Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dave Snowden On Applying Complexity Science to Ignite Your Passion EP 24

Starting point is 00:00:00 So I got given one of those jobs with go and do some interest in things that will pay you a salary and don't worry if you upset people and I am quite good at upsetting people so I had a lot of fun all right and it's Seven years I lasted and I began with a lot of top cover and I think it sort of taught me something about if you really believe in something go for it And I remember a guy called Philip Oliver who's a brilliant guy in IBM. And he said you got, and he worked for him for a bit. And he said you got a choice. You can either try and play the politics, but you'll never survive because you're gonna grow up

Starting point is 00:00:32 in IBM for that. Or do what you think's right, and I'll give you top cover. And that was the nicest thing anybody said to me, and that's what I did there after. Welcome to the Cash and Struck Podcast. My name is John Miles, a former combat veteran and multi industry CEO, turned entrepreneur

Starting point is 00:00:51 and human performance expert. Each week we showcase an inspirational person or message that helps you unlock your hidden potential and unleash your creativity and leadership abilities. Thank you for joining us today on the show and let's get igniting. Hi, I am John Miles, host of the PassionStruck podcast, and I am so excited to have all of you here,

Starting point is 00:01:14 especially those of you who are growth seekers, visionaries, leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators of all types. My role in being the host of this show is to bring on my achievers like our guests today and then week out of them their secrets, the way that they learn to overcome their obstacles and how they are living a passion-driven life. So you can learn from them and pick up action skills, mindsets and techniques that you can apply in your own life. And before I get into the introduction,

Starting point is 00:01:44 I did want to give it a shout out to my fans in the United Kingdom, who again this week were the top watching group of our YouTube channel, and now constitute over 30% of all views on the channel. I'm going to start today's show off by reading you two different quotes. The first one is this, speaking of the ideal has a long history. It produces many saints, but few paradigm changes. And the second one is, true values are not taught and declared. They evolve through the tax and interaction of the living. They are understood at a near-tastic level by those who live them. And both of those

Starting point is 00:02:19 quotes are from my guest today. Welch, futurist, knowledge management, expert, and complexity science guru, Dave Snowden. I am so excited for you all to hear from this amazing man who literally has millions of fans worldwide and is a springy sought after speaker. Now let me tell you a little bit about Dave Snowden. He divides his time between two different roles. First, he's the founder and chief scientific officer, a cognitive edge, and the founder and director for the center of applied complexity at the University of Wales. His work is international in nature and covers government and industry, looking at complex issues relating to strategy and organizational decision making. He has pioneered a science-based approach for organizations growing on anthropology, neuroscience, and complex adaptive systems theory.

Starting point is 00:03:13 As I mentioned before, he is an extremely popular keynote speaker on a broad range of topics, as well as a pragmatic cynicism and a kind of classic style. His paper with Boone Unleadership was the cover article for the Harvard Business Review in November 2007 and also won the Academy of Management Award for the best practitioner paper in the same year. He holds Physicians Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria and Stellan Botch as well as Visiting Professor at Banger University in Wales.

Starting point is 00:03:47 I am so excited to have Dave Stone on the show today. It was absolutely a thrill for me to have the opportunity to interview him and I left out one important detail. He has also been hired by our government agency inside the United States to uncover the origins of COVID, which he will also talk about later on the episode today. Without further ado, let's bring on Dave to the show. I am so ecstatic to have with us today Dave Snowden as our guest on the Passion Strike podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dave Snowden, as our guest on the PassionStrike podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dave. That should be with you. Well, as I was going through your background,

Starting point is 00:04:32 one of the most pinnacle tip of points it seemed you had was during a time that you were at IBM and then I believe your company was acquired. And I know having been in some large companies like that, those acquisitions can cause many different things to happen. So I wanted to understand and thought that that was a good lead off point for our discussion today.

Starting point is 00:04:58 Yeah, I was in a company called Data Sciences. Yeah. I was one of the 50 managers who'd actually done a management biotech of it, and we're in the process of launching the company on the market, so we got to the point where we were going to pay off the venture capitalists. By that time I was running strategy and there were three companies I was going to go and buy the minute we had the cash from the sale and Friday night IBM phoned up and by Sunday we were sold it was actually scarily quick is of course we've done all of you diligence to float the company and they just picked up on that and I lost a lot of good relationships

Starting point is 00:05:38 over that but you know IBM was with interest and because they get they've worked out what I've done within data sciences to create a thing called a genus program which had been gone from zero to about 60% of our revenue. It had turned the company around. So I got given one of those jobs with go and do some interest in things that will pay you a salary and don't worry if you upset people. And I am quite good at upsetting people. So I had a lot of fun, all right, and it's seven years I lasted in IBM with a lot of top cover. And I think it sort of taught me something about if you really

Starting point is 00:06:11 believe in something, go for it. And I remember a guy called Philip Oliver as a brilliant guy in IBM. And he said you got, and they worked for him for a bit. And he said you've got a choice. You can either try and play the politics, but you'll never survive because you're going to grow up in IBM for that. Or do what you think's right, and I'll give you top cover. And that was the nicest thing that anybody said to me, and that's what I did there. Well, that's great. And I personally know what this meaning of top cover is, because at one point, I worked for a competitor of IBM's as the CIO of Dell, and I can tell you in similar circumstances, you kind of lived or died

Starting point is 00:06:52 by your top cover, and unfortunately for me, once multiple of my top covers had been exited from the company, eventually you run out of top covers who can protect you. That's happened to me. I mean, after Lucas, theler, the writing was on the wall. Yeah. That by that time I was, I mean, it was quite interesting, because I mean, the other thing

Starting point is 00:07:11 which was weird on that is I got summoned down to Arlington in DC when I was working for IBM and I was based in the UK, but in Boston all the time, I'm, that's where the institute was. And they, it was a CIA and they were kind of like interested in my work on narrative and complexity theory. And I'm a good world socialist, so this was a little bit of a show. Either way, I sort of went down and met this doggie old guy. Didn't know he was, but I did, but everybody does,

Starting point is 00:07:38 is look at somebody's book source and then use that. People's book shelter. And he had all of Patrick O'Brien's C-Ferrin novels there, which is a passion of mine as well. So we got into this passionate argument for about 50 minutes with everybody else in the meeting because he was obviously the senior guy. And then I saw a picture of him with Ronald Reagan and realized I was talking with Admiral John Pointexter, who I'd given my own political background and not meant to like.

Starting point is 00:08:03 But that's how I really liked him and he was a really, he's still a good friend, right? And effectively, I worked in his direction then for several years and that was absolutely fascinating because all of a sudden, this sort of theoretical idea was being looked at in the context of counterterrorism. And I was in Arlington, the night before 9-11,

Starting point is 00:08:21 I flew out that night picked up the news next day, my team didn't know there were a light for the next three weeks. And then it all got very serious. And I think that was one of the big benefits of IBM. You could do some really serious work because you had that brand behind you. Yeah, I absolutely know that that is the case because we, when I was at Lowe's, got to do some very serious work with IBM. And at that point in time, we were trying to build the first seamless customer experience.

Starting point is 00:08:53 And the thing that was dogging us at that time, and I was at that point running all data and software development was we could not find computational models that could take in real time the order management data that was coming in from the customers customers and pass it through all the system so that it could enable that whole ecosystem to take the input in and then expose that output out. So it was the true knowledge management system. And as you might guess, IBM was very interested in this capability at the time. But we were trying to run it on the mainframe that wasn't working. We went to the, we stepped down from there

Starting point is 00:09:39 and tried using UNIX systems. And it turned out not to be a horsepower as, it turned out to be what I think was a processing issue. But I'd like to get a little bit of your perspectives on that from that angle. Yeah, you was actually, I mean, yeah, that's a side story on IBM. And one of the weird things is we've got taken over by IBM. And they got rid of all our PC based email system and put us on host.

Starting point is 00:10:05 And only those of us who've grown up with mainframes could cope with it because we knew about PF keys and inconsistent use and it was interesting to see they haven't changed. I think the the knowledge management, I mean it's interesting at the moment is coming back into play. I mean it's like knowledge management goes through this cycle of being fashionable, and then people start to focus on codification because they think it's all about rules and it's all about databases. And then of course that doesn't work, so the whole thing gets abandoned, but the need's still there, and 506 later the cycle comes around again. So there's a big conference every year in Washington called Colcai and Will,

Starting point is 00:10:45 and I have the unique distinction of having keynoteed every one of these conferences from when it was on the West Coast, I think of them 30 now, one year I did turn up, so they made me go virtual and I didn't know how they put a pumpkin head, it was Halloween, there was a pumpkin on the stage and I was speaking through the pumpkin, and I didn't find out until afterwards. And there's some jacked up next time. But what you see is the consistent mistake and there's a famous saying by Polani, all right, you always we always know more than we can say and I extended up to say not only that we can always say more than we can write them and what you can codify is about 10% of what people know and that's the big problem. It's the focus on structure process.

Starting point is 00:11:25 We do a lot of work now, it's a comes from the counterterrorism work, where we're working with narrative-based understanding on narrative databases, a lot of work at COVID at the moment on lessons learned, because you want real-time stories, you don't want highly structured doctrine, it takes that military work.

Starting point is 00:11:43 But also, I think fascinating that we're bringing back in the apprentice models because there's a whole body of knowledge, which takes you two or three years to actually acquire, you can't just read a manual or follow a process. And I think that from my point of view as things, it's still deeply frustrates me, is people adopting a purely engineering approach to human systems. Yeah, and I mean, I took my daughter, I mean, she was doing, she now, she's now over 30 of anthropologists and working for me and criticizing my inability to understand the losing assemblage theory. That's what happens when you have daughters who are massive

Starting point is 00:12:21 anthropologists, right? But when she did her A levels, which is the sort of 16 year old things, she got a textbook, we'd agreed she'd do psychology as one of her subjects. And she came back with a textbook and showed me the opening chapter and it said the basic assumption of psychology is that the human brain is a limited capacity

Starting point is 00:12:42 information processing device. We found up the school in X-Day and switch to subjects, but that was still the common assumption. When we were doing KM and IBM and elsewhere, it was the computer model and human beings were just not very good computers. You know, I think that's a really good point and it was something, if I go back to that experience that we were we were really trying to work with because this was one of the first times in my career I was exposed to Agile and we were trying to divide this project up in a bunch of Agile teams and we spent tons of time doing consumer research and instead of designing this, like many were designed at that point, which was kind of an outward in, we put the consumer completely in the middle and then tried to

Starting point is 00:13:38 think back to, you know, how do we enable their life to be the best it could be when they experienced our stores and so one of the most critical elements we found was that I think at that time those like many companies had this just spaghetti architecture that we inherited from I call it spaghetti or accidental architecture, but all these systems come in for good use but over time over 20 20, 30 years, there's so many interconnections, and by that time, many people have left who don't understand it. So one of the most important things that we had to deal with

Starting point is 00:14:14 was the metadata, and I know that that's a big area that you deal with. So when you're looking at something, you know, like COVID that's been around us, you know, what are the different types of metadata that you analyze for that? Our work is a large part of what we do is what's called high abstraction metadata. So the easiest way to explain that is if you do, if you have an employee satisfaction survey,

Starting point is 00:14:39 let's take one way people gather data and you get this question, it says does your manager consult you on a regular basis, scale of zero and not at all 10 all the time? All right, that's really common. Yeah, great. And you see the same in net promoter score and all these sort of things, right? And I remember phone, FIBM, HR,

Starting point is 00:15:00 and I was on a watch list, by the way. So I, UK wouldn't talk with me, I got put through to head office. One of the reasons is that actually we're on a three-month program which had proved that Myers-Briggs was less accurate than astrology and predicting team behavior. And for some reason, they were annoyed with me over it. And I said, how am I going to answer this?

Starting point is 00:15:20 Because I've got several managers, and sometimes they consult me and sometimes they don't, and sometimes they consult me and sometimes they don't and sometimes they should and sometimes they shouldn't You're asking a context specific a context free question in what's a context specific world which I'm not sure she understood And she said every pure experience over the years stop causing trouble and slam the phone down on me now We take a very different approach. So we ask a non-hypothesis question. Yeah. Manages may in different contexts, it's different. So we'll ask what story would you tell your best friend if they were offered a job in your work group, which is non-hypothesis. And then we ask people to interpret the story. And this is a method we developed on counter-terrorism and you know,

Starting point is 00:16:01 did the patents and everything. So we end it with a series of triangles. And each of the triangle has three balanced positive items. So one of them, for example, will say in this story was the manager's behaviour altruistic assertive or analytical. Now, what happens with that is it forces a cognitive load on the brain. The brain doesn't know what answer it should give. So you move to thinking slow, not thinking fast, to use the famous phrase. And of course, with six triangles, I'll get 18 metadata points. So that's called high abstraction metadata.

Starting point is 00:16:33 Yeah. And the work we did on counterterrorism, which gave rise to that, is to using children as ethnographers to understand street stories. And that sort of metadata is input. And this is, by the way, it's an issue about cognitive sovereign to your epistemic justice because power lies in interpretation, not in contribution. So what we focused on was allowing people to interpret their own narrative

Starting point is 00:16:58 and the metadata came from that. Now, they come back to your point and I'll be brief now. High abstraction metadata research is discover novelty because if you can say if I knew the answer to the program, I did index it like this and then the system recalls all the stories that other people have indexed like this, you find things you didn't expect to find and that to me is actually what knowledge management is meant to be about. Anything else is information management. And I think that's a great clarifying comment for those of you who don't really understand what the difference is who are trying to listen, because a lot of people look at them in the same way.

Starting point is 00:17:37 And I think, yeah, and it's it's the old problem, right? I mean, and also it's partly instantiated by that awful D.I.K.W. model, the one which goes data information knowledge wisdom. Because that just means good information management programs don't get funding because they're not knowledge management, so people re-batch them. It's like Agile's the same, you mentioned Agile, all right? I was working with Telstra in Australia

Starting point is 00:18:01 and they got waterfall projects. I mean, they're massive infrastructure projects, they're waterfall, but nobody got promoted unless they were agile. So they created one year's sprint. So they could say they were agile. And corporations get into this nonsense and it frustrates the hell out to me

Starting point is 00:18:17 because actually different things work in different contexts but everybody wants a universal. What will they do? And I think one of the areas that we share in common, based on other interviews I've heard you do, is when I was being trained in the military, I was lucky to do siops. And one of the things I learned

Starting point is 00:18:40 was that the type of leadership that you have to invoke in different situations differs. And so I, when people always ask what type of leadership that you have to invoke in different situations differs. And so I, when people always ask what type of leadership do you practice, and it gets me in trouble, I always say situational. Now, I think my default is to be a servant leader or what I term now as a gardener leader, but one thing that I've read about in your studies is that you believe in different circumstances, you have to react differently. The other big thing that this chemistry and complexity theory, all right? So what I do is I take a natural science approach, all right? And we use natural sciences at constraints. So we know things about cognition, we know things about systems, so that

Starting point is 00:19:23 that's a kind of basis. One of the things we actually know for complexity is connections matter more than things. So if I'm doing leadership development, I'm focused on how do I connect people in different ways, not on developing leadership qualities. And if you do that, leadership decisions nearly always then become contextual, because they're arising out of the connections with people in different circumstances in different times. And one of the big things we focus on

Starting point is 00:19:51 is the concept of cruise, which comes from the military, and that people are trained in role and role of expectation. And the cruise has a cognitive capacity more than the best individuals. So this cult of the individual leader, I think it's actually deeply worried because what you get is it's either a rigid process or the inspirational leader. And that's actually just really bad science because most of the time

Starting point is 00:20:17 leadership can be distributed. Sorry, I'm running around a bit, but no,, no, no, no, you're kind of going where I were. I want to speak. I mean, I've just finished writing. It'll be published next week. A joint publication between Mike, Nevin Centre and the European Commission. So it's the first field guide to managing complexity in crisis, which has been published. It comes out next week.

Starting point is 00:20:43 And one of the things we're focused on there is that, and I'll give you an illustration, is if you're a leader in a crisis, you only make decisions at the start, and your decisions are draconian to give yourself options downstream. And people like the New Zealand Prime Minister did that. She actually broke the law, but she created that space, which gave her more room to move, whereas the UK and the US didn't. They waited too late.

Starting point is 00:21:10 But after you've done that, the role of the leader is coordination, not decision-making. And people keep getting that wrong. If a good leader never makes a decision, they coordinate people. Well, and I think that's an absolutely amazing point you've just made. And I'm going to give two examples from my own life on it. So, I've seen this on both sides when I was in the military. I was fortunate, not sure if you're familiar with this organization, but when I was there, it was called Joint Interagency Task Force East. It's now Jad of South and it coordinates all the counter drug

Starting point is 00:21:46 interdiction and it was For me one of the most fascinating jobs I ever had because I think it was the beginning point of starting to get fused and the fusion of different intelligence Correct But what we really learned was that we could give direction, we could coordinate the assets, but you know, unless you're on that ship that's going after the go fast or you know, that aircraft that's going after that grub smuggling aircraft in the air, you don't have eyes on of what's happening in that exact situation. So it you had to be hands off

Starting point is 00:22:28 But eyes on type of methodology and the bigger the crisis the more important be that she if you're in leadership role You can't afford to make too many mistakes otherwise people will lose confidence So one of the ways you don't make many mistakes is not to make many decisions But you have lots of other people making decisions and you make sure the right people talk with the right people. Yeah, I think the other interesting thing on this and it comes back to the metadata issues. So if you're trying to coordinate people from different agencies and you did a lot of this work on the intelligence agencies in the state, if you try and make them share data and you make it a legal requirement, they'll sort of do it, but they won't really, they'll still hide stuff.

Starting point is 00:23:09 And that's just life, right? When we all learn this, right? We've focused on, if you share abstract metadata, then we can discover that we need to ask you for specific items of information. Because if you go to somebody and say, look, I've just run this search and we think these three things with these numbers are relevant. Can I look at them? People will generally say yes. But if you say, can I have access to all of your data, they'll say no. So because when you ask for, and that's one of the other things, metadata is far more important than data. Partly, visit reveals patterns, but be because it has less ownership, and therefore it's more likely to be shared. Yeah, and that's another great point, and an illustration that the listener may comprehend is when I was again at Lowe's, put metadata and context in a retailer, it would be things like your personal view of a customer, a single view of a store,

Starting point is 00:24:06 location, product, etc. But one of the most critical areas is something called product-specific selling attributes. It's a mouthful. But what it really means is if you're looking at a fan, what are the different attributes of the fan? What sizes it? what are the colors of the blade, the inner workings. And, you know, at that point in time, you had minards, art self, home depot, sears, ACE, true value that we're all working with these vendors. And this third party came on the scene called Big Hammer and convinced all of us to work together on this. And so in this case, we would share the product's specific selling attributes because it benefited the whole ecosystem, but we wouldn't share the other metadata elements that made us unique.

Starting point is 00:24:59 And I think that's probably a good illustration of that concept. Yeah, and I think let's actually something the agile movement didn't learn. So years before when I was in data science, we said a thing called DSTM, which was about rapid application development and jazz, right? It was actually one of the three seeds in the agile manifesto, the other's been ex-fee and scrum. So DSTM was one of those. And because we were British, we did it one evening over dinner in a pub in Chelten not going to a ski resort, right? But it was actually three competitors because we worked there. If three competitors came together

Starting point is 00:25:38 and made a standard, that would create a market. And we would all actually make more revenue into it. And Adjal never got that because they tried to put everything behind firewalls and make it proprietary. And that's still a problem with our job. I mean, it's heavily commoditized now anyway with things like safe. That's something like safe comes along. Something is reaching the end of its life cycle because it's too structured. The other indication says he's feeling, is you know something's coming to the end of

Starting point is 00:26:09 its life cycle when IBM adopts it as strategic, because they tend to be a later doctor of any consultancy approach. Well, I think you absolutely have something there, and unfortunately, in the case, IBM, I was hoping when they bought Red Hat that they would have adopted more of the Red Hat culture, but I think from what I'm hearing and seeing from insiders, it seems to be going the other way. Yeah, I get the same feedback. But I mean, I've been telling them that,

Starting point is 00:26:37 I mean, when IBM took us over, right? I just went out and talked with everybody who'd been taken over by IBM before. And I remember coming back to the office and saying, guys, all this crap about the wanting us to keep our culture is just nonsense. What they want to do is watch us for a year, then they'll cherry pick. So I said the only way we can survive is by saying we want to be IBM tomorrow, and that was actually extremely successful strategy because they weren't ready for it.

Starting point is 00:27:05 And I remember the other thing I said is each of you are a general. I said, I'm OK. I've got this really interesting job, which I can do what the hell I want. But any of you want to survive as a general manager, you know, spend employing IBM D grade or VP grade, somebody approaching retirement. It will cost you 1,350,, 350k a year and they'll handle the IBM bureaucracy for you. You can't afford to follow it. All you have to do is decide what to do in this person will work out how to say it, so I'd be able to. And yeah, and I said the same to my contacts

Starting point is 00:27:40 in Red Hat, but they haven't taken the same advice and sooner or later the ball will absorb them. That's the way it works. Did you know that Forbes Magazine recently cited that 70% of individuals who do personal development masterminds and one-on-one coaching benefited from better work performance, increased communication skills in overall better relationships. And we at PassionStruck are obsessed with self-development, coaching, and mentorship. That is why we've created a free resource to help you unlock your hidden potential. Because people doing great things in business and life are just like you, only they've had a coach along the way, and we've got that cover too.

Starting point is 00:28:25 Let us show you the systems and frameworks that we teach for oath-minded individuals to help them step into their sharp edges, execute on their passion journeys, and get predictable results time and time again. Go to passionstruck.com slash coaching right now and let's get igniting. It's unfortunate because so many of these strategic multi-billion dollar acquisitions that are made are on the premise that that it's going to be a cultural change and it's going to bring this or that. If you look at the figures, I mean, I got very drunk one night with one very senior person in IBM, all right?

Starting point is 00:29:02 You have the crate of Pino Loa. And just how we say the crate, half the crate disappeared by all right? You have the creator, Pino, or just how we say, the create half the create disappeared by three o'clock in the morning, all right? And we took every IBM acquisition. We were both ex-accountents, yeah, so we could do this, all right? So we took all the IBM acquisitions and worked out how a big IBM should be

Starting point is 00:29:20 if it had just maintained value. It was actually quite scary, because effectively, they cannibalized each acquisition to maintain a very slow growth rate. And the industry, and that's what you see with most acquisitions these days, nobody's trying to create the new Apple or the new Google. They're trying to create something that Apple or Google will buy. And that's actually quite dangerous for the world. And can you go into that a little bit more? Because I think that's a good point. I think, yeah, I think it's,

Starting point is 00:29:50 if you go into the valley at the moment, right, every, and it's partly because of the VC market. You haven't got the sort of Steve Jobs or people like that. We just passionate about something and want to make it happen. I mean, you know, Silicon Valley was a wonderful satire because it was based on reality, all right. What you've got is the issue is to get to the point where somebody big buys you and your venture capital gets a lot of money back. And therefore, it's short-term strategic, it's short-term strategic link rather than long term strategic. And that's going to damage industry, I think, because nobody's doing anything really radical

Starting point is 00:30:31 in that sense. They're just augmenting or complementing. But then the big guys, when they buy things, I mean, IBM bought data sciences to create what became IBM global services because IBM didn't have a service background, like they bought locus for software. And it kind of was okay for a bit, but then they started to acquire things like PWC, which was a major mistake from my point of view. But they didn't understand the business models. IBM's culture was still physics. And there was a point where services was 50% of our revenue, but service research was

Starting point is 00:31:06 1% of research. It was all about physics. And the manufacturing framework, you know, if you're a consultant, right, you're hand to gather us, right? You may be doing three days for free in order to get a big contract. I mean, that's all the big six work. You couldn't do that, Nibium. If you wanted to do anything below 43.5% profit margin, you had to get approval from somebody in Tokyo, some

Starting point is 00:31:31 like that. And the cultures couldn't survive that. The good people after a period just gave up and left. And then it got to marginalised into a yet another product company. it got homogenized into a yet another product company. Well, I got to hear some of this first hand, and I'm not sure you ever met him when you were going through your sale, but when I was at Dell, I worked with the gentleman who was the head of our corporate development named Dave Johnson, and Dave had spent 25 years doing the same thing spent 25 years doing the same thing at IBM. And he had done most of the software acquisitions and he was the person who acquired PWC. But, and that was part of the reason he left

Starting point is 00:32:15 was because of the mismanagement of how what he had wanted to do with the acquisition would actually happen. I mean, you stick it anywhere I mean they call I mean anybody calls themselves Monday is gonna go under Hp. Turn down I mean I was part one of the audit teams and We basically said we don't need to buy this we just need to wait for months and we can pick up what we want from it Because they're gonna go bankrupt

Starting point is 00:32:39 But but Gin I mean that was the point Ginny needed to acquire a lot of people very quickly That was that I've to mind, that was a point, Jenny needed to acquire a lot of people very quickly. To my mind, that was a motivation. Interesting. Well, speaking about motivations, one of the topics I wanted to approach here with you is I, in a previous life before I started doing passion struck, I got to interview some very interesting people and one of them was a lady, a former CIA operative, who ended up becoming the head of corporate responsibility

Starting point is 00:33:14 for Facebook, her name is Yale Eisenstadt. And we had a very interesting conversation as you're talking about these startups that are building new technologies and it can even be a big one, how they're not looking at the full implications as they're building them and many of them don't have very strong ethics or not necessarily the ethics that they need to have, especially as they're unleashing AI and other things on the world. I wanted to kind of get your take on it because I think you have a strong position here. Yeah, I mean, I wrote a paper recently for the I tell community, they were the publisher new book and they wanted it, it's I wrote a chapter and it's online I think. I basically said these days nobody should be allowed into any engineering software

Starting point is 00:34:05 rule without a training in ethics because the implications of what we're doing in technology are really scary. And I think the trouble with Facebook, I think less Apple, the Apple Facebook confrontation moment is really interesting. Facebook have never been immoral, they're immoral. And that's actually far more scary, because they're not concerned about the implications of what they're doing. So for my various and many sins, until recently, I was reading tweets every morning from God Bam, I got withdrawal.

Starting point is 00:34:43 And Trump uses key phrases to activate belief systems in a body of narrative, it's called an assemblage. Facebook propagates that because they clumplied wood like there's insufficient diversity in the system. And I think, you know, those companies are now, they're switching from A-moral to A-Moral because they now understand the implications of what they're doing and they're not changing. Yeah, so I'm sure you've watched the new Netflix film, The Sep Social Dilemma. And I think it did a very good job if you've seen it kind of laying this out for that and what it could be. What Yale was talking about is the implications

Starting point is 00:35:27 of even a device such as the Fitbit and unknowingly putting that on the arms of soldiers and them being deployed in operations and foreign adversaries being able to use that information to track where they're at and how oftentimes, we're just putting things out there that we don't understand how could be used in other ways Well, you have to monitor the micro I mean, I won't use things that Microsoft teams because they do too much monitoring Yeah, I think after the quite interesting to Tim cook is fascinating Because I think he's realized that privacy is probably one of the most important things around.

Starting point is 00:36:07 And he's taking that position. I mean, before the big tech giants haven't fought each other on moral grounds, but he's at that Facebook. And I think that strategically will time. Yes. I think you're onto something there. And he has taken Apple in many ways. I don't think anyone would have expected

Starting point is 00:36:26 when he came on that had occurred over the past years that he's been at the helm. I think he was actually very clever because he knew the trope after, after the show, with the trope when he took over was nothing is the same anymore. Yeah. So there was no point in Apple doing anything novel for two or three years because the market had already decided they wouldn't. And I think Fanny started, I think what he really did is he took what was Jobs of Regional Vision, which is it's not about the hardware, it's not about the software, which is why Apple took over from Microsoft, Microsoft took over from IBM. He realized it was about an ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:37:05 And Apple is still the only ecosystem approach. And I think that's why they're going to survive. Because once you're in the Apple ecosystem, you don't really want to leave it. It's not that you can't, but you don't want to because it just works. Yeah, and I, you're absolutely right. And when I was. Yeah, and you're absolutely right. And when I was at Dell, and when I first got there, I was working very closely with the gentleman named Ron Gehrigz. And I probably don't know the name,

Starting point is 00:37:33 but Ron had been a long-term executive at Motorola, had created the Razer, was known as the Inspiration for it. But what he wanted to do in the mobile space was to create our own version at Dell of kind of that Apple ecosystem, but he wanted it to be, you know, Dell would allow it to create one customer experience, but the difference between us and Apple was going to be, he was going to allow different plugins to it so that... Yeah, and that would never work because it means your speed to market is lower. But what jobs realize is if you control the hardware in the software, you can move higher functionality to market much faster.

Starting point is 00:38:16 With a loyal follow-on. Yeah, and I left IBM and I bought a thinkpad when I left because it was on the staff discount, so I took early time. I still remember about a year and a half later I was at bored to think, people, and I left because it was on the staff discount, all right, so I took her the retirement. And I still remember about a year and a half later, I was at Cremnich University, and I said, this bloody thing is running like a dog. And this techie said, well, you haven't reinstalled the operation system.

Starting point is 00:38:35 And I said, what do you mean? He said, well, why do you think IBM called it in every year? And I said, you mean I could reinstall the operating system? And I was going on, I went into the Apple store in San Jose and showed them the PC and said, I've had was going on, I went into the Apple store in San Jose and showed them the PC and said, I'm highly nephilis, I need an Apple. And it was like going into a bathroom, dischaping and saying you'd discovered God, or I went half an hour later, everything

Starting point is 00:38:54 can figure than my first Apple Mac. And I've never looked back since. And it all just works. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that. I've really, if I ever had trouble with my Mac computers. I think the thing that which is then, it's important is I think what jobs realized. I still quite proud of the fact I had a part of books for a bit by Steve Jobs. That's my only meeting with him. And he got angry and threw a part of books. So I'm still proud of that one. I think what Apple have realized is that technology has moved from being in exciting new thing to be in a tool. And that's when everything changes. And I think he understood that shift. And Google didn't, and Microsoft didn't, and IBM didn't.

Starting point is 00:39:36 I think that's a very selling point. Well, Dave, I wanted to, if I could maybe switch directions here a little bit. So the part of the reason that people are on this podcast is to learn advice on how they can unlock and of their hidden potential, overcome their fears, et cetera. And I remember hearing you talk one time about a person I've read pretty thoroughly, a Clint Christensen, and a concept that he had called induced failure, you know, oftentimes in his case companies don't see the change that's coming and so it's catastrophic. And I think the same could be said about our own personal lives. Are there any words of wisdom that you can give using that concept that could be applied to an individual person's life? Yeah, I had the privilege of working with Clayton in one major client. And what you're talking about there is what he talked about is competence in use failure.

Starting point is 00:40:40 So companies don't fail because they are poor. They fail because they could too bad at the old paradigm. And they don't see the pattern. And I think, and it's quite interesting, you see this happen all the time, and there's a have a whole theory around it called Fletcher's Curve, which basically says that's the cycle. So when something gets dominant, you know that it's going to go under. It's called a codec syndrome. Yeah, you're right.

Starting point is 00:41:04 You do it. And I think we actually know some of the cognitive neuroscience reasons for that. So part of the problem I think for individuals at the moment is people are too specialized and not journalists. Generalists actually can accommodate faster because they've got more patterns to available to them. And to give an illustration, when I went up to secondary school at the age of 11, so this is 1964 I think, right? So it gives you my age. And we were allowed to wear long trousers for the first time until you were 11 in the UK, you weren't allowed to wear long trousers, which in British winters, we shall we say, last, and we had to walk the school for three miles as well. And the first thing we had to do is I remember walking to the front of the class, I got called at

Starting point is 00:41:50 first and given a card and it said you support capital punishment. Now I think capital punishment is a warrant, I think societies which have it are just uncivilized, right? But I had to speak for seven minutes without preparation on something which I profoundly disagreed with and we did that every week for from the age of 11 to 18 and that made us generalists because you never knew what you're going to get hit with. She read everything and you learned to argue things you didn't agree with which made you better you made you more critical And I think one of the reasons people lack resilience is they're over-specialized. So the one bit of advice, at any one stage, I'm reading a history book, a science book,

Starting point is 00:42:31 some science fiction, maybe a novel, all in parallel. And you need that sort of, you need that, and it gives you more patterns to absorb and more ability to see weak signals. And I think that's the key thing. And organizations go down the same route, they've become too specialized. So how, in that same scenario, how would you apply the concept of deterministic chaos then? You know, which is,

Starting point is 00:42:54 Yeah, we use that in a sort of wisdom of crowds approach. So again, this is, so faced with a situation, we put together a situational statement and then we present that say to the whole of your workforce and everybody interpreted, Hybstraction, Metadage, we're in the same 10 minute period and then we draw match from that. And what that shows is the dominant views and the outliers. Yeah, and the outliers are what you're after because they're people that were thinking differently.

Starting point is 00:43:23 Now, the term, the KOS, that's kind of like a use of chaos because all the agents are separate and then can interact. So it's quasi-round them. Deterministic chaos itself is, as it says, deterministic. You can run models because you get, you've got a normal distribution. But the minute you're connected, you're into a greater distribution and that's complex. So you very, very rarely get a chaotic system in humans. It's nearly always complex because we find ways to connect things. And at that point, you can't use that sort of maths anymore. Yeah, and I find sometimes, though, we get into these complex systems and we actually need

Starting point is 00:44:04 some chaos to get us out of the patterns that we get into these complex systems and we actually need some chaos to get us out of the patterns that we get into. That's the forest cycle, right? And that's chaotic systems and stuff like that. That's actually very dangerous. You get into this myth and to everything collapses is something you can't happen. And it's kind of almost like the rapture again and it actually it's kind of it's okay as long as the world can recover but the

Starting point is 00:44:34 world can't recover from that sort of thing anymore. You've got to use complexity without chaos and that's actually not difficult and that's that's how you evolve a system and get it to change in radical ways. If you fall into chaos, you don't know how you're going to fall out of it. It's a dangerous place to take things. And I know it's, you know, we're probably running shorter on time, but I can't have a conversation with you without talking about Caniva and how you would potentially take what we're talking about, that order complexity chaos system. And how would you apply that if you were a listener in your endeavors?

Starting point is 00:45:13 Well, I'll give you an illustration. And this is in the field guide. If you have a crisis, you're in chaos. Yeah, everything is all over the place. Doesn't last for long. So in Kinevin, what you do is you basically creates some draconian constraints to shift yourself into what was called the aporetic doesn't last for long. So in Kinevin, what you do is you basically creates and raconing constraints to shift yourself into what was called the aporetic

Starting point is 00:45:29 confused. Upper ear is a key word. It means a state of creating deliberate paradox, which prevent you from resolving a problem to leave thoughts about it more. And once you've done that, some stuff becomes ordered and some stuff becomes complex and some stuff becomes complex and some stuff becomes what we call with the deterministic care point. It's a hypothesis generation. And you get some things which are conflicted experts. And I say we've laid all of that out in the handbook. So you get rid of the chaos and then you move different aspects into different domains. The key thing which Kenemian teaches you

Starting point is 00:46:05 is there isn't a one size fits all approach. And generally, if I look at organizations, it's like, there's nothing wrong with business reengineering. We just took it too far. There was nothing wrong with waterfall, but we just took it too far. And the whole of Kenemian is to say,

Starting point is 00:46:21 different things work in different places. You don't abandon the old, you realize it's boundaries, and then you create new things. So if you create those boundaries, how would you apply this then to a person who was facing this dilemma of, you know, they're stuck in what I call the comfort zone or in a phase where they know they're not happy and they they want to break out, but they're afraid to do so for various reasons. Yeah, I was actually advising somebody on that this afternoon. And I remember saying I mean, I left IBM, all right, just became impossible.

Starting point is 00:46:58 In fact, they got really nasty. And so I knew I had to go and it was very comfortable and that's there. And it's not a decision I've ever regretted, right? But I think there were a couple of key things. One is by the time I left IBM in my field, my brand was stronger than IBM. If I'd been who I was because I was IBM, I wouldn't have got the business for more than about a year or so. And a lot of people make that mistake. You know, they leave, they carry their clients with them, but then they haven't got a reputation independently of their organization. So you need to be careful on this, right? The other thing is

Starting point is 00:47:35 to be quite honest, you're more likely to see if you leave, if you're controversial, then you're not because you stand out. And that's why I actually say in what you think counts. I mean, I'm not nice about this anymore. You know, if somebody comes along with some bloody homogenized management consultant solution or says they're gonna implement the Spotify model when Spotify themselves said there is no model and I'm happy to call them out.

Starting point is 00:48:00 And I think calling out things which you know are wrong ultimately actually makes you a better person and gives you more employability. So along those lines, so you know we're now up to our knees and the fourth industrial revolution with all this technology that's a component saying everything that we're doing, what would you be your biggest advice for someone who's a generation Z or a millennial into, what steps would you take to prepare themselves to be better for what the future is gonna hold?

Starting point is 00:48:38 Again, involved in something like extinction rebelling, otherwise you won't have a future. All of the fourth industrial revolution is dependent on power. And there are circumstances in otherwise you won't have a future. All of the fourth industrial revolution is dependent on power. And there are circumstances in which you won't be available to us anymore. So I think the next generation has got to be engaged with the planet and other cultures and other people. It's no longer possible just to take an industrial approach. Okay, and I think the last area I wanted to go in is I have been doing a ton of

Starting point is 00:49:07 research and that research shows that entrepreneurship and business fatality, the two forces that made much of Western culture and where I'm sitting the United States, the envy of the rest of the world have been on a slow decline and some may say dying for decades, whereas other parts of the world such as Asia, South America, etc. are taking a different trajectory. And I wanted to understand if you've seen that in your own research. Yeah, and there's some interesting reasons for it. I mean, Northern Europe, North America. I can't like the exemplars of the individual. It's called social atomism. It really comes from the growth of Protestantism if you go back to the reformation. So the individual is everything. Whereas the other areas you mentioned China, Latin America, interesting where I come from

Starting point is 00:50:00 in Wales, are commuterian cultures. They're defined by their relationships with the community. Now, in conditions of resource starvation where you haven't got infinitely available resource and that was the basis of entrepreneurial capitalism, the danger is you fall back to feudalism but if you look at what China have done and Singapore have done, and China has always done this.

Starting point is 00:50:24 I mean, they let the barbarians conquer them and they make them Chinese. That's what they've been doing with capitalism, they've made it Chinese. And state, yeah, it's saying Singapore the same, one of the most exciting, I'm based in Singapore. My company is like, well, yeah, the company's been there ever since I created it. And they've understood that there is a social responsibility that free market capitalism will not work, all right? Now after COVID, nobody can really argue that anymore because only the state has got the authority and the power to do something about what is not the worst pandemic I will see in my lifetime and I'm 67 in a month's time. So all of those models, and this is why it's quite an exciting time to be around at the moment,

Starting point is 00:51:11 because those models can't come back in their original form because the world can't cope with them anymore and we're gonna have to rethink this. That's a very interesting way to put it. Well, Dave, I always always liked from my guest the ability to give a shout out for if people would like hire you to speak or learn more about you, where can they do that? Most of my stuff I do on the blog, blogs are made for me, I love blogging. So cognitive edge website and then you can have incentive website. That's where you can find what I'm doing and what we're doing and how to engage.

Starting point is 00:51:50 And we've just gone open source on all of our methods. So we're trying to expand the range of what we're doing with our work. Okay. And the last thing I was going to take you through is just a quick quick rapid round of questions if you don't mind. Okay. So the first thing I would like to ask is if you were given the opportunity to be on the mission to Mars and you were allowed to establish one law for that new planet, what would that law be? I get rid of money and I'm going to face it with gifting.

Starting point is 00:52:21 That's a great answer. One that I've never heard before. If you were able to meet someone alive or dead who you've never had the privilege of meeting today, who would that be and why? That's more difficult. I think actually Aristotle, he introduced science and I hate Platonism.

Starting point is 00:52:39 And Aristotle is the scientific application of social systems. Okay. For you, and I'm not sure if you follow superheroes, most of us do, but if you were to, who is your favorite superhero and why? Anything which refused to call itself a superhero because there ain't any such thing. What is the best compliment you've ever received? I got called a professional emergent, I'm really proud of that one.

Starting point is 00:53:07 And what is the most important life lesson a person can learn? Read. Okay, and I'll give you one more. I see all those cups behind you. What is the favorite place you've ever visited? I'm still proudly Welsh, right? And the nearest thing to Wales is New Zealand, because a. They play rugby, b. They have mountains, and c. They have a large arnkin next on the neighbour who thinks they're part of them. So New Zealand. Okay, well, great. Well Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show today. I truly appreciate it and I know our listeners are going to get so much value from this episode.

Starting point is 00:53:46 What an amazing interview that was Dave Snowden and I learned absolutely so much from him today. It was one of my most favorite episodes I have done to this point. And we learned all about order, complex and chaos and how they interact with each other and how not only can you apply that from a business perspective, but how you can apply it in your personal life. And I have some amazing episodes coming up in the next few weeks. One is with Navy Seal who became an astronaut, Chris Cassidy. Come on the show and discuss his path. I'm going to the Naval Academy, becoming a combat hero with the Navy SEAL teams

Starting point is 00:54:28 to then attending MIT and transitioning into the astronaut program where he did both shuttle flights and was the commander of the International Space Station. And I have former superintendent of the Naval Academy Vice Admiral Carter, who is also going to be on the show, where he is going to give his leadership lessons for many years of naval service, both as a fighter pilot, as well as other duties he commanded and as his time as a superintendent, and now from his time at Nebraska University. We have so many great guests in addition to these two coming up and I can't wait for you to hear from them and

Starting point is 00:55:06 I appreciate so much you watching and listening to the show and if you love these shows Please give us a shout out on Instagram or any of the social networks you're part of until next time Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us the purpose of our show is to make passion go viral And we do that by sharing with you the knowledge and skills that you need to unlock your hidden potential. If you want to hear more, please subscribe to the Passion Start podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your podcast ad. And if you absolutely love this episode, we'd appreciate a five-star rating on iTunes. And you you sharing it

Starting point is 00:55:45 with three of your most growth-minded friends so they can post it as well to their social accounts and help us grow our passion start community. If you'd like to learn more about the show and our mission you can go to passionstruck.com where you can sign up for our newsletter, look at our tools and also download the show notes for today's episode. Additionally, you can listen to us every Tuesday and Friday for even more inspiring content. And remember, make a choice, work hard, and step into your sharp edges.

Starting point is 00:56:18 Thank you again for joining us. Music

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Dave Snowden On Applying Complexity Science to Ignite Your Passion EP 24

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