The future of work is: no jobs

Welcome everyone, Future Works Scotland. Great to be here. As I was just saying before we kind of came on air, we did an in-person event yesterday, our first one in 2 and a half years, and so that was jolly good fun as they say. But yeah, back to our usual virtual format, so this is our originally planned July event. I'm Saif Baw-Singh, everybody calls me Saif. I'm your host for this session, I organise Future Works Scotland. I'm joined by Donald Henderson, who's my co-host and co-organiser, and Martin Mitchell, who is our sponsor. Just a few formalities before we get started. We do have a code of conduct. We simply ask that, yeah, you're all respectful to one another. We want everyone to have a great experience, and we'll do some, you know, community shoutouts and various things if there's anything we think we want to share with you all at the end. In terms of Q&A, we usually encourage our attendees to stick their questions in the chat. If you prefix it with a Q, it makes it easier for Donald and I to spot them, then we relay them back to our speaker. And I'm delighted for the session to welcome Benjamin Taylor. I met Benjamin last year at some point. Our paths first crossed in the Requisite Agility community, and I've always been really fascinated by the work Benjamin does. We've collaborated a little bit in that community with some of the wider group. Benjamin's got a very impressive resume and bio which I couldn't possibly repeat, otherwise I would probably take up the duration of this session. He's involved in numerous things, but I really like the fact that he calls himself a business evolutionary. I'm really keen to understand more about what he means by that. His work in the last 20 years has really focused in on public service reforms, really where his passions lie. And some years ago, he set up a company called Red Quadrant to really sort of take that on and also sort of disrupt consultancy. He's also the CEO of the Public Service Transformation Academy. Academy. I got it right. And yeah, and I'm really looking forward to the session tonight. And to be honest, from my perspective, having been hosting these events for 2 and a half years now, I can't think of a more fitting topic than the one we're going to cover tonight, which is the future of work. The future is no job. So I'm fascinated to understand exactly what you mean by that, Benjamin. So without Further ado, the floor is yours.

Thank you very much, Saf, and everybody. It's nice to have this opportunity, and I should say that this is enjoyable speculation for me, and I don't claim to be an expert in this space. I've slipped in some of my more general thinking, but it's just interesting for me to speculate about certain aspects of the future of work. And first thing to say about the title, I am not an AI doomer or maximalist. I do think there will still be work, but this is about models of employment. And I'll try and sort of cite some sources as I go through, but this— so, you know, I think what I'm trying to do is illustrate one way of thinking about one aspect of the future of work, and hopefully that'll become clear as I go through. And Southwell was kind enough to give me a very nice introduction there. If you'd like to connect to me on social media and you're not already connected, I am at bentaylor.com. I'm Antlerboy on almost all the social medias for reasons that you may be able to work out for yourself, but it may not be immediately obvious. And I am involved in a lot of things in public services consultancy, systems complexity, cybernetics, that kind of space. So what I plan to talk about today is these 5 things. First of all, what I don't like about employment, I should really say, not work. But with the caveats of the reason— I recognize the reason why the way we tend to employ people is the way it is. I'll give some definitions that back up and explain my thinking and very briefly talk about the future of work that I would love to see. I haven't practiced this talk before, so it could be anything from half an hour to an hour, but we'll definitely have plenty of time to talk about it at the end. And I'm hoping that we can kind of, as a world, as a civilization, muddle through to find a better way of doing employment without too much damage and mistakes along the way. And I want to give an alert. This image was created by Crayon, the AI image generator, the easy and freely accessible one. to try to illustrate the concept of WEIRD— Western, educated, etc., etc.— i.e., I come from a position of enormous privilege in many, many ways and slight disadvantage in some other ways. But in thinking about the future of work and the future of employment, that has to be taken into account. And as with so many people who speculate in this space, I am starting from thinking about well-paid knowledge work of the sort that I do. So take that into account. I think it's generalizable, but that's the bias. So the things that I don't like about employment— it should say employment, not work, my mistake— are at heart the parent-child dependency model that's implicit in the employment contract in most of the world. And this idea of being tied in, and in the US obviously with health insurance and stuff associated, the permanent employment contract with long periods of notice with all kinds of complexity and with a fixed hierarchy tending to be built into that. And if nothing else, a fixed hierarchy between employment organization, employing organization, and employee, right? By the way, this photo is of kids at Stile Mill in Cheshire, at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, one part of it, where working conditions— this was a progressive mill, And working conditions were appalling. So built into here is an appreciation that we've got where we've got to today by use of workers' power, by the assertion of rights. So there's a lot that's been achieved and is embodied in employment legislation and employment contracts that we easily risk losing and throwing away. But nevertheless, that's what I don't like about employment at heart. is that built-in dependency parent-child model. I also don't like— and this is very important because sort of the obvious alternative is turning people into machines. And there's a, there's a really valuable concept that I'll come to a little bit later about contract work that's below the API that's controlled by the machine. Which, you know, more or less many of your delivery drivers, Uber drivers, TaskRabbit workers, and all of the rest. I often ask when I take a taxi through one of those services if people— what people think of the organization and of their status, their situation. And it used to be about 60/40 in favor of people being— feeling quite liberated by it and actually being able to be flexible, be in charge of their own hours, those kind of things. It's definitely about sort of 70/30 against now of people feeling resentful and kind of controlled by the system and so on. So that's a really important lesson about how saying that we are going to liberate people from old-fashioned models of employment carries quite a lot of risk of losing agency rather than gaining it, if you see what I mean. The other thing I don't like is the bizarre concept of taxing work. I just speak specifically here in the UK sense. It is utterly bizarre that for employment income and only for employment income, both the employer and the employee have to pay national insurance tax, and that we then pay pay as you earn income tax on our income through employment. It works out not that. Different from income through running your own company, but why we would have a taxation system that builds in a disincentive to employment is just really fascinating to me. So what I strongly prefer, and obviously this is just a big statement to make and it would be radical and revolutionary in many ways, is to have a progressive taxation on income rather than employment. It would be more distributive, it would be fairer, it would treat all income equally, whether that was through dividends, pensions, employment, or other means, and it would level the playing field between employees and others. Effectively, you've got a situation where those who have to earn a living through employment pay obligate tax, and those who earn income through other means have more flexibility in making their tax arrangements. And that strikes me as just absolutely crazy. In the UK, the Part of the response to this situation, because actually at the end of the day, identifying who's an employee and who's an at-will worker working for themselves, taking an entrepreneurial risk, running a business, is I think fundamentally irreconcilable. There's no fixed way of defining the two, and we've introduced this thing called IR35. Which is a way of trying to tax people working as contractors, freelancers, independents in the same way as employees when it's considered that they're effectively employees. But there's an absolute have your cake and eat it approach from our tax authorities. So that's just a mess. But the mess— and it's a destructive mess and it's hugely problematic for the economy And let me be, you know, very transparent about this. For me personally, it takes the flexibility out of the kind of market that I work in to a relevant degree, and it's a total pain. So I have an interest in saying this is a mess, but it objectively clearly is, in my opinion. You know, but it shows the absurdity of attempting to draw a distinction between employment income, employment status, and non-employment income, non-employment status. And what it leads to, by the way, is further exploitation through zero-rights employment. So if you approach an organization as a contractor but you're deemed to be inside IR35, you basically have none of the rights of an employee, but you have to pay tax as an employee. So just a disincentive to industry, but showing up the fundamental problem that I'm concerned with here. I also dislike employee engagement, and for me, again, this is illustrative really. This is absolutely illustrating the core concept here, which is that as soon as you become an employee, you fit into a different category and are treated and interacted with fundamentally in a different way than if you're an individual making agreements to do work. And maybe we'll need to— I'm happy to enunciate that further. And by the way, I'm happy to put questions in the chat as you go if you want to jump in and clarify anything. You know, these 2 things that exemplify this, you know, we have human resources and whistleblowing schemes and so on, but those exist to protect the company, a non-human entity, rather than the employee. And we have all of this stuff. Peter Block has this fantastic phrase, the annual review, a courtly ritual where you come and sit before my throne and I let you know that you're inadequate and that I own you, i.e., I identify your development needs, your inadequacies, and we have a completely one-sided negotiation about your future prospects because it's not an equal-to-equal conversation, it's an organization-to-employee conversation. If you're hearing annoying noise, it could be my headset because apparently it's been causing problems today. Is everybody hearing that? Only a few. Yeah, is that thumbs up? Okay, well, fine, I'll carry on.

A little bit. It's not too bad, but it's definitely there.

How interesting. Okay, I'm really sorry about this. It hasn't— unless people have just started telling me today, this is a new problem. So my apologies for that. Let me know if it becomes a problem, Saf. Okay, great. So I might have sounded quite angry so far. This is me posing for stock photography, but honestly, I'm not really. You know, what I'm just trying to do is shine a light, and I just think we don't talk enough about the way this employment relationship is assumed and is intrinsically unequal. What we do need— I hope I've stressed this already— is rights and protections for employees and for working people, full stop. And I also recognize that, you know, I had the freedom to leave a job in a big consultancy and set up on my own and work as a freelancer and trade and so on and so on. And I employ a couple of people, used to be up to 11, 12 people, but actually we do work, and I'm happy to talk about that later, through a complete network associate model. where we don't employ any of our consultants and we deliver in the normal way, a normal consultancy project that people would normally expect, if you see what I mean. But not everybody wants that and not everybody can deal with that and not everybody wants to be, you know, working day to day or project to project with uncertainty. Our employment system does allow that vulnerability within employment and through zero-hours contracts and shift work and requirements to work and split shifts and all that kind of stuff. So that's a problem in itself, and it's not really about employment, but the point is people do need security as well as rights and protections. And I recognize, by the way, I am not one of these people who believes that we can cross a magic Rubicon and have teal agile organizations. I think it's something to aspire to, but I posted recently about the concept of total football, which is something like that. This idea of a completely adaptive soccer team, football team, where everybody can play in every position and the whole team is manifesting a collective intelligence and intent. That's great, and it happens sometimes in organizations, and it happens sometimes without hierarchy, where there's mutual negotiation. But it requires either great serendipity and just luck of finding the right people, or very strong contextual framing that allows people to work together in a perfectly organized way. And I think Buurtzorg in the Netherlands is a good example of that, where there's lots of contextual framing that allows them to work— their employees but allows them to work in a relatively unmanaged, self-managed way. Or, third possibility for getting to this, it requires loads of experience and training and investment and loads of overhead of coordination through that mutual negotiation. So in the absence of those 3 things, you need organization structure, you need a certain type of hierarchy, maybe slightly different from the way we we typically think about it. But certain things are required in order for work to happen. The other thing I recognize is that there's a— in these slightly speculative future of work conversations, I meet a number of people who do fantastic work with real cutting-edge self-organizing organizations and all the rest of it. And almost without exception, they will say something like, I go where the energy is, I go where people are committed, where there's the opportunity for people to organize that. They are not working in the big old hierarchical permanent bureaucracies and organizations like that, which frankly are going to be with us in 500 years' time, I suspect. I could be wrong, but people have been talking about dinosaur companies are going to die out since at least the 1940s, and it hasn't particularly happened yet. So there's a difference between those fresh green fields where you can build something new with incredible willingness and energy and the swampy stickiness of the world in which most people work. So all of those things are facts, and they're all constraints on this vision that I hold of the way that work could work. So now I'm going to go into some definitions of what I mean by above and below the API, what I mean by work, the dark matter of organizational life, and then free tribes and a progression from dependence, which I think is relevant to my concept of the future of work. Above and below the API. Is a phrase created by Venkatesh Rao, who's a guy on Twitter who runs a thing called the Yak Collective, which originally aspired to be a kind of loose association of indie consultants and has become something a bit different in the way of these things. But Venkatesh is very good at naming and identifying— he's very good at social learning, at naming things that are happening in the world, giving them giving them a name and a life. And his point is very simple, that in gig work, you're either below the API— you are the thing which is controlled by the algorithm, the Uber, the DoorDash, all of those kind of systems— in which case your life is not going to be much fun. You are a component of the mechanism. Or you're above the API, and, and you— API is a is he's from the Silicon— from Silicon Valley. API is a technical interface into an IT system. Um, so the point is either, you know, the mechanism is controlling you or you are able to use and take advantage of the mechanism. So an indie freelancer who can use LinkedIn, who can use networks, who can use a marketplace for their technological skills or their consultancy skills or their strategy skills would be somebody who's above the API, who's able to be in control of their own life and use the mechanisms of organization of the market to support them. Below the API, somebody where the mechanisms of the market use you and you are a part of the delivery structure, and it's a lot more miserable. Hopefully that makes sense, David. So Definition of work. So this is definition that's developed from a guy called Elliot Jacks, who's an organizational thinker from the mid-20th century, and I think just this is really, really valuable. And what we are trying to get to here is the exercise of effort to a purpose, using judgment and discretion within boundaries over time. Those are the elements of definition of work. There's a slight variation on what he said. If you want to follow the link and look at the comments below, and the slides are on the Meetup page, there's a link to them, and I'll send them out to staff afterwards to make available if helpful. If you want to look at the comments there, the citations for the original quote are in those comments. So I find this a deeply cybernetic concept. Cybernetics is the science of understanding purposeful activity, we might say, and it breaks down into the idea of purpose, which is very fundamental— the intent to achieve something. But purpose, of course, depends on the context. It depends on the way you frame and understand the situation, depends on your level of thinking, and so on. So in order to be doing work, having a purpose, all of that needs to be communicated. There's also no work without judgment and discretion, otherwise you are perhaps, you know, a robot in the original Czechoslovakian sense of the word, which was something like a mechanism. You need boundaries as well. Now, working, as it were, without boundaries is great fun. It's creativity, it's play, it's kind of setting something up. But in order to be doing work, my argument is that you have to be— you have to know what your boundaries are. If you have absolute freedom to act, it's just not work. And in a context where you're trying to achieve a purpose over time, it's actually stifling, it's confusing, it's constricting, ironically, not to have boundaries. Boundaries are an enabling constraint, to coin a phrase, right? So judgment, your own professional understanding, and a grasp of purpose are part of the way towards providing boundaries because they have inherent boundaries. what you can do, what's possible, what's going to be constructive, what's going to move you towards the purpose. But actually, a lot of the time in organizational life, we don't have clarity of boundaries. Boundaries provide the space for discretion, right, and allow you to have confidence in how much freedom you have to act. So boundaries make the work make sense. And by the way, that The original word robot is from an old church Slavonic word, it says here, robota, which means servitude, forced labor, or drudgery. So it's interesting that below the API you are a robot or robota in that sense. So if you see work in this way, then I believe that really illuminates a lot about effectiveness, teamwork, delegation, psychological safety, and so on. And I'm really sorry to interrupt the presentation, but my dog is barking at the door. I'll be back in like about 30 seconds. My apologies. One second.

All right.

I think there's been some questions in. I can hear you, Satpal, while I'm— I've got my Bluetooth on. So do you want to just play back any relevant questions at this stage?

I don't think I saw any questions come in actually so far. I could be wrong. I'm just Sifting through the comments to see if there is one. Oh, there is one. Okay, that's quite a long question from John. Um, possible question, if of interest to the speaker, could you say something about ways that public sector orgs exploit fear and suspicion amongst employees about the private sector and see the kind of flexible gig model being discussed as inherent to the private sector and so inherently suspect and to be resisted, avoided? Long question, I don't know if that made sense.

Yeah, it makes sense to me, that's great. Sorry about that, I saw the dog. Um, well, that, that, that's quite intriguing. Um, um, yeah, I mean, I think that— what do I think about that? I think there is this Weird thing in the UK, and it's been doubly weird over the last few years—the outright hostility of the government to enterprise. So I would—I would—I've particularly felt this from the government more so than from the public sector, although there has been a strong current of that. over the years, and I would say particularly from kind of 2010 for a few years. And I think— I don't know why that might be, and John, you might have your own thoughts, but I do think that there is a stream which casts probably full-time, permanent, 9-to-5 commuting-based employment, which of course is deeply discriminatory to women, to people with children in general, and so on and so on. It has its own massive implications. It's good and flexible Gig working is either abusive or it's basically just a tax dodge. And there's a real stream of that that goes through. I guess it is small-c conservatism. I guess it is a job should be a job, and the job is a job, and we don't like change. But there must be more to it than that. But I don't have a slick answer as to what that might be. Let's come back to that in the conversation at the end, if that's okay. And I will move forward now. So that's my definition of work. Which is which I think is really important to me. I've got loads more definitions in coming up, so bear with me for this one. So this is a thing where I'm basically trying. I'm I'm really interested, just as with that definition of work, at identifying the core underlying patterns of organization. What is it that shapes ineluctably? Can't be avoided. That shapes the way that human beings are in organization, right? So I've got a list here of—it's probably about fourteen—and I'll try and be super brief. The first one: the purpose of the system is what it does. Posiweird a phrase of Stafford Beers, another management thinker from the mid-twentieth or late. 20th century. His point is that the purpose of organisations is actually not what they espouse, but what they do in practice. There's no useful way of assessing purpose of an organisation without looking at what it actually does. Of course, you're always looking at what it does from a framing. He also came up with a thing called the Viable Systems Model, which is an essential organisational logic which a lot of the time most people don't see, which is, you know, the fundamental functions that organization needs to have in order to cope with complexity and to survive in the here and now and to look forward and adapt to the future. Inside that, there is the inevitability that leaders shape culture and create empowerment or disempowerment And so on. And this comes from Elliot Jacks as well, and Systems Leadership Theory by McConnell Dowell came out of that work. In organisations, we, depending on our role, depending whether we're in management, leadership above the API, below the API, sales, marketing, engineering, etc., we live in different worlds. We are conditioned, trained, incentivized, and we we we see different things from different points of view with different perspectives. So there's a potential for us to misunderstand, fail to communicate, etc., etc. Huge potential for that. And we also fall into a pattern where we define us and the other, and the other is to be threatened or feared or or dealt with. We naturally fall into different worlds, those different spaces, depending on our interactive roles with each other. If we're at the bottom of a pyramid being told what to do, we become vulnerable, done to, and we get into a strong sense of unity with others at the bottom of the pyramid. And there's a pattern for each of those spaces. All of that's from the work of Barry Oshry. We're also shaped in organisations by human needs. By trauma, shame, referred pain, the things we don't say, the things we think it's important to bottle up inside ourselves, otherwise we'll explode, and we might be right. Organizations also naturally fall into a pattern with their environment, with their competitors, with their regulators that shapes them incrementally and subtly in the same way that the hummingbird's beak is shaped by the mutual growth of the flowers that it feeds on. And we don't notice any of it. All of this is dark matter. It's the strange stuff that shapes organizational life. We also fall into things where any aspect of organizational life can be captured for the benefit of individuals or groups, whereas it's supposed to be existing for the benefit of the whole system. We also have different capabilities at different times. may or may not be a good fit for the roles that we're assigned, the length of time we have to think over, the scope and complexity of what we have to consider. The world is fundamentally complex, so it's always multiply interpretable. And a really important one for this is, you know, it's all about setting constraints. We always have to select constraints at an organisational, structural, personal level to work within. That's connected to the boundaries that I was talking about, it's connected to organisational strategy. We also see that patterns that happen at one level or in one part of an organisation tend to replicate into other levels, and the testing in the real world can be a vital element of seeing and learning how to manage these patterns. My point of including this here is, A, that I think it's interesting and fundamental to how we think about work. It's the basis of my work in Requisite Agility. But we are locked into certain patterns through employment relationships, which represent certain ways, very fixed, very predetermined ways of trying to deal with all of these organisational tensions, and usually doing it really, really badly. So this is very much along the lines of agile thinking, and how do we deal with these dynamics in a different way? And my answer to that is, wouldn't it be nice if we could try more often to deal with those dynamics in a way that we were all respected, independent, sovereign individuals making choices to commit to things as people together? And that's what, you know, that's what this is fundamentally all about. So I'm going to take you through now this idea of there being 3 tribes in the future. and you'll see where my idea of the future of work fits in. And this originally came from futures research. The first one I saw was a very good piece of futures research from PwC. I don't think the consultancies are usually very good at doing this kind of thing. I think I found an earlier piece or a related piece from Arup, and the comments— the references, if you want them, are in the comments, my comments to that LinkedIn post. So the 3 tribes for the future of work, right? So there's a contestation going on, and there's a competition. Oh, I see I've got some kind of transition animation from when I did this as a slide for LinkedIn. Let me just remove that. Sorry about the— about that. So there are 3 tribes going on here. And okay, the animations will be amusing. Let's just leave them, leave them in. So the 3 tribes are the blue tribe, right? This is the corporate writ large. This is you being employed as a salaryman— sexism deliberately insinuated— as part of the big corporate machine, right? And so they want you in the office, on a suit, on their PC, using their methods. And these days, you know, these big corporates probably have a great diversity program. They probably have some kind of work-life integration, but they are getting their pound of flesh out of you. That's probably an inappropriate expression to use these days, actually, but you're paying in blood for what you get from them. But the worker's identity comes from, I am an employee of big corporate. They identify with the organization. So this is dependence. This is being part of something bigger. At its best, it's kind of being part of the hive mind. And this doesn't mean that these people are not independent, independent thinkers, deeply competitive within the context, and all the rest. It can mean that, and it can mean that they're crushed as individuals. And it's about working in the corporate world. That's the first of the 3 tribes. And you'll see, you might remember the Spider-Men before, there were 4 of those. There might be 4 tribes, let's see. So the green tribe in the future of work is the people who are focused on their cause, usually environmental or social justice. And this is often not-for-profits, non-governmental organizations, but not necessarily. So these people are attached to the cause, they go where the action is, their identity comes from the cause, and they are focused on spreading the gospel of interdependence, that we are all connected and that we all depend on each other. At their best, they will change the world, and at the worst, they are self-righteous and relatively self-interested because They know that they're better than everybody else. The orange tribe is the ones that I have the greatest sympathy with and that some of this idea about the future of work is built around. So this is the nomadic worker, the independent, the person in their own right, working in the coffee shops, shops probably highly online, on Twitter, etc. At worst, they're independent and arrogant and they get a bit weird because they've got nobody to rein them in. I saw a photo on Twitter today of, you know, CODA looking for their first job, clean-shaven, very smart-looking, wearing a shirt, and then CODA 25 years into the job where they're the only one who understands the system, looking like a kind of mountain man with a huge beard and looking unkempt and free. So At their best, the orange tribe are inter-independent, and I'll come back to that. They are a network. They take multiple perspectives. So the interesting question for me is, how do we build more of this possibility, knowing that— this seems really credible to me— that there's going to be a slight fracturing into the blue tribe working in corporates, the green tribe working for causes, and the orange tribe being independent, right? So broadly speaking, this is dependence, independence, interdependence, and I'll come back to that in a minute. So 3 tribes working with each other. And the distinction there is that dependency is focused on authority, conservative focus, and things running smoothly, being responsible. Sorry, it's got the animation. Independent is mutual influence, calculated risks, and open disagreement and use of expertise. I have to keep going back. And interdependent is focused on collective direction, creative energy, and responsibility. Anyway, it comes from Stephen Covey originally. Here is the lovely 1980s book diagram of the move, and this is a developmental model. Model, moving from one to the other. So this is the meme illustration of that developmental model, when each thinks they're superior, but each is actually part of a system of relationship and development. Or rather than just moving from dependence to— oh, goodness sake, I thought I'd removed all of them now. I've just went through the slides and tried to And, and, or is it that actually there are 2 dimensions here? And really, the interdependence is allowing vulnerability while maintaining confidence. So the distinction here— how do I get— sorry, just one second. And I didn't realize that the animations were still on, and it's slightly annoying me, as you'll appreciate. And I will— I think I've— oh, never mind. All right, but hopefully that'll work. And so what's interesting to me is that rather than thinking about dependence or independence, and you can see the clear distinction there, or interdependence, there's a concept called inter-independence. So this is the 4th layer, right? So inter-independence is what I want in the future. I think you can see that disturbingly aged photo of me there. And I think it's the next step on from dependence, independence, interdependence. The animation should stop now, and so will I. So this is an aged photo of me from the app that everybody was using before it was discovered it was kind of harvesting photos for AIs in China or something like that. me looking disturbingly like my old dad, actually. So in the future, when I'm old and grayer than I am now, what I'm hoping for in the world of work is a recognition that everybody has different needs and that you've got those underlying forces going on. It's a simplified taxation system, hopefully backed up by universal basic income, so that people actually have a secure base, a de minimis secure base from which to start. And effectively everybody has the security to allow them to be independent if they want, interdependent if they want, but potentially that inter-independent, maintaining their independence but entering into relationships by free association mutual benefit, if that makes sense. That would mean adult-to-adult free— that should say fee-based contracting in an agile way, which actually looks very much like good delegation, i.e., people enter into arrangements to do work together flexibly and through peer-to-peer, adult-to-adult negotiation, even if they're negotiating to work as part of a team, as part of a business, but they're actually making their own choices. And that's a principle that we really try to stick to in Red Quadrant— adult-to-adult. We might offer people things that the market just isn't paying that much and it's not particularly great for their development, but it's an adult-to-adult conversation. If they say no, that's fine. If they say yes, it's a choice they've made. They haven't been forced into something, if you see what I mean. Now understandably, at the moment, that mostly works for people who've got a bit of flexibility, who've got a range of clients, who've been independents for a while, or who are kind of semi-retired. And I also hope that in the future, while we do probably still have these 3 tribes or 4 tribes existing, and the tribes respect, recognize, and engage with each other constructively, I think there is potential in decentralized autonomous organizations I don't think that's really radically new. It's like saying there's potential in cooperatives, potentially in organizations. These are blockchain, Web3 type of organizations that are springing up at the moment, the DAOs, or DAOs as they're normally called. And they start from a potential of everybody's equal. as kind of people fundamentally, rather than there is a power base and there are people being brought into that power base, assessed against that power base, controlled, contracted for. Now, probably with DAOs, we will replicate every single organizational failure in human history. I hope not. I hope people running DAOs will listen to and learn some of the lessons about the organization of work in the past to create a better future. But in a word, the future I'd like to see is inter-independent— ah, sorry, typo on my final bullet point, that's annoying— inter-independent, that point that I've talked about. And the rest is all a little bit of window dressing and explaining and setting up the context. So Some of that was a bit complex, and my apologies for that, but at heart I hope that we do away with the employment contract and that we have people contracting on a free and equal basis to do work together, and that that is the future of work. Thank you.

Thanks, Benjamin, that was very interesting. As you say, some complex ideas there. You're Touching on. Yeah, no, thank you for that. I don't see any questions, but it's a relatively small group, so I'm very happy for anybody who wants to kick us off and ask a follow-up question for Benjamin so we can start to do more of a deeper dive on some of the things that were covered, or you want things to explore. David, you're waving at me, feel free to chip in.

Yeah. Ben, what's the— hello, can you hear me?

Yes.

What's the future of unions in this?

Oh, good question, good question. Yeah, I mean, they're having a bit of a resurgence at the moment, aren't they, in visibility at least, which is a good thing. And it's really interesting Because just like hierarchy, unions have a very clear, very critical, and distinctive humanistic purpose. They have got us rights. They have got us towards being treated equally. They also come from Quite evidently, that space of bottomness. Barry Oshry's Dynamics of Organizational Life make the point, and we can replicate this very quickly in a simulation or just in, in a very quick exercise where people feel this. When you're the doers, the bottom level, the team members of an organization, you're in a space of vulnerability and being done to, and that's a fact. And that is a reality, and that drives a natural sense of unity. Solidarity would be the appropriate word in this context, and that's actually hugely productive when that solidarity is put to good use in fighting for changes to the structure of the system, which is what we've seen over the years. It can also get fixed into resentment and blame and an us-and-them attitude, because that us-and-them attitude is necessary to fight the fight for those kind of structural changes. In an ideal world, David, the future of unions would be, um, to fight for, um, the things that I'm advocating. But, you know, fight for the people below the API who are being treated as robots in the system, who are being, um, uh, exploited, um, mercilessly. Um, and to start a conversation about how can you have free and equal contracting without going straight into zero-rights employment and deeper forms of exploitation. So I think unions should be the guardians against exploitation of people in the system and the advocates for human-to-human conditions. And if I was being political about this, if I was in politics, which I'm absolutely not, then I would seek common cause with the unions around universal basic income, around taxation being employed in a much more progressive way across all income rather than across employment income, and those kind of things. How you unionize, if at all, the inter-independent workers is a really interesting question. How you get them to work together, if at all, is actually really challenging because I've been in a lot of these organizations with kind of post-conventional people who kind of fit in this category, and it's like herding cats to the nth degree. But I see Christina has a hand up.

Hi there. Thanks for a talk. It's very interesting. It's I find some of the things that you're espousing things that I value.

Oh good.

However, my question is yeah no but I just wanted to say because you mentioned I think it was in terms of the potential of is it DAOs? Was it decentralized autonomous organizations?

Yep.

One of the things which you said was in terms of about. View or the opinion that everyone is equal. But I kind of wanted to say, do we think that it is within human nature for us to value us being better than others, whether it be from the systems that we have grown up in or just from certain contexts of where power sits? And as a consequence of that, I'm— I would love the ideal of

Yeah.

A lot of people realizing that we're all just human and that everyone is equal. But are we essentially not going to get to that point in the sense that, let's say, for Blue Tribe workers, I believe that in the Blue Tribe group and the category, they're literally maybe, let's say, 80% of the people who are actually crushed by it. However, 20% of them are thriving in that environment because for them, the influence and power that they get from being in that type of blue tribe organization speaks to their values, that, you know, their underlying values. So

yeah,

I'm not quite sure if I have a question. I would love to hear more from Paul.

No, it's an interesting quote. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm sorry, by the way, that point about— so the people who rise to the top in those blue organizations may have gone in with that worldview and it suits them. But interestingly, they may also be socialized into that worldview by the process of rising to the top, if you see what I mean. So you have to think and act and declare in certain ways to rise to the top. In fact, in all these organizations, you do.

I will agree with you. I will agree with you because it is about, one, the systems that you are born in. And in those blue tribe organizations, they're people who are valued more than others. So there are people who are falling over themselves to go, oh, we have somebody who's a graduate from Cambridge. Let us make sure that they're on all of the right projects because we need to keep them in the company and they come from the right background. Yeah, absolutely. So I completely agree with you with that. And the people who can rise in that are the people who know how to fight and to network and to show that they have intrinsic value higher than the other people who don't necessarily have the— they don't have the same background.

Well, and who are willing to do that. And I guess that, you know, to my pride and shame, you know, I know how to do that. I can do that. And I hate it. I just can't really do it over a long period of time. That's why why I left. So there's a whole set of dynamics behind that. But I think one of the things that I hear from what you're saying, Christina, is— and I would say you'd be right if you're saying this— this is a very idealistic project.

I like ideals. I really like them. I really wish the world would be like that.

Right, right. And the world isn't. I guess, so what can us And it's a danger of becoming a libertarian project, which is, um, which is dead risky in my opinion, um, uh, which is also a form of, a form of idealism. Um, so I guess, I, I guess I would say there's, there's a hope that by being more egalitarian and more, um, what's that word for organizations in which, um, the, uh, the best people rise to the top. You know, people go around saying, oh, we're quite such and such organisation.

Like a meritocracy.

Meritocracy, thank you. Yeah, the idea, the hope is that in a more meritocratic world, people will— there will be more valuing of what's valuable actually in impact, and therefore, you know, Therefore, that brings in valuing of compliance and valuing of distinction. So both of those things are possible, if you see what I mean. Yeah, sorry, but the origin of the word meritocracy is actually a dystopian vision of how horrible things would be in an absolute meritocracy. But yeah, carry on. Sorry.

No, I was just gonna— I'm just saying, like, I do— I would love I would love to say that meritocracy actually exists, and I think it does exist in some respects, but I think if we acknowledge that nepotism and cronyism is the strongest thing in terms of people rising to power and certain— so I completely get what you're saying because in terms of working in consulting, I did not believe that people can network authentically.

Yeah.

But you can learn how to do it, and you can do it for a long time, and you can rise to the top, like you said, but you have to keep on going to do that. And there are people who are able to just keep going, keep going, keep going. And I would like to say that if an actual meritocracy existed, there are lots of people who are worker bees and people who value them, but they're happy for them to stay in that corner being valued, but they won't, they won't ever go, let me promote that person. They will promote the person who is the loudest, who knows how to network, and nepotism and cronyism comes into play in that.

Definitely. Yeah, yeah,

yeah. Gonna bring Jane in because Jane's been patiently waiting with her hand up.

Yeah.

Hi, and where do we start? Hello, Benjamin, nice to see you again. Thanks for inviting me to get in on this presentation, because you know I have a few divergent ideas on this. Where to start really with all of those propositions you've placed? But there are a few questions. I would say, what is the point of a meritocracy if only some contributions are valued? You know, if the playing field is limited by, say— and I'm very interested in Kate Raworth's work on Doughnut Economics at the moment.

Yeah.

You know, we have a very false extractive wealth model of GDP, which values some things above others, some contributions above others. If you buy a car, it contributes more to the GDP of the, you know, of the nation than than buying a bicycle, but walking makes no contribution at all. But we have, you know, an existential climate crisis, we have global poverty, we have inequalities which have been designed into our world by people who have profited from extractive wealth, from being competitive with other people, with not working collaboratively, with working to industrialized mindsets of management. You know, I'm going to wear the badge, so I'm going to look after you as a resource. Now, there's a wonderful opportunity to use technology to reset that relationship. You know, how about using technology to allow people to have relationships, embrace collaboration, rather than being used as or being designed in as another resource, you know, limiting kind of capability. As you said, people are below the API rather than somehow being lifted by it. But that comes from very old style. So we have great new technology, but it's being driven by old style management thinking, which is about how we— how do we do the same stuff faster, quicker, cheaper. Instead of how do we fundamentally change things. So my question really is, what is the incentive for the status quo to change? The people who make a living, you know, getting what they need out of the way the system works at the moment. As a sideline to this, I'd like to introduce everybody to the work of the Women's Budget Group and the work we're doing in Liverpool on the One Day Movement, which is showing how predominantly women are making millions of pounds worth of unpaid contributions to the economy through caring. You know, I have had a full and exotic career, as you know, Benjamin. Yeah. But I now find myself caring for an elderly parent, single mother, 2 adult children just getting into the world of work, can't get a property of their own. It's not the world that we lived in years ago where we have some kind of prospects. I'm stuck, I'm stuck where I can't, I can't contribute in the way that I would like to because I can't do it in a way that earns me money, but I will be an Orange Tribe member for the rest of my life and continue to have a view. So how do we value the unpaid contributions of everybody? How do we— and the other question there is, how important is education to allowing people to stay true to their values or to take risks on behalf of the community and not be compliant to the big machines?

Uh, yeah, I mean, those are just powerful contributions, Jane, and I think I, I, I, I, as, as with Christina's comment, I can only mostly acknowledge them. And they're really important issues. I think all of these things— there's a great bit in— I keep thinking of this, I referred to it earlier in the week— in Nora Bateson's book Smaller Arcs of Larger Circles, where she talks about the way that systems thinking was a potential real paradigm shift in the world. But it came into a, broadly speaking, mid-20th century context that was mechanistic, um, uh, and, and, and about— and therefore it got interpreted in a mechanistic way. And, and, and I just, you know, when I hear— so, so there are great DAOs and new organizations that are truly trying to do radical things And yet they almost always end up fitting into the kind of existing worldview almost inevitably. And there was one recently which was like, can we price in the contribution of keystone species to ecosystems and can we value that financially? And that really gives me the creeps. A little bit. I have the same reaction to, can we cost the price of unpaid care? It's not the same, but the risk in both is, well, what if somebody comes along and provides a cheaper alternative? As soon as you financialize something, as soon as you bring it into that financial system, then you're playing the game. Then you're playing that game, if you see what I mean. There's a really interesting dynamic there. I mean, I guess I would say you try and create the conditions for people to take risks and have greater independence. So universal basic income, not something that I'm a huge— I know a lot about and campaign for, but actually that is the kind of thing that might liberate a few more people to— and more progressive taxation, frankly, that might liberate a few more people to be able to be more independent. Because actually what you're pointing to is that there's a whole— the world of our lives is not the same as our world of employment. And so there's dependency and interdependence and community and care and all of those things going on as well. So it'd be nice if we could consider work as something, an addition on top of that rather than as the whole thing that the rest has to fit around, I guess. You're muted, Jane.

If I could just follow up on that point about costing the social care model. Whilst it is being done freely because people feel an empathy to the community and a capability to do something because there's a pain point that they need to respond to, around them, the state hasn't necessarily needed to look at it in the way that it has had to with health. So, you know, that's a big question for me, that whilst it's not a problem for the big machine, but it's at the cost of people's personal contribution, what would be the incentive for the state to say, actually, we want to raise all boats, you know, raise all boats?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Perhaps fund those, those people who are doing the care so they can do it better without health problems for themselves, or that they can contribute creatively in other ways, because the technology, the digital world, should allow us more opportunity rather than less.

That's great. I mean, there ought to be an incentive to— A, there ought to be a moral incentive because it would be the right thing to do, but that's That is what it is. And it's a similar argument with equality, diversity, inclusion, but I also have some trepidation about this argument as well. But you would think that there would be a productivity argument, you know, that actually funding carers in such a way that they didn't have physical and particularly mental health problems, which then created other costs, and funding them in such a way that you liberated their intelligence and capabilities to be part of contributing in other ways as well to society. You'd think that that would all be— those would all be strong arguments, wouldn't you? But again, that's a little bit like the same financialising. And I originally got wary of this, Jane, when we did all the stuff under Blair government about volunteering and pricing up volunteering and took away a lot of the intrinsic motivation in volunteering. So I guess there's an argument— sorry, I've gone back to the previous point really, haven't I? But on the previous point, there's an argument about how we can increase intrinsic motivation and reduce extrinsic motivation, because I think that would change some dynamics in a constructive way. But on your point, well, clearly the system hasn't changed, and there is a little bit of kind of— this is why I only put my toe in the water of things like the future of work, because you immediately get into how do we change the whole of society. And I don't know, and what we say in this room might probably not make a difference, except we just have to go out and do some good things ourselves. So I'm not— yeah, I guess I would write a book and go on Radio 4 if I had really good answers to those things.

But for me, a very simple example, Guided by the Sea. Is the local pub organises people to clean up the beach. Now, from my perspective, on principle, I wouldn't do it because it's doing people out of a job.

Hmm.

But they still do it. Now, so if the volunteers stop doing it, eventually the council will have to employ someone to clean up the beach. So therefore, this volunteering is removing people off employment opportunities. It's a very simple example of the same case you've just been talking about.

But I do think that what my idealism is about is liberating intrinsic motivation rather than equalizing extrinsic motivation. If you're, you know, I used to do some stuff with a charity while I was at university, and I did it very, in a very clear-eyed way because I got something really valuable out of it. I enjoyed the time and it was a break and it was a change and it gave me experiences I didn't have in my week at university.

And you got a better job.

Say again?

You got a better job because you've done it and it's on your CV.

Well, that's arguable. Maybe. I hope so. I think I deserve it. But what was interesting, David, is that the people who came into the charity who really just wanted it on their CV didn't stick around for very long, um, uh, because they actually weren't motivated to be part of it. They, they just wanted the, the, the, the badge, if you see what I mean. Yeah, but I did put it on my CV. I put a few things on my CV that I, uh, uh, benefited from and felt slightly odd about benefiting from, but there you go. Uh, you also have to respond to the existing system, don't you? That's the challenge.

Debbie, you've got your hand up, you want to come in? That's deliberate. You can hear me, Debbie?

Hi there. Hi, I think it was interesting talking about the idea of a meritocracy because I think that that certainly is an ideal But on the other hand, I think the problem is that we don't necessarily all value the same things, and it would only work if we all value the things that everybody has to contribute. So, for example, IT is something that, you know, it's a thriving area. Yeah. People with skills in that area are highly valued, whereas cleaning toilets and caring for people is not something that's highly valued. So people in those jobs aren't going to benefit from the kind of meritocracy that most people would have in mind, I think. We would still have a very unfair society if that is the version of meritocracy that people looked for. I don't know, would you agree?

I would, yeah. I think it's fair enough. Same response. As to Jane and Christina, I think those things we just have to take into account. It's intriguing, isn't it, that care and other manual and otherwise low-paid and disregarded labour is actually now worth more in the market than it used to be, but still less than IT for sure.

Still very undervalued, I think. You know, somebody who— I've noticed people who have children, you know, they would maybe expect to earn a certain amount themselves, but they wouldn't necessarily expect to pay somebody else anything like that amount to look after their children. So although that's their most precious thing, they don't value that skill and contribution that somebody's making as much as they value their own.

Yep, yep, yes. Yeah, I haven't got— even in, even in the, um, even in just the playing around, um, conversational sense, putting the world to rights as we are, um, I, I can't put the world fully to rights even conceptually. Um, yeah, so, so that's interesting, isn't it?

Um, I do wonder if one thing that we could do that would make a massive difference is— and this is speaking in Britain because I, I don't think it's the case elsewhere— but I think if people were very open to discuss salaries generally and within companies, I think that would make a massive difference. I think it would help highlight how unequal society is, and I think it would help address some of the issues where I believe despite there'd been quite a lot of legislation to potentially avoid it, then I think there's still kind of large disparities between who's paid what for doing the same work, basically. Because I think it does depend on, you know, who the managers like, and it's not necessarily who's most productive, it's who they feel is most like them a lot of the time, I think.

Which is the Scandinavian or Nordic country where all tax salaries are public record? I think it's Finland, isn't it? You can search for somebody's name and find out how much tax they pay on how much income. Yeah, I would just add that I would say it must not be just salaries, because that's the problem built into our system, isn't it? You know, I remember reading in some Beatles book And I wish I knew who it was. Somebody was talking to Paul about wealth and just made the point that income is not wealth, capital is wealth. And, you know, Paul McCartney, I think, now owns half of Suffolk, so maybe he took that lesson to heart. But I think that's the Obviously, that, that's, that would be missed out in that system as well, if you see what I mean. That would be another thing that needs to be added. Sorry, Christina, you've got your hand up.

I just wanted to comment on what Debbie said about in terms of what we can do, and I think all of us, we can just present ourselves as allies to people in our community who we think they may not know the bigger picture about the systems that they've entered. Because my sister was lucky to have a white male colleague share what he was getting paid as a contractor, and that therefore informed her how to move forward with her next salary negotiation. And I think if we just show up and we present ourselves as allies to people, who they don't necessarily know. That's one of the things we can do as individuals.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So empowering to have something to think, something like that, that you can just do that's constructive. And yeah, great.

I don't see any other questions. There was a comment in the chat when you were talking about the Scandinavian country. I had in my head it was Norway, and I think Maruki even thought the same. So I don't know, it might be Norway. Yeah, so Sheila, you've got your hand up. Do you want to come in with your question?

Yeah, um, you were talking about just now sharing salaries, and in a lot of organizations in the US, at least, that can be grounds for termination. I know a lot of consultants do share information on salary with each other and with other people. But if you're sharing it with an employee, they don't necessarily know what a consultant is having to pay themselves that the employee is getting somehow through the employer. Yeah. So that can be really tricky because you have to couch it in such a way that people understand what that means in terms of what you actually have as usable income and what you have as benefits. But that's one thing. And another thing is, you talked a little bit about the idea of who gets the next opportunity. A lot of times there are a couple of factors. One is, they've done studies where they say that people feel more comfortable with the people that they see every day. So with remote work, if you don't see people, But you see some people, if you go into the office in a hybrid environment, or if you have a global team, which I've worked with a lot, the people that you see in your local office are the people that you trust more, and everybody else is them. You don't totally trust them. And then the other factor is that people generally want to advance people who are more like them, which still in most organizations means that—

Hmm.

White males have an advantage over everybody else because the people at the top of the hierarchy in most organizations are white males.

Uh, yes. Um, I, um, you know, uh, there is a, um, you pays your money and takes your choice aspect to, to all of this at, at the end of the day in operating in the, in the twisted and shaped world that we already live in this. I would hope that we can find a way that one of the responses to that is to decenter that power system by setting up your own company if the people who are at the top are not going to promote you. But again, that requires, you know, degrees of enabling systems of security, of independence, and various things that are not in place at the moment. I appreciate that.

Well, they've also done studies. I mean, they know that if a woman-owned company goes for funding, they won't get more than about— I don't know whether it's 10 or 20% of what even a young person, young man in his 20s would get. I was trying to do a startup with, with someone, another woman, and we were advised that if we were going to try to get any kind of funding, we needed to get a young guy who was a finance guy and let him do all the talking, because otherwise we weren't going to get any substantial funding. Yeah, he was passed away, so that's not happening. But I mean, that's just the reality of things.

I think it was Etsy, wasn't it, where the 2 female founders invented a third fictional male founder called Tom, who sent all the emails and got a better response. Mind-boggling. And there's really good evidence in the UK that if you send out job descriptions with— send out applications for jobs with identical CVs, but ethnic-sounding names versus English-sounding names, they get a very different response.

It can work the opposite way, though. I have a friend who's a white, blue-eyed, blonde male who said he's gone into jobs where he has a common name, but it's a common name in the African-American community too. And the whole team was African-American or African, and they took one look at him and their faces all fell because they were expecting a person of color.

Right. It can work. Yeah, you know, and individual instances of unfairness are always still individual instances of unfairness. You know, I know somebody who worked for the BBC, who— and I was told a similar thing in local government, now I remember it— who was literally told, you're too white and male to get to the next rung around here, you know, sorry, it's not gonna work that way for you. And if you're in that situation, it's not great, is it?

Well, and it can also be age, because one of my friends who's I think probably in her late 50s, was told that she was perfect for a company in Silicon Valley, except that everybody else was half her age. They didn't question her skills. They didn't question her attitude. It was just age.

I mean, I, I, we do, despite the inequalities and the problems that still exist, we do, I think, have better and stronger laws in the UK than the US about things like that. Um, and, uh, and I think, you know, in Nordic countries, they, uh, they have better and stronger laws still, um, about a bunch of those things.

There's laws against that in the US too.

Okay, okay.

Well, if you, if you go and file a lawsuit or file a complaint with the agencies that administer those laws, you're basically a pariah from that point on. So you better have a lot of job security somewhere, because if you, if you complain about discrimination It— you just make yourself say, oh, she's going to be a complainer, therefore we probably don't want her, even though she's perfect in every other way. So I don't know what to do about that, because there was one point where it was about something else, but I— there was something where I knew there was some inequity, and I did report it to an agency, and they said, okay, well, we can go this far without giving your name, and beyond that we have to give your name. And I was like, Well, it was bad, but I don't want to you know be tied up in court for ten years and have nobody want to hire me because I spoke about something. There was another question I had about what was in your presentation because when you were talking about the hierarchical organizations, you were talking about everything I think being organized around processes, and a lot of companies now that I've been working with. are reorganizing around product line. Do you think that eliminates any of the problems or just changes the shape of them?

Oh, I mean, I think it just changes the shape of things. I don't think you can do without hierarchy, actually. But I think the question is, is it a value-adding, justified, contingent hierarchy? Just like our politicians actually subject to recall, or are they, you know, or are they in a safe seat for 50 years? So that's the dynamic that I would go for. I think I would recommend, you know, I don't think either a technical specialist-based hierarchy, or a kind of product or process line hierarchy, as a fixed idea, is the right idea. In the Viable Systems Model, we would talk about variety engineering, and you basically need to find operating units that can be coherent, but that can, you know, deal with the complexity of what the organisation is doing in the world, and that depends on the context. If you're if that makes sense. Um, but the important thing is that the hierarchy is, um, yeah, I would use the word contingent.

I mean, one of the points you haven't raised is that it is generally accepted that diverse teams are ultimately more successful than old white males. Um, and people fight against it, but nevertheless The accepted wisdom is this. Second wisdom is that if you're building organizations based on product lines, you're not necessarily fulfilling the value and the mission of the organization as a whole, as the product lines will tend to fight against each other in order to get promotion.

In a straight fight, it's probably a better choice, but

Yeah, just, just to, just to, um, don't cut off the, the great questions in the bit, but we are coming up on time, so we've got a few minutes left. I need probably a couple of minutes just to wrap up. Mario, I see you've got your hand up, mate. Uh, I don't know whether it's a very, very quick question, uh, or whether you want to pick up with Benjamin directly. I'm sure he'd be happy to hear from you.

Could be yes or no question, uh, catch up with Benjamin. I'm already connected to him on LinkedIn.

We're still here. Go on, what's the yes or no question?

The yes or no question is, are you familiar with approaches to business simulation for systems like the, you know, the classic beer game, etc., that would simulate evolution of this kind of behavior in companies? There is also a game theory-based game called the trust game, and the rest I'll ask you on LinkedIn.

Yeah, I think they're very useful. It's like the simulations, the organizational simulations that Barry Oshri does. They are very deeply useful for illustrating those underlying patterns and dynamics, definitely.

That was the most impressive yes/no answer I've ever heard. Fantastic. I am going to bring it to a close here because we're pretty much up on time. Can't see anymore, Benjamin, but—

No, I'm sorry. My camera seems to have overheated.

That's all right. That's OK. No, just to say that was a great session. I knew it was going to be interesting and thought-provoking. It was exactly all of those things. And just to say thank you for joining us and sharing your insights. We will circulate the slides, so just to say thanks again for joining us. Really enjoyed hosting you, so thank you. Round of applause for me, and thank you all for joining the discussion today and asking a whole bunch of very diverse and interesting questions to provoke thought and keep the debate going. I really enjoyed listening to it all. And if I get a chance, I'm gonna go back and certainly watch the recording at some point. I think you've thrown up a lot of very interesting ideas. I'll be interested to see where things go next. As Benjamin said at the start, if you want to follow his work, you can connect with him on LinkedIn. He shares a lot of interesting posts, etc. So yeah, please do that. Thank you all again for joining us. Just to say, we've done 2 events in July, and we actually have 2 events for you in August. So check out Meetup. Our first one is with an old friend of ours, Ellen Randall. She spoke here before. She's introducing a new talk that she's not done before anywhere, so she'll be unveiling it here at FutureWorks Scotland. And it's really about time management. It's based on some HBR article and some of our new thinking work in that space and how to kind of deal with that, manage that. And at the end of the month, we're going to have Jenny Lambden here who's written a book on choosing unity, and her talk will be all about how we explore vulnerability. So 2 great sessions for you, do look out for those. Plenty more in the diary, we've got events right up till November, so take a look, see if there's things that tickle your fancy, and hopefully we'll see you again soon. Take care, stay safe, and good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you happen to be. Thank you again, folks. Take care.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.