WB-40

By Matt Ballantine & Chris WestonBusiness Technology Management

WB-40 episodes

September 16, 2019 (120) Building the Network
On this week’s show, Chris speaks with Mike Ames about Mike’s approach to networking. We also catch up with Paul Armstrong about the forthcoming TBD Conference in December. The first 10 WB-40 listeners can get a £600 for just £100 if you follow this link.
0 min
September 16, 2019 (120) Building the Network
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/episode-120-building-the-network.mp3
On this week’s show, Chris speaks with Mike Ames about Mike’s approach to networking.
We also catch up with Paul Armstrong about the forthcoming TBD Conference in December. The first 10 WB-40 listeners can get a £600 for just £100 if you follow this link.
49 min
September 09, 2019 (119) Internet Fridges
On this week’s show we speak to Jason Murphy from IMS Evolve about connected devices at scale. Matt and Chris also chew the fat on the challenges that WhatsApp poses in government organisations and politics.
0 min
September 09, 2019 (119) Internet Fridges
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/episode-119-internet-fridges.mp3
On this week’s show we speak to Jason Murphy from IMS Evolve about connected devices at scale.
Matt and Chris also chew the fat on the challenges that WhatsApp poses in government organisations and politics.
59 min
September 02, 2019 (118) Fall Back
On this week’s show you can hear Matt & Chris talking about some of the implications of facial recognition and deep fake technologies, and also quite how clever the Prince of Darkness Cummings may actually be. You can find Chris’s blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/de-risking-personal-data-process-chris-weston/ And the Cummings post here: https://Dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/ Matt is running a panel […]
0 min
September 02, 2019 (118) Fall Back
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/episode-118-fall-back.mp3
On this week’s show you can hear Matt & Chris talking about some of the implications of facial recognition and deep fake technologies, and also quite how clever the Prince of Darkness Cummings may actually be.
You can find Chris’s blog post here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/de-risking-personal-data-process-chris-weston/
And the Cummings post here: https://Dominiccummings.com/2019/06/26/on-the-referendum-33-high-performance-government-cognitive-technologies-michael-nielsen-bret-victor-seeing-rooms/
Matt is running a panel next week at Tech Leaders Summit, and next month at the IT Directors forum.
—-Transcription automatically generated for search purposes by http://Otter.ai—-
Matt Ballantine 0:21
Hello and welcome to Episode 118 of WB40 the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, and Chris Weston. And so after a somewhat extended summer break, we’re back. Hello Chris.
Chris Weston 0:34
Hello Mike How are you? This is a just a great pleasure to be back in the in the saddle as it were.
Matt Ballantine 0:40
Indeed, I was wondering there for a moment if you completely forgotten the way in which this works and you were just sort of waiting to be told to talk but
Chris Weston 0:46
I am I am it’s as if we’ve never done this before. This is Episode 118 600 1800 19
Unknown Speaker 0:51
Yeah,
Chris Weston 0:55
okay. Yeah, I don’t I’m out of I might have practice Matt probably I’ve been keying myself up for this all day to do this again to be back on the on the podcast child because it’s been it’s been quite a long time and a few weeks since then we’ve both been on holiday and and various things you’ve been off to even have to various places far flung parts of the world and different parts of the country. Then you go to Scotland at some point. We did.
Matt Ballantine 1:19
We had a week in Fort William up with a view of Ben nervous when it wasn’t raining as the front window or the cottagers thing and it was beautiful, tranquil. Start not actually, you know, I went out there about 20 years ago, but I can’t really remember it. So it was a wonderful thoroughly recommend it. And we went to Devon for bit, which was sunny, and we had a weekend reporter those Yeah, Richard chicken right. Fantastic all across the UK and other bits. And he made it to summer in Spain.
Chris Weston 1:53
It was actually Canary Islands. We went to Gran Canaria which I’ve not been to before but it was really hot and very, very pleasant. We went anywhere else really we went nothing there were really bad during the summer holidays. But then when I came back up, I had kind of this emergency back operation which was kind of exciting. And which explained all the pain I was in back when we did the podcast.
Unknown Speaker 2:21
Yes, there was an episode about three episodes Yeah, he were in a foul mood and
Chris Weston 2:28
absolute agony. And now I’m less one disc, which is suboptimal? Really, I think I might be shorter than I was before.
Matt Ballantine 2:40
is as far as importantly stay solid. Take Scott storage, pick one disc lighter.
Unknown Speaker 2:45
Yes.
Chris Weston 2:47
redundant array of this these are important. And a half expected the year and went to see the surgeon and see see a man with a normal normal legs but an unnaturally long back. Removed bits from other move into self.
Unknown Speaker 3:05
It’s a quiet twisted idea.
Matt Ballantine 3:09
I sped up it’s been a funny old summer as well with continuing political shenanigans. And what about technological things and I think caught your eye over the summer months?
Chris Weston 3:19
Well, there is something that the thing that really caught my eye was something I blogged about only today. But it was something that I was arguing with people around at the time. And it was this, this issue in Kings Cross where people have introduced some face recognition technology, which is not novel or new, really. But I think because it was in Kings Cross and because that’s where all of the the chattering classes hang out these days, Kings place and all that it was suddenly a terrible civil liberty that people’s faces were being recognised. And without the college, and so much so that the the Ico actually decided they were going to look into it and issued a statement to say that they were going to do some work into the use of facial recognition, which, which is a good thing. You know, I’m not I’m not downplaying the, the fact that regulators have to move with the times and understand the technology that’s currently being utilised. And after I’d written it, one of my colleagues in IDC, told me that in Switzerland, the company, it has already been fined and the GDPR for doing facial recognition around children. And that’s that was considered beyond beyond the pale. I don’t know I have a, I’ve got two hearts on this, I, I absolutely want to see privacy protected. And I think GDPR is a good thing, etc, you won’t get me, you won’t get me moaning about it. But I also from a practitioner point of view, somebody who would have absolutely implemented face recognition, if I’d had the tools to do so in various workplaces, if you know actually identifying an individual. And as much as you you haven’t got any reference data to say that this is this person this is that, you know, this is a person’s name, and this is their face, it’s hard to see how your how you’re breaching somebody’s privacy, unless you then subsequently do match that data. But that could that could apply to a lot of things could net so if you if you’ve got a database of anything that could identify you. So even if even your even your school, for example, your kids this school your kids go to if you’re if they’ve got a database of appointments with the head teacher, and you’ve got an appoint with the head teacher, two o’clock on Monday, the 21st of February, if one day that was matched up, show it so that somebody could find that you were in that school on that time, is that personal data? I think it is, you know, and where do you draw the line between what is pretty personalization, what isn’t, and what could possibly become personal data and what and what, what couldn’t and when it’s inadvertent and when it’s by design, I think it’s quite tricky, and probably is all covered under GDPR. And maybe previously, lawyers have already figured all this out. And I’m just too simple to understand it all at the moment. But it just seems to me, there’s a there’s a long way to go. Because the face is only one way you can recognise it as a person, there are lots of different ways that you can not unique, the only find people their their their digital fingerprint, their actual fingerprint, the way they walk the the number of times that they that their heartbeat, or whatever, you know, combined with all this, all this stuff that could be a kind of digital fingerprint or, or, or a fingerprint of your virtual fingerprint, how to how we to know what those are today, and what advanced data crunching techniques will be able to will be able to figure out about as in futures, it’s really tricky. I just think it’s really hard from attack practitioner point of view.
Unknown Speaker 7:00
There’s two things that actually some of the things that have been happening around and about in the tech world over the last month or so
Matt Ballantine 7:07
the first thing I’d say is the fingerprint that is generated digitally or somebody’s face is not the same as their face. And we have, particularly, you know, technology, evangelist at the moment seems to have this absolute faith that these things are absolute. And we know from the history of using DNA matching and fingerprint matching. And we will see it within these sorts of technologies around facial recognition as well, that false positives are not out of the question, by any stretch the imagination. And anybody who’s stood at the the passport queue, going into the machines, he throw any of the other airports who knows and facial recognition, which is how that stuff works, is not infallible
Chris Weston 7:54
at all, at all look good working, getting them to recognise your pitches, and in you know, are you Do you have any pictures of me, your
Matt Ballantine 8:03
locker all sorts of things? Absolutely. So and it’s getting better, and it will improve, but it’s not the same, you know that a unique identity is not a unique identifier. It is something that is close to being a fingerprint that can be used, you know, an algorithmic based thing that is used to be able to identify is not absolutely, and that there’s a worry there. I think the other side of this, though, is actually the the little bits of bubble of hype there have been around deep fake and visual processing, technology and how that’s developed. and developing. There’s been three examples there was the the app that got very popular, which I think was from Russia, that enabled you to bear to make yourself look like you all look in 20 years time, which quite frankly, I don’t need that shit I can imagine from looking in the mirror now how look in 20 years time, and it’s not pretty. And I don’t want anybody to reinforce it. Thank you very much. I prefer to wait frankly, what exactly, and then somebody did it to me for 20 years hands. And it was absolutely nothing like what I looked like 20 years ago, because of course, it wasn’t able to be able to regenerate my luscious long hair. There was a lot of hubbub around that though in tech. So because about all this is terrible, because it’s infringing your privacy, because he’s taking these pictures. And I’m sure a lot of that was because it was a Russian, and not much to do with the technology itself. There’s then actually in the last day or so, this app, which is called ZL, which is a Chinese app, which enables you to upload a photo and then it’s super fun superimposes your face onto a series of Hollywood clips, making you the lead star in a bunch of little clips. And I know it’s obviously it’s very tightly controlled. But I’ve seen a little demo of it. And it’s able to be able to put your face from just a single snapshot pretty convincingly. So any first glance look into anybody or into this, you know, show real, basically, of Hollywood stuff. And again, because that’s Chinese. Well, yeah, absolutely. Because it’s Chinese people saying this is going to be a terrible infringement of privacy, obviously.
Unknown Speaker 10:19
And then the third one was, I think you saw this a few weeks back, there’s an American
Matt Ballantine 10:26
impressionist, and he was doing a bit on a chat show. And what they did was he was doing an impression of Tom Cruise. And they face morphed him into chocolate. And it was so subtle. It was it was really interesting, because it was very subtle. And as he started doing Tom Cruise his face became that a Tom Cruise. But I had to watch it a few times to even realise that was happening because I was just taken in by the performance of the guys is really interesting thing. Now, out of all of that is two things. First of all issues around privacy, the use of face and who do you want to have your face. But if you’re on the internet, and everybody’s got a copy of your face anyway, because he’s on the internet, almost undoubtedly. My biggest problem is getting rid of pictures of me from about 10 years ago that CIO magazine still insist in publishing because I had hair than an over now. Exactly. I know, it makes me look like some sort of dishonest thing by pretending I still hear other people I know do this on things like LinkedIn profile pictures, but that’s a different storey. So yeah, this issue around privacy and how valuable is your face? And how much of that is personally identifiable and identify about identifiable information in the sort of GDPR sense? There’s a bunch of stuff there. But the other question that starts to come out of this is, how much do we trust photography? And there’s a, you know, the pitch tells 1000 words, and the camera doesn’t lie? Well, certainly that latter one has always been untrue. And there’s never been more at all. And the fair is exactly this, there’s never been a point in the history of photography, when you’ve not been able to bear to create fake images. The difference now is to be able to do fake images, as an individual you can do with a free app that you can download off the internet onto your phone. And you can make something that at first glance is convincing. Voice synthesis is now getting to a stage I think Adobe have got a tool that enables you with a bit of training, to be able to voice emphasised anybody and obviously things like Siri and Alexa, the voices on those are actually an actor having sat in a room saying every single thing with the voice says they’re a synthesiser, the fifth generation that speech as you go. So static photographs are easily faint. Voice is pretty easily fade. And now videos, the extent to being able to make things look like they are people they are not in moving video is something you could do on a smartphone. And so on the one hand we’ve got faces are personally identifiable information. And isn’t it terrible that people in Kings Cross can be able to use facial recognition, blah, blah, blah. And then the other hand, we can’t trust any image that we see anymore?
Chris Weston 13:21
Well, that’s right. And that will go back a few weeks to when we talk to men over and Dawn about know the synthetic generation and the fact that people are growing up in that, in that world where that it is a fact they have to. They have to learn to cope with those synthesised images, synthesised movies, and be able to discern truth from fact.
Matt Ballantine 13:45
So there’s something within the the GDPR storey I think now, which isn’t about are you holding my personally identifiable information? But how can you show that the identifiable information that you have about me know only is stuff that I’ve given you permission to have about me? But it’s also true? Yeah, that’s very true.
Chris Weston 14:07
And whoever’s haven’t given false information about ourselves. when presented with I don’t know, a form to download something that we want to download, but we don’t really want to tell the person genuine detail. So you put a slightly false email address or you know, you we’re we’re quite capable of giving misinformation away our of our own nevermind, as you say, somebody’s doing it for nefarious reason. And it could be that one day that misinformation that we give away, comes back to bite us because somebody has decided that we might be older than we are. Because, you know, I’m my partner on year, then as my birthday sometimes in order when somebody if somebody puts in a, you have to put your birth date into an H verification. Sometimes I’ll give the wrong date entirely. Just because I know it’s a replication thing. I don’t know. But as long as I’m able 21 or whatever, that’s fine. Well, why do I get my birthday? Why? So I’ll give a different date. But maybe one day somebody use that information, but also some purpose. And you’re right, accuracy and veracity is a is a very different matter. And whose responsibility is that.
Matt Ballantine 15:16
And then it’s interesting idea, one of the other bits of news over the summer has been changing management at the GM additional service. And Kevin Kennington has now left the building. He has been replaced with a name that it is taken over from him, but she’s on an interim basis. But also the unsurprisingly, given the amount of shenanigans has been in the cabinet over the last six weeks. But there is now a new minister in the Cabinet Office who is responsible for amongst other things. GDS, he’s also got responsibility for the major projects authority and a bunch of other things. And he’s his background is basically has been an MP for about three years. And for those dollars that comes out of line. So Sharma fox hunting, maybe not so strong on digital strategy, but you know, who am I to judge. And one of the things that GDS and the new Acting Director General GDS has said is that identity is still going to be one of their headline, big things to be able to deliver, even though identity has been recorded and utter disaster, I think is unfair, but it hasn’t worked.
Chris Weston 16:26
And it’s still falling apart, isn’t it though they lose experience or somebody from the programme the other day, because
Matt Ballantine 16:35
yeah, three other providers, I’m not sure who it was. But three of the providers, the private sector, providers who are providing identity services have withdrawn from it. And it’s not being used uniformly across government. So it’s not a surprise. But this thing about a verifiable identity on the internet, it’s been something is fascinated me for as long as I’ve been aware, and we are more or less of the Internet, and still seems to needs to be on the one hand. Without it, privacy issues are always going to be a massive problem, because unless you can, authoritative Lee identify somebody, and authoritative Lee identify yourself, issues about who you are, and where you are always problematic. But on the other hand, we can’t have a single authority issue in those identities. Because previously, people get really up in arms about that, because they see that as a massive, effectively personal security flaw, which of course it is. And as current events are telling us, you can’t necessarily trust anybody to add to the good intentions of anything. And that that tension, I think actually underpins a lot of this stuff. And it’s going to as we get more and more technologies that are able to identify people through methods that aren’t about, I presented you with a document that shows you who I am. issues about how I can identify people, whether it’s from the gate of their walk, or whether it’s the speed at which they type in and we will have a unique typing pattern, which will identify us, which probably Google know, because they keep keystroke information as part of what they’re doing through an odour their apps online. Those kinds of identifiers will start to be used, they’ll be used in this kind of pseudo anonymous way. And then that comes back to the point of your article, I guess, which is about how non personally identifiable information if used in certain ways can become identifiable?
Chris Weston 18:29
Yeah, that’s true, I guess. And it comes to, you know, I’ve long held the idea that, that we would come to a point where we would need to be responsible for our own data. And it would be in a in a place that we controlled as individuals, and we will allow people to access it when as long as it needed to, and then they stopped having access when they don’t need to, and sometimes you will have a right to do that make that control happens. Sometimes you won’t, with regards to your civil civic responsibilities, such as tax or if you are convicted or something I have a crime that I I can’t see any other way other than was being the holders of our own information. And you know, what can I say my curse This is this. This is a clear case of blockchain being Ah,
Matt Ballantine 19:18
oh, I was just thinking we were going to get through this conversation without mentioning distributed Ledger’s alone. I know it isn’t, because you still got to have somebody. Ultimately, there’s got to be a thing this is this is that this is the paradox maybe that with, even with distributed Ledger’s, there’s which legible to use and which code is is it who are responsible for the creation of the ledger, there is no such thing as a totally decentralised ledger
Chris Weston 19:45
and get with a ledger. This is a decentralised solution. I’m just going to create the company name and issue some chairs.
Matt Ballantine 19:58
Please stand up anyway. Well, interesting stuff, we’ll put a link up to the article, what you wrote on the website at wp 40 podcast,
Chris Weston 20:08
which wasn’t all about that, but it referenced, we reference some of that. And yeah, that’d be good. And we’ll know, I think that’s a subject we’re going to return to a lot because as Ico keeps going around and kicking people’s doors down to take their money away, and that is the kind of subject I think we’re going to come back to. So bad, I think you’d have to be living under a rock of enormous proportions, or in a different country with all the windows closed, and the curtains drawn on the radio turned off, not to know that we have a brand new prime minister of dubious quality, and whole bunch of people around him that, well, I’ve taken politics in a slightly different direction. Notice somebody that’s on the on the Twitters yesterday or the day before said, you know that everything has changed. And the politics has been completely changed by this, this, this new government and the way they’ve done things. And I think, you know, in terms of approach, we can all see that, I think in terms of actual results, nothing has really changed. But we now have Johnson, reclined Johnson and his what some people are describing as a kind of swing, golly, figure, this public master behind the scenes was your dominant coming. And you pointed me to one of his blogs today, because we thought we’d have a look at how he thinks and, you know, is it relevant? And what it does it does it tie it with any of the things that we’ve talked about over the years in terms of how you think and how you make decisions and how you create high performing teams, right? He used to call them high performance teams, and this particular article that you sent me.
Matt Ballantine 21:56
Yeah, so the article, Cummings is a prolific writer of long blocks. He doesn’t see the form as being one for succinct
Unknown Speaker 22:08
throws. No, it’s not, nor well constructed paragraphs to be fair.
Unknown Speaker 22:14
And so this blog, I thought it was interesting, because it is kind of on topic for us.
Matt Ballantine 22:20
It’s called on the referendum number 33, high performance government, cognitive technologies, Michael Nielsen, Brett Victor, and seeing room so you know, from the start this is grab attention. Now, I just like to be completely out in the open here, I know about a thing called confirmation bias, which is where we find evidence to support our views. And my view going into this was that I thought he was basically there’s, there’s people that I’ve met over my career who have been incredibly smart, and very good people, people who’ve made you feel at ease about how intelligent they are. And a very easy to work with, and not very many people I’ve worked with like that. But I’ve definitely worked with a few. I’ve also worked a few have been phenomenally bright, not particularly socially adept, but understood. They weren’t particularly socially adept and found mechanisms to better word their ways around that. And there’s people I’ve worked with, and mostly it has to be said in the, in the world of marketing, who have been at a make a career as a spouting out of bollocks, obviously, with a modicum of intelligence. And they basically they spout stuff out there people go,
Chris Weston 23:37
are
Matt Ballantine 23:38
there obviously operating a different level of intelligence to me, and I don’t understand what they’re talking about. So I’ll just not along. And I’m fairly convinced that dominant Commons is in that latter category. And as little points of confirmation, confirmation bias evidence of that, a few weeks ago, there’s the theory of the Black Swan, which is from the same Talib, and is about how unexpected events come up. And they happen and we can’t predict them. We can’t see them coming because they’re unexpected. And then often what will happen is that we will put in place measures to be able to prevent those sorts of events ever happening again, which they won’t because they are unexpected, and very unlikely. And in his follow up book, anti fragile. Where he then says is that actually often then those solutions to prevent that same black swan event happening in the future makes the systems that that organisation has incredibly fragile, because it means that they’ve geared themselves around a bunch of scenarios that will never happen, which leaves an incredibly vulnerable to the ones that they can’t predict. And Cummings have taken on this metaphor, the Black Swan and told people to go and hunt for the black swans and government departments involving anything is to embrace it. Which if you understand that the Black Swan metaphor is utter nonsense, because you can’t that’s the point of the Black Swan, you get yourself around being able to deal with unexpected events occurring, not trying to preempt them. So that for me was so yeah, now he’s he’s, he’s Breitbart. And then this document, basically, it tries to bring together anybody who uses the word intersection, basically, as a bit too obsessed with Steve Jobs. And it doesn’t really mean anything. And if you’re intersecting more than two things, it’s so complicated that you’re not talking about intersections really, at all, are you. So the blog is supposed to be about having a look at the intersection of decision making technology, high performance teams, and government. And it’s about 10,000 words or so. And it quite early on says that this is the sort of document that the basically the people who need to read this off document and should be acting upon it and the sort of people who won’t read 10,000 word, blog posts, he calls it a blog, by the way, it’s not as a blog post going to be a pedantic ass about these things. A post is what you do on a blog or blog is the aggregation of those posts where society point one in for you, and simply always goes on about and pulled me up on it and many occasions. But yeah, he he talks about how this won’t be read by the people that he needs to be able to read it. And you think, Well, why are you writing it? If the people that you think needs to be addressing this won’t take any notice of you? Because you’ve written it in such a candid and long way? And then it goes on like that?
Chris Weston 26:34
Yes. Well, I, you know, I hear you, Martin, I’m not, I’m not going to defend this article, in great depth. I read it through, right. And he talks about high performance government cognitive technologies, which in turn to me, and the seeing rooms and I I mean, I take your point, right, so so he talks about the intersection of fields, but he does going to way too much detail and kind of losing himself. He talks about cognitive technologies, there’s these are essentially ways of learning more effectively, which, okay, you know, there are things that we can do, it’s a bit like the whole, the old memory trick, isn’t it? You know, you you meet eight people in a room and if you try and associate their names with a picture, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to remember who it is or so and sometimes I found mentioned this to a lot of people, if I’ve got my brain switched on, and I’m ready to think I must remember all these people’s names. I’ll try think of somebody famous who has a name a bit like it, and try and pick something about this person that makes them either look like that person that’s famous or is completely different. So and then when I look at that person, I think Oh, yes, that that that girl’s got long blond hair and her name was Meryl so I said oh yeah, like Meryl Streep in my brain and that’s metal, okay, I can do is kind of just something silly like that. So there are there are ways that you can you can kind of throw it all kind of what we would now in the vernacular, cool hacks that you can do to improve your cognitive abilities and memory and he talks a bit about that. But the people the kind of people who are impressed by those things that kind of people are impressed by neuro linguistic programming you know, that they are they an NLP is one of those fantastic areas of of flimflammery, which takes a few perfectly reasonable little tricks, some Mr. misdirection, and some, you know, complete bollocks. And then and then tries to make you believe that was all true because of this. And it strikes me that he’s a bit like that now. And there’s, there’s certain things about this out this article I wrote, and I really all the way through. And sometimes I thought, No, you know, this guy has understood this thing. And, you know, fair enough, he’s done that. But in in many ways, it it. He believes he understands it to the level, he kind of projects upon himself a level of understanding. And it’s a bit like that there was a book we read when we did the book club, earlier in the year or late last year, whenever it was. And there was somebody who wrote, there was this stoicism book. And he wrote a book and then he wrote about these different great leaders like Hannibal, maybe it was one and all this kind of thing. And he would, essentially he projected onto them his own thought processes. And as if they made those decisions because they thought like him, and there’s this there was this really self indulgent codswallop that he wrote about how, how he was like them, because he understood how they thought, which was the centre of the point, but and the it reads like somebody who has decided they really understand advanced physics, because they’ve watched every single episode of Star Trek and really enjoy the engineering bits. And you can learn a lot of stuff from that, you know, you can learn a lot of good words, and you can even learn some concepts. But you, and you might be very bright, but I’m afraid you’re not going to be you know, you’re not a physicist, when when that happens. And I.
So there are certain things that I wrote down as I read through this article, and one is, I wrote down the clock clockmaker, because coming seems to believe, and the only from this, this article, I don’t really know much about him. Obviously, you know, I’ve seen the output from this, this is gone, and we’ll dignify it with that word. But as front of this, it seems like he’s got this clockmaker idea that, that you can model, you can model the world, you can model it, you can model people, and you can model a department or a country or government to the point where you can have a whole bunch of the US and if you pull this lever, then that happens. And then is a fundamental flaw of people who are not quite as clever as they think they are. They are clever, and they have brains, and they have ability, that I see it a lot in, in and I might be I suffered from it, you know, when I was 18 years old, when I was coding, you kind of learn you grow out of it, you know, if you if you if you’ve got any sense, is that if only you had a computer big enough, and if only you had enough time, you could write code that could model anything, you know, and it’s like that XKCD cartoon about, you know, we’ve been trying to solve this problem for years. And then a computer programme comes along, says, Oh, don’t worry, I’m going to sort out with algorithms. And then six months later, so this is really hard now. Yeah, you know, you, you, you get fooled into the that you this this talk that you’ve got you can you can sell anything. So he’s got a clockmaker thing. He’s also, in this article, he seems to suggest that people that don’t make decisions based on numbers all the time are somehow relevant. Shouldn’t the worthless and that you should like so it’s like is this empiricists kind of
Unknown Speaker 32:07
thing is highly rational
Chris Weston 32:09
approach to everything? Absolutely. Everything’s got to be backed up with minimalism. And not only our YouTube, if somebody tells you something, if somebody asserts something, then they should back it up with evidence Well, okay, fair enough. But they should not only back it up with evidence, they should back it up with the details behind that evidence. Nothing that’s that’s true. But you quite quickly get to a point where only certain number of people can understand that the the evidence and the way that’s been that’s been bought, built up, and you need to trust some of those people in that chain. Unless you’re the kind of person that thinks you understand quantum physics because you’ve lost a lot of Star Trek. So there’s this kind of imperious thing that goes on. I I think he’s impressed with parlour tricks. So a bit like this kind of Black Swan thing where he’s various things. Nicholas, tell me he’s a clever fella. The dynamic room is that what he called it, dynamic land. So he talked about how you should be able to make decisions and and create your strategies, in rooms that are designed to help you do that. And I understand that and not don’t don’t disagree with that. It helps you to have tools, and it helps you to have visualisations and it helps you to be able to manage things in a in a more joined up way. And I wouldn’t we all rather have a good visualisation of data that tells us whether we’re going to run our money this year, and a business, then a big table of numbers, which we then have to draw our own conclusions from. Absolutely, it’s important to do that. But he talks about this this particular example. And really, when you look at the video that you pose, it’s just crap. It’s just rubbish. It’s it’s a, it’s a lovely idea, but never going to work in practice. It’s just it’s it’s a pretend, advanced working environment.
Matt Ballantine 34:06
And lots of the experimental environments that people at john Seely Brown, were talking about 20 years ago. Yeah, absolutely learning context. And that have never really happened not because they weren’t good ideas to experiment with, but because they were never practical. And he, I mean, the thing that comes across above all else for me on this is how down he is on the civil service, that he believes that they’re basically all stupid. And I think that that’s possibly because whenever he’s had to deal with any senior civil servants, I’m projecting a little bit here. But I don’t think he’s able to be able to do anything other than do logical argument as to why people should do what he says. And anybody who knows anything about influence knows that logical argument as an influencing tactic, and somebody who disagrees with you, is just about guaranteed to fail. And he then gets into a piece where he talks about how we should be selected people much deeper in the tails of the ability curve, people who are plus three or plus four standard deviations above average on intelligence, relentless effort, Operation ability, and so on now, in the UK working population, plus four standard deviation on anything is about 34,000 people of working age. So if you combine, I don’t know the math well enough here. But I would say that there’s probably identified about 60 people out of those four combinations, if you want plus three or plus four against that number of different things. Assume you can even measure them properly anyway. And let’s not get onto discussions about whether IQ is a little bit hogwash or not, spoil it is. And it’s that kind of thing, where it’s just this glib, throwaway mark, because the people in the civil service aren’t intelligent enough to understand it. He’s never worked at any depth in anything other than the civil service politics and this kind of bubble around Westminster
Chris Weston 35:58
surgery. And the owner said, of course, the unsaid words, alongside that comment around we need to pick people from this long list. Now these these tales of, of Bertie is like me, because he sees himself in that in that, and maybe it’s Ryan, I don’t know, if I’d maybe if I sat down and talked to him for an hour, I’ll be convinced that he is, but I don’t from this article, I do not see that he understands. He’s had more much more exposure than me to the civil service and to government. So who am I to judge but I don’t see that the civil service I the civil service does not work entirely on empiricism and data because there is so much experience and so much unsaid stuff that has to be maintained. There’s there’s so much what we might call corporate memory in a commercial world that has to be passed down and understood in order to be able to operate in a such a complex environment, and the top civil servants. And not just the top sort of servants but but many of the civil servants. And so in high rankings It was our fiendishly, fiendishly clever, and really know how to make things work out how to influence. And I, I worry a bit because he talks about the post pictures of the cabinet, Cabinet Room, okay. And he complains that it’s a, it’s a frosty old room, and you can possibly make a decision on that. And he posts he post pictures of the Large Hadron Collider at collider control room, and he posts pictures of a power grid control room, and he post pictures of a NASA mission centre. Right? Well, brilliant, you know, fantastic, exactly what you need, you know, NASA, the big, big screens that show things that everybody needs to see in little screens to show what the individual needs to see whether they communicate absolutely right. But he fundamentally disagree, misunderstands that those rooms have designed for a purpose, which is to make instant decisions that have an immediate impact on something is happening now. That is what you’re doing in those rooms, you are not setting policy, and you are not pushing a particular decision into a government department that will then go off on lots of different areas to close, stop doing this, start doing that, something that will take quite a long time to achieve and involve lots of further influencing. These are not the same thing. As I mentioned, the Cobra room, which is a little bit more like that, in terms of you know, that this is therefore being briefed about a situation but it’s still I don’t think is, it’s very unlikely to be the Cobra room is very unlikely to be there to control response to a situation in actual in real time, you will have police control rooms, or you know, how to bed army or you know, forces control rooms that which will be controlling the actual response. This is about direction, and they’re completely different. I just don’t understand why he hasn’t, you know, with his enormous intellect, and having sat down having all the time to write all these words and find all these preachers don’t understand boy hasn’t understood that.
Unknown Speaker 39:22
I think for me, the conclusion of this only he he was able to hack the
Matt Ballantine 39:29
the 2016 referendum for the leaf campaign he managed to better get the vote down. That shows the level of strategic planning and and rationality which probably something like a referendum on a binary decision can happen. I probably would have more belief in the idea he’s some sort of genius evil or otherwise, if he actually managed to then get the whole thing to be completed. We wait to see whether that will ever happen.
Chris Weston 39:55
Well, indeed, my lot, sir. That’s all playing. You know, watch this space.
Matt Ballantine 40:00
I will put a link to the article on the website WB 40 podcast.com. You can have a political through if you’ve got an hour or so to spare. It’s interesting if you want to get an insight into this management a little coverage. Okay, so that is it for this week. First week back got the the old podcasting limbs working again, not too much rustiness.
Chris Weston 40:23
Now I think we, you know, came in for the long run there, we were up to up to full pace pretty much immediately.
Unknown Speaker 40:30
I knew you wouldn’t be able to get through this without mentioning their cricket louder.
Matt Ballantine 40:36
Exactly. Over the next few weeks, we’ve got some really interesting interviews coming up. I think next week, we’re going to get one with a chap, he runs a company that helps large businesses use connected devices to better work more efficiently with things like refrigeration in retail. Somebody I met a few weeks back. I’ve also got an interview that I did this week go out in the next few weeks with somebody runs a diamond and jewellery company. And think about the technology involved in that the some archaic world of jewellery. You got one or two coming up?
Chris Weston 41:13
Yeah, we got an interview that I did with a chap who helps businesses with their sales process and things like that. And we talked very specifically about networking. So how, how people can use networking more effectively? And what are the things that stop people from doing it? Nothing that should be quite an interesting lesson for anybody who is having trouble exploiting their own personal network.
Matt Ballantine 41:40
Excellent. And then over the next month or so I’ve got a couple of public appearances, which makes you sound much more grand than I am. Next week tech Leaders Summit in London, I am going to be hosting I’m really excited about this hosting a panel about how diversity can be a key to here unlock great innovation in organisations. And to be able to do that I have brought together probably the most diverse panel that I could think of I’ve got a person who is expert in Gen. Zed. I’ve got somebody who is an expert in neuro diverse conditions. I’ve got somebody from a digital agency in Canada, I’ve got a musician. And I’ve got an international headhunter who specialises in developing economies to better bash around the thinking around how do you get diverse teams working effectively together to innovate. So that’s totally the summit next week. And then beginning of October, I’m going to be back at the it directors forum. And this time I’m playing cards, I’m taking some of my it and other priorities cards out to show how you can use games to explore priorities and explore ideas. So if you’re interested in either of those going to put the links to the events on the website, you got anything coming up.
Chris Weston 42:58
Not this weekend. I’m not doing anything publicly this week. going on next week. I’m off to the European CIO summit in Ireland and then I’m going to do a keynote at the the Slovakia CIO summit in Bratislava after that so it’s a bit of a bit more exciting now the week after, if you’re doing public appearances, Mark, then I know you know, you know, I expect you to wear a suit particular t shirt and I know you’ll be promoting wd 40.
Matt Ballantine 43:31
I might wear one of the batches put it out. Anyway, it’s good to be back. Thanks for listening. We will be back next week and in the next seven days. Let’s just get through it, shall we people?
Chris Weston 43:59
Thank you for listening. You can catch us as always on Wb 40 podcast com or on all podcast outlets. And of course on twitter at Wb 40 podcast
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
45 min
July 22, 2019 (117) Is STEM the problem?
On this week’s show we speak with Amy Golding about her nology project. Matt mentioned the Value Proposition Canvas which you can find at https://www.strategyzer.com/ If you are interested in The Social CEO book in which Matt (amongst may others) has a chapter, you can pre-order it here: https://amzn.to/2StevNy (sponsored link). We’ll be back in September […]
0 min
July 22, 2019 (117) Is STEM the problem?
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/episode-117-is-stem-the-problem-1.mp3
On this week’s show we speak with Amy Golding about her nology project.
Matt mentioned the Value Proposition Canvas which you can find at https://www.strategyzer.com/
If you are interested in The Social CEO book in which Matt (amongst may others) has a chapter, you can pre-order it here: https://amzn.to/2StevNy (sponsored link).
We’ll be back in September – have a great summer!
55 min
July 15, 2019 (116) Consulting Artist
On this week’s show we speak with Consulting Artist Doug Shaw about the work he does with his corporate clients exploring ambiguity, and Matt accuses Chris of the most appalling crime. –Transcript by otter.ai. Included for search purposes. ———– Matt Ballantine 0:20 Hello, and welcome to Episode 116 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with […]
0 min
July 15, 2019 (116) Consulting Artist
https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/wb40podcast.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/episode-116-consulting-artist.mp3
On this week’s show we speak with Consulting Artist Doug Shaw about the work he does with his corporate clients exploring ambiguity, and Matt accuses Chris of the most appalling crime.
–Transcript by otter.ai. Included for search purposes. ———–
Matt Ballantine 0:20
Hello, and welcome to Episode 116 of WB 40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine and Chris Weston.
We meet again,
recording on a Sunday evening, it’s been a weekend of large amounts of sport. How are you Mr. Weston?
Chris Weston 0:36
A bit frazzled. Actually, there’s somebody who has been following the fortunes of the England cricket team for many a year. And who remembers getting up at silly o’clock once upon a time to listen to the last time they were in the World Cup final 27 years ago, having just essentially steeled myself with the fact that they weren’t going to win today’s game, because they were behind the eight ball for most of it. And then having gone through the last hour or so of that was I die, I think I might actually be dead. And we’re just moving around. So. So yeah, I’m pretty fascinated by you. So
Matt Ballantine 1:16
there should be an interesting podcaster one of the co-hosts is dead. I’m doing good. I didn’t watch the cricket because I I kind of understand the theory of cricket. But I’ve never really got into it. But I did watch the tennis and the men’s final was quite something and all five and a bit as it watched from about the third seconds, actually. And
Unknown Speaker 1:40
it was good.
Matt Ballantine 1:43
So yes, I feels like it almost the summer holidays are here. Now when you get to the point where Wimbledon is over and into the last week of school term. And then the madness that will be August, indeed is
Chris Weston 1:55
so good and have to do last weekend thing interesting in your professional dealings.
Matt Ballantine 2:01
There were many things. And it’s also I’ve got a load of bits and bobs where there’s some work kind of a pass kickoff. So it’s just kind of that balancing act between being able to get work that is in play done and get work that might be in play over the line. And then also being very aware that I’ve got lots of bits of holiday all over the place next couple of months as well. So it’s just a sort of the soul trades a juggling act goes into full effect again. But there’s some interesting hopefully some interesting bits coming up an organisation that I two organisations have worked before with, one of which is massive, although very UK centric. And I think the other thing is also getting my head around the idea that may be there’s a bit about how innovation is needed in organisations as a thing. But then there’s also a getting people up front, Erica, how much we actually going to invest in innovation, because one of the things I’m seeing again and again, at the moment, is organisations doing the kickoff, and then it floundering because they don’t really they want to do a thing that I want to do the long term, or they haven’t really thought about it long term. So So battling with some of that stuff at the moment as well. Oh, the other thing was, and I’m going to write some more up about this, but enterprise architecture and architecture within technology teams, why? And actually going back to basics about what might be the business value of having architectural functions within the organisation, which we’re
Unknown Speaker 3:35
starting from
Matt Ballantine 3:36
first principles is really interesting. And then talking to well renowned enterprise architects about it, and they just don’t get it because they just go Yeah, everybody does enterprise architecture, because you need to enterprise architecture. This is not a reason.
Chris Weston 3:50
So big busy, I’ve got a good done. Good video. shout about that. About how to make it enterprise such a work with agile, and it’s quite, it’s good. It really is genuinely good. So I’ll send you that. If you did have to help them out and be interesting. And yeah. Do you think that was oxygen has a place? But not in the way it’s been done in most places Really? isn’t really an IT thing. But there you go.
Matt Ballantine 4:21
Yeah, I mean, we started from the principle that actually the whole thing about architecture other than designing specific applications, actually, what’s called architecture and organisations is probably more like Town Planning and building regulations. Building control is more about being able to set some general principles, set some regulations, what you should do, and then making sure you’re not going to build something is going to burn down after five minutes, rather than being actually doing architecture architecture. And so just like the metaphor that underpins is that is not that good. And that doesn’t help because actually, everybody knows what an architect is, or it has a conception about one architecture on architect is, if you’ve got a deaf metaphor that’s being used to explain what the role is, and it’s not like that. problems can arise.
Chris Weston 5:09
I’ve had a pretty busy week, and I went up into a couple of events. This week one was about security, and it was quite good. And one was a bomb was about a diversity and inclusion, which is also good. in Birmingham, with some good presentation. So yeah, it’s been a really interesting week and busy one next week, too. So yeah. So as you say, then we get into the into the kids being off school, and then everybody so disappears in little patches don’t know, one at a time.
Matt Ballantine 5:43
Yeah, I do think it would just be easier for shots, everything for all this to just make life a lot more sensible parent has to be done. So there we go. Right. Anyway, on this week’s show, we have coming up in a moment and interview with doc Shaw, who is a consulting artist.
Unknown Speaker 6:02
And that will lead into probably a bit of a chat about ambiguity.
Unknown Speaker 6:06
Or maybe it won’t.
Chris Weston 6:10
So much, you recently talked to a chap called doc Shaw, who is consulting artist, as somebody who it seems spends time getting people out of their little sort of zones to take them on a journey into what they might be able to unleash if only they thought about things slightly differently. Is that fair?
Matt Ballantine 6:30
Yeah, I think so. It’s kind of a repairing thing. I’ve been talking to a few people in the world of creative arts, whether that’s pure art, or theatre and stuff like that, because it’s just interesting to a very different take about how people go about creating things from what happens within, you know, the average r&d department. And Doug’s interesting because he, as you will hear, he comes from quite a traditional big corporate background, and then kind of has gone into the world where he described himself as a consulting artist, he goes in, and he works with clients to bear to help them use art to bear to discover things about themselves. So to start off with, I just asked him a bit about how he managed to go on that journey.
Unknown Speaker 7:14
When I began to start working for myself, I was very interested, I still am, I’m very interested in people and relationships and what makes us tick and how we how we interact. And very quickly became aware to me that people working in an organisational construct, are often very well meaning have lots of good intent, and on the whole arrive at work each day wanting to do a good job. But very often the job and the work kind of get in the way and prevent that sort of thing from happening. There’s a extent to which people are looking for and in fact, I might even go as far so crave a degree of certainty, which simply doesn’t exist. And I think that that’s credibly harmful, because it means that we’re looking for answers that aren’t there. And we’re, we’re too willing to follow kind of set patterns of behaviour unquestioningly, because we kind of think that that will take us to where we think we ought to be going. And partly out of frustration, I began to introduce art into my work, because it offered a lens through which to invite inquiry. So I began sharing, well known artists work and just acknowledging within the conversation, that we’re all looking at the same thing, but we’re all feeling very differently about it. So we can all look at it, you know, we all can all look at an identical object or artefact, and it will invoke different thoughts and feelings for us. How might we take that acceptance and look at our work in such a such a way. And beginning it was very much about so using other people’s art and just using it as a way of starting the conversation about what it might feel like to approach things differently and do things differently. Instead, that this is the this is the thing, but we’re all feet responding to it in a in a different way. And I stuck with that for a while. And then I just was curious and wondered what would happen if we stopped abdicating responsibility for the art to the artist. And we began to include the responsibility for the art among ourselves. And so the, the invitation became less to view a piece of art, but what about creating it either separately or together. And then looking at that, and understanding how we think and feel about it, not just about the image itself that we may have created, but also the process that we’ve gone through in order to get there. And all of a sudden, the conversation kind of deepened and expanded because we’ve gone from viewing the artefact made by someone else, to co creating and creating the artefacts ourselves, which gives us a much deeper sense of what it feels like to think and act like an artist. And from there the opportunity to come a debate and discuss what our work as a product designer or a product manager, or a project manager or a head of department or whatever might feel like if we look at it through different eyes. And I mean, that’s developed over a number of years. But that’s the essence of the the crux for me. So acknowledging the art in the first place. And then for me, the real shift coming when when we in source the responsibility into the group for actually making it and appreciating it and experiencing it.
Unknown Speaker 10:29
How did you get to be able to get this insight into bringing art into organisation environments, what what came before the consulting artist,
Unknown Speaker 10:38
so before I worked my most recent property, or if that’s the correct term,
Unknown Speaker 10:46
I worked, I had a number of roles in the telecommunications company BT. And it was an interesting experience, on the whole, quite positive. But it was it was also it was quite, I experienced some quite unusual things while being in that organisational construct, which actually served me you know, things that don’t go very well at the time. And very often the things that serve you well in, in the long run, even though they they really don’t feel like it at the time. So, um, I had my first real experience of being bullied, you know, at the age of 40, something through my boss I had at the time, and it was a really fascinating experience into what it feels like to appreciate vulnerability and uncertainty when it was being inflicted on you. And you’re being kind of systematically undermined by somebody who I’m going to try and be kind here and say he was probably feeling threatened or maybe undermined and insecure in their own way. And the only way they knew how to deal with it was to kind of project it onto someone else. Anyway, so I digress. But but the the experience in between was rich and diverse. But it was also ultimately frustrating. My last sort of 10 year, if you like in that organisation with as part of the Global Services Division, which was collapsing at the time, as a result of some really terrible business decisions made by senior management, and their subsequent inability to take responsibility for those decisions meant that people like me in kind of middle and upper middle management, were really feeling the heat. And for sure, you know, we’re all part of the process, and we’re all part of the system. But I felt there was a great abdication of responsibility going on, and it was hurting me. So I wasn’t my colleagues, it was hurting customers. And eventually, I just kind of came to a point of view where I felt I had to get out of it. And so I did, and then I just continued my curiosity. So as I, as I mentioned, you right, the beginning, the thing I’ve always been interested in is people and what makes us tick and how we kind of get on together, and how we might choose to do that sort of thing differently. And in pursuing that, and skilling myself in various kind of conversational and facilitation or methods, I began to become aware of this notion that the the ambiguity of our had a place had a really useful place to fit in the kind of structure and certainty of your typical corporate environment, which as we know, when you when you touch that certainty, it shut it off and just kind of, you know, shatters and distorts and breaks. So that that’s kind of it just evolved. It felt like the right thing to do and and I desire, I suppose
Unknown Speaker 13:24
it’s interesting, isn’t that the,
Matt Ballantine 13:27
you know, for all of the talk about the Zuiker the volatility uncertainty, towards it chaos and ambiguity? And the the deal organisational responses, we must embrace the uncertain and ambiguous world around us by trying to make it certain and an ambiguous.
Unknown Speaker 13:49
Yes, well, the very notion of
Unknown Speaker 13:53
life’s full of lovely paradoxes, but the whole notion of uncertainty makes us crave certainty even more, which means that we’re looking for something that is in in diminishing quantity and what have you. So yeah, it’s fascinating. And I think that what’s really interesting is that very often, the artistic response to uncertainty is very different from the organisational response. So there are, there’s a, there’s a group of researchers and academics based out in Germany called the age of artists, and they have constructed various frameworks for looking at this kind of thing differently. And they offer a typical organisational response exactly, as you’ve just articulated, and up against it, they invite a more playful, inquiring, inquisitive model, they’re not the only people doing this kind of thing, but I find them an interesting organisation to look at. And I often use some of their work because it’s available to be used as a way of particular particularly in the corporate environment, cuz I produce things that look more like nice tidy models and boxes and things behind which sits on the madness and, and the paint and other stuff. So so it’s really interesting. Talk the notion of things like Trojan mice, and all that kind of thing. And how do you sort of sneak this thing in, if you liked at the beginning? I’m not necessarily very good at that behind me. But but but I think there is something really interesting about how you present something in a way that enables people to begin to come on that journey, rather than rather than just turn up with spray cans and paint pots in hand and scare the hell out of everybody. Because I’m not sure that’s necessarily going to achieve what we’re ultimately looking for. Yeah, there’s the
Matt Ballantine 15:34
if somebody is afraid of something. immersion therapy often actually isn’t the way we should go about it. And I was at the guy who does all the stuff around improvise ation. Keith can’t remember he said, Keith Johnston. And in his book, one of the things he talks about is actually allowing people to generally expose themselves to the things that they’re afraid of, rather than just just dropping them in at the deep end. And so being able to find ways to enable art, the through rather than it to be right today, writing.
Unknown Speaker 16:15
Yeah, I think
Matt Ballantine 16:16
is is important. So things like Lego as a creative tool, I found, actually, of all of the things I’ve used over the years, Lego is the one because it connects to so many people because a childhood. It is a creative medium, but it’s also a very logical medium. So peels, it seems to quite a broad spectrum of people, I’ve yet to find somebody who won’t engage with Lego Lego out in a way that if you get a pot of paint, paint pots out of whatever, there’ll be a resistance almost an artist, I can’t paint I’m not, you know.
Unknown Speaker 16:49
So I absolutely agree with you. And I think they’re in again, perhaps slightly paradoxically, if you can have a slight paradox is, is part of the challenge. So that very resistance is part of the problem and part of the opportunity, because it is that very resistance that stopping us doing other things differently. And so one of the fascinating things about offering an artistic perspective, is that there will be people who will resist it. And I think it’s important to, therefore to make the offer, kindly, gently and invitation Lee, it’s quite interesting how I’ll get contracted to work with an organisation. And I will talk with the people who are sponsoring me and I will explain useful ways of kind of introducing what might be about to happen so that when I arrived, people have some idea of what’s going on, the frequency with which my requests are not acted upon, is remarkable. So I will arrive at an organisation and I will be met with a sea of quizzical faces who have no idea why I’m there. And again, you know, you see, you win, that’s what happens, I think to myself, okay, it’d be interesting to see if one of the challenges of services is how we communicate with each other. And it nearly always is in those environments. Because I’ve had a dialogue with a sponsor or a group of sponsors, explained what might be a useful way to teach this kind of stuff up. That’s been agreed and, and it hasn’t substantive subsequently hasn’t been executed. So anyway, that that’s not uncommon. And it might sound like a criticism, but you know, everyone is busy. And maybe it didn’t it, that’s just the way these sort of things unfold. And then so when we come to talking about work, and how does it feel? How do we feel about it? What brings us joy? What brings us frustration, how do we more of the stuff like less of the stuff we don’t like and all that kind of thing, there can be resistance to, to even talking about that. Because we’re we didn’t know this is what we were talking about. So I’d say I don’t put pressure on people, I just invite them to have the conversation, or to sit there if they’d rather not take part or to leave the room. If they really are resisting strongly. People really do get up and go. And actually the ones who sit there reluctantly, given the time, and space will often unfold their arms over time, and then listen, and then thing that sounds interesting, I can relate to that. And then they’ll begin to get involved. And similarly with the artistic process, I don’t want people to feel compelled. It should be Invitational, and I have a really good example of working with a client last year about using art to facilitate dialogue around culture and values. And I got talking to one of the people I was working with, and this particular woman was laughing and joking with me about what a good time that she was having, and how she imagined this would all be a bit Tony heart and they’d be kind of told what to do and how to do it. And it would all unfold in a very specific way. which point I looked down at her feet, which were shoeless and topless, and she had jammed paint brushes in between their toes. And while she was talking to me, she was just making this mad abstract painting on a sheet of paper on the floor. And I just looked at her and said, Do you think Tony Hart would have thought to tell you how to do that? And silence? And then she went on? I guess, I guess no, I guess he wouldn’t have said No, and I haven’t come here today to tell you what to do. But you’re expressing yourself in a way that has meaning for you, and will find its way into this project in some way. And if the people who are sponsoring the project choose to do so they can hear your voice and see your work and understand more more about what makes you tick and what motivates you What brings you joy. I couldn’t have contrived that in a million years, it had to happen organically.
Unknown Speaker 20:36
And artistically. They’re actually even more so if you try to have engineer that you would have had utter rejection, you know, right, everybody socks off?
Matt Ballantine 20:51
Do you think there’s a problem about how we are encouraged to make a separation between our work self and not work self?
Unknown Speaker 21:00
some extent? Yes.
Unknown Speaker 21:04
And again, I think so I think there’s a there’s a, there’s a trend about this whole idea of bringing your whole self to work. And I worry enormously about that. Because there are elements of my whole self that are best kept in a very dark box, in the corner of a very dark cupboard. And so I’m not a fan of this advocating of this kind of whole self thing necessarily, but because I think it puts us in potentially in difficult situations. But I would like I’d like online people to feel more comfortable about recognising that that who they are not at work, can very good very usefully be informing who they are at work. An example a friend of mine, Mark, catching up who works for the furniture designers, Herman Miller, who were very kindly sponsored work that I’ve been involved in and done in the past, they’re they’re really good example of an inquiring, inquisitive, curious client, with the added benefit that they always pay me on time, bless them, which I mean, that could form a whole rabbit hole brand. But they’re, you know, they’re a big company. And they see the importance of the relationship with a small company like mine. But But, but I find that whole thing, really interesting. And one of the things that mark often does when when sessions begin is he will inviting people to talk about the stuff that’s going on, it’s not about work. And it’s very often a really lively conversation. And some of that conversation can then seep back into the more work related dialogue. So I think having an appreciation of what motivates us and drives us is really important. And I often will ask the question, in an artistic context, what brings you joy, and people’s artistic responses to that sort of thing is very often just very illuminating quite profound, very often quite emotional. So I think one of the things that’s really useful about using various art forms, it doesn’t have to be visual art. I mean, we can be photography, it could be vers, it could be storytelling, improv, all of those things form part of my work, that they give us an opportunity to see things from a different perspective. And I think the the emotional aspect of what’s going on comes out in the arts much more readily than it does in a more sort of typical work conversation. And that’s something that I think is really important, really powerful and really enriching.
Unknown Speaker 23:27
Sometimes, I guess, it’s about being able to have something around which you can have the conversation. So
Matt Ballantine 23:36
it’s something I use a lot, I’ve got a box of 100 random photos, and I’ll lay them out on a table and then ask people to be able to pick out photos that somehow symbolise something to them. So I’ve been using it with helping people to better understand how they might use technology better by saying, take one photo, that’s something about how you are today, and something about how it could be in 12 months time if everything went wonderfully. What that enables people to do is to think around a problem and to start to express stuff emotionally without having to talk about their emotions directly, which again, I think in a work context, people find really hard. Because it’s, again, we’re not, you know, you’re not supposed to have fun at work, you’re not supposed to be emotional at work, you’re not supposed to be, you know, the list goes on.
Unknown Speaker 24:20
He does. And I love that idea. I mean, we’re really, for me, very powerful example. So the notion of these of us the symbol of the heart, as a as an indicator of of love, or affection, or something akin to that, you know, is something that we’re all very used to it’s, it’s probably in lots of people’s most used emoji lyst, and what have you, but but you start to talk about that kind of sense of feeling in a in a conversation and very quickly in workplace context, it becomes very weird and very awkward. However, in an artistic sentence, I see lots of love being expressed through various forms, either as a symbol, or as part of what is bringing us together and giving us common ground. And if we use art as a way, as I often do with kind of drawing a vision for the future, it nearly always surfaces, along with things like sunlight, and other other things like that. So kind of things that we we need, you know, we need the sun, we need to be we need to feel loved. And and those are the things are not just nice to have their essential. And yet, yeah, they don’t. They don’t come out in your typical workplace conversation. But they do come out in your photo exchange, and they do come out in the various artistic exchanges that I facilitate. And they’re essential ingredients. As far as far as I’m concerned, at least the
Unknown Speaker 25:46
word that you’ve described so far, feels like it’s often around the the periphery in a way it you know, it’s about the culture and values and the HR stuff and the l&d stuff, one of the things that
Matt Ballantine 26:02
organisations who are good employers try to do because they see it as a value add, almost, I’m stereotyping it a bit, but you don’t I mean, on that, do you see it being used at the core of an organization’s activities, have you been brought in by clients to be able to address how they deal with customers, or how they develop new products, or
Unknown Speaker 26:24
certainly the customer experience piece have done quite a lot of work on.
Unknown Speaker 26:32
And that is a really interesting conversation to have. And I think that the way in which the customer and employee experiences sort of oscillate an orbit around and within and together one another, is a really interesting conversation, I don’t know, there are times when you can separate them, but they become very quickly becomes obvious that the two have an opportunity to kind of resonate and bounce off one another. So I find that and it’s interesting that, you know, when EPB, it takes on a more serious tone, when when it’s about customer experience, as opposed to maybe employee experience, but I think the two are very, are often very closely related. So I think that the opportunity to discuss those kinds of things is really important. I haven’t really done anything, in and around kind of product design, quite a number of workplace type engagements. So I, I did a really interesting piece in a highly regulated environment recently, where the client was looking to physically relocate, and they wanted to mentally relocate at the same time. And they want, they saw the opportunity to try and allow one to facilitate the other. And that particular organisation saw fit to bring me in to help them plan through, you know, what they perceive to be a very serious move, I mean, moving physically is quite an upheaval. And they saw the benefits of integrating the mental shift with the physical shift and bringing the behavioural shift in as well. And they saw fit to use various art forms to enable a co creation around what that might look and feel like. So you know, I think I work best with groups of people who are curious. And I readily accept that not everybody is necessarily curious, with better that kind of people like to talk about creativity and innovation, but pick away at the veneer and there’s maybe not much behind it. But I think what’s really interesting for me is that if I come from a position of what I currently use the term of being a consulting artist, were able to get to a point of whether or not this could be an interesting thing to go ahead with much more quickly than then in previous times when I consider myself to be a consultant with an interest in the arts. Because I could do lots of talking about the whole consulting process for life. And then people go, ooh, but you’re going to do you’re going to bring in it. Now it’s much more obvious to people that that part of me at my best, and therefore an opportunity to hopefully see you at your best. And so let’s see if we can find a way to work around that construct.
Unknown Speaker 29:10
And it feels like there’s a
Unknown Speaker 29:13
there are a series of things that people are resistant to,
Unknown Speaker 29:17
or scared of within that
Matt Ballantine 29:20
that are part and parcel also of an organisation becoming better able to deal with the ambiguity in the world around us to be able to innovate, to be able to be able to come up with new ideas, because it is about being able to allow people to have ways about being able to confront the unknown in a kind of meta sense. To them be able to do that, whether it’s creating a piece of art or whether it’s creating a new product or service. Yeah, no.
Unknown Speaker 29:48
I think it’s, I agree. And I’m that sort of thing, agonising and conflict Me too, I’m no different from anybody else. So I I, I find myself in situations where things may not go as well as I thought they might, very often, when I look back on it, I, you know, I look back on I tried it when I reflect on things I reflected within, within the hope that I can learn things to do to do things differently, again, in the future. But I also reflect on things and try really hard to understand what my responsibilities in that reflection. So I think one of the things that organisations don’t necessarily facilitate very well, is a reflective process that’s about responsibility. Very often, it’s about blame, you know, this thing didn’t go very well is Doug’s fault, or let’s find a way to make it successful. I find it really interesting to look at something and think I didn’t go very well, what could I have done differently in that space? What might I do differently next time. And I’ve very often that sort of thing, it leaves me feeling quite vulnerable, quite exposed. I’ve actually played with it a couple of times in organisations where I’ve seen evidence of, you know, worrying levels of dysfunctional behaviour. And I’ve kind of sat there and thought, Well, I don’t want to happen if I absorb the responsibility for people’s frustrations. And actually, very often, what happens in those kind of environments is that the more you try to absorb it, the more it gets turned on you. Again, all you can do is reflect that sort of thing back and say, Well, this is really interesting. This is what I’m feeling. This is what I’m sensing. I’m digressing slightly, but I But yeah, I find I find these sort of things. You know, really interesting. So how do we get how do we shift from from pointing blame to thinking about responsibility and being comfortable to step into a place and go? Well, I could have done that differently, or, you know, yeah, that didn’t quite go according to plan. Here’s my contribution to why that happened. Maybe we could do it differently next time. It’s hard. I mean, that’s at the very sharp end. But a lot of my work is more exploratory and forward looking. But But reflective processes are interesting. And partly, I think, if they if they’re not done well and done properly, and they create sores that continue to scratch, rather than an operation NT to accept and appreciate what’s been done before and learn from it and move on.
Unknown Speaker 32:04
And that point about being able to learn from it, but not assume best practice or any of that, we’re just
Matt Ballantine 32:14
when it comes to things about the way in which people are interacting, when it comes how one person works with another person, or worse within a group of people. The constant seeking of the best way to do things within organisations is, is I think a bit future already. Because it’s it’s all contextual, don’t give people the time and space to be able to, you know, work out how to be able to reflect and have the time to learn and inform what they do going forward, rather than just determine what they do. Going forward.
Unknown Speaker 32:47
It’s very difficult. I mean, I agree with you. And I think that’s a really important point to to highlight.
Unknown Speaker 32:54
And it
Unknown Speaker 32:56
when we are in a planning phase, that’s coming a really exciting time, because all sorts of opportunities open up. And at some point, decisions have to be made. And I think we’ve had those moments are really interesting, because when a decision gets made, it’s it become it crystallises, you know, thinking crystallises, people’s behaviour crystallises around it, and it gets set up very often, that’s when we are at our most dangerous if you like, because we’ve come with all of the other options that we considered, have fallen the way and this is the one we’re going to do. And that has to happen, and we have to get on and do it. I think the challenge then is to remain awake and alert enough to realise that actually, whilst all those other options and things seemingly are falling away, everything else that’s going on around us is continuing to change and evolve and shift. And actually, people who plan really effectively are able to recognise that the forgive the artistic analogy, but the kind of landscape if you like, has has has changed and is changing if we keep on with the plan, just regarding because we’ve spent so much time and money and effort in investing in it. And there’s a danger that those things diverged unhelpfully so I don’t pretend this stuff is easy. But I think the organisations that do this sort of thing really well are able to hold almost two distinctly different things in their minds individually and together, and yet still continue to function healthfully. And usefully, I think, art and the arts, and the kind of creative practice that you were talking about with can’t with those photo cards and other things. Those are really important things in making it easier for people to hold that dissonance and operate usefully with it.
Matt Ballantine 34:41
Do you think there are any sectors where this is easier or harder? Or is it very much down to individual organisations in a cult for specific organisations?
Unknown Speaker 34:52
I think it’s the latter.
Unknown Speaker 34:55
Mike’s I’ve never really focused on a particular sector. I’m never sure whether that’s a weakness or a strength. And it’s one of the I don’t, I don’t know, I guess, I would have to say I don’t have deep experience in a particular sector, I find myself being fortunate to work in all kinds of different environments. So that’s a very that for me, that’s really interesting and useful, because it allows me to spot similarities and differences. But what I don’t have is a sort of deep expertise of what it feels like to do this in the FinTech sector or so, you know, I have worked with people in that sector, or not in any great depth. So I’d be a bit disingenuous of metre, I think, profess to have any knowledge and experience I’m I’m thinly spread across a wide range of places and people for which I’m genuinely grateful. But But that doesn’t mean I let that depth and expertise in a specific sector for sure.
Matt Ballantine 35:55
Although I guess that the evidence that you are working across so many different actors is probably one that says it’s it’s probably more organisational than it is sector specific, specific. Otherwise, you’d find that All you ever did was telecoms or finance or whatever else. Yeah, I guess yeah. Yeah, it might also be a bit about where an organisation is in terms of its its life cycle, because I don’t know but it was, you know, a company like I don’t know who’s in on the skids at the moment Arcadia say, I’m not sure that Philip green would ever pay for somebody like you to come in anyway because he’s a bit of a tight Boston but
Unknown Speaker 36:31
and then this big decision I would have to make as to whether or not I would want to accept to work with somebody
Matt Ballantine 36:40
you know, an organisation that said that light stage of its lifestyle I can’t imagine would be going in I guess it’s more of a
Unknown Speaker 36:47
it’s a luxury is a luxury purchase for organisations. It’s a good question.
Unknown Speaker 36:54
That’s a really,
Unknown Speaker 36:55
I think, at times Yes. And at times, not so much. But I mean, that whole Arcadia thing, I love that meme of the dog, slurping the coffee while the house is on fire that you see around the place. And that’s what immediately popped into my head when you mentioned that particular organisation. And and she yet that point? I’m not sure whether or not whether I could be of any any used to them putting the putting the morality bit aside. And again, that that is a really interesting thing. You know, do I is that?
Unknown Speaker 37:30
Let’s not go there. But yeah, is that the right kind of thing to be doing?
Unknown Speaker 37:35
But I don’t I don’t know. And again, I I don’t I don’t I think it’s important. So some you’ve another something that’s really interesting and useful. And something I’m trying to get clear on. And that is, when mighty be useful for clients to look to me for some sort of support and assistance, because I think there are points in cycles where I’m probably extremely unhelpful, you know, if we let so if we let that nutcase into Arcadia now, I don’t mean me. What the hell is going to be let loose? I don’t know the answer. And equally, I think there are times, you know, when when a more when a shift that is desired rather than inflicted on us is more in the mix, then I think that’s the kind of time and space where this sort of thing can be really powerful. I’m sure there are other times too. But I think it’s important to acknowledge that anybody who tries to position themselves as being the right fit all the time, is playing a dangerous game, I think.
Matt Ballantine 38:33
Yeah, I’m very much for event context, as these things inevitably are, it’s about, you know, it would work at a certain point, and there’s almost, there’s a serendipitous element to that, as well as a tactically planned part. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 38:48
Yeah, there is. And if I if I think about the survive, if I relate what we’ve been talking about here now into a more community minded experience, I’m in I’m in the process at the moment I have, I facilitate a weekly art session in the local community. And it’s a really exciting experimental environment. And there’s lots of uncertainty and experimentation in that on a week by week basis. And yet, at the moment, it’s kind of, it’s solidifying into something a little bit more certain forum for better word, because we have a, we have a community exhibition on tomorrow night. So we’re taking all this experimentation, and beginning to curate it and put it into an environment where members of the community are going to come along and appreciate the word that other members of the community have, have made together. And separately. I’m excited, I’m excited about that. So I think I think there is there are times when when you can use this kind of thing to focus around quite a certain environment or happening. So to bring it bring it back into the corporate world, again, that might be something like a conference or a big meeting. So I quite often get asked to help facilitate commerce among large groups of people using using techniques that allow those big groups of people to talk in much smaller groups and isolate and kind of move around and provide sort of visual support that people can riff off and contribute to and play around with. So you might call that sort of individual meeting or whatever. But but there are, for me that I’m getting quite excited now. Because I said, You know, I see I’m in this world, and I see how these things kind of inform each other and Evan flow and drift from certainty and uncertainty and back again, depending on the context of the environment. So it’s a it’s an exciting place to be an at same time, often very uncertain place to be I mean, I, there are times when I kind of look and think crumbs, why don’t more people get this, why aren’t I busier? And then there are times when I’m running around like man thinking great. Yes. It’s all making sense now. But that’s the life of the freedom. So I guess.
Chris Weston 40:57
Well, thanks. But to Duke for that it was Yeah, kind of, as I said, he is somebody who is trying to get people to think slightly differently about what they do and how they do it. And I think there’s this challenge around ambiguity, isn’t it? You mentioned about how you try to embrace it a little bit rather than smash it down and pretend it doesn’t exist?
Matt Ballantine 41:21
Yeah, I think it’s, it’s an interesting thing, isn’t it that the the Luca world volatility, uncertainty, chaos and ambiguity and the, you know, it’s been well established now that the world around our immediate moat around us and the world around our organisations is not steady, it’s not stable. We don’t know what’s happening next. There’s an extent to which has always been the case. But the pace of this uncertainty seems to be stepping up a bit. And lots of organisations talk about how they want to be able to, you know, embrace this uncertainty and ambiguity, but actually, what they do is they try to embrace it by removing it, and removing uncertainty and ambiguity and ambiguity. ambiguity isn’t the same as dealing with it, because all you’re doing is trying to be able to bash stuff down, you’re trying to be able to constrain things you’re trying to be able to, effectively try to conceptualise the board in a way that you’ve just said, doesn’t exist, but we’re going to try to do it anyway. And it’s pleasing. And it’s makes people happy when the certainty in the world but it doesn’t really help very much of anything. And so when when you look at organisations who engage with people like Doug, I find it interesting as to whether it’s a little bit of a sticking plaster over the problems, or whether it is a real attempt to be able to try to extend out there, if nothing else, there people’s ability to be able to
Unknown Speaker 42:47
just deal with less
Matt Ballantine 42:50
times around them, and the different techniques that you might be able to do to try to achieve that.
Chris Weston 42:55
Yeah, I would hope that it would be around, let’s do something that is the just take people out of their normal day to day way of thinking, because that isn’t really healthy. We live in these little bubbles. And, and these I mean, there’s I talked about this, this diversity inclusion event, I went event I went to the other day, a lot of people in those situations, they talk about group thing, they talk about the fact that you get into these common ways of thinking, well that which does happen. But also if you’re in the same group doesn’t matter if you’re all from different corners of the world, or different social backgrounds or whatever. If you sit with the same group of people for a length of time, you will all start to forget about what it wants to do something different and, and to Bravo if people do this in order just to break out of that little bubble. Because we absolutely always do. And we’ve talked about this on previous podcasts, I’m sure we are trying to make me try to crack this illusion of control, we have this illusion that these people in our CRM system are going to buy from us one day, because we’re going to follow this process. And they’re going to do that. And that’s and that they’re going to put they’re going to do on that day. And that’s our sales pipeline. When actually, you’re just you can’t model that you’re just trying to work on the balance of probabilities and your and your hunch. And, and there is always ambiguity and risk, but we try to pretend that they they either don’t exist, or we can manage them, which we can only to a certain extent, is a fascinating kind of existential crisis moment for some people really, where they actually they can’t manage it. And they’ll either go through the exits into crisis, and then resign and go and live as a hermit for the rest of their life. Or they pretend it didn’t happen. You know, there’s the different ways that you can carry on after that.
Unknown Speaker 44:45
Yeah,
Matt Ballantine 44:46
it can come back to the macro political stuff going on. You know that. Sorry about that, because whatever everybody is trying to pretend is that there is going to be a strong leader who will be able to remove all this fear and doubt and just be able to crack on. And that’s going to land so bad. Because you just know that’s not what’s going to happen now is this kind of continuing state of chaos, that is self inflicted to a great extent, and there isn’t strong leadership that’s going to get us out of that. It just doesn’t work that way. But within organisations, we crave it, we want to be able to see you know, there’s a there’s a mythology about what management leadership is about, that we’re willing to be able to invest in, because it makes it feel like there is some sort of nice, sane answer to this. And we’ve all been doing this, we’ve been doing this for time immemorial, you know, the Oracle Adelphi was providing exactly the same function to the ancient Greeks is nothing new. But there’s a, I didn’t know that, actually, we need to step back and say, Okay, let’s just see if we can work through this rather than let’s look for the person who will give us all the answers. That’s the that’s the bit for me where people start
Chris Weston 45:53
to click. Yes, well, we’re all guilty, I guess at times of falling for wish fulfilment, that people have all the answers. But I really wish you hadn’t brought up the fact that our next prime minister is going to be is going to be Boris Johnson. It’s going to happen quite soon. But now I’m just depressed again after being told that to load up the cricket little cricket moment, there’s taking me out of reality for a bit and now I’m back. Thanks much. Thanks for that. All good day’s work.
Matt Ballantine 46:26
Okay, well, we’re done for another week. The week ahead is still work weeks, gold is still in busy. And we’ll we’ll see what happens on the show next week. Have an interview with somebody and the thrust of the interview is basically everything about diversity and technology. Its stem the problem,
Chris Weston 46:50
which is pretty profound idea.
Unknown Speaker 46:53
Well, we’ll see how it goes.
Unknown Speaker 46:56
anything particularly exciting you want to highlight for the weekend.
Chris Weston 46:59
I’ve got an interview on hoping to record for the podcast so that I’ll delight everybody with that soon and then move to Brussels again. Then the week so it’s always nice but otherwise no it’s gonna be going to be another another exciting and I’m watching right yeah, cuz you know
Matt Ballantine 47:18
if you said you got a job. It tells me you’re going to get a job. Good job. But it says all of it coincidental you started regularly attending Brussels. At the point I was the new me PS have started to attend
Unknown Speaker 47:36
process. Are you actually a Brexit policy me up when you think I’ve secretly joined the Brexit party? And now I do. But you haven’t seen me tweeting about the fact that how polling is that? I’ve been given a technology unable to do my job.
Chris Weston 47:51
And being asked to turn up for things
Unknown Speaker 47:53
that you may be taken under a pseudonym.
Chris Weston 47:55
I couldn’t be couldn’t. I am a Nazi artillery smog in I’m in drag. I don’t know. I know. Pretty well paid. And they they don’t have to do very much. So it’s it seems like a pretty good gig.
Unknown Speaker 48:12
Well on that bombshell.
Unknown Speaker 48:15
Have a great week. We’ll see you next week.
Matt Ballantine 48:30
Thanks for listening. You can find us at web 40 podcast. com You can follow us on twitter on wp 40 podcast and you can subscribe to us on all good podcasting platforms. leave us a review if you get a moment. We love them.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
49 min

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