This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
So today it’s a pleasure for us to have you here and be able to to leverage on your deep understanding of how organizational models but also the very concept of work is evolving and evolving across and through the new limitations that we are also witnessing, especially in these days of crisis, regarding the current mainstream ideas of how a larger scale or any scale of organisations work, and what are the frames that we need to break and rethink when we think about work, organizing and organizations in the 21st century. And in preparation of this conversation, you shared with us a couple of key ideas that you believe are important to interpret this transition. And the first one that I would love to discuss with you is this idea of, you know, the need to see and look at platforms as commons. And I’m really interested in understanding where this idea is coming from, from your experience.

Stowe Boyd:
Well, there’s been quite a lot of interest in this set of ideas, primarily driven by the nature of very successful internet giants that are based on platform economics. So one way to think about is the riddle of how our Google search results like railroad shipping rates in the United States and many other parts of the world. Shipping has to be fair, meaning railroads can’t use the fact that they have ownership of the railways, as a means to control, you know, the economics of, of shipping across the country, which was, in fact, a problem. And so the the answer to that riddle appears to come down to the question or the reality that it’s good for us, as a nation as a society as an economy, if railroad shipping rates are fair, that is: they don’t disadvantage commerce, or the people who rely on commerce, you know, shipping across railroads. And so the reality is, it turns out that search results from Google may have to be treated through the same kind of lens through what we have in the States as common carrier rules about fairness. And, and so we’re seeing a lot of regulatory response to that. And so there is a regulatory response, a sort of immune system response, if you will, to the enormous potential for platforms to be unfair. And, and so the question comes down to what do we the people want our governments or ourselves to do about this? Can we treat platforms that we have come to depend on — and expect or impose rules of governance that make them fair for us — in a way that benefits everyone?

Simone Cicero:
Well, that’s that’s a very interesting point and I think this has also been a subject of lots of discussion, especially if I remember well, something like 10 or 12, months ago. I remember there was this case of discussion that Amazon was being regulated for example in India in a way that prevented Amazon to sell its own staff on the marketplace. And so and many were making these parallels saying, you know, we’re used to regulate something like networks or railroads or something that has such crazy enabling importance for our the way we do trade for example. And I see the point that it’s interesting also to connect these with some reflections that we did a few weeks ago with Arthur Brock that was talking with us about holochain. And he brought up this idea of carrier that you also brought up with this common carrier rules — but in a way that was a slightly different — so I see two ways to address this come this carrier issue, this idea that you were debating, and one is the regulatory one. And another one I would say a revolutionary one. So somehow, you know, people that are creating, for example, blockchain or holochain solutions are looking at the carrier and kind of thinking about how do we create another kind of carriers. And instead that you are making the point that we should regulate them, you know, with antitrust. So what do you think about this other perspective and to essentially not regulate platforms, but create alternatives that are governed that differently, but not from the public from the participants, I would say.

Stowe Boyd:
So yeah, exactly. The example — once again, going back to the example of Google — you might imagine that someone say what we should do is create a nonprofit search engine that the platform owners would have to use, right and sort of take it out of the hands of someone like Google and say: “well, you know, this is too important for a single corporation to control” or, you know, the regulatory path, which is what we did with railroads and what we did with communications in the United States too. Or is it simply a matter of requiring a voice inside the organization? Does the organization have to create some means of involving others in the way that the platform runs? And, you know, if you look at the tradition of very successful commons, like the aqueduct system in southwest United States, which goes back hundreds of years where the participants themselves agreed on how the commons is shared, or the sharing of the pasture land in the Alps by the cow herders, you know, the people that are trying to, you know, create milk from cows. And they work collectively so that they don’t diminish the value for everyone by overgrazing or over watering in the case of the aqueduct system in the southwest. But it’s not clear, since we have an monopolistic player already owning the thing that we’ve come to depend on. It’s not a situation where it’s some federation of players who are sharing the common. So, you know, there is this sort of this formless mess. Everybody uses Google to search. But we don’t have any kind of representational entity, no institution represents our interests aside from governments at the moment. And so that’s why I think we’re seeing, in a sense, the imposition will be coming from, you know, the EU. In the United States that winds up being the, you know, the attorneys general of the various states are the ones that are, you know, attempting to regulate because there’s this concept of a natural monopoly. You know, the AT&T phone system was a natural monopoly, it made sense when the system was being rolled out, there’d be one company that would create the entire system so that it could work, so it could, you know, be built in the first place, and then it could work. But then ultimately, the the power that that gave to AT&T was deemed to be, you know, dangerous to the economy and so it was broken into pieces in order to, you know, end the monopoly and open up, you know, the phone, marketplace to competition so that, you know, the prices could be potentially more fair and so on. But of course, as we know, the natural monopolistic — I’m speaking in a week that we had Sprints and T Mobile merged together- the natural tendency is for these things to accumulate and grow back into large monopolistic players. So I mean, it took an Act of the federal government to get interoperation of text messaging services across the various mobile phone providers, because they naturally believed that they would be better off not interconnecting, right, it took it took legal action to get local number portability in the United States, so that you could change your phone number from one mobile phone company to another. Right? It required the government to step in, because well the perceptions of competitive advantage of the people that had these platforms was such that it, you know, they thought they’d be better off not providing what is now as you know, seemingly an obvious and highly beneficial service. I mean, I’d like to be able to text message you no matter what provider you’re using.

Simone Cicero:
That’s really interesting because we are talking about platforms that everybody uses, like, you know, the big GAFAs, you know, the Amazons, the Facebooks and the Googles and the Apples and so on, you can think about, also you can think about today, you know, maybe before the corona — now we really don’t know what’s gonna happen with Airbnb — but you could think about Airbnb in this way. Now you can start thinking about Airbnb in this way, you know, I see these also this resonates a lot with some interesting work that Ben Thompson and Ben Evens have been publishing on lately, you know, in the last couple of months. And you know, it’s about looking at these platforms as as utilities somehow, no? Indeed, when you make when you make examples, we were talking about the aqueduct, the railroads, the AT&T. So, something for which we are used to think about that society at some point needs to step in in terms of governance and in terms of stakeholders’ interest being somehow protected from the government, so that we can ensure that there is some level of trust in these utilities because they become so important for our lives. And if we think about these platforms as the new utilities, let’s say — and this is again, something that Evens and Thompson have been saying in the lightest in the latest species — so the question is, where is the innovation, no, then? Because, you know, we’re being used at these rounds and these, I would say waves of innovations coming up in you know, the S curves that Carlota Perez and others have been thinking about and talking about. But now what it looks like — that on top of such mega platforms- we are seeing innovations that are really — I don’t want to say, I don’t want to say irrelevant — but if you think about it, you know, we are seeing platforms coming up and marketplaces connecting people with celebrities to get birthday wishes. This is an example I did already in a previous podcast, but, you know, the point that comes up is, are we living through a stagnation then? So where is innovation coming from? And if I look at, you know, once we have regulated Facebook once we have regulated Google and where is innovation coming from? What are the innovations that we’re gonna see? And I feel like that we are really stepping into a transition here. We’re moving beyond markets, so the innovation that we can expect is going to come through open networks that somehow we’re now facing, because they are the only institutions that are ready to face this. So these informal networks that we are creating are the only institutions that are ready to face something like the crisis that we are living and really able to reinvent the idea of work beyond, you know, the traditional employer employee relationship that we are used to in the 20th century. So what is the solution of the 21st century coming up? It is for sure is not going to come up from Google, as I understand? And if yes, what kind of shapes are they having? And how these institutions are going to reinvent work and meaning in this age of crisis?

Stowe Boyd:
Well, there’s a lot there’s a lot to unpack from what you just laid out. One thing that occurred early in the last set of ideas that you laid out, I was thinking of the approach that some organizations have taken who have built platforms and have taken steps to actively prevent innovation on top of the platform. One example of that is the famous case of Twitter that for a period of time, allowed innovation on top of the platform, they said: “Well, we will allow people to build”, for example, Twitter clients or other tools that could take advantage of the data inside of Twitter. For example, at first you may recall, Twitter was doing nothing at all with hashtags except for allowing you to search for them. But they didn’t actually use them in any sensible way. But the simple case of Twitter clients, there were dozens, hundreds of people were building different clients and experimenting with different sorts of things that could be done with them. And then one fateful day, Twitter — because of its board of directors — finally, or apparently decided to shut off that innovation and all of a sudden the platform was closed. And it was the only innovation that was being allowed after that point was, you know, done by Twitter itself and to a great extent, that’s one of the many reasons that, you know, Twitter has had such a slow rate of innovation since that day. There’s very little innovation and people have commented about it at great length. But you can point directly to that event as a failure of the company to embrace its role as the platform owner, the platform founder, and opening the platform up to experimentation and innovation by other people. And, you know, to some extent, I think that’s a lesson to be learned. And it’s, I’m not recommending or suggesting somehow Twitter will wake up one day and come up come out of it since, you know, it’s funk. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t. But the point is that it’s in the hands of a platform owner at various points to make these fateful decisions into perhaps intentionally block for whatever reasons, you know, that innovation from happening. I mean, the classic example that, you know, was sort of the beginning of one of my forays into this area was the lack of interoperability between the instant messaging surfaces back in the day when AOL was the dominant player. And it didn’t allow cross-messaging to Microsoft’s product, for example. And they just didn’t want to do it because they thought it was best for them that if people, you know, had to use their service, they’d be better off. And that was debated by the FCC when AOL was in the process of acquiring Time Warner, they considered forcing that and then they decided not to they went a different direction. So I think that was damaging for us in the world of, you know, commerce, our economy, because it would have been beneficial for people if we could have had a free, you know, collection of interoperable instant messaging products. It’s sort of been obviated by something we talked about earlier: people can text message each other now and, and the rise of other alternatives. But the point I’m getting at is it’s it there’s this inherent power in the person who sets up the, the platform. The interesting thing is that people that are building platforms now, as opposed to say, Twitter back at, you know, the point at which had made that fateful decision. A lot of them are intentionally setting up the platform with the goal of attracting people to join the platform and work on it. My my favorite example these days is the Rent the Runway company, which is, I guess, just in the US, so it might not be that familiar to people outside, but it’s basically…

Simone Cicero:
I think it’s pretty familiar.

Stowe Boyd:
Yeah, it’s a mechanism for women to basically rent clothing and to hold on to it as long as they want. And they have a subscription model where you can have a certain number of pieces of clothing in your closet and when you’re quote unquote “done with it”, when you’ve decided it’s no more fun or whatever, or your button pops off, you send it back and, and Rent the Runway, then, you know, cleans it, saws the button back on whatever. It’s been very, very successful. It’s grown quickly to being a multi billion dollar enterprise. The thing that’s been fascinating is to see how, at first, the well established designers, the manufacturers of women’s clothing, did not want to play with them and forced Rent the Runway to actually buy the clothing and own it all themselves, in order to rent it to its customers. And what has happened though, is as it has grown in prominence, and people start to see the value of the notion of this revolutionary way of thinking about, you know — having access to a virtual closet of clothing and not actually owning it — more and more of them have come aboard and they’re building on the platform that’s provided by Rent the Runway, and relying on their capabilities for fulfilment and returns and all that sort of thing. That has happened very quickly. It’s a classic S curve, as you were saying. So we’ve seen you know, reluctance, reluctance, reluctance than the knee of the curve, the asymptote of the curve “zum”, and now you’re seeing that very fast growth as more and more designers are joining the platform and getting the benefits of it. Of course, then you have, you know, the classic network effects, right, everyone’s benefited by every new participant that joins and starts to participate on top of the platform of Rent the Runway. Rent the Runway benefits, and so do all of the other participants. Because the greater the selection, the more people are likely to join and so on, you know, the classic double loop of, you know, network effects. And everyone’s learning from it because they have all this data now that they didn’t have before: they can really find out what kind of things people like, if the cost barrier isn’t the primary factor determining whether or not somebody wants to try out a dress or something. Because people are not forced with, you know, paying $1,000 for that dress, they can just try it one weekend. You know, it’s a fascinating example. It shows all the benefits. Of course, if there is still the question if — at some point — you have to say “Well, is it going to be fair?” Who is going to manage and monitor whether or not the Rent the Runway corporation is taking too much of the profits out or whatever? Because of the state of where we’re at, it seems that established designers have a lot of power — there’s not a great imbalance of power — at least at this point. But if Rent the Runway grows so vast, if it becomes an Amazon and it starts to for example, you know, starts to design and rent its own lines of clothing, you know, then we’re going to start to see the problems that have happened in so many other platforms. Like Amazon, you know, the complaint that Amazon is selling its own product, you know, against the interest of the players that have participated building their own Amazon stores. So, you know, we always come back to the same set of constraints, which is who has benefited by the actions that are taken by the players and in the ecosystem? And so, in the perfect world, you’d like to imagine that ecosystems will be fair and all will benefit from the network effects, but there is the likelihood of, you know, power imbalances that could diminish the positive benefits of the platforms. And of course, then the other part of the the questions you asked us about the shapes of the organizations that, that grow in this and you know, the example of Rent the Runway, you could imagine that part Participating in the Rent the Runway platform will change the shape of the organizations, the designers have that, you know, there, if they are going to shift away from the conventional model of design, you know, clothing design companies and move to a model where they’re not trying to sell them in, you know, Nordstrom they’re they’re moving more to a model or people are renting their clothes through Rent the Runway or Rent the Runway alternatives, their organizations will change shape. There’ll be more focused on interacting with platforms and less, you know, conventional relationships with department stores, for example. And that’s going to be, I think that’s going to be a relatively fast transition. I mean, witnessing the collapse of retail and, you kno, of course corona virus always plays a you know — it’s like the Joker in the deck at this point — but even prior to corona virus, it was clear that retail was undoing some vast restructurings and largely because of e-commerce and now, you know, the sort of next generation of e-commerce thinking which is clothing rental. Strangely enough, it really hasn’t had a big impact yet on on men’s clothing and, you know, that might be about psychology of men and how they think about their clothes or something. But it’s obviously having a very profound impact on at least professional women in the US. So I think it’s exactly the same, you know, set of principles that are happening in in things that we talk about a lot, you know, like Uber and Airbnb and so on.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I’m happy you mentioned the psychology because I wanted to also go in into that a little bit because, so when you talk, it sort of sounds like we’re moving into more these ecosystemic organizations where the boundaries between who is consuming and who is producing is sort of blurred, because the consumers take an active role in shaping the platform company. And so I wanted to maybe come back to that: if that’s the case, that the sort of responsibility for different decisions and so on is shifted very much to an individual that is active in this kind of ecosystem. How do you see this? Because, I mean, there’s a lot of also critiques around platforms in terms of the workers who might be less protected. It requires really a lot from individuals to re-think their role basically in an economy? So I’d be curious to hear your, your thoughts on that?

Stowe Boyd:
Well, yeah, it’s interesting, there’s a couple of things in the Rent the Runway story that are really indicators of how this how different this is. One of the things that many of the design firms were saying is that they had a very indirect way of figuring out what what consumers actually wanted to buy, or wear right. And in fact, they didn’t really know much, except through focus groups and, you know, classic research techniques about what, in this case, what women wanted to wear. The only thing they knew is what women wanted to buy. Right? Or were willing to buy. So that changed profoundly. One of the things that was really fascinating in this case study is that the people that Rent the Runway to begin with believed that subscriptions weren’t what people wanted, they thought that there was going to be sort of one off things where people would like rent a fancy dress to go to a party, or to go into a wedding. And then they wouldn’t, you know, and then they would send the dress back. Right? It was the women who were using the service, who sort of pushed them towards subscriptions because they wouldn’t send the things back, right? They’d rent a couple of pieces of clothing and hang on to them. So it evolved the interaction with the with the the sort of “power users”, if you will, who took the service and pushed it in this direction that led to the subscription model, which is the thing that has led to the, you know, the real advance of this. And now of course they have all is data about things that people look at, and then rent, how long they hold on to them. What frequency are different people, you know, turning clothes over what’s their average usage and so on. And that data is now accessible. First of all, it was accessible to Rent the Runway and now to the design firms that are putting their clothes on the platform, they have access to this data, which is a different, completely different kind of data than they had before. Because what they had before it’s like sales at department stores and so on. And a lot of times they sort of lost track of their clothing, right, you know, department stores would have clothes, they’d put in a consignment to get it off the shelves and then went to some third party, retail and so on. So they lost all kinds of track of what people were doing with these clothing. Well, that’s all you know, fascinating stuff and gives all kinds of reasons why it is that, you know, the designers want to get on board and learn from all this. The secondary aspect of this, you know, maybe this is what you’re getting at with the sort of notion of people’s impact on the system. But when you realize that they could make, they’re making these clothes and they’re getting used, the ones that are popular are getting used more, right? They don’t necessarily sit in someone’s closet for four years, when somebody wears something a few times and they decide they’re not in love with it — or even if they like it — they’ll still send it back, right and then somebody else gets to wear it, right. So there’s this sort of natural aspect of this, which is not quite the same as with all these other examples we’ve talked about, but the impact on the clothing industry, the manufacturing, and the sustainability of clothing is potentially much higher with this style of clothing, you know, this style of managing the clothes, through rental relationships. It’s kind of a fascinating side effect, if you will, I mean, it’s not necessarily what anyone was intending, but the consequences that the clothes are potentially used more and by the nature of this sort of replenishment model, they’re probably in use and maintained more. So there’s less waste, there is less, you know, people taking the clothes and throwing them in the garbage. And hopefully that is a different kind of learning that the companies can learn to build things, make clothes and accessories that people want to use and are likely to persist in the system, right. I think that’s a side effect.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, totally. And you could even take it. I suppose a step further. We have been talking about about this sort of radical transparency when we, you know, in a previous conversations with Michel balance in the accounting systems. So if you would have complete transparency in how things were produced, that would also empower the costumers to make choices, you know, in terms of their environmental or social impact of what they buy. So it’s really about that data, if you make it completely visible to people, btaht could really shape the direction of the company.

Stowe Boyd:
Right and, you know, many of these companies were heading in that direction, in a sort of sustainable, you know, marketing approach. They were marketing the fact that their clothes were fairly made or, you know, that people are getting paid a living wage and someone involved in a manufacturer, but this carries it to a new level, which is yes, this information can be associated with the goods and you can also accumulate all this new data about the lifecycle of a garment that’s managed in the system. You know? And, you know, I wonder, would it be of interest to people to know that, you know, five other women have rented this dress? I think, you know, I don’t know how radically transparent people want to be about that. But, you know, and at least in an anonymized level, it might be of interest I don’t know. You know, it’s the life cycle of the clothing itself might be an element of this.

Simone Cicero:
Well, I if I can add a little bit of a twist to the conversation that you guys made me think about, is this one: so we are talking about essentially evolutions of consumption. So we are talking about, you know, the transition from products into services and rental models like that. And yeah, of course this has all these partial intended impacts on the reduction of impacts and sustainability and so on. My question is, is more like: can we see a new perspective where we are more intentional on rethinking organizations? Because I see that the evolution of organizations into platforms such as you know, the example that you made with Rent the Runway has been mainly driven by expectations. So this narrative of user experience and convenience, so “I don’t need to own like an access to many, many clothes and so on”. But my question is, with, you know, in relation to your experience in the ecology of work and how this is evolving, and now also the expectations and the capability of workers are changing with time and with these new capabilities and new sense-making processes that are happening on social media and beyond, access to open knowledge. So is there any way that we can hope — or we can expect — some kind of intentional transformation of organizing and work towards something that is much more interactive and productive? And not necessarily just about, you know, consuming in smarter ways and going along with these narratives of user experience enhancements?

Stowe Boyd:
Well, I think so. Obviously, I think what we’re seeing in some of these companies and other companies that are trying to create a platform on which work gets parcelled out, delivered, managed, directed. I think, you know, the example that you and I share in common Simone is, you know, Haier for example, where they’ve spent a tremendous amount of time and energy building over the last decade, a collection of technologies on which they in fact try to manage a very different kind of organizational structure that’s based on very small, nimble entrepreneurially oriented customer-centered micro enterprises, right. And that the organization exists in order to allow those micro-enterprises to be successful in essence. And people join them, form them, dissolve them, whatever, around the notion of building products that meet the needs of customers in very specific ways, you know, in their case, largely appliances of various kinds. But the delivery from the viewpoint of the consumer doesn’t seems very, very different. And more importantly, the experience of workers inside those organizations is radically different to my perception — I have not actually worked inside of Haier, I’m just a perceiver of what I’ve learned about it with my research there. It’s radically different. I mean, it’s different enough that a great number of people who had been involved in the company at various stages of the wave found it disorienting and difficult to work and have left, you know, new people have come and joined and learn the ways and so on. But it’s so different from the normal notions of hierarchical command and control organizations or even more progressive organizations. It’s still so phenomenally different and I think it’s very difficult — and this is the paradox of the Haier story: it’s been a very, very successful company — but very few other companies have tried to adopt the principles that animated and actively, you know, emulate what they do. I mean, there are companies, many other companies, that have taken similar paths or some set of similar ideas and put them in place. You know, Kyocera, the, you know, their Amoeba organization is very similar actually predates some of the Haier stuff, and is based on some of the same notions of highly entrepreneurial small groups inside of an organization that is designed to support you know, highly entrepreneurial small groups. And the role of senior management is to make sure that such an organization, you know, operates, basically, you know, be the bloodstream be the nervous system that allows the different organs of an organic kind of ecosystemic organization to exist. It’s a very different model and the transition from, you know, sort of conventional, managerial, neo-liberal era of, you know, management to that is a radical transformation and one that very few companies have successfully termed. And honestly, I’m not sure there is a formula that says start here and then, you know, three and a half years later you’ll you’ll be there.

Simone Cicero:
The question that I was introducing is are you, you know, for example, you’re talking about Haier and Kyocera as ways to overcome the neoliberal management paradigm of organizing industrially, let’s say, and to some extent I can agree that Haier group with Rendanheyi, that our listeners will be become used to because we just had an another podcast conversation with Bill Fischer, where we explored that quite widely. I can agree that to some extent around Rendanheyi is a way to unframe the organization from some of the neoliberal patterns that have framed the organization, the industrial organization for so long, especially with this call towards, you know, enterpreneurship and human expression and so on, but I feel like it’s still, you know, operating mostly within the framework of modernity, capitalism and UX, user experience. So getting there, you know, these enterprises exist to create the customer experience, essentially.

Stowe Boyd:
I think you’re right. It operates in a world that is the world we live in now. I think there are cases of what goes on inside there that are indicative of the sort of things that we might anticipate being sort of truths to be expected in platforms. And one of them is, for example, they have a kind of distributed governance built into the system, you know, so for example, they have standard contracts, that they require the micro-enterprises to use in their negotiations in their agreements with each other because the micro enterprises support each other in various ways and with outside partners. So in a sense, without putting their finger into every deal, you know, the management of Haier that, you know, sets the rules of conduct, so that there is some notion of consistency and fairness. And I think that kind of distributed governance is the thing that is the part, once again, that comes back to the notion of creating a commons. That is, you can have distributed governance so that everybody can rely on that the system is going to be fair, as defined by the, you know, those conventions. And I think that’s important. And that’s what makes it possible for people to operate as members of the ecosystem without worrying that they have to cover their back all the time.

Simone Cicero:
That’s very interesting in the case of Haier, because I feel like also external organizations are learning to trust a higher as a common, so to some extent, of course. But when they, for example, prototype their new organizational artifact of the ecosystem micro community that — just to clarify to our listeners — is a kind of system of companies that are both inside and outside the organization, sharing a common, I would say a common mission. And these companies from the outside, they totally trust and then and interoperate with companies inside the group through these smart contracting technology that Haier is using. And again, we’re seeing these patterns coming up also in other places. You mentioned Kyocera that that is also, you know, before that. But I was at the Drucker forum and I was exposed to — if I’m not wrong — it was a gaming company from China. I don’t remember if it was Alibaba Group, if I’m not wrong, something like that. So especially in China, these patterns are coming up often — and more often — because of the success of Haier. My question is in this process, now that we are starting to see for example with Haier or but also other organizations that that are Europe and the US, Buurtzorg or others. Do we see a possibility for the entrepreneur to, I would say, interact with an organization and a brand that has overcome the narrative of a user experience? So organization that actually activity exists to to lead entrepreneurs to enterprise — I don’t want to say outside of the market — but maybe to produce different for different kinds of services that are more essential, less, I would say less consumeristic, much more into regenerating environments, for example, or just you know, producing basic services such as, you know, food or energy or something like that. Do you see some of the brands you’ve been working with, or some of the stories you have listened to moving into this post-… you know, somehow having the energy to approach to this epistemic crisis that we’re also living, this meaning crisis that we’re also living?

Stowe Boyd:
Well, you know, I’ve seen a lot of activities where things are much more, well, it’s more tangible and less consumer oriented. So for example, initiatives like the reconstruction of the waterfront neighborhoods in St. Louis, I mean — pardon me — Louisville, Kentucky, which is being driven largely by a collection of investors, who are basically revitalizing a community that was mostly abandoned buildings and you know, had something like 16, I think was 1600 housing units, for example, that were, you know, abandoned, empty and falling apart and also taking over a manufacturing space and so on. And with the intention of candidly making money, but, you know, building an ecosystem of companies that were doing things like, you know, refashioning the real estate, coming in opening new restaurants, building new grocery stores. So you know, this revitalization of a neighborhood and to the benefit of obviously, to begin with the people that weren’t there yet, you know. It’s going to benefit the people that will be living there for the next 20 years. And people in the surrounding area are going to move over to these newer, you know, nicer neighborhoods and getting the benefit of that investment but mostly the investments being made by an ecosystem of people that are moving into the area and investing their time and energy to get it off the ground. And I think that’s fascinating. So it’s an example of something that on some level is about capitalism, but it’s not naked, you know, capitalism, hyper capitalistic exploitation. It’s not where somebody takes control of everything and owns and runs everything or something. So I think that’s a fascinating example of, you know, sort of “willing into existence”, an ecosystem of companies who are united and going in the general the same direction, right, but they’re not, there’s no central committee deciding anything, you know, there’s a distributed set of ideas that are shared among the participants and I think the same sort of thing is likely to emerge over and over again, sort of public private partnerships that will be building on the sort of platform concepts, even if the platform in this case is the actual, you know, territory, this neighborhood is the platform.

Simone Cicero:
The landscape at the end of the day. So I think it’s really, really interesting. You know, I think sometimes we have this idea of the future of organizing that is so very technological or exotic. And we may end up being surprised that the future of organizing is about, you know, as you said, so making some place you live more resilient or just, you know, creating infrastructure, or it’s about, you know, taking care of each other. So, for example when we were talking I was thinking about another entrepreneurial project that we can definitely think of as a platform that is called Participatory City — it’s a project from London, where there’s this new charity that has this mission to essentially improve two boroughs where they operate — the boroughs of Barking and Dagenham — and it basically is a very interesting for example, it runs on a warehouse where people can work and enterprising and you know, creating crafts or food and so on. And they also have a business incubator where they are trying to incubate 100 new businesses for these two boroughs in the next the next few years. In a way essentially, you know, exaggeratedly improving the quality of the place where they live and at the same time, of course, also the value of the properties that they own, right. So, it’s when you say it’s capitalistic, but with another shade of capitalism, I would say it’s more entrepreneurial than capitalistic, you know, so it’s really about enterprising together, for the benefits of many, and it’s actually configured itself as a commons.

Stowe Boyd:
Right it comes down these questions, which is the distribution of value, if it’s done in a fair way and people aren’t harmed, so that others are benefiting, then that’s, you know, the sort of foundational notion of like, the commons, right, that we all, you know, benefit from the results.

Simone Cicero:
And if we, if we make this, maybe as a last reflection for this conversation, if we make a reflection based on our experience and also understanding of organizational models and tools and capabilities that people will need to have what is your impression in terms of, if you think about this new wave of enterprisisng and this new wave of organizing that looks like much more distributed and small and and care-driven and commitment-driven and landscape-oriented, then what kind of organizational models are we going to use? What kind of organizational governance approaches are we going to use?

Stowe Boyd:
Well, I constantly come back to comments that have been made by several people that have had a big influence on my thinking in this area. And the one is McChrystal, who’s in his “Team of Teams” book he said his role as head of the joint command for the army in Iraq was ultimately to be more like a gardener than a general and he was trying to create a context in which his team of teams model of management could support the independent, semi autonomous actions being taken by small teams in order to affect what they needed to get done and to stay inside of the information loop that define their world. And that’s very similar to, you know, the fog of war that we all find ourselves in the world of business. So it’s going to take the creation or, you know, the discovery of those kind of leaders who have that sort of servant leadership mindset and take their time and energy in creating a context in which others can be very successful in the various activities they choose for themselves inside of an ecosystem, model, enterprise or network of enterprises. And so that’s I think the stumbling block for us today is we have to find these people. We have to create them, we have to get them in charge organizations. I was reading a thing yesterday in the Harvard Business Review by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic one of my favorite guys. And, you know, he, it was a story about how leadership has to take on more the characteristics of women to be more effective. And I think, you know, the reality is that that’s true. We have to respect and adopt a different set of psychological characteristics in our leaders in in order to be able to make this transition and that’s the missing piece, I think in most business.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, we’ve also talked a lot about in previous conversation about the role of education, and maybe that’s just more like a closing comment on my end, this is sort of… we see quite clearly that we will need to make people more prepared to become entrepreneurs and to, to embrace new ways of working. And we’re probably going to see that, you know, even even more in in this period and this uncertainty that we start to live in. It’s something that people will have to learn how to embrace uncertainty in the probably more in a way that an entrepreneur does more naturally. And I think that’s a great challenge in this new economy that we see emerging that it’s something that for example, our education system is not really doing at the moment and something that we will need to see to so that in order to make that kind of fair distribution and value sharing that you were talking about.

Stowe Boyd:
Right, you know, I think it’s foundational, but it’s also like, it’s not just education. I think it’s, you know, societal norms have to, you know, shift. And who knows, when I came up with the quote on something I wrote yesterday from Carl Jung, which is like, “in all Chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder, there is order”. And I said, after I quoted him, I said, “well, I hope he’s right”. Because we are definitely in the mess. And if we’re going to get our way through it, we have hope, we have to hope that there is an opportunity for some kind of new order, you know, post corona. And I also believe that the best lever for us to make changes in society is to change the way world business works. So I think I think we, we have an obligation those of us who are, you know, observers or students of this, to try to push it in the right direction to help to the extent that we can.

Simone Cicero:
Well, this quote from Jung is, I think, really good as a closure. I love that. And I think somehow is one of the features that we are using in these explorations with with Stina and the other colleagues that are running with us this podcasting and this research that: yeah, it’s gonna be a messy transition, it’s gonna be full of paradoxes. We’re going to have many, many different, I would say, seemingly conflicting patterns coexisting. So yeah, I think Chaos and Cosmos are good ways to frame these things, in a way that seems like the ones that’s going to happen. So thanks very much Stowe. One thing I would like to ask you is to tell people where they can find more of your work.

Stowe Boyd:
The best place to look is on Medium. And that’s Medium.com/work-futures. And I’m at medium at Stowe Boyd. That connects you to all my writing there.

Simone Cicero:
Yes, and they can also go register to your newsletter Work Futures, right?

Stowe Boyd:
Yep, yep.

Simone Cicero:
Thanks very much Stowe it was a great conversation and Stina do you want to add something more, otherwise we can close it.

Stina Heikkila:
No, thanks a lot, it was really interesting.

Stowe Boyd:
Thanks, guys. It was a pleasure to be here.

Simone Cicero:
Thanks, thanks very much.