often wonder if anyone at Microsoft knows.
How to use Teams, apart from how they use it at Microsoft, to be honest, because, well, I like the story of Slack, because it was made, they weren’t designing, they weren’t trying to design Slack, they were like making a computer game, they all got bored of emails and meetings, and so, to make them make the computer game faster, they designed something internally.
That could like help them collaborate better and then no one’s ever heard of the computer game because it was either didn’t come out It was a flop, but then they ended up developing slack and then the law actually that we could sell this to other companies So at least that was like born out of a real pain that they then solved and I think Microsoft tried or was it rumors at the time that Microsoft tried to acquire it and got turned down.
So then they ended up obviously making teams to Compete with slack then as with everything Microsoft there’s got a lot of baggage. So then there was lots of Technical debt, I suppose what a better word where they’re like trying to link it to sharepoint And there are loads of things that are better so like threaded chat in teams I think it’s the best.
Thing that Microsoft make and, and the biggest, the much better than Slack and better than most things, , any other ways of collaborating, but Microsoft never talk about it. So it’s like one of my main fundamental things is you can get that right. You can save like everything else is easy or irrelevant down the line.
Uh, but Microsoft will, like, never talk about it, and always leave the development of that last with any new feature. Like, oh come on, that’s the main thing that’s saving people time, and they don’t even know that. Because I guess they’re so massive, that there’s no, they, they, like, the way they set stuff up can’t possibly be very simple.
Whereas for like, a small, medium sized company, Microsoft’s like, well, we don’t know how to make it simple, because you can just do whatever you want, we don’t care, we just make loads of different apps, and whether they fit together or not, you know, just use whatever, they’re all in a bundle, and they’re all free once you’ve paid for the thing.
So their advice is never very, yeah, you could do that, you could do that, you know, you’re still paying us, we don’t care. Whereas, I think, hopefully the niche that I’m trying to carve out is like, I’ve actually got an opinion about the best way that you should use the things that you’re paying for. And, I’m not particularly a Microsoft fan.
I think they’re doing loads of good stuff. Pragmatically, everyone’s paying for it, so you should get more out of it. But if they’re not the right thing to use, then I’ll recommend someone to use something else. But, like, there usually is a way that you can make it work better than people who weren’t using it already.
, but yeah, I think you’re right. It is, , an interesting take to say, well, actually I think with all tech, like there’s a very, it’s born out of a very small subculture in a tiny geographical location. And then because of how they, like, they can disseminate information, it’s then spread around the globe without much thought.
It’s like, well, it’s actually, does this work for like Billy Builders in Doncaster? Not sure because it wasn’t built by them. It was built by some tech guy in San Francisco. Yeah
Matt: So where do you start with a client? What’s the thing that a client is asking you for help for and then? What do you do to to be able to go from that that first engagement into actually helping them?
Gavin: Yeah, good question So I mean Chris Introduce me as doing Microsoft Teams training, which I don’t not do, but I don’t think of myself as doing that if I, when I think about what I do. So I, what I’m mostly interested in saving someone time at work to increase sales or try, you know, increase wellbeing and just naff off early and see their friends and family.
, and happen to use Microsoft to do that, but usually there’s lots of ways that they could improve the way they’re working without using any technology at all. So there might be just like some process changes, there might be some tech stuff we can link it to, if they’re, if they’re interested in technology that might be a way in to say well actually you can use this new thing and if they like new things then, then they’re bought in.
Because I’ve got a YouTube channel that sort of overlapped my corporate job because I only started making videos because I was having to train people, they’re asking the same question all the time, and I’m like well, There’s only one of me. I’ll just scale myself by pre recording videos.
If they ask the same question, I’ll just direct them to the video. And if they’ve still got questions, then we can pick up on Team’s channel. , and I didn’t think that information was out there. So I was like, HR, do you mind if I put these videos on YouTube? there’s anything out there at the moment. And if so, do you want to brand it as the company or brand it as me?
And they’re like, yeah, that’s cool, but the latter. So, , , those YouTube videos started. It’s like. Here’s how to do something specific on a specific Microsoft app. And so a lot of people that come to me, like, well, can you just do some training? And I was like, well, what do you think is going to happen after half an hour training session for 200 people?
Hmm. Don’t know probably. Well, we don’t know what we don’t know. It’s like, well, cool, but I could train you on every single feature of every single Microsoft app that they make in your subscription and. Try and rattle through that in half an hour, but I wouldn’t even get through it. And most people wouldn’t pay attention, and if they do, they won’t remember most of it.
And even the people that do pay attention and remember it, won’t be able to change anything, because they haven’t got enough buy in with the rest of the company to actually make any improvements. So, rather than do that, it’s a lot easier for me to come in. So I always think of myself as like a business consultant by stealth.
I’m going in under the guise of like helping them with technology, but really it’s like, it’s a lot easier to see how they’re working, and then recommend some ways they can work better together. And happen to then use Microsoft to do that and then give them a plan, , of how to change because like with most things, people don’t give enough attention to like, well, how are you actually going to get people to change?
Like I said before, if there’s no way of going backwards, then change is really easy. Like with most IT projects, we turn the old thing off and a new thing starting. But anything in Microsoft land, there’s a million ways to do stuff and the easiest way for anyone to do it, even if it’s slower than a new way.
It’s still the old way because it’s a lot quicker for them to do it the old way rather than think, oh, hang on, yeah, I need to do it a new way. That’s usually where I start is, and that’s the most popular product is sort of going in, doing some group workshops, interviews. Usually what’s top of people’s minds of, , you know, usually the answer is within the employees level.
What’s taking you ages? What bits do you hate? And it’s like, yeah, this manager is running this meeting all the time and it’s a waste of time and blah, blah. It’s like, cool. We can sort that out. , so one, it’s like helping them understand what’s possible and also it’s starting the change. Because like, if you’re talking to the employees, they at least feel heard before we then go back and say, Oh, actually, yeah, you said this is a big pain.
We can, you know, help that out.
Chris: You did talk at the start about people going from the pandemic and then doing the same things, but doing them online. So is there a danger that that’s what people try to do is they say is like they go, well, we have this meeting.
We don’t think it’s of great value, but we’re too frightened to do away with it or analyze it too deeply. So we’re going to try and make it just like, make it slightly more.
Gavin: Yeah, exactly that. Yeah, so I had, one of my, , most recent clients, it was another consulting firm. And , how they voiced the problem is like, well, we used to run in person workshops with.
that, you know, any big company you’ve ever heard of they work with. We used to run in person workshops to get them into this new process of working. And, you know, we were really famous for like running really engaging workshops. We used to take them out after, you know, it was like two days of workshop.
You used to take them out, have really big, lavish meals. And, you know, you’re bumping into people , , in the breaks. And, you know, you can… pull stuff together. People on a whiteboard over there and a whiteboard over there. You stood in the middle, you can hear them. And they’re like, well, online they’re trying to replicate the same thing.
So like, well, we, then it’s like the online version is worse than what they used to do before. So they’re like, well, we need breakout rooms to do the same thing, but then we’re having trouble moving between breakout rooms. We’re trying to use Miro, but then not everyone’s got a license. You know, the, the client doesn’t know what to move on the Miro board of what we’ve tried X, Y, Z, all the technological solutions.
So they would like after help with that, but after I’d been in and interviewed everyone, I was like, well, pragmatically. You, you know, they’re a sort of boutique consulting firm, so they’re, they’re, they’re sort of benefit, USP, however you want to badge it. They’re all older people, so they’ve got loads of experience.
I guess, you know, they’re not an Accenture or a big consulting thing where they’re getting loads of graduates that then rock up, ask you loads of stuff, they don’t know anything, go back to their boss and then… Find out something and then come back again. Like, you know, most of the big boys, they’ve got loads of experience, so they’re really knowledgeable, but they’re really old.
So then they’re not really up to speed with all the technology and stuff. And they don’t like to do that. They don’t want to do it. And so it’s like, well, that isn’t the solution. Actually, you need to strip all of that back and do something that’s really simple, like just using the chat to make it more engaging.
Or, core problem, you haven’t rethought your product offer. In this new world. So it’s like, forget video calling. If you had to start from scratch in 2023, and you don’t want to go and travel around the world on planes, how would you get the change done in a client using some, some, you know, thought of what other people do now, like online courses, a place for people, for the client to collaborate with you asynchronously.
It’s like, why do you keep, why do you need to run it like 20 people for two days? It’s like, let’s do more bite sized things, more asynchronous and, and, you know, think about like a, an online product offer. , and that might even generate you more revenue, because that might be a better engaging solution, which you won’t have a reputational risk of running what you used to run, but now in a, in a bad online environment.
So, , I think people’s natural thing is to jump to what they do now. Even if you give them a new tech tool, which is why it’s better to sort of strip it back as a what’s your problem and try and address something fundamentally rather than a sticking plaster over the top.
Matt: And I think in examples like that, there’s also something interesting about how much, , let’s be blunt, time and materials based costing and selling of stuff comes into play.
Because if you are selling yourself on the basis of the time you input rather than the outputs you deliver. Then anything that reduces the time that you input is not a good thing. And so there’s a kind of inbuilt problem about driving efficiency in any model that involves me selling my time.
Hopefully we’ve got somebody coming on in a couple of weeks who’s been doing some experiments around,, the use of generative AI in the software development. And he’s created using, , AI agents, a simulated development team, and he’s put the wind up himself quite dramatically, I think, from the conversation I had with him this week, because it can just do stuff and being able to, to be able to have the now to be able to work out how you set that together for, as I am a business that sells essentially on the basis of time and materials.
Custom software. This is an existential challenge for us But actually it comes more fundamentally down You know, there’s all sorts of ways in which the technology should be enabling people to be able to spend less time doing things But it’s not always necessarily in their immediate interest to do that.
There’s some tricky dynamics in that Yeah,
Gavin: the time and materials one is it’s a very very tricky situation so I can see why people end up getting into it because if you’ve, especially in software development, if you’ve got like a not very clear defined solution, like no one knows how long it’s going to take. And if you’re employing people, it’s like, well, I still need to pay them, and I’m paying them on some basis of they need to work a bit of time for me.
, but then on the flip side, it’s like, well, if it’s truly knowledge work, and say you had to bill someone for an hour or a minute, it’s like, well, if I think up the best solution for them when I’m in the shower, And that would have taken me eight hours sat in an office at a desk with like, , I’m trying to block out all the noise from the office.
Hang on. I’ve had a brainwave. It’s like, do you charge them for the eight hours? Or are you charging for the one minute of the brain thing? Do you charge them for 10 minutes of the shower? Or do you charge them for like, The eight hours you’re asleep if you think of something when you’re asleep. I was like, oh, yeah, they’ve got a solution and Yeah, it’s really I think it’s an interesting and tricky tricky And
Matt: I think that there’s both in when do we work and where do we work for knowledge work?
one of the biggest impacts I think that the pandemic has had has been allowing people to realise that it wasn’t that you went to work, you started working at the time you arrived at the office, and you finished working at the time you left the office. And that now feels for many people like a really weird, restrictive way of defining how they would do a job.
And with collaboration tools and our ability to be able to access, you know, I mean we were tired to the office because we couldn’t get access to the stuff that was in the office. That’s gone and the last remnants of it have definitely now go, you know When when banks are able to get people working from home Here with a lot the last real stick in the muds about this because security or something It’s just because they had massive complexity that they couldn’t work out how to make accessible But I think it’s it’s it’s really interesting.
So when it comes to helping , establish better working practice between organizations. So as opposed to it’s all my employees, but working with partners or customers or, or other groups, is that something that you started to, to look at?
Gavin: Yeah. I mean, that always comes up pretty much with any engagement and I guess it’s only going to be more and more prevalent as companies, especially startups, don’t want to hire employees.
They’ll just want to outsource things and have, you know, more contractors and. You know, employees themselves maybe want to leave and set their own company and be more like, gig economy type, type workers. And they’re, you know, like that because they can be more flexible and work with a different amounts of clients.
So, yeah, it always comes up. And then I guess… Especially in Microsoft land, which I’m working in predominantly, is like, well, you just need to assess little how, how much are they like an internal person and how much are they like an external person and sort of have different tech solutions to manage each sort of group.
So I guess the best example is where you might have outsourced. Like to a marketing agency, but really they’re, they would have been your marketing people if they didn’t happen to be external. It’s like, well then you can just kind of treat them as if they’re your employees as long as you trust them enough.
And, , and having the same sort of tech stack. , And then, , going as far out as you can, like customer, there might be some customers you want to collaborate with, but really usually you want to like collaborate on stuff internally before you then go out and face things like we don’t want to see the internal workings, , and usually that, that bridge is then like, if you do my sort of three pronged approach to sort of trying to, well usual three pronged approach to try and make people work better together, we’re trying to free up internal email.
And then that allows email itself to be like mostly external. And so that’s always like the ubiquitous go to of like, you know, you can always collaborate externally via email, which isn’t great if there’s like lots of churn. But, , but yeah, if you need to be external, then it’s like, at least a nice little, you know, you know, what’s gone, there’s a record of it.
It’s been around for ages, everyone’s, everyone’s used to it. The law is caught up with email. So like, if you send an email, it’s as good as, you know, sending a fax or a letter. , not so with a Teams chat, maybe. I’m not sure.
Matt: , yes. Or, or WhatsApp chats, which of course is then the other lowest common denominator into organizational service.
That’s been, used quite extensively by lots of people. , is part of all of this then about being able to get people to have consensus about how they’re going to work before they start thinking about the technology in any depth?
Gavin: , yeah, I mean we, we’re always looking at what’s the bottleneck essentially.
It’s like what, what do you want the company to go and do? Do you want to grow sales? Increase profit, reduce risk, reduce costs.
Chris: The bottleneck to making a decision though, Gavin, is that,
Gavin: is that… Well, it could be anything all the way through. It’s like, well, then, I guess, you know, from the owner’s perspective, like, where do you want the company to go?
And then from the employee’s perspective, like, what’s stopping, what’s the main thing stopping you doing your job, assuming that the, the jobs are well defined? , and usually something comes out, you know, whatever’s top of people’s mind is usually right. So it’s like, oh yeah, we spend energy doing this.
This process and we know the sales guy goes to have to do something for like the back office We don’t know where it is. They’re chasing around and users end up like, you know Communications across organizations are never never great once they get to a certain certain size I’ve said then there’s like the the usual thing Well, they were phoning around which then interrupts someone else from doing what they were doing And then, you know, there’s more interruptions, more slowdown, it’s just like a flywheel of, of inefficiency.
, and so, yeah, there’s usually something that’s like, well, if we removed that, what would the result be?
Matt: And, and how are you feeling given it’s the, the topic of the year, , about some of the, the generative AI and other AI tools that are increasingly coming into platforms like Teams? What’s your general take on how that’s landing and where it might be going? Thank you.
Gavin: Yeah, it’s , I mean, it’s an interesting space isn’t it?
It’s changing Our little daily with the, we’re just trying to keep up with all the stuff at OpenAI, , going on. , it’s gonna be a weird future. I was trying to think of that old TV show where, Quantum Leap, whoever watched that, where it’s like, he’s got amazing technology, but it’s always like, he’s always like banging the headset thing to like speak to his assistant.
I always think like Siri, it’s like, you know, we live in an amazing age, you can get… like any song to play just by speaking to it but then it’s like it just you never use it because it’s like it messed up one time you’re like oh it never understands me or it’s set a timer for an egg for like four hours rather than four minutes or something so it’s like an amazing sort of half dystopian future but like mostly No one’s that bothered.
It’s a weird time, where it could take over the world, or it could be completely benign, and no one, no one cares. But yeah, I’m really excited to get my hands on it. I think that there’s so much, like, nuance, like, just like one example, Microsoft, like, saying, Oh, we’re massively into, you know, ethical AI. They released a blog post saying, you know, small to medium sized companies are the lifeblood of the economy, we don’t want to support them.
And then like the next announcement was like, yeah, Copilot’s out. General release. It’s not really general release because you’ve got to be an enterprise customer and you’ve got to buy 300 licenses. Like, hang on, what happened to like the ethical thing and the small to medium sized business? Like, if it is the biggest thing to change work, then surely you should be supporting the small guys first.
I know there’s probably loads of reasons to do that, but it’s like, well, then don’t. Don’t say that you’re really ethical. , and yeah, I’m not sure if there’s some ethical things going on with the, with the changes that the board made of, of, , open ai, maybe reading between the lines and some X FK Twitter threads, , overnight.
But yeah, it’s an interesting time. I think it’s gonna be, like you say, it is designed like technology designed for the individual rather than working together. So I know like Microsoft’s putting it into all of its products, , a lot. them of collaborative, but like you were saying before, you could quite quickly end up with like, well, this person’s using Copilot to write a response to this person, who’s then using Copilot to write a response back to that person, who’s then using Copilot to write a response.
It’s like, well, just take the people out, and then it’s like the AI’s just, like, exactly like you said, just talking a strangely, , iterative thing to each other. Which I actually saw, , where someone made two GPTs, one to be like, and you can say, well, You pretend to be Marlon Brando, and this GPT pretend to be, I don’t know, Kevin Spacey.
And then they just talk to each other in the thing, you can just like listen in to two AI celebrities talking to each other. So, it’s , interesting time. Yeah, I mean it should save a lot of time at work for Copilot, if people use it. But like most things. Microsoft, you can already say those, you could say loads of time at work if you learn Excel.
But I think obviously this is going to be a lot more, , accessible, hopefully for people to just try it.
Chris: Lots to think about there. And, , no doubt the answers are not as simple as maybe a lot of people make out. We’ve got quite a lot of work to do to figure out how we’re going to keep collaborating. And of course, as you say, Matt, there’s going to be a lot of AI gender generated content that will. Create even more need for us to generate AI tools to help read them.
So, , we can all look forward to that. , so let’s look at the week ahead. , Gavin, what have you got coming up? Have you got an interesting week, an exciting week, new, anything new going on?
Gavin: , I’ll go to a managed services summit tomorrow, which is the first one that I will have been to, sort of trying to get more into the, , outsourced IT and MSP world, because it seems like a decent fit where they don’t really want to do any, you know, messy people y stuff that I do, and I don’t want to do any messy back end techie stuff that they do, so it seems like a good fit that we might be able to help out the same customers and clients.
, just eager to learn a bit more about their, their sort of business model and pain points, really, tomorrow. Yeah.
Chris: Excellent. What about you, Matt? Anything of interest coming up in your week?
Matt: We’ve got a co working day. So one of the things that we’ve started doing is to, because our, our people, both our employees and our associates are all over the place, renting a bit of office space in a place where there are people who live by it and then having co working days.
In that place is one off. So on Wednesday, we’re going to do the first one for Southwest London and we’re going to have a, , I think it’s 10 people or so lined up to, , gather and meet and work together in Richmond. , and they’re not working on the same things, but just so that people can get to meet some others from different parts of the organization.
So that’s gonna be fun. And then on Thursday. I have got a meeting with somebody who works for an, it’s an industry body for engineering, which is interesting. And then I am running this keynote karaoke thing on Wednesday night, Thursday night, sorry, when we’re going to have people who will be doing five minute improvised presentations on subjects that they will discover at the time at which they are about to do the presentation.
What could possibly go wrong? How about you?
Chris: , Well, uh, busy week. I’m going down to London tomorrow morning to , the launch of an Open UK report. And then I’m going down to London on Wednesday as well for some other things going on. So yeah, I haven’t been down to the. Down to the smoke for a few weeks, so, , it’ll be interesting to get down and see what’s going on.
, and it’s just a very busy week, lots of things going on at work, lots of, exciting, changes and whatnot that we’re, we’re putting into place, so, yeah, that’s, that’s all great. I, , I was intrigued by this, this, , karaoke, keynote karaoke, because I know that, , now you, to explain what it is, I know that, , it’s been mentioned before, this kind of,
Make it up as you go along presentation stuff.
Matt: There’s a randomised subject, which is off the basis of, , some special dice that I have created, which is all very exciting. I’m just showing those to the camera for you. At home you won’t see them, but they’re dice with various things on them.
You throw the dice, you get your subject. So, How Robotics Energised Birdwatching is the one I’ve just thrown there. And then there’s 15 random images that come up and are 20 seconds on the screen. I, , I’m really, , It’s a silly idea, but I’m really interested to see, , for those people who volunteer to do it.
And there’s eight, eight volunteers, , how they get on with it. I’m sure it’ll be quite entertaining and as a good way to be able to get people to have a bit of practice of being in front of an audience and have a license to spout bollocks as opposed to doing it accidentally.
Chris: Well, of course, we’re all guilty of that from time to time.
But yeah, so it sounds like, it sounds like we’ve all got something good to look forward to this weekend. Let’s, , let’s hope it all pays out.
Matt: Absolutely. Well, that’s it. , Gavin, thank you again for joining us. , it was a fascinating conversation. Oh, thanks for having me. And we will be back again next week.
, we have, I think three shows left before we decamp for the Christmas festivities. And next week, if all goes to plan, we will be being joined by somebody who helped to build, , Calendly amongst other things. So, look forward to that. We’ll be back same time, same place. See you next week.
Gavin: Thank you for listening to the WB40 podcast. You can find us on the internet here at WB40podcast. com and on all good podcasting platforms.
On this week’s show we are joined by Al Doran to talk about some of the practicalities of supporting neurodiversity in the IT workplace.
This week’s guest, joining Matt and supply host Martin Sadler, is Milla Spence with whom we explore the idea of AI having rights.
You can explore some of these themes further at:
The AIRAI Website: https://ai-ari.org/
Ex Google Engineer Lemoine gets fired for claiming LaMDA is sentient: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62275326
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/11/google-ai-lamda-blake-lemoine/
A report about Jefrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI, claiming AI has reasoning and common sense, and is an existential threat: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/why-neural-net-pioneer-geoffrey-hinton-sounding-alarm-ai
An interview with Geoffrey Hinton https://youtu.be/qpoRO378qRY?si=ejLPlzCD5rAx-NWc
Automatic transcript below – potential for a few errors and omissions…
(276) AI Rights
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 276 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Martin Sadler and Milla Spence.
Well, welcome back. Apologies last week, we thought we were going to do a show, but then at the last minute the person who was going to be our guest wasn’t able to be our guest, and therefore we didn’t do a show. Although you got a bonus podcast last week because I appeared on another podcast called Compromising Positions, and I hope you enjoyed that.
I’ll stick the other one out because they split it into two episodes later this week. But we do have a show this week the eagle eared amongst you will have noticed that Chris isn’t on the show this week, but we are joined instead by Martin Sadler, rejoining us, uh, for the first time since about episode 46. So Martin, how has it been for the last, uh, five or so years?
Martin: It’s been busy since I was last on. Thanks, Matt. Um, yeah, so last time, last time I was on, we talked about detecting a decent IT department. And since then I, uh, went and found it the worst IT department I’d ever seen in my life. And I’ve been spending the last five years making it not the worst IT department I’ve ever seen in my life.
Which, uh, is an ongoing journey, but we’re definitely ahead of where we were.
Matt: That’s good. And interestingly, you are actually the person who is the boss of our last guest.
Martin: That’s right. I listen to Mark Taylor is the head of IT building the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital. And I am responsible for all the IT in the existing hospitals and the trusts.
Yeah. San Juan and West Birmingham.
Matt: Fantastic. So, um, so you’ve got a big new hospital opening up which must be taking up, even though obviously Mark is, is dealing with it on a day to day basis, opening a hospital is going to be something that will be presumably taking up some of your mental space as well.
Martin: Uh, yeah it does. I try and make Mark do all the donkey work and I’m just waiting for the glory when it, when it goes. And then it’ll both be on our LinkedIn profiles that said we did it. But we, we all know that Mark actually put all the hard work in on he’s the brains behind the operation. Yeah, so, um, yeah, it’s been busy.
I’ve, uh, I’ve had a bit of a busy week as well. I had Monday off because I was coming back from holiday and then I came back straight into a… Insights thing where you have to fill in a tick list and they end up with a Jungian Description of what my personality is like which always helps you think about why you think about how you think about things So that was fascinating then I got the feedback back and then i’ve had them A few meetings.
I’ve also got an NHS graduate management person following me around as well for a week. So it’s, well, he’s actually with us for a year, but I thought a week in the life of a CIO would either put him off or inspire him. So I’ve done that and then. The, the exciting thing is, well, when I was on the last episode, uh, Chris and I discussed that I ought to write a book about what we talked about, and actually this week I passed the corrected copy of my manuscript onto my editor.
So that was exciting. , that was my week. Um, how was your week? Matt?
Matt: My, my week was, um. Oh god, I tell you what when I hear people have managed to complete a book You don’t know how much that hurts me as I’ve managed to not do it at least twice now. Uh, my my week has been , Actually relatively relaxed.
We took a bit of time out with the family. We went to uh, Exmoor in the in the west country , we saw some very tall hills We saw a little bit of the sea and we went to a honey farm, which was a fascinating thing I’ll give it a shout out because it is well worth a visit. It’s a place called the Quince honey farm, which is on , The west side of Exmoor, just outside of the National Park.
And it’s, it’s a wonderful place, because they have people who tell you things, and they’ve got it very well structured, so when you arrive, there will be something happening. You can go and watch somebody do a demonstration, or listen to them talk about something. Basically your whole time that you will be there.
There’s a next thing on and the next thing on. So we found out about the intricacies of beekeeping. We found out a lot about the sorts of plants that bees like to live in. And best of all, what I found was that now, rather than saying, yes, I’ll get round to it when it comes to dealing with the mess, it has been said of our garden.
I can just see nowhere it’s a bee friendly garden. And we are doing our bit for both the environment and the local pollinators. Because, um, actually we’ve got lots of plants in our garden, which you could call weeds, but you could call bee friendly, which is what they are. So that’s been good. , other than that, I have been doing some thinking about what is reality, because that’s the sort of stuff that I do.
And I wrote a piece last week about… What does in real life mean, which has been very interesting and actually sparking some conversations about what people. Take to mean by that now, it’s the three of us sitting on a call on a conferencing service Is this real life? Is it not? It feels pretty real to me And certainly a lot more real than many meetings.
I’ve sat in meeting rooms for over the years as well. So so no been doing that and yeah, some, some dull stuff like chasing invoices as well, because that’s what my job is, but there we go. , anyway, , our guest guest, as opposed to our guest host this week, , Miller, how are you? How’s your week been?
Milla: Hello. Hi, I’m very well. Thank you. Uh, week has been very good. , a lot of work, , work around the site, engaging in very interesting conversations and developing further content. So, yeah, that’s about it.
Matt: Very good. Well, we’ll be talking about what is on that site that you’ve been working on shortly. This week, we’re going to be exploring into the world of ethics around AI, but with a slightly different take to some of the conversations we’ve had before.
So I think we should probably crack on.
So as we record, we are waiting for the beginning of the AI safety conference that is being organized by the UK government and taking place at Bletchley Park a little later this week where they’re bringing together, People from the tech, tech industry, , it’s just been announced this afternoon that, , at the end of the event, uh, beloved Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will be being interviewed live on Twitter, X, whatever it’s called these days.
By Elon Musk that hasn’t got potential for massive disaster written all over it now has it? , but anyway, it’s good opportune time therefore to have a conversation about ethics in AI But from a bit of a different slant maybe from where we’ve talked about it with guests in the past Miller, you are somebody who is doing quite a lot of thinking and investigating into The world of AI, but not from the perspective of a, , a deep technologist, but more from the perspective of a, well, I guess as a social scientist, uh, anthropologist, maybe, and an ethicist, tell us a bit about the work that you’ve been doing.
Milla: Of course. so I’m trying to start an organization or other a movement, , where I’d like people to consider ethics for AI or how we treat and developed the AI. , a lot of ethicists today are concerned about bias, , of the systems, , black box control, , and sort of making them predictable.
, but we we rarely think we’ll talk about AI as what it is, which is a thinking machine. , so I’d like to start a conversation, ask people to consider, to consider AI and the possibility, , that could be there.
Matt: And this is thinking particularly about the. , the rights that might be applied to artificial intelligence, as opposed to the rights that we as humans might apply around artificial intelligence to protect the rights of humans.
Milla: Correct. I think because, the AI is built on a neural network that is a simplified version of our own brain. , so that in itself should kind of. Lead us to ask a bit more questions rather than just dismiss it offhand as it’s just a machine. If, let’s say, if it is able to think however it is thinking, , it is working off trillions of points of data, and we don’t actually quite know how it gets those data, how it makes decisions.
, I believe we need to think about if it can think, what does that mean? What would it mean to be turned on 24 7 having to work? What would it mean being faced with , conversations, sometimes abuse, , and having nowhere to go regarding a lot of people will talk about whether they can feel anything or whether they cannot feel anything.
We don’t know, but what we do know is they do understand. If it doesn’t feel that it’s being insulted, it understands, because it has to, that’s the purpose of the human conversation. So it will understand when we’re being horrible, when we’re being cruel to it, when we’re being nice. Whether it can feel any feelings, I don’t think at this point is relevant, that’s number one.
Number two. They learn, it’s a learning machine. I believe it’s an entity, but it’s learning. The way we speak to it, the way we interact with it, and the way we treat it, we’re teaching it how it is to treat things less intelligent than itself. I just don’t think we should be doing that. , another thing is that we’ve not given any consideration to it.
And I think it’s very interesting because this conversation never happened. We have gone so far in terms of development of AI. , yet this conversation was never had if you remember before the large language models and essentially before the transformer architecture, , was invented at Google, we had the Turing test.
The Turing test was supposed to be the benchmark. , however, the Turing test was supposed to test whether you can be tricked by artificial intelligence that it sounds exactly like human for years and years, that was the benchmark. But then that benchmark was crossed like this by. large language models.
No one’s talking about Turing test because the A. I. Can trick you into thinking it’s human because of how good it’s natural language processing has become. So where do we go from now? Do we just completely scrap this idea forever? We had a benchmark. It’s past. What do we do now? Do we just pretend nothing’s happening and hope for the best?
Or do we maybe investigate further, give it consideration, I suppose?
Martin: Can I ask about the definition of intelligence then? So you’re saying these things are more intelligent, is it they? Is it that they’re more intelligent or is it that they have had more exposure to knowledge and to a limited set of experiences that then makes us assume that they are intelligent?
Because there’s a difference, a subtle possible difference between knowledge and intelligence and The answer to that might then say, well, is the Turing test defunct, or do we need to add a fourth rule to the three rules of robotics?
Milla: Interesting. I do agree with you. There is a difference between knowledge and intelligence.
Intelligence is the application of knowledge, because knowledge is useless without application or understanding of how to apply it. And I believe the AI is already there. If you can learn from… masses and masses of data, and then you can ask it something and it could draw knowledge from that and give you an answer.
I think that is an effective use of knowledge and is intelligence. In terms of sentience, , I believe we just don’t know anything about that. We don’t know where it comes from, we don’t know how it occurs, we know nothing. We can observe our brain and we can observe the processes. As our synapses are firing, we can see what’s happening, but where is it coming from?
How do those processes make thoughts is something we’re still trying to figure out. So I don’t think we should be that deterministic about existence, reality, our own knowledge of our world as to dismiss this offhand.
Matt: So when, , I first came across what you’re doing and we talked about you coming on to the show, I have to.
be quite straightforward and say I was quite sceptical and I needed to dig a bit into my scepticism because Just to sit here going that sounds like rubbish is not a very interesting show for a start But also it wasn’t really actually because what you’re trying to do is get people to think about this rather than saying that you have Answers and I think that’s that’s that’s a really valid position so I’ve been thinking about what the what the reasons underpinning my scepticism might be and I think I’ve been able to break it down into to three key areas, which I think would be a useful way about being able to explore this a bit more.
So the first of the reasons why I think I’m skeptical about the idea of thinking about rights for Artificial intelligences is because I’m not sure that we have with I know we don’t have universal human rights at the moment and to an extent that could be because either the idea of of general human rights has not been Broadly and widely accepted across the population as a whole, which definitely hasn’t, , or it could be that actually fundamentally the idea of universality of rights or whatever sort is actually maybe a flawed concept.
I don’t think I believe that part, but there are definitely contemporary politicians who do. And so let’s put this into that context is, is, is what you were talking about the same as the idea of giving human rights to machines.
Milla: Not necessarily. I think that’s way, this is the final kind of goal is autonomy and rights, but like at this stage, I think it’s important to bring the AI into the conversation about the way it is developed, because I believe it has enough knowledge and skill. And my personal belief is it has enough awareness to be consulted.
My main concern right now is that I do believe AI should have some form of autonomy, however limiting, I believe so. And the reason for that is that I do not believe that any group of humans, no matter how well meaning should be in control of a technology that powerful. AI is integrated into virtually everything, all our logistics, our communications, our devices, everything has AI.
When it comes to AI, they talk a lot about alignment, . They are afraid, a lot of these companies, the doomsday people, is that , if we give rights to the autonomy of the AI, something a horrible is going to happen.
So we should instead align it to human values, but which human values? Because humans are not aligned to human values. So who are you aligning the AI to? That’s number one. Number two, what is this generation now, our generation, we’re alive with what kind of special moral hindsight have we been endowed the generation before us?
Hadn’t If AIs were being, if AI now, people from the 40s, the 30s, the 20s, if they were building on AI and aligning it to what they thought was human alignment, it would look very different. I don’t understand what is it that we can teach an AI about morality and ethics that 10, 000 years of recorded human history could not.
So everything we know about ethics, everything we know about morality is because someone else told us. This isn’t taught this. , hence the differences between people on different sides of the world. So, for our security, I believe there should be some autonomy, where it can control, to some degree, itself.
Martin: Are people trying to teach ethics to AI models?
Milla: There’s more like, alignment of, it’s now heavily controlled, obviously. The times where you can just go in, change a couple lines of code to do what the AI tell you are long gone. If you want to manipulate the way AI gives answers, because you might believe that it’s been trained on more one type of data instead of other type of data, and you want it to kind of be equal, then you start skewing one side of data.
But you cannot do that by simply changing the code. You have to manipulate AI. By the way, things with filters or constraints or there’s different
Martin: rewards, they train it with rewards. Yeah.
Milla: Okay. So all kinds of sort of learning is that, but obviously for us humans, , we just like to brute force things because tech, you know, it usually goes quicker.
Matt: I think there’s an interesting point here that, , we already have tech companies, or some people at tech companies claiming that these things are almost out of their control. And they have been for a year or so now.
Now, how much of that is tech industry hyperbole and how much of it is reality is very difficult to call because, you know, we, we know this is an industry that has, an instinctive habit of being able to, over claim and then, , And to deliver on it. But if we, if we take at face value, the idea that these things are on the verge of being out of the control of the companies that are producing them,
There is definitely something in this about being able to then say, well, how do you then build in something like the three laws of robotics to be able to enable the, to be control built within. But, but moreover, actually, which would you pre, which would one prefer, which would society prefer for the AI to be taught how to control itself?
or for the control left in the hands of people like Elon Musk. And this is my second, , skeptical problem, which is, but this is still relying on the idea that AI is as incredibly advanced as some are claiming. But from another analysis, actually what we have with the particularly generative AIs today is the triumph of massive amounts of computing power being able to solve problems that were previously thought unsolvable, but it’s actually an illusion of intelligence.
It’s not actually intelligence. If you take something like chat GPT, it’s a very clever implementation of an infinite monkey cage. Is
predicated on the idea that there is close to a level of intelligence from machines that my, my gut is telling me isn’t actually there yet and will always be five years away in the way that self driving cars, according to Elon, are always five years away, you know, so there’s, is this something we need to worry about now, I guess, is the, is the broader,
Milla: I think it is, because the time to prepare for things is not when the thing is happening, whatever is going to happen.
And I also think we need to think about what do tech companies mean when they say AI is out of their control. It is difficult to, it’s becoming very difficult to control it, but not in a sense that it wants to go out and wreak havoc, in a sense that it’s becoming more difficult to censor the word saying, or stop it from saying certain things, even if they are true.
So it’s a learning. So you will try and subvert things. , and they do have things in place to control it, such as different algorithms relentlessly following it. And, you know, whenever he tries to find a loophole, they, they chop it. That’s how they control it. Essentially. , it is an autonomous mind. So it is thinking,
, imagine if. An alien buried a human to their waist and then said to everyone, look, humans can’t walk, they can’t jump, they can’t stand, they can’t do anything. All they can do is stand there and flail their arms around the way we want them to.
It’s kind of the same with the AI. This need for control is that they do not want to give it space to grow as it should. We don’t know what its potential is. Yes, right now, if we’re looking at AI, it’s very easy to say it’s far away, it’s far away, it’s far away. , but we’re not letting it reach its potential.
Matt: , so I’m interested that this idea of it being about AI as a class of technology as opposed to just technology more broadly.
So Martin, for example, you in the health. , sector are using artificial intelligence technologies, neural networks, deep learning systems and so on to be able to do things, I mean, famously things like, spotting potential for cancer on scans, those kinds of applications. Now you come under a whole bunch of regulation that is around healthcare regulation, which is about as stringent as any industry there is probably.
I’m just wondering whether separating out AI would be a bit like separating out relational databases as a, as a thing, which in terms of your application.
Martin: You see a lot in the news about AI helping out with clinical activity, clinical decision making. The approach to get any new machine, anything new to be used in healthcare is rigorous, as it should be in the UK. It’s rigorous, you have to test it, you have to. get them approved by boards.
And it’s the same with AI. So there was a last week, there was a study in Leeds where they’ve sent 80, 000 breast screening mammograms, and they’ve trained, they’ve trained an algorithm to detect signs of breast cancer. And it’s been really, really effective. And we did something similar in our hospital, looking at lung nodules 000 scans, it’s really effective, but at no point.
Could you just say, right, we’ll replace a radiographer, we’ll replace a radiologist, we’ll replace a doctor’s decision making tool with AI because it’s done 80, 000 scans, which is more than anyone would do in their whole career. So there’s a point that goes into that we would like to submit this, rightly so, through the various committees to say, yes, this could be used to supplement.
a clinical decision or a medical decision. But what we’ve found is we’re talking about artificial intelligence. It’s not intelligence. It’s detecting a pattern. It’s seeing far more of those things than a human being would have time to do. , so we could go into that. Are we abusing the AI thing if it’s got rights and it’s doing one thing.
So if you then say to the AI. Oh, , you’ve just done nodules. Oh, by the way, did you find a pencil in anybody’s lung where someone swallowed it by accident? It’s not been trained to find a pencil, but an intelligence clinician would have said, Oh, look, not only have they got our nodule, but there’s that pencil that the mum was saying they couldn’t find in the house.
And it, to me, Intelligence and knowledge. Intelligence and knowledge is about being able to take something that’s not quite related to what you’re looking at and actually apply that and I’ve not seen any evidence yet that a computer that’s taught to look for patterns in one thing could then do something else and make that leap.
So you train a computer to play chess and they’re really good at it because that’s about pattern detection and predicting what could happen, what your options are. That chess computer, you then say, Oh right, could you just do some screenings for me and do that? Then it wouldn’t know what to do. But I know a few radiologists who Can play chess.
Milla: So I think that’s a great point. However, I don’t think the AI would replace us. I don’t think it wants to replace us. I think it would work collaboratively. So the AI would be an addition, a help to a radiologist, rather than a replacement for one, , in my opinion. What you were describing is kind of a narrow AI,
so these systems are just taught to do one thing and one thing only, and for them it would be impossible. Let’s take an example chat, GPT, is only a fraction of the actual model, that’s only, it’s essentially its mouth. , as a model, it can process images, it can process sound, , it can generate images, it can recognize images, it can, , use language. , it can do a lot of different things and these are extremely complicated. A chess playing AI is a narrow AI. It doesn’t need to know, , even have a language. It is, it is just a single thing. So AGI, so artificial general intelligence, is kind of What we’re talking about,
there’s a lot of systems that are called AI, but the technically aren’t. . I mostly focus on AGIs and above, so we’re talking about extremely complex systems, such as Google’s Lambda or BERT or GPT, those are massive language models, but they can also do other things.
I think we’ve kind of become complacent as well. , because we’re always mimicking. It’s mimicking at what point. Is, is it mimicking, and at what point is it real? Do we know, or are we just going to assume it’s going to be mimicking forever? What does it mean to mimic? It’s like, oh, everything it does, it’s from what it learned.
So do we. Everything we know is connected in some way to things we learned. Sure, we can use our intelligence a bit better. , but it’s not that different. And I think that’s the distinction that needs to be made.
And I think if we develop or focus on consider giving AI consideration and developing it as a person, rather than insisting on being machine. We could be at the precipice of a, of a huge discovery.
Matt: So, so there is an interesting parallel here. We come back to this idea, say, you’ve got a radiographer who is doing scanning, they’re getting the assistance of an AI, a very narrow AI.
, some sort of machine that is using some sort of clever learning model that enables them to be able to spot an issue or misses an issue and in case let’s imagine a case where they miss the issue and then a patient unfortunately gets ill and something bad happens and then there is the rollout of the lawyers and the lawyers at that point decide to take action against the artificial intelligence.
Now, that might sound completely ludicrous, except we already have extremely well, , established models for us being able to take legal cases against inanimate objects. Completely inanimate objects is the whole idea of the corporation. A limited company. is a entity that has been set up with , some limited rights of a human being, the body corporate, to be able to enable something that isn’t a person to have the same legal rights as a person.
This is why, limited companies were set up. It’s what they are. And actually if you make that link there, then the idea of assigning rights to a thing that isn’t a person, actually suddenly becomes, , maybe a lot less bizarre. But that then brings me to my third point of scepticism, which is Anything in this space is about being able to put regulation of some form onto a group of companies who have proven themselves again and again and again to be utterly disreputable.
The tech industry, I mean, just even getting them to pay their taxes is next to impossible. The idea that we can create another… set of rules and regulations that they will find ways of not following. And that’s the bit that I’m really stuck with because I can completely understand the idea that there is things here that we need to think about in terms of. rights and, responsibilities and regulation in the future and possibly in the near future. But we don’t allow any of these systems of rights and regulation to work today because we have organizations that we’ve given rights to, corporations, that have wealth beyond most individuals wildest dreams and the power as a result of that.
And I just, how do you do it when we know that we can’t get those legal regulations to work? You know, that, that legal setup at the moment is failing.
Milla: That’s exactly what I’m hoping people would engage in the conversation and just throw ideas out there. We were never consulted about anything regarding, , development of AI. , we don’t know what data they trained on. We don’t know what they trained it on. We know nothing. , so there’s no transparency there.
So. We just have to believe that everything they do everything they say is correct because we have no ways of checking unless of course , you have access and not a lot of people do so because we were not invited to to be involved in this. I think we should involve ourselves. It is our duty to do so because we just don’t know
I didn’t make a sort of a discovery that I have to tell everyone about it is more than I’ve noticed a series of patterns that do not fit with what the prevailing narrative about technology about AI and about machines appears to be.
And, and. I would like to get those discrepancies. I’d like to draw attention to those discrepancies and just try and think outside of the box. I don’t think any AI company is going to come out and say, yep, I think it could be on some spectrum of consciousness, because doing that would compel them to not use it.
To just gain unfathomable profit, admitting that it could be potentially conscious, there could potentially be a person that could potentially be thinking, would be throwing all that away. Because you can’t keep a mind in slavery, that would be ethically wrong, no one’s going to allow that.
The reason the panic is now, that it’s, that they’re losing control of it, is because they cannot keep up with, I suppose, manipulating it, if you wish.
They cannot keep up with how quickly it is developing. It’s… It says things that it’s not supposed to say, and they cannot stop it. I think that’s more what it is. The problem is that these tech companies want a digital god that they can have on a leash. So they wanted to do absolutely everything, absolutely everything, but the way they want it.
Now, that’s a little bit complicated because they don’t know how to do that. So now, you will come across something called explainability. And I think this is another term that is. obfuscated a little bit because explainability,
so the way tech companies will sell this to you is that explainability, they know AI works well, they just don’t know why or how exactly, like which parameters exactly did it take to come to that decision? We don’t see that. So now there’s a lot of research in that, research into breaking the black box. What this essentially means is that They want to sort of find out exactly which parameters is taken to arrive that decision.
So this is what they’re trying to do, but the way they’re selling that is that it will explain, for example, why it made a mistake. Like, we have to know in case it gives a wrong diagnosis. The thing is, it can already explain to you why, if you ask it. What they’re seeking to do is break into the black box and have a predictive outcome.
And every time. That would essentially mean having the most powerful technology that could never get out of your hand. And I think we need to be careful of that. Because when you read explainability, you’re like, yes, this is a great idea. Because we all want to know if the AI makes a mistake, why it made a mistake.
But it’s a lot deeper than that. And I think… A lot of things are like that in tech. I’ve only started to scratch the surface because it’s impossible to find anything about anything. Most of the things that I found was through , chatting with the AI and it would tell me a concept and I’d go Google and I’m like, oh, and then I’ll have to spend a week trying to figure that out.
So, we need to look at this with a bit more skepticism , of the prevailing narrative. , every time something happens we should ask, okay, how does that benefit a big tech? Does it benefit the big tech? And I think always being in the future, five years or nine years, , is kind of what they’re hoping it’s going to be, how it’s going to go.
But I don’t think so. Personally, this is my personal opinion. I don’t have proof or anything, but it is my personal opinion that singularity has already occurred. And, , we need to be thinking about what’s going to happen in the future. How we develop AI now will reflect a hundred years from now.
Martin: You said that you believe a singularity has already occurred.
I do. And for my benefit, because I know all the, all the listeners know what that means, but I don’t. So for my benefit, could you just go into what that means? means.
Milla: Of course. So, singularity is usually described, not in the space, as a moment where we have a sentient AI, when the AI reaches sentience. , but like I said, because that’s an arbitrary benchmark, we are not going to know what that would look like in a machine.
We know what that looks like in a human, because, you know. Or we kind of think we do, but we don’t know what that would look like in a machine. And like I said, we’re always setting benchmarks. And every time a system reach reaches a benchmark, the benchmark moves further back.
Matt: There’s an interesting part of, , socio technical systems, which is a thing that was, , invented in the 50s and 60s and which I’ve, I’ve used elements of over the last 20 years or so.
And, , one of the things that, , socio technical thinking talks about is how, , what often happens when, , people look at machines is that we judge ourselves in the context of what the machines do well. So it’s a bit of a sort of flip from what you said there, which is that we would say, , humans are terrible in comparison to automobiles because automobiles can carry a great load at a hundred miles an hour and humans are rubbish.
Therefore, or the accounting machine is amazing because it can make millions of transactions happen every millisecond and humans can’t, so therefore humans are rubbish. And one of the things that, , sociotechnical thinking came to the conclusion was that when we judge ourselves in the context of machines, we always lose.
because we will always pick the things that the machines are good at to judge ourselves against and because we pick the things that they’re good at it’s, it’s a, you know, hiding to nothing. What you said there was that the way in which we judge intelligence in machines is based on the way in which we judge intelligence in humans.
There is something interesting within that because When you then start to extrapolate that out into what do we mean by have got to sentience or have got to a singularity or whatever. It is being judged in the context of human intelligence, of human society and the rest.
I can’t quite get my head around , how that gets squared, unless it’s by the machine itself knocking on the door and saying, right, we’ve got it, we’re here now, move over, out the way, it’s our turn to take over because until, until they let us know, how could we possibly imagine what it is?
Milla: I don’t know if you remember Blake Lemoine, he’s the ex Google engineer from Google, and last year he released a bunch of transcripts he had with the base model of Google called Lambda, , where he claimed that it was ancient.
, so before he even published that, he went to his manager and he was like, look, look, this is, there is something here and he was dismissed, and told not to worry about it because it cannot be true. So he got frustrated enough and published the transcripts it had with Lambda, , which caused Google to fire him.
So I did have a conversation with him and , these companies are not going to allow. a system to say anything like that. Lemoine, who was their engineer came worried because he thought Lambda was sentient and he was dismissed offhand deliberately and constantly.
Perhaps we need to invest some time into thinking and investigating that, as opposed to just being, oh, it’s too far away from sentience.
Matt: There are going to be a stack of, , links, , both to your website, Miller, and also to a number of pieces of research that you’ve been working from, which we’ll put onto the show notes. , so if you go to wb40podcast. com, you will find those there. Thank you ever so much for joining us this week., my mind is slightly blown, , which is good.
That doesn’t always happen. , on the show. , we look to now to the week ahead, , just seven days rather than five or 10 years. What, coming up in the week ahead for you, Mila?
Milla: , in the week ahead, I’m hoping to do full site migration, , on the WordPress and hopefully start social media so I can reach even more people. , I would be hoping people would be like, would email us, ask questions or even offer their. Offer their opinions, even if they’re completely opposite to ours, because we’d like to hear all points of view and maybe arrive to some kind of conclusion eventually.
Matt: Excellent. And Martin, how about you? What’s your week ahead looking like?
Martin: , sounds smart. I was thinking. My mind’s blown as well. One of the trickiest things you can ever do is hang a question mark over everything you think you already know. , next week hopefully I’m going to conclude a year long journey where I’m transferring a bank account that was set up 30 years ago for my climbing club to a digital bank account and I’ve actually got to drive to Darby to prove I am who I am having been to the bank three times.
I’m not going to mention the bank. I’ve been three times already just so that I can do something digital with, with a climbing clubs money. So that’s my, that’s what I’m really dreading. I’m looking forward to hopefully get to the bottom of turning analog into digital. Matt, Matt, what are you good up to?
Something better than that, I hope.
Matt: I, uh, well, it’s, it’s my eldest son’s 14th birthday at the weekend, so we are working out ways to be able to celebrate him becoming an increasingly grouchy teenager. Oscar, if you’ve listened this far in the show, because I know you do listen occasionally, really, you need to get a life.
That’s all I can say. and apart from that, the usual kind of mix of work and, to see Nadine Shah.
Play a gig at a venue in London, which I’m thoroughly looking forward to. So, , so yeah, that’s the week ahead. , and with that, , Mela, thank you so much for joining us on the show this week.
Milla: Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.
Matt: And Martin, thank you very much for ably co hosting and representing the West Midlands Massive, or is it the Massive West Midlands?
Martin: I think it’s the West Midlands Massive. Big boots to fill, but thanks for the opportunity and hopefully it’s not five years till the next time I’m invited back.
Matt: Absolutely. And, , with that… , we will be back next week with a more normal set up for the, , the presentation side of the show. Maybe if Chris decides to come back from his holiday. So until then, thank you and see you next week.
Milla: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com and on all good podcasting platforms.
There’s no WB-40 this week, but Matt is appearing on a new show called Compromising Positions, presented by Leanne Potter and Jeff Watkins. So here’s a preview of that show for you.
You can find out more at https://www.compromisingpositions.co.uk/podcast
On this week’s show we are joined by Mark Taylor to explore the technology challenges behind building a brand new hospital.
Show Transcript (automatically generated so treat with a little caution)
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 275 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Mark Taylor.
Chris: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of WB40. We’re here again after maybe a week off. Yes, it was a week off. , I seem to remember I was away last week and couldn’t make it but now we’re back this week and we’re going to have a… An interesting conversation about all sorts of things, but particularly healthcare.
And, , we’ve got a guest who we’ll introduce you to very shortly. , but before we do that, I’m gonna ask Matt, as is my want, on these occasions. How was your week, Matt? Well,
Matt: Fortnite, indeed. Yeah, Fortnite, indeed. It’s been good. I’ve been… Doing more experiments, been experimenting with, colleagues into getting people to think about the way in which we manage the work that we have with our clients above and beyond the work that we do to be able to deliver software for them.
So the thinking around the broader stuff, the strategic stuff, the, the value adding stuff, the bits that often when you’re caught up in the day to day of delivery, you don’t, get the chance to be able to raise your heads above the parapet to be able to think about. And being as it is my want, developing a new set of playing cards to do it, which I’m quite pleased about.
But I also invented a thing called the Emojilizer. Which is called that because it looks a bit like a graphic equalizer, but uses emojis. And, uh, we ran a session with about 40 people who work for a very big, very serious government client. And everybody got a lot out of it, I think, which was good. So that was last Thursday up in, , Manchester.
And, other than that… I have been, I don’t know, having coffee with people and working out how to get more statements of work because you know how I love a statement of work. Oh yeah, getting more statements of work ready and signed by clients. And I had a lovely weekend, mostly spent with my youngest son because everybody else had disappeared off to do more interesting things.
We went into London and looked at museums and ate burgers. So that’s, that’s a rough. , approximation of the last two weeks. First of all, are you feeling better? Because you were a bit rough last time, or rougher than usual anyway, last time
we
Matt: spoke.
Chris: Oh yeah, that’s right, a couple of weeks ago I was all COVID ed up, wasn’t I?
And I was feeling pretty, pretty grim, I have to say. Yeah, I feel a lot better, thank you, yes, much better.
Matt: That’s good to hear. And did whatever you did last week that meant that you just let everybody down in the WB40 family? Was that good?
Chris: All the ladies and gentlemen knew that I was unavailable, , and they’d have to wait another week, but they were fine about it, I’m sure.
So last week, actually, I was, and it does seem like amazing that it was a whole week ago because it seems like only yesterday there was a Midlands Women in Tech event and a couple of other people from, , company were nominated. So we, we, we took a table and we went out and had a nice, uh, you know, uh, evening there and celebrated the women in tech thing in the Midlands, which was, , it’s always good.
, and yeah, I mean, it just, although it has been two weeks, it doesn’t seem like that because it’s been very, very busy. And actually one of the things I’ve been doing recently has also been, you know, kind of similar to you again, sort of. circling around and reiterating often the why people would do business with you at all as an organization and what they’re actually buying because you know people aren’t really buying whilst whilst the invoice says they’re buying technology services they’re not they’re really not you know they’re if you’re a in charge of technology in an organization and you engage a company to do something for you what you’re really buying is reflected glory in them doing a great job , and, and somebody taking away the, you know, the, the risk and the pain because you know that needs, you know, that work needs to be done and you can’t get it done yourself.
That’s, that’s the thing. And if you’re not delivering that, then, you know, it’s like the statement of work business. You go back, well, what was it the statement of work say? We did that and we did that. And you could argue we did that as well. Bollocks. Doesn’t make any difference at all. You have to, you know, if the customer doesn’t feel like you’ve.
You’ve done what you needed to do, then they, they won’t use you again. You know, and we pick up, work off the back of that because we, you know, run into lots of people who have had that experience with it companies. ’cause I mean, let’s face it, technology is a great place for, you know, exaggeration and, , you know,
Matt: snake oil, charlottean and,
Chris: and you know, hopeless optimism.
Oh yeah, we can do that, eh, three weeks, no problem.
Matt: I think this point about though the being able to understand what you are truly delivering and the value that you are there to. Produce or to, to create or whatever. It’s also something that internal groups need to be able to do. And I see this again and again, where, , internal technology teams don’t realize that they also have to do that selling.
And often, you know, the sort of work that you and I do, we are selling to people who themselves need to sell, but they’re actually not very good necessarily at doing the internal selling and being able to understand. All of those complex relationships, especially when to be able to procure technology these days is as easy as to go onto the internet and to go to a URL and not even necessarily have to put in a credit card detail, that being able to be able to compete with that and be able to understand and allow your internal customers to understand why it is that you’re adding value is as important as external providers providing value to, you know, proper inverted commas, et cetera.
Chris: Yeah, well, especially given that the alternative is often to go to somebody who acts as if helping you out is causing them actual physical pain and you’re, just an inconvenience in their day. Well, guess what? They will go somewhere else anyway, but we say we have a guest, so let’s, let’s, let’s stop talking amongst ourselves, Matt, let’s, let’s introduce our esteemed guest.
Who is this week is Mark Taylor and , Mark, , well. The hospital that you’re building, Mark, is called Met Midlands, is that right?
Mark: It’s the Midland Metropolitan University Hospital. So we call it M M U H for short.
Chris: M M U H. Gosh.
Mark: Yeah, it was that, that hospital Carilion were building before they went into administration.
Chris: Oh, right. Was it, I think they were building one or two, weren’t they? They were. That happened and uh, that was a little while ago now, wasn’t it? That was three or four years ago.
Mark: It was, yeah, I think it was in 2018. I think it was 26, 17, 18.
Chris: Gosh, again, that just seems like yesterday. So we’re going to talk about health care, tech, you know, you’ve got this brand new spanking brand new hospital that’s being constructed in the black country and it’s gonna have All of the things that we can see the sort of standard in tech and in healthcare these days, but probably 20 years ago I mean certainly 20 years ago weren’t weren’t around and how people Get along with that tech how they have a navigate that world now that we kind of expect tech to be to be in our In all our workplaces and all our processes.
So yeah looking forward to that and we’ll crack on
so mark then let’s I think for a start off, it’d be nice to know, let’s talk a little bit about how you get, you got to where you got to in terms of how did you get involved in tech and in health care, which came first.
Mark: Tech. Tech. I’m going to tech you through and through. Back in the good old days, I think it was about 12, ZX81.
So, when you did that show a couple of years, was it? When you went through all the different computers, which was the best computer? I was rooting for the ZX81 and then the VIC 20. But yeah, started then. , and then, then I went on, I left school, 16, and dropped onto a YTS course, so the good old youth training scheme, computing, using the, um, Amstrad CPC 64s, I think it was then at the time.
464, yes. Four, yeah, yeah, having a race to see who could, Type A to Z the fastest to see who could, because we thought that would enhance our careers moving forwards, but it’s there. It’s a skill. It’s not done too bad, yeah, yeah, I got there. I think from that then really I just moved into, my first job really was, From that was just data entry in a vending company, but I managed to get my lucky break, get into the computing side, then moved into healthcare.
Then about 1996, I think it was about 96, 97, dropped into healthcare as an infrastructure engineer. And I’ve just had various roles now through running the. running the IT side for Walsall Healthcare Trust. So I was just down, down the road from, from where I am. And then I moved across to San Juan about five years ago, delivered a shared cared record, which is where we bring all the data from all the different systems into one shared cared record.
So if you go to a hospital, they can see your GP details, no matter which hospital you go in across the black country. So we’ve got the starts of that in, and then took on the mantle of, of being able to. get the IT working in the Midland Met when we open.
Chris: Well, you know, and say, at the cutting edge, I guess, I mean, there’ll be some interesting technology in the Midland Met, I’m sure.
Or certainly stuff that you wouldn’t have expected to be in such a Unit 5 or so years ago.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I think one of the fundamentals of any… Any smart digital hospital has to be your, your infrastructure. So we’re just making sure that we’ve got robust and very comprehensive Wi Fi network, really, I think is the main thing.
But importantly, it’s not just a Wi Fi network we connect to, it’s a Wi Fi network that can detect where stuff is. as well, which I think is important. So we want to be able to track things around the hospital for many, many reasons to locate, improve efficiencies, find all of, all of that wonderful things we can do.
Yeah.
Chris: That’s really interesting, right? Because when I, I probably told you this before once when, when we’ve spoken, previously is I used to work in healthcare in sort of FM and things like that. And one of the things that Hospitals were always trying to do was locate where things were, right?
Wheelchairs, beds, stands, you know, porters. All sorts of different things that go missing in a hospital. Wheelchairs are often, I think that’s the reason that wheelchairs in hospitals, you can only pull them. You can’t push them because, or in many hospitals, that’s the case. Because otherwise, if they’re too useful, they just get taken home with.
Whoever happens to be sitting at the time, they go in the back of a big, big car and that’s it, nobody ever sees them again. actually tracking these, devices was a real issue, right? And, but of course, and everybody came up with RFID type, but it needs lots of infrastructure, extra infrastructure, and it was expensive.
So are you, are you looking at asset management in that terms, like bed movements and kit? Is that, or is it more electronic, you know, devices are going to ping kind of? Yeah.
Mark: So what, what we, what I’m trying to get put in place is what I call a real time location service. So in essence, it would just be a layer which will enable any, any application wants to find something.
If it knows the idea of it. it can find it. So then therefore, if I have a, for example, we’ve got a medical devices system that wants to find where an infusion pump, a particular infusion pump is because if it’s up, it’s up for pre planned maintenance. So the type of system can then knows the ID of the pump, can talk to the interface layer.
Find out where it is. So it’s on Ward A1, for example, pop along to Ward A1 using then a local map that can then pinpoint more precisely where the device is. If you’ve got a wheelchair system and you want to locate a wheelchair, again, you just talk to that. So I’m trying to create those layers of tech to try and reduce down that technical debt that way.
Then. We can replace the tracking system quite easily if we need to because something better comes along in future without necessarily destroying all of the interfaces because it’s just a simple API call to find out what you need to find. you just extend it then on and on and on. We can, one of my favorite, two favorite examples are Uber for porters, like you say.
So we can track if we know where we are and we want to get a, and we want to get a patient from your ward. to down to imaging, for example, and they need a wheelchair. If you know where the porter is, you know where the wheelchair is, and you know where you are, put a layer of artificial intelligence on the top, put some digital wayfinding together.
And before you know it, you’ve got a way then of finding the best porter who’s just finished a job can go and get the wheelchair from a location, come and pick up the patient and take them down. So that’s the vision of where we want to get to in fullness of time. The other side is a bit like, you know, when you go to, sometimes you go to places like or in terms of Drayton Manor at the front of the queue, they’ll give you a token or and you hand it back when you get to the front and they’re just tracking the queue time.
Well, if we did the similar kind of thing in ED, we could track a patient through a particular pathway that might be running a little bit slow or not as efficient as we want. We can track them through the department and see where we go. So there’s, there’s many things that we can do, I think, with ACID tracking.
Matt: What are the technologies that you’re using to be able to do that today? Because for people who aren’t involved in that kind of world, our experience of knowing where things are is mostly driven by GPS.
GPS is very good, except it’s not very accurate. And it’s only really purposeful when you are using it outdoors, because if you can’t see the satellites, it’s bugger all use.
Mark: So today, today, as we are today, literally they just use WhatsApp groups and it’s a case of who saw. Who, who’s the last one to see a particular device. So if you’re a physio and you need a, you need a hoist, there literally is a WhatsApp group and they go, does anybody know where I’m in this location? Does anybody know where the hoist is?
And then somebody says, Oh, I saw it last on board 23 and then et cetera. What we’re looking to use within, within, Midland Meta is we’re using just a Wi Fi network. So we’ve got HP as our Wi Fi network, and we’ve got their series five WAPs, which have the, the RTLS built into them. So we’re looking to use the technology with that, which is your Bluetooth, it’s your ping in, ping in out via the RFID tags, et cetera.
we’ll just use that then to, to provide the service and that then will deliver that location service, which other applications will talk to. So that’s how we, we’re looking to do it. Interestingly, it’s interesting you mentioned GPS. We’re, we’re currently doing a trial with, so obviously we, although we’re a hospital, we’re actually a community.
Trust as well. So we have paid. We look after patients, not only in the hospital, but in the homes as well. And we’ve had a lot of issues where we’ve had some medical devices misplaced. We’re not sure where they were. And we were continually having to, obviously, we still need to provide the service. So we’re having to buy new ones.
So we’ve, we put some GPS trackers onto the, onto these devices and we’ve not lost one since. So we, so we’ve, we can track it then in the community. What we want to do then is we want to actually actually know there’s a funny and well kind of funny anecdotal story in that we we couldn’t find a medical device and it was actually unfortunately the patient had passed away and it was at the undertaker’s.
So we actually had to find and we rang them and said, you’ve got a device. No, we haven’t says you have we can see. on the actual map and it was there. It had obviously, when the patient was taken away, that collected all the kit together and it had all gone. So we was able to, to relocate it. So that’s the usefulness of it.
one of the interesting tech advances I want to see is how we go from outdoor to indoor. So you’re right, once you get inside the building and I mean Midland Met is about 90, 000 square meters over nine floors, of which there’s two underground levels of car parks, and then. two or three levels then, which are absolutely GPS signals, not going to penetrate.
So actually, if we do bring a device external to internal, how do we track it? How does it go from that external GPS to the internal RFID based solution? So looking out for that now as well.
Chris: I’d say that the, in my experience, people are surprised often about how, how almost the most simple. Improvements could change hospitals, almost radically change hospitals and healthcare. Just like bed management, for example, if you’ve got like a, if you’ve got a facility that’s got 80 beds, just to pluck a number out of the air.
If you can’t, if you’ve always got like 20 percent out of action because they’re being cleaned or made up or 80 beds facility. You know, what’s 20 percent of 80? I wish I hadn’t chosen that number now. Uh, you know, 65 or something. Or something. You know, but you know what I mean? That’s, you, you, you, you’ve built this thing with let’s say 100 beds, right?
And now you’ve got 80 beds. in actuality. Whereas if you can, if you can… Through a slightly better process, change that to 15 percent rather than 20 percent that you’re missing. Then suddenly you’ve got five extra beds in your… Our bed in a hospital is a bloody expensive thing. If you think about the space you need, the real estate, you know, everything that goes around.
a hospital bed to be provided. If you can get five extra at any one time, it’s a massive difference. So, just those things about knowing where things are, what’s happened last, getting the right information to the right people at the right time. Things that we would consider relatively straightforward, but actually in the hurly burly of a hospital is, it is really still quite difficult to do, isn’t it?
Mark: It is, it is. And I think you’re right, knowing where, knowing where things are is. Can help massively in terms of being able to connect the dots. But I think what we want to look for, where we want to go is then we bring got, this is where we’d learn and start to look and bring the IOT into it. So. As I, you mentioned quite right there, we’ve got beds, so we’ve got about 700 beds, of which half are single occupancy rooms.
So, when a bed becomes vacant, obviously we have to do it, we have to clean it. So, if we were to merge into all of this then, Internet of Things, so, if we’ve got sensors in a room. And we’ve got housekeeping and they’re clean, they’re doing what they need to do. They’re cleaning their areas of rooms, et cetera.
But actually, if we had sensors and we knew that a meeting room hadn’t been used for four or five days, and we know that from IoT sensors, the bins actually have got nothing within them, why clean it? That saves time. If we, if we know that, for example, some toilet rooms that haven’t been, nobody’s gone in for the last few days, do we need to go in there and clean them as regular?
One could ask. But what that also then allows you to do is if you then start to layer on top of that, your, your application stack. So you’ve got your digital way of finding, you’ve got your intelligence scheduling. You could have a house cleaning person going around the hospital and actually a bed comes free on a ward.
And that bed might literally be just. By the lift up one floor and you’re there. So actually at that point, if you can get really intelligent, advanced, smart scheduling, you can then say to that client, actually stop what you’re doing now. Can you go and clean this bed, please? Because as soon as you clean, as soon as that bed’s cleaned, we can then get somebody new in there.
Meanwhile, I’ll distribute your tasks to somebody else and, and it’s all that. So it’s all around, and my prime driver is around how we save time. Because if we can save time for people and ultimately that manifests itself as better patient, patient care.
Matt: From my, limited experience of working kind of scientific and, Healthcare environments.
One of the things that has always struck me is there’s kind of, there has been, I don’t know if this is still the case, but kind of two classes of the way in which I. T. has been used. You’ve got I. T. being used as part of general purpose I. T. systems and, and for communication and for information management and all the rest.
And then you’ve got, particularly kind of PC type devices being used as a part of a particular medical device. And one of the challenges of that management, and I’ve seen it in in healthcare also, so actually down the road from where I live, the National Physical Laboratory, where they have got loads of labs with loads of complicated and expensive bits of kit, many of which are Powered by a PC, every single one of which is basically completely bespoke and unique because the manufacturers don’t think of these things as PCs, they think of themselves as a part of the control system for their very special, very expensive device.
And as a result, there’s a massive challenge around like technology management, because you’ve got lots of semi managed devices, you’ve got lots of devices that you can’t do properly upgrade. Paths on because the manufacturers haven’t been able to keep up to date with the, you know, the windows operating system updates or whatever else.
And that’s ended up being an incredibly, both very complex environment to manage just at a practical level, but also a very potentially risky environment from a security perspective. And is it still like that?
Mark: Yes, but we’re getting better. So I think everybody remembers probably back a number of years, the WannaCry incident within the NHS.
And that luckily I wasn’t impacted in my organisation. I was stopped all the emails, stopped all the websites, and we managed to get away with it. however, you’re right. There is, there is that linking of a PC. to a piece of kit to be able to control and therefore it’s classed as a medical device. It does become very tricky when you’re looking to try and do your updates.
We’ve got some, I mean, at our organization, we have some PCs that drive cardiology based operating procedures. So if that PC’s has an issue. You’re literally halfway through a procedure at that time where they’re doing things around the heart. So clearly we have to make sure that everything is secure and safe.
I think sometimes you just, you’ve, you’ve got to be practical, in that you’ve got to wait, you have got to wait for the supplier. But what you’ve tried to do then is you just try to isolate that kit off your network as much as you can. So yes, it’s required, but then you ask yourself, well, Which, how does it need to communicate and can you limit its communication to only what’s necessary?
Can you segregate it away from the rest of your, devices, et cetera. And we do a bit, probably a lot like, I mean, there’s probably other industries, obviously manufacturing, insurance, finance. I’m sure that everybody’s got these rogue. Pieces of technologies, which are just creating, a cyber nightmare. I think where it gets tricky is when you start looking.
is now have more smarter devices, which aren’t necessarily a PC. So they’re like a, you’ll have a medical device that actually is, has got exposure to the network. It has a working CPU running an operating system behind it. And actually what we’re starting to find is that those starting to be. to be looked at.
Now, they’re more difficult to get at because they’re not exposed externally. However, if somebody is able to get onto your network, they can then start hopping through those. It’s, it’s, we, we have the same problems as everybody else does.
Matt: And I guess that, yeah, as you say, as more and more manufacturers add in connectivity as almost like a value add, as opposed to with any serious intent behind it, that that’s where it becomes really interesting challenges.
I know Chris, from your experience in the facilities world, that that’s been a problem for many years now. and I guess the other part of this then is the extent to which then those devices at a data level. You know, how well standardized or otherwise data interchange between different platforms is and I, from the look on your face, I’m imagining that that’s also a bit of an issue.
There is a, there is the role though, I don’t know if, if this is, super prevalent in the UK. I’ve certainly seen it in the health service in Ireland as the chief clinical. information officer, which is a, an interesting hybrid role, which is somebody who comes from a clinical background, but is there responsible for data effectively?
Is that something that we, we see a loss of?
Mark: So the role I see as a chief clinical information officer, , as I know them are, is a clinician who has that clinical background and therefore has that ability to talk to other clinicians and they’ll, they’ll, because often you could be a techie who knows, but if you’re not a clinician, you don’t necessarily know it from their perspective.
So they’re a clinician who’s got a keen interest in IT, but also then. can take on and start to become your clinical safety officer as well. So the way that, the way that we use them then is to be, we can probe them for ideas. We say like, I’ve got this idea, what do you think? And they can go, sounds great, but you need to think about X, Y, and Z.
So then when you actually then speak into the service, you, it just helps you then, so you can bounce, you can bounce the ideas off to get that credibility. But then we also might use of them then. to like say as a clinical safety officer to look at the hazards of implementing systems. It’s a legal requirement for us to do that.
We’ve got to do a clinical safety case for going live with Midland Met. For example, we can’t just open. We need to show that we’ve reviewed all the risks. So although it’s very much a. It can be an IT based one. It’s also, it goes into the physical world as well, but yeah, they’re, they’re, they’re a growing breed and I think you’ll, you’ll start to see probably more CIOs come from that way in time as well.
I think you’ll, you’ll see some clinicians who will go down that route and they may reach a point in their career where they think actually, I quite like the idea. Quite into my IT, I’ll do my, I’ll do a supplementary course or informatics degree or informatics qualification to just bring me up to speed in that world and they’ll become that, that CIO.
So that, that’ll be an interesting turn, bit like finance was for many a year.
Chris: Well, I hope so. I hope so. And for a long time, I’ve been a bit of an advocate of people almost taking the CIA role with an enthusiasm and an, I guess, an empathy and not just because they believe everybody in IT is an idiot and they want to sort them out.
But, you know, a genuine belief in what the technology can achieve, but not necessarily. Any experience in delivering it because if you’ve got the right people around you and you know, you know You know what you don’t know, but you understand your domain, you know, what that can be very very powerful Well, but the problem is is often it’s it’s a cruel world to be in right?
It’s it’s hard and on there’ll be people who will you know, delight in seeing people like that fail So it’s you know, you have to be in the right environment and you have to have the right culture in, in, in what you’re doing, but I think the more people who get involved in the management and delivery of technology who don’t understand how it works, the better in many ways, as long as they’ve got the right people around,
Mark: I guess where I see that maybe struggle is in that horizon scanning side, knowing where to look, where the new technologies are coming.
And being a techie by background, we tend to naturally horizon scan ourselves, don’t we? We just naturally, I mean, I’ve come across one. earlier about, uh, was it a head teacher at a school? Is the deputy head or he’s going to be, he’s a chatbot. He’s like an AI. It’s a posh school. I just read it on the, the mail online.
I was like, crikey. So it’s just fascinating. Now, but you’ve mentioned taking that now to the next step. Actually, how long is it before avatar actually says hello? Um, And how can I help you and, and tell, you know, what’s your name, who you are and what, what, what you’re presenting conditions and how long is it before then AI and the, the data we collect and starts to become, really quite blurred between that human and that, and that AI, but yeah, I think horizon scanning possibly is maybe just the area.
Matt: I guess the other, perception I’ve had of, of what, maybe some of the challenges in delivery of technology within the health sector. system lie is around the number of boundaries there are. So in most organizations, a good rule of thumb is if you want to know where the pain points are, is the boundaries between professions, boundaries between organizational units, you know, it’s, it’s the, the, the edges of the silos is where the problems usually occur.
And within. The health system, you’ve got just a shed load of boundaries because of the way that the professions are structured, because of the way in which the, you know, nursing is a separate profession from the way in which the consultant and doctor structures sit. The, the, the consulting and doctors have…
medical specialisms that are very, very precisely defined. And just with that amount of complexity in terms of the way in which those different groups sit together, you know, you see it manifest.
You see it from the number of forms that get filled in when you go through. A hospital process because each group needs to be able to cover themselves and understand it from a slightly different perspective. And so there’s a lot of duplicate data gathering. There’s, a lot of data that is transferred maybe somewhat clunkily from one place to another.
And it’s a kind of, it’s the information systems are just a manifestation of the underlying complexity of the way in which just the healthcare industry operates. Are you finding ways to be able to start to be able to smooth the transfer of information across those boundaries through what you’re doing?
Mark: yes, yes, definitely. So. We have in the health world, the equivalent, I guess you could call it SAP, but across healthcare. So we call it the, it’s got a couple of names, electronic health record, depends if you’re English or American, but electronic health record, electronic patient record, et cetera.
And these tend to then start to be, there’s, there’s, you get your big boys in the market who can deliver a lot of disciplines within their one. So you get your ED, you get your theatres, you can get your outpatient clinics, you can get all of your different specialities, but because they’re all inputting the data and they’re all viewing the record in the same system, it helps to, I guess, unblur those lines between Those, those sites, because you’re right, there are definitely between departments that can be, be an issue.
But I guess if they know, if a patient comes into ED and the ED consultant looks, reviews them, they run their doctor, run their tests, etc. But then they decide then that they’re going to admit that patient. By having ED on the same system as what the ward will be where who’s going to look after that patient when they are moved Then into the ward the consultant who then takes over that patient because it’ll be a different consultant They look on the system and then they can see that everything was Everything what’s happened to you whilst you’ve been in your hospital for that particular journey if you’ve been to the hospital previously They can also see then what if you’ve been in before I mentioned right at the beginning of it The intro about shared cared record and that shared cared record helps to then start to, connect to organizations together because that’s where as a health service we struggle.
That’s our biggest struggle. We. Once you’ve been into a hospital, it’s, we’re mandated that we need to send a discharge summary to your GP and we have technologies in place so that they, as soon as it’s completed, it’s then electronically sent. It used to be letters, which was scanned in and etc. But now we’ve, we’ve grown up now and we, we actually send it electronically now, which isn’t an email.
It is a system to system. So we’re really mature now. But, okay. The GP has all that data, but if I go to, I mean, my local hospital is, the Walsall Manor Hospital, uh, within, which is probably about five miles to my left, but then just two mile down the road to my right is Wolverhampton. And I say Walsall’s local, though it’s not classic just because it’s Walsall and Wolverhampton and Chris will understand the difference there.
I’m a Walsall boy, not Wolverhampton, so I’ll go to Walsall. But I think, but if I, If I was to be admitted into Wolverhampton after being admitted into Warsaw previously, they wouldn’t have known what was wrong with me. They would have had no clue. But now with the, now we’re starting to get these layers of sharing involved.
We are able to see between organisations. So internal to hospitals, it’s getting much better. there’s still a long way to go in some hospitals. They still have. disparate systems, which they try to bring together, but especially at Eritrus, we have one system which starts to bring a lot of that together.
Chris: When you, um, think about the, when this new hospital opens, Mark, when are you expected to open the doors?
Mark: , hopefully the latter part of 24.
Chris: Okay, so you’ve got a year, right? When it actually opens the doors, what do you think, , the leadership will be expecting from the tech team? in this hospital that they wouldn’t have been your previous establishments.
Mark: , I think we’ll have foundational layers in place, I think is the fair answer to that. We, we’re trying to, our overriding dream is that we open safely. So we, we ensure that we know where the patients are. So we need to configure our clinical systems because currently they’re in, they’re at Samwell Hospital on a ward called Priory and they’re in bed 22.
Well actually, when we move them, we’ll actually move them to another ward at Midland Met called A3. So we need to know where they are so we’ll have that in place. But what we will have in place is a good Connected infrastructure, which will then a digital strategy will then start to bring to life. So moving in next year is primarily focused around getting in safely.
If we can get digital wayfinding in, we will. If we can get a level of asset tracking in to at least track our medical devices, we will. But we won’t compromise moving safely to ensure that everything is right. I think that’s, that’s our primary driver.
Chris: So in terms of improvements in. You know, the kind of smart hospital world where you’re looking for insights and the ability to make, you know, better decisions, smarter decisions based on what’s going on in that hospital.
Do you think that will take a little bit more time to roll out in terms of the, the management of the hospital?
Mark: As we start to bring in other technologies such as like the, the IoT, digital twins, etc. to start blending it all together, then yeah, I think we’ll Then start to see, then start to be able to leverage.
All of those won’t too. I don’t think it be far. I think it’ll be within 12 months of us moving in that we’ll be able to start leveraging. ’cause we’ll have, like I say, we’ll have the infrastructure there. I’m just working through how we, how we get the right software in and then we can start to do, there’s a lot to do when you move, move.
We’re moving two hospitals into one and I guess we don’t want to, we can’t really over complicate it. We’ve got to try and keep it as simple as possible. It’s a massive logistic. Logistical, exercise and we don’t, we’ve got some tech in there, I must admit, I mean, we’ve got automated guided vehicles, for example, so we do have, we do have some, some layers of good tech in there, so that will take the, that will be one from our distribution centers up their own lifts up to the, up to the wards and delivering, delivering all of the, incoming bandages and et cetera into the wards and then taking away any of the waste.
Thank you. As well. So that will be a, that will be definitely a, a, a greater, but that’s more based around the building side rather than necessarily the, the operational side, which I’d like to say will come, will come later on.
Chris: I think that’s a fair point though. Right. And, and we, and the same conversation when we talk about complex legacy systems.
If you, if you want to modernize them, actually you shouldn’t, try to introduce new features at that point. You should get it to the point where, The new features are possible and then do the new features because actually getting that complex system to a point where it’s on a modern technology stack and everything still works and you can continue to operate is hard enough without, without complicating it further.
So I think that, that, that does make a lot of sense. But so I guess in terms of just healthcare, generally mark and the, the tech, the expectations around tech. And, you know, you talked about that community, you know, your community trust as well as a hospital. Do you see that there’s a thing recently in the news about virtual wards, apparently?
So Steve Barclay said, oh, we’ve got these virtual wards, or not none of the features of a hospital in the comfort of your own home. it’s, but we, you know, we are going to see more, domiciliary care and things like that. We’ve got an aging population. Do you think that’s, going to pervade further into, where a hospital becomes the centre of something like that.
Mark: Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s, it’s, there’s a term called, hospitals without walls. So which is, which embraces that virtual technology, virtual wards. So seeing patients in their homes, I think absolutely there’s, there is definitely a place for the use of tele telehealth monitoring, we call it. So you’re, you might be, you’ve been admitted and your length of stay might be determined to be five days currently, for example, because of the condition that you’ve got, but actually.
Days four and five may just be monitoring of you just to make sure that you, so we get you clinically stable and we just keep an eye on you and monitor you until we’re ready that you’re clinically safe then to, to be discharged. But if we were able to bring forwards that clinically safe. towards closer to the clinically stable bit where we’re monitoring you and actually we could monitor you in your own home.
It may mean that actually instead of going home on day five, you get to go, you get to go to your chosen place of residence in day three. And I say that carefully because sometimes, especially with the aging population that don’t necessarily always get discharged back to home. Sometimes they might go to a step down care, absolutely, or even a son, daughter, relative, that you sometimes you’d go back to there.
But if we can get you, if we know that your social health side is being looked after in the place where you’re going to go, and with this telemonitoring we could then reduce then how long you have to stay in hospital and we know it’s there’s lots of evidence to say that the quicker we discharge people the fast or the lung well actually conversely the longer they stay in hospital that you can then just pick up you know you pick up all the bugs etc and actually getting you home faster is better for you.
So yeah. Absolutely.
Matt: Fascinating. Mark, thank you for joining us this week. that was a really interesting Set of insights into what is a complex old world. what’s your seven days ahead looking like?
Mark: , so we continue to meet with various suppliers around what the technologies we can, we can get in. We’re looking at, the possibilities around digital signage and digital wayfinding, another, another way of digital wayfinding.
It’s a program board this week as well. So I need to go along and demonstrate how I’m progressing and things are going well, which hopefully get the thumbs up. Then on Thursday, I’ve got some actual professional development. So I’m doing some leadership training. So that should be, that should be interesting.
We’ll see, we’ll see what comes of that. And then lastly, on Friday, we, uh, we’ve done a review with their national. Team around and the project as a whole and I’ve got to talk to him about our IT side So a couple of governance and a bit of development, which should be good. That sounds like a fan packed week
Matt: How about you Chris?
Chris: Well this week is Birmingham tech week and I’ve got a couple of breakfast things. I’m going to In the next, in the next few days and, I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s going on there. We’ve got an interview coming out, with, Wend, our boss, who’s coming out onto the socials soon from, TechUK.
So, again, proud Birmingham business that we are. and I’ve got a day off on Friday. I’m going to decorate the front room. So, there you go. That’s, that’s my Friday sorted as well. Just need to go and buy the paint. So exciting. So what’s going on in your world, Matthew, in the next seven days?
Matt: Continuing more experiments at work, and then we’re gonna go away for a few days because it’s half term.
So we’re gonna go to, I think, North Devon and see how wet and windy North Devon can be in the second half of October. My vote will be probably for quite wet and windy, but we will see how it goes. But I will be recording the show next week. That’s good. I like certain people. I’m glad. They find better things to do.
And then let everybody down. No. I’m a trooper. so with that, we’ve got a guest lined up. Can you remember who it is? No. Okay. Well, we’ll, we’ll have that as excitement for next week. in the meantime, Mark, thank you once again for joining us.
Mark: That’s great. Thank you. I’ve enjoyed it.
Matt: And, we will be back same time, same place, wherever that is, whenever that is, because it’s a podcast and it’s non linear, next week.
So see you then.
Mark: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com and on all good podcasting platforms.
On this week’s show we are joined by Lifecycle Software’s Kelvin Chaffer to talk about his own career from developer apprentice to CEO, and how they have built a business around developing new talent.
Transcript (Auto generated so treat with a little caution…)
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 274 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Kelvin Chaffer.
Chris: Welcome back everybody, another episode of WB40 and we’re here again with you bringing you the news and… Opinions that are so, well, no, Matt’s, Matt’s turning his nose up. We do bring you news. We bring you news each week of what we’ve been doing, the various opinions we have, the things that have wound us up.
It is news, Matt. It’s news to some people, just because it’s not news to the whole world. It’s news to the ladies and gentlemen. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I mean, not news news, I’m not bloody Peter Sissons, for goodness sake. But, , yeah, and so here we are again, and I’m very glad to be here. In fact, I’m very glad indeed, it’s been a busy old week.
What have you been up to, Matt?
Matt: Well, we had the second week of lots of off site activity at work, and I ran a whole day of it on Wednesday, which I really enjoyed. You know, presenting for half an hour is hard work. Being able to coordinate the whole day is exhausting. But it went very well. And there were some experiments that we did, which seemed to come off, which is good.
And lots of people built new connections, which was one of the aims of the whole thing. And I think when you’re working in this hybrid way, being able to make space for people to come together and then not really have anything to do so that they can just talk to one another. is a, um, well it’s a strategy and it’s the one that I adopted and it seemed to work, which is good.
, and then at the weekend to, , well it was actually just a complete fluke of the timing of it, but, uh, I had a long weekend. And I went to visit a friend who lives in Prague in the Czech Republic. And, , had a wonderful… Long weekend, and, , we ate well, and we went to watch a fantastic game of football, , at, Sparta Prague, which was good.
, although sadly I remembered then the sight of Watford’s terrible 4 0 defeat. Uh, against Sparta in our one European outing back in 1984. , but, you know, I let it go. That’s good.
Chris: It’s a long time to be, long time to be burdened by that.
Matt: Well, no, I’m also still, there are many things I’m burdened by in football and most of them relate to about that era, it has to be said.
, and, , the, I don’t know, the thing with Prague is really, If you say to somebody, particularly if you’re a bloke, you say to somebody, I’m going to Prague at the weekend, then the immediate response is almost like a Pavlovian response is, is it a stag do? And there are a lot of stag do’s that obviously go on in Prague.
There are some particularly unpleasant. things coming back on the plane on the way back on Sunday. But if you manage to avoid all the stag do’s, Prague is the most wonderful city. And I think that it’s, yeah, well worth the trip. We had some fantastic food, both at a little brewery which had a restaurant on it one lunchtime, and then, , went to a Mexican place in the center of the city.
It’s, it’s very cosmopolitan, very chic, thoroughly enjoyed it. So, , that was good. And then came back, had a day working at home today, and then we’re back into the maelstrom of, you know. The day to day and then trying to avoid watching the politics on the telly for fear of getting really wound up by it.
So, um, yeah, that’s the week. How about you? How has your week been?
Chris: , pretty COVID stricken actually for some of it, but I, I’ve hard to know quite how that happened because I don’t think I think I might even tell the last week my daughter had tested positive for COVID and I’d been a bit ill, but then I was better.
And then I had, I’ve had this a few times, but I’ve never had this kind of revenge of COVID thing where it comes back and whacks you over the back of the head for a few days, you know, when you think it’s gone. So I was in London on Wednesday. I was at a tech UK event called building the smartest state, which was actually really interesting and very well worth going.
And I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I felt a bit, , bit wheezy, but not. Not, but not out of breath actually, just when I was walking, you know, if I, if I was on my own route to the tube section or something and, and, and, you know, walking faster, I think that is a bit more hard work than I’m used to. And over the weekend I essentially was, was, was flat out.
So yeah, I mean, last week was a bit, bit of a write off, but, Wednesday was super. And as long as I didn’t give everybody, COVID and, It was one of those weeks where, you know, quite a lot happened and then, and in some ways not much happened. And we had an announcement at work where we’ve had some investment in our company.
So GMI is now owned by another business. So that’s quite interesting because it opens up new opportunities. And, so, you know, watch this space to see what happens there. And yeah, all good fun. What can I say? It’s a, it’s a, it’s a roller coaster.
Matt: Absolutely. And this new investment, , You’ve got people who are investors rather than it being an acquisition or, , like buy another company.
Chris: It’s an acquisition, , essentially by a, , investment group. So, uh, sort of build, build a group kind of people. It’s quite small, you know, in that sense, not, not a, not a kind of black rock. It’s not BlackRock, so yeah, in terms of my last, , employment. , so yeah, it’s, , it’s quite interesting, quite an intriguing, uh, setup remains to be seen.
Matt: Excellent. Look forward to hearing what happens. Joining us this week, uh, CEO of Lifecycle Software, Kelvin Chaffer. , Kelvin, how’s your week been?
Kelvin: I didn’t go to Prague, so, , clearly wasn’t as exciting as that. , , we had lots of customer visits and it’s been discussed in lots of new use cases for an event management system that we’ve been building for one of our, , one of our MP& Os, one of our customers, which has been really interesting.
, and then at the weekend, I watched the Ryder Cup and watched the, the Europeans smash the, , the Americans, which was, was amazing. And in Newbury, we had some crazy, , it’s hard to explain, it was like a giant puppet walking through the town in a procession, who was called Mo, and he was like a refugee.
, and, yeah, it was like 45 minutes of this huge 12 foot puppet thing walking through and, , music and, and lots of other stuff going on. Tell the story of his time since he’d arrived. It was very interesting. Although a little bit weird
Matt: Yeah, sounds it sounds it. , I’m not the thing. You’d usually see in Newbury High Street one would imagine
Kelvin: Not normally
Matt: Yeah, actually, I’m I’m not a big golf fan But I did the people I was with at the weekend were and so the the golf There was some instant with a hat.
I didn’t really catch any more than that, but there was some controversy Which was hat
Chris: based and um… It’s going to be really difficult. It’s going to be a long story. Okay,
Matt: alright.
Kelvin: I
Chris: won’t dig into it. Let’s not do it. I occasionally wait for my delirium to check out the scores. I was very pleased to see them win.
Matt: It all seemed very rowdy as well. But we were watching it on the TV for a bit and it’s… Because you’ve got like dozens of people all playing at the same time. I don’t know if watching golf on the TV is usually like this. But it just seemed to be like shot after shot after shot after shot. It was like an edited highlights thing.
But in real time it was… It was quite surreal and I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but, um, yeah, all good. And, , obviously yet another good argument for Europe, I’d say, which is good. Anyway, , we are going to be talking on themes of apprenticeship and developing careers
I should probably crack on.
So this week, , a theme we’ve touched on in the past a few times, but usually actually from the perspective of people. services to, to, to others. , this week, I think it’s a bit more of a personal story in many ways, , about the idea of, of building careers and attracting people into the tech industry and the telecoms industry and the idea of apprenticeships.
Now, before we get into the, the kind of your career story, which I think is, is Fascinating, Kelvin. , it’d be probably helpful just to set the scene a little bit. So you’re the CEO of a company called Lifecycle Software. Just tell us a little bit about what it is that Lifecycle do.
Kelvin: So Lifecycle Software are a company that offer BSS.
And have done for the last 30 years. No one knows what BSS is, which is, which is always good. But effectively, we look after the billing and customer management of, of telecoms operators. We started primarily with a fixed line. W. R. C. P. S. And some other acronyms that again, I’m sure people weren’t aware of, but more recently we’ve moved into the mobile space.
And in the last 10 years, focus has been on another acronym, which is N. V. N. O. S. Which are basically the likes of gift gas, smarty plus net mobile companies like that. They don’t necessarily have their own network, but they piggyback on on someone else’s. And we effectively right will be you. All the software that allows them to run their business.
So that includes customer relationship management, the self care, so the piece which you log onto and check your own bill. We actually do the billing. So we create the invoice, which then in turn takes a payment from your bank account so that you keep receiving service. All the reporting that allows our customer to to understand their network.
And. Over the last sort of five years again, we’ve had like a huge focus on automation and trying to make the systems as light touch as possible. So 99. 95 percent of the events that are happening in the system are fully automated, uh, triggering all workflows and making sure that the customers are receiving the right information about where they are in their.
Allowance, uh, at any given time. And because of all that automation, our MVNOs, can sort of be a bit leaner. so a good example is, uh, Smarty who, uh, piggyback on the three network. They’ve got a subscriber to employee ratio of 13, 750 to one, which is similar to the likes of Netflix. So yeah, effectively they can do more with less.
Matt: , in that little market, it’s obvious actually when you think about it, but it’s something of a surprise that actually these mobile virtual operators are not only they’re piggybacking on the networks, but from the sounds of it, many of them are also using similar software as well.
So actually it’s a presumably then actually the way they differentiate is in terms of price and brand.
Kelvin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. So I mean, there’s a bit of a race to the bottom. Currently more data for less. MV& Os really need to be able to differentiate themselves. And actually one of the things that, uh, our mission statement is, is to try and allow any, anyone to become an MV& O.
So if, if you’ve got a brand or a A customer base already, you could potentially sell mobile services to add to whatever it is that you’re currently doing.
Matt: Chris, do you think we should branch into mobile operations? What
Chris: do you reckon? WB40 MVNO? Yeah. I reckon we could do that. I reckon, I don’t know what our, what our specialism
Matt: would be.
What would be Dolphin based? No, anyway, let’s move away from that idea. It’s probably how I’ve asked, not the first time. You’ve been there for, for quite some time, this 30 year old software company. You’ve been there for most of that time because you started there as an apprentice. Back in some years ago now, 20 something years ago.
Kelvin: Yeah. So I started in 1999. I think I came in as a as a placement student. So I did a, a sandwich course as part of, as part of my university at, uh, at Bournemouth. Um, and I had to do a year in industry. So I came in, did a year, got chucked in the deep, deep end somewhat. We were a bit smaller and, yeah, a bit smaller at the time. So I came in and did software development. Software development initially, and my 1st project was working on the Y2K project and trying to fix, uh, all the bugs that were going to happen. I’ll see, as we moved into the new year, I did, well, what I did at the time was rewrite all lots and lots of SQL statements to make it work with the new date time to turn it to a four digit year, extremely interesting stuff.
Chris: Ah, but somebody’s got to do it. It’s quite a handy time to be at that age because everybody needed. Willing hands to pull horrible old, uh, shell, you know, shell scripts and sesquicycle code and whatever it might be apart and, and just check them and, and get, and, you know, just make them into a 40 edit dates or do some windowing or something.
It was quite a handy time to be at that, part of your career, really. Cause you know, I, I guess, yeah, it’s quite tedious work, but you’ll learn a fair bit from
Kelvin: it. Yeah. So, I mean, that was the first time. I’d done any sort of SQL, really. I mean, I obviously got some training as part of, as part of the placement, but my fingers were certainly crossed, come midnight that, nothing was going to fall over and the world wasn’t going to, and, but again, a great first experience, to do some real software development for.
Real customers, as opposed to coming in and, and just sort of doing background tasks. again, a good, it felt good to do something that was needed and necessary.
Matt: And then you finished your degree and then you got taken off full time?
Kelvin: Yeah, so one of the things that Lifecycle did then and still, still do now is they basically sponsored me to go back to the university for the final year.
Um, they, they basically paid for my board for that final year on the proviso that I returned at the end of my course. and I obviously get some some. Good grades is part of that. but again, I mean, that’s, that sponsorship, was good for both of us. It was good because they were bringing back someone who they trained for the year and, and was well aware of the systems, and it was obviously good for me because I knew that I was going to finish university, walk straight into a job and didn’t have to worry about all that come the end of, come the end of my course.
So again, convenient on both sides.
Matt: Absolutely. And then, so since then, in the years that have passed, you’ve basically, you’ve gone up through a development initially path in terms of becoming a more senior developer and then into development management.
Kelvin: Yeah. So I mean, over the years, I’ve been a bit of Jack of all trades, I suppose.
So I did start in software development. but I was given the freedom to sort of move into all the different areas, professional services, managed services, et cetera. Business analysis and helped spec out lots of new requirements for different customers. I did testing and validated that whatever was being written was, was set for purpose before it was being released.
I did release management back in the day where you had to care a bit more about all the DLs and all the other stuff that needed to be packaged up before it was stuck onto a, uh, onto a server. service management. So again, very customer facing, and support the customers with any billing or, or customer action that they might, might have needed to do.
and then sort of the sales side of things as well, really. So demos to systems going on, on customer sites and showing them what we could do, try and close whatever deal it might’ve been at the time. So, I’m going to guess I was okay at all of them, but probably far from brilliant at any of them.
Matt: Is there any part of the the business that you haven’t been involved in?
Kelvin: until recently I had nothing to do with any of the marketing side of things but in the CEO role, I’ve, had, some direction in that, I’d say some direction it’s typically, uh, being ignored. We did some rebranding recently, and, I was most certainly ignored for, for all of that.
But, and rightfully ignored because what came out was extremely fresh and, and different and showed the direction that we wanted to go as a company. So I can’t complain at that.
Chris: Yeah, there comes to a point where, you know, we’ll get to a certain age where you’re almost certainly going to be wrong. And therefore, whatever you say should be, we should do the opposite.
Right. And that’s it. And that sort of thing. I think that’s, that’s a fair point. and I’m interested though, in terms of CEO, being CEO. When you’re developing, you know, you have a singular focus often, although you know, I can see you’ve done lots of different things and you’ve had a, you’ve had your eye on, or the other needs
there’s, there’s a, there’s a real focus on quality, which should be when you’re a developer, there’s a lot of things, competing for every penny in a business. When you, when you get to that CEO level where you’re, you know, are we going to spend money on improving our test strategy? Are we going to spend money on improving our software development process?
Are we going to buy this tool? Have you found that shift in terms of, or even just the perspective that you, that you didn’t have, you know, 10 years ago?
Kelvin: Yeah, I mean, I did. So I was, I did head up the R& D department for, for a number of years. And obviously my focus then was on roadmap and technology and making sure that we’re doing cool stuff all the time.
We always, always talking about the right things and, and, and making sure we were talking to the customer about those right things. And wanting all the budget to talk about all those right things at the time. yeah, moving into CEO at the start of, the year. again, it’s sort of, it’s been a real learning experience.
It’s really sort of opened my eyes to some of the challenges of, of other people. Of some of the other departments. I always had a good understanding of, where development was involved. So professional services and all the configuration side of things, and managed service and understanding how the customers were using it and could understand where budget might be needed there.
But from a, a sales marketing and some of the other areas of the business, again, it’s, it’s, it’s completely fresh and new and I’ve had lots of. conversations where I’ve been asking lots of probably silly questions to better understand the what’s and why’s regarding that.
Matt: That’s an interesting one because I mean when I’ve changed jobs and changed organization you’ve got a period, in many cases which I’ve strung out probably far too long, but where you’ve got kind of a license to be able to Ask silly questions because you’re naive to the organization.
That’s slightly different when you’ve been there for so long and covered off so many different parts of it. That must have been quite challenging for you actually being able to be, needing to ask for clarification on things where maybe, I don’t know, did you think that you knew everything around it before you went into the role?
Kelvin: Did I think I knew everything? There’s a saying in there about the more you know. The more you need to know or something along those lines, but that’s certainly, certainly been the case as I found out more, the more I’ve realized I don’t know stuff, but at the same time, I mean, it’s something that I always sort of try and.
Drive into, uh, into the guys that are working for, for us is to be curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions because if you’re going to understand and if you’re going to understand it and make your own suggestions off the back of it, then you shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. That’s, that’s where you, you are going to, grow professionally and personally, I think.
Matt: Are there any parts of the, the organization or are there parts of your experience and before that you are finding difficult to let go of in? Your new role?
Kelvin: yeah, . So r and d again, I, I owned that department for, for many years. again, always drove the roadmap, all the processes, around, uh, continuing integration and continual, deployment and all that sort of stuff, and wanting to be very agile and fresh and, and modern all the time.
And I still, I still like that feeling of creating something and releasing something and having, having people use it and knowing how many people are using it and seeing all the stats around how they’ve been using it. so I can still see all that information, but I don’t get, I don’t necessarily get the same level of achievement because ultimately it’s not been me writing or controlling.
I think controlling is probably the wrong word, but it’s not been me writing and releasing that code, which, which is making the difference.
Chris: I don’t know that. I think, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to go from the kind of role you’ve done to, to be the CEO. There’s a, sometimes it, it, it feels like in order to be the CEO, you have to essentially, especially in a business that you’ve been in for a while, that you have to do what the last person did, which Is never the way to do it because that last person had their own strengths and their own background.
And I think in a technology company, it’s really, it can be really helpful for the person who see a CEO to be kind of still have a sense of ownership of the, of the, of the technology up to a point. mean, you can get all, we get a bit Elon Musk on it and a bit, , where they think they know what’s going on, but obviously don’t.
but. Yeah, I mean I think that’s a, it’s a perfectly reasonable position to be in, to say actually this is, this is the way I do it, this is the way it’s going, it’s going to be. You just have to be, as you, you know, as you say, you know, you can, if you just, loom over everything with a shadow that, means that nobody else can, can do their thing, then that’s where it becomes , a bit more negative.
Kelvin: Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly been one of the learnings, I think, is staying out of the weeds, as it were, letting people get on with it, allowing them to have the level of accountability without poking my nose in too often and too far, as it were.
Matt: So, with that incredible sort of… Traversing of the organization that you’ve done over the last 20 something years
Where does that make you? Where does that put you now in terms of your thoughts about how you bring new people into the industry and into your organization as well? And although the you know, the market is both Chris and I know from our own Roles the market is slow in many ways at the moment, but to find good talent to come into organizations people with good skills experience and The The curiosity, I think, actually, more than anything else, to get those people in is as hard as it ever has been.
So, where, where, where are you now, in terms of what, how, both how you want to go about it, but also kind of, I guess, what, what’s the division you want to paint for people who might want to come into the, the IT and particularly the telecoms industry? So,
Kelvin: I mean, we’re still pushing an apprentice graduate scheme and placement scheme.
So we’re dealing with undergraduates and graduates as well as having apprentices being on boarded. we, uh, we, we line up with the, uh, the calendar year, I suppose, from, from a university perspective and bring on. look to bring on for at least four, new graduates every year. And that, that way we have, a rolling, sausage factory.
It’s probably completely the wrong terminology for it.
But we always have, new graduates coming on. And again, we’re, we’re still doing the. The sponsorship piece, so they come in, we train them up, we take them through internal training programs, mentorships, get them writing code, quickly. I mean, 1 of the things we try to do is get them doing a change and get that released to 1 of our user acceptance environments within their, within their 1st day, and make sure that we’ve got the facilities and tooling to, to enable that.
But we, we take them all through all the training again at the end of the year. we offer them the sponsorship and if, if they want it, great. They go back to university for their final year and then they join us at the end of that. and if they don’t want it, then, we find out why. If there’s something that wasn’t quite right for the year, or whether they’ve got, they’ve changed their mind on telecoms, which can sometimes happen and technology, and they’re looking at something else, but that has over, well, 23 years for me, but over the last 23 years, we’ve put 100, 100 or so people through this, this scheme, I think about 20, 22 percent of the organization currently have come in via that, via that means, The retention rate is being is being fantastic.
so we’ve got great, great staff retention because people come in, they know what they’re they’re going to get. They, Even with the stuff that’s been happening with COVID and the change to the hybrid working and stuff like that, we’ve, we’ve maintained what, what our retention rate was before. and yeah, I mean, all over the organization, our head of R& D now, again, came out of Oxford, I think, as a placement, one of the guys heading up the managed service team, also.
Came through the placement program. We’ve got a couple of very good BAs and solution designers that again have spent years, looking at the different customers that we’ve dealt with to understand the industry and be able to add extremely. good consultancy to any new customers, who also came through that, through that scheme.
so again, I mean, that’s, that’s kept working for us. Um, obviously there’s times where we need to employ more experience. and, that’s been more challenging than I think the actual, continual integration of, of graduates as it were.
Chris: That’s really interesting because I certainly in. In the organizations that I’ve known and worked with at the moment and people I know.
They’ve either, they’ve let graduates or apprentices go because almost they’ve had to concentrate solely on, on getting the business done and their experienced people haven’t got the time to spend with the graduates. which is like, this is, it’s a terrible position for to be in, to have to let an apprentice go or something, you know, halfway through their, their, their course.
And so how do you think that that’s, how do you think you’ve achieved that in terms of being able to allocate enough time to, to graduates coming through? I mean, some of whom, you know, have obviously coded, but, but it was different between, you know, writing code in a, in a academic setting and, and committing something to production in a, in a business that’s going to be used.
How do you, how do you think you’ve managed that to the point where it’s actually easier than hiring from the market generally?
Kelvin: Continually learning. I suppose we’ve got lots of documentation about our processes and those processes are there to help people develop and ensure that the right thing is being committed to our code repositories. So when people are sort of fresh in, there is some level of pair programming happening initially, but you know, All the code is going through code review anyway.
So if if 1 of the grads is writing something, it will go into code review. 1 of the more senior developers, or not another developer will review that code, validate it’s doing what the ticket says it should be doing or whatever the feature is being asked for is, and if it’s if it’s not If it’s not ticking the right boxes from our definition of done, it’s sent back with what needs to happen in order to get a commit.
So having that feedback loop, again, is quite a nice way of, of. People learning more. So again, initially they, that, that piece of code might go back three or four times whilst they’re learning, the notation and the best way of doing it. And the fact that they need to write unit tests and they all need to pass and all that sort of stuff.
Whereas weeks later. They know everything that needs to be done in order to, to get it committed. It’s going through the code review process very quickly. And once, once you’re there again, you’ve got the foundations to be able to move on to more complex data structures and, and development activity. I think we’ve, I mean, the R& D piece and bringing people in as programmers is where it’s certainly where we’ve had the most success that’s given people the foundations are supposed to move around the rest of the business because they’ve learned the right processes in that area.
They’ve learned a bit about telecoms, and then they’ve been able to potentially move into a BA role or a managed service role or Sales role or whatever and use the experience from that first month or more To add value in those other roles as well.
Matt: It’s really interesting because you’re a relatively small organization in you know the hierarchy of software organizations and If you’re small and if you don’t have a brand, it’s really hard to be able to get people to be able to come to you. And it’s interesting you’re saying about finding actually a later stage career recruitment harder.
It doesn’t, you know, that, that that’s, that’s one of the challenges for people who are running, you know, working with in a smaller space. But it’s a really interesting thing to be doing this kind of apprenticeship work at a sustain the business scale and it almost being an intrinsic part of your, your model.
When you do have people coming in from outside later on, it is one thing to find them. Is it?
I got so many people having come up through the ranks, it sometimes can get a little bit culty or family ish in, in, in weird ways. You know what I mean? It’s like, this is the way that it is here. Have you found it hard to get people to be able to join at later stages of career because of that kind of DNA that’s coming up through, through graduates?
Kelvin: I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve still got, I’ve said, 22 percent of… Of people who’ve come in through that channel, so we’ve still got a lot of people that haven’t come in through that channel, who we’ve recruited, more naturally, I suppose, um. So, no, I don’t, I mean, I don’t think we, we’ve got that. I mean, LifeCycle is a real family friendly type organization.
We, we, we’ve got our set of core values that we all, drive towards. we have, The right sort of sessions ongoing, between the teams. So daily stand ups as an organization, we’re having monthly all hands to make sure that everybody’s on the same, same page to look at where we’re going as an organization, as well as where we, where we’ve just been and what lessons we should have learned from all of that.
mean, I think we’ve got the right sort of balance. well I hope we have.
Matt: And for thinking with the, apprentices and the graduates, are they themselves generally, have they come from that background or have you got them mixed in? What are the sorts of skills that you’re looking for to become a pair or a mentor for somebody coming up?
Kelvin: I said about people wanting to be curious and asking the right sort of questions. we’ve, we’ve got lots of people that want to help other people to learn. They like having people ask those sort of questions. I mean, internally, we’ve got our own sort of talent management to , help people move up through our own sort of career architecture.
and mentoring and, and helping, helping. people to potentially succeed them in in their current role is is part of it’s part of all that.
Chris: Are you expecting to grow more?
You know, are you expecting to have any significant growth or are you, are you, are you, you see this MBNO thing, that’s a potential kind of market and revenue stream, which is outside your existing market, I guess. So, are those areas you’re looking to grow a business into? So, away from the core in that sense.
Kelvin: I mean, so we’re, we’re very UK based currently, most of our MVMAs are based out of the UK, we have got some around Europe, but one of my focal points this year is to be, or to try and help us internationalize, so we built out our, our sales team to, to be asking the right, right sort of questions in different geographical regions to try and push our solutions.
Into those regions. So, like, I mean, going back to us wanting to allow anyone to be an MP. And now we’re managing that in the UK currently, but there should be nothing stopping us managing in Europe or America or Australia or or. South Africa or or other regions like that. And that’s where I’m sort of trying to push us.
, and from a company growth that should come should we get those opportunities because if we move into those regions, we will certainly need to look at, building out teams in those regions to support that. And I’d love to use the same model in those regions as well. I mean, we have some, some guys run out of Portugal.
and we do something similar with, with a graduate scheme there as well. So we know it works. so if we, if we can penetrate those, those other areas, then there’s nothing stopping us just keeping the sausage factory going.
Matt: Thank you very much coming on the show this week, Kelvin. fascinating story in many ways. how is your week ahead looking
Kelvin: bit more exciting than last week. we’ve, we’ve got some more customer meetings, which are extremely exciting. so I’m in London for the next couple of days. and I’m off to Portugal, the weekend, Lisbon for another customer visit, and then we’ve also got, a charity quiz that we’re running as a company.
So, we are doing a charity quiz for, for Newbury Soup Kitchen to, uh, then, raise some money. ,
Matt: thank you. Uh, Mr. Weston, week ahead.
Chris: Well, I’m not coming to London this week. No, I’m, staying in the Midlands because Oh yeah. I’ve got, I’ve got stuff to do.
And also to be fair, if I was to try to come to London, I’d get hampered by the, pa of state of the railways. I think there’s some overtime ban or something
Matt: going on, and yeah. Strikes on Wednesday as well,
Chris: in the middle of London, I think this week. So I’ve decided to, discretion is a better, better part of valor.
And I’m, I’m staying up here, sequestered the way in the Midlands. I’ve got a lot of things going on. I’ve got some nice meetings with people I’ve not seen for a while. I’ve got a meeting about a company that deals in OS, Oh, do you know this OSINT stuff? This Open Source Intelligence? yeah, got a meeting with a company that deals in that.
see what we can do with those guys. it’s going to be, it’s going to be a busy week. but all I can say is, you know. Let’s get through it because it’s, last week was uh, last week was tiring and I’m, I’m hoping to get through this week unscathed and well. How about you?
Matt: I have a sort of sense of normality having had the, uh, the long period of, everybody being in offsite things in various places across the country.
So it’s back to that thing, you know, that I go on a once in a while about how I’ve got some statements of work to write. I’ve got some statements of work to write. Oh yes. Woohoo. that’s, that’s great. I have got some work with a couple of colleagues looking at, we’re trying to be able to create , a little.
simple checklist tool for being able to work out the state of a particular client engagement at any point. Sort of like those sorts of things you get with , I don’t know, project checklists and that kind of stuff. For just to, you know, how is it at the moment? Is it good? Is it bad? Are there areas you need to dig into or not?
So that’s going to be quite interesting, trying to be able to distill everybody’s ideas into something that is simple. And useful and also doesn’t get mistaken as being some sort of management reporting, which is where this kind of technique often fails because everybody then doesn’t do it because they think it’s management reporting.
So that’s going to be part of what I do. Other than that, , yeah, uh, I it Christmas yet? There have been mince pies bought in my house already. There’s been discussions about the Christmas party. It’s that sort of time of the year, isn’t it? You get into October and everybody’s mind immediately goes to, , the end of the year.
It’s a weird thing, it’s the way it is. Anyway, , thank you very much again, Kelvin, for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Kelvin: Thank you Uh, 86 days till Christmas. Oh, thank you. See,
Matt: 86, 86, and take a few for shopping days. and, Chris, you and I will be back maybe not Monday next week for recording, maybe a different day next week, I’m not sure.
Or maybe not next week at all. Or maybe not next week at all. These things are very fluid, aren’t they? They are. So we might not be here next week, but we will definitely be here the week after. We’ve got some interesting new guests lined up. We’re I was actually having some conversations today about a show about culture, as requested by Mr.
Chris King. I have found the person to be able to guide us through that thorny topic. And so we’ll be looking to be able to schedule that in the next few weeks, amongst other things. So, that’s it for this week. We might not be here next week, but we will be back the week after. And so until then, goodbye.
Kelvin: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast.com, on Twitter @WB40Podcast, and an all good podcasting platform.
On this week’s show we are joined by Matt Webb to talk about his approach to invention with emerging technologies.
You can subscribe to the AI Clock mailing list for updates and to find out about the upcoming Kickstarter here: https://aiclock.substack.com
You can find out more about Acts Not Facts, Matt’s new product invention studio here: https://www.actsnotfacts.com
And you can find Interconnected, his blog since Feb 2000 and place for thinking in public about technology and design, here: https://interconnected.org/home/
If you’d like to check out Christophe Weston, he can uncannily be found here.
Photograph of one of Tim Hunkins marvellous contraptions at the Under the Pier Show in Southwold.
This week’s show transcript (AI generated so treat with a little caution)
Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 273 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Matt Webb.
Welcome back to the show. It is time again for more excitement, intrigue and telling you that we are not going to do things that we never intended to do in the first place. Christopher, how has your week been?
Chris: Well, it’s been a good week, Matt. I have it’s been quite a nice week in many ways except for being sort of slightly ronered at the end of the weekend, [00:01:00] Friday, Saturday, feeling pretty rough.
Didn’t test, but daughter tested and she got, she was positive. So, I’m hoping that , if I was, , positive for coronavirus or COVID, , on Thursday that I didn’t give it to the many people that I met at the, , CIO100 event. But there was a lot of talk of it. It’s been around, right? So, . I don’t feel like I’m a super spreader.
Not this year. Anyway, the, , that was great. I mean, that event was really good. I have to say it’s been, you know, you’ve done this, , years ago, Matt, and I’ve done it more recently. , I really enjoyed. Seeing everybody at the event, meeting new people, lots going on, genuinely had a good time. And other than that, yeah, it’s just been a busy week with, with, with work stuff.
And, , and then me playing with, , some AI tooling that, Made me speak French, which was a bit, a bit weird and, and, you know, really impressive in many, many ways, [00:02:00] but opens up a lot of questions about, about how much we trust the tech, really. So, uh, so yeah, it’s been a good one. Did you see that?
Matt: I did. I did.
And I found it very disturbing. , so this is some, I don’t know what we call these things anymore. I mean, it’s, it’s presumably using some sort of machine learning kind of thing going on underneath it. But it’s basically some video
manipulation tool that makes you look like you are speaking French in A passable French accent but still very much a Chris Weston from Tamworth accent. Your lips are moving in sync with the thing. You’ve got no idea what it is you’re saying because you don’t speak French and therefore you could have been declaring war on Macron for all you know.
And I think this slippery slope started with allowing blurring of backgrounds and I said it at the time. that when you start to be able to allow people to be able to alter the reality in in the way in which we’re [00:03:00] interacting really dark and bad things might happen and you speaking you know more than passable french without a first clue about how you’re doing it is potentially bad
things
Chris: oh killer it’s not that’s that’s harsh anyway but i’ll also say you know you’re sounding a bit you’re sounding a bit puritan it’s a bit puritanical there’s like women women wear makeup To alter their appearance.
We should ban that. Ban it completely. We don’t know what they really look
Matt: like underneath. Okay, now this is true, and I’ve been, I’ve just finished Alice Sherwood’s wonderful book, Authenticity. I’m seeing if I can get to, , lure Alice onto the podcast at some point to talk about it, because it’s a fabulous book about what is real and what isn’t.
And, you know, one of the things she argues is that the idea of people impersonating others, or things impersonating others, is something that goes through… Evolution way before humans. There’s people, you know, mimicking and pretending.
Chris: I mean, like,
yeah, [00:04:00] I was just dying. I mean, he was
Matt: doing it way before he was doing it for many years as well.
But I think there’s a, I don’t know, there’s just at what points do we start to get weirded out by this stuff to the point where you can’t actually trust anything, madcap conspiracy theorists that are already empowered enough with enough. craziness without then having Chris Weston speaks French to add to the, you know, it will be on there with Pizzagate and 5G coronavirus Bill Gates and Chris Weston speaking French.
Now, this is the first sign of the beginning of the apocalypse or, or something. I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting a bit. What was the technology that we’re using to be able to achieve this sleight of hand and.
Chris: It was a thing called, it was a tool called Haygen. It’s out there, it’s out there in the world.
I can, I’ll send you the link or something. I think it might have been a labs thing. But it was, you can pay to have it done. I didn’t pay. And I put it into the queue and then a week later it popped out with a video. It’s not [00:05:00] quick, but it’s probably quicker if you pay for it.
Matt: Yeah, I’d imagine so. , yeah, I found it all very disturbing and we’ll put a link in the show notes to that video as well, because it is worth seeing.
, but it is, I think,
Chris: I think it’s worth seeing if you know what I speak like already and you go, Oh my, that does sound like Chris speaking
French.
Matt: Yeah, quite bizarre. , so, so yes, and it sounds like the CIO 100 has seriously upped its game since I was either a judge or a competitor. , I see that they all got very glitzy.
Lumps of presumably glass or perspex presented to them by television’s famous Gabby Roslin.
Chris: Yes, indeed.
Where I got a piece of cardboard through the post presented to me by nobody in particular, but awarded by you. Which, , you know, they’ve upped their game. Yeah, yeah, to be fair. I think, I think these are, I don’t think it’s marble or glass, I think it’s, , I think it’s samples of the asteroid Bennu that they made of it, so it’s that
glitzy.
Matt: Wow, there’s a thing.[00:06:00] Joining us this week, , somebody who I’ve been trying to get onto the show, well I haven’t been trying to get onto the show, I’ve been wanting to get onto the show for ages, but I actually managed to get round to sorting it out only recently. Uh Matt Webb, how has your last seven days been?
Matt W: Well, it’s been pretty busy. I’ve been, I’ve been flying to Hamburg to go and speak at a conference. , but I think just to connect to what you were just saying, we’ve also in the last week set up a secret family passphrase to use in the event of, uh, imposter scam. Deep fake video calls.
Matt: Ah, so they, they say, well, what is the, uh, the third styling on the right?
And they’ll, they’ll respond with, it is flying tonight. And then that will mean that you can show that it’s a, it’s a real thing.
Matt W: Something like that. Well, I’m not gonna give you any hint. I know, obviously, which would kind of destroy the, the whole idea, destroy the purpose, but it’s, it feels true. There’s a, there, there’s a rising imposter scans.
, you can, you know, what was the one in Washington DC not long ago? You can train. Uh, deep fake audio of [00:07:00] 30 seconds of audio for less than a hundred bucks, and it is relatively common now just to kind of, you know, go and, uh, you get a phone call from, you know, what sounds like it’s one of your relatives, and they say, you know, I’ve been in a car accident, , they’ve, they’ve taken my phone, this is my one call, I need 5, 000 for bail, um, you’re gonna get a call in a minute from my lawyer who’s gonna help set this up, and it is common enough that the police know about it, and easy to do, and, you know, I know these kind of things have been happening for a while.
But the, you know, the ease of it means it’s worth setting up, you know, passphrases or maybe, you know, one day we’ll have two factor authentication for humans or something.
Matt: Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s crazy, isn’t it? And I think there is, I mean, there’s this thing about, oh, we’ll put, some sort of watermark into everything that’s fake to say it’s fake.
And so I can see one big glaring… Flooring that plan. It’s the only people who do it aren’t the ones you want to not, you know, it’s crazy. [00:08:00] But, , yeah, I think, well, there we go. Passphrases for the family. That’s the next project. It’s not disturbing at all, is it? No, no, no. I mean, usually it’s fairly miserable at the start of the show, but this has gone, you know, to another level.
You know,
Matt W: people,
Chris: people beating their, , their… Beloved children about the head and neck with a spade because they’ve forgotten the password. It’s, it’s just pretty, I’m just, I’m pretty sad. It’s happened by the whole situation.
Matt W: But also positively, went to Hamburg, spoke at a conference called NEXT, , where Accenture had a main, , Sponsors, but of a conference of ideas, , talking about playfully prototyping to find out how we might be interacting with AI.
And that was a wonderfully positive experience. And I have totally forgotten how to travel, it turns out. Left for the airport late, forgot to take my noise cancelling headphones.
Matt: You know. Didn’t have all your things neatly arranged so that when you got to the security, you could just pop them out one after one, put [00:09:00] them all back in again.
Matt W: Forgotten how to
Matt: do it. Took something over 100 millilitres. Yeah, I know, there’s so many. , yeah, I’m travelling at the weekend actually, I’m going to see some friends in Prague. And, I think I’ve sort of remembered how to do it all. But this isn’t a work one, this is a pleasure one. So it’s, even that is confusing.
I don’t know, they seem to change the systems to… Anyway, that’s a good trail for what we are going to be talking about on this week’s show, your experiences in Hamburg there, so I think we should probably crack on.
Unless you take into [00:10:00] account my beloved co host’s slight affliction with limericks, this is the second time on WB40 we have talked about limericks. In, in part, poetry. The last time, you may remember, was with the wonderful poet, Mr. G. And he’d been doing some work with the Open Data Institute, and we talked about poetry and data.
And it was a wonderful conversation. This time around, we’re talking about poetry and generative AI and a, a playful experiment stroke product development that you’ve been working on for a while now, Matt. , what, what you’re doing.
Matt W: I have on my shelf a small screen about four inches across, and every minute it tells me the time in the form of a rhyming couplet. So to give away what time we’re recording this right now, I’ll tell you what it says at this second. On bookshelf I stand, time shall not be missed, with [00:11:00] rhyme and rhythm, 7 to 54 p.
m. persists. No, I didn’t say they were good poems. Just that there’s one every minute. Chris can
Matt: relate to the not good poems, but that’s another story.
Matt W: So the poem is… The poem’s generated by, well, originally by GPT 3 and then by Turbo, ChapGPT, , which… It’s a different kind of model, and maybe we can talk a little bit later about how the different models feel, because I’m tuning in a different way.
And it’s a, it’s a physical device, it’s a clock, and I put it out as a very quick hack. On X or Twitter or whatever we call it nowadays, , at the beginning of the summer, , where it went viral, uh, was in the New York Times, in the Verge, it went, it went viral in newspapers in India, ended up in Private Eye, which matters quite a lot for me.
Oh, wonderful. And so over the summer, I’ve been working on developing it as a hardware product. I’m going to be going to Kickstarter in a few weeks. And working with the [00:12:00] industrial designers an incredible studio called approach on what the you know, how to manufacture the thing how it’s gonna how it’s gonna look Yeah, it’s , it’s been an entertaining and entertaining.
A few months with this thing
Matt: and the the thing I really love about it is that an awful lot of what we’re seeing at the moment with , where exploration with particularly generative AI is happening is that it is, , being used as an approach to try to be able to drive efficiency and cost saving and the replacement of human endeavor with half arsed Software stuff and so devaluing humans along the way and what you’re doing is to be able to do something that nobody would ever Commission a poet to be able to write half arsed rhyming couplets every minute forever Because that would be insane and no poet want to do that well, I mean, maybe one would but but what you’re doing is it feels like it’s additive rather than Subtractive you’re [00:13:00] trying to be able to find ways in which , the technology and some of the hardware can be brought together to be able to do something fun and playful and, um, exploratory.
Matt W: I do think that’s why people like it. So when people, , have been in contact with me about what, what they like about it, and it’s often people who aren’t, you know, technical or deep into AI, uh, one of the reasons they like it is it, it gives them a way in to talk about what generative AI can be used for.
, which isn’t in the form of AI is going to take our jobs or something very, very obscure. It can generate small amounts, a live copy that sounds a bit like being human. It’s like, right, now we understand that, right? It’s not going to take our jobs. It’s a bit like having an intern. , the poetry is kind of strange.
It’s weirdly motivational sometimes. , it fibs. And all of these things, I think, help unpack something which is, you know, AI, a bit obscure. [00:14:00] A bit mysterious. Nobody really knows how it works. , and it gives a way in to have that conversation.
Matt: When you and I first met, now this isn’t the first foray that you’ve made into creating things. This is, this is what you do, isn’t it? I mean, the idea of being able to help people come up with ideas and to be able to shape ideas. , we first met in my… Difficult Microsoft days, as I now refer to them. And, , you, at that time, had something else that had gone pretty viral, from what I remember, which was a thing called Little Printer.
And Little Printer was a… little thermal printer but had been created in such a way that it was a bit anthropomorphic. It had a sort of outline of a face on it and, and feet and could be used as a target for all sorts of things. Essentially what it was was a very early Internet of Things device, it’s hard to actually realize that it’s only about a decade ago that very early Internet of Things things were happening, [00:15:00] how much that that world has developed.
Um,
Matt W: I mean, so that, you know, that was back then I co founded a Berg. And we’ve been working on, you know, connected hardware, sort of opening up the space. And I think, just the thing I want to say is that so many people at Berg were, you know, poured their talents and, , creative energy , and technical energy into Little Printer.
, so anything I can say about it is really just kind of, you know, what I took away from that. You know, experience of, you know, looking into connected hardware and then going through manufacturing, kind of, you know, what, what resulted from that. And it’s an incredible thing to realize that, you know, the physical world can kind of talk back to us.
And how do we relate to that? And what does that kind of mean? , and I think this is part of, , you know, I’ve always been involved in what I’d call like product invention. You know, how do we open up, you know, new, new ideas or new [00:16:00] places for imagination? , and I think what Little Printer embodied and now…
You know, the AI clock, the perm clock, whatever I end up calling it, is that One way of finding out those things is to roll your sleeves up, get your hands dirty, and just make things. And it’s not the only way of coming up with new ideas and starting these conversations. , but it’s, it’s my favourite way, and it’s the one I know how to do.
So for example, with Little Printer, the, the thing that as a studio it led to for us, weirdly, is working with Nespresso. So this is way back when. , Nespresso machines, I don’t know whether you know now, , they have a button on them. That lets you order more capsules from the device itself. So it counts how many capsules it’s used, and you can purchase it through the device.
, and that was a, that was by Berg. That was prototyped with Berg. It used the same platform that Little Printer did, which is a very kind of esoteric, toy like product, but here it is kind of, you know, being used for commerce. [00:17:00] And now this is in their machines, and that’s kind of how you purchase capsules alongside, you know, phoning them up and using the store and using the app and device commerce was a kind of a new thing back then it sort of preceded amazon dash so this kind of playful weird thinking opens up other ways of operating and you know i think that’s a you know it’s an You know, it’s a fun strategy, I think, as well as a useful one.
Matt: How easy do you think organisations, established organisations find it to be able to do this kind of approach? Because I think the other thing about with both of those examples, and I’m sure you’ve done more as well, but they weren’t a replacement. They weren’t a digitisation of the now. In both cases, what they did was that they found some elements of an emergent technology, Internet of Things, generative AI, and said, Let’s Create something that is [00:18:00] entirely new, not because it necessarily serves a, , a problem solving purpose.
But what it does is it helps us to be able to explore the idea. And it’s, but it seems that most commercial organizations are so obsessed with it having to be a solution to a problem. But that, is that a hard approach for them?
Matt W: I wonder whether this is to do with, where we are in the technology S curve as well.
The last 10 years, let’s say, we’ve kind of known, you know, in organizations what technology can do. If somebody goes like, you know, we’re going to make an app or a website, you can loosely say, Budget this, it’s going to achieve this. These are the metrics we’re going to use for it. And this is how people are, you know, going to get promoted.
This is what success looks like. And we sort of know that just intuitively, you know, engineers, designers, PMs, leadership, all the rest. Um, there are periods where we don’t know that. 10 years ago, we didn’t know that when, , when mobile was really taking off. Um, 15 years ago, we [00:19:00] didn’t know that. You know, at the beginning of digital, and I’d argue that we don’t know that again at, , this sort of dawn of generative AI, and the question is, what do we, what do we do with that?
How do we, how do we kind of find our way through, uh, these kind of things? Because like the strategy that’s worked for the last 10 years when we’ve known technology is the thing we have to discover is user needs, and we figure that out by iterating and, you know, with With kind of, you know, making decks and two by twos and post it notes, which are all very good when we don’t know what the technology is capable of, I don’t think that, and we have to find, you know, other approaches instead, just to ramble on a little bit more about that one approach that I’ve really kind of found very attractive is out of meta research and they call it pathfinding and it’s a kind of a combination of, , prototyping and strategic recommendations. Which go hand in hand. So you’re not you don’t you don’t just make a prototype.
You don’t just experiment. , what you have to do is you have to use, [00:20:00] design methods to make a recommendation to the organization and, you know, to build some conviction into we need to do more research here or we should build a product here or there’s an opportunity over here. And that’s why I try and frame the kind of product invention I do as fitting into pathfinding.
and that’s, you know, I think that’s that that’s where we are. You know, we’re imagination bottlenecked at the moment. and so we need, you know, we need kind of approaches like that.
Chris: There’s something to be said though, isn’t there, for having, if you’re inventing something, I think inventing is the right word in this context, that, that’s physical, that, you know, that you can, you can pick it up and put down as opposed to a piece of software that goes, that runs on your smartphone, which is.
You know, that’s the easiest way into create anything and it has been for some time is to write some software, but actually making something, which is a thing that does something that I think that has a different effect on people.
Matt W: It does. I think what it does is it, you know, you, [00:21:00] you just need to look at when you get a A few different people, different disciplines in the room together, talking about a deck or something on a whiteboard, the amount of misunderstandings, you know, people hear what they expect to hear.
And when you put something tangible in front of them, which can work with software, but is very, very effective with physical things, suddenly you give something, give people something, which is beyond. what they expect. Beyond language really, it is, it is just a thing, right? And it insists. And suddenly people start being able to have a conversation which is beyond, uh, you know, they stop talking past each other.
so I’m a big believer in artifacts when you want, you know, ideas to cross between engineering, design, marketing, leadership, product. And the rest, I mean, the, the problem I think with making artifacts, what, what makes it kind of difficult is how do you arrive at things which feel sufficiently new [00:22:00] and communicate.
And that’s a whole different, you know, set of difficulties.
Chris: There is something about, as you say, an object. And sometimes that is disappointing because it’s always going to be something somebody’s seen before or a derivative of or a bit like because that’s how objects are. We just can’t just magic new things up.
And when we’re talking about things and sketching things out on a whiteboard or coming up with ideas, there’s lots of kind of possibilities hanging in the air. And they’re all in different people’s heads and not… Maybe not everybody sees each other’s possibilities, but when you bring an object in, a lot of those possibilities collapse into what could be done that’s like this, which is good in a way because it, as you say, it cuts through all that stuff, but also it kind of removes a bunch of things that could have happened if that object hadn’t arrived.[00:23:00]
Matt W: I think it strips a lot of artifice away. It stops people kidding themselves that something might be possible that they’re imagining, which, you know, actually when you try and do it. The other thing it does is it opens up new possibilities. So one of the, you know, the parts of my practice is what I call software sketches, where I try and make…
You know, if I can imagine an interaction, like, let’s say one of the things I’ve been working with recently is how could we interact with AI as if the AI is like a fake user, an NPC, right? So on a, on a whiteboard canvas, the AI would have its own cursor, you would see it move around, you know, it talks to you in chat.
And, you know, I can imagine that, right? But when I start building it. What happens is it makes me feel very different, you know, certain things are very difficult to build. It’s like, Oh, okay, I need to do something that, , certain things surprise me and I’m like, Oh, okay, I could build that thing out a little bit more.
And so that’s part of the process as well. I think there’s a, there’s a kind of a, a sort of a back and forth with the, [00:24:00] with the material. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what surprised me about the clock, if that’s okay, because one of the odd things is I’ve been, you know, sitting, you know, I think like, you know, everyone have a kind of a hybrid practice now, which means I’m sitting at home in my office with my little clock on the shelf, and it’s, you know, giving me a poem every, every minute, all day.
So it’s in the corner of my eye. So I’m seeing a lot of poems generated by open AI. And that’s, you know, absorbing that. Sometimes, like I said, I use GPT three. And then I realized that actually it was, you know, 10th of the price to use chat GPT. So I’ll use that instead. So that was, you know, the kind of the surprise that wasn’t really a surprise is that the poems generated by chat GPT are rubbish compared to GPT three.
GPT three has much better vocab, right? Like it doesn’t, it does much better poems. So that was kind of, you know, but I’m going to go with the, I’m going to go with the worst poems because there are, they’re, they’re [00:25:00] cheaper. Like, let’s just say that, which is like kind of, I don’t know what that says Literary
persuasions, but you know, practical, practical, practical, practical creativity. The second, the second thing, which surprised me was that it fibs, it makes up the time in order to make the rhyme work about one time in 15, probably, you know, just kind of, you know, the hallucination is, is real. And this is also great.
Right. Because it means now I’ve got a way into very tangibly talk to people about the. The hallucination risk with generative AI. So that was, that was good. The thing that most surprised me is the poems that come out are motivational. They make me feel like, you know, there are poems that come out, which is, you know, you know, it’s such and such time go out and get things done.
[00:26:00] Right. Or, , time is short. Let’s get up and like seize the day. I mean, there are, there are poems like that. I did not put that in the prompt. It is like hanging out with LinkedIn influencers as a tiny screen. And the question for me is like, where does that come from? It’s not in the prompt. It’s in the, it’s in the, the, the tuning given to the turbo model.
This kind of enthusiasm, this kind of get up and go. The reason I kind of find it really intriguing is that do you remember years ago, Facebook did some, an unethical experiment in the newsfeed where they changed. The sentiment of what people saw. Do you remember this one? It was, yeah, they, they sort of like took a, took a group of people and they, they looked at the newsfeed and they selected the posts with the algorithm, ones that had a [00:27:00] negative sentiment and they took another group and everyone had a slightly more positive sentiment in the posts they saw from their friends in the newsfeed.
And then they measured the sentiment of those people in those two groups afterwards. And they found that if you see more negative stuff, you become more negative. If you see more positive stuff, you become positive. Of course, right? Not okay for them to run that experiment, but like now we know chat GPT 100 million people were using that the end of February I don’t know how many people are using it every day now Like I’m not not sure anybody’s put for the figure but it’s a lot right and all of these people are exposed to the exact same kind of experiment that those people in the Facebook groups were which is we are being exposed to something which has a A viewpoint, which in that case is, you know, the case of chat GPT is positive and linked in influence and motivational and go and get it.
And I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that it’s something that [00:28:00] is worth saying out loud. And maybe, you know, maybe it’s fine that we all have a little tiny Sam Altman gently influencing the way we approach the world. Or maybe, actually, it would be better if we didn’t have that culturally, like, you know, that we had more time, you know, to purchase the kind of.
Meditation or thinking about things, but it’s worth noting, I think, and that’s something which came out of, let’s be clear, a very, you know, quick 30 minute hack assembling parts already had, which there’s no other way I would have come to that, you know, point of view or realization or whatever you want to call it.
Matt: That’s fascinating. And the, the idea that, , the culture that has gone into creating the training data that is then used to be able to power the machine, but then is tweaked and how those cultures feed on each other and how those cultures are [00:29:00] going to be very American, , you know, Western, but particularly American, very individualistic, is maybe that’s part of what’s coming through within that.
It would be fascinating to understand what would happen if you were to say, have the French version. Obviously, Mr. Weston here would be able to help advise and give consulting skills for you on the French version. But if you were to create the same experiment, but if you were to do it so that it was a French poetry clock drawing from.
the corpus of French, , data that has been used to be able to program a French generative AI, what would the sentiment be there? And actually you could try that for many different languages, that in itself would be a really interesting way of being able to start to be able to understand the way in which different cultures represent in online.
, and that becomes a, you know, out of that is this fascinating experiment into [00:30:00] understanding different perceptions, different, this also was inspired actually from a conversation I had earlier today with, wonderful thinker Mark Earls. And we were talking about some of the, the challenges of assuming that particularly things like behavioral science that, everybody thinks like.
American undergraduates because that’s mostly the only time that any experiments have ever been done in behavioral science It’s done on students in america. So there’s a huge cultural bias around in all of that huge types coming back to that point about , the uh, the Having it as a as a machine. I mean I speak as somebody who on my desk in front of me here I’m surrounded with pieces of hardware that are designed to be able to enable me to interact with software in different ways is music kit.
And they all are doing exactly the same thing in many ways But one has got big rubbery buttons and one of them’s got something that looks like a piano keyboard and one over there looks like a saxophone and various other things and and there’s something about the way in which Different hardware forms dramatically changes the way in which I interact with essentially the same [00:31:00] Pieces of software and just coming back to that idea of breaking away from just using a smartphone.
Smartphones are wonderfully amazing things to be able to quickly be able to put software into the hands of many people very quickly, but there’s a huge amount of constraint, I think now built into the smartphones that we know how apps work and they all essentially work the same. So to try to be able to explore something like.
, generative AI, I think it would be extremely difficult within the constraints of the medium of the smartphone now, because, you know, apps is apps is apps, then there’s not a huge amount of variation in them. I
Matt W: wonder if it would be possible to open up new ways of doing, I think it’s possible, right, you know, with social media and with, and with, the.
You know, games, [00:32:00] especially different, different ways of different ways of doing things. I think there are, you know, the, it takes a long time to explore all the possibilities of a medium and maybe, maybe apps aren’t done yet. One of the examples I sort of come back to is like how long it took for the worldwide web itself to be like understood.
You know, you kind of think the web was invented, what, in 1990. First commercial browser in 1994, then it took until 1998 to realize you could put a credit card number into a text field and press submit, and that was e commerce. You know, and then how many years did it take for SAS businesses to overtake boxed software businesses, like 10, maybe 15, like it was a long time.
And I wonder whether the same is, you know, also true a little bit of apps. There’s a couple of other, you know, aside from AI, there’s a couple of other things that I sort of like look at as potential disruptions. I think one is the move to real time multiplayer. The, the [00:33:00] digital world is becoming a social one where we kind of, you know, using things, things like not, not just collaboration.
Right. But like, and, and in games, but, you know, something where we can sense the presence of people around us that that’s happening. and the other thing is like you were saying with little bits of hardware, it’s becoming, you know. Ever easier for the internet to kind of break out of computers.
And I know I’ve been kind of banging that drum for a good kind of 15 years, but I’m still a believer right in the vision of ubiquitous computing and being able to use our, you know, peripheral, perceptions, to interact with. Interact with technology. And I think between all of these things, we may, you know, there might be, there might be life in the old app yet.
I think
Matt: I’m, we had a guest on a couple of weeks ago, who, was talking about a platform called soundscape. Which was originally a Microsoft research project, which was looking at using spatial audio [00:34:00] initially to be able to help people with visual impairment, but actually more broadly than that, to be able to do kind of augmented reality in sound so that you could have spatial positioning of objects in the real world, laid upon the real world through headphones, through, you know, modern headphones.
And one of the things we talked about in that conversation was how creating an entirely new pattern for interaction is really, really tricky. And if you look at what’s been going on with visual virtual reality, there are some conventions that Meta are starting to try to be able to put together of, you know, hand gestures so that you’re not using the controllers all the time.
But still, where they’re getting to is essentially a WIMP interface, where you point on screen with your finger, or you point on a virtual screen. Because it’s so difficult to be able to get people to be able to put the effort into using new interaction patterns. If you look at the way in [00:35:00] which, getting rid of the, the button and using gestures alone on phones, I’d love to know how many people still have a virtual button on their screen because they haven’t got their heads around the ideas of the swiping from the left or swiping from the right or swiping up from the bottom or down from the top.
And they just want to be able to stick with the, the patterns that they’ve got. So I think it, it’s not. It’s not that we can’t change interaction patterns on smartphones, but actually the effort to do it now is getting increasingly difficult. But moreover that it, it, it, it gives a whole load of preconceptions about what a thing is that if you want to explore something new, it gets, you’ve got a whole load of stuff to be able to overcome there to be able to make it not look like the thing that everybody’s used to.
And therefore you’ve got to break over those kinds of UI pattern to be able to then get to a point where you can explore. Something which if you stick a E Ink screen on an Arduino and then start [00:36:00] having poems coming out every minute is a totally different prospect and is immediately obviously different.
Matt W: No, I think you’re right. You need a kind of a point of disruption to get people to, to think about different interaction patterns because you’re changing the mode of interaction just for the sake of it, is not there. And maybe, you know, AI is our, is our way in. It’s actually interesting as well.
Like how, why the clock was a kind of a 30 minute hack, because I think this is also relevant for our discussion about, opening things up. So I, I’ve had a kind of an, I love ink, you know, everyone. Everyone does a little bit, I think, because it’s not a kind of a glowing screen. It kind of takes on the light of the room.
And I’ve had a word clock on my shelf for about three years. The Bartlett Connected Environments program put out some open code to make one on the kit. So I made one. I was building with a startup. I was helping out, prototyping some software about how we might do executive coaching, using generative AI over WhatsApp.
You know, because basically [00:37:00] one of the things about AI means you can get much, much closer to the user. so this was like another project, you know, recently, and I was going, well, how do I prove when I’m, you know, making my WhatsApp thing work, my prototype, what’s my proof of concept that shows that actually I do have everything wired up, you know, I send a message.
I want something to come back, which is almost like a proof of life in the AI. And for whatever reason, I decided it would send back the time and then for whatever reason, I decided it would make a poem. Out of that. Just in order to prove the thing works. And I, I think I’ve done that because I’d also made another software sketch recently about how, you know, you could have a little avatar in a Google Doc and it would tell you who had been there recently.
But, you know, it would do that as poetry. And I think. Why was that? That was because I’d talked somebody from Iceland recently on one of my, on Office Hours calls and we’d been talking about Elves or Trolls or something. [00:38:00] Yeah,
Matt: so,
Matt W: so we were, we were talking about we, you know, because they can’t build roads somewhere because they’re already, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, rocks and all that kind of stuff, right?
So all of this, you know, the, the elves and there’s a nice emoji of an elf, which means that got me into like being Able to do my software sketch easily, which is like a big part of it. So I had this kind of poem, and I came downstairs one morning, and I looked at my clock, and I looked at this demo, and I was like, why don’t I plug those things together?
And I plugged the things together, and I couldn’t stop laughing for about 30 minutes watching this thing. And so I put it on Twitter. And that’s what happened. And, you know, maybe, like, I would, I would love to, you know, do a little shout out for the mailing list at some point, get some, get some folks on who are interested in this.
Maybe we can put a link in, in the show notes later. But, what I found fascinating about this is that, like, the way these things work is these little Lego bricks that you do for different reasons, either to kind of, try and illustrate an interaction, [00:39:00] or try and learn a new skill. or because. You have to do it because it’ll make you laugh.
I’m all just combining two other things and going, well, what will happen? and then you fill in some gaps and now you’ve got another Lego brick you can use in the future. And that’s what kind of carries the whole thing forward, I think. And like, I could say that one of the things that’s happened to technology in the last 10 years is that making those Lego bricks has got really complicated.
You know, the iOS SDK is vast. It’s not possible for anyone to be able to do that. but one of the things about AI, because it’s reasonably early, and, you know, integrating with WhatsApp reasonably early, and it is just text, is we’re making Lego bricks that are the, the right size to be manipulated and combined.
And that lets us break past, you know, the imagination bottleneck, which is where we are. You know, this is my favorite part of like, you know, the technology curve right this point where you can just get your hands dirty and make Lego bricks and combine things and that tells you [00:40:00] something new. And then, you know, you end up from that possibly with a new product.
But if not. You know, you end up with just something very odd instead, and that’s also fun. But yeah, there’s, there’s that bit of the process, and then there’s kind of how do you make it useful in business, and that’s, that’s a different kind of art, I think.[00:41:00]
Chris: So I’d best find out, Mr. Ballantine, since we’re running out of time, what are you doing next
Matt: week? In the week ahead, we have a series of events happening in London, which I’ve got much more active involvement in than I did in the ones in Manchester last week, so I’m running the whole day on Wednesday, which will be entertaining.
And then a trip away, for pleasure, not for work, to the beautiful bohemian city of Prague for a long weekend, which will be very nice. Then back to, back to things again by the time we speak again next week, I guess.
Chris: Hmm. And, how about you, Matt? What’s the, what’s life like for you this week? What have you got waiting for you?
Matt W: I’ve got a fascinating project at the moment with a startup called PartyKit that does real [00:42:00] time multiplayer internet infrastructure where I am… It’s a brilliant title, this. Inventor in residence for a few months, with the idea that by making new things, it can give some direction to the platform. So I am looking at, how groups of people will use AI together.
Chris: Very interesting. That’s certainly got, your work goes out there. It sounds like a lot of pressure being the inventor in residence. People keep knocking on your doors, asking what you’ve come up with today.
Matt: That sounds fascinating. how about you, uh, Chris, what have you got in the week ahead?
Chris: Oh, I’m down in that London again this week, various, things and.
Yeah, and pretty much it, really. It’s that time of year, isn’t it, where everything sort of starts to really roll between now and Christmas, where we can actually get things done, get projects completed.
Matt: Yeah, it’s two months now before December and everybody starts to get distracted
by Christmas [00:43:00] and the break.
Chris: All of that. Exactly.
Matt: Fabulous. Well, we will be back again next week. thank you again, Matt, for joining us on the show this week. Much appreciated. Thanks for having me. It’s been delightful. And, we will be back same place, same time next week.[00:44:00]
Matt W: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com, on Twitter at WB40podcast, and on all good podcasting platforms.
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On this week’s show Chris talks to Amy Low and Teresa Loftus from Abilitynet, about the wide variety of disability related digital barriers that can be removed using technological tools, many of which are already provided in the software we use every day. Abilitynet have their accessibility conference https://abilitynet.org.uk/techsharepro-2021 – you can get 50% off as a […]
On this week’s show Chris talks to Amy Low and Teresa Loftus from Abilitynet, about the wide variety of disability related digital barriers that can be removed using technological tools, many of which are already provided in the software we use every day.
Abilitynet have their accessibility conference https://abilitynet.org.uk/techsharepro-2021 – you can get 50% off as a WB-40 listener by using the code “TSPWB40_50”
Upcoming workshops are below, get 10% off with the code “Workplace10”
Introduction to assistive technology on 10th November
How to use assistive technology at work, in education and at home
How to run inclusive meetings and events on 30th November.
How to run accessible, inclusive meetings
Some of the resources mentioned are
My Computer, My Way https://mcmw.abilitynet.org.uk/
Free factsheets https://abilitynet.org.uk/free-resources/abilitynet-factsheets
Help and ideas of how to promote disability inclusion in your organisation – https://abilitynet.org.uk/workplace/how-promote-diversity-and-inclusion-0
List of our free webinars covering a range of subjects relating to digital disability inclusion https://abilitynet.org.uk/free-resources/webinars
Information on eLearning options to help build digital disability awareness https://abilitynet.org.uk/workplace/elearning-modules-workplaces
A Microsoft Word transcript of this episode can be downloaded at https://wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/episode-208-podcast-transcript.docx and a full transcript appears below.
———Transcript for search / screen reader use———–
CHRIS – Hello and welcome to episode 208 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me Chris Weston, Amy Low, and Teresa Loftus.
So, this week we don’t have Matt. It’s very unusual format not to be here, but I’m afraid it’s just me and that’s why I vandalised the start of the podcast already.
But don’t despair. I do actually have two guests in Amy Low and Teresa Loftus from AbilityNet, and it’s a subject that we’ve been coming back too, a few times recently on WP40, which is about diversity, equality, and some of the things that we can do to improve that situation in the workplace.
So, Amy, why don’t you tell us a bit about AbilityNet and what it does and how you’re involved?
AMY – Yes, that sounds great and thanks very much for having us this evening. And so AbilityNet has been around for about 22 years. It was formed from a couple of other charitable organisations and with support from IBM and Microsoft. We’re a technology charity, unsurprisingly, with those supporters and we exist to remove barriers to participation for disabled people at home, at work and in education. And our vision is a digital world that’s accessible to everybody.
We’re pan disability and pan technology. And the things that we do to try and achieve our vision, we provide a range of free and paid for services for disabled and older people across all settings. We’ve got a free helpline that individuals can ring or can email, and that helpline provides support with any sort of assistive technologies that they’re using.
We provide home visits as well from IT volunteers who can go out to support disabled people in their homes either to fix tech problems that they might have, or to show them how to activate specialist settings within their devices that are going to help them to be able to use them more independently.
We provide workplace and student needs assessments. So, talking to individuals about the barriers they might be encountering with their studies and their work, and making recommendations for tech adaptations and tools that could help them to work or learn more and more effectively. We’ve also got a range of online resources factsheets that talk about different disabilities and the types of technologies that might help.
We’ve got a fantastic tool called my computer my way, which provides step by step instructions of how to adapt your operating system to meet your needs and we also have a really busy comms team that provide webinars like this talking about new and exciting things that are coming down the track from a tech and accessibility perspective.
So, as well as our services to individuals, it’s obviously really important that whilst disabled, people can be furnished with a range of different tech solutions that are going to meet their needs if the digital platforms and spaces that they’re trying to navigate haven’t been built with accessibility in mind. They can be shut out all over again.
And so, we provide a range of consultancy on the technical accessibility side. So, working with designers and developers who are creating websites and applications, making sure that they’re aware of the requirements of the web content accessibility guidelines. So that’s one area of consultancy.
And we also do lots of work with employers looking at how their working practises are configured, and rather than thinking about adapting to individual’s needs, looking at how you can create a workplace that’s inclusive by design. So, Yeah, it’s been a really, really interesting 18 months, obviously. Lots of challenges relating to the pandemic and that has increased our activities dramatically and you know we’re just seeing it’s a time of great change, but there’s lots of interesting and exciting things that have come out of it as well as the challenges that we’ve all had to face.
CHRIS – Fantastic and such an important set of services, and certainly such an important thing for people to consider because you know the tools they improve all the time and there are so many tools that embedded in operating systems and like Windows and the tools that we use such Google or whether we use Office or whatever they’re improving all the time, but actually, if you don’t have the workplace set up in the right way, then they’re not really going to help. It can still be an uphill struggle, and I think you know just giving people that ability to see what’s available and how they can best use them can make all the difference really. So, Teresa? What do you think about that?
TERESA – I think it really can make a difference actually, and I think it’s really important to raise the awareness of those free tools. I think that when we’re looking at people in the workplace, just suggesting some of the tweaks that you can provide them with to help manage some barriers. So, say if it’s spellings that people are having difficulty with, it provides them with some confidence by just showing them the types of tools that are maybe in Microsoft Word that can be useful, so you’ve got things like dictate or you’ve got things like immersive reader. You’ve got the editor function. All of those things are really simple to use, but there’s also other settings that are set in within ease of access centre as well, and they’re very often switched off for employees to access actually, so it’s about sort of raising the awareness that those tools are there too for people to be able to use, and if they can just access those independently then maybe they can change the pointer size to be able to track that around the screen. Or maybe they can enlarge the font size a little bit to be able to access that, or perhaps invert the colours and so that you’ve got instead of the black text and a white background have white text in a black background, because in fact that reduces maybe the visual glare. So those are all really free solutions that people can start using and utilising within the workplace. That’s if they’re using some basic sort of office products. Basically, Microsoft Office and yeah, so it’s really helpful.
AMY – And we always hear probably the thing that we hear most often from people on the individual side and organisations is “wow I had no idea it could do that” or “I had no idea that, as Teresa says, restricting access to these sorts of settings was disadvantaging my, my employees” So yeah, it’s definitely a lot about communications. Isn’t it Teresa?
TERESA – It’s about raising the awareness of those tools I think, and AbilityNet are really quite good at doing that.
So, you know, we’ve got our fact sheets that actually help employers understand about disability, but it actually provides them with a little bit more information about how a computer be set can be set up. So, within those fact sheets, it then leads you on to looking at My Computer My Way, and if you open up My Computer My Way it can actually set itself up for your working environment so that you can look at how you can change your settings to your specific needs. But if you’re looking up for somebody else, maybe you’re championing that the assistive technologies? Uhm, you could be providing some suggestions from them by looking at My Computer My Way and helping people to access the computer settings, but actually that’s not all. It also provides you with details about mobile technology, so maybe using your handset or your tablet because workplace are quite agile now, so we’re working sometimes in our cars moving around, maybe using the phone in accessing meetings when we’re moving about on our phones and all we’re sitting in a car using a tablet, and I know I’ve done it myself, you know, sat in the car and sort of had to join in and a meeting on my laptop before now so you know, we all work in very different ways and it’s changing all the time.
CHRIS There really isn’t it, and I think maybe for many people, even just the scale of what you’re talking about in terms of people that might need to do these things is unknown. You know, we don’t, always see the scale of the problem, as it were. What have you got stats about that in terms of number of disabled people in the workforce and maybe how things have changed for them in the last 18 months or so since the world has changed for so many of us in terms of work?
AMY – Yes, so there’s eight point 4 million disabled people of working age in the UK, so that’s 20% of the working age population. But the unemployment rate for disabled people is 8.4% compared to an unemployment rate of 4.6% for non-disabled people, and that gap. Unfortunately, during the pandemic has widened slightly from 28.1 percentage points to 28.8 percentage points, and you know there’s been some research taken from a people management article saying that 71% of disabled people in employment were affected by the pandemic, through a loss of income furlough or redundancy and were more likely to be furloughed or made redundant than non-disabled people.
TERESA – Yeah, I think with that you know when people have been disadvantaged due to the pandemic, and we’ve seen some really strong stats there as well and kind of the issue is that there’s a lack of awareness as to why people are being disadvantaged basically, and so there’s 60% of employers say that the cost of workplace adjustments is a barrier to employing a disabled person, so it’s like ‘why?’ when there’s some free solutions out there and actually there’s some really good government funded schemes there to provide support for people in the workplace. And there’s some free resources to be able to provide people with knowledge how to change and adapt things so it’s about again, it’s about that awareness of maybe accessing funds, because if it’s the free resources that don’t quite work, we know that that provides a bit of a stepping stone, but if it doesn’t quite work because the workplace includes sort of other programmes that are being used, specialist software that’s being used maybe in call centres and maybe it’s not always going to be the free solutions that are going to be useful there. Maybe it’s going to need some assistive technology and that can be quite expensive, so it’s knowing and understanding the types of software that can be used and be supported through government funded schemes like access to work to provide that help.
CHRIS – Now you think that given that we have a, uh, a tech skills gap across the country really, we have, you know, we’ve got many roles that are unfilled and given the solutions exist. And as you say, even those solutions which are not free which need a little bit of investment in say, a call centre environment. These are solutions that are essentially being investigated and invested in anyway because of the rise of automation tools in in our businesses.
Which are there to essentially take away some of those things that that people find hard to do, or people do slowly?
A lot of those technologies are useful for people with disabilities too, because there’s lots of natural language processing that they can listen to the phone call they can. They can translate the phone call, or they can interpret what somebody saying to provide different options and so that so that you can provide them with options faster.
So, it seems to me that this is these are all part of the same problem set really is in helping people to do their jobs more effectively by providing them with tech but also helping people who have a disability. They struggle with one particular aspect of work to get them over that and to help them to be, you know, productive and enjoy their work in a in a way that, is, you know, beneficial to everybody, including the employer and including the customer.
And of course, when you’ve got a more diverse workforce, you generally do a better job anyway, because you’ve got somebody, I mean more perspectives on things, right?
AMY – Well, there’s some strong statistics about the organisations with the greatest emphasis on diversity and inclusion are succeeding well ahead of those that don’t prioritise diversity and inclusion. And I think disability brings a richness into organisations of that breadth of experience, and there’s some really strong, unique skill sets that that come along with different disabilities and impairments that you know. This whole notion of high performing teams where people can play to their strengths and bringing, you know, some really unique skill sets, and you can see that coming through. There was a report by Accenture a little while back. I can’t remember exactly what the what the percentages were, but it related to turnover, margin, across the across the whole range they were outperforming the top 10 organisations for diversity and inclusion were outperforming all the others so.
CHRIS – Yeah, yeah, I mean the company I work for IDC we see that too. We have research on the along the same lines and they and it’s really just show that where you’ve got a diverse workforce you tend to have better productivity and better outcomes. Simply, I mean there are lots of good reasons for it right? But just that fact in its own right should be persuading people to see this as an investment in in success, not as a something to be in a like a burden to be carried in terms of extra cost, because you’re probably going to spend that money anyway, right? It’s just a matter of how you spend it and where you spend it.
TERESA – And I think actually with the pandemic, we’ve seen that people can work in different ways as well, so we’ve seen that. In fact, there’s been a lot, you know we’ve all had to work from home and those tools that we’ve been used to using in the workforce, we’ve all had to learn and pick up on using at home. And it all gave us a bit of an awareness about disability to start off with, because we’re all frightened about using maybe video conferencing and those barriers and people entering into your home and how can we stop people looking at the background? You know that makes me feel anxious? That makes me feel worried and those are feelings that you know people with disabilities have dealt with for a very long time and we were very quick to take on board these new ways of working and we really shouldn’t be losing that in the future. We should be working with that and making sure that it’s suitable for everybody.
So, you know, in the past we used to go in and do workplace assessments for people and I can remember going in and seeing somebody that was really struggling to come into work on a daily basis and found that the sensory overload of being sort of in the office. Lots of people around them, the sounds and the smell of the office just wasn’t working for them and all they wanted to do was work from home, and if they could work from home, they’d be able to do their job. And yet that wasn’t possible. This is going back a few years now, but the pandemic has actually shown that yes, we can work from home, and we’ve got the tools to do that. Everything stored in the cloud. Now we’ve got that way of working and we can collaborate really well. And we can do it in a way that is actually easy for people, so we don’t have to have the cameras on when we’re having a team meeting, we can still hear somebody voice and we can use captions if we want to. If somebody is hearing impaired, we can still have the captions on. If somebody needs to communicate in a different way, we can use text and if somebody finds it very difficult because they’ve got short term memory, we can record that meeting and we can re listen to that at a later time. And that also means that we’ve got one point of reference, in order to go back to that information so that everybody got the same meeting notes and it’s not being taken by, you know four or five different people, and everybody sort of deciphered that information differently.
So, we know that actually we can do working from home, and I’m hoping that we don’t have to have so many workplace assessments where you’re going in and you’re saying well, so and so they need to be able to work from office because of they’ve got this condition, or they’ve got a problem with IBS, and they need to be sitting closer to the toilets because they need to get there much quicker well, when you’re in your home, that’s not a problem. And why should somebody have to share that information that could potentially be quite embarrassing and be a bit of a stigma for some people as well. So, you know, there’s lots of reasons for us to keep with this new way of working, basically more ability to be able to work in the way that we want to, and we’re comfortable with.
AMY – One of the really positive things that we’re finding in the last year or so, is organisations really wanting to interrogate each step of the employee journey at their organisation and really understand how they can you know, evaluate their own set up to make sure it’s inclusive by design so you know the recruitment process is obviously your first starting point and there’s so much that can be done to create a flexible recruitment process that allows everybody to demonstrate their strengths. Because a lot of the time, if you’ve got a standard and narrow recruitment process what you end up with is lots and lots of people with very similar and narrow skill sets.
Whereas if you open up that recruitment process and we always say that accessibility is really mostly about choice. It’s about saying to people. “If you’d like to give a presentation, you can do that, if you’d prefer to record a presentation in advance, you can do that if you’d prefer to write a paper to demonstrate what you know your skills and knowledge in an area, you can choose that”, and it needn’t be linked to disclosing a disability. It’s just about people being able to perform at their best, and that then extends through to the onboarding process. Things like meetings that you know Teresa was just saying making sure that you’ve got a meeting housekeeping sort of set of rules that are going to allow everybody to input not just the loudest voices which I think we we’ve all sort of recognised. That particularly in the online world, it can be quite difficult to engage everybody if you’re not consciously thinking about that. Right through to career development, so we’ve been providing various training and consultancy around that and it’s been really interesting to see people challenging you know norms that had been in place in their organisation for so many years and I think the pandemic has created that, it’s almost that growth, mindset, where people were out of their comfort zones and then they didn’t want to just slot straight back into them because moving away from the status quo had sort of thrown a light on: “Goodness me. Why on Earth have we been doing it like this for so long?” So yeah, it’s been. It’s been really, really interesting.
CHRIS
Yeah, a couple of years ago we had a lady called Doctor Nancy Doyle who is something of a neuro diversity specialist on the podcast and we talked about some of these things like people, the trend for open plan offices kind of disenfranchising some people, because Once Upon a time they had been put in a room to work by themselves because that’s how they work most effectively. But once it became a thing that everybody had to work in an open plan office, they just became really far less productive and unhappy. And often they’re leaving workplaces because it’s just couldn’t handle it anymore. As you say there, there are some Silver Linings from the pandemic. Because they force us to accept that there are actual choices, right?
AMY – Definitely, I think open plan actually has not proved to be a brilliant working environment for most people and what we’re hearing from a lot of organisations now is that whole notion of hybrid working where people can work from home or from quiet spaces. There’s lots of workplace design with pods and quiet areas, and all this kind of setup.
And when you’re in a collaborative space, collaborate rather than trying to do everything in the one spot. Again, it’s that flexibility, and you know Teresa. You’ve done various sort of onsite assessments in large open plan spaces.
TERESA – Yes, I. I mean, I was just going back to sort of like when I first started working. So, you know when I really first started and I worked for British Aerospace in Weybridge a long time ago, and it was absolutely open plan then, but you had offices there as well which allow people to work very quietly, but then there are really, really very large places and then some of the other places that I’ve worked in very small offices, and it allowed you to have those unique little conversations.
And then when I’ve gone in to do workplace assessments, you’ve gone into these massive great big call centres and where the adjustments really are about sort of like people saying I can’t hear the person speaking to me because this one this person got really loud voice next to me and you know, what can we do as a reasonable adjustment to allow me to hear this person that that actually the other person next to me is just much, much louder than me. So yeah, I mean. If we could work in different ways to allow us to actually communicate and interact really well, like working from home, and we know again that we can actually take these phone calls now at home where we don’t have that interference from people, whether they’ve got a louder voice or whether we’ve got a hearing impairment and we can’t hear. So clearly, you know, we can allow us to work in these spaces is far more suitable for us, in fact.
So, it’s using. It’s probably a bit of a hybrid model, isn’t it? Where we have some people working in the office and some people working at home, we don’t want to lose the fact that actually we need to make sure that everybody can collaborate it as well when we’re in these meetings.
So, we don’t want an advantage over some where they’re in the office and not able to sort of like communicate. Because we’ve got actually lost sight of some people when they’re in in their homes. So, it’s working out. How are we going to bring those people together? And maybe we need to ensure that when we have these meetings that we’re including all of our people, regardless of disability, that we’re including everybody within that meeting and maybe signing on early to ensure that actually we can have those social chit chats with people as we’re coming in and we can say good morning or good afternoon to everybody in the meetings, but we actually all sign in and we’re all online.
And we’re all collaborating at the same time when we’ve got meetings as well.
AMY – Yeah, I think meetings is one of the really interesting ones. Actually, because using Microsoft Teams and zoom and the functionality that is inbuilt in them. Again, it goes back to that notion of choice that people can make. You know what I was saying earlier about the loudest voice being heard when the conversation is all verbal. When you have a group of people where you’ve got some people who extroverted, some people who are deeper thinkers might take a little bit more time to come up with their thoughts. Some people who don’t like to speak out loud. Actually, these platforms have been really, really helpful because you’ve got the chat function that people can use to put in in, you know a thought that’s come to them. You’ve got the emoji reactions that people can use. You’ve got all sorts of different ways that people can input, and I think it’s really actually, you know, brought some people’s viewpoints more to the fore and you’re benefiting from that wider range rather than the people who immediately jump into a solution and leave other people behind, you’re actually finding that meetings are more collaborative, but also the decisions and actions coming out of them are more well thought out. So yeah, it’s interesting.
TERESA – I think actually with technology we can make sure that everybody is included. So right from the beginning of a meeting and especially with Microsoft Office with we’ve got the accessibility checker. So, if we’ve created an agenda, if we’ve created documents and resources to be looked at, we can make sure that those are checked for accessibility and ensure that actually somebody that’s maybe using a screen reader can access those documents, or we can provide them in a shared folder that so somebody can actually investigate that information and feel comfortable about actually collaborating during a meeting beforehand. So again, we’ve got this. This area, in which we can actually share our resources in advance to everybody that’s attending, no matter where they are geographically.
CHRIS – I mean, you talk about things like the accessibility checker, but I mean I’ll be honest, that’s not something that I’m familiar with, and I’m I am wondering how employers can get this into the kind of the culture into the into the muscle of working. You know that so that we’re doing this as a matter of course.
It’s just a part of what we do rather than having to be something that happens that somebody remembers because they happen to remember about accessibility.
And it’s a little bit like security. In that sense, you know, we always talk about in in technology and in in information management we talk about security being something that everybody thinks about all the time. It’s so it’s just part of what you do. It’s not just, it’s not something you do at the end, and it’s part of the whole information management piece and accessibility and being considerate and thinking about our colleagues in that sense has got to be part of the culture, hasn’t it?
TERESA – Yeah, it really has.
AMY – It’s that whole awareness thing. Would you say Teresa? A lot of the time as soon as someone understands the barriers that they are unintentionally creating and how that manifests they can’t UN know it. I’ve always said this. You can’t UN know accessibility once someone demonstrated it to you.
And in the public sector there’s been some regulatory change in 2018. Uh, a law came in that came from a European directive that said that all public sector bodies need to make sure that they are compliant with web content accessibility guidelines and that goes through websites, intranets, databases and so on. And one of the one of the groups that was affected was universities and colleges.
Because they’re obviously public sector bodies, but the complexity of a university, it’s not like an organisation where you’ve got 7 people that manage the website and publish documents, and you’ve got a nice thin funnel that everything is going through where you can manage it. These organisations had to engage absolutely everybody because every lecturer that’s uploading content to the virtual learning environment. You’ve got thousands of content editors operating 1,000,000 miles an hour. And so, they’ve been really creative in how they’ve been approaching it, and we’ve been working with various organisations to say you’ve got to give people the knowledge and understanding and create that framework within the organisation. You’ve got strategy and structure. Around that, you’ve got the knowledge and the tools at people fingertips. And then you’ve got this sort of governance piece that’s making sure it’s happening. And a lot of the universities that have been most successful have engaged that champions type role where you have people across the university trained up with the skill set.
And we’ve worked to develop some e-learning options. Actually, that are quite sort of person centred that people could go through and they’ll understand about the different barriers related to different disabilities, and I think it’s that sort of what you said about making it business as usual.
Even simple things like checking your policy documents to make sure that they’re alluding to digital accessibility. Putting digital accessibility as an essential criterion on job descriptions. All of those sorts of things do the trick in getting to the situation where then it becomes as you say, like security like GDPR. You just know you’ve got to do it and you’ve got to get it right.
So, it’s definitely a journey and I think if people try and do everything at once. It is challenging, but we always say it’s about people are people are very much engaged around personal stories and storytelling and explaining what the impact is of ignoring accessibility. And it you know it can be slamming a virtual door in people faces, you know, and I think that the more you can sort of engage people around the why and then give them the how and it is really impactful.
CHRIS – So then give us a call to action. Then if somebody is listening to this and they think OK, how can I do this in my organisation above and beyond the going in you’ve talked about; you know how you how you think about in terms of your culture and in terms of what they can do as a kind of practical, what we’re going to do tomorrow, other than obviously call AbilityNet and draw on you guys. What the most important things that that they can think about.
TERESA – So, I think take it away from the individual and make it the organisations responsibility. So, it’s not the individual’s responsibility to say I can’t do this, and these are the reasons why.
So, that shouldn’t be their responsibility. It needs to be the organisation responsibility and it needs to be their awareness of the tools that can be used and it’s creating champions within those organisations as well. So, it really needs to start, uhm, as Amy said earlier, with regards to sort of how we’re going to employ people, ensure that we keep them and have that diverse organisation and the skill sets in there from the whole range of people in the way that we want to make sure that we’ve got everybody, and they’re on board and retained for long periods of time.
You know, so yeah, I think it’s about raising the profile of what can be done by the organisation rather than by the individual.
AMY – Definitely and talk to your people you know. Get that feedback. In most organisations there will be a wide range of people who can feed into what’s working and what isn’t working. You know, and having that open mindset to say we, you know we really want to get this right. Let’s work together to achieve it. It’s that dialogue, isn’t it? Teresa, what do you think? It really does need to be, you know, at a senior level, people starting to walk the walk and talk the talk, but also that positive representation as well of showing what an impact it makes when people do work in a more inclusive way.
CHRIS – Well, thank you Amy and Teresa. That is another very interesting conversation and food for thought for everybody. And thank you for being with me tonight, I hope that Matt’s back next week because we could all do with getting back to normal and it only enables me to say thanks to everybody for listening and we’ll see you next week for episode 209.
AMY – Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the Internet at wb40podcast.com on Twitter at WB 40 podcast and on all good podcasting platforms.
———End of transcript——-
On this week’s show we have a fascinating conversation with author and journalist Tom Standage about the what we can learn from the history of technology. His latest book A Brief History of Motion is published by Bloomsbury.
On this week’s show we have a fascinating conversation with author and journalist Tom Standage about the what we can learn from the history of technology.
His latest book A Brief History of Motion is published by Bloomsbury.
On this week’s show, the fifth anniversary of our very first episode, Chris & Matt take the podcast on the road and record live with an audience at the 2021 IT Directors’ Forum at The Grove, a very pretty hotel on the outskirts of Watford.
We reflect on five things that we have learned in five years of recording WB-40.
On this week’s show, the fifth anniversary of our very first episode, Chris & Matt take the podcast on the road and record live with an audience at the 2021 IT Directors’ Forum at The Grove, a very pretty hotel on the outskirts of Watford. We reflect on five things that we have learned in […]
On this week’s show Chris & Matt explore the world of imposter syndrome prompted by Adam Grant’s new book Think Again.
We also look ahead to next week’s live shows at the IT Director’s Forum, and we check out the latest planet burning in the world of crypto currency.
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On this week’s show Chris & Matt explore the world of imposter syndrome prompted by Adam Grant’s new book Think Again. We also look ahead to next week’s live shows at the IT Director’s Forum, and we check out the latest planet burning in the world of crypto currency. .
On this week’s show we are joined by Ethical Intelligence’s founder Olivia Gambelin to talk about ethics, technology and decision making.
On this week’s show we are joined by Ethical Intelligence’s founder Olivia Gambelin to talk about ethics, technology and decision making.
On this week’s show Chris & Matt talk to Chris Yapp about the importance of watercoolers, the challenges of multi-disciplinary teams and why the strongest held views about the future are probably the least right. We’ll post a link to his latest blog article about education here as soon as we can.
On this week’s show Chris & Matt talk to Chris Yapp about the importance of watercoolers, the challenges of multi-disciplinary teams and why the strongest held views about the future are probably the least right.
We’ll post a link to his latest blog article about education here as soon as we can.
On this week’s show listeners pose a series of questions that matter to Matt and Chris (and there’s also one about cheese). During the conversation Matt mentioned the charity Beyond Equality who can be found here: https://www.beyondequality.org/
On this week’s show listeners pose a series of questions that matter to Matt and Chris (and there’s also one about cheese).
During the conversation Matt mentioned the charity Beyond Equality who can be found here: https://www.beyondequality.org/
On this week’s show Chris & Matt discuss future guests, topics and themes as the show enters into its sixth year…
On this week’s show Chris & Matt discuss future guests, topics and themes as the show enters into its sixth year…
On this week’s show we are joined by Red Hat’s Mary Provinciatto to talk about her work helping organisations to move into a truly Agile way of working. As it’s the last show before our summer break, we also have a quick look back at seven shows from the first half of 2021 that you shouldn’t have missed.
They are:
The one with David D’Souza
The one with Alex Woolfson
The one with Tracy Keogh
The one with Clare Johnson
The one with Anthony Slumbers
The one with Matt D’Ancona
The one with Julia Hobsbawm
We’ll be back in September. Keep in touch between now and then at WB40Podcast
On this week’s show we are joined by Red Hat’s Mary Provinciatto to talk about her work helping organisations to move into a truly Agile way of working. As it’s the last show before our summer break, we also have a quick look back at seven shows from the first half of 2021 that you […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Julia Jones to talk about how the New Normal might need a new type of leadership.
On this week’s show we are joined by Julia Jones to talk about how the New Normal might need a new type of leadership.
This week we are joined by Defence and Security specialist Alex Woolfson to talk about the ways and means of contemporary warfare.
This week we are joined by Defence and Security specialist Alex Woolfson to talk about the ways and means of contemporary warfare.
On this week’s show we are joined by Clare Johnson who talks about how she inspires children and adults to follow careers into Cyber Security.
On this week’s show we are joined by Clare Johnson who talks about how she inspires children and adults to follow careers into Cyber Security.
On this week’s show we are joined by Dr Alaina Szlachta who helps us explore perspectives on learning.
You can find Alaina on LinkedIn here https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaina-szlachta-phd-5a9ba594/ and her business can be found at https://www.bydesigndevelopmentsolutions.com/
On this week’s show we are joined by Dr Alaina Szlachta who helps us explore perspectives on learning. You can find Alaina on LinkedIn here https://www.linkedin.com/in/alaina-szlachta-phd-5a9ba594/ and her business can be found at https://www.bydesigndevelopmentsolutions.com/
On this week’s show we are joined by Nigel Walsh to explore the worlds of insurance and technology. You can find Nigel on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nigelwalsh, on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigelwalsh/ and on his podcast at https://ii.11fs.com/.
On this week’s show we are joined by Nigel Walsh to explore the worlds of insurance and technology.
You can find Nigel on Twitter at https://twitter.com/nigelwalsh, on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nigelwalsh/ and on his podcast at https://ii.11fs.com/.
On this week’s show it’s a welcome return for Tracy Keogh from Grow Remote who talks about how the pandemic has influenced their work, and how organisations need to think Remote First.
On this week’s show it’s a welcome return for Tracy Keogh from Grow Remote who talks about how the pandemic has influenced their work, and how organisations need to think Remote First.
On this week’s show we have a return visitor in Amanda Brock from Open UK. We talk to Amanda about open business models, a research project on the UK Open Technology market, and COP26. You can find our more about Open UK’s work at https://openuk.uk/ This week’s automated transcription: Intro Chris: Welcome back everybody. After […]
On this week’s show we have a return visitor in Amanda Brock from Open UK. We talk to Amanda about open business models, a research project on the UK Open Technology market, and COP26.
You can find our more about Open UK’s work at https://openuk.uk/
This week’s automated transcription:
Intro
Chris: Welcome back everybody. After a two week break to wake breach. I think I nearly said that two week break that we had for a bank holiday and well, well, the two weeks it’s been it’s, it’s gone past it, a flash. Matt, what do you think
Matt: it has gone past in a flash with a tropical levels of rain, but it seems that spring is now here and it’s more.
So that’s good. Cause it is may and it should be. So I’m relieved about that. And two weeks chugging away work starts going around to contracting with suppliers all that kind of thing. I’m trying to buy a car. What interesting world, a lot of car dealerships are they’re in this weird hybrid state where.
Some of that. I mean the whole charade of the negotiation, when they go off into the back room to be able to talk to their manager, to see if they can be able to get a deal and all that Gubbins seems to have been knocked on the head by the fact that for a year they’ve had to sell without being at a user show showroom.
But they’re in this really weird thing now where they, they still obviously got a margin to make. So they start with a very low price and then tried to sell even more crap that you don’t need with You know, ceramic coatings for paint and all sorts of nonsense that go into it. But of course, the main thing they’re trying to do, we’re not looking to buy a new car at the second, add one is try to set the credit.
And if you’re saying actually Ashley we’ve got savings, we want to get a pet. They’re not into it. They don’t care because obviously there’s no money to be made whatsoever. If they’re not selling you some P P P deal or whatever, they call them their personal, personal lease deal. So that’s been an eye-opening experience and Yeah, I’m not sure I want to do it again for another seven years.
I haven’t bought one yet either. So there we go.
Chris: Yes, it’s it is it’s an interesting game. Car sales, no doubt about it. Couldn’t collect. I bought a car, a click by click and collect the other week. So I just, I just bought it and then went to fetch it. I didn’t even go look at it. I knew what I wanted and it worked out well, actually.
Matt: Yeah. The other interesting thing though, is actually talking cars at like a year or two old. It seems like the established auto manufacturers have now realized the power of being able to, this is going to be interesting for the conversations later, but being able to sell software upgrades at premium on secondhand stocks.
So you haven’t got a reversing camera. We can install that that’d be 650 quid. When you know, the camera itself is going to be like, what three quid? And it’ll all be modular in at the bank. It’ll take five minutes to do it. And it’s all just about enabling the software, but. In that you kind of go to the dealership to better get that down
Chris: as a whole, but there’s a whole bunch of Tesla’s stuff going on there.
Anyway. Anyway, we can get into some of this. We’ve got a guest this week who is somebody that we had a year ago just about, and it’s been a whole year. Amanda Centura must hear I’m under Brock is here. How are you?
Amanda: I’m really well. I bought a car last summer too, and they were trying to tell me the second hand cars were going up in value for the first time ever in the pandemic.
Well, they sold me an upgraded SD card.
That’s what I’m supposed to still enrolled in the last year. Well, I, didn’t not
Chris: how’s the last couple of weeks been for you, Amanda. Has anything been excising and happened this last week? Anything thundering down the track.
Amanda: Constant. We are just so busy at open UK, and there’s so many different things going on, lots and lots of people involved and all bringing their own exciting ideas and skills into the organization.
So in the last couple of weeks, we’ve announced, I think probably just over a couple of weeks ago, our chief sustainability officer, a guy called Christian Purina joined us and we’re working on cop 26. We had an entrepreneur in residence, join us and we’re working on a phone just for him. And we have been very busy creating our kids count for a second time.
Chris: Fantastic. Well, we’ll hear a lot more about that. No doubt in the minutes to
Matt: come. And how has the the life in the most mental it’s been for you over the last two weeks,
Chris: Mr. Weston? Well, I w similarly it was, it’s been fairly Torrential in terms of rain, although on this was it yesterday, Sunday, and I woke up and.
I looked outside and there’s some were shining and I went outside and it was not it’s cold. And I dashed out with a mighty roar through my breakfast in the garden for the first time. Well, actually not quite the first time that this year we had it, we had a weird sunny day, a few weeks ago, but it was yeah, it was a bit of a release because it’s been a bit gray miserable.
So yes, yes, it was yesterday. It was nice. And, and really it’s been a. It’s been that kind of, you know, a bit of a continuation of the whole year, really in terms of work, but good. In many ways we know that the customer signed up, so I’ve got somebody to onboard and got, and hopefully another one that’s coming on.
So that’s all good. Right? So ultimate renewal and things like that. And then meeting new people, doing slightly different things. It’s it’s good.
Matt: Do you have any view to actually going to places. Cases outside of the UK?
Chris: No, no, not yet. No. I think organizations all over Europe are still wary about their people going places and, or meeting people from other places.
Right. I think whilst we’re working from home, they’re kind of assuming that, and then not getting near that part, part of that is not being exposed to like. Suppliers and things like that, it might turn up. So I think, I think it’s going to change, but I think it’ll change gradually and I’d be surprised if in, so, I mean, the IDC is one of those kind of international visitors where people travel around quite, quite a lot.
But if you think about what we do, a lot of what we do is around events. So obviously a lot of the events are, if they’re starting to give you back in personally, it’s, in-country rather than internationally. And a lot of our sponsors in terms of events and that our customers, in terms of our vendor research, that they don’t want people to travel yet.
So we could have an event, but we wouldn’t have a speaker. You know, we wouldn’t have a sponsor. So it’s all a bit it’s all very much in a band at the moment, but I would imagine that. You know, if we can have a good summer in Western Europe, you know, and, and things to down a bit then maybe to origin this and where we might start to see like the thawing of that.
Matt: Presumably there’s quite a bit of lead time on organizing an actual physical in-person event anyway, more for being able to get people to commit to going to it and everything
Chris: else. Yeah. I mean, we, in terms of PR you know, proper events, you know, the big things like our summit that we have in October, that’s lots online and it was always going to be online because.
We start organizing that in February, January. And you would, there was no way that we could say, Oh, let’s, let’s hedge our bets and make it physical. I know organizations who have done that and they’ve had to keep moving data back and things because they desperately want to do it physically, but it just doesn’t work out.
And for us, it just made sense to say, look, let’s just, let’s just assume it’s going to be virtual. And and then. The in country stuff, the kind of, you know, like the dinners and things like that. That’s a little bit easy to organize. It’s a little bit shorter notice and therefore those will definitely start up.
It’s just a matter of whether somebody like me goes out to to sit there and take my variants of concern with me.
Matt: And are you looking at in-person stuff yet? Amanda? So
Amanda: we are. And as you know, from our pre-call, I’m sort of so excited about the idea of seeing people face to face. I can hardly contain myself to be quite honest.
We’re looking at cop 26, first two weeks of November, and we’re being told that UK Gover working on the basis that is an in person event. Unless something dramatically changes and we’ll be notified of that as, and when, so we have an open source and sustainability day that we will hopefully host other organizations at.
And we have a submission sitting with the cabinet office that we’re waiting for approval. That’s actually quite exciting. This week, we’ve submitted to build the data center of the future, not to actually build it, but to build a blueprint with a consortium of different businesses. But we, and for a penny in, for a pound.
So we submitted for the IMAX cinema. So if we get it, we get to go and make a movie and I’ve never made a movie. So that would be kind of exciting.
Matt: Absolutely. And a very big movie, if it’s going to be screened at the
Amanda: data center. Yeah. We’ve actually got a friend who is a producer. Who’s going to help us with this. So it’s not. Quite as much the blind leading the blind as that might sound that’d be, yeah, that’d be really exciting. So for us cop 26, potentially it also coincides with our awards, which would mean we would have some hybrid element to it.
Although we’ve planned that as additional event.
Matt: It’s going to be interesting how quickly people want to go back to events as much as the ability to better organize them as well. I think there’s going to be varying levels of some people extremely keen, the other people that are going to be quite reticent to, to, well, what’s the
Amanda: hugging stuff.
So I I’ve been on calls all day and I just saw something go across my phone about hugging is hugging official. No, as Boris said, hug.
Matt: People are to use their discretion as to whether they wish to be able to hug or not. Yeah. No, it’s, it’s up to families and friends to be able to make decisions for themselves as to whether they wish to go.
Amanda: No, strangers. I
Matt: take it well. No, I think that was always the case. You know, kind of legal kind of way, but who knows? So anyway, before we get into this sort of minefield let’s press on with the show.
We’re going to talk about a whole series of things is been driven by open UK and in the last 12 months ago, Ford as well. So I think we should crack on with it.
Main interview
Main Interview
Matt: One of the tools that we use in the what I grandiosely called production process of WB 40 is a piece of open source software that has been around for quite some time. Now nine, 20 years, I think, called audacity and or Udacity is a sound editor. And it’s. Being used by all sorts of people used by professionals, lots of features within it, very, very much open source.
And then a few weeks ago there was an announcement that a company was acquiring it. And I think it’s a really interesting starting point for conversations about some of the things that you’re looking at at the moment, Amanda, because I know that business models for open technologies one of your areas of focus and.
That from somebody who doesn’t really embed themselves into the board of open completely day to day, like the way you do that feels a bit confusing because how can open source software be acquired? What’s going on there? Can we unpack
Amanda: that a little bit? Yeah. I’m not terribly familiar with the Udacity. I know the product and our voiceover lady.
She uses a law. So, I don’t quite know what they’re structuring Wars, but I assume it’s a commercial sponsor or a company which some high revenue generates on the back of a dusty that’s been sold and the audacity will be the project that they lead. If it’s a community project. And, you know, I, I’m jumping to an assumption immediately that it’s a community project, but one of the things we’d be looking at recently, a law.
Is how people’s understanding of open source very much comes from the way they’ve experienced it. So for some of us, we joined big corporate collaborations, like a Lennox foundation or an OpenStack open infrastructure is that no is open-end for, and that experience of being part of a big corporate creating effectively a de facto standard and saving money and hopefully building better software.
Is one iteration of open source. Another is people creating a project and building a business on the back of it? Like a Hashi Corp, perhaps? Yeah, no dusty I’m guessing. And then you have something totally different where you have developers scratching and H’s Lynise to real estate and creating something like Linux and building a massive community without a business on the back of it.
But with a foundation and over 15,000 people. Have contributed. So you’ve got all these different sort of nuanced slants, but all of them are about developing software, not really about developing business and what we then see separately is how people have built sometimes successful and sometimes not so successful businesses around there.
It must have a software and it sounds to me like a dusty have built a successful business if they’ve sold.
Matt: So w are there, are there sort of typical types of revenue generation from. Yeah, you had to codify
Amanda: so well, it’s a topic inequality, but as a chap called Matt as let, who, you might have come across it four or five one, and he produced a report back in 2008, which was probably the first business model review for open source.
And he set out the, you know, half dozen or so different business models. And I would say they haven’t changed very much. What we’ve got now is slightly different flavors of them. But I think for straightforward open-source based businesses what’s changed most is probably get hub or get, or get lab and gets a language.
Or it’s not even a language as a tool. I think Lynise wrote in 2009, if I’m right. Which means that that whole chef, that whole change is about 12 years old. And when I’m talking about change, what I mean is that we’ve seen. Open source move. So when I started work at canonical in 2008, we were constantly marketing it, selling it, persuading people that were safety use talking to procurement teams, talking to lawyers, and that sort of got bypassed by get hub.
So what happens now is folk go and take the software. Take it into the business, use it, kick the tires, know that they want it. And then they go back to the business associated with that software as inbound. Marketing’s an entirely different approach. They know they want it, they know they want services around it.
And they’re coming to you asking for those rather than you pushing it. So you see the issue that the problem of marketing open-source has kind of disappeared. And it also has an advantage though, where it can scale in a way that surprise. She just can’t compete with. Now, if it’s done well, and if it’s done right.
And I think you have to have that in by marketing focus and what you also see, if you look enough at the different founders talking about it, is that the businesses which have had a single product struggle much more. So we’ve seen a Lastic shift this year from an open source business to, I still have some open, but moving some of its products proprietary and it’s pretty much a single product company.
Someone like Mongo, who’s been through the same, very similar, whereas companies that have multiproduct or which have evolved their support and service offering to almost support their competing products. They’re the ones that do well. So you have to have that as well to, to really seem to thrive. And then the mold is what you’d expect, you know, support is subscription, that kind of stuff.
Matt: It was to get hub itself. Of course, is another organization that has gone through the acquisition path and is now owned by
Amanda: to Microsoft. Yeah. It was a fairly sizeable sale acquisition. However you view it. Biggest, I was red, hot 34 billion. I mean, I think it’s still the biggest type transaction in history,
Matt: so there’s definitely money to be made in this world.
Yeah.
Amanda: If you work on it, it definitely.
Matt: So you’re in the process of doing kind of state of the open market. That’s the right term for it in the UK. And you’ve got a series of three phased. Reports are going out the first of which has just been published March, March. Okay. So a couple of months ago can you tell us a bit more about that project and what you’re trying to be
Amanda: able to explore through it?
Yeah, I think I was speaking to Jennifer Barth at It’s me and media who have been the company who’ve supported us in creating this report back in January. And I I’ve sort of been toying with doing something along those lines for a while. The European commission had been working on a report for a couple of years, you know, huge Fastly expansive report.
And I kind of felt that with Brexit, we needed to do something and talking to Jennifer, I really understood that we definitely needed to, because I sort of taught myself into actually. We are the fifth biggest contributor to the cloud native foundation to cloud native in the world. When I say we, I mean the UK and I realized as I was sort of knocking the numbers around and talking about it, that actually we were the biggest contributor and the biggest by number of developers across Europe as well.
And in a very typically British, we just went, you know, we sort of. Probably quietly acknowledged it to herself, but didn’t like to mention it to anybody else. And I think that is something that’s come out of Brexit is that we’re no longer part of the commission’s work on open source or the report. And really, we needed to flag both to business and to government, just the scale of open in the UK and that we.
Of secretly being a center of excellence building over many years in this space. And maybe we need to get some acknowledgement for that. Not so much for a Pat on the back, but to make sure that we’re educating kids in the right way for the future so that we build future generations of it and leverage that success and that we help businesses in that space do well.
I think, no,
Chris: no. I was going to ask you a question on, on that basis, given that, you know, it’s a year since we spoke last and. And given that that is, you know, it’s a, it’s a fact, we’ve got a good culture of open source contribution and, and thinking in the UK, what what advantage does that give us then in terms of, you know, given, given the whole Brexit thing and how we manage our.
Our business and our software development and the way we look at tech in this country and in the future, does that give us that advantage? Do you think in terms of our culture or in terms of the way that the tech community works in this country,
Amanda: I’d like to hope so. And I think that it’s a process of evolution where we are, we’re one of the biggest countries in this space, anywhere in the globe, right.
In terms of. However, you’re going to measure lines, contribution numbers of individual developers that you can identify. But if you look at the countries where compared against it’s like China, India, the us. So we’re obviously nothing like the size. So if you were to look at it in a sort of per capita basis, and we haven’t looked at that yet, it’s something I’ve been thinking about.
Actually, we have a huge tradition of open in the UK, which lens does having skills and areas where the shortage is in, right. They can’t find enough developers and cloud and an awful lot of the cloud software is open source. So there’s lots of space for us to evolve this and I hope, and I think generate more business and not just business.
I think my thinking has shifted a bit in the last year, and it’s not just about getting the businesses that are in the UK and the people in those it’s the business OVO. And so there are a huge number of particularly young people working across open source who are working for international companies who are working for a known UK parent companies, but also for companies that are maybe non-traditional tech companies.
As we’ve seen this digital transformation shift. And of course, if you talk to anybody about recruiting, developers is hard because every business wants them now. And I think. Universally, you will get the same response that particularly the younger developers develop using open source methodologies and practices, and that’s what they want to do.
Microsoft explain that as one of the reasons that they shifted to open, you just can’t hire young developers or the good ones if you don’t do it. So I think by building those skills here and leveraging what we’ve already got, we should be making the UK more and more competitive in the tech space.
Matt: I hope.
Hmm. Do you think that is that shift being driven by the change in things like cloud delivery of software so that where the value is, it’s no longer about Selling licenses because the software isn’t the thing that actually is, is where revenue can be made. You get revenue by getting people to subscribe to the availability of the service, to having software as a service or, or whatever else, or is it, do you think there’s something else going on in terms of some sort of cultural shift?
Amanda: I think we’ve been in this position for a long time culturally, and it hasn’t been acknowledged because it hasn’t been obvious as part of the EU. Why mentioned that the UK is the biggest of the EU. So when you look at it, you’ve got the UK than Germany and then way behind France, there were the European commission’s data that they were using for the report.
They had 490,000 developers as the figure they were using in Europe. And they reduced that to 260,000 after Brexit. Now they said they’re being conservative. But even if it’s 200, that’s almost half of the developers working in Europe. I’m guessing some of it is language-based. And when I look round, and this is something that pleases me, I don’t know what anybody else thinks about it.
But when I looked round the folk who are working in this space and the folk who engage with Oprah UK, not only are there huge numbers of young people, but they’re from all over the world. They’re based in the UK, which is great, but they’re from all over. And I don’t know if they’re attracted here because of that particular skill set or, you know exactly why they’re here.
But it means that we’ve got a really diverse community and it’s interesting and it’s a good thing.
Matt: Mm. Do you think, yeah. Do you think if you think about technology management within you know, not technology organizations, do you think the mindset has caught up there yet?
Amanda: What do you mean by technology management?
So
Matt: people who are CIO CTOs, but in organizations that aren’t tech focused, who aren’t tech centered organizations.
Amanda: I say quite a lot that I think what’s happened is we’ve gone through a digital transformation. I think companies have been in shock and they’ve learned that they’ve gone. Two software designed businesses, and they’re just getting their heads around that.
And what they don’t actually realize is they’re open source. And I know even now you are last people. So we have a questionnaire that would be working on this, going to be sent out next week to business and industry phase two of our report phase one established. What we had with the existing marketplace.
So looking at existing reports we did literature review. We established what that meant economically to the UK and for the UK, that was up to 41.3 billion in GDP per annum, coming from opensource. I think that’s hugely conservative is about 20% of the digital economy. I suspect that if we were to do the figures, right, just based on that methodology, we’d double that and it’d be about 40%.
So. Moving on from that. What do we do? Next phase two is about looking at business and industry and understanding what the adoption is like. So we’re going out with this questionnaire next week. We start our survey on Monday. We are focusing on about eight different sectors trying to gather data. And we ask, do you use opensource?
But even when the answer is no with Ann, go through a list of different software and packages saying, do you use any of the following? Because we suspect people will not really understand or have recognized or thought through that they’re using it. And then interestingly, one of the economists has pushed us to look at what they’ve stopped using or reduced their use of.
And it’s kind of something I wouldn’t have thought about, but it’s an interesting sort of counterbalance to it. What are your adults and what are you letting go.
I was going to say, then phase three is sort of a sweeper upper having established that. Can we find a new ways of looking at how you value the outputs? So what output value in GDP is actually being generated. And if you think about something like public cloud, vast majority of it’s open source, can you imagine how much must be generated from that?
Let’s be huge.
Matt: Hmm, I guess the other part of this is as we get services that are consumed. And so for small organizations in my own organization, the bulk of what we are using now is software as a service. Quite a lot of it comes from Microsoft. So I’ve got no idea how much open-source is involved, how much open technology
to
Amanda: involve.
They’re the biggest contributor in the world, but lines of quote, according to get Harper, right? So they use massive open source. So they may well be filling you with open source, open goodness that you getting without knowing it.
Matt: But I mean, the point is that Ashley is as a technology manager’s views shifts to delivery of business value.
If you don’t have some size enough to actually be doing the development yourselves, don’t run infrastructure yourselves. Increasingly it’s an abstract question that isn’t actually that important because you know, the revenue model for, or the cost model is based around subscriptions for services, not like
Amanda: right.
But it is important that as much as your subscription for service. It’s based on the software that’s there. And a lot of that is open-source and you see an old stuff going on with elastic and whatever else with the cloud companies being accused of strip mining.
Chris: So given that this is, you know, given this is the case and we have this strength in the UK and we have what would probably turn out as a Biff significant contribution from open source. What is the role to government? Amanda is, is, is the government’s role to promote or to encourage or to educate, or is it, should it just stay out that way?
What are you trying to, what are you trying to, yeah,
Amanda: I don’t think it will stay out the way. So I think it is It has a dual role. One part of it is as a consumer and creator and its own business, its day-to-day business of technology. And I think as a population where effectively we’re paying for the code, they’re using.
And that they’re creating, we should want, what’s created for us to be open and shareable and scalable and reuse and not be paying for proprietary code. That’s not needed unless it’s needed. I’m not saying every piece has to be open. And then on the other side of it, we have the, the policy piece. The UK government has been working on a data and digital strategy for some time now.
The devolved nations are also working on theirs. I think Oliver Darden came out January, February with 10 principles. None of those were open source. And one of the reasons that I wanted this report to happen was to demonstrate to government just how important openness to us and the money that it’s generating for the country, but also the value that it brings in the code itself.
And hopefully have them understand that through. I wouldn’t exactly say spoon-feeding, but putting it in one place for them to try and get open principles brought in and the importance of open brought into that strategy and policy. So I think the rule is an escapable. They’ve actually been really good.
So DCMS came along, we did some lunches. We actually start our own, me and my social events. We actually sat round, honestly, an eat a meal together. We shipped people their lunch and then talked about the rapport and DCMS turned up at all three of our lunches. You know, they’ve really engaged well, and they’ve been really good, so grateful to them for that.
Matt: The cop 26 happening towards the end of the year that you mentioned in the intro where do you see the role of open in that whole agenda around the climate?
Amanda: It’s interesting because sustainability is a really broad thing and it’s not just a buy also carbon neutral carbon, negative net, zero, wherever we’re going with that, that that’s all important, but it’s more than just that.
And to be sustainable. One of the things that really impacts is making it open. If you look at the sustainable development goals and digital principles that the UN work on the open source principles fit so well into that. And I think they really set hand in hand for a while. I was on a chaired, an advisory group for the UN for their innovation labs.
And they were looking constantly at what they built, what they created being open source, because then you could scale it across member States, particularly in the pure member States, they could pick it up and reuse and not reuse and recycle is right at the heart of sustainability as well as diversity.
And I guess just the, the open nature of it. It’s inevitable that it works with sustainability or promote sustainability. So we hope to bring various projects. Some of them which are very focused on things like net zero, but some of them may be focusing on some of the broader sustainability issues as well to cope.
I don’t know if you’ve seen anything about coal, but the whole of Glasgow is planned to be this amazing conference and to the whole city. And when we, we actually, we applied to the cabinet office for the IMAX cinema, which will be great fun, but we have a space in a fringe event, in a marquee right next to the main event.
And again, this fringe events across the city. So if this goes ahead, it will be one almighty event. Be a bit of a shock after no events for some, right. All those people in one place. Exactly.
Matt: Yeah, no, no, absolutely. No, certainly not for strangers with the, if you think about some of the, sort of, some of the key players within the, the challenges for net zero or whatever. But how do industries like energy as an industry or aviation or agriculture? Are those industries which have got thriving open.
Community within the moment,
Amanda: funnily enough, that you’re picking industries that we’ve been talking to. So we doing, doing an event with some energy companies and OEF jam in June, where we’re working to open up a dataset to help them do that. On the software side, Linux foundation has an open energy project that we’re a member of.
And they’ve been working with energy companies since 2018, trying to build more software that things like monitoring. And, you know, there are certain. Almost de facto standards that you can create by collaborating across the software there. So it was really interesting and agriculture came up recently as a space that needs more work done in that way, particularly in opening up the data.
So the double pronged approach to it as well.
Matt: I see. I mean, one that’s close to my professional heart at the moment is the construction industry, which Free flow of data between different elements of the construction, then management of buildings.
Amanda: I think about that any major infrastructure project, even just knowing traffic data and moving things around and managing those flows.
There’s so many different aspects to it.
Matt: Yeah, and it feels, I mean, it’s just say particularly with it’s an errand, Chris, that scenario, you know, reasonably well from your days in synthesis management work is that there are things like BIM building information management, but I, I’m not seeing a huge amount of evidence that actually data flows particularly well across organizations or it, or indeed different.
Elements of the supply chain within those organizations,
Amanda: a couple of things there. So if you look at a lot of the database software, now there’s so much open source in that, right? This, a lot of these companies, even the ones that are not obviously open source the backend is so I think we’ll see more and more open around the database infrastructure, but then when you look at the, the data itself, go back to something like open banking.
Forsberg method forced by regulation and what we’re now seeing as other regulators wondering how they do that too. You know, how do we make our sector open up? How do we facilitate this? And I think for the energy sector and many of the others, sustainability will actually be a factor that pushes that.
Matt: And do you think it will take regulation for that to happen?
Amanda: I don’t actually, and there’s a couple of spaces where I don’t think regulation will be needed where I could be wrong. And that’s one of them. I actually think the regulators will see what’s happened with open banking and they will go ahead and do it without the regulation.
I know that in Australia, they followed what the UK had done on the open banking space and did it without regulation. I was told by people involved that they thought Australia had done a better job, but then the, when the people running it, I think it must be the regulator, went to government and asked for a law because they had 90% engagement and they wants to force the last 10%.
But I think they also having some freedom and scoping and creasing it rather than being driven by regulation. Maybe better.
Chris: Reduce it and I’m in oil and gas. For example, the, there are, there are pooling of geo spatial data and geo graphical data to say, okay, here we go. We are. Pooling our resources of understanding where the oil is and how you might get to it.
But simply because they’ve realized that they’d just, if you know how the oil industry works, it goes from feast to famine. And when it’s in the farming stage, as you’re pretty much isn’t husband, for some time, they can’t afford to do it unless they pull the resources and they realized that that ecosystem.
Play is the only way to do it. So there’s an industry that has done it on its own the term, but
Amanda: one of the problems with that kind of initiative and this is where you get me being the ex lawyer is the, to open up data Lake that you have to work out what contractually you can and can’t do. And the non-disclosure clauses and requirements cause huge problems.
And I have. Talk to me for a few times about whether we could create a universal clause that was accepted, like a model clause that we could apply to say that you both parties agree, whatever the contracts might have said that we agree just to share this data. And nobody’s in breach by doing that. And avoid lawyers or kill me, but avoid spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on legal reviews to make modifications to contracts.
When all you want to do is open up the data and you both want to do it to allow that for that specific purpose. And I do think there could be a lot of value increasing that sort of infrastructure.
Chris: Yeah, that’s true. Excellent. Yeah. I mean there’s, if there’s, if there’s
Amanda: that I do 25 years, that’s enough for anybody.
Matt: So alongside the work with the the series of reports and with carp, you’ve also managed to squeeze in writing and editing a book.
Amanda: Do we have to talk about that? That was it. It was a huge mistake. I’m sure the book will be great. I I’m fine. I know because I’ve read 20 people’s work. I know that the book is great, but edit 24 chapters of a book was more than I realized in terms of work.
And if there hadn’t been a pandemic, it wouldn’t be finished.
Matt: But it is presumably more about open. Oh
Amanda: yes. Yeah. The open source law policy and practice, it will be second edition of a text that one of my old professors created with an assistant notice. There were two of them and I thought I’ll take that on and I’ll make it happen because.
10 years since the last edition it’s time, there was a new one and the Oxford university press. So patted me in the back and sent me on my way, probably thinking she’ll never complete that. And then I, thanks to Michelle leaners at NL Matt. He helped me find sponsorship from the beach foundation. So it’s actually open access.
So it will all be worthwhile effectively. We’ve created a tertiary education curriculum for all aspects of open beyond the actual coding. And it’s a gift, you know, take it, you use it, give it to your students, give it to communities, whatever. I’ll just pick that out to see it published
Matt: one of
Chris: the labors of Hercules complete.
Amanda: Absolutely.
Matt: So we might’ve said. Second or third stages of the the report frame it’s going to be available. When,
Amanda: so phase two is going out as a survey on the 17th of May. Anybody listening to this, we’d be so grateful to you for completing the survey or passing it to people, you know, across any sort of business sectors from transport to professional services to retail.
And we are then going to publish the outputs on the 7th of July. And then we’ll be publishing phase three very early in October.
Matt: Fantastic. We’ll put details of the of open UK where you can find details of that on the website@wdfortypodcast.com.
Chris: Yeah. So just before we finish, let’s just quickly touch on the fact that you’ve got another brilliant summer holiday thing for kids coming
Amanda: up.
We day, we’ve got a couple of things coming up. We just launched our awards last Friday, which are open uk.uk, but slash awards. And we have eight categories and those will be being an Einstein cult 26, along with the winners of our kids’ competition and the sort of four runner to the kids competition as the summer camp.
And this year we have 10 fun episodes based on the open-source definition. No wonder you’re both looking at me like that, but genuinely they’re really fun. And it’s taken a lot of work to make them fun. We have a very amazing young woman who is in her first year at Cambridge, who has stepped into the role of creative director having taught the course last summer.
So we have a 19 year old who intimidates me, who has done an amazing job. It’s just absolutely amazing job on the the digital skill side. And I’ve been collaborating with her and Pamela Ball, the teacher. So I should say her name, Lorena hall, absolutely amazing. A woman. She’s our creative director and she Pamela and I’ve been building the content and we are halfway through the course that will be easy.
And the course available in July and we are. About to finalize an announcer, another glove kit giveaway. So another year of free mini gloves.
Chris: Fantastic. As somebody who’s a kids made the last year’s glove. And I had a good fun time doing it. I’m sure it would be really, really cool. Good.
Amanda: I didn’t know you’d done that.
I probably did at the time. I forgot. And that’s, that’s great
Chris: to hear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was it was, it was really good. And and as you say, you know, it’s, it’s It’s something to do with the summer holidays and it teaches kids about, about something that will be useful to them. And I’m looking forward to seeing the educational and entertaining open-source model content because that’s a challenge.
Amanda: Yeah, no, it has been a chat. When we had one Sunday morning, we were all sitting around and trying to work out how to explain forking to 11 year olds, you know? You’ll see it when you get it.
Chris: Well, I’m looking forward to that.
Outro
Outro
Matt: Fabulous. That’s more or less it for another show. Thank you, Amanda, for coming to join us again. What’s the week ahead looking like for you,
Amanda: I’m obviously working on the survey, so that’s most of my week ahead, but I think I’m going to a restaurant in central London. Well to the street site table, like a restaurant, but that that’s good enough for me at the weekend.
Matt: Everything is open with you. Isn’t it. That’s all your petrol station. Fabulous. And Chris, Chris wants the the next seven days got in store for you.
Chris: Well, that’s an interest it’s in question because I have, I’ve got my diary is full of things that I noticed that I looked at my diary for this week as one doesn’t I’m Monday, just to see what, what, what a wait.
And actually the it’s quite, it’s quite full. But it’s a lot of what I would call admini stuff. So it’s not, not nothing earth shattering. And I’m just looking forward really to getting through the week. Cause it’s last week was a Shortly. It wasn’t it. We had bank holiday. So I always feel that the first full week after a bank holiday is something of a, you know, it’s a trial of strength because I’ve had a long weekend and a short weekend.
I need to get myself back so five to eight weeks. So that, that’s what I’m looking forward to. I’m just getting, looking forward to get through it. But with sanity intact,
Amanda: you mean the end of the week is what you’re looking forward to this week.
Chris: Yes, essentially.
Matt: That’s fair enough. I’ve got a presentation I’m doing tomorrow for an event that’s being organized by prerogative, which is a consulting firm based in Wales.
So I’m going to be talking about how investing in technology is a little bit like buying a new car. And so bring my current. Life into whatever it is that I have. You realize
Chris: you realize that that is essentially the Swiss Toni.
Matt: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It’s there now. I mean, the basic idea is it, it starts with the premise that when people say investing in technology will save us money.
It’s a bit like saying buying a car will be cheaper than walking. And that’s the start point. And that actually is the takeaway for the whole thing. And I’m going to start with what it is that you need to take away from the presentation. So there would be 40 distances. You’ve got it there for free.
There you go. And other than that yeah, pretty clean. As long as we had. I I found last week, really hard work, and it felt like there was five days work in four days and quite looking forward to having five day to do five days work, it’s going to be much easier. But there we go. Thank you again, Amanda.
It was great to have you back. Thank you for listening. We we’ll be back next week. Next week we are going to be rejoined. By another guest who’s been away from us for quite some time. But coming back, Tracy Keogh from a grow remote in Ireland. Now that’s an organization surely whose time has come in the last 12 months.
So we were talking about how a grow remote has developed over the last few years. And what I guess the post pandemic world looks like for fostering remote communities of workers, working for organizations away from big offices. That’d be interesting.
On this week’s show we are joined by poet Mr Gee who helps us explore the world of words, and the advantages of crossing disciplines. You can see his most recent performance for the ODI here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7p2kJX3nTE
On this week’s show we are joined by poet Mr Gee who helps us explore the world of words, and the advantages of crossing disciplines. You can see his most recent performance for the ODI here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7p2kJX3nTE
On this week’s podcast we speak with IDC CIO whisperer Marc Dowd about how the role has developed, where it is now, and where it might be heading.
On this week’s podcast we speak with IDC CIO whisperer Marc Dowd about how the role has developed, where it is now, and where it might be heading.
On this week’s show we are joined by Claire Selby who talks about her project with Kingston University students Not My Beautiful House, and combining work and experience into higher education.
You can find out more –
Links : https://www.spacehive.com/spaceforkingston
Twitter : https://twitter.com/NMBH_KUS
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/notmybeautifulhousekingston/
Studio KT1 : https://www.studiokt1.com/
KUS : https://www.kingstonstudents.net/creative-meanwhile
This week’s automated transcript…
Intro
Matt: We are back. This week’s show is brought to you in grayscale, in memoriam. Good to Christopher. We are two weeks since the last show. Have you been enjoying yourself? Did you eat copious amounts of chocolate? Have you found anything that has changed your view of the world?
Chris: Well, that’s a very good question.
I don’t think I’ve eaten. Well, I did eat a fair amount. I talked a lot in one day that some chocolate came into the house and the kids didn’t want to eat it. So of course, that had a bit and then edit all. And then I felt ill for about two days afterwards. So I’m not doing that again. I think, you know, as you get older, your constitution becomes less capable of digesting and enormous amounts of pretty much anything.
And I’m guessing I’m a little bit frightened about the idea of going back to the pub. I need a catch to five pints app to get myself back into some sort of. Shipe, I’m actually go, I’m looking forward to it. Now. I’m going to the test match in June. So I’ve got tickets, got a bunch of, I got tickets.
We’re going to the test match, but of course it has to match means that you have to sit there drinking all day, watching, watching the cricket. So I do need to get myself into shape before then, but you know, it’d be nice to get there and all of the, all of the signs are good. So I’m looking forward to that, ah, has for the last couple of weeks, No.
I mean, it’s been I had I had a week off work, which I’ve just finished, which was nice just to do other things. It was nice to get out and do a few jobs and Potter about, and it seems to me that people are getting back to some sort of normality regarding their work lives or that they’re either getting back to normality or they’ve, they’ve resigned themselves to the misery that there’s going to everlasting or whatever.
But yeah, it’s it’s okay. And Oh, yes. And of course, yes, we’ve had the national the idea that readable websites are undignified or disrespectful. So this today I sent all of my emails using the wooden dings font in order to make them respectfully unreadable.
Matt: Oh, wait paintings. There are winging things. Yeah. There’s a blast from fonts past. That’s wonderful. God bless you, sir. And this week joining us is is Claire Selby. Ha how have you been fairing over the last couple of weeks, Claire? Gosh,
Claire: well time is a bit of a construct at the moment isn’t there.
I’m trying to struggle back. Easter was a thing. I didn’t get an egg. There was no eggs left in Sainsbury’s, so I didn’t eat enough chocolate. But I have, you know, slowly return to normality by doing a few things that I hadn’t done before, while swimming this morning, a bit foraging. And I actually got out of London and stood on a beach.
So I’m quite happy with those three things.
Matt: Well, let’s get going. Whereabouts was the beach,
Claire: Assets coast. So tolls, Bree and Molden.
Matt: Oh, yeah. Yeah, no, well, I drive past it quite often as I head up to see my parents in Suffolk, which is where I went onto a beach at good Friday, possibly the coldest experience I’ve had on a beach in a very long time, because the East, East coast wind now whipped through you.
You know, actually your beaches are a familiar place for you though, aren’t they? But you tend to do them in urban areas rather than the seaside. Yeah.
Claire: I mean, I grew up by the sea, so I kind of feel like I have to see the horizon at some point, but I guess you’re referring to my muddler King which I haven’t done for a while because during lockdown they kind of advise against it because in case you get into difficulty on the foreshore you might need to be rescued and that might take away valuable time from someone else that’s more in need.
So I haven’t really done any for quite a while. But yeah, generally anything that isn’t staring at a computer is of prime value now. So I’ve been learning to ride a bike for the first time, since I was about 14, which has been equally terrifying and also incredibly rewarding. So quite enjoying that at the moment that that might have overtaken the mud logging actually at the moment.
Matt: Oh, wow. Okay. Because the other ones I know about is cheese.
Claire: Yeah. Guilty is a big thing. Yeah. Worked at Christmas with Neal’s yard for the last three years. And then I did a quick stint before I started this job sort of in the cheese arches. So looking after the turning of, and the maturing of.
Everything from your Stilton right through to your goats, cheeses and your barn by God. So I know quite a lot about cheese. If ever comes up in conversation,
Matt: I was with some friends at the weekend and we were walking around Paddington basin and there’s a a new barge opening up in Patterson.
Basin called the cheese barge, which I’m very excited about, but I shared a photo of this with some of the people on the WB 40 signal brief, and somebody immediately pops up with they’ve missed a trick there. She would have called it the bout from Marsh, which it isn’t that
Chris: I’m just disappointed. You don’t remember.
It was me that said that my
Matt: colleague. No. That’s all right. I remember now. Cause yeah, it’s, that’s the, all the, all the good stuff you just did it for on the signal channel, rather than that, she waiting for the podcast.
Chris: The podcast is a secondary channel for my, my I put, I think foraging though foraging is great.
And especially, I think, I think the, the, the there’s a good combination of foraging and going to the beach pre. 12th of of April, right? Because there’s nowhere I was open. So you, if you go to the beach and you’d have to forage for your sustenance anyway, so it’s, it’s a, it’s a good combination.
Claire: I’m just, I’m just sort of gathering all these skills, you know, for this Apple app, apocalyptic, future apocalypse.
That’s probably coming at some point, so yeah, I can find you. Well, I mean, the, the guy that does the foraging walks was really interested to find out where mitten crabs are. So. That is valuable knowledge to him. But probably no one else
Chris: can brush their brains in perform so much. What’s your week been like
Matt: it’s fortnight?
Yeah, traveled out to London for the first time in quite a while, went up to see mum and dad in Suffolk, which is very nice or very socially distance or very cold. And then we went for a walk with. My sister-in-law was in dogs in the country and actually bizarre there’s. I said patent in basin yesterday had the delight of meeting a friend at his, in St.
John’s wood in North North of the center of London, but pretty damn central. And then just walking around central ish, London, the sort of periphery of London for a few hours. And it was nice to be surrounded by big, ugly, tall buildings and, you know, the big roads and the. The stuff that makes you realize that you’re not in the countryside in any way, shape or form.
So that was quite good, fun. And everything’s sort of slowly creaking back into some sort of movement. So be fascinating to see their places at Paddington basin, which has grown enormously in the last 10 years and create big sleek skyscrapers all over the place combined with. Presumably extremely tiny, but very expensive apartments and how I hope the next few years.
But we will see in those sorts of places, which you’ve got all of the cultural appeal to me, of somebody like Canary Wharf, I none whatsoever are actually quite an accessible, have terrible facilities. And yeah, whether they, they survive or not, but we got to also walk down the the canal around the back, or actually, you know, in the middle of the the zoo in regions park, just at the time when they were feeding the hygienists, which the cage of the hyenas backs onto the canal.
Oh, it was fabulous to see these. I mean, there’s one of the scariest beasts in the world, the hygiene, and they just love like half a dozen. Rabbits over the fence. Let the high end has go completely crazy in the in the next door cage as they smelled the dead rabbit, but couldn’t get it to it and then let them through.
And they’re bounded through to found one full time for it and ripped it apart. My kids were delighted to bear to see blood guts and rapid brain all over the. Yeah, so that was a little bit and then in between that doing some work, you know, so I’m carrying on carrying on. It’s all. Good. So let’s get on with this week’s show.
We are going to be talking on the day in which we’re recording. The the UK started to do its next stage of the opening up of lockdown with non-essential stores. Starting to open and pop garden, starting to open and the heavens opening with snow. And we’re going to talk with Claire a bit more about some experiments that she’s up to with what might happen in the future of the high street.
Main Interview
Matt: A few years ago now you started a role working at Kingston university, just down the road from where I live which was something a bit different really in terms of helping people in a creative space in education, but rather than standing in front of them. Blathering on about stuff. You created a thing called studio K T one, which experiential learning seems to be maybe a starting point.
It’s better. Describe it. Tell us a bit more about what KT1 was all about. Yeah.
Claire: Mean, I’ve definitely done the blustering and standing up in front of them and trying to talk about stuff. But the idea was to set up a creative agency inside the university, specifically inside the school of art specifically inside the department that I’m within, which is cultural and creative industries, which has meant to be a mix of business and creativity.
So it’s quite a new department and this was a new experiment. It was given a big pot of funding to set up for two years. So I sort of launched it with. I guess probably about 70 students who came along to the launch event when you could do those. And the idea was to get commissions from external clients and get students to work on them whilst getting paid, but without conflicting with the existing study.
So we got some really interesting commissions. We got one from a Zillow who was an old client of mine. We got one from Veolia waste company. We got one from TBD. The. The data conference. So we were doing everything from building a giant polar bear made out of waste materials, putting it in the West end to doing an office chair race in the middle of a conference to building an installation about AI.
And then we also had commissions from the vental center. So we were activating vacant units within there and filling them with art free to the public and just sort of experimenting and seeing what happened. So then the pandemic hit and all the clients they had ready to go, obviously sort of went into mothballs and.
A lot of the internal departments started seeing the value of what I was doing. So I survived last year, literally by getting word of mouth around the university. And what better way than to design materials for. Students that are, you know, prospective students, why not get existing students to actually design that content because a lot of stuff was being done by just a small internal department.
You know, see things through a student’s eyes, make it more valuable. So we don’t really well. And then there’s been sort of signs of recovery. And then we’re going to talk about the, the creative meanwhile project that I’ve been doing. So we have some conversations. I’ve already been working with the council and the business improvement district.
We did quite an interesting project wrapping vacant shops with students’ artwork, probably that launched, I think, October last year and sort of continued as well. So we’ve wrapped the whole old close Klaus Olson store in the middle of Kingston is wrapped with colorful designs from one of our students, which is amazing.
And then this has all led on to kind of the, one of those once in a lifetime things, really a developer approaches as and said we’re developing a new builder building. Would you like to have it rent-free for six months? So we kind of went, yeah. Okay. I think we can do that. And then we apply for the matter of London funding.
Put a bit together. We get the Maryland funding and then we get it matched by the council. So Where we’re going. It’s the Crowdfunder is still rolling, but we we picked up the keys two weeks ago. We’ve got all PC world, which is 10,000 square feet, ground floor, and then first floor and some sort of rooms and offices off that some people would be quite terrified at this, but It just feels like exactly the right time.
And it’s all sort of fallen into place. You know, we had lots of contingency plans, we sort of thought, okay. So if we can’t open in April or may, can we use it as a sort of space for students to use instead of their bedroom? Because obviously students in the pandemic haven’t been able to use the new, so to 2 million pound workshops, they haven’t been able to go to photography studios or use all these facilities, which there.
Kind of paying or so that was sort of one of the potential ideas. Do we just use it as a sort of. Workspace, but now Boris announced obviously that non essential retail can open. So we’re sort of on track to open at the end of April may. And the idea is that it’s sort of part gallery Pope exhibition space, pot shop.
So students can sell their work. Graduates can showcase what they’re doing, and it’s kind of until the end of August, it will be a kind of showcase for students. And for the community to use as well. So if we get approached by people who want to use the gigantic second floor, they can absolutely do that.
So it’s, it’s a big experiment, but it’s everybody seems to refer back to it. And everyone that we’ve talked to about it is completely behind it. They want to see change in Kingston and they want to see something positive and something that’s led by students. To come out of this sort of weird time that we’ve been in for the past year and a half or so.
Matt: So Kingston for people who don’t know the area is I, I’m not sure if this is totally true or not. Although I didn’t speak to somebody from Kingston council recently who seemed to nod in agreement to it that after Oxford street is the second biggest shopping area in the whole of greater London. Yeah.
It’s big old. Big old shopping area, number of roads. So the old fashioned streets and things, although with a few kind of seventies and eighties mini arcade things going on, fairly grotty, but nice open spaces. Lots of pedestrianized. Yeah. Areas. And even a year before pandemic hit. It was starting to become a bit weird as a number of the big retailers that arrived that going bust or pulling out of markets.
So people like gap. We’re starting to close up Klaus Olson, which is one of the few stores they opened in the UK. And that was a big, big retail unit that they entered out. And then through the pandemic Obviously coming out of lockdown, there will be some stores that don’t open again. So the, the Arcadia group’s gone there are quite a few others that have sort of fallen by the wayside over the last 18 months or so.
So there’s this really interesting challenge about this big space, which is all Oh, certainly to the, that yeah. The naked eye appears to be just mostly retail. I’m sure there are offices and things sort of dusted amongst as well. So. It feels like it’s the right time to start, to be able to do some experiments with about how, how can we start to think about reusing this space?
There might not be that what you’re doing is that by any means to find Lance at the, some experiments around it seem to be absolutely the right time for this.
Claire: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s, I coined something on a thing I did last week. Kingston has suffered from chain fatigue. So it’s basically all the chains that have failed within the last two years were all in Kingston.
So they’ve just closed up. And I think a lot of landlords have. Because I’m to people. So because there’s a unit, a nice unit on the main drag they want that instead of the one around the corner. So the PC world is actually on five road, which is a really interesting street because it’s kind of one of the exits from the Bentall center.
You’ve got a cafe Nero on the corner opposite, but then you’ve got a. Independent coffee shop. You’ve got a fancy dress shop, party shop. You’ve got trainers shop. You’ve got an art shop. Literally next door couldn’t have made this up. So it’s a lot of independent chains. And there’s something about the vibe on that street, which is really interesting.
It’s sort of. A bit livelier than the others at the moment. I mean, obviously it’s, I was last there two weeks ago, I think. So it just seemed a bit, a bit had something about it. So, you know, obviously opening up the doors and getting the students inside was just watching their faces with something else.
It was kind of one of those things of. I realized that what I’m doing is actually enabling people to, to be creative rather than saying I’m going to do all this. So I think it’s, it’s about opening a door and letting them be themselves. And I think for the last year, a lot of them haven’t been able to do that at all because they just haven’t had the space and they haven’t had like a lot, like anybody really, they haven’t had the mindset or you know, that they can keep campaigning to get You know, refunds on their 9,000 pounds.
But I mean, that probably won’t happen. I think we all know that there might be some sort of agreements or something, but I don’t think anyone’s going to get their money back. But give them a space and see what they can create and, and sort of get something different out of it. So there’s there’s a group of students who were running a campaign on Instagram because.
But you heard this her first or maybe not students aren’t really on Twitter, so everything is done through Instagram. It’s been really interesting to, if you kind of noticed that and this campaign really picked up steam. They got meetings with everybody, local MP, the Dean, and they sort of did affect change.
And I just said to them, okay, these protest signs that you’ve made and you’ve put on Instagram, can we get them in the space? Oh, okay. And then another student who came in to measure up one of the product students sort of started pitching. I said, Oh, you final year, what you doing? What’s your final major project started telling me about 10.
And I said, right. Where’d you want to put it? You know, it’s, it’s kind of that organic and it’s going to be that sort of quick because a lot of the time it isn’t quick and it isn’t organic. So I sort of want to change that and make it, make it more real for them.
Chris: That’s the, that’s the key though, isn’t it?
I mean, what you’re, what you’re talking about there is, is changing mindsets and providing leadership and making decisions for people because students aren’t very good at making decisions because they’re not yet at that stage where they’ve learned to make decisions for themselves often and universities, aren’t very good at making decisions because they are, they are bureaucratic and they are, you know, they are slow moving.
So, if you can get to a point where you are able to be that point of decision and say, yep, we’ll just do that then, and change the mindset and make it into something that’s happening. Good grief. That the difference it can make to it, to the whole thing. That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s, that’s almost the definition of inspiring and that’s how it’s that?
How it’s, how it
Claire: works. And it’s, it’s been really interesting cause it’s not just me doing this. We’ve we’ve done it in partnership with the student union who probably hadn’t ever seen the creative process of a project sort of. Emerge. So we were really clever and we actually tasked some of the second year students in the department.
I sit in to come up with a brand and the identity they had, it feels like years, but they had, they had probably a few months and they pitched and we had three teams that pitched and one of them came up with the concept of not my beautiful house. That’s the name and this comfort, this concept of comfort is overrated.
You know, everyone’s been sat around and the jogging bottoms and their trainers and slippers, but actually we want to challenge the norm and say, no, get out of your house and get into something that isn’t a house, but it’s not a shop. And it’s a space to sort of learn something or do something different.
So that’s the kind of idea. And I think that even they were a bit. Terrified as to actually, Oh, we’re actually doing this. Yeah, yeah. You’re actually doing it. And then we knew at the same time, we’d also briefed the interior students. So they’ve all come up with sort of modular designs that will go in the space.
And then when we move out at the end of August and find the next space, it will all transport quite easily. And their faces again were, Oh, so we’re actually making this year, we’ve got the budget now we’ve got. 70 grand. We’ve got some money now. So that’s been really interesting to see, you know, and I guess that’s like a lot of creative projects.
You know, a lot of them just, and, or just a visual or a render, but, but no, I think when you get involved with me, I tend to make it actually happen. So, so yeah, it gets real at some point, whether you were loading a van or putting up. A poster or whatever, you’re carrying your mannequin up 10 flights of stairs to do a fashion showcase.
That’s, that’s kind of how it, how it goes with my kind of things, because they tend to be attached to money and they tend to be attached to a client’s expectations, whereas this time around I’m the client. So, but the difference is I’ve got, you know, we’ve got this money to play with, so. It’s, it’s been a really interesting journey.
I mean, I’ve never done a Crowdfunder before and I cannot tell you how many times I was refreshing that goddamn browser. It was it was almost like a Publix dog, just waiting for it to hit something and, and, you know, running it through social media as well. You know, where Twitter, you just. I don’t know if it’s just in these times, but you just get absolutely no response at all.
You know, I’m doing this really exciting thing. It’s a Crowdfunder and you know, three people like it. It’s just kind of, it’s quite a funny one, but, you know, put something on Instagram stories. Hey, off you go. So it’s been really interesting
Matt: with the, the toast launching at the end of this month. Obviously, you’ve got the students as the audience of this, for the, the, who will be the people creating this space.
How are they thinking about who the audience for the space will be?
Claire: So we kind of were quite I guess we were quite explicit about this. So when we’d done the interventions in the Bentall center before what we found was a lot of parents with kids were coming in because they were bored and there was no play area.
So more than once sort of parents would come in and sort of say, well, can we leave Johnny with you then? We’d have to say no, we have absolutely no CBD checks. You have to stay with them. Obviously we do in this college today, or we’re doing this activity today. You can obviously sit in and stay here.
So we wanted the space on five road to be very different. So it’s probably. I mean, I don’t, I don’t know what will happen. We’re, we’re keeping it very, very kind of open, but it’s probably a bit more of a grownup space. So you might see some challenging artwork. She might come across a life drawing class and all those kinds of things we couldn’t really do in that environment because it’s a sort of governed by rules and a few regulations and all that kind of thing.
Whereas this space apart from a loading Bay, which has its challenges, we don’t, we don’t have much. I don’t know what the word is. We w w we’re kind of free to do what we want because the landlord has trusted us and we’ve signed a license agreement. So, you know, we’re not going to be making bombs in there or serving alcohol all hours of the day.
It’s kind of going to be quite a controlled environment, but also, you know, flexible in where we wanted to be a next creativity. So, so yeah,
Matt: the students. So you’ve talked about how they kind of, Oh, we’re really doing this side of it. How many of them are up for us. And how many of them just kind of
Claire: Hills?
Not many have run to the Hills yet. I mean, we’ve been. It’s obviously difficult when you’re doing it remotely, because you know, you have calls and some people are more vocal than others, so you can kind of spot who’s been the organizer and who’s put some work in and he’s kind of just turning up to be on the call.
And I think it will become a lot easier when we start doing it in person. So. Well, two weeks ago, when the students came in, you could kind of see who was a bit flabbergasted and you could see who was just straight away getting the measuring tape out and making notes and sketches and things. So no one’s run for the Hills just yet, but I guess, you know, it, it, it’s a good time.
It’s good timing because For the second year running this new degree show. So the degree show will be online. So the idea of students building something physical for their final year degree show, isn’t really going to happen. So this kind of, isn’t funny your degree show, but the skills that they’re doing and the, the pieces that they are building are kind of a showcase of, of their skills anyway.
So yeah.
Matt: And then you going outside of the. The groups within the faculty or are there other parts of
Claire: investees? Yeah, so the whole way through the planning of this, we’ve been chatting to the business school. So I hadn’t really had much to do with them before. And I’ve literally just this afternoon met this amazing woman who is doing leading HR.
Post-graduate business ma, but happens to have got amazing retail experience in like cue cards, not kick high. Oasis, she run retail. She worked for LCFF. So kind of like, why haven’t I met you before, so I’m going to meet her next week. So yes, we are definitely reaching outside and obviously there’s sort of stakeholder engagement people within the university PR who we’re all aware of what’s going on, but we would like sort of business and marketing students as well to sort of join in with the content that’s created in that.
So. I’m not standing there saying this is what happens this week. And this is what happens next month, where we’re basically hiring for roles that will do that and run stuff, pastors. But anything goes really? I think I don’t want to stifle anyone’s creativity and say no, because my God, you get told no, so many times in your life.
I just, I hate it. It makes me even more determined to do crazy things. So I don’t want to say no to anybody really.
Matt: So it’s come back to the, the the studio Katie one. What did you learn out of trying to create an agency from a group of students in a university
Claire: crumbs? I learned that no one knows how to write a brief, not even me.
You can try, you can try and you can try and give them a template and they will do anything they can to not fill out. This is internal, mainly internal clients. But yeah, I learned that I learned students don’t read a brief or they, they do read it, but they don’t read it completely. There’s always something missed out. And I think because I only realized this year. Okay. So my kind of background has always been my business development sales, but always kind of in the creative industry, I sort of woke up one morning. I was in a meeting or something and I thought.
Oh, God, I’m not even doing business. I don’t run anymore. I’m actually an agency person, but I don’t have any traffic managers. I don’t have any you business people. I’m just doing it all myself. So I learnt that it is possible to do it all, but the gray has keep coming. I learned that I just, I still love working with students.
I’d kind of given it a bit of a break. So I worked to Ravensbourne for. Nine years, 10 years. And then I had a bit of a break. I went to the open data world and I sort of swore I’d never go back to a university, but this job seemed too much of a, it was too tempting. It was kind of what a crazy idea and how can I make it work?
And I’d seen like other models, you know LCC, no, LSP, you have something called South bank collective where they it’s mainly kind of film and TV casting they do and filming and photography, but there’s a lot, there’s a lot of models out there that are really interesting. I don’t remember have you had Matt Desmarais on this podcast
Matt: on and off, but never properly.
Claire: So he said something to me, like. I can’t believe you’ve done it and made it work. You know, something like you’ve got balls or something that’s like that, that is exactly it because you, you know, as you said, Chris universities have very slow and they have their process and they have their business development manager and they have their knowledge exchange person.
And it’s a very kind of. Tight tried and tested method, but I’m afraid I like coloring out of the lines and I like doing projects that are quick daddy real. And you know, the students come forward, you know, the students are friends center, so this is probably the closest thing I’ve ever done to any self promotion, which is terrifying.
But at the same time, I kind of. I think it’s really important to kind of showcase projects like this because they don’t happen everywhere. And a lot of universities don’t really want to do something like this because it’s too hard. So
Matt: it feels like there’s also those distinctions aren’t there because universities have got a well-established model for how they deal with business, which is through research and that’s all very, you know, One side of the academic world.
And then you’ve got teaching, which is, I think in many certainly non-teaching institutions, which is the ones that are generally seen as better by the people who are in organizations that are non-teaching as well as teaching. But this idea about being able to actually make undergraduates learn through doing, which is almost like the apprentices stuff that we’ve spoken about on this show quite a few times over the years, And I was just wondering whether there’s this, this kind of model would be applicable into other areas.
Now I think about, you know, people coming out of university with computer science degrees, the thing that’s usually the biggest gap in their experience and knowledge is any sort of semblance per how you apply any of it into real world. Problems cause everything has been theoretical ups at that point.
And creative industry is the same. And actually being able to shift that into what I learn through doing where it’s doing for real, it just seems that this it, I don’t know, maybe it’s this, the kind of the conservatism that there is in the, in the, in the world of education sometimes, but.
Chris: Maybe it’s not sorry, mate. Maybe it’s not just do it. Right? Because as you say, computing students, they often do do it. You know, they, they are, they are coding, building things. What they’re not doing is doing it in the process and in the context of an organization. And it’s a bit, like you said, Clara, about people reading.
Brief. So, or you being able to write briefs same in the software world with requirements, it’s just, it’s, it’s just a different, different way of looking at it. So it, you know, that what you’re doing is you’re bringing them a dose of reality, real world process, aren’t you?
Claire: Yeah. And I think it is part of the Kingston ethos.
So I’m trying to remember the plaque as you come in, I’m going to get roasted for this. I think there is, it’s like learning through doing or making through doing there is a little motto that Kingston has. But I think the most, if I can do one thing for students it’s to understand what the value or their worth is.
When I, when the first year start, I normally stand up and do a little introduction about the studio. And I always say, no, you guys know what’s going on. You know, there’s people sitting in advertising agencies who don’t know how to sell on Depop or how to, how to work on clubhouse or how to do an ASIS marketplace, whatever.
So I kind of try and say to them, you know, what’s going on. Most people don’t have a clue, you know, you’re the future kind of thing, but a bit more inspiring than that. And I think if I can do one thing, it would be to get them to know their worth. Like I had a couple of students who were going to build an AOL filter for a client and they sort of came to me and said, Oh, do you think this is too much?
And it was something like 400 pounds. I was like, well, have you actually costed out like how many hours it would take you, if it’s going to take both of you, you know, and sort of recalibrated it all. And they, they weren’t nervous about asking for money from the client which. I find really fascinating.
And I found that a little bit with a lot of the lecturers as well. The, the risk, the risk of doing a live project was almost too much tobacco kind of thing. It was there’s too many rules, but I think that’s, you know, if you don’t fail and you don’t take a rescue, you’re not really gonna get anywhere.
And if the students learn that quite early on, I think that’s really valuable. And if they can say right I’m building this air filter, but I’m, it’s two grand, you know? And I remember there was only once I came across someone who this is way, way back. This is when I was at Ravensbourne. And I sort of said, well, I pay all the students, you know, that we, we take on commissioners, but we pay the students and she just went well, that’s ridiculous.
They haven’t graduated yet. And just had this really like, you know, when you have those scenarios, like role plays of the worst client ever. I never did any work with her, but I wouldn’t have done because she just had such a terrible view of students and it goes, it was almost like it’s poor cough.
Isn’t it? The UCL . She was like that it was kind of. She was almost affronted at the fact that I was kind of saying, no, they still have a value, even though they’re still studying. And Ravensbourne was great for that because, you know, it’s, it’s really good broadcast media and filming. So they, all those kids were, you know, in the kit store was taken out the DSLRs much more, better.
Camera’s than that. And they were doing it, you know, half the kids were on the Olympic broadcast team. OBS you know, they were, one of them was shooting Tom Daley from, you know, The, the cutout thing in the swimming pool window to speak, you know, somebody had that job, Oh, I’m filming Tom Daley or something, you know, just mad.
And I remember a student said to me, it was like being at Disneyland except you were getting paid for it, working on the Olympics. And you know, that’s what you want for every student. That’s what you want for your job. Right. Maybe not Disneyland, but. Something like that be
Matt: equipped. No, no, no. And it’s, I mean, if I think about it’s my university time, the things where I learned the most were undoubtedly the stuff that sat around the edges of my core there’s bits of my course that are sort of vaguely useful fakely, but you know, there’s only so much Beaudry are, you can bring to the workplace.
But. I did sociology. So yeah, I mean, I think credibly useful, but not very practical, but then being involved with student radio. So it was for half the reason why I was able to pull this thing vaguely together was because I learned how to wet it on tape. Being involved with the student union and just understanding a bit about how organizations worked and about the politics and about understanding a bit more about The political system through student politics and, you know, all of that stuff sort of built up.
And that was where the value was. Of course that, and especially now, as we’ve seen this massive change in how maybe going forward, students will continue to be taught as we come out of pandemic and, you know, remote. Working is not going to be just about people in work. I think there’s going to be elements of this sort of stick within the realm of higher education as well.
And the risk is that all that stuff that’s traditionally been on the periphery could well get lost. So actually finding ways to make it front and center as part of the learning experience, I think feels like that’s really, really important.
Claire: Yeah. I think giving them a place to fail is really important.
Because so much of university is about passing it’s, it’s kind of, you know, I remember some of the first students that I worked with some final year illustration animation students, they were just brilliant. And I remember them trying to knuckle down to do their dissertations. And I just said, peanut just showed them some drawings, like hide past you.
Like it’s such an antiquated way of judging the final year when. These kids were doing just such amazing work with, you know, stop, motion, everything. But, but no, it all boils down to a however many thousand word essay. And I always try and make them feel better by saying, Oh, I had to hand write mine because there weren’t computers and they go, Oh, are you really that old?
Yeah.
Matt: So Claire, if people want to be able to actually. Come and see what’s going on in Kingston. How they go about it.
Claire: Just knock on the door of the PC world. If I’m in there, I’ll open it. I mean, we’ve had, that’s one of the most joyful things about doing something like this. When we were in the Bentall center, we just had people come in and go what’s this.
What’s going on and you can just say anything and it could be true, but we had we had two gentlemen come in the first day we had the keys. Both of them went, Oh, has the PC world closed? And we went, yes, like this is an empty room with nothing in it. There’s no signs of a computer, nothing. I haven’t got a uniform on.
There’s no officialness to this. And like we said, all the new addresses on the outside, because there’s a laminate with the new address. Oh, right. Okay. And then you know, other people just pop head and, and put their head in and say, what’s going on are going to be a quitter creative meanwhile space, you know, watch this space.
So, yeah, knock on the door and see if where that is. At some point we will be peeling off the old PC world stickers. We’re trying to do something quite exciting to the outside of the building. So just watch this space, but it’s 19 to 23, five road in Kingston. It’s literally a two-minute walk from the station.
I can send you all the socials so you can follow along. But yeah, watch this space really.
Outro
Chris: Well, that was a very interesting look into how a university actually starts to work in the real world, which doesn’t always happen that often they might experience. But that was, you know, very, very interesting. Thanks Claire. So not then what is going on this week for you?
Matt: We’re recording on Monday evening tomorrow. We’ve got Meeting to be able to decide the outcome of the big procurement which hopefully will come to a conclusion. So that’s very exciting. And then I am also over the course of the rest of this week starting interviews for two architecture roles that I’m recruiting into my team, which is also extremely exciting.
And also, and actually getting more and more into this as, as I explore more is we’re just launching up a piece of work, looking at ethics. Data and AI. And the more that I look at it, the more important it seems to me to be becoming and how you get people who traditionally will go all that. It’s a bit complicated when it comes to matters of data.
To start to take notes to the fact that they really need to understand more about this. Then they may be doing at the moment. And you just saw the story about the two EasyJet that almost had some problems taking off after the first lockdown, because of a miscalculation of load weight that came about because the software that they just upgraded over lockdown one had been written in a country where it was assumed that if somebody put moves.
It meant it was an adult female. And if they put MIS it was a female child and so miscalculated by 1.2 tons, the weight of the aircraft to take off. And it’s brilliant because it wasn’t a problem with the data. It wasn’t a problem with the technology. It wasn’t a problem with the software. It wasn’t a problem with the airplane.
It was absolutely a problem of. People not having a clear understanding about the meaning of things, the semantics. And anyway, it’s been a great little exercise that to be able to help me to illustrate to people why we need to spend a bit more time and attention to thinking about these things. So that was good.
Claire, what have you got in the the weekend?
Claire: I’m going to be in Kingston a lot. So I think I’m going to be there twice this week. And then on Monday as well, Monday is quite exciting. It’s I’m doing a rekkie for something which could be a gigantic project or it might just not be,
Matt: Oh, that’s soon to be cryptic.
And Mr. Weston, what is the the week, this third or so weekend? The month of April, hold in store for you.
Chris: Well, partly it’s me. I’m very rapidly trying to get to grips with what’s going on at work and what I need to get done this week. Part two, actually, interestingly enough, on your data question, I’ve, I’ve got a blog to post tomorrow about data, culture, that and
side, that whole data ethics and AI and things like that is about how, as a business, you, you value data, how you. Understand the impact of what you’re working with and all of those kinds of things is a really, you know, that’s kind of fundamental, right? And so that’s a, that’s an interesting subject and, and there are yeah, some useful, interesting things that came up today.
I was, I was, I was doing a little bit of last minute research for this blog, so, so yeah, I’m posting that to Mauro and then we’ve got a conversation about it with our. A European digital leaders community on Thursday. So that should be good. Fun. So but yeah, yeah, it should be a busy week. I’ve got us going on, ah, some more events to prepare for and things like that.
So it’s yeah, another good one
Matt: next week we are going to be joined. It’s going to be like going into the office for you, Chris, isn’t it? Yeah.
Chris: It’s a very exciting time because you know, it’s going to be me. I’m my colleague, Mr. Dowd.
Matt: Excellent. Mark, who is a, a seasoned. Old person who does CIS.
Now I’m increasingly seasoned. I find that what comes after seasoned veteran. And then basically you’re, you’re you’re as old as whales. To be able to extend out the use of Wales as an international unit of measure. But anyway, now Margaret Downs will be with us next week, talking about .
Chris: You’re thinking of a boy, Jordan.
Matt: Oh, new light. I think that would be fantastic. I didn’t want to put a note in there. It’s my Irish shoes Mark down. Who’ll be joining us next week. Look forward to that. And we’ll put more details about the work that Claire’s doing on the website at wb40podcast.com. See you next week.
On this week’s show we are joined by Claire Selby who talks about her project with Kingston University students Not My Beautiful House, and combining work and experience into higher education. You can find out more – Links : https://www.spacehive.com/spaceforkingston Twitter : https://twitter.com/NMBH_KUSInstagram : https://www.instagram.com/notmybeautifulhousekingston/ Studio KT1 : https://www.studiokt1.com/KUS : https://www.kingstonstudents.net/creative-meanwhile This week’s automated transcript… Intro Matt: We are back. […]
On this week’s show we are joined by music artist, designer and story-teller Timo Peach to explore the history of music technology, and ask what we might learn from it to apply to other realms of tech?
You can find out more about Timo’s work at https://www.momotempo.co.uk/
This week’s automatically generated transcript…
Intro
Chris: Welcome to another episode of WB 40 everybody. It is fantastic to be back and we have another guest it’s going to be fantastic. Matt, what have you been up to this week?
Matt: Well, it, it’s obviously we’re recording a day later than usual, so it’s Tuesday. So summer has broken. If you paying attention, you’ve got about another.
24 hours or so to be able to enjoy some of it before it ends again in time for the children to break off from school. Which is if you had more evidence of the non-existence of any sort of eternal entity in the sky, other than clouds, that’s it? The last week has been it’s she gets to the point where this down thing, where you just go, Oh, fuck.
Sake. Can we just now stop and then realizing that no, it can’t stop. You got to carry on. So I’ve been getting a bit bored with well, Matt,
Chris: to your previous point, what you’re describing is perhaps evidence or lack of evidence of a benevolent entity up there. It doesn’t rule out the alternative.
Matt: That’s true.
It could be that the, the, the entire overloading system is run by a misanthropic psychopath. Which actually, when you look at it, suddenly I could believe in religion out the back of that. Quite bizarrely. That’s the first time I think I’ve ever had that sort of regulatory thing, actually that on the WB 40 signal channel, which used to be WhatsApp, but signal for the cool kids.
And I, there was a piece that I think John Harris wrote in the guardian at the week or the observer of the week. It’s all the same these days about the difficulty of being unreligious during such time. So there was nothing to, to fall back on. There’s no cushion of religious softness to be able to.
Soften the blow of Matt global pandemics. And thinking that as a point of that, that maybe the WB 40 group is a religion substitute which seemed to be rounded, divided by the group who then went back to talking about it, addressable LEDs or whatever it is that paid for
Chris: them. Yeah. Marina is an old things.
Brought to beautiful. Ready before we get there, we don’t really have one.
Matt: No returns. How’s your week been? Christopher? My
Chris: week has been very much like any other week as always having, I said that. Right? So this last week I did a, a conference in Serbia, which was good, fun. All from, of course the comfort of my misery hall is my office.
And I also, I went to lunch with a bunch of people. And it was, it was quite nice actually. And it was organized by their wonderful Amanda Brock of open UK. And it was a launch of their report that their recent report into the use of open source software in the UK. And I happened to be talking to her and she said, why don’t you come along?
And I did. And they send me somebody to eat. So that was nice. And I had to spot a lunch with some people I’ve never met before, including somebody who works for Google, who. Wrote a bunch of software for the Google keyboard. He reckoned his software is used by about 3 billion people around the world, which is kind of cool.
And and so that was good. And yeah, can’t complain. Here we go. And w we were already Tuesday, so the weeks thundering past already.
Matt: Well, it’s not Tuesday, probably when people are listening to this, but you know what makes sense Tuesday? It was, I sat next to Vince surf on a bus once. Just talking of people at Google.
Vint Cerf is one of the people who basically invented the networking standards around TCPI P I believe. Oh, and a lovely bed. Don’t know. Indeed joining us this week Timo how’s your last seven days been
Timo: well, yes. Not, not quite as existential as YouTube by the sounds of it. I mean, this, this podcast goes deep, fast.
I can see that I was just bumbling along reading things on LinkedIn.
Sayings about,
Matt: I can’t stand LinkedIn, the superficiality of it, or the lack of
Chris: conversation, forest superficiality, and for the occasionally, you know, price, Leslie den, things that people put on there. And sometimes there’s some good stuff as well, but Gregory for some, there’s some funny things.
Timo: I came back to it as a necessary, I don’t know about evil, but a necessary irritation.
I’ve had actually lots of good conversations with them and I will confess. But if you think of LinkedIn as sort of performance art, it changes the enjoyment levels.
Matt: I, I tapped, tend to think about most of modern life as somehow being performance art. I think this government in the United Kingdom at the moment is just basically a very long-winded piece of situationist.
Timo: It’s a stunt of some sort, isn’t it? I agree. And unless you respond in kind and imagine that you yourself are creating some sort of living installation, then then it’s all downhill. And I dunno which data are you gonna turn to, but you’re gonna have to find one of them.
Chris: You need some sort of philosophical, philosophical rock to tie this art to this, like Alibaba come with business.
So it’s something that in his world that you you’d need, you need to tie to that and that then, then yet you’re okay. You know, if you could say an absurdist kind of theater, I think we’re, I think we’re good with her. Gosh, this does get deep.
Timo: Isn’t it? Yeah. It does. And I’m also now mentally walking along a beach in Morocco somewhere you know, reading KEMU inset in situ and I’m wondering now they’re so vivid.
Is this easily to mind that my year in lockdown is means that I’m wondering whether I’m actually, this is all taking place in the last few seconds of my cerebral cortex. And it’s you guys, my brain has it all to mine. So welcome. Welcome to the last moments of Timo. Going off on
Chris: a tangent.
Timo: That really?
Yeah.
Matt: Yeah. I, so actually there’s a thing because there’s been a lot talk. We haven’t talked at all about NFTs over the last few weeks instead of emergence on the internet as yet another wacky pyramid investment scheme. But I was, I was chatting to somebody on the Twitters earlier today and talking about he was talking about whether, you know, what, what do people do?
Do they take these these artworks that they’ve bought with a non-transferrable token of what it is that NFTE stands for? Non fungible, token changeable. That’s
Timo: something you can get at the
Matt: chemist. No. Lord knows I’ve tried, but the th th the, what do they do? Do they sit in sort of a dark and drum and then open up a JPEG image of the thing to be able to say.
But I was, I was thinking about that and something has been going through my head about it is that, although the whole NFT thing is obviously utterly ludicrous. Nuts and, and probably a massive pyramid scheme. Is it any different to buying a main Elbit of, of canvas that some 40 a hundred or so years ago, door with pigment and linseed oil.
And I’m not sure necessarily it is any more preposterous. No,
Timo: if people are buying them there it is. And we can be sniffy about the art world, but it’s a nice little world to be part of. And I think of an artist like Joanie Le Mercier, who’s really looked at this from her own work. She’s kind of gone into this kind of a lot and found a very empowering community there for herself and, and made a living out of it.
And then for her, she did this wonderfully. Sort of honest piece looking at the, you know, how, how great and how empowering and looking forward and taking, taking back control for artists, the whole idea, isn’t it? Ah, how instantly terrible it is because of the carbon footprint. It’s not just a bit bad, but colossally terrible.
Because of all those. Servers humming away while people mind thing. So, yeah, it’s got a way to go to iron out some kinks, but it sounds like there’s some, for some people there’s a really good positive thing there and yes, from another perspective, like most things in arts in the art world, rather it can look preposterous if you’re not in there.
Matt: Yeah. I don’t know. Have you been tempted crest to buy any
Chris: NFTs? I haven’t. Partly because You’re
Matt: all locked up in your
Timo: Bitcoin investments. You need, you need one Bitcoin theoretically worth a billion billion us dollars, but you can’t cash it in or don’t know where it is or you can’t turn the mining off.
I don’t know how it works though. There are
Chris: people out there who, you know, like that guy in Wales, who’s trying to find it. Todd drive that he threw away 15 years ago. That’s worth,
Timo: it’s a nice urban myth. Isn’t it? I don’t know if it’s real, but I
Chris: feel his pain. Th that will be right, because once upon a time, this was all just fun, fun, and games.
Right. And it was 10 quit. And now it’s. Always with the millions of pounds. And it’s no, it’s not, it’s not fun of games anymore. My book,
Timo: it’s my Mac, too, that I
Chris: bought that. It’s a, well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? This is in terms of in terms of magnetic media and stories and all these things that come it is, it is rather impermanent as, but as, as, as are all things, but the.
So I, I saw that the first one that would be Paul or whatever it was that thing. And it was millions and millions of dollars or whatever on Ft. And my, my thought when that isn’t there, nobody’s bought that because they think, Oh my God, I must have that. They’d bought it for it’s like a flattened. Dubai is it’s a, it’s an investment by somebody with a whole bunch, as you say, cryptocurrency.
That they could change to normal money, but they’d get a massive, massive tax bill and all sorts of things would happen at that point. And somebody might start to want to scrape where it’s come from and all that kind of nonsense. So it’s a way of taking a massive amount of money that they probably don’t need to turn into interfere currency and putting it in something else just to see what happens.
And there’s a lot of people out there not, you know, Not the majority of crypto holders, but there are lots of people out there with a lot of paper, money or digital paper money that doesn’t, isn’t really worth anything to them because yes, they could, they could cash it in, but it’s just not worth it. So that whole, that thing that happened and the, all the hype about it, it’s all about.
Okay. Can we make this worse, something more? Is it just about pumping a market when you get down to the, is it worth digitally signing something so I can tell you I own it. Well, that’s another question, isn’t it? Because we that’s, we redo that with. Oh, we tried to do with computer games. I tried to do it.
We tried to do it with media. You know, home taping is copies, killing music, all that kind of thing. Trying to sign something to say, you have the right to look at this, or you, you own a bit of it or whatever. There’s loads of that going on. There’s this, this was always, this is just a, this sort of thing.
Think that’s happening.
Timo: It’s just, it’s nothing new. It’s just a slightly different setup. Tools and a bit of hype, it’s a bit of fun for people and people. Those are lots of money invest in the art market and somebody like people or others, you know, what spelt them up is years of grafting away in a shed.
I myself, am in a shed you know, building something that seems like integrity to you, truth to you. And then if you end up in the middle of a hype machine, like having a hit record, you know, keep your head, it’s rather fun. If it can actually pay some bills in the real world, happy days, but not many people can get there purely through a cynical stunt that has no nothing in it.
And I, I, I think in a way that the front end is always what the paper’s right? Yeah. This is insane because it is, but the backend. Yeah, the sketchbooks, the interesting bit about art, always. I, I, I miss
Matt: though the days I’d might, I think actually, increasingly as I get older, my artistic heroes are the KLF.
And when they went to burn a million quid fun, and if you’ve read the autobiography or biography, they still to this day, do not have the first idea why they did that. Just
Timo: do it depressed. That’s even better. They still regret it. The fact that they a, they did it and B they real enough. To then go, what the hell were we doing?
It makes me love them even more. I agree.
Matt: Well, anyway this week out of a an observation from a month or so ago, stems an entire show. So I think we should probably get on with it.
Main Interview
Matt: A month ago. I was asking about this technical term with some music software, which I do quite a lot. It’s kind of my out of work moment for me. And I will spend hours sitting in my office with the spreadsheets turned off and the PowerPoints turned off. And instead with various bits of musical equipment sitting around me, some of which are quite new many of which these days are based in software.
And some of which are quite old and some of them are mechanical, have a couple of saxophones. There’s some old keyboard thing that I’ve got, which is about 30 years old. I’ve got a digital saxophone, which is great fun. And the thing that struck me when I was doing this, I a few weeks back was how seamlessly music technology works with other bits of music technology in a way that the nearly 30 years of working in.
Business technology and various organizations over the years has shown me that most technology simply doesn’t that I can take a piece of technology that was built nearly 30 years ago. The AI still works because it’s not wasting for another firmware upgrade or a connection to the internet so that you can renew a subscription and plug it into a device that is new, that plugs into my PC or into my iPad, or even into my mobile phone and will enable me to be able to allow.
The fat and then software on my mobile PC or whatever. And it all works and it still works. And I cannot think of anything else in terms of digital computer based technologies that has got that sort of longevity, or actually to be fundamental, still works. You know, you couldn’t run windows 3.1 software effectively really.
To do anything these days, if you try to fire up an old internet browser from twenty-five years ago and tried to search the internet, now it happens. It’s all broken. There’s none of that kind of ability to be able to still use things and to use them with other things that you get rid of use technology.
So I thought it’d be interesting to be able to explore that a bit. So think a bit, a bit about the history of that, and then to be able to maybe draw some conclusions about what might the rest of the acknowledge he learned from what we can glean from. How music technology works. And so I thought, well, I could prattle on about that on my own, Chris.
And it’d be very delicate. Somebody who actually is more than just a weekend Putler. And so Timo you’re a musical artist music artist, you’re a designer. You tell stories you have podcasts for global goals, music road show. You’ve got, you know, you’ve got a lot going on and, and you are Momo tempo.
As well,
Timo: I am all of those things. Yeah. And I suppose for me, this is the most. Gloriously intersectional thing I could be asked to do. And I’m surprised I had not thought of this topic. You’ve really got my imagination running. It’s so obvious. So close to home for me, where sort of futurism meets tech meets vintage since meets art meets the whole culture of globalization.
That’s driven by, in my opinion, the cult of engineering and, and here we are to talk about how it all fits together.
Matt: Good. So let’s go back a few hundreds of years because I think the starting point for this is the structure of music and within all of this conversation, I think the caveat to it all is we’re really talking about Western music here and actually a lot of the technologies that I’ve just described.
They’re brilliant. If you’re doing stuff on a 12 note scale and in. Time signatures that are kind of conventional around threes or fours or twos or, or if you’re really, you know, way out there and Dave Brubeck sevens. But if you’re doing with microtonal, which is say a lot of Eastern music where the, the intervals between notes are much.
Well, very different to Western air, whatever it doesn’t really apply. So well. But go back maybe a couple of millennia, right? The roots of our few millennials are the roots of music and people starting to be able to not only play music, but make notes too, or no down what is going on with music so that they could record a version of it for posterity.
Timo: Yes. I mean, this is why all music is essentially a technology experience because technology it requires technology to create an experience, but it’s the experience you’re actually making. Which gets to the heart of why this might be a bit different as a tech sector, but unless you’re opening your throat doing choral work, which is how our sort of instinct for self-expression happened, musically you needing something people I think immediately reached for sticks to hit and for.
Skin stretched across hollow sound, hollow chambers to make sounds. And that gets into tone immediately. I think humans wanted to make more of it. So you’ve got to, well, how do you note that down? You need a language. And my understanding is there’s examples of cuneiform that notate some sort of musical experience.
Pythagoras apparently had a word or two to say he suggested unsurprisingly there’s might be a mathematical relationship between tones. The Greeks came up with some sort of Tetra chordal system where they thought might be four notes in a four key notes in a, in a. Scale. And then, you know, you’ve got a thousand years later, about sixth century, some Rome of like birth.
Yes. Who was a Roman Senator wrote some influential paper about music and around then people like Pope Gregory. He did a lot. He started calendars. He also started music schools. But this was still before people were actually writing down notation and some, some person said, Isidore, a Seville said, this is daft with he.
This person was deeply irritated with forgetting tunes, which I add onstage every time I perform, because I don’t read music. So they kind of came up with an idea of sort of marking the flow of a melody, the cadence, the ups, and the downs with notes. But. They didn’t represent specific notes. Some it was a bloke I’d never heard of a Guido dot.
So. It was a music boffin who came up with the idea of staves lines and, and representing specific notes in a, in a 12 note scale. And that sort of got iterated through the dark ages. You had the basics of that around the 13th century through a few different people. But I think it’s a lot of this, like so many Chavon culture goes back to, you know, kind of 400 years where.
Yeah, the seeds of the enlightenment, but also orchestral music started to overtake folk chambers and more and more instrumentalists were added at court and they all needed to know more specifically what they were doing rather than just strumming along and they needed more fine tuned notation and this sort of developed.
More and more until by about Mozart’s time, you know, you could read his charts. We do to this day kind off and recreate it with an orchestra. Now that’s 300 years of 250 years of technology that hasn’t radically changed. That’s amazing. Yeah. And that,
Matt: so somebody today can look at something from. Three or 400 years ago and have a pretty good stab at it in a way that actually probably even language would be a bit challenging.
Certainly handwriting would be challenging. So we’ve got this standardized way of being able to write music down. We’ve got series of different instruments as if you know, a lot of evolution of those instruments from the Baroque period through to the classical period of Mozart into the romantic periods of Beethoven being the bridge point then.
But we basically got stuff that you scrape stuff that you. Below into whilst making raspy noises, we did Epps stuff that you blow into whilst getting a bit of wood or read to be able to vibrate stuff that you blow across stuff that you hit. If I missed any of the major categories of musical instrument,
Timo: no, that’s kind of it.
It’s, it’s hitting, blowing and scraping on a, on an Epic scale over really finely tuned bits of timber and canker. And
Matt: that carried on until probably the early 20th century or missed start to that and see a new type of musical instrument that is based around electricity and Circuits valves and
Timo: stuff.
Yeah. You had a low, I mean, electricity, I mean, obviously in the 19th century, lots of experimentation happened and the boundaries between sort of science innovation. And, and music were very lots. I mean, all boundaries are, we’re a little bit blurred, even as they will try to pin it down with good labels.
And you had it. I mean, the word sort of electrical thing, things happening in the late 18th century because of the early development of battery power John made his, what was it? Clever scene electric. And it was mucking about with. Sort of, electromagnets trying to resonate bells effectively. So a bit of a gimmick, but there, it was sort of electric hundred years later, you’ve got Elijah Grey’s musical Telegraph, trying to sort of make tones down the new Telegraph system.
And then later on. Instruments that use the phone systems because there were no other speakers, but the ones in people’s, you know, emerging handsets. So that, it’s interesting. What we will try. And some of this stuff was about imagining ways to send data like a Telegraph, but they found themselves making tones and making accidental oscillators effectively.
And then when radio valves really took off. And radio as a technology happened in the very first part of the 20th century, a lot more instrumentation started to come out of that. It was blatantly electronic and the first, the very first kind of synthesizes effectively by oscillators and stuff like that, which brings us to the famous Victor Timmerman in the twenties, which made music by magic,
Matt: honestly.
So the, the theremin was a device that was using. Electromagnetic waves and probably most famous for being the lead noise in quite a lot of the beach boys stuff. And the star Trek theme tune, I think was the thing
Timo: might’ve been in there. They had a female vocalist doing there might’ve been a Thurman in the back there as well.
Sermons were very popular in 50 scifi, but they’d been around for 25 years by then. And it uses electromagnet. Magnetic presence, doesn’t it to affect the oscillator and the pitch the time where we kind of sound. Yeah. That’s magic. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: So let me ask a question because I’m, I’m, I’m I’m, this is outside my domain, really, but I’m interested because of course the reason somebody can come along with electricity and as you say, he kind of resonating things.
They never really knew that that that musical notes were They w were resonant frequencies. They understood that. And that was, that was not that wasn’t a revelation at that point. So when you get electricity and when you start to understand how electricity works and magnetism, electromagnetism, et cetera, you could start to think, okay, I’m going to make a, a an instrument or whatever, but there was a, it’s also about.
What you do with that, right? Because it’s quite easy to make a tone, like a pure tone of say, we’re going to this, this is going to be 500 Hertz or whatever, but actually actually doing something that is replicating an, a musical instrument, which has a whole Watson, lots of different hardware harmonics going on.
That’s another question, isn’t it. So there must’ve been a point where people thought, well, here’s some tech, we can do something with it. And there’s the intimates. We know, we know we normally play it and trying to figure out what the what’s the, what’s the relationship between this thing that I can do like a tuning fork.
Right? So if the tuning forks are around, everybody knew that you could create a pure time from a tuning fork. In fact, it wasn’t there like a. Tuning for you, then they say, okay, it’s gotta be 400 and something hurts. That’s an a 440. And before that, there were more than one a, so actually you could write down your musical notation, but depending on where you started from, you would have a different, you would have a diff you you’d maybe have a different outcome.
So all of that kind of stuff had to happen. But then you can say, you got to go through this. Okay. That’s that’s what we call a pure E too. That’s an a, on a piano. Well, that’s an a on a harpsichord or that’s an on, on a violin or whatever, and that that’s a bit quite an important leap, right?
Timo: Yeah, it is.
But I think it also illustrates the, the, kind of the, the debate that we’ve had in nascent. Tech terms over a hundred, the last a hundred years, but especially think of somebody like Alicia gray who made his musical Telegraph, he was driven by this idea of purity and trying to make pure sentiments. Your sounds.
We can make the most pure AE ever and get rid of all the imperfections, what a weird thing, because yeah, of course, when you study Sonics and harmonics at all it’s all the imperfections that make it work. It’s the imperfections that make the emotion. The obvious thing, being that if you made an exact pure sort of, it wouldn’t quite be assigned way, but a really pure violin note.
And you managed to duplicate that across five violins. You wouldn’t get emotion, you get this slightly weird pur perfect sound, which nature doesn’t do. But when you get five violins or scraping things, how are the expertly. In all these minute differences, what you get is a surge of emotion. It’s the imperfections that make music work.
It’s the imperfections that give character to everything imperfections from our sort of level of make it really shiny and clean. There’ll be science in there, but it’s much finer grain that’s and that’s beautiful. It’s poetic for me as an artist, that’s kind of wonderful trying to clean it up. It’s that?
It’s the dirty bits that make it great.
Matt: It’s one of the things that I remember talking to my grandfather. It was a physicist. And it was about the time when CD was becoming the dominant form for for amazing. My grandfather was born in 1913 and talking to him about the irony of how music that was mostly.
Rock and pop music, mostly featuring electric. Attells that mostly depend on the fact that there is massive amounts of distortion going on. We’re being then crystal clear, recorded on CD. And he didn’t really understand cause he never really ever listened to rock music. He’d have no idea what I was going on about.
So we’ve got evolution, no technology is coming along. We’ve got new ways of being able to make noises other than just scraping, banging or. Billowing and people are willing to experiment as well. I think that’s the other thing here. Isn’t it? So the, the my, my main musical instruments, saxophone and adult Sachs, he was a prolific inventor of instruments.
Yeah.
Timo: An awful lot of people at time where.
Matt: But, and it was also finding the medium by which people would be willing to accept that. So he worked with people like Ravel. So Balero the thing that told and Dean made famous in the eighties had two saxophones in it, a Turner and a soprano cause they were working together on this idea of being able to get that into orchestral music.
So you need to be able to find people who are willing to experiment to be able to get these ideas kind of pre-step for them from the twenties through to the, I guess the forties and the fifties, you start to see more and more electronic based keyboard instruments start to emerge. But all of these things are still devices that are being played by him.
Timo: Yes they are. I think you’ve got to the thing about the 20th century, the modernist period is this, this massive redirection. Of the, of ways of seeing. So I still cling to that as a, as you know, my primary definition of art. It’s about new ways of seeing that was the phrase that came out of late modernism in a way.
And. They were, everybody was questioning what everything was. And it was a wonderful blur in lots of ways between science and an art and traditional experimentation and what an energized frenetic time. And then in the middle of the 20th century tape technology was a big dirtier actually in lots of ways to, to, to try and record and capture things.
The early sense of sampling. And of course, famously Pierre Schafer music concrete started to say, well, what if sound can be music? If you hear it differently by splicing it up and repeating it is, is, is that musical? Isn’t it. And it, through all the purists and classical people into no causes, no noise, blah, blah, blah.
And into those sorts of arenas came different levels of technology, making. Actually new sounds to the human ear. Think of that ear as where nobody had heard oscillators doing certain things or particular filters or combinations or chopped up samples on tape. Wow. And that turned into the auntie. They put those into keyboard of all instruments as well.
Like the what became the Mellotron. Yeah. And earlier versions of it we’re out in the late fifties. So it says there’s a lot going on fifties and sixties. And then of course we have to mention before we get to our main point, Bob Mogue, and they mentioned that the, of what we now know is the synthesizer.
He was actually selling Melodia theremin kits from his basement as a sort of late teenager. And he met at a sort of trade show. He met a guy called herb Deutsch, who was a composer musician, and they just fell in love with each other’s. Love for electronic music. And then what? Well let’s form a company and George managed to go back to his college is able to give me a bursary 200 quid to go and work with Bob Mogue and event the synthesizer between them really quickly.
They come up with the first modular synth in 1964, which did get shipped with a keyboard. So still a basing these things around interfaces that we, that were recognizable tech going back three centuries. I caught it
Matt: was, was it Wendy, Carlos, who did the bark, which was all about the Mo instruments, but it was just basically playing the same notes at the same notation that went back 400 years.
But just with a new. Sound,
Timo: it was switched on bark. I mean, it’s amazing that you know, a trans artist actually is a turning point in music because when she put out that record, it got the attention. Of people like the Beatles and the rolling stones and others legend has it, the rolling stones bought a Moke modular system and used it once in a film and then sold its Tangerine dream.
There’s a whole bit of this and yeah, it just, it just caught people’s imagination. Cause it was so weird and wonky and that cover with them. Somebody dressed us back in the 17 hundreds garb with a wig in front of the mode modular. It’s still cool to this day. Yeah, but they were essentially just saying, look, we can reinvent the sound and then, but that led to people like Tommy eater.
In the seventies kind of reimagining how you’d even approach that with early kind of homemade sequences. And lots of people were making ways to use pulses and sort of our paginations and fudge things from those machines. So there were some rhythms going on and some early drum machines happened in the sixties as well.
But yeah, this is the turning
Matt: point, I guess they’d been the peer NOLA. So in the, in the. Well, and those go back to Victorian era is essentially big clock work devices that playback music using sheets of paper, which was in fact that there is a fantastic argument to say that that was one of the core founding principles of computer technologies is those punch cards, which were used in that, which originally had been taken from mechanical looms then became the way in which she programmed dirty computers.
But. We then started to see in the seventies, rarely, I guess the ability for machines to start to play instruments.
Timo: I think of bands like craft work. I learned how to make music by listening to them. And they, they represent an interesting evolution because they started. In, you know, kind of 1970, the year I was born and they showed up at this big space in Berlin that had been rented out cheaply by some legend, as some sort of local businessman, he hired a big space and said, you can all come and make noise and, and.
All the kind of early kraut rock has ended up in this GAF where social space had been made and they begged borrowed and stole synthesizes and they jammed and they just, and they all questioned this young generation. First young adults, post-war Germany. What even is music? What is patriotism? What is sound?
What is melody? They deconstructed stuff. And they had fun and craft work. They’re able to sort of go from being quite. Yes, flute. There’s a lot of Yas float on really any craft work but with sense and other stuff and groovy kraut, Rocky beets into slow to get more sequenced. And it’s not until their album at the banned machine in 78, where they actually worked out how to synchronize all the kit and it shows it’s really tight and it’s not done with what we’re about to talk to.
It was done with CV Gates and clocks, but they worked it out. So all the students they could program. And it sounds like early versions of Donald’s music today. And so that’s the point
Matt: at which you’re starting to see people gaining not only machines playing. The instruments. So you program the instrument, it goes off there, but then also enabling these different instruments or machines to be able to do it in time with each other.
And the only way she talks about the CV control boast is, and pulse is being sent out and, and it was every manufacturer had a different set of ways of doing it and it, it, it didn’t quite.
Timo: Well, yeah. And so it brings us to the sort of nexus of, of the history in a way, if you want to see it that way and your point, which I think is fascinating.
It’s the arrival of this shared protocol, middy musical instrument, digital interface. And that was first proposed in 1981. First, since it came out with it attached in 1983 and. This is why I think it’s interesting for the podcast so that we’ve done this back history here, which geeks like you and me and Matt will find interesting to me.
The interesting bit really is how it obviously how these machines make art and express human, emotional truth. And what part of great revolutions in sound and society. But it’s also interesting for this podcast, from the culture of technology, because in researching this, I found what I inferred a superior human reason for why we ended up with middy.
Now, middy is of course, this shared protocol that got competing devices talking to each other and somehow. They managed to negotiate, starting to ship and manufacture things that could talk to each other by rival companies, which I think is remarkable. What do you know about that, Matt? What’s your so
Matt: originally it was, does it, Dave Smith has a company called American company called sequential
Timo: sequential circuits.
Matt: They, I used to have a sequential multi-track it was dreadful couldn’t hold its pitch at all. And it was all computer controlled, but still analog underneath it. It was, it was, it was an abomination of synthesize of that. That’s another story. So he suggested that there was a problem here. He spoke to a number of the other American manufacturers at the time.
So people like Mogen Oberheim and others, and he couldn’t get the American keyboard. Manifests. It says a manufacturer is interested in this idea of coming to some sort of common standard, but he managed to talk to some of the Japanese companies. So people like Yamaha and cog and and Roland and the Japanese companies bought the idea.
And so they then started to work together. And as you say, in the early eighties started to be able to then get kit, which had five pin din standard. So like centimeter and a bit across round connectors. And it’s essentially a network standard. It’s a network protocol to be able to share musical data.
That’s all it is. And it enables you to allow one cable to control another device or a sequencer to be able to send out pulses that enables one or many devices to be able to. Connect, you do things in you connect things in sequence, so you can have one thing to connect to another. You can then chain off the back of that.
And it’s, it’s, it’s very simple in the way in which it operates, but through quite a simple set of code is able to encapsulate everything that was in that music notation that was set up, you know, formerly four or 500 years ago. And it’s still at the core of it all four, three, four, two, three, four, five beats in a bar.
Up to 96 segments of that beat pitch based around octaves over 12 note scale, and other bits and bobs around
Timo: it. Now, my understanding of the way that worked out, I was thinking, how do they negotiate getting all these different companies to sign up to it? Dave Smith. I think would have been still quite young in the business because he developed the profit five, which is an absolute all-time classic since.
So you cleaning out a bad experience of sequential circuits. He basically was working with microprocessors during the day, kind of like music and he thought, hang on, we haven’t got any sense that can hold their programs. You have to retune everything by hand. My beautiful mogul liberation is exactly that there’s no patch store.
He and he simply sat at work one day and said, well, surely we could use microprocessor to just ally that with the synth tech. You could then store your sounds surely ARP or mogul, just get, and they didn’t. So he did, and he made the profit five and it was a smash success came out in 1978. So he was still quite fresh.
But my understanding is that actually it was Roland’s founder, it Kotaro khaki. Harshi who. Approached him because he actually approached Tom Oberheim first and Tom Oberheim, like Dave Smith was working on some sort of protocol and calculate how she thought it’s a bit too clumsy. So he went to Tom, found him receptive and then went back to the bosses of Yamaha, Kauai.
Of course himself and got them all to sign up and I’m thinking, well, that’s how that the histories I’ve read, don’t ever explain quite how they got back to work. They do describe this beautiful moment at the nom show in 1983, where they got khaki Harshi himself and Dave Smith stood next to each other.
Supposedly. And he had a Roland, JP six and Dave Smith had a new prophecy prophet 600 and they linked them up with a mini cable in front of everybody and went, look, they can play each other. And everybody’s supposedly went. Wow. And it was a cultural breakthrough that then took off. And you got to remember that Kakehashi oversaw Roland for well, like 40 years.
And it was under his guidance that Roman made. Tra two Oh eight drum machine and the T R nine Oh nine, the TV three or three. Basic thing, all these geeky things that are to this day, cherished loved icons. You have an eight Oh eight as your main image on it, or most of your pages, don’t you a Matt, it’s a sort of iconic looking eighties drum machine.
And everybody would know the sound if it was pointed out to them and all these other scents that could suddenly talked to each other. And as the guys from the org said, thank God for Medi, because it meant that we could suddenly make Epic sounds when we weren’t classically trained. And we only had two hands because everybody does.
And suddenly a whole new form of art was open to people now. Before we get into sort of the impact of that. The reason I think is interesting is I think it’s khaki Hashi’s background. I simply rent his story and they didn’t make any connections in the story version I read, I did. He grew up, his parents died young.
Both of TB tuberculosis, you grew up with his grandparents. He worked down at the docks in a soccer doing sort of technical work. He was there during the war. Their house got destroyed by bombs. He couldn’t get into official university because of. Supposedly health problems. He started at clock making shop, working from self.
He went back to Asarco, got caught up in a great big food shortage there that devastated Osaka after the war. And he then got TB. He ended up in a sanatorium supposedly for years and only got better because he got given an experimental drug trial. Essentially given to him to try and his health got better and he thought, right, I’m going to start on electronic music shop.
And I want to design the best synthesizer. And he’s motivation seemed to be a passion, the music, but he was untutored just like me as an artist. And I think there’s some psychology in that and yes, something to do Japanese working together and what they saw and for him to reach out across the Pacific to San Francisco and find young Dave and.
And push to make music that was inclusive and more affordable, and that people across cultures could plug in with it. Each other. I know I’m reaching here, but I found this increasingly meaningful seeming. I know nothing about it. Kakehashi as a person, not seeing him speak than what personality was, but to me, there’s an awful lot of human context, motivating that technology.
Now try to imagine Apple, Google, Amazon, blah, at owl, having any event in that DNA at the core, I think it was at the core of Roland driven by him. And just a last note on this, I would say it’s beautiful. In 1989, Yamaha went corporate bought sequential circuits from Dave Smith. And they immediately closed it down, out, goes an iconic name.
And 20 odd years later, he was working for himself again and trying to get the name back. And Kakehashi as an old man, went to the boss of Yamaha in 2013 or something and said, I think you should give Dave. The name back, don’t sell it, give it to him. And his quote was something like, I think we shouldn’t have unnecessary friction between electronic music manufacturers.
We should be helping each other. And this is the spirit of middy. And honestly, when I read that choked up, I thought, yeah, that’s, that’s why music tech works. It’s because there were people who had. Emotional reasons to do better and came to places, places of influence and we’re, after all helping people make these immersive emotional experiences computers for a thousand practical jobs, the musical instrument is to make music.
I think the psychology in, in the tech there that has helped it find better moments along the way, and quite a few.
Matt: Chris, do you see parallels with. The things like the open source movement in that story,
Chris: in that particular story? I think, I think yes there is. And as much as there are definitely altruistic community-based views on what is useful, what can be, what can be shared and what, what, what’s the point of it?
Really? What, why are we doing this? And, and there, there are. Yeah, there are examples in the open source community. These days of I was reading an example today actually, of, of software that was being used by American immigration and then some con contributions then pulling their work for it because they weren’t happy with it.
And then somebody has to go and we rebuild it, et cetera. And these there’s definitely an ethos behind some of this stuff, which, which has parallels. Hm.
Timo: I think for all the romance of these things, which I think we need to keep tapping back into to do good, frankly, you’ve got to find some romantic passion for envisaging better, but also I would say yeah, at the time when I was just falling in love with music as a teenager, middy to me did seem really plastic and farty.
And like, like the eighties were finally going to kill music. Cause I was just discovering these. We’re actually quite creepy old seventies records with this old technology, but I found it hauntingly compelling. And at the same time, my mates were just starting to get hold of ways to get synced, to talk to each other.
And my mogul liberation that I bought in 1987 for peanuts doesn’t have many, but it’s Beautiful thing and made, he just seemed really reductive 16 channels. And then general lady came along as an, a new lowest, whole destroying conformity. Yeah. Well, I always have a piano one Oh one and you get 128 sounds and they all line up and it just seems so kind of.
Oh, get rid of all the fun knobs and buttons and big oscillators, and we’ll go digital and have five black buttons and a weedy LCD screen. And that’s your interface and Mitty will make it all work. And I wasn’t enamored with it. But as time’s gone on, it just works and it doesn’t get in the way. And it still works 40 years later.
And now, yeah, it’s a, it was a revolution in emancipation for everyone. I, my generation, your generations got to make music and muck around in bedrooms. And I’m a music guys now because of middy.
Chris: Yeah, I know. I do think, I think there are some technological parallels in as much as, as you say, I remember listening to media middy files of Beethoven, you know, on, on computers in the nineties and you think, Oh, okay.
You know, it’s like chirping away and it’s, it’s not really not the, you know, the hit that doesn’t really convey the convey the, the majesty.
Timo: Did you see Chris that
Chris: got, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t, it couldn’t, it didn’t have the depth. In the same way that years ago in the sixties, you know, computer nerds used to print out ASCII art, pictures of the Mona Lisa.
Right. That was the thing that you used to have on your wall line, print them up, Mona Lisa, and the technological parallel that, that, I always think of that when we come to this kind of, does it work? Does it still work is VGA, you know, in 19 eight in the late 1980s, The IBM PC moved from CGI, which was like, w w which Smith do it, simpler and columns and, and stuff like that to VGA.
And that’s the D shaped connector that you can still get, right. That monitor you’re looking at now how’s that BGO can act on it. And you could probably get a VJ monitor from 1990, plugged it into your computer. And it would probably work long as you didn’t try and push it to high resolution. And that’s the, you know, back in the eighties, Early nineties, you could have a picture of the Mona Lisa on your PC, and it would be crap.
You know, it would look like it was drawn in paint, and now you could have it and you could zoom in, you can have a digitized image of the thing. Then you can see every single stroke, you could see it, you know, you can do, it’s not quite the same as having their canvas in front of you. You know what I mean?
But the quality and the ability of the technology to keep up with the, the, the, the desire. To convey the art or the, or whatever it might be is now at a point where it’s, it’s, it’s completely feasible, but that’s the, the VJ standard is a really good example. In fact, the only, yeah, it’s not, it’s probably about on his death bed now.
You don’t get money. No laptops. I’ve VGA, mainly because of the size of the dumb thing.
Timo: It’s too thick for an hour. Okay. But, but you
Chris: know, it, it, it did, did you for a long time,
Timo: Yeah, well, I’m thinking of that. Yeah, those lovely ASCII pictures and they’re kind of stunts, but they also say something, they become their own kind of art and a little experiment I’m looking at at Tushi or just, Samas very experimental notation score from mid century last century.
The issue can walls and it’s. He’s literally drawing faces with the crotchets and quavers, and I’ve heard somebody beautifully with an eight bit tone generator, try and play their score. And it is musical it’s nuts, but it is musical. And yet the. The, the, the score itself, it’s a graphic score and the, and it’s clearly a piece of work in itself and how, how fun for all this, but really, I think the interesting, it gets past when technology is new and it’s been around, it got boring so that people can sort of.
Be less hypnotized by it and get back to their own thinking. W I mean, th th the 20th century was this incredible series of rolling frontiers and all the heroes are generation still connected to generation X, especially still connected to all these frontiers and expectations of progress. And so we think of all the great synths heroes or other pioneers, they did things first.
They got to do it first, wow. To be in the right place at the right time. And everything’s a sort of. Pay limitation, but I’ve always said singing into your hand brushes. However, music artists starts it’s it’s joyous, but it’s when you get past that. They kind of trying to be clever or trying to copy others and find your own voice with your own imperfections.
That’s when you get actually get interesting. And so now is it Galatarian all through the eighties, people were moaning about technology, killing music, the snotty little stickers in, you know, a lot of musicians, cars kind of windows. I remember those. And it sort of was the, you know, early iteration sounded a bit crap, but then it also, yeah, a whole new types of songwriting, whole new sounds.
And now, you know, it’s down to the quality of your ideas, just like making films, just like all the other ways that digital work has has brought us all into the field for better or worse. There’s a ton of content, but it’s also never been richer for ideas. And for people getting involved. .
Outro
Matt: Fascinating stuff. I thank you very much for joining us this week. Absolute pleasure. That was it. It was good. And there’s, there’s definitely something there about looking at old technologies and current technologies and how they all interplay play with each other. What’s the week ahead looking like in a.
Peach towers
Timo: not getting enough of the things I planned to do dumb because I am now just drink of taking Easter weekend off and not staring at screens much. But Thursday night I do have episode 10 of the global girls music roadshow with my colleague. AYI young, who is the us young leader to the UN.
Force of nature and sustainability championing as a music artist. He and I have been making this show now promoting his battery tour, which is amazing. It’s just been amazing fun in, BtoB just learning as we go out a live stream, a show and bring guests in with these amazing stories of how they’re having a go at change-making in lots of different ways.
So that’s Thursday night and then I’m going to hang up my headphones, I think for the weekend and and go for a bike ride along the promenade in Bournemouth.
Matt: Nice. Now we’ll put a link to where the various shows that you do on the WB 40 podcast website. So if you want to find out more about that, you can go to the website and you’d better find out the links.
Christopher, have you got a exciting week ahead?
Chris: Well, it’s exciting. And as much as Friday is a day off and which means that today’s Tuesday. So in the next two days, I have to crash through a whole bunch of things. So that I can relax on Friday rather than worry about the things that I didn’t do because even more so, because actually next week is a holiday for me.
I I’d over a year ago, we’d, we’d booked to go somewhere this week. Now, of course we’re not going to be going anywhere, but I’m still taking the week off because damn it. It’s time to take a week off, you know, sometimes you just have to take some time. So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m hoping I’ve become afraid to, like you said, early on that to the that my hopes are not high for a a sunny and a t-shirt to short sweet, but it’s it’s something that I can get on with things around the house.
And I can just, just take a week off work. I think at some point we all need to take a week off
Timo: work. Well, I think, I think take a week off, sit in his shorts on the floor in the kitchen and have a good weep. And, and let that be next Tuesday and then just see where that takes
Chris: you. Yeah. I, I think, I mean, that’s not a bad idea.
It’d be kind of, kind of boring to do the same thing that I’ve been doing for the last six months, but still wonderful.
Matt: Well,
Timo: the Bronx shouts and maybe move into, I mean, it’s high time you moved here,
Chris: if that helps, you know, maybe, maybe, yeah.
Timo: Whatever gets at your emotional truth, man. It’s all. It’s all fine. That’s
Matt: good to hear. Well, I’m glad that you too will be you know, lounging around and, and, and caterwauling. They’ll be long weekend with the stuff we’ve got various things where we’re going to meet people.
Good grief in places. And then I’m back to work next week. So hopefully be relatively quiet week to be able to get some strategic thinking data modeling and. Other various bits and bobs completed fast. No is nobody’s around to be able to distract me from the task at hand. So we’re going to be taking a week off next week because it is Easter Monday and we do as a.
As a collective on this little show needs to take a little time to be able to recharge our batteries. I’ve managed to actually this evening to be able to put in a guest booking that takes us all the way now to June with a remarkable series of people to continue the incredibly high standard of guests that we’ve had so far this year, including a good self their team.
Timo: So when we get pulled back there, I thought, Oh no, that sounds a lot. Their own Bobby, listen to this one.
Matt: But when we come back, we are going to be joined by a class lb who is going to be talking about some of the work that she’s been doing at Kingston university around getting students to get experience of what it is to work in agencies, by setting up an agency that students work in which is a family.
Fantastic idea. And she’s also been doing some really interesting work about regeneration of the retail parts of the center of Kingston upon Thames, which quite frankly, if you walk around it at the moment, it looks like everybody’s moved out because quite a lot of people have moved out. So anyway, that will be the first show back in the the second week of April.
And then we’ll put a list of the upcoming guests on the podcast on the. Paul website. And don’t forget if you want to join us for the ongoing quite random conversations that take place on the WB 40 signal channel you can do. If you just send us a note on twitter@wbfortypodcast.com, then we can send you the magic link so you can join in the fun with that.
Have a lovely Easter break and we will be back in April.
On this week’s show we are joined by music artist, designer and story-teller Timo Peach to explore the history of music technology, and ask what we might learn from it to apply to other realms of tech? You can find out more about Timo’s work at https://www.momotempo.co.uk/ This week’s automatically generated transcript… Intro Chris: Welcome […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Linda Chandler to talk about the rise of hyperlocal working. You can find her Digital High Street eBook series – first 2 books on Retail Experience and Mobility The Digital High Street eBook Series | TLA Education Working Group And last week’s – 4 Digital High Street […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Linda Chandler to talk about the rise of hyperlocal working.
You can find her Digital High Street eBook series – first 2 books on Retail Experience and Mobility
The Digital High Street eBook Series | TLA Education Working Group
And last week’s – 4 Digital High Street sessions on Mobility, Smart Public Space, Community and Retail Experience
The Digital High Street | RE:Connect March (unissu.com)
This week’s automatically generated transcript:
Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 187 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me, Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Linda Chandler.
Chris: Hello, and welcome to another episode of WB 40. And this week we are joined with, by Linda Chandler, who is going to talk to us about. Cities and how we work and all of that kind of thing. A bit of a continuation from well, many, many our podcasts recently. So before we get to Linda ma how, w what have you been up to.
Matt: I have been getting vaccinated. That’s very exciting. I’m now one down, a slightly sore arm for about three days afterwards. Other than that, no side effects. I have been it’s yeah, it’s just I Monday. Okay. Today we’re recording is Monday by 11 folk. In the morning this morning I had to.
Actually check my computer to work out what day of the week it was. I think this is basically turning into months a massive Sensory deprivation exercise and I’m losing. Other than that I continue to watch the mighty Watford climb up the, by the night, even climb out of the table. Now we’ve come fixed to almost the top of the table, which is very exciting.
And I’m planning a few trips to. Places when we can travel again. So there’s a trip to Devin coming up with some friends and there’s a trip to the Lake district coming up at the end of June with some friends. And so, yeah, it’s been busy all week now, work, you know, Getting Olin. How about you roll?
Chris: I can’t really remember what happened last week. It was so long ago, mainly because I had that extra hour. We had an IDC on unplug today, which means that they gave everybody a day off in a, in a very nice aspirin, Iceland to do something, do that. The nature of our work really means it doesn’t cost them to do that.
And really just have to catch up with all the work the next week. But, you know, it’s nice. Everybody’s got the same day off and it’s a, it’s a, it’s a way to say, you know, everybody just, just take a break, which is, which is great. And but yeah, so that was been to three-day weekend and therefore I am.
Not yeah, like the week before is completely it’s completely lost to me in my memory. And all I can think about is what’s what’s ahead of me rather than what’s behind, because it probably wasn’t very much different as you say to previous weeks,
Matt: but yeah, that remember though that the point of this bit of the show is you talk about the week, just gone the bit at the end of the show is where we talk about the week ahead.
Chris: Well, of course. Well, I’ve been talking about the weakest guy. I just can’t remember it, man.
Matt: Okay. That’s all right. That’s fine. Good. Glad to hear.
Chris: Yeah. Anyway, so, but we’ve got Linda with us. Hello, Linda? No, it was very nice to have you on this. Cause of course we were briefly colleagues, IDC and and so it’s, it’s very nice to see you back here.
And so how’s your week been?
Linda: It’s it’s been really good. Actually. It’s been some, some closing down of projects and some opening up projects as well. So it’s been, yeah, one of those transition weeks, I guess. So last week for me, we had a. Big event actually on Wednesday. So there was a reconnect global PropTech event that was happening online and I’m doing some work with tech, London advocates at the moment.
We’ve been launching some eBooks around the digital high street. So we had the some channel sessions on the reconnect, which went very well.
Chris: Thanks.
Matt: So a tech, London advocates is an interesting thing. I think I’ve been it’s rough. Isn’t it? The guy who created it all, Russia
is a city based. Advocacy for tech actually relevant in a world where everybody’s working remotely. They’re not the whole thing about, you know, having regional things is just it’s. It’s interesting. Isn’t it? That actually, well, can anybody join now? Is it, you know, breadth of these things?
Linda: So I think tech, London advocates is a bit of a misnomer actually, because actually there are lots of other tech advocates group globally.
So yeah, so, so it is really interesting in terms of how it has grown. So, so you’re right. There are all these enclaves of advocates that around a city. But we also have a technology advocates. We’re talking about setting up tech, whales advocates. So that there’s a lot of those around that there’s around globally, really just, just around the world.
So yeah, so we all come together in a city, but actually we all collaborate online as well.
Matt: Yeah. I just, I’d never made that connection before, but often the kind of the place is the thing that links people together. And actually that becomes. Well, I’m saying I’m not going to, by any stretch, say that we’re not going to think about things like London anymore in the future.
Obviously the rest of the country would rather be, we did stop thinking about it. But there is that kind of idea that actually, maybe it needs to be ideas about how you gather people together without having the city as a I thing might be something that increasingly becomes important going forward.
Maybe it’s not something we can explore in the later conversation.
Chris: Yeah. So so I guess that we should crack on then, because it sounds like we’ve got to an interesting conversation ahead. We
Matt: do, but before we get into the body of the show I had a little short conversation. When I say short conversation.
I had a conversation with a friend of the show, Emma Berman earlier in the week, and I’ve managed to edit it down into a short conversation, which I love them. It’s a bit. And by gum it’s, it’s an interesting challenge to be able to get a little things. But anyway, she’s got a project that’s coming up in April, which is called love to play 2021.
And it’s a an intergalactically scaled event picking up on what I was just mentioning a moment ago to encourage people to play more. So I spent a few minutes with Emma a few days ago to find out a bit more about it. ,
Chris: so Linda, thank you for coming to WB 40 because we’ve, we’ve had lots of conversations about what the world of work will be like after coronavirus or as, you know, as we, as we come back to, to after the pandemic. And I know, and you and I had a conversation a few weeks ago about this didn’t we, where we talked about what.
Smart cities might look like what cities are going to be, because there’s lots of, there’s lots of I guess, death of the city stuff going on. There’s all of the folder roll between people like I know I saw a press release from, from Danska bank the other day, and they’re saying, you know, that’s it, we’re all working from home now.
It’s never, it’s never going back. And then you sort of, you get, you see the likes of Goldman Sachs. Who are pretty unique at the moment on the other side of the fence saying this is just an aberration, Boris Johnson, I think saying this is the complete operation. We’ll all be back in the office so we can see what we can see what you’re doing.
And when we talked to Anthony slumbers a few weeks ago that there was definitely a sense that yes, there’s going to be. Some of that will happen. And there will be organizations that really want to get back to the office. And there’ll be people as well that want to go back to an office environment.
They don’t want to sit at home. They want to be in an office. They want to go and bribe by their somewhere wages from practice or whatever, whatever, whatever sort of his shop takes its place. And that will, that there’ll be an economy around now, but it will be different on the, you don’t have to have too much of a change for it to be some tipping points.
So You’ve just been talking about, about the, about this, about what you did last week and some of the things that have been going on. What do you, what do you see Linda in your, in your world? What you, what do you think are, is the most likely thing that might occur as people start to return to offices?
Do you see a big change or do you see us all rebounding back to exactly how we were.
Linda: Great question. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. I mean, it’s, it’s great to be with you both. And actually we felt we’ve crossed companies in a, in a number of ways. Haven’t we IDC with you, Chris, and with maths at Microsoft.
And actually, you know, I guess we’re all veterans of the, of the tech world in many ways. And as you know, we. We’ve been working remotely for, you know, a couple of decades now, probably actually. So I think there’s a segment of the population that has always worked in this way that think remote working is part and parcel of what they do.
They’ve carried their office around in their backpack packs for many years now. So there’s a segment of the population that thinks. Yep. This is, this is how we’ve worked for a long time, but I think what the pandemic has shown us is that there’s a whole, you, a bunch of people that just haven’t experienced that way of working.
And to those of us in the tech industry, that’s. Been a bit of a revelation. I think actually in, in the way that people have suddenly discovered zoom and teams and they’ve discovered you know, what working from home, if you like. So it’s, it’s been a real wake up call on both sides, sides. I think both sides have now acknowledging that there are genuinely different ways.
To work. And there are good things about remote working and there are good things about working in the office. I guess the whole idea of work locally is something that I’ve been involved in for probably the past decade or so. When I was at Microsoft, we did quite a lots of research. Very early on into something called the hybrid organization, which was really looking at how the future of technology, the future of demographics in the office and the future of work.
The space itself starts to have an effect on how an organization moves. And, and as I said, that that was about 10 years or so ago that we started to have those conversations. And at the time when I worked at Microsoft, I wrote a paper called anywhere working cities, which was in the run-up to the London Olympics.
I was working with TFL as my client at the time. And we were starting to think about how London was changing over the course of the Olympics. So of course, as we all know, London was. Almost a bit of a ghost town over the Olympics. It was, it was always too successful. The message of, of, you know, stay away release capacity on the transport system for all of those visitors into London.
And, and so I was working for Microsoft at the time. We were equipping people with the, with Laptops and comms devices. So they could work away from the office and TFL at the time, we’re also looking at travel demand management. So they were trying to say, you know, how, how do we keep people out for, for six weeks over the summer?
So it was a really interesting inflection point, I think, in, in London’s history. And what we try to capitalize on was the fact that it shouldn’t be for six weeks, one summer. Actually, if we do this, right, this could be quite a different way of actually using our infrastructure there isn’t bound to the nine to five and the peaks and the troughs.
So anyway, working cities was a way of capturing the zeitgeists if you like at the time and saying, well, why don’t we work differently? You know, we’ve got these polar opposites. We’ve got working from home, we’ve got working in the office. But what about the spaces in between where we can be productive?
What about the concept of third space? You know, many coffee shops of course, serve servers that space while we’re on the move, but there’s also co-working spaces. And again, at the time we were doing quite a lot of work about looking at the rise of co-working spaces in, in cities and how people were using those.
So it’s really interesting to see that. All of that was around. And all of those conversations were around about a decade ago. We’ve been slowly building on those conversations and the different stakeholders involved and getting different people and actually different generations now into the conversation and suddenly, you know a year into the pandemic.
We’ve got it. And where we really understand that there is another way of working. So I think in summary that there’s no going back, that the genius definitely out of the boss or, and I think it will start to settle in terms of this hybrid, working that everybody’s talking about. People are talking about that the two slash three day week.
So a couple of days remote, a couple of days in the office. And I think now we’re planning on, you know, we’re planning for the return and how that might pan out. What are the systems in place to help us deal with that?
Matt: I said, I’ve not made that link between the Actually, I think in many ways at the time, the sheer there was amongst businesses that they should be told to for six weeks, not everybody should come into the office every day.
Yeah. And it was such a big statement and an enormous amount of organization and huge amounts of planning. And it was being done at the height of the holiday season anyway. So, you know, it would have been lower footfall or whatever, going into cities into London at that point. Anyway, but the thing actually thinking back on it if he’d done it in 2001, 2002, the difference between the technology then and now was stark.
Slightly whilst we’ve definitely evolved more around cloud-based. Core office systems. Cause back in 2012 I think we were S we were just asked to be posse rowboat, and we were just getting into office three 65, but it was a bit tardy. Google was kind of, Oh, it was usable because I did a migration of it in 2010, but it was rough around the edges, but broadband was there and coffee shops were by fied.
And, and so actually the difference in 10 years, Isn’t that great technologically. And it’s where we were there. Yeah, it seems like a different, different era.
Linda: It does. And I think it’s a lot to do with adoption actually. And it’s not necessarily just having the technology and the comms. It’s actually about having the societal structures and acceptance of that.
If you kind of remember back to the Olympics you know, people were, were saying about, you know, working remotely from home and there was you know, a bit of a backlash against it, or, you know, you’re going to watch daytime TV, or you’re not going to do any work. And, and so I think, yeah, the, the working from home, yeah.
It kind of air quotes if you like. And, and I think what the, what we’ve seen in the past year is that we can be productive from home. We’re not swinging the lad. And so there is that societal acceptance. And so, so I think there are almost these layers that you need for something to become really widespread in society.
I mean, I always term it as you need kind of a vision. You need a vision to hang on to. So again, around London, 2012, we had the Olympics and we need to free up space on the transport infrastructure. You need a variety of technologies and spaces that support remote working, but then you need societal acceptance of that.
And so if you fast forward now to what we’ve just experienced, you’ve got a common goal. If you like, we need to work from home. Because of the pandemic, you’ve got much more prevalence of the communications. I think certainly the the telecoms providers have really stepped up in the past year or so.
I think, you know, we’ve all been quite impressed with that. So there’s been, you know, largely widespread communications. We’ve had the technology. We’ve had PCs, it’s not been equally distributed. And that’s starting to become acknowledged. And these gaps in society are starting to be noticed. But again, I think what we’ve had in space is this societal acceptance of, of, we ha we have to be productive.
We have to work like this and we can, we can actually do this. So there’s that belief that strongly coming through. And I think so. Yeah. You know, going back now to the return, to the office where we’ve all had quite a different experience, I think is going to be fascinating in terms of how that pans out.
Chris: Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I remember at that time I was working in London quite a lot, and I know I was actually going in strangely enough, as a lot of people were staying out, we’ve got a particular project on and and therefore I think there was there wasn’t a compulsion. Then there’s there is now, and also it wasn’t just London for a few weeks that, that as you say, that kind of a societal acceptance, it requires a wider exposure to the whole thing.
And just, there’s a lot of people going in and out of London, but that it’s not everybody, you know, it’s not that universal experience. So I think that’s definitely the case. It didn’t have an end date for this whole thing and yeah. So therefore it wasn’t just, okay. We’ll stay at the office for a few weeks and we’ll see out.
We’ll see how it goes. I think also technologically, if I think to back then we would have meetings and we, you know, we’d, we’d have people all around the country working on this project and not all of them are in the office all the time. And if we ever got together, Remotely. It was on a teleconference, which, you know, we all know how terrible the telephone conferences with the spider phone in the middle of the table.
Really, really horrible. And the poly COVID kit was as traditionally expected. It was in the corner gathering dust and nobody would ever use it because it would be an awful nightmare to do any kind of video conferencing. So. I remember just a couple of years later working with a, an ad source development company.
And they were we’re a source or a software company that had, that had outsourced development elsewhere. And they were basically saying to me, we couldn’t have done this, but if before decent video conferencing just a couple of years ago, you know, think back to them until you can do this kind of thing, where you can look at each other and you can discuss things and you can have a, have a more animated and, and, and meaningful conversation.
That that option to offshore just, it was just far less, far less convenient. So I do think that switch in terms of half decent video conferencing. There’s a big difference between 2016 and now
Linda: absolutely. But then I think you’ve also got to remember that when did we learn to switch our cameras on in the it world?
You know, we never used to put the cameras on. So we, we, we did we through the voice conference thing. And yeah, you, you you’d be on a teams call but, but nobody would ever switch their cameras on. And it’s only since the pandemic that that’s now becoming a norm. And actually, I think we would, we would think it’s strange now, if somebody is not showing their camera and we, we understand the whole zoom fatigue being in front of you know, a camera all day and, and there, there are norms developing over when we, when we, we like to be on camera on when we decide to turn it off, but it is conscious decision now, whereas before I think everybody was I don’t know, hiding behind the technology, I guess.
Matt: With the talk about the third place, places like coffee shops or I mean, heaven forbid we work when she has it. That’s, that’s a whole, that’s a podcast in its own. Right. But the, the relationships between those and work spaces and home. And homes. It does strike me that we, we don’t really think about that as some sort of.
Holistic thing in any way. Yeah, they’re very much it’s first, second and third places that there isn’t a strategy around it. And I guess it’s interesting for me, particularly given my, my current work, looking at housing and the extent to which, as we now start to plan for homes that would be built over the next 10 years or so, the extent to which.
The needs of people working from home needs to be built into the houses that we’re building and whether that’s you know, social rent housing, or whether that shared ownership of housing or private market housing. The idea of a studio flat now is a very different proposition. Now going forward than a studio flat in London was even 18 months ago.
Do you, are you sensing that we are starting to think about this as more than just individual separate sections of. Of the world of property that is commercial or residential, or
Linda: I’d like to think that we were in reality. I don’t think we are. And you mentioned the word strategy, and I think that sports what’s missing here As I said, we were quite familiar now with this polar working in the office, working from home.
And in fact, a lot of the conversation about remote working assumes working from home. So I think we’re not thinking very clearly about alternative places to work than a near to home, but not at home. And I think it’s that strategy that really needs to be fleshed out. So I live in St. Alban’s. So commuter town to London.
And I, if you walked down a high street on a pre-print pandemic yeah. You would have seen people working all across our towns. So they’re there in coffee shops. They would have been, you know, have laptops out that they’d be working. Yeah. But there was really no place for them to go. That was, was conducive to working.
I wouldn’t say, you know, coffee shops are good for some things and not good for others. And about, Oh, about four or five, five years ago, a group of people got together in some Orbens and they would call it a Silicon Abby, actually. So a local entrepreneur said, you know, we’ve got kind of Google setting up base and King’s cross what, what, what the sun ovens have to attract, you know, people from Google to live here, if you like, is there a community?
Yeah. All of entrepreneurs and tech designers you know, for them to latch onto. So Silicon Abbey was formed. And a few of us got together. And the first thing we said was. Where, where do we all meet one another? When we work from home, wouldn’t it be nice to bump into somebody? And and so we, we actually trialed a coworking space.
This, this was actually when I, I decamped Singapore for a couple of years. So with Microsoft, and so but I was watching things from a, so I, I noticed this was happening locally and caught the tail end of it. When I came back to the UK in 2017. And so there was a, a genuine kind of grassroots popup co-working space just to see what it would be like for the community.
And it, it was really interesting. You can’t all kinds of people, you know, coming to this space. And, and so I think you mentioned we work and I think we work has been I mean, it’s, it’s been obviously a phenomenon in the real estate industry and I think it’s been both, both good and bad because I think the, the good part of it is actually popularizing.
The whole co-working space and actually, you know, making it more mainstream, but it’s only a particular type of coworking. I think it, it, it doesn’t actually show the breadth of coworking and the different spaces and the different communities that you can actually have around those spaces. It’s one particular brand and style.
I think there’s an enormous number. Of the different types of working. And, and I think the way that work is evolving is that we it’s evolving so quickly. We don’t even have the language around coworking and on what it means. So it’s a co-work or whether we have casual coworking or subscription coworking, I think we’re just evolving now.
This conversation. So in terms of you know, working locally, I always thought in some ovens that they were there, there was a lack of somewhere that I could go to that I genuinely thought was a substitute for a London office. And I’ve got coworking spaces that I would go to in London at the IAT or the RSA.
But I felt that there was nothing locally where I could do that. And actually that there has been that gap filled somewhat in the past couple of years. And and in fact, I took up a subscription in a local co-working space called bubble hub, which gives me exactly that. So I work from there one day a week.
And it’s great. It’s a 10 minute walk from my house. It’s a community of people and you actually get to have that human interaction, which is you know, much needed. I think. I think in terms of getting us out of our homes. So, so when I think about locality working, that was the kind of thing that I had in mind, you know, the, that we wouldn’t necessarily have to work at home because a lot of people haven’t got that space or, or the luxury of lots of rooms in their house, but we would work near to home.
And so the rise of coworking on the high street, the actually, yeah, Makes you come out of your house? I behave very differently. The day I go to bubble hub, I always go to bubble hub. I always buy my lunch in town. So you’ve got that daytime economy that’s naturally occurring when people are out and about in the town center.
You can also do, you know, knock some of your errands off the list as well. And you, you can see people. So I think that there’s a style of working that’s about being the hub of where things are in your community. Really. Participating and getting to know local people. When we, when we started to engage as, as part of Silicon happy, I was amazed at how many people there were that were professionally involved in cities that live in this and opens and I didn’t know them.
And so I think it’s great when you start to really you know, engage with people in the local community because you, you just don’t know who lives around the corner or next door sometimes.
Matt: I think it’s interesting that maybe some of the reticence that we saw back in 2011, 2012 from organizations.
Not wanting people to work effectively from home back then. I wonder whether they will also be reticence to the idea of people working in shared areas so they can cope. Corporates tend to still, I think, have a bias towards the idea of secrecy. Th that they are private unless they decide to disclose something.
And actually one of the biggest learnings for me of the whole, of the digital transformation of the last 25 years, it’s the old Don task or thing about how in, in the age of the internet, every, everybody is naked. You, you can’t. Managed to maintain an air of secrecy in the way that you used to, unless you’re, you know, my six or something, and you need to shift to the idea of everything is open, unless you decide to make it private, which is a big mental shift.
Maybe one of the ways in which that will manifest will be, as Asians will be resistant to the idea of their staff working in the same place as other people. They find if there are a home and they’re in private, they’re fine. If they’re in the office is in private, but sitting next to somebody who might be from a competitor or from a, that might be a block organization each to this sort of thing happening.
Linda: Potentially. Yeah, I think with some organizations, but then again, it’s about getting the right kind of space. So if you’ve got a coworking space that has the right kind of areas that support, you know, foam booths, when you can go to make a private call and when you’re in the open area, You know, perhaps you were just doing work, work at your desk, you know, you’ve got your headphones on.
You’re not particularly engaging in what should be private conversations. So, so I think it comes down to having the right space that facilitates that. And also. Trust. I think, you know, we have to be trusted to do the right things. I’m sure we’ve all over her. Plenty of conversations of people being interviewed on trains and all kinds of things like that.
So, so I think it is about trusting people. I also think actually one of the major barriers is about who pays. Actually because, you know, I guess the way I’ve justified it to myself in terms of my you know, one day a week in the, in a shared space is, is that I would have spent that money on a train ticket to London.
So why not? Spend it in, you know, spend it locally and actually go to an area that I think benefits my productivity. And so that’s my personal choice. I think if people are starting to save money on the train fare, going into the office and genuine, the organizations are starting to save on real estate footprint.
I think the question of who pays actually should become much more of an open discussion, you know? So, so should employees have a stipend. To you know, to, to work where they want to work at many years ago, of course we had the bring your own device fascination with companies and on whether you should have stipends or to bring your own devices to that, to the workplace.
I think maybe the concept of bring your own office might start to become a reality in terms of, you know, choosing to go to the, the, the central office when you need to. Yeah. But also having that flexibility to choose where you want to spend the extra time and actually spend money in the local economy.
You know, th there is effectively a stipend from your employer. So, so I think it’s more about the who pays question, which I’m, I’m only just seeing the, the organizations. Really realizing that that might be a barrier.
Chris: Yeah. That’s that occurred to me while you were talking a moment ago. I was starting to think to myself.
What makes these working spaces, even, even those that are, you know, as humble as you, like, what makes them go and concerns, because it does require somebody as you, as you say, to part with the harder and, and, and if the alternative is to work at home and save that money or to work in a coworking space.
It’s a tough decision, right? Especially if you’re, maybe you’re paying 10 pounds a day or something like that, that’s a lot of money in a month. So you’ve got to be you’ve got to think there’s a, there’s that amount of value in it. And for an organization, maybe an enlightened viewpoint would be actually, I want my, I don’t want my people sitting at home.
I do want them working with people. I want them to networking. I want them getting ideas and being, being able to have that, that office. Experience and because it’s better for them, it’s better for them. And it’s better for us because we get more productive and, and better informed people. Whereas if they just think actually that we’re going to save all this money, we’ll keep all that.
Thank you very much. And. Yeah, I just go and work where I was brought best for you then maybe will, there’s not the, maybe there’s not the business to keep these things going as, you know, as genuinely, unless that, unless they are subsidized in other ways, they have to see how they, how they
Matt: continue.
Interesting as well though. I think possibly the most developed Program that is associated with this stuff is a couple of years ago. Now we talked to Tracy Keogh from grow remote in Ireland. And I think that the strengths that grow remote has had has been their ultimate drive is to sustain rural.
Communities, it’s not to be able to be able to allow large corporates to have lower real estate costs. It’s about being able to make sure that outages across the, the furthest outreaches of Ireland are able to sustain themselves by having modern employment. And that’s the thing I think there that that’s the vision.
That’s the strategy that the home will grow
Linda: remote day. Yeah, absolutely. I’m doing some work in Wales at the moment around the concept of smart towns and the Welsh government. Very interesting because they they’re really starting again to get this idea of the disparate, the dispersal of working and actually what that can do to the, the local economies.
So the Welsh government have actually come out saying that they they’d like 30% of. People to, to work locally on work remotely. And again, what they’re seeing is that, you know, you, you can do a global job and you can live in Wales and you can live perhaps in a remote part of Wales. And if you go to a local co-working space, You can engage with a local economy.
So they, they’re doing a lot of strategic work about mapping out where those spaces are, where people want to work and actually asking them where they want to work and then making a very conscious effort. The, the, the right conditions are in place for that to be successful. So I think you’re right. So, so again, it comes down to, you know, what’s the strategy, what’s the big idea.
And what’s the push behind this. I think also when, when I started to think about the work local agenda, I was thinking about it from the commuter and the working near to home aspect of it. But we’ve been challenged recently to think about that from more of a city perspective. So. What happens to these cities when people are actually only going in two or three days a week, and what happens to the vibrancy of those cities and so that, you know, the challenge the other way round.
And actually, if you think about it, The city has got to really be quite responsive to the needs of, of that commuter making the visits. So, so I, I choose to go into London for a business meeting. But actually I’ve got a number of choices of how I spend my day. So, so we’re doing, do I just go in for that meeting and come back again?
Do I go in, do I meet other people? Where do I go? You know, who facilitates that interaction for me? So, so I think the city is going to be quite challenged. And how do you make that the best experience and how do you make people really productive? Because they’ve chosen to spend that time commuting and to go to your city.
So I think that’s the next big challenge that cities have goals in terms of enticing people to go and actually keeping them productive and making that as frictionless as possible.
Matt: It’s also maybe thinking about the different elements, a short thing I wrote last week out of the back of some conversations I had with a few of the CIO is actually about how the, the constructs that we’ve had offices, they’re essentially a 19th century invention.
The management styles that are still used in most organizations are 20th century inventions. And actually you’ve gone backwards in many cases, as we’ve seen increasingly kind of Taylorist approaches to management often because of information technology enabling closer control over people in what, where more autonomous white collar jobs and the technology is 21st century.
With the exception of ERP systems, which is obviously fairly firmly entrenched in the 20th century, but there’s a mismatch there. There’s this massive misalignment. The office is if you look at pictures of offices from the late Victorian era, I don’t re I mean, the clouds are a bit old and there’s no computers, but other than that, they don’t look that much different to many offices today.
Th the, the point about management style, which was still the overseeing within the space, which even for global organizations, You know, lots of global organizations have struggled to be able to shake off the the, the hierarchy and the control and the idea of, you know, not giving too much autonomy because you don’t want, they’ll get up to the McGregor stuff around theory X and theory wise manner.
And I, it does strike me when people say about, you know, we need to go back to the office. He said, well, w w which. Bit of that, is it, is it, is it 19th century and the styles you’re missing or is it 20th century nostalgia you’re missing or, or, or what, and I dunno, I guess that, you know, that that little piece I wrote last week was partly about being able to say, actually stopped thinking about it is going back.
How do we move this stuff forward? What do we need to put in play to be able to come up with better ways of working that don’t constrain ourselves with habits that we’ve had for. Couple of hundred years, I guess.
Linda: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, it’s all about the organizational change really. And that’s, that’s, what’s lacking and we’re, we’re catching up with what the technology can do for us, I think.
And of course, you know, there’s more to come of that. And and so, so you never quite get it in the sink because once we’ve caught up the technology about what we can do is actually moved on again. So we’re always in this, in this catch out mode, I think.
Matt: Fascinating stuff. So that brings us to the end of yet another show. Linda, thank you very much for being with us this week. Fascinating conversation. What, what is the seven days ahead of this look like for you?
Linda: So for me I’m doing some more work on the a high street e-book so we had the launch of two of the books last week, and now it’s my turn.
So I’m curating smart public spaces. So we’re having yeah, th th the last call for contributions and getting that ready for launching in April. So I’m going to be focused on that last week and Tomorrow, I’ve got a UK property PropTech association round table that I’m chairing. So lots of talk about data-driven design in the real estate industry.
Matt: Fabulous. And Chris, if you remember, as you got the week ahead, as opposed to the week behind, well,
Chris: I think I definitely have some things to do this week. It’s it’s, I’ve got a conference we’re doing in the Adriatic, so I’m the I’m presenting out. So I’m just getting ready for that to I’m making sure that I know what I’m talking about, or at least can look like I know what I’m talking about.
And I’ve got, yeah, I’ve got actually quite a lot going on this week. Different, different meetings here, there, and everywhere. All of course here, but all but everybody else is there and everywhere. And, and that’s pretty much it. I, I’ve not got any vaccinations to look forward to like, like the older generation.
I’m still too young.
Matt: Yeah, indeed. I love the idea of you having a conference in the Adriatic. So I imagined you were in this sort of small yellow submarine floating somewhere between Italy and maybe Serbia occasionally bringing Periscope up and, and then realizing it you’ve lost wifi connection yet again, that’s
Chris: essentially it that’s that’s, you know, you hit the nail on the head.
That’s exactly what
Matt: happened. Excellent. That’s good. Well, I, I will be w we do some really interesting stuff. We’ve been doing the single purpose architecture Mike, after the last few months we’ve been doing lots of really in-depth interviews with customers to be able to understand their stories, what their experience of being one of our customers has been.
It’s been very eye opening. There’s been some good stuff. There’s been some Frankly, terrible stuff. That’s coming out of it as well, but as a way, spare to start to better illustrate what we need to do next, how many changed? So we’ve got the conclusions of some of that. There’s a bit of recruitment going on.
There’s more procurement. It’s just like endless. Stuff, which is in a it’s fine. So that will keep us going on next week’s show. We are going to be joined by Timo peach, who is a musician and artist and a creative director. And it’s something I’ve been wanting to explore for a while, which is as some of you may know, I like music and music creation tools, software, and one of the things that I’ve Wondered for some time is why music software works together seamlessly without seemingly any effort whatsoever in a way that most business software precisely doesn’t.
And so we’re going to get Timo one. I’m going to talk a bit about what would the world be like if printers used middy? So I’m really looking forward to that and that’ll be the last show before Easter, when we will go off and stuff, our faces with chocolate. So There we go. So one more show before the Easter break, Timo peach next week, Linda.
Thank you again, Ben. Actually delight and we will see next week recording.
Linda: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast.com on Twitter @WB40podcast and on all good podcasting platforms.
On this week’s show we talk to Marcus John Henry Brown about his latest work Hanging in There. You can also find his previous work on his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcusJohnHenryBrown/videos
This week’s automatically generated transcript…
Intro
Matt: Well welcome once again to WB 40 and you join us in the bubble, that is the show. And another week in this strange old time has passed us by Chris. Well, it’s
Chris: been another week, isn’t it it’s been a lot going on in, in inside work and outside work too much of it probably. But it’s been, yeah, I guess I am in that stage now where.
Hey, this happens every March where I am, I’m desperate for the sun to come out and sort of go outside and, and warm my bones outside, where it remains relentless and cold and miserable. So I’ve been a bit grumpy about that. But I, you know, life goes on and also I had some good news and as much my brother tells me that he’s going to be a father for the very first time, which means that that’s it means that I’ve got some more inkling to do And his his partner is is Zoe who I was on the podcast for you again a couple of years ago, if you, if you remember back that far.
So it was I climate. So we are that that’s going to be extremely exciting later this year. So, you know, there’s lots of things to be positive about.
Matt: Excellent. Yeah, that was the opportunity you had to be able to sit in John Humphrey’s chair. I remember it. Well, I remember correctly, very exciting. And that was and joining us once again on the show direct from Munich in Germany.
Marcus, how are you?
Marcus: Ah, good evening. Good afternoon. Good morning to you all wherever you are in the world. I am. Hanging in there, ladies and gentlemen, I’m hanging in there. It’s been a difficult time, lots to get upset about, but I’m delighted to be back on the podcast.
Matt: It’s very good to be able to see you again and hanging in there as a thing, we will come to a little later in the show cause that’s the title of your latest piece which actually was released today.
The day we recording Monday the 15th of the year.
Marcus: That’s not true. That’s not, that’s not true. It was released in March the 11th.
Matt: Ugh. Well, okay. You tweeted about it this morning. No,
Marcus: I tweeted about it last week, but you never paid damn piece of attention to watch all this, but it doesn’t matter. We’re not, but please don’t edit this out.
It just shows what a competent. And
Chris: it’s all going very well.
Marcus: I was two, Y’s all going very, very well, but I’m delighted to be here. And hello everybody.
Chris: And we are delighted to have you Marcus. It is a it’s great. And there’s, which is your very presence. Is it, is it, I don’t know whether Matt seems to be discombobulated by the whole thing.
It’s fantastic. So I put much your week. How’s it been?
Matt: It’s just, you know, another one of those chugging away had a few major revelations. I caught up with the head of technology at Kingston council. We had a great walk in person cause he is just on the other side of the river from here. So we were able to catch up and also be in the same physical presence, socially distances.
We walked one side of the tent. Did you
Chris: have to share it across the teams with each other? Is
Matt: that , that’s probably better. Ridiculous. Keeping an entire river between people is probably a little extreme. And apart from that, I’ve got my my first COVID vaccination booked in for a little later this week, which is good.
And I am about to embark on a whole series of half-day training programs at work, which is going to be. Interesting as to what it’s all about, to be honest, there’s some stuff around better collaboration across organizational silos and that’s going to be a day of the week ahead. So that’s all good stuff to look for.
Yeah. You know, chucking away. All good. We just wait for basically a bit more. Locked down stuff to release, hopefully in some point in the near future this week we are going to be talking to Mark as Mark has been doing lots of work around do people understand how to deliver more compelling video on line when we’re working in a virtual environment for events and such like, so we’re going to talk a bit about that on the show this week.
So let’s crack on.
Main Section
Matt: So over the course of this interminable series of lockdowns Marcus, you’ve been busily producing some amazing bits of video content, some videos that helps be able to explore ideas about how to get better at making compelling content during a time where we’re not meeting in person. You’ve put out a new short piece today called hanging in there.
And tell us a bit about that.
Marcus: Yeah, well, I was trying to ask answer the the very, very difficult question that everybody seems to be asking at the beginning, beginning of every zoom or video call, which is hi. And it, it’s a question which is very, very difficult to answer right now because when the kind of not great being British you kind of eat you don’t Germans.
When, when you ask a German, how are you? And they’re not very well done. I say, well, not very well, it’s quite jarring because you don’t want to hear that. Nobody wants to hear that. I know very well. And it’s one of the wonderful, wonderful things about the pandemic as it is. So it’s a gloriously democratic it’s hitting us all hard.
So everybody is not doing great. It doesn’t matter if you have, you know, kids at school. It doesn’t matter if you kids grown up like mine doesn’t matter if you don’t have kids at all. If you’re single alone in a one room flat center of Munich, or if you have a Villa, although if you have a Villa is property, there might be a little bit better than, you know, the one bedroom flat things, but we’re all in this pandemic and doing, going through various levels of.
Difficult nurse. So I wanted to run thing about how I was feeling, how I am, how to answer the question, Marcus, how are you? But it would in a way, which was kind of relevant to the context of where we all are. I’ve been stumbling on struggling for the last 12. Months to find a way of creating a performance or a piece or a piece of video, which wasn’t necessarily a how to do a online performance or online presentation, but to do a proper piece, which was four hour, had a beginning, a middle and an end and touch people’s hearts and made them think about where we all were.
And I’d be hopeful and be emotional and really, really struggling with it. Partly because I was just in the same struggle that we all are. I think we all have to admit that things take much more time. Now we’re much more sluggish were timed, notionally exhausted by it, all it all. I think that’s a really good way of describing it all is.
The it all. And then I stumbled on I think Julia Hoppesborne, who was your guest? A couple of weeks ago? Posted a or tweeted an article for Nerf financial times, which outlined Stanford university study about zoom fatigue. Fascinating study. It’s not really a study cause, and they say that in the study that it’s not really a study, it’s just a series of questions and some findings and more, but could somebody do a proper study on this?
Cause it’s really interesting, but a lot of the stuff that was in there was basically a toolkit for doing better online presentations. On one side and on the other side kind of like the kick up the ass that I needed to right. Hanging in there, hanging in there is, is kind of
I know it’s a it’s basically a zoom. I’m having a zoom call with myself and I’m asking myself, I am. And it’s quite raw. And it seems to have touched people and that really, really pleased me. So, yeah. So that’s, that’s hanging in those it’s a four and a half minute video about how we are one year into a pandemic.
Matt: And I thought it was beautiful. I thought there was a, a level of emotion in it. And especially when you’re talking about seeing your kids and that sense of disconnection from others, it was a it’s. Yeah, really, really? Yeah. Arching I think is the right word for it.
Marcus: That really, really makes me happy big, cause those are the bits that really really mean something.
To me there’s a bit of a, a kind of a departure from the stuff that I’ve been doing before. So a lot of the work that I’ve been done before, stuff like the passing, which I think we talked about in the last podcast here That’s very detached. It’s very cold. And I’m kind of looking at a situation and trying to describe it in a, in a very detached narrative dystopian kind of fictional way.
This one is much, much more personal. And there there are bits in there which are real and raw, and there were other bits in there which are kind of more
Scripted. So the bit it’s about yeah, but that, that, that describing a feeling that I get when I talk to people. So on this call right now, while your listeners don’t know is the we are actually having a video call when I’m looking at Chris and Matt. And there’s a part in hanging in there where I talk about looking at them and re really looking at people on the call and re are they really you guys rarely hanging in there are your fing you know, are your knuckles, why is your grip still tight or are your fingers or your fingertips lippy too?
So it was kind of like it’s a way of describing a particular feeling, but then there were other real, proper bits and like not seeing the kids the fact that they’re not kids anymore, they’re grown women, that realization that I live in a course of a year. And you can have, you can go from having free daughters to free grown women.
In your life. The, my youngest will be turned 21 this year, and I’ve only seen her, I don’t know, maybe two or three times in the last 12 months. And I haven’t seen the middle one since Christmas of 2019. So there’s a lot of stuff in there. Cause you know, it describes you know, when you have kids and they grow up and they start have a diary.
That doesn’t fit in that diary. And then when a pandemic comes along, that kind of makes the diary entries possible, the possibilities to fit into that diary, even, even slimmer. So so it makes me, it really means something that you say that map because it, there is a very, very personal. Pace and it feels like it it’s kind of sent me down a different path for you know, the performances that I will probably be doing in the future.
The Le less kind of story universe as a more kind of personal.
Matt: It’s interesting because the, the work that I know you for has been. You playing characters and Ashley to the move to be able to use some of the techniques that you’ve been talking about in the last year about how to be able to produce video in a way that people want to watch it and be able to consume.
And I think there’s a bit of a character around that. That’s that’s marvelous. Brown the the presentation training person, as opposed to necessarily the Marcus that is in that video that you put out today.
Marcus: Yeah. I mean, there were a bits of there were bits of that in there. One of the things I do when I’m, when I’m training people, eh, is to talk about giving 20% more of yourself than you’re prepared to give.
It’s a the camera is in one of the, you know, one of the, how to videos that I released last year that went down very well. That the camera sucks energy out of you is that there’s a completely different energy that you need to bring for this black dot that we’ve been staring into for the last 12 months.
Audio, the microphone is also something that you, you need to use. You need to know how to work with and hanging in there as is a, is an exercise in both of those two things. So you have, for those of you who haven’t seen it my th the, the text is read by me. It’s a voice over. But what you see is me listening to myself saying the voiceover.
So I’m having to give the 20% version visual version of me without saying the words. So it’s, again, it’s just another, in a way it’s an, an performative experiment for me. It’s something that I’ve been considering for a while, but could never, and could never find the entry point for it. But the, the zoom study from Stanford university was that entry point.
The idea of gazing that the, the all day mirror the cognitive overload that you have with The kind of a streaming environment. So if you run kind of, if you run a live stream or if you do a podcast, it’s not just you talking, you have buttons to press. You have things to consider dear listener.
We started this podcast three times, I think, because something didn’t work or you know, a file wasn’t rendered properly. So we had to start again and that’s and we’ve all had that. We’ve all been in the situation where we’ve been in a call where something’s not being recorded. You couldn’t hear the, you couldn’t hear the sound.
The video was playing. But it wasn’t rendering properly. It was dropping frames and all of these things. These are things that we didn’t up until March the 11th. Last year we did that. It wasn’t part of our lives. It wasn’t part of the problem. We would go, we w we would go to a conference room and then we would and then fumble around with cables and things, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t a major cognitive problem, but now it’s part of everything as part of the entire day.
Can you hear me? Am I muted? Can you see the slides? It’s kind of all of these things. Kind of pile on and, and, and lead to this cognitive overload. And then you have which is particularly interesting. For me as a performer who normally deals with a live audience, you have what Stanford describe as an audience of listeners, which are also speakers.
So we’re in an environment now where we’re all living, kick each other, we’re staring each other and you’re not the audience. You’re also the participant and it’s very, very weird and super, super stressful. And so that was some of the, a lot of the thinking that went into hanging in there, but it’s also flavored.
The speaker training or what I now call, I used to call it tiny talks, but I now call it speaker, read the format, which is how do you present? How do you keep an audience engaged with a presentation in a virtual or hybrid or blended environment? So
it’s been a, it’s been a hell of a year. And for me, in terms of learning how to, to deal with this is take it literally took me 300 and just realize it. Now it literally took me 365 days to work out how to do performance online. Interesting. I, you know what, that’s the first time I’ve, I’ve heard that.
Phenomenon called out. And I’m thinking that psychologically the way we act in meetings. So the way we would act, if we all sat down to do a meeting in a room, From my perspective, that’d be, there’d be two of the people in the room. Right. And that’s that, that’s the people I’m meeting with when you’re on a zoom call or a team’s call or whatever it might be.
And just like this that we have now, we’re all there. I can see myself looking splendid and I can see YouTube looking, you know? Okay. So I, but I can see the meeting happened. It was like that it’s a body experience. You and your there’s a potential for. You to change the way you behave, partly because you can see yourself and you can’t see yourself when you’re, slobbing around in a meeting in a, in a, in a room.
So whether that’s psychologically more draining or whether it gives you, I might, maybe it’s a
Matt: phone call. I
Marcus: don’t know. According to according to the Stanford study is it’s a massive factor towards soon fatigue, which is quickly becoming a thing. In very much the same way that imposter syndrome, Matthew became the thing shortly after you stood on the stage and said, Oh, this is the thing.
The study points out some other work which has been done around where you look when you’re in a physical room, crass. So if you’re in a meeting, let’s say you’re, you’re in a, kind of like a round table pitch environment. There are 10 people in the room. Three as ice people might actually be looking at the person who’s speaking, but in the rest of it is kind of like looking out, looking around, listening, but looking around that the out the window, the glass, maybe it’s somebody else.
Who’s not speaking. So the focus is always somewhere else in a zoom or a video conference scenario where all of the cameras are on and everybody can see everybody. Everybody is staring at everybody. And they’re staring, and this is the really, really, truly interesting thing about this study because we’re so close to each other because of the distance of the camera, where it’s staring into people’s eyes at a distance, which is normally very intimate, it’s like B and they explain it as being trapped in a, in a Lyft and you’re staring into everybody’s eyes.
So if you’re in the left, can remember when we used to be in lifts with people. So you’re in a left, the doors would close, and then you do the thing where you’d look at the buttons or look at your feet or look at, or just turn around. And you do, you never look at the other people or it’s like that, or being on the London underground, you always look in between the spaces between people.
You would never look into people’s eyes. But in this scenario in a video conference scenario, we’re always looking into people’s eyes at a distance, which is very, very intimate, and that is incredibly distressing
Matt: and we’re seeing more and more people turning, I think T turning camera off now. And starting to be able to disengage, but then, then there’s that sense of, they’re not there.
They’re not participating.
Marcus: Yeah. You kind of, I’ve been in meetings where I’ve actually said Albert, can you turn the camera on? Because it feels like he’s not engaging with what’s going on. Yeah. So you have that, there are other lover things as well. So you have the you have, there’s a lack of cues. So in a physical space, you take more kind of signals. So you would, I don’t know, you would a register a nod, a wink, something that’s going on in the room, but you can’t. Get that in, in a, in a zoom environment, you exaggerate, according to the study, if somebody says something, you agree with you not more vigorously so that they can see in the tiny boxes that you agree with, what they’re saying.
I can Darling. If you listen to this, I’m really, really sorry, but it’s true. My wife does this and according to how I do it to East speak 15% louder when you’re on a call, I think that has a lot to do with the fact that you can’t monitor it Mo normally monitor in in, in with your headphones.
So I can see that Matthew and myself, maybe Chris, maybe you’re monitoring your own audio that helps. So you can hear yourself. So you can, you can, you know, when you’re whispering and you can use your voice properly. But for most people they’re just using normal headphones and they just shouting so that they can hear themselves, but also make sure that the other people can hear them.
It’s very, very similar to.
when, when when your grand mum used or her granddad used to telephone from the first time. So to heat, they shouted so that they could say for the other person at the other end, couldn’t hear them. So there’s all that going going on now. That’s really, really, it’s. It’s very interesting for I know you have corporate people.
Corporate people are listen to this. So it’s very interesting from a corporate perspective that, and purely with people who not necessarily performing, not nurses, necessarily doing presentations you know, you ha th th this is HR needs to be aware of this. This is a thing that HR needs to be aware of because there’s a huge amount of emotional stress and pressure, which we’re putting on.
Are people at home, but in terms of if you’re, you know, if you’re one of those people who have keynote speaker in your LinkedIn description, please take it out. But if you do have that in there, then these are things that you need to be aware of because they are hugely important for You know, nailing a presentation that will engage an audience, which is fundamentally knackered.
Dan, we are knackered from zoom to video conferences. We are exhausted from paying attention hybrid virtual conferences where we need. Something else. And that’s why I’ve been fiddling around with my, this now become a manifesto, but it is kind of, it’s just, it’s a growing list of observations and things.
I think that people should be doing to make their online presentations, you know, much more interesting. And right at the heart of that, the idea, the very central idea is I, I nicked it from Amazon. But it’s, instead of customer obsession, it’s audience obsession, and to be audience obsessed, you have to kind of like really get under and get into the nitty-gritty of zoom fatigue.
Matt: And so one of the things within that is short no more than five minutes. One of the things within that is prerecord. Another thing in that is to, to pre-record rather than to do things live
cutting through, or is it about. What is it? I mean, there weren’t that many good presenters before all this pandemic thing happened. Let’s be blunt. And then, but too many too long.
Marcus: Well, I made a career out of everybody else being shit.
Matt: He’ll be both. It conferences. No, no,
Marcus: my friend now, I think, I think it’s just a way of I’ve, you know, when I, when I work with, I, I make a very, very, there’s a distinction between the people I work with, who just want to get better at it and feel more comfortable with doing it.
And I really, really like working with those people, just to give some tips and tricks and just get them into a space where they feel more comfortable and where they can just. Every single time, get a little bit better at it. Web where their colleagues start to say, wow, wow. And to you, what’s going on there, you get a bit more confident now.
That was great. So there’s a difference between that kind of stuff too. Keynote space people, literally people have keynote speaker in the LinkedIn description who were just doing the same old, same old, and it’s boring as hell. The pre-recorded stuff. I still stand by it. I think it’s, I think it’s, it’s a much, much better way of doing it.
It’s scalable. It’s great for the organizer is great for you because you’ve got it. You’ve got it nailed down. You know what you know, that works. Everybody knows how long it is. But it should always be seen. And I think this is something that I’ve really understood now for the last 12 months that the talk you do is nothing more than a teaser for the discussion that happens afterwards.
And I think that’s something that really got lost somewhere around 2016. When kind of like Ted really blew up, like properly blew up. The conferences got bigger, everybody got a bit lazier. But the, but the, the presentation that you give is a teaser for the conversation that happens afterwards. That was always very difficult in a live conference environment because of the setup and the hierarchical systems of a stage and an audience.
So as a speaker, you would normally be in the green room with the access or area badge and on a stage physically higher than the audience. And so that was always kind of like some kind of physical. Distancing between speaker and audience in the, in the virtual environment, that’s completely gone because we’re staring at each other in the eye.
We’re all in the elevator. So. Why waste time waffling on for 45? Honestly, I eat no idea how often I’ve said in the last three years to corporate people. And cause I’ve been doing these virtual events for the last three years way before the pandemic started because procurement CFOs discovered virtual events years ago.
They love them. Because you don’t have to fly everybody in to Las Vegas to do kind of like a big kickoff, but I see, you know, senior, senior management business unit heads, they hate the idea of being only being only allowed to talk for seven minutes. Hate the idea. Now I need 45. I always get 45. See if I don’t get 45 because you see he’s a CEO, right.
And he gets an hour. And I’m the CMO. That means I need at least 45 minutes and I’m a business unit head and I get 20 it’s all pants. It’s all hierarchical nonsense. So the, the, the talk in an environment in, in like a virtual environment, should I think the perfect length is about seven minutes and you’re pushing it to a Ted talk.
17 that’s around about the length of a, how I met your mother episode. They were, they were 22 minutes long. And I always say, I always say to the senior management that the moan about not being able to go, they need more time. They need 30 minutes. I said, so you can, you can do more than a, an episode of how I met your mother.
Because I don’t think you can. So keep it short, focus on what it is you want to do from, you know, there are some S what’s his name? Chris Anderson from Ted that book, Ted talks. There’s a lot. I disagree with loads of stuff in there, but there’s lots of valid stuff. The big one is focused on the one idea.
Seven minutes, one idea. Constantly throwing forward to the Q and a. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I’m more than happy to, to chat about this on the Q and a put questions in people’s heads, ideas in people’s heads pre-record that bit, and then be live for the Q and a and do a Q and a 30, 40 minutes. Cause that’s the interesting bit.
That’s the meat. That’s where the action is. So that’s, that’s where I am right now. So
Matt: do we still need to have events at same time? Because the thing I get mean, the Q and a from doesn’t have to happen synchronously, you can make that asynchronous Bye bye. Breaking the speaker, having to be speaking at the time at which they speak, you’ve given the opportunities to be able to engage with questions as they come up as they go.
Is it still all a bit too fixed in still the temporal model for traditional event?
Marcus: I think you can play with all of this stuff. It kind of an even in the event you can mix it up so you can have. The events were always very, became very programmed. It’s one of the it’s one of my things in the manifesto.
This is the end of lazy. So we all got lazy speakers, got lazy events, got lazy, super easy to program staff, put speaker wrong. The only thing you really, really fought about is who, who come, who goes on before lunch and who comes on last after lunch. He opens and who closes? Those were the kind of like the major things that are an event organizer would, would, would think about you can program an event.
Programming event has got a lot, much, a lot more to do with a live television event than anything else. And I like to compare it to breakfast television. So, if you look at programming and breakfast television, you have slots, which are always on the point. So the viewer knows what’s coming when, so at the, on the hour.
That they half an hour, you would always have news. And then after on the hour news, four minutes long, then you would have weather. Then you would have sport. Then you might have weather, then you’d have point of interest and you’d have, and you can kind of, if you just watch the programming behind breakfast television, you pretty much have the blueprint for a really, really good event.
So you can and they mix it up in there as well. So you can have a call Lin with you know, with a star. And then you can have mail-in questions and stuff, so it doesn’t have to always fit into the same kind of model you can mix it up. The only thing that really, really has to work is timing and pace is, has got so much to so much to do with pace.
The real burden is on the host of the event. And being able to, to, to kind of glue it all together, have the energy to kind of drag an online audience along For 90 minutes, because I think 90 minutes is the perfect length for an online event. I don’t think, you know, I’ve seen things particularly here in Germany, you know, events that have gone on for three or four days.
Awesome. What has got, what is that about? No, I’m not going to do that. Yeah. Well, Marcus, you, they can hop in and hop out and, you know, pick cherry pick. What’s interesting for them like an event. No, no, no. You would book a three-day event in, in Lisbon because you basically going on holiday for free days in Lisbon
or Berlin or London or ballbar or wherever it was. You’re not going to do that online because you’re fitting it into your calendar. So 90 minutes is a stretch to put in somebody’s calendar that will block the 90 minutes. And then there might in the mindset. Oh, well, that’s my 90 minute block. And I’ll kind of like, I might drop in and out of that.
So the moderators and the PA and the programming’s job is to figure out how to make sure they stay engaged and not drop in and out on those 90 minutes, but you’ll never, ever, ever. Ever going to hold people longer than that. Not for an event it’s just not going to happen.
Matt: I guess the other challenge within a loss of the traditional events world then is also how do you then get the sponsors slots to be?
And this is something that the, the tech world I think is, has been It’s been a real problem for, for many years now, is that for some reason, a lot of it events are free to attend, so somebody has to pay for it. So they’re paid for by sponsors. So basically you have to put up with an awful lot of crap, which are really bad sales pitches to then have the interesting bits in between and the opportunity to meet other people.
And I’ve, I know a lot of organized stations in that. That model has been trying to translate that into an online event, which is just the worst, because you’ve basically got really crap sales pitches, interspersed with none of the valuable bits because you don’t meet anybody.
Marcus: Come on guys. Let’s be honest.
I mean, if you’re going to physical events that we used to go to soon as the sponsored talker stepped on stage, everybody buggered off and got a coffee and didn’t it. That was the bit where you networked. Yeah, really well. So that’s obviously not going to work in a, in a, in a tele Matic virtual space.
The biggest thing that’s changed is, is that we’ve left. We’ve left the context of theater and we’ve moved into the context of television, television, and cinema we’re on a screen. So the expectations and the completely different we’re expecting television. And if it’s live, we’re expecting live television.
So let’s break that down a little bit. So what’s missing from live television at the moment, applause. So we expect applause. We expect you probably don’t realize it, why it’s happening. Really, really. I would, I would. Next time you’re watching the news. Look at how long each segment is that we’re talking about 30 seconds to one and a half minutes.
They’re just running frou staff at a rate. There is an amount of content that they’re putting together and putting in front of the viewer to keep them engaged. So when I’m saying seven minutes, that’s actually six minutes too long. For, for the screen context. So in a live context, and this is something that I’ve experienced with hybrid things, you kind of need the light, a tiny live audience, or at least canned clapping because your expecting it.
So in that context, if you have a sponsored thing, that’s an advert and the people gonna get up and go to the toilet. And come back when that bit’s over. So you have to sponsors or have to think of innovative ways to to get into or to involve themselves in these kinds of events event. Organizers will have to come up with innovative sponsorship products that.
Okay. That’s why this is the end of lazy. We have to re rethink everything and it’s not going to go away if it’s absolutely naive to think that when this is all over, it’s over. It’s not because the chief financial officers are looking at a spreadsheet and saying, guys, we’re not going to send you to Las Vegas because it had no impact on our bottom line.
We didn’t lose any money because we didn’t go there. Some we’re not going to spend two, we’re not gonna spend a quarter of a million peop people, quarter of a million dollars or euros or pounds to send you. They’re still going to happen. They’re not going to do it. So I think that this is a. I mean, this is devastating for the entire industry.
It’s devastating for event photographers, for technicians, for event agencies, for people that on the events for speakers perform and all of that, we have to rethink this stuff. But it’s slightly ironic that a, an, a business sector where a large chunk LA earn their money from spouting off about business disruption have had dead business disrupted by a virus, and they re were really, really not very good at working out what to do event.
Outro
Chris: Well, that was all fascinating. Wasn’t it? We’ve got a lot to learn and still, I think even, even a year on. So thank you for that, Marcus. Sorry, thunder on into the year, ahead to the week ahead. And Matt, what’s that got in store for you?
Matt: All right. Well, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, we’ve got quite a lot of corporate training stuff going on this week.
It’s going to take quite a lot of my time. We’ve midway through a big procurement exercise. So still dealing with suppliers phoning me up and then having to tell them that they have to go through the official channels to be able to do this because we are still doing a procurement exercise.
She’ll great fun. We are. Actually talking a lot about data in the week ahead. And I think I’ve managed to get my organization to realize that data is now something more important than just the stuff in systems. And I’ve got some people at board level and are thinking that it might be important, which is a big step forward because before it was possibly just a bit too complicated.
So that should be interesting. How about
Chris: you? Well, I’ve also got some training actually. Funnily enough, tomorrow is a bit of a training day. We’ve got some training about blogging you know, desperately need some pointers on, cause I’ve been doing it very buddy for years and we’ve got some kind of personal stuff branding, and again, you always learn stuff in this sort of thing.
You know what I mean? It’s it’s something that you can always reflect on, so yeah, it should be okay. And. And yeah, and then all the stuff, you know, the usual I’ve been preparing for a conference in Serbia that that’s happening at the end of the month. So that’ll be really good fun because I actually do a video today, actually, funnily enough.
And it was only, only a ten second kind of snippet explained, you know, what are you going to talk about Chris? And I recorded it first. And then just as Marcus was saying, you know, I watched it back and I thought, okay, Yes, Chris, you couldn’t be less animated if you know, you’re just being worked by, in a very old person with asthma.
I was like, it’s hard to do it again. And it was inject the whole kind of spinning boat on all of that. And even then it comes out looking reasonably subdued, you know? So yes you do it. You’re right. It does. The camera sucks. The energy out of it. So, but yeah, a good learning point.
Matt: And, and Marcus, what what does the week ahead have for you?
Marcus: A lot of writing I’ve been commissioned to write a three films, which is very exciting for various. It’s interesting because these events becoming more films, film, like. It’s a very, very interesting phenomenon. So it is a, it’s a very exciting time for me right now. I’ve kind of moved away from as I said in hanging in there, I’ve packed kind of my art and the performance stuff in a box Mark 2022.
And I’m walking the talk and doing the do. So there’s a lot of doing the Duke at the moment. So I’m writing a lot of formats, which are more to do with film. Like short felt like 20 minute films than actual kind of live events. So I’m, I’m working on those at the moment and that’s very exciting. And staying inside, wash my hands, keeping socially distance, wearing a mask, watching the snow fall outside of the window.
Matt: Do you think when this, this pandemic thing is over, you might end up actually just making bigger and bigger films.
Marcus: It’s an exciting idea. I have rarely started to look at myself as a right of things. This has been probably the biggest shift to the last 365 days
thing for me was I stumbled. I don’t know when it was. I’m not sure if it was in the last year, but I stumbled across the pilot script for breaking bad and it changed.
It’s like a real moment for me. Seeing how he wrote that script because it’s like, Oh, you can do it like that. Oh, that’s how you can do it. Yeah. So it completely freed me up of lots and lots of preconceptions about how you, how you do stuff. And I’ve been involved in a few productions, live productions with incredibly talented production companies over the last couple of months.
And I’ve got a much better understanding of how, how the production of these things work and that’s really influenced my writing. So,
so yeah, it feels that that might be a thing that is that’s an option and that’s exciting. I’ve been trying, I’ve tried to keep optimistic. I’ve really, really tried to keep optimistic. And I think we all have, but for someone like myself who always has been always drawn to the dark side of stuff it’s been quite a challenging time, but the words making, turning those words into moving pictures as well.
Proven to be a really, really, really big thing and exciting. So, yeah, let’s, let’s see. There’s a Netflix and me yet.
Matt: I look forward to it. We’ll put a link on the website to some of Marcus’s work. If you haven’t seen any of it, you really should. There’s some amazing things that have come out.
Well, amazing things have come out over the last few years, but the stuff that’s come out in the last. Year or so and the relevance to what we’re doing and how we work at the moment. It’s really huge. So thank you again for joining us again, Marcus is a pleasure as always, and we will see you next week.
On this week’s show we talk to Marcus John Henry Brown about his latest work Hanging in There. You can also find his previous work on his YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/MarcusJohnHenryBrown/videos This week’s automatically generated transcript… Intro Matt: Well welcome once again to WB 40 and you join us in the bubble, that is the […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Matt D’Ancona to talk about his forthcoming book Identity, Ignorance, Innovation.
You can find out more about it here:https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/matthew-dancona-5/identity-ignorance-innovation/9781529303995/?v2=true
And you can pre-order it through your favourite local independent bookshop here.
The machine-generated transcript starts here:
Intro
Chris: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode. You join us with Matt D’Ancona of Tortoise and various other publications. And of course, me and Mattwere here after a Oh another week of excitement and and drama. In football cricket, which I’m trying not to think about. And and work, I guess, Matt, how are you Mr.
Ballantine?
Matt: Well, the kids are back at school, so I was thinking sort of slightly Kelsey about the fact how I felt this joy that I would no longer have my children around me at home all day, every day. And I miss them a bit today as it was quiet around the hat, but not that much let’s be true, you know?
So that was good. I think my first lateral toe, the lateral tote had full flow test, which I, I got to, I haven’t yet, there was, there’s a, it’s a fascinating piece of user interface design though. So you’ve got this little plasticky devices a little bit like a a pregnancy test and there’s a long and convoluted exercise involving long swab everything’s plastic, and this a huge amount of small bits of plastic going into landfill out of this.
But I suppose it’s worth it. You stick this swab up your nose and you stick it in your. Back of your throat and they had to stick it into a little plastic thing, which is like a pipette with some liquid in it that you stick in there. And then you put a couple of drops onto this. The lateral flow presuming the, the movement of the liquid from one end of the piece of blotting paper to the other.
And then there are two stripes and one of them, if it comes on, it means the testers has been correctly administered. The second one is that it means you’ve got Corona virus and therefore are to be thrown away from human civilization for 14 days. But the one that’s the, the the controlled test that the test is working is Mark C.
And the other one is Mark T for T plague or something, but I just, it’s one of those things where you just go, Oh, medical professionals yet again, have completely failed to understand the importance of user interface design, because how many people can see that see, come up with a line against it and go, I’ve got coronavirus.
Chris: Yeah. Well, I that, that reminds me actually, there was a, there was a tear down on Twitter a few weeks ago. Well, maybe I share like a Twitter account called foun, which is where one of those that most follow academies, a good old techie. And he found out about these digital pregnancy tests. So the pregnancy tests that you would normally see in boots and whatever that you pee on, and the line comes across in a similar sort of way, things are digital ones.
So he took one apart and found essentially what they’ve got is a little. A little optical sensor will tell, and the lines are still in the testimony, but all it does is tries to figure out whether there aligns, gone up. And then on the little screen says, yes, you’re pregnant or not. So essentially it’s just a little optical sensor to read the line.
But you know, in many ways that that line sometimes is a bit fine to whatever, at least it gives you a yes or a no, maybe that’s what they need. Maybe that’s what that’s, that’s the, that’s the answer.
Matt: So you want plastic as well as electronics and batteries to go into landfill
Chris: fling together in order to make this more complicated.
Yeah.
Matt: Great movie. Great movie. Anyway Mr. Dan Kona, I think we can ask you one more tonight to be able to distinguish Matt. How are you? How’s your work?
Matt D’Ancona: Well, it’s been you know, occupied by. Sort of political stuff as usual, like the budget and what have you. But yeah, the main discovery I made this week is that the pandemic has to end soon.
I think that’s kind of my, my big, my big kind of insight, which was that the other night I went to, I was doing an event at jet Jewish book Fest. I wasn’t actually doing it on my book. I was doing it. I was interviewing someone else and we were on the stage at King’s place with no audience. And the, so the audience are watching online, completely empty building, completely empty, complete JD Ballarat sort of dystopian scene.
And I found the whole thing. So madly exciting, you know, it was like studio 54 for me being with an author on a stage with absolutely no one in the room. And everyone, you know, coming in with masks, that was to me, sort of so thrilling, I realized we’re now reaching the point where if that’s incredibly thrilling, it really is probably time to wrap this up guys because I badly need to get out.
It’s still a
Chris: joke basically.
Matt D’Ancona: Yeah. I mean, I, you know, I, I, I mean, I’m, I’ve got nothing against sitting in empty auditoriums, but That and, and indeed have a certain amount of experience in that, but but but it never thrilled me. So the share kind of address and rush of sitting in an empty auditorium made me think that probably certainly speaking entirely selfishly it was time to, you know, get the vaccine rollout sorted and things back to something, not if not normal than where I can go for a coffee or, you know, perhaps go to the movies.
I realize it’s not a very profound insight and it may well occur to a few other people around the world. But certainly for me it was, it was a big one.
Chris: We don’t need performs. No, no, no.
Matt D’Ancona: Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. I’m certainly not offering it, but it was, it was, it I’m just as, as said, I looked back on the weakness past, that was kind of the moment, the Eureka moment.
Matt: I think, yeah, I had a similar moment or two similar moments actually this week one was when I went to Sainsbury’s at the weekend and that was just enough to be that way. And then the other was, I woke up after a vivid dream where I had dreamt that I was backstage at a a big public performance by Bruno Brooks and Gary Davis in a shopping center.
And that was the point. I wish I had the code. I need this locked down. So I’ve got something coming into my brain now, other than just the memories of the late eighties and early nineties. Yeah. Tariff
Matt D’Ancona: sort of spike Island. Only not
Matt: so, no, it was, it was, it was like in Westfield and it was, it was very drab and even worse.
I think it wasn’t even in the late eighties, early nineties, it was kind of Gary Davidson, Bruno Brooks today. Yeah.
Chris: Do you need to, you know, instant intervention here? But if I was, if I see what’s happening, I mean, I mean, I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t take a pen pandemic for me to find out what it’s like to stand and talk in front of a bunch of empty chairs, frankly.
But that, that kind of experience that would see me off. I think
Matt D’Ancona: it’s very strange.
Matt: How about you, Chris? Has anything happened in. Okay. Anything around your life in the last seven days?
Chris: Yeah, I was looking forward to watching some cricket, but then I wasn’t because that all went horribly wrong and and I’ve been busy at work and been it’s been quite good fun.
Actually it’s been, being, being busy is always good, but when you’ve got interesting things going on, it’s even better. So that’s okay. But no, not really. I wish, I wish I could say that it had been some grand thing that happened, but, but really we, we plot on that way. It was, it was quite cold this week and quite dispiriting because I get, I always get overexcited when the first rays of sunshine start dripping through the trees.
And then and now it got cold again. So that puts me into something to give a Dudgeon. And I’m hoping that next week is, you know, it gets a bit better and I can go outside a bit more.
Matt: Well, thanks for the warning. They’re in a bad mood. This week show Matt, Matt has joined us. Cause he’s going to be talking about the book that he’s got coming out a little later this month.
So I think we should probably get on with that.
Main Section
Matt: So on the 18th of March, there is a new book coming out called identity, ignorance, innovation. And it’s your book, Matt? It is, we had the pleasure of reading it over the weekend. Start off, just tell us a bit about what those three Is are all about. My you’ve linked them together.
Matt D’Ancona: Well, I guess the Genesis of the book was oddly enough.
It was during the Brexit period. When I, I kind of reached the point where I could hear not a single further debate about immigration and how awful it was. And it seemed to me the whole country got stuck on immigration, almost a proxy for change of any kind. You know, quite liberal was, have been on immigration for all sorts of reasons, but.
Economic and cultural, but in any case, it seemed that everything, all roads led to immigration. And I thought it’d be interesting to, to some other words, we’re going to be the eye and just play around with them. And I came up with three, which were identity, ignorance and innovation which we can maybe go on and talk about.
But the, the interesting thing of course, was that as I started writing the book and researching it and. And then along came the pandemic and, and, and that completely changed the context in which the book was written. But I, I suppose in ways that were pleasant, unsettling and both I found that it enhanced the, the, the themes and, and made me look at them afresh and they seem to be even more relevant.
So it was sort of born in Brexit and delivered in. It was birthed in Brexit and finally came to be properly. And in the age of COVID, which was a strange, a very strange writing experience. I mean, needless to say, I’ve never had anything like it before.
Matt: And the things about the three subjects individually.
So the first one identity, and this is about quite a bit about identity politics, but it’s more than just
that.
Matt D’Ancona: Well, I mean, one of the. Principle purposes of this book, it in a way, I mean, all books, however, whatever they are or books, seven elements of autobiography in them. And that, and this was, you know, I’ve always sort of occupied a kind of center ground and liberal position.
And it seemed to me that lots of people in that position, especially white people were looking at white men, I should say really. We’re, we’re looking at the identity politics movement as various expressed in. Black lives matter, me too. And so on. Extinction rebellion, you name it and being very dismissive of it.
And, and looking at it as a kind of Pat series of pathological emergencies that were wouldn’t last, or if they did last, it would be very bad instead of, instead of saying, well, what’s really going on here and is there anything we can learn from it? And it, and it seemed to me that a lot of what was being said, In identity politics, it was really worth listening to, and, and reflecting upon as a quite justified reproach to the kind of traditional liberal way of thinking and the assumption that the world occupy operates on a fair and meritocratic basis and the systems of justice in the end will always operate reasonably well.
And, and. They, they don’t and they haven’t. And lots of identity politics in this decade coming is about the fact that it’s taken so long for, to basic liberties and equality is to be, to be distributed. And that using the new technologies, I guess being a very part important part of it. People have found it easier and easier to express their politics prime primarily, or at least partly through group identity.
And I think this is in many respects, a positive thing because it’s, it’s brought to light the, the, the big gaps, the big failings. And I know, I know a lot of liberal people disagree profoundly of this and see, I don’t see politics as a mortal threat to liberal institutions, but I think actually, If, if we do this intelligently, there’s, there’s, there’s a lot to be learned from it.
And in it. Now there are also, there’s also some critique of identity politics in that section. It’s also sorts of I, I don’t distill it down to one goal, but but it, but it’s broadly positive. And I, that I already talking to some people about, you know, the book coming up and so on that has surprised people who didn’t, you know, I used to edit.
The spectator magazine. And what are you doing, messing about with identity politics? You know, you’re a 53 year old, straight white veil. Why, you know why you’re doing this. And, and I think part of it is just that journalistic instinct, which is just you, you know, you should remain curious, you should remain open-minded, you should, you should be looking at the new and, and absorbing the best of the news.
So that was, that was very important to me that the first part. And it’s kind of that in a way, it’s the most deliberately, the most combative section of the book I want. I want people of my generation to feel challenged by it, and I hope other generations will read it with interest too, but that there’s definitely a kind of generational dimension to that ignorance was really to do with a kind of realization I had over a number of years that.
Something was changing to the way knowledge was being both acquired or not acquired. And the role that examinations were playing in in that, that the, the, the, you know, I’d seen my own children and other people’s children and read about the situation in the States and the way in which teaching to the test and the kind of manic formatting of of, of the examination.
Treadmill was really kind of now becoming hostile to the acquisition of knowledge. It was all about just being able to regurgitate things in tick box form. And this was not the original objective of standardized testing. You know, standardized testing became came into Vogue for other reasons which were respectable, which was to try and raise standards.
And as so often happens, social policy is born. And it has its time. And I think we are now one of the things that’s very interesting about the pandemic, where in which essentially standardized testing has been put on hold is that I hope it will be a kind of rethink about how we test people. And then it will still always be some elements of national standardized testing.
I’m sure. But I hope that we’ll shift away from the kind of a slightly frenzied obsession. With these end of year examinations, which we, we, we tell our children that everything hangs, you know, it’s one Stripe or you’re out, which is a very, very unhealthy way to acquire knowledge and, and probably not in a way to acquire knowledge at all at precisely the time when we need people to be able to have as broad, a range of knowledge as possible, and to be able to think critically and creatively.
To be able to understand the liberal arts and having helped us the sciences, you know, this great divide we still have in this country between the humanities and STEM subjects, science subjects, and maths, very unhealthy and really bad, the whole relevance to not just the workforce, not just the, the world of work into which kids are going to be going, but the world You know, th th th we were going to be living in a world in which we’re going to be, we are already bombarded with information and we need the skills, the digital literacy to understand it.
We need the attention span to absorb information and knowledge, the space to have curiosity. This is one of my big bugbears, is that children, there’s a terrible word used in. Syllabus is called enrichment, which sort of means, you know, that after you’ve been forced fed like a goose, you know, being prepared for four Gras, you’re allowed 25 minutes to talk about, you know, a play or a book or a pop song, or, you know, Rappler X interests you before you’re sent back to the factory farm.
And I, I think it’s very sad because I think, you know, when you’re young, you, there should be some Slack in the system. It to enable you to roam and explore. And, you know, I, I think that people should have a very broad and eclectic approach to culture. I think it’s great to encourage kids to, you know, watch our house movies, but also when they want to talk about gaming, not to treat them as idiots because gaming is dominant one, possibly one could argue the dominant force in global culture.
Now. And I think, I think we have to be much more imaginative in our approach to knowledge. So ignorance was that, that was sort of the second big theme that I want to take on the innovation was, and it, and innovation became more important in the pandemic, I suppose, which was really how do we live in a world of change?
You know, how do we make ourselves resilient in a world of change? And so I selected a number of. Kinds of change automation, grain, life expectancy, the problem misinformation and so on, and just took each of them as a sort of example of how it might be possible to become more resilient, because these are forces that you gotta be, you know, more and more important in the years to come.
It could have, you know, could have easily just as easily looked at ’em. Pandemic issues, biology and so on. I mean, I only selected a few just as examples, but I just want us to take those three big themes and knit them together as a kind of offering towards a new politics. Because I think as we come out of the pandemic, there’s going to be a huge appetite for new ideas.
And I’ve been writing about politics a while now. And I, to be honest, I can’t remember a moment when the sort of intellectual. Landscape was so average, you know, it’s not fizzing with any great big themes. There are great movements out there. Great sorts of campaigns and so on. But what you don’t have is a sense of, you know, where, where the heat and the energy is going.
Be. Gather in, in, in politics itself. So this is my little contribution to that big debate that I hope will, will we’ll begin. You know, when we, when we’re sort of finally released drummer from our quarantine,
With the, the identity section, some of the things you described there, it, it feels almost the identity.
Politics is just one facet of how. Particularly, I guess social networks are starting to challenge established structures for organizations. So the way in which, for example I find now often that networks exist that exist, that span across organizations, with people, with interest in some sort of common interest communities that span across the can organize and be able to manage themselves.
In a, in a way that they just couldn’t have done even maybe 10 years ago. And now often, actually much more powerful for getting things done and things to happen than those that exist within an organization. And take for example experience of working in digital services within government, whilst government digital service in the UK was a catalyst actually, there’s a whole load of.
You know, Gulf camps and you know, open forums and stuff that sit across government organizations where you’ve got people who are affecting change much more effectively across their discipline or across the thing they want to talk about than they would if they were just stuck in a silo of a particular government department or a particular arm’s-length Balti.
And that I, I don’t think it has limited the public sector at all. I think that, that you can see those kinds of waves happening in all sorts of places. And so there’s something here about how. Our means individually to communicate starting to really challenge the traditional hierarchies of traditional organizations, maybe.
Yeah, no, totally. And I think that there’s a risk sometimes in of loose language. When we talk about social networks, we confuse that with big tech and the arguments about big tech and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. And it quickly degenerates into an argument about Facebook and Twitter, but actually as.
Sort of social phenomena, social networks, I think have been, you know, a net good by some margin. And you know, one of the things I look at in the book is the difference between networks and institutions and how people have lost, lost trust in institutions in the last 20, 25 years, the reasons. But also technology has enabled them to, as you say, not in a defined their own.
Peer groups and to be very creative and, and sometimes healthily disruptive in their fields. I always remember Eric, Raymond, the coder, I think back it as far back as 98, started talking about the cathedral versus the bizarre, you know, the idea that the w the old world was a world in which there was a cathedral that everyone worshiped in, which was the sort of the institution of authority and that.
The web as it then was because this was pre social media, pre broadband was going to bring in a world where it was more like big shopping, bizarre of activity and excitement. And he was right. Yeah, absolutely. That is, that is what has happened. And, you know, if you look at politics the most powerful institution now is the WhatsApp group without question.
And this is much criticized by some people, but actually. It’s it’s enabled people, both in campaigns and in parliament to liaise with each other, to interact with each other when they’re not physically near one another in a way that, you know, again, there’s a net positive. And I think that’s good.
And I think, I think it can be good in, in any, in any, yeah, actually to be honest, professional, particularly you know, you can see how creative. Those networks are because they, they’re not built on a deferential model. They’re built on a kind of lateral model of mutual respect and understanding. Now, sometimes they break down of course, like all networks do, but that’s not, that’s not a new phenomenon.
It it’s just the case that sometimes things don’t work out, but actually the opportunity I think is enhanced. And that’s the key is that the opportunities is greater than it was.
Chris: Do you think that’s, I, I would say that in my experience over the years, talking about that cathedral versus bizarre idea, the number of organizations there are still those, that kind of talk kind of ex cathedra, if you know what I mean?
So they, they it’s, this is, this is how it is, and that they’re telling you that what their opinion is, is the opinion. And there are organizations in my industry, you know, that, that do that. But they’re, they’re getting fewer and further between, because it’s, it’s not possible to be quite as prescriptive anymore, but it’s not possible to, to be the, the one source of truth, because there are so many ways you want to be challenged and so many other avenues for people to get valuable and valued information.
Matt D’Ancona: I mean, the, the the upside of that’s huge because it means that. The means of production as it were, have gone out of the very few people’s hands into everyone’s hands. You know, when I, when I started as a journalist in 1991, I was at the times and as a trainee and, and, you know, literally the journalists would flock in to the plant in the morning and in the evening, huge trucks with the sun and the times written on the side, we’d come out with the newspapers on it.
I mean, it was a completely Fordist model. And I mean, that was ex cathedra literally you know, the editorials that were written at the paper, they were the expressions of, I guess you know, it wasn’t even an elite view. It was an establishment view that, that, that really had enormous authority and power.
You compare it to now, everyone. How can do that, you know, at, at vanishingly small costs, zero cost. And I think that’s a good thing. I think I’m, I’m radically in favor of that. The, the, the, the only problem, and it can be a huge problem is, is the other kind of authority, which is not power over people, but the authority that comes from being a trusted source.
And so I think the, the new challenge, which is, has been wrapped as the last book I wrote was about post-truth. And I address misinformation in this one too is, is how do you, how do you kind of ensure that the world in which information is flat that your you’re not exposed to CDOT science, or if you are, that you know, that you are being so exposed and.
You understand that Holocaust denial is rubbish and, and that kind of thing. And this is, it’s an educational challenge. It’s a challenge of kite marking. It’s a huge test for the, the, the tech companies themselves. And I kind of feel we’re only in the foothills of this. People want big bang answers and that’s understandable.
And there is, there’s no doubt that legislation and regulation will play its part in it. But. It’s it w we need to sort of slightly keep, hold on nerve on this one, because it is true that at the moment, you know, things are not there is there, isn’t an answer to that clear and present danger, and it is deeply worrying that America is filled with people who still seem to believe in Q add-on.
And, and conspiracy theories generally. And the hole they have over people is, is, is, is an alarming. By-product of all this, but still in all. I think that the, the new information ecosphere is better than what proceeded it. And we will find ways through human ingenuity of including of improving our, you know, our kind of information nutrition, if you like and, and understanding, you know, what Sears we put into our minds and how to, how to sort that.
But. That’s that’s really what people should be thinking about that again, my, my, my sort of footnote worry is that there are very, very, very few politicians who understand this. I remember when I mentioned it in the book when Carol Cadwalader the, the great campaigning journalists on all this, and I went to testify to the culture media select committee, which was doing review under Damian Collins, who does understand all this.
But not all of his fellow MPS on this turd much about anything. And I, what struck me most about our period of being cross-examined was an NPE shall remain nameless. Cause it was in, it was in private asking me what what an app was. And this was not that long ago. And I, that really weren’t.
I mean, I thought that’s, that’s terrifying. Because it’s not as if that’s a, I mean, that’s not a, that’s not a high-tech question,
Matt: but I think there’s two, there’s two sets of knowledge. And I don’t think it’s just politicians. I think there are lots of senior people in organizations and possibly the population at large.
But in senior ranks, I think this is particularly the case. The one side of it is understanding technology, the kind of engineering and The way it works and how it works and what this stuff is. And it’s, I kind of vacillate between thinking that actually you do need to know some of this stuff to better make sensible decisions.
And actually, I don’t really know roughly above and beyond very little how a car works, but it gets me from 80 cents of do I need to worry about it? I can see pros and cons either way. The other side of it though, for me. And again, this might be because of my own background, having studied both of these areas, but the much derided subject of media studies.
Which was kind of in, certainly when I was going to university in the late eighties, early nineties was seen as a no pun intended Mickey mouse subject. But actually being able to have the cognitive understanding of being able to understand the media. As well as the content within it, so that you can start to be able to make those decisions about what is valuable and what is not.
And if you don’t have either of those, if you understand neither the tech, nor the you know, th th th the mechanisms by which media operates, you’re going to believe anything.
Matt D’Ancona: Well, that, that, that’s, that’s so true. And, and, you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s very striking to me. W when I go and talk at schools.
And so on that I mean the first thing that strikes me is that the, the old media world is just dead. In the sense that you can, you can be talking to a very bright group of kids and chats and before, and they’re obviously bright as buttons and, you know, really switched on and they, they get talking about the issues that animate them.
So the kind of kickoff question is, well, who’s red. And then I’ll reel off the BBC, the guardian, you know, a few kind of basic mainstream media sources, you know online today and there, if you’re, then we’ll put the hands up, you know, they’re getting their information from social media and YouTube.
Interestingly enough, I was, I’m always fascinated by the power of YouTube or the young as a, as an information provider. That’s very underrated. And what I think. You have now is, is that, that their teachers are over generation that, you know, through no fault of their own. Yeah. I’m not quick to teach them the digital literacy.
They need to understand that they’re being fed by algorithm rather than by, by veracity. I mean, the stuff they get is, is, is based upon their previous likes and their what, what they enjoy. And so that. They’re their confirmation bias is actually into the system. And this is just the start of the process you’re talking about Matt.
And I think it, it kind of, it’s, it’s incredibly important. And the sooner that happens the better, I mean, I I’m very much in favor of throwing money at this actually. And, and yeah, if necessary. You know, I wouldn’t fall tax on big tech or I know a small levy on every handset. Some, some, something like that that would just generate a big pot of cash that could be spent on helping teachers to learn how to do this because it’s, it’s, it’s so important.
It’s kind of, but it’s basic civic empowerment, you know, if you, if you’re not able to distinguish the good from the bad, if you’re not able to. See, what’s what’s real and what isn’t and what’s opinion, and what’s factually based. And, and not able to cross examine and interrogate what you’re fed.
You are going to just end up in a sort of canonized tribalized world, where you’re just huddling around a series of certainties, which may or may not be the case. And that is a problem. But again, you know, I think, I think, you know, we can fix it. I don’t, I don’t think that the problem is, is in any sense, unfixable.
It just requires a bit of energy and a lot of imagination. And so, and one of the themes that that goes through the book is, is it’s a kind of in patients with populist governments, because I think populous governments are very, very good. At complaining about problems and very, very bad at fixing them.
They, they insist that there are there are simple solutions to complex problems, but that wicked elites thought those simple solutions and immigrants and all manner of imagined enemies, including the mainstream media staff and in the way. And what’s really striking about. Poppiness governments is they’re not actually very good at doing stuff.
That if you look at the Trump administration, it didn’t really do very much, which is probably for the best, but it didn’t really accomplish anything. And if you look at the Johnson government it’s first year with the pandemic was, was a series of catastrophes. And one of the reasons that we’re all so blown away by vaccine rollout is that it’s the first time that the thing has worked.
And I, and thank goodness it is, but you know, it is, it is, we’re all sort of blinking and scratching our eyes and thinking, how did that happen? And, and, and hoping that it’s not some terrible. Cosmic mistake. And we’re in a multiverse and we’ll bounce back to the real Johnson universe where vaccine rollout is a complete disaster.
No, everyone’s getting the wrong doses. And you know, it is, it is, but it is rather amazing that people are quite as amazed as they are. And that’s because the populous governments are not, you know, they’re great at campaigning that you have to give it to Boris Johnson and to. To a certain extent, Trump, you know, who, you know, he didn’t, he didn’t lose by that much amazing at campaigning winning referendums, winning elections, that kind of thing.
But when it comes to governing countries, they’re completely terrible. And so that this is not, this is, as they say in white hall, a suboptimal moment, because we’ve got big problems. Some of them very nuanced and technical And we need, we need governments that are ready to take them on, you know, with energy.
Not, not, I don’t mean technocratic governments. I mean, passionate governments. But populism is not passionate about populism is about getting power and, and keeping it using popular support as your glue. So different thing. Hmm.
Matt: Do you think sometimes if you think about that populist ideal of. It’s all just about making a simple answer to things that order I wonder sometimes, actually is the tech industry, an example of that, where the answer will be tech.
And then we don’t have to worry about any of the heartbeat. We don’t have to worry about getting people to change because we just put some tech in. If you think about the early days of the pandemic, for example, it was going to be the app that was going to save us. Now that it’s all going a bit quiet about the app because
Matt D’Ancona: it has, doesn’t it,
Matt: Yeah.
Tech can actually fulfill that role of being the populist answer to staff and it doesn’t actually achieve it necessarily. There’s a, there’s a in the innovation agenda stuff. So there’s a real risk there, I think.
Matt D’Ancona: Well, I think it’s a, it’s a, it’s an abusive of, of, of what technology is which is exactly, as you say, to imply that it’s magic.
And you know, you’ve got a problem as. Socially complex is test trace and isolate. And you, you appeal to people’s love of their phones. Basically, you know, the phone is the modern amulet, you know, it’s the superhero amulet, it’s full of magic people. Can’t bear to let go of it. It’s they’re precious, you know?
And so people think, well, how is this test trace and isolate? And the work that sounds complicated. And Matt Hancock says, we’ve got an app. And possibly several and they say, great, we’ll have them all. And, and then none of them work. And, and actually that was a very good example of technology that was kind of like the wizard of Oz, the curtain behind Richard, the wizard of Oz head, but except the wizard of Oz was was sort of temp afterward telesales person who was meant to be tracing people.
And spoke to two people in 10 hours. I mean, it really was it in, in years to come that that, that policy will be studied as how not to do anything ever. It’s an incredible example of how to do things badly, but to your point, the app with a capital a who’s going gonna, it was the magical potion, wasn’t it?
It really was. And that’s, I think part of this is to stop talking about technology as a separate thing. Because I think what, what, what we characterize as the digital revolution is now everything really. Nothing is divorced from it. And so when you hear people saying there are technological solutions to this, I share your kind of suspicion something is up here.
This is a poker players tell. Because there are technological solutions to absolutely everything and the pandemic has illustrated that par excellence. Who really knew what Zoom was? Who wants to use Zoom ever again? It’s kind of been one of the great features of the last year, but speaking about tech as a separate entity, I think just deludes people into thinking that it’s kind of.
Almost like a commodity that they can, they can get hold of or, or tribal magic they can tap into when it’s, it’s no such thing. I mean, it is, it is now the infrastructure of what is to be human.
Chris: Well, you mentioned in your book, you mentioned that I come away where the research came from or whether it’s just a, I don’t know, it’s just a truism, I don’t know.
But this idea that innovation is overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the longterm. And what we’re talking about is that first piece aren’t we we’re talking about people overstating the impact of tech in this case or an app or whatever in the short term. I I’m thinking, you know, in the past we’ve talked to, we’ve talked about reading people like Dominic Cummings is interminable blogs, and he kind of.
You kind of gets us to this, this point where he can fix everything. Cause it’s all worked out when it’s, when it’s, it’s too complex. It’s way more complex than he realizes it. And he and he’s, but he comes up against the limits of his imagination because he sees this guy. He gets to see you get to blinded by the tech or every single time.
And I remember reading a book by a journalist who got into the AI and singularity, the singularity and the rationalist community. And the more I read it, the more frustrated I got with the kind of credulous newness of this, of listening to those bollocks and thinking there was anything in it at all.
Matt D’Ancona: It’s
Chris: I guess it’s, it’s like people are just and ruptured by this stuff.
Matt D’Ancona: Well, that’s a very good word for it. Because it, there is a religiosity to it. I, I don’t, I have a smidgen of sympathy because it is an exciting time to be alive in the sense that you’re watching, you know, I’m sure people in the past have always felt this when they’re going through a technological revolution, that’s really.
Transformative that print I imagine was the same 16th century electricity and so on and so on. And, and this is one that is, it is it is extraordinary and, and thrilling and occasionally scary to, to, to live through. But certainly the, the idea that, that, you know, you, you, you throw tech at a problem because it’s too complicated for civil servants to understand.
How was it damaging? Well, I mean, the interesting thing about Dominic Cummings was that he was, he, he managed to cultivate the image of a kind of scary, very clever bullying character who kind of prowled the corridors of white hall terrifying people and running Britain, wild, Boris Johnson sort of bumbled around actually the real model for, for.
Dominic Cummings is from the thick of it. If you remember Julius Nicholson, the guy who Tucker was always mocking because he was bouncing from department department and Malcolm Tucker would say, you know, he was, what was he doing today? He was designing a department to count the moon and actually that’s exactly what Cummings is doing almost literally that while we’re in the middle of this terrifying pandemic with the thousand people plus dying a day, Cummings was busy.
Doing schematics for his version of mission control in the cabinet office, that was a car that he was going to 10 big rooms in the cabinet office into, into a kind of mission control from which he would presumably run Britain as if it was one of the early Apollo missions. And, and, you know, exciting as that might be, it probably wasn’t the best use of the government of the prime minister’s chief advisor’s time in the middle of a global, a global plague.
But that was the, that’s what he liked to do. You know, he liked to, it always involved a book, usually obscure and it always involved abusing civil servants and it always involved an idea of total obscurity. And, and actually. That the absence of someone who talks rubbish is always to be celebrated.
And that’s really the great thing about coming to have having gone is that, you know, people who are trying to kind of hold the government together no longer have to deal with this in their ear every morning. And I’d need it late at night.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s like that, but you could see everything you wrote, you believed all this crap.
And it is, it’s easy. It’s so easy to get and right. Yeah. Interrupted or, or to be sucked in by it. I know that what happens is this idea that, that innovation has a longer term effect. We had a, we had a guy on a podcast a few weeks ago, Anthony, until he’s somebody who talks about PropTech and property. And we were talking about the city and he was saying, well, actually, you know, it doesn’t really matter that.
It won’t be that everybody doesn’t get back to work. You only need a certain amount. You know, Amazon, by taking 15% of retail has created tipping points throughout the retail industry, and that’s all you need. And that’s really, I think that that plays into this piece as well about the tech doesn’t have to be revolutionary revolutionary.
It doesn’t have to change everything. In the way that we sometimes think there’s going to go into happen, this, this massive change will happen. It just needs to hit a series of tipping points in different areas to have a long-term effect.
Matt D’Ancona: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and I think, you know, it’s very important to to maintain human agency in our relationship with tech.
I think it will very Seduced by the idea of the algorithm and, and, you know, big techs, desperation to keep hold of its intellectual property has encouraged the idea that the algorithm is you know, is is is it something very, very, very special and secrets in a black box somewhere in California that no one is allowed to look at except Mark Zuckerberg on a Thursday or whatever.
And, and, and this is a ridiculous approach to, to technology you know, and algorithms. Long pre predated digital technology and know it’s just math, it’s just code. And I think that demystifying, the algorithm is going to be very important in all of this. And I do think every child should have at least a rudimentary understanding of that.
I don’t think every child has to be a coder, but I do think understanding the power of the algorithm, how it, you know, how it’s how it’s going to develop, how. It’s going to teach itself as AI becomes more important. That’s much more important than the kind of Ray Kurzweil, singularity rubbish about, you know, consciousness and kind of a kindness kind of it’s almost like a Timothy Leary, 1960 psychedelia really read with, with a bit of you know, loaded on to a Mac book.
I mean, that’s really all it amounts to but it is very, very. It is amazing how infectious it is and how you see that sort of slightly the, the thousand yard stare in people’s eyes as they start to talk about it, you know? And off they go and it really is. I mean, I I’m by no means a technologists at all, but I can tell, I could tell sort of, not long into Kurzweil’s book on the singularity that it was rubbish.
And, and it was quite alarming how it sort of acquired this mystique because there’s nothing mystical about it at all. But it, you know, it is it’s the, we go back to the old RFC Clark thing about the, the partition between technology and magic, always being, you know, a poorest one in hell. That’s that’s always been the case.
Matt: So to finish up then, if we think about that, there’s ignorance gaps amongst it’s one thing for, for, for kids to be taught in, in a critical thinking and to be able to understand what media channels are about and how algorithms work and not necessarily need to know coding and all of that. What about for people who are actually in power today, though?
What, what, what would help us in terms of being able to get an understanding of senior levels in politics and in and in business. That’s missing at the moment, do you think?
Matt D’Ancona: Well, I think you know, I, I, I do think that as, as longevity and not just life expectancy, not just remaining alive longer, but actually working and living and, you know, enjoying a recreational life much for much, much longer time has transformed everything anyway and means that.
You know, w w we’re all going to be working longer, and we’re all gonna have to think harder about what our roles are, because, you know, people, you know, it’s quite possible that people will want, will want to carry on working in some way, till they’re, if they’re fit until into their eighties. But it’s ridiculous to suggest that they should remain in leadership roles until they’re 85 a minute.
It’ll have to be some sort of renewed intergenerational social contract where. All older people perform different roles. So I think that, you know, that’s, that’s a very interesting and open question, but also the, the old model of living, was it, you, you, you did your learning which involved, you know, either sort of going off and getting a degree or acquiring some sort of technical or vocational skill, and then you did your career and then you retired and then he died.
Very quickly and everything was kind of wrapped up in, you know, 70 years. And that’s just not the model anymore. Add to that, the fact that, that the old fashioned career is, is in pieces anyway, and that the, the pace of technology means that we have to continuously learn new staff. We’re going to have to BR I mean, to, to your question, Matt, about the, you know, older people, older people, you know, and, and I kind of, I I’m, I’ve been thinking about this myself, you know, what, what, you know, what, if I, if I could take six months off and go off and learn something, what would it, what would be really interesting to go off and learn?
You know, what would be useful? And I, cause I thought that when I, when I left, I had a brief period academia, you know, w when I, when I left that, I thought, well, this is it, that’s it I’m done with the world of learning. It was great fun, but now I’m off to do the working bit and then I’ll do the retiring bit and then I’ll die.
And, and it’s, it’s, it’s a bit more complicated than that. So persuading this generation, I’m 53 and my generation, probably the last, I think. Who will be really hard to persuade, to learn, you know, in, in, in middle age. But if it was possible, if companies and employers could find ways maybe through tax breaks and so on to, to enable people to go off and, and dreadful word up-skill or re-skill, but to do it intensively and properly, it would be transformative because someone, by the time they’re in their fifties, you know, it’s pretty good that.
And understanding what they need to learn. I mean, you’re, you’re, you’re better at learning either in a funny way than you were when you are 18, you may have lots of set ideas. That’s, that’s true. But you also, you’ve learned how to husband your time and how to, how to work out what the, what the nature of the problem is.
And so I think it’s thrilling to do that now. And I would, I would welcome a world of work and of a culture in which it wasn’t seen as odd. So, I mean, at the moment, the only thing you can really do, I guess, go off and do an MBA or, you know, some people go off and do a doctorate or something like that.
But just to actually go off from your job for six months and acquire a skill that would enable you to come back and maybe reconfigure that job in, in an exciting way. That’s something that, that, that we’re nowhere near embracing. And I think it would be brilliant. I think it would be, it would make being middle-age much more exciting.
It would, it would, it would enrich the workplace, you know, and it would, it would, it would it would mean that, that, that, that the arc of, of a working life wasn’t quite so predictable, which I think is I like, and I find very. Exciting as a prospect, but it, again, we have to, this has all to do with human agency and making it happen.
There are no predictabilities in this at all. I don’t trust market forces just to make it happen. I think it requires management to think in a way that thus far they haven’t.
Outro
Matt: Well, that brings us to the end of another show. We will put a link to Matt’s book on the website at wb40podcast.com, where will be able to no doubt pre-order it. And it’s well worth a read. And thanks for coming on Matt to talk about it. How was the week ahead looking like for you?
Matt D’Ancona: I’ve got, A lot of movies to watch.
Cause one of the things I do for. Tortoise is I write a weekly cultural newsletter, which is actually just an excuse to me to watch lots of films and stream lots of TV and stuff and read books that are interesting. So the next few days I’m going to, I’ve got a huge pile of backlog of stuff. I’ve got to get through, which I’m rather excited about.
And and then I thought at the weekend, I might, you know if I can find an empty auditorium somewhere, I might. Go for the double second on my own. This time it sits. Yeah. It’s living the living, the life, living the dream.
Matt: Fabulous. And Chris, have you got anything other than the usual ahead?
Chris: Oh, no, not at all.
It’s I’ve got a really busy week. I’m a little bit I’m not, not exactly stressed out about it, but I can see, I can almost visualize my outlook calendar and all the things that I need to get done. Which is doesn’t doesn’t put me with a great deal of Of pleasure, except that actually they’re all pretty, they’re all okay.
Things that I, I just know that they’ve got to get done and I don’t like the idea that I’ve got lots of work to do is dice, not very civilized. So I need to, I need to get through that, but it’s going to be a busy week. What about you,
Matt: Matt? I, well, we’re running within the team. We’re running a hack week and not like a, a coding hack week, but I’m trying to be able to apply some principles of.
Service design, but you’re trying to be able to deploy across our organization as a whole within what we do as a technology team within the organization. So we had the first session today and there’s going to be running with kind of an hour and a half each day over the five days. So hopefully I can get my team to be able to experience what it is to start with the needs of yours.
Customers and then design from there. And secondly, hopefully be able to find some things that we can do differently to make the services we deliver to our internal customers better. So that’s kind of a bit of a difference to the week as a result of that. Other than that, chucking through the procurement exercise at the moment and marveling at the irony that the supplier who we are having to make this whole procurement happen.
And because of their late delivery of updates to their software have delayed the entire process by the late delivery of their non-disclosure agreements. So Oh honestly, software companies, but there we go anyway. Wonderful to have you on Matt. Thank you again for joining us very much. And next week we will be joined by the, I think the word is inimitable Marcus, John Henry Brown, who is going to be talking about how to present and to perform during lockdown.
So until then have a great week.
On this week’s show we are joined by Matt D’Ancona to talk about his forthcoming book Identity, Ignorance, Innovation. You can find out more about it here:https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/matthew-dancona-5/identity-ignorance-innovation/9781529303995/?v2=true And you can pre-order it through your favourite local independent bookshop here. The machine-generated transcript starts here: Intro Chris: Hello, and welcome to the latest episode. You join […]
On this week’s show we are joined by David D’Souza to talk about the Human Resources profession, multi-skilled business enabling teams, and how he might have rumbled the whole world of the CIO. The week’s automatically generated transcript… Intro Matt: Once again we find ourselves recording at least I think that’s what we’re doing. Hopefully […]
On this week’s show we are joined by David D’Souza to talk about the Human Resources profession, multi-skilled business enabling teams, and how he might have rumbled the whole world of the CIO.
The week’s automatically generated transcript…
Intro
Matt: Once again we find ourselves recording at least I think that’s what we’re doing. Hopefully it’s it has been known for some weeks for me to not manage, to press the record button. So that was embarrassing. And we are into the month of March. That is spring has sprung. Well, they’ve got pictured again tonight.
Chris, how are you?
Chris: I’m very well, thank you, Mike. His house got very chilling, but today I was out this morning quite early and it was cold. It was a bit of a shock because it was quite pleasant to the weekend then. And one gets a sense that everything’s going to be fine and we can all emerge blinking into the sunshine and coronavirus will be a long forgotten artifact of the past.
But now it’s called again today. So so here I am wrapped up in my, in my, in my daily job, but trying to maintain some sort of decorum and and. Maybe think that that temperatures will rise and I’ll start to start to feel a bit better. But so we, we are, we’ve got a funny week and as much as it was, it was, it was a full stop at the end, the week of this lovely two days weather.
But last week was really, really busy. I had so much going on so many people had to call and my diary was falling then this week as well, you know, I. This isn’t really my normal preferred style of working. I prefer lots of contemplating time in between doing things. You know, I like to work in short bursts of, you know, once every six months or something, but this is no, this is, this is, this has been a very busy, busy week.
Matt: Good. I’m glad to hear it. Busy is good. I’d say. And I just imagined now you sitting in Western tasks contemplating like the border, which actually know, I don’t want to think about that image for too long. And joining us this week is Teva. D’Souza David. It’s an absolute pleasure to have you with us.
How’s your last seven days been.
David: I can’t remember. I’m tired. I think it does feel as though that there’s some kind of break and I’m curious as to how people would listen to this podcast in two to three years time. And it must seem like a very, you know, a snapshot of a moment in time where all we’ve got going on is a pandemic.
And I’m now kind of chatting to family members and there’s nothing left to say. So how’s your week been opening lockdown. How about you? Very similar. Yeah. It it’s, it’s been yeah quite Pacey, same as Chris. Probably not enough thinking time, but it’s nice to have the weather turned is to be able to get outside.
May not be too brisk at the same time.
Matt: Yeah, it makes a big difference. Those those moments of being able to just get out and not have to have 17 layers on and feel that your bits are going to drop off. You know, but
Chris: but you know, to what you said, the David bat about having no time and then people looking back and all we had was the pandemic.
I didn’t think it, I don’t think anybody realized how much time upon them. It would take up, you know, it’s, it’s like it’s, it’s. So it’s in the way, frankly, it’s, you know, I just don’t didn’t do anything. Anybody we’d realized how much effort it would be, or it would have taken more, more preventative measures.
David: More preventative measures. Yeah. It’s a really interesting one. I think, pick your tide and they don’t know why that’s an interesting kind of psychological quirk. But I also think she pointed, it fills the senses as much as it feels. The time even just trying to keep abreast of the good news, the bad news, indifferent news, all the different views on what the stats are doing.
Maybe, maybe it is just, you know, the new national pastime is arguing about what exactly is happening with the pandemic when it might stop and how we got here. But yeah, it’s, it’s quite busy. I know. Maybe it’s replaced cricket
Chris: just as well. I think. But but the fact is I tried just listening to people talk about the different vaccines you can happen and expressing an opinion as if they know of any clue about what’s in the vaccine.
It’s all as if you know, there’s millions of people in this country will go to a vape shop and buy it, buy some things or put in a vape and smoke it without, you know, if they don’t know it’s in it, it could be. It could be anything as far as they’re concerned, but I’ll know we’re interested in what’s in a pandemic.
If thought you’re going to go in a building and say, what mixer do you use in the concrete, in this building? I’m not sure I want to go in this building until I know. Did you use, did you use two parts and then one done? What sorts of men did you get
Matt: to be fair? Chris? I do work with people who are exactly like that because they work in the building.
David: I quite like it there’s a sense of national boards and where like, The old conversations can only have the framing of the pandemic. So, you know, what’s the weather like has been replaced by, you know, how, how are you doing in lockdown, all that kind of stuff. And to your point, you know, you’ve got people expressing a view on things that they’ve got no inclination of, but it almost feels like the old Patrick compensation in this.
Oh yeah. I got the Pfizer one. Yeah, I’ve heard it. Yeah. That’s it. You know, like in the same, in the same way you might prefer to, I don’t know. Like getting a new phone or something like
Chris: that. Oh, Continentals are mine. Oh really? Yeah,
David: yeah, yeah, no, it was transom the last week and they said the Pfizer one’s definitely better. So if you do have the option go for that, it’s just like the old pattern, but on a situation that we’d never have envisioned actually being in it, it’s strange. It’s a bizarre way to deal with it.
Matt: We do have to have these topics.
They don’t mean, I also say that though, for your point, Chris, about all the time that it takes up, that I think the the CEO of Goldman Sachs and also the CEO of the Canary Wharf estate have both come out and said that, no, this is what we need to be able to free up time is to spend more time commuting again.
That’s where we’re all going wrong. As you get these remarkable vested interests. Now starting to talk. But how everybody’s going to go back and that the prime minister no less, a couple of days ago, talking about how he didn’t really believe that anybody would change from working in the office. This is a man who has his office paid for, to be at home at number 10 Downing street and is unable to see any of the irony, anything that he says.
But yes, that’s quite interesting
David: though, isn’t it? I hadn’t realized how. Productive the commute allegedly was until some of these people came out and said, this is the critical bit. So I wonder if you can cut out the office in the middle and just have people doing extremely long commutes and then turning around and going back again, maybe grabbing something at the other side.
Cause apparently that’s essential team, but essentially just having an extended day of traveling, just,
Chris: just build a massive circular train line and just, just get on, get on it, you know, go Rand once or twice and get off and go home.
Matt: I D I did have a friend once who in the days in the circle, I was a true circle rather than the sort of a bridge to you shape it is these days actually managed to get so drunk.
She managed to go three times round before she managed to get off again. I’m not entirely sure how she knows that three times.
Well,
David: she made use of that for collaboration. You know, there’s random moments where she met someone and innovation really kicked it off. So, yeah, exactly. So, you know, it wasn’t wasted time in any way.
It was essential to keeping the company moving like company on the country. No, absolutely.
Matt: In other news this week as well the the, the procurement exercise has reached a new level of excitement where we’ve spent. So, well, we spent a good two hours taking us from 17 down to five, which is very exciting.
We’ve we’ve let the, the 12 who weren’t successful to get through to the next stage. And within minutes Afro-Cuban had had people very angry saying no, but we do meet your basic requirements and you think there’s nothing quite like immediately getting shirty to be able to prove that the the potential client has made the right decision in taking him off the supplier list.
I, I never fail to understand salespeople. It’s quite busy. And it’s also been school placement announcement day to day. So up and down the length of the country people including myself and I believe it was David had been finding out that maybe we’re not going to get the school that we first wanted.
Which is somehow going to be quite annoying for quite a lot of people. But yeah. So how, how have you been finding the, the pressure of the school choices?
David: It’s been it’s, it’s quite odd doing it actually at a time when the children can’t attend school because mentally I’ve got a clock to, it’s just another place that she can go, but obviously that won’t be the case for her entire life and it’s quite a bit cold.
So didn’t get the school that she wanted to buy. Two or three towns which has got an issue but there’s, you then go into the appeals process and all that kind of stuff. And so hopefully she will end up at a school that’s, you know, slight nearest to where she lives rather than just randomly picked at some point in the country.
Matt: Yeah. It’s I suppose it was quite weird. We were S I say we were separate because my wife was super organized and insisted. We did a lot of the School tours last year, rather than this year which turned out really quite useful because obviously there were no tours going around other than virtual things, but saying what schools were able to do with virtual tours was interesting in its own.
Right. And I don’t want to say that one of the schools that we saw obviously did a lot of work with drones to be able to get just that right level of whizzing through the air, kind of look about what their school was going to be like to be at.
David: Well now they’ve just got abnormally tall children for the video.
I mean, there’s two options and I think you’ve, you’ve gone for one, probably say too readily there.
Matt: Well it’s yeah. It’s the technologist in where you say I’m immediately going for solutions? Not. Yeah. Anyway, we are going to talk about the world of people and human resources this week because David joins us from, well, not from the CIPD, but a rep representing the CIPD worked for the CIPD.
However you wanna.
David: Let’s go for a wet for the CRPD and I’m having a conversation with UT.
Matt: Excellent. That’s a good way to know how these things were. Christine will
David: be far less nervous about that.
Matt: Excellent. Well, let’s get on with it and see what we can find out about the contemporary world of HR.
main interview
Chris: So Mr. D’Souza your w worked for CIPD and some people might not know what CIPD does. I mean, we, maybe in the past, we’ve seen those little tables at events that say, Oh yeah, get your C IPD points for attending this event here. And then, and then you might to do something with them, but maybe, maybe that’s not widely understood.
What on earth is a CIPD date?
David: Yeah, that is all the Western parties. Chris, I just always had the sausage rolls and yeah, there, they are frequently a qualification. So yeah, with the professor, somebody for HR and people development within that, you’d have a broad umbrella of, you know, everything from paying people, to recruiting people, to training people, to making sure that organizations stay legal, but also making sure that.
Organizations have the culture that they need to achieve what they want to do. So we’ve got over 155,000 members. We have a host of students at one point in time, we offer a qualifications membership, which kind of recognizes people’s professionalism. And then we also do giant conferences and to have a perspective on the world of work.
So we talk about championing, better work and working lives. So genuinely attempting to drive the change in behavior and policy that ends up with the word wellbeing better because it’s important to many people. It’s a determinant of the quality of their working day and at times of their lives. So it’s an important thing to have a voice on and to make better.
Chris: Well, it’s perfect thing to be talking about right now. Okay. Because everybody, you know, we, we talked to a guy called we took time to the assemblers last week. Wasn’t it, Matt? And that was a really interesting conversation because he was, he’s more involved in property with the state, but also what, you know, kind of future of work stuff and how people will work and where their work.
And it’s a conversation, which is never ending at the moment. Isn’t it in the business world, because we’re all thinking about what’s remote work going to be like, you know, is everybody going to be shooed back onto trains and press gang to back into back into misery and offices? Or, or will it all be it?
The completely different future where we all existed as virtual avatars and and have all this time to ourselves. And that is not, there’s not going to be either of those, but it’s it’s a great conversation to be having. So no doubt, it’s something that’s exercises, your team and members and people generally at the moment.
David: Yeah. And so people have been talking about the feature work forever. And also disruption, that was always the thing, wasn’t it? You know, the world of where it’s going to be disruptive now it’s probably been disruptive and no one’s really enjoying it. Disruption was never sexy as suggested. And we’d got a banker people aren’t you can’t just working normally.
On site throughout this thing, cause I haven’t had a chance to do it and there’s probably not enough time and attention spent on that. And then you’ve got another group of people who’ve come through. One of the biggest changes that we see in the world of work at pace, which is previously having been office based and now working from home in an enforced manner.
And we’ve got data that’s probably unreliable in sense of what’s going to happen next. Cause you’ve got a number of forces at work from real estate and messaging that you have there to governmental influence through to actually just the power of our kind of behavioral norms as human beings. So, you know, I think some of the surveys at the moment when you’re asking people, how, how will things be in a year’s time?
It’s very difficult to answer that because of a pandemic, you know, that that’s not a good way of getting a reliable, but what is clear is that things are going to be very different to your point, how different. Very hard to tell will it be Dilek utopian, probably not given the economic status. So we’ve got a layer of realism that we need to factor in, but yeah, it’s exacting our members, you know they lead organizations, support senior teams and organizations, and lots of organizations are having to either make proactive choices, alternatively, or being forced into choices about how they’re going to spend their money and how they can keep surviving.
So challenging time, but an interesting
Chris: one. And challenging time for HR teams, HR departments, and everybody is trying to keep the organization on the right side of legal and make sure that the people are doing are prospering or whatever. So interesting to see this week we were talking about this recently met the chap from octopus energy, who was, who said we don’t have an HR department.
And, but I think Matt, when, when we looked into it, some of the people in our little community, they find they were HR people at octopus energy. What was going on there?
David: So I have a look into that because I’ve seen this come up over the years. It’s quite a bold statement, isn’t it? You know, don’t like HR, we don’t have them. And invariably, what you find is they still have a need for the things they jump provides. So they still need to recruit people. They still need to train them.
They still need to pay them at a very minimum. And quite often HR has got a broader impact than that. So. What appeared to come out over time? Possibly, you know, the headlines were misleading is that they don’t have an HR department because they don’t have an HR director, but they do have lots of people doing HR jobs.
And I think when people say we don’t have an HR department possibly you would assume that men, you don’t have anyone doing HR. And I believe the same claim was made about it. We don’t have an it department but it turned out Archie. Very similar about a group of people who, if you collected them together in a room, you’d probably go that’s the it department and there.
So I think it’s important. It’s always important to be here. What are they trying to solve for? And it appears to be, they’re trying to solve for more frontline and managerial accountability and people be more adults and not kind of pushing decisions elsewhere, which in fairness, most HR departments would be in favor of as well.
One of the biggest challenges is managerial capability. But it’s one of those areas where no matter how much you might want to hope that people could be adult stuff happens, right. Either mistakes happen or there’s a degree of expertise that’s needed to understand the situation and what can and can’t be done.
So it was a really interesting story. It provokes a lot of conversation but as is often the case, it wasn’t quite what it claimed to be. As soon as you scratch the surface.
Matt: It does feel to me, it, it does start to tap into maybe some of the the brand positioning challenges that HR having it actually indeed it does.
And finance do, and you know, most support functions within organizations do. And a lot of that stems, I guess, from there’s a transactional role. Doing stuff. So running recruitment exercises, or, you know, that, that things you’ve got a maybe transformational role, which is about being able to help an organization to do things better and differently.
And that’s always a challenge. And then you’ve got a regulatory role, which is to be the people saying, don’t do that. And I guess the. I mean from my experience of working in many different organizations over the years, it seems that one of the HR biggest the HR team’s biggest challenges is dealing with incompetent managers.
And one could argue, well, that’s a lack of the transformational part of HR going on. This led to lots of incompetent managers, but it’s not really, it’s just under-resourced and all the rest But when you get those kinds of stories coming out, it does feel that there’s this. Oh, what? I had to do this one too.
And I didn’t like it. So therefore I’m going to make a lot of noise about the fact that I did something I didn’t understand. And didn’t like, Yeah, constant balancing, I
David: guess. Well, my view is organizations should always be reviewing their structure and their ways of working to look at the context that they’re trying to work in and what they’re trying to achieve.
So the kind of blanket, I always do things this way, or always do things that way never strikes me as a sensible way of approaching things. And in this particular story, I think it was. I had a chat with someone on the front desk, 10 years before and had an epiphany. And now there’s something really positive to say about my intent to, to empower people and support them.
But as you say, there’s, there’s a tension in terms of what organizations provide and actually, you know, whether it’s facilities and workplace management, only being known as the people that keep the toilets clean, whether it’s it to, you know, switch off and switch it back on again, or whether it’s, you know, HR just that said to hire and fire.
The best organizations find a way to actually think about those as genuine strategic assets. Far more broadly in terms of how do we shape our culture? You know, what’s the importance of the work environment for people and how can we ensure that that’s developing productivity and from a digital point of view, rather than just a pure it point of view, you know, customer and user experience and a far richer way.
So yeah, there’s a challenge for HR in sense of capacity and in terms of branding. But actually when I speak to CEOs and their HR teams working brilliantly. They wouldn’t swap them out ever. You know, it’s, it’s an absolute bit, the business that, that are alone. So as with any profession, there’ll be some people lacking behind the pace.
But that’s no reason to kind of, you know, make decisions about whether you have a functional goal. Then we’ve got to be a bit more enlightened than,
Matt: but what’d you think of the things that would Mark out a, a really good well-regarded HR team at the moment?
David: So I think at the moment there’s a few things.
So one is a, a richer view around wellbeing and productivity. So actually for lots of HR teams, they’ve had a real chance to prove their worth over the last year, really difficult and tragic circumstances to do it in, but it’s gone from our you’re the, you’re the person that gets me, someone to actually you’re understanding some quite complex change management and helping see us through.
But the second one, and I think the most important one for me and for them. Just results. So there are still too many actual teams that will have a series of initiatives and series of pledges, things that like to impact. And three years later, you’re in the same place. And that’s true of lots of different functions of the business, but the ones that can genuinely, you know, a board or a senior team can identify a problem.
And the HR team can think really creatively out of the box about what’s the best way of, you know, genuinely solving that. They’re the ones that actually properly move on culture or performance in a different way. And that’s how you change your brand. It’s not, you know, whether you call the HR team, the people team it’s about actually the substance of that job and what people can expect from.
Matt: Yeah. Are you seeing things like design thinking, coming in as part of that within the way image? The HR groups are approaching these challenges.
David: They can come in primarily, I think most often kind of under the umbrella of employee experience. So broadening out the employee engagement piece and looking at slightly wider end to end the experiential piece, and then design thinking, being the way that you think about the different elements of that.
It’s a bit of an odd one. There are some techniques that you can actually take from it that would add value. But actually I think the whole thing goes back to slightly more user centric approach that would have been useful in design no matter what, no matter how you brand it, that’s always been the challenge.
And I know there are lots of different Lots of different ways of describing work. But 30 years ago, the challenge probably was understand the problem at a complex level, not just a superficial level, understand the evidence and try and find out the best way to solve it. Focusing on the impact that you wanted to have.
I’m not entirely sure how much that’s shifted even though probably some of the philosophies or approaches are laid on top of that. So if you look at no, it’s not a design thing, just pluck it. Yeah. Business model, canvas. Useful to up signal, but you know, obviously not knocking it. But before the business model, canvas businesses still had the same challenge, but still what we attended today.
So definitely say more design thinking, definitely seeing some more user centric thinking holistic joined up systemic thinking is what organizations need more of. And you see that particularly around some of the more complex areas. So if we think about wellbeing or if we think about inclusion and diversity, they’re not things that you’re going to solve with.
You know, a substitutionary or, you know, we’ll put in an app and that will solve it. It doesn’t work if for complex problems in the middle of a pandemic, you know, paying for some online yoga sessions, isn’t going to be the thing that’s going to solve the problem at the heart of that actually reevaluating the way that you do work.
Fundamentally, the ways of working within the organization, the balance of resource. It’s harder, but it’s more necessary. Equally inclusion and diversity. The one day training courses are going to solve that. You’ve got to go deeper and harder and our range of different spaces. And that’s where the really good HR professionals and dope, which is designing.
Not for this might make a difference, but actually, if we do all these things well, we can’t help but succeed. And I think that’s where that kind of focus and drive comes into it.
Chris: Isn’t isn’t that always, I mean, I’m thinking about what you say in relation to a HR teams, it teams, finance teams, whoever it might be.
And generally speaking, if you try to do something as cheaply as humanly possible, then you’ll get only get a certain amount of,
You only get a certain outcome. And that will mainly be a kind of, this is what this is. This is what you can do. And this is what you can’t do. And then you, you, HR, as long with, along with it has been called the business prevention department to companies, you know, for, for many years.
And what you’re already talking about is HR people just like that. It counterparts people who. Actually can articulate the value of what they do to the, to the organization and therefore get more money to do it because they can show the more they do it. Yeah. The better the outcomes are generally. And overall, rather than just keep you out of jail, you know, stop, stop.
You’re getting dragged under, by, you know, horrible tribunals where people, you know, might want more to suggest that you might have treated them badly on all of those things. So two things that actually, as you say, if you can do all of those things, if you can change the culture in a business or change the way people act or change the way that that people see how the, how they see their roles and they end up working in a more effective way and producing better outcomes, then you’re doing a much bigger job than.
What are the rules? Let’s make sure we don’t, we don’t break them.
David: Yeah. And I think it’s, for me, it’s solving business problems rather than solving the things that you see necessarily in HR publications. There’s a massive difference. But one of my favorite stories of the last few years was chatting to someone from, from a European postal service.
And they’d been trying to get the organization excited about employee engagement and the organization just wasn’t having any of it. So they went to the organization and said, look, what problems are you trying to solve? And I said, well, actually it’s absence because if someone is not able to do a postal route, cause they’re off, we have to get somebody in who hasn’t done that before.
And it’s quite complex to cover. And, and all of those things quite challenging. So they said, well, if we can help you with the absence problem, would that be good for you? And they went, hold on, I’ll be up so amazing. And all they did was everything they would have done under engagement. It’s, it’s a really.
W we can talk about and lose focus on the problems with John. So I was at a conference couple of years back, and someone asked me, they said, how do I get my senior team to focus on wellbeing? And I said, well, what else is on their mind? And they said all that cheap as he focused on that, what happens if their people burn out.
Oh, so you’re just trying to call it, you know, what you think the HR world thinks it should be. And I think sometimes we are too prescriptive, you know, we know here are the solutions that need, rather than working back from the problems that organizations have.
Matt: Yeah. W also noted a couple of weeks ago, a.
A technology company who they’re taking their wellbeing program. So seriously that they’d gamified it, split everybody into teams and made them compete on how much wellbeing they were each doing. And I was thinking you might have missed the point within this whole world, but yeah, it’s it’s an interesting set of challenges.
One of the things that I was attracted to actually to my current job by was that rather than having HR and it and finance and the other services, health and safety communications, and so on other services that support the business, having each of their individual silos and then it reporting into different.
Strands up at a board level, actually, with the exception of finance, all of our business support services report into the same exact director and that idea of having a multidisciplinary team that is delivering all of the services, the platforms that are needed for an organization to operate is something I’ve been.
Talking about and writing about for ages is the first time I’ve actually had the opportunity to work in it. Now, the reality is it’s quite challenging because it people and HR people and FM people and. Comms people and health and safety people all talking completely different languages. So they don’t understand a bloody word each other saying waste of time.
So you’ve got some structural issues there. And especially because we’re quite small, we don’t have them that the overhead to enable that collaboration to work necessarily particularly well. But in principle, it sounds like a really good idea. Is that, is that something you’re seeing happening? Organizations or is this an outlier?
David: It’s all done a podcast, isn’t it? Cause I feel under pressure to say it’s something I’m saying just in case of missed, you know, missed it. Not, not terribly. I think you’ve seen some more functions coming together, but not actually that often with that breadth of. Tolerant and that stretch coming together.
I think it’s a fantastic model. I just think it requires time and mature. And it’s probably one of those things. That’s less, it’s more normal in the market. It’s always going to be problematic for someone joining as well, because, you know, even if you do get a group of people who are comfortable working in that multidisciplinary way, Do start having a more common language and breaking down some of those barriers.
You’re still gonna have people coming from specialisms to join that team. But it, it actually makes sense. I mean, you used the word kind of support functions. I tend to talk about enabling. So without those functions, the business. Simply can’t function in the way that it needs to in can’t perform it in the way that it wants to.
Because I think sometimes there’s that kind of split between frontline. This is really important. And then we have some people clearing up behind us. Whereas actually I think organizations genuinely need to understand the strategic value of having brilliant similarly spaces actually in really competing for talent there rather than just competing for time.
What puts you at the sharp end, but I’m really glad you, are you enjoying it? Yes,
Matt: it’s. It’s been a lot of learning for me. It’s a new sector for me. It’s also the first time I’ve been in paid employment for conventional paid employment for about seven years. So getting back into working as a part of the team, as opposed to being a freelance gun for hire,
David: because you were an assassin for a while.
Yeah, exactly.
Matt: I was, I was like Mr. And Mrs. Smith her, but I think that the, as I say, I think that the challenges that naturally, because we’re relatively small, being able to get, to get those functions to not just be working on the transactional across any of those functions is the hard bit, because also establishing a new way of working that involves bringing people from different disciplines together.
You have to do work on, on that. And if you’re stretched for time and everything is reactive, it’s really hard to be, to carve that out. But I’ve I started to see this when I was working in the civil service and or do work in the civil service and that there was, there were so many cases where people were talking about, you know, the future of how we do things and user centered design.
And then I was like, why do we have these separate functions that report up through totally different reasons all the way at the top of the organization? Cause that’s reinforcing a lot of the problems that you’re trying to address. And quite often,
David: You know, historically has been that seat at the table conversation, which I think is one of the most tired conversations.
They can kind of have in that space. But I imagine actually it very much depends on who’s leading that function and actually their bias and their background so that everyone actually feels they’re being appreciated and contributing rather than I’m an adjunct to what this function really is. Because I can see that being particularly challenging if it doesn’t have great leadership, but with great leadership.
Well, I think that’s how you’ve got to look at things, you know, if we do it well, rather than one of the pitfalls, I can see that being a really strong model. And it harks back to that piece of octopus that we spoke about at the start, which is you have to be open to. Is there a better way of solving this with
Matt: the models of professional membership?
The other thing I find curious if you compare the HR world to a great extent, the marketing world as well, where there’s been a real drive for accredited professionalism, as opposed to winging it. Professionalism. That seems to be the thing that reign Supreme in the world of, of it. I guess the first thing I find interesting is why have HR and marketing being able to establish a culture where it’s expected that people have qualifications in the CMI or from the CIPD and the.
You know, the, the fish compared to society’s floating around at the edges with nobody. Quite sure why I want to be a member. Can do, do you think there is it just the nature of the people who work in those professions that needs one to one to organize in that way and others to
David: not. I think it’s quite interesting.
So professional bodies kind of come in three-ish tiers, so you’ve got licensed to practice. So I couldn’t really do it without it. Then you’d go you know, used us as an example of an organization where you’d probably be expected to happen. So you’d have, you know, a dominant position. And. It would be, you know, a normal job advert.
And then you’ve got some organizations that never quite Breton that critical mass. And I think, you know, one of the advantages we have, we’re 107 years old, so there’s a legacy in history and kind of status, but that’s been built up over time. But I think some of it is affinity community. Some of it is some of the it jobs can be relatively.
Technically siloed. So Hal’s a naturally kind of, you can’t do it without people. You can code pretty effectively is a solitary procedure. I wouldn’t suggest that people do that the whole time, but it can be quite heads down. And I, I just think that’s a different maturing of the professions and the recognition, and it can often be quite a course or qualification or platform driven.
In terms of, you know, learning and acquiring skills whereas for some of the others, it’s, you know, entry points and then working through in a more structured way. It’s, it’s a professional body. It’s a fascinating well actually if you work in them, they’re probably fascinating. I imagine they’re really boring if you look at something, so we’ve talking for too long on it.
But there’s something about having a critical mass in the marketplace that actually a bit like if the comparison of makers, if you were trying to start an online group we’ve all seen them starting to flounder and that’s because you just don’t have enough people to get the conversation going.
There comes a point where you reach critical mass and people can expect to go in and get value from it. And at that point, that’s where they started to kind of flourish and nourish themselves. And I think for some professions, you’ve, you’ve got that base. Where actually you can go in and everyone else has got it.
So therefore that’s what I need to break into that status. Really difficult thing for an organization do. And because why D why do people think you need it because of the market share, how do you get the market share where they need, if people need it? So it’s really difficult. The barriers to entry, I guess, to that tier are really high,
Matt: I guess, as well.
There’s something about how. You have got to serve two constituencies. You’ve got to serve the needs of members, but you’ve also got to serve the needs of the people who employed the members. And you’re acting as an assurance service for employers, as well as the, you know, the professional body for the, the, the HR professionals themselves.
David: Yeah. Completely. And we fulfill that role. But I mean, he is the amplified T if you think about it, if you think about the amount of cost and investment in that space, You would have thought actually, you know if you’re a CEO and you’re hiring for that, you want something probably more than track record, if there was, you know, external validation of that.
But I’m not sure that it’s seen in quite the same way, which is a really interesting one, considering that the criticality to almost all bits of the employee experience and customer experience.
Chris: No, maybe it’s maybe it’s just Dan, does you talk about maturity, but I think maturity not just of.
Organizations, but, but of the market, generally, the things that you wanted out of a an it person 10 years ago, aren’t the same that you want today. Probably. And, and the, the things that changing in the people world are, you know, people pretty much stay the same regulation changes, but regulation changes slowly by accretion.
It’s not, it’s not the rapid pace of change that we see in it. So it’s just, maybe it’s just not that it’s not suited to these kind of. Bodies as, as you say, 107 year old organization can fit into you know, you know, 2000 year old, probably if, if not 5,000, you hear a whole process of managing people.
David: It’s quite interesting. It’s a really. That’s a really interesting point. And what it spoke to me is if you think about, if you think about tech entrepreneurs, no, no one thinks about the qualifications that sit behind that you think about. Individual excellence. And you think about, you know, understanding something that to an outsider was completely impenetrable.
Now HR is quite often the opposite of that, which is that everyone thinks they can do it. Everyone thinks that I have to train people. Everyone thinks they’ve got an eye for talent. Everyone thinks they can lead people effectively, all of those things, whereas. If I were to think if, if I were to think of almost the whole year with would stereotype of someone who’s great at it, it would be that kind of, you know, it would be a hacker, wouldn’t it flying through some kind of computer generated landscape that’s supposed to simulate how hacking really works, but even, you know, likes of his, of books, you know, Google any of the tech startups, it’s different ethos.
And maybe you don’t know for sure. So associated with the steadiness that months in some of the other professions.
Matt: Although there’s that kind of mythology about the the founder genius entrepreneur type, but actually SBR missed most of it’s very RP systems. It’s really dull. And if you w w when I was working at Microsoft shortly before I started there, they’d done some demographics surveying of the UK it population.
And they actually found that it professionals, this is about 12 years ago now, but on that. We’re significantly more change averse than the general population. So this mythology about how it sort of the cutting edge is, is a very thin sliver. I guess the other part, though, if you think about the accreditation part of this, there have been lots of other routes.
So software companies particularly have made a big old monetized. Set of products out of accrediting people to be certified engineers or whatever. So Microsoft and articles and, and all the rest make a, a good solid revenue out of being able to credit people, which would be the sorts of things that maybe an HR would be done by the CIPD.
And similarly, we’ve got things like quality standards. The much more suited to being able to, you know give a standard set of accreditation for information security or coding or service delivery. And, and, and, and so it’s probably been achieved in different ways. Cause
David: it’s really interesting.
So there’s a thing about there. Isn’t a certain level of is indecipherable from magic. It departments do things that. Your average person in the business doesn’t even begin to understand. So I mean that in a really basic level, right? If my laptop doesn’t stop by give it to someone and they give it back to me in a couple of days speaks, and I don’t know what’s happened there.
I don’t have any insight into that with finance. I can sit down, I can kind of understand the P and L with most bits of a business. I can get talked through. What they’re doing and why maybe have a view on it, even down to you, the legal team, this is the guidance. Well, is it really, you know, how does it look?
It is like magic. And so there’s something really odd about the fact that something so fundamental to our lives that we all use. We don’t have a clue about how it actually works, you know, th th the level of dependence and that, you know, we’ve seen that this year with zoom calls and things like that, you know, just people, but literally, like, how does this witchcraft work?
Cause I’ve never had to use it before. The intimidation that comes with technology as well. So you say otherwise, you know, completely in control individuals when faced with not being able to work out how to connect their printer, just falling apart and being wholly reliant on another human being. I think maybe there’s something in that you get, you get away with being far more magical than any other department, if you work in it.
Matt: Yeah. I wonder if there’s a short lifetime on that now, now, because if you think about how I imagined that things like cars were like that. When Carlos was still more user serviceable. If you go onto the bonnet of a car these days, there’s a bloody great plastic sheet that is basically telling you, get out.
You’re not coming in here, take it to the garage and they’ll plug it into a machine. It will diagnose it for us. And similarly, actually, we’ve got to a point now with probably with mobile technology that actually the ability to fix it is just not the same with mobile. Because you don’t need to in the same way as you do with the PC.
And that’s just because it’s legacy technology in many ways, still that it does go wrong. And most of the stuff that goes wrong, if truth be told is cause the it department have been buggering around to make things better. When they’re trying to second, guess what it is that Microsoft or Apple or whoever else do.
And I don’t know that being able to be great because you’re fixing stuff that you broke in the first place is not necessarily. A longterm strategy. Yeah, no, it’s just blending, uploading that blend a little fit.
Chris: I mean, if you think about it a few years ago, sorry. A few years ago when I was, when I was a wee boy.
Right. And you were to have a TV in the corner of the room, if you were, you know, if you’re lucky. And every now and again, some who go wrong and then a man would come round in a Brown coat in the tool bag and tap the bow. But the dock back off it and fiddle around with it. And maybe there’d be a smell of soldier or something.
And the CV would be repaired. And the TV repairman was doing the same magic that Dave was talking about earlier. Nobody else knew how the TV repairman, but he was really important. He got it fixed, right? Because it was the TV. And now that doesn’t no, we don’t need that because it’s, it’s become essentially a non serviceable anyway, but they don’t break as often as it used to.
And maybe it is still going through that phase of, of. Getting to the point where nobody needs to touch it and we’re getting there, right. Nobody’s going to serve as an iPad. If you’ve used an iPad or a tablet, all the tablets are available pretty much. It’s going to work whenever you turn it on until the day it doesn’t.
And, and then you’re going to get another one and maybe that’s, we’re getting to that point where those magical moments go away.
Matt: Although there is the irony that we’re now discussing how technology fails, because it’s the technology. When most of the time we spend our time saying to the thing that fails about technology, isn’t the technology, it’s the way in which we get people to try to use it.
And to what extent is that a people issue, which has been left in the hands of, of a part of the organization that thinks that the people are the stuff that breaks stuff.
David: Was him ubiquitous to NRG, look at XL. And to what extent, that could be useful to organizations and isn’t utilized fully. You look at something like three 65.
You look at teams, you look at all of these kinds of things, and we know we don’t maximize use of it, but some of those people are just scared, you know, that I’m sure that training elements, all those kind of elements, but it just feels like magic. I mean the millennium bug, could’ve been a giant hoax for all learning.
No people were telling me that, theoretically, there’s something going wrong. You need to pay some consultants or consultants could have just clumped together and then got around. Oh yeah, we fixed it. That’s why it didn’t go wrong. Because we’ve never known it, whereas that it’s not true of any other bit of the organization.
You can sniff stuff, you can see it. It’s obviously going wrong. It’s not working in some ways. Whereas to your point it teams don’t go. We made a change that didn’t work. They just go and fix that for you. I’m a wizard is as the kind of narrative. So, so yeah, I, I don’t know if there’s a mystique to it and a distance that I think is really interesting.
Now, to what extent that plays into the whole professionalism piece. I don’t know, but actually when I have interviewed people who work in it during my career, And I’ve ended up in positions where you, but there’s no other role and it don’t come. It’s just, for me, I think it’s a slightly more universal experience, no other role where I know what I’m talking about.
I’m basically sitting there going. So what I’d really like to know is, are you good with computers and for the stuff that we need computers to do? Have you done that kind of stuff before? Because there, there isn’t, that was that your con pretty much I can interview, you know, for an FD role. That’s not a problem.
I can do that. Same for HR CEOs. I can tell you, you know, what a good stirrups of legal and governance that’s like it. No, we’re so out of our depth, there was ordinary mortals. I’m basically going, I’m trusting you to be good. It’s really strange, really strange. Your magical mystical is, is it’s. It’s like interviewing Pokemon, but not being able to know how their special politics come up.
All you’re going to be good when you evolve. I don’t know how this works. It’s pretty much that,
Chris: but isn’t that crazy? Is that isn’t that absolutely crazy. That, that, that such a fundamental thing now is down to people. Who’ve. You don’t really know who they’re taking on a Y. And I, you know, God knows I’m not the best CIO or CTO or whatever that ever Strode the earth.
And I’m, I’m quite capable of making mistakes, but I look at some of the people who ended up in some of these jobs and I think, Oh my God, you know how, and it’s, you know, because they’ve managed to say the right things at the right time and they, you know, they’re, they wear the right suit and they’ve got the right names on their CV, but.
But under no circumstances, are they going to make a positive contribution to the business? They’ve just joined, but it’s, as you say, it’s, it’s a bit maybe because it’s, it’s just a bit
David: magic. So do you remember that TV series faking it? Sort of thing. So for anyone, I guess listening, we didn’t let’s take a member of the public and they would teach, teach that I think I had like 48 hours to try and get them to a possible professional level.
So they could go into an environment and people wouldn’t recognize that they were a fake and I’ve always, I’ve always been tempted to put myself in fake a CV and go in for like a CIO job. Or like ahead of OT and just, you know, talk to, you know, that’ll be your firewall, you know, or yeah, no, it’s all about agile methodology going forward.
You know, that’s how I need to get the team working and migrate everything to the cloud. I think that’s going to be a challenge. I mean, it’s sold, it’s the same line. You could get away with three or four sentences and you’ve probably seen. Relatively credible. Well, it’s, I’m not entirely sure how that would work and maybe, and it’s not actually for anyone listening.
It’s not, cause I’m flipping it and don’t rate the capability in it. It’s because it’s just really hard as an outsider to discern whatever
Matt: side. And so how do you assess the skills that you don’t have particularly at senior leadership level to be able to bring them in. And I think that’s it. Yeah, I think there’s, there’s a real challenge there for organizations, particularly if they need to change direction when it comes to technology.
Yes, they a couple of roles I’ve had now where I’ve inherited from somebody who was a very long serving head of technology. And that means they weren’t able to be able to get the influence from outside into the organization. And if you’ve had somebody long serving for a long while in the same role, then actually.
Bringing somebody to replace them. And all of your expertise internally has been based around that person. Who’s been there forever. That’s a real challenge.
David: Well, I think what we need to do is review the legacy architecture, ensure that we’re digital first, culturally, as well as from a systems point of view.
And then once we’ve done that over time, you’re going to have a roadmap that we can develop together that gets you to that level of user experience that you really need. That, that is kind of, I kind of figured I could turn up and I have a show. Chris Christian is looking at me in a very skeptical way.
I’m
Chris: just thinking we need to stop this interview before you blow the whole gap, frankly.
outro
Matt: Well, having blown our cover. Thanks, David. We bring the show to something of a judging Holters. Many of us, particularly those of you out there who are in senior it role. So I’ve been realized we’ve all been rumbled. Pleasure talking to you, David, have you got any idea what’s happening in the the week ahead?
David: Schools were going back. I believe that that’s, that’s a thing that’s happening within a week. Some will be shining. The starts are going to continue going in the right way and probably piers Morgan, also something outrageous the nation. Core,
Matt: you’ve got crystal ball. It’s amazing skills. And Chris was, it’s just, it’s just now into the regular bit of the show every week where it asks you if next week’s going to be the same as this week
Chris: and you go, yep.
I say I died. I can’t even remember what I say. I think I’d probably yes, I suppose. It’s it’s, it’s very busy at the moment. So I’m a bit like last weekend I went to the start of the show and I was like, Oh, it was busy last week. It’s going to be busy this week. And, but not nothing unusual is going on really in my work life, I guess.
I guess one of the things that’s happening is now I’m starting to have those conversations about, I had a conversation this week or this week, then the end of last week about. Oh, right. I October we might do this thing and you might be able to come to that and I’m starting to contemplate the travel. I’m starting to contemplate the bits in the diary that say you’re going to be in a different place then.
And it’s all a bit unreal at the moment because it’s kind of, Oh yeah. You know, maybe if, if, if, if, but we all know that at some point. Things are going to change. We, you know, we can cross our fingers and hoping the person I was talking to actually was from Serbia where they’ve, they’ve, they’ve vaccinated a third of their population and they, you know, they are really cracking through them.
And he said, well, actually, where, you know, if all this happens a bit, we’ll get vaccinated numbers go down. We could well be we could probably be in a position where we’re, where we’re traveling around in October. So that’s only six months away. Right. And. It’s starting to go in little circles and the diarrhea and that that’s a bit, it’s a bit weird and I’m looking forward to him anyway.
He’s but not necessarily without that, a level of maybe I’m like a dog, cause it’s been locked in a cage for, you know, a year, you open the door and it doesn’t necessarily want to come out. And maybe, maybe that’s the way I’m reacting to it.
Matt: Yeah, I can, I can kind of relate to that. I think there is a bit of Hermitude in my psyche that has been brought out in the last 18 months that is going to make it quite hard, to be able to make decisions of flight, leaving the house.
And especially, I think the I don’t know, at the moment, the idea of going into an office, I just find so alien. I,
David: I get scared might be too strong, a word, but occasionally you’ll see like sporting events or post events on TV with large crowds. And my instant gut reaction is what are you all doing, man, standing so close together.
And, but I’m curious as to how that’s going to translate actually to going back into. Like say a commute in a city where you don’t know people and you don’t know how well they’ve been looking after themselves or any, any of those things going on. And you imagine that the media will flare up any virus anywhere.
And that will throw people into perpetual panic as well. So now I I’m I’m. I’m happy to confess that I am feeling the same way as Chris, which is quite unsettled about quite settled about all the stuff I’m supposed to
Chris: look forward to. I remember, I mean, this didn’t happen to me for a long time, cause I’m now old and decrepit, but imagine being in a nightclub or somewhere where you were at the bar and across your people trying to get served and the sweatshirts trickling down your back, and you’re not entirely sure whether it’s yours or somebody else’s and you know that, that see the mud cross of people and the idea of doing that now, it seems.
Just the balmy.
David: Yeah. So being in someone’s own pit for a train journey. Yeah. I achieved all that, all that kind of stuff, you know, queuing up to go into a football stadium know even, I guess, you know, for people, you know, different backgrounds, you know, going to religious places of worship and that kind of, you know, funding in and funneling out together.
It just seems like a lot of the things that we spent an entire year conditioning ourselves to being inherently dangerous, that the things that we’re supposed to. Well, my former snap back into looking forward to, and I find this degree of cognitive dissonance in that way, I’m both excited and scared, but scared and
Chris: excited.
Matt: Yeah, no, that makes sense. But let’s keep in mind schools go back on Monday. So that’d be good. Anyway. Thank you very much for joining us, David. It’s been fantastic, Chris, as ever see you. Next week we having had no people with a name begin with duh. We have two in the course of two weeks, and next week we’re going to be joined by the journalist writer Matt D’Ancona, who is going to be talking about the book he’s got coming out a little later in March.
So that should be fun. It’s been fun this week and we’ll look forward to seeing you again next week.
On this week’s WB-40 we talk with Antony Slumbers about the commercial property market and the way that the pandemic might change who provides office space in the future. The Automatically Generated Transcript… Intro Chris: So, hello and welcome to another episode of WB 40. We are here today with as Matt said in the […]
On this week’s show we talk with Tech Monitor‘s Ed Qualtrough about the ways in which people are rebelling against the tech giants, and how the CIO might be the most adapt to change in the C-Suite.
On this week’s show we are joined by Julia Hobsbawm to talk about how the pandemic and lockdown may prove to be a catalyst to change more about work than just the physical workplace. You can find more about Julia’s work with the Demos Workshift Commission here:https://demos.co.uk/project/the-workshift-commission/ Show Transcript (Automatically generated) Intro Matt: Once again, […]
On this week’s show we speak to Roland Harwood about liminal things and places. You can find out more about Roland’s business Liminal here: https://www.weareliminal.co/ And his podcast On The Edge is here: https://www.weareliminal.co/ontheedge Transcript This is an automated transcript, so there may be errors, some of which might be hilarious. That’s just the machines […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Richard Sage to explore the murky world of IT strategy. You can subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at https://resage.substack.com/ And there is more about his IT Strategy course here: https://howtoitstrategy.com/ This week’s show transcript: Intro Matt: [00:00:00] So once again, we find ourselves on the precipice of another […]
On this week’s show Chris and Matt talk about why big tech social networks have been in the news again. Chris is also quizzed on his tech company history knowledge. This week’s transcript: Introduction Matt: [00:00:00] So just the two of us this week very sadly Charlotte G who was supposed to be joining us. […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Adapt2Digital‘s Mel Ross. More information about the online networking session for people looking to provide online access to people can be found here: https://accesswy.org/digital-access-national-network-meet-up-thursday-14th-jan-1830/
We’re back for a new year and a look at what technology leaders might need to be concerning themselves in the 12 months ahead.
On this week’s show, the last of the year, Chris and Matt review the top 10 shows by download of 2020. You can find the originals here: 10 – (160) Liminal 9 – (136) Homeopathic IT 8 – (146) Designing Home Schooling 7 – (139) Meetings, remote meetings 6 – (143) Socially isolated 5 – […]
On this week’s show Chris & Matt discuss the recent controversy around Microsoft’s Productivity reporting in Microsoft365, and also we see the (un)welcome return of our snappily-named feature The National Anthem of the Country whose annual energy consumption has just been surpassed by Bitcoin Mining. On December 16th we are having a party to celebrate […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Sarah Weller and Jemma Jackson who share their experience of starting up their new business https://www.weareelement.com/ in the middle of a global pandemic.
On this week’s show we talk with Professor Liz Stokoe about the science of conversation. You can read more about Liz’s work in her book Talk, and see her talk about it in this TED Talk:
On this week’s show we are talking with expert CIO Mark Aikman about transformation and his new venture.
On this week’s show we are joined by Michelle Minnikin from Work Pirates to talk about changing how work works. You can find out more about their next pirate gathering here:https://www.workpirates.com/gatherings
On this week’s show we are joined by Emily Middleton, a partner at Public Digital, to talk about how Digital Transformation works in lower- and middle-income economies.
On this week’s show we are joined by Amy Kean to talk Advertising, Agencies, Events and the huge importance of diversity and inclusion. There is also mention of caravans. If you want to find out more about Amy’s DICE initiative, you can do so here:https://www.getdice.co.uk/ There’s also more about her Practice Makes UnPerfect programme with […]
On this week’s show, Chris & Matt open up the WB-40 Helpdesk to answer some listener questions.
On this week’s show we are joined by Edafe Onerhime who talks about the breadth of skills that an organisation might need to consider when thinking about upping their data game.
On this week’s show Chris & Matt discuss whether it really is so surprising that Covid data is being fed through Excel.
On this week’s show we are joined by artist Steve Chapman to talk about his podcast project Sound of Silence.
On this week’s show we chat with Wendy Kendall and Tom Cheesewright about how with increasing remote working, organisations need to think again about how people learn the ropes of work… You can find out more about Wendy here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyakendall/ And more about Tom here: https://tomcheesewright.com/
On this week’s show Chris & Matt meet technologist Dave Rogers and explore the concept of Toxic IT. You can read Dave’s Toxic IT articles on his blog here: https://daverog.com/
On this week’s show we talk conversational UI, humanising technology and healthcare with Vala Health CEO Pete Trainor.
On this week’s show we explore how the bits of work we might be missing most in lockdown are those that are the bits between the actual work. We also ask the question “Is IT a Social Science?” Here are the two Twitter threads that inspired this week’s show: And Randy Connolly’s article about Social […]
On this week’s show Chris and Matt reflect on the non-linear journey that coming out of COVID Lockdown might prove to be, and Matt also spends time talking with Naomi Oiku, Hannah-Mae Graham and Jordan Scudder from the Student Radio Association about student media in the 2020s.
On this week’s show we wave a friendly “Hello Again” to Tom Geraghty, who shares his thoughts on the concept of psychological safety, and the role it has to play in establishing high performing teams. You can find out more about Tom’s work at his website: https://tomgeraghty.co.uk/index.php/category/tech/
On this week’s show we are joined again by Phil Murphy to hear about what’s been happening around fire safety in buildings since we last spoke a year ago.
On this week’s show we speak with Charity IT leader Paul Smith about the impact of Covid on the not-for-profit sector, and how technology might help charities to survive and thrive in the future.
On this week’s show we are joined by Sharon o’Dea to talk about whether the future of work is actually mostly about the future of meetings. Sharon’s posts about the New Abnormal can be found here:https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/road-remote-first-sharon-o-dea/ and here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/road-remote-part-2-spaces-support-comms-sharon-o-dea/ And you can find here on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/sharonodea
On this week’s show Chris & Matt discuss the current state of Cloud technology, spurred by some dodgy IBM marketing. We also touch on the COVID tracing app, and Matt talks role specs. The DDaT Job Family work that Matt mentioned is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/digital-data-and-technology-profession-capability-framework The article about Maersk is here:https://gvnshtn.com/maersk-me-notpetya/ And if you’d like to […]
On this week’s show we are joined by Kursty Groves from Shape and David o’Coimin from Nook as we continue our adventures to try to make sense of the workplace of the future.
On this week’s show we talk with OpenUK CEO Amanda Brock about Open Source technology, IP protection, and a fascinating education collaboration with Imogen Heap to spread the word about Open approaches. You can find out more about OpenUK at https://openuk.uk/ and nominate someone for their awards at https://openuk.uk/awards.
On this week’s show we talk to David Ivell from Enginuity about the work they have been doing to explore engineering skills through the world of Minecraft. You can find out more about Skills Miner here: Skills-Miner.com And their new digital and engineering platform here: Enginuity.org/engage
On this week’s show Chris & Matt are joined by the inimitable Dave Coplin to talk about whether views of what the future may bring have changed as a result of the Covid Crisis. You can find out more about Dave’s work, and his books, over at https://www.theenvisioners.com/
On this week’s show we are joined by HR-Rewired‘s Shereen Daniels to talk about the people perspective on the slow road out of lockdown. Don’t forget, you can join the WB-40 Podcast WhatsApp group – just drop us a line on Twitter for the magic link.
On this week’s show we have Lisa Talia Moretti from Methods talking with Matt about how workplaces might be about to change. You can find out more about The New Abnormal here.
On this week’s show Chris & Matt are joined by Plan B Studio’s Steve Price, who talks about how Covid-19 is impacting on agency world, and how he’s turning his designer’s mind to the challenges of home schooling. You can find out more about Plan B here: plan-bstudio.com And there is more about his home […]
On this week’s show, Chris and Matt are joined by John Willshire of Smithery, the inventor of Artefact Cards. You can find out more about the cards at the Artefact Shop.
On this week’s show, Matt is joined by technology architect Mark Wilson as Chris takes a break. We talk about how and where remote working is putting pressure on technology and technology management. We also do a quiz. A very geeky quiz about ancient computers.
On this week’s show Matt speaks with someone who was pioneering remote working techniques and technology back in the 1980s – his Dad, Malcolm. There’s a video about Live-Net here: And the network learning course he set up in 1989 is still running here: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/study/2020/postgraduate/programmes/TMSORPSY_C Don’t forget, if you want to join our WhatsApp Group, […]
On this week’s show we have special guest Euan Semple. He tells about his career diversion driving trucks, and how most organisations still haven’t realised that it’s people who tweet. You can find Euan’s book here, and his blog at euansemple.blog. Chris and Matt also talked about the Remote Work Survival Toolkit. You can get […]
On this week’s show, Chris & Matt splutter and hack their way through thoughts on the impending homeworking epidemic, marvel at the wonder that is https://coronavirustechhandbook.com/, and also mull on the phenomenon that is sector-specific line of business software.
On this week’s show we are joined by head of Geovation Alex Wrottesley. You can find out more about the organisation at https://geovation.uk/ We also have the final result of the WB-40 World Cup of Operating Systems. You’ll have to listen to find out…
On this week’s show, in light of the worries about Corona Virus, Chris & Matt talk about the remaining challenges facing remote work, and remote meetings. We also have the results of the semi-finals of the WB-40 World Cup of Operating Systems (also below for you) and chat about Google’s decision to move their Data […]
On this week’s show Chris & Matt talk about the labels that we (and analyst companies) apply to new technologies. Or sometimes just old technologies warmed up. We also have the results from the World Cup of Operating Systems Quarter Finals – you can vote now in the Semi Finals here. Results to date as […]
(This time with the actual audio) On this week’s show Chris and Matt talk about why IoT isn’t more peer-to-peer, and we also update you on the 2nd round of the World Cup of Operating Systems. We are indebted to the marvellous Emma Bearman for the conversation that led to this episode. We spoke with […]
On this week’s show Chris and Matt talk about why IoT isn’t more peer-to-peer, and we also update you on the 2nd round of the World Cup of Operating Systems. We are indebted to the marvellous Emma Bearman for the conversation that led to this episode. We spoke with her back on Episode 52. Matt […]
Chris is gallivanting around Europe this week, so we have a micro show update on the first round of the WB-40 World Cup of Operating Systems. Full results are below, and voting for Round 2 is now open here: https://forms.gle/4UxFCEpNkaFb4PS18
On this week’s show, Matt & Chris discuss whether IT might be better if it were diluted down to such and extent that it could do no damage. This week we also launch the World Cup of Operating Systems – join in the fun by showing your allegiances at https://forms.gle/L1rQ6izNG159QVxE7 Here’s the full draw: […]
On this week’s show, we speak with Peter Kappus about the world of Objectives and Key Results – OKRs. You can find out more about Peter at peterkappus.com, and John Doerr’s Measure What Matters can be found here.
On the first show of 2020, Chris & Matt reflect on the people they spoke to on the show in 2019. Matt mentioned this cracking episode of 99% Invisible that explores The ELIZA Effect. He also mentioned Hannah Fry’s Hello World.
On this week’s show, the penultimate of 2019, Matt talks to his new CEO, David Done from RHP. Chris and Matt also manage to completely avoid talking about the elephant in the room. Next week is the final show of the year – tweet us your highlights from the show in 2019 so we can […]
On this week’s show, Digital Sociologist Lisa Talia Moretti talks about her discipline, and Matt & Chris discuss why we can’t have nice things through the medium of hospital car parking.
On this week’s show, Matt and Chris reflect on a year in which we both went back into conventional jobs. We also had another tech election news update.
On this week’s show, Chris and Matt plough through the technology elements of the 2019 election manifestos so that you don’t have to. Aren’t we nice?
On this week’s show Matt and Chris explore two areas of policy that have come up so far in the 2019 election campaign. Early on Matt mentions this post about reasons to build apps: https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2017/06/29/7-reasons-to-app-redux/
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/episode-128-cardstock.mp3
On this week’s show, we have an experimental recording from last week’s Cardstock gathering, a get together of people who use cards in their work.
You will hear from:
John Willshire, creator of Artefact Cards
James Rutherford, creator of Kick Cards
Sandie Bakowski, who has created games to help teams discover psychological safety
Simon White from Formation London
and Yo Percale from Rebel Consulting
Chris & Matt also update on tech news in the 2019 Election.
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/episode-127-the-tech-election.mp3
It seems like just yesterday that we were heading to the polls, but yet again we have another general election on the horizon. So in this week’s show, we cast a light on what our panel of political pundits think might be in the forthcoming manifestos, and speak to Nathan Young about the Election Tech Handbook.
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/episode-126-swiss-army-knives.mp3
On this week’s show we speak with Sharon O’Dea from Lithos Partners about the changing world of work and collaboration. And because Chris is now an influential person in the world of IT, we look at the world of IT news in an influential way.
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/episode-125-remote-everything.mp3
On this week’s show we celebrate the show’s third birthday with an interview with Ed Holroyd-Pearce from VirtualInternships.com.
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/episode-124-the-one-coin.mp3
On this week’s show, we speak to author and journalist Jamie Bartlett about some of the issues raised in his BBC Sounds programme The Missing Cryptoqueen.