SU Global Summit 2019 | Panel: Exponential Transformation

[Music] it's wonderful to be with you here to help close out this incredible first day that we have had to explore what can we do to bring transformation back to our organizations we've already started the conversation with Peter earlier today about the meta trends that are suggesting that the world we are in right now will continue to go into is very different than where we are right now so I'm absolutely delighted at the opportunity to go deeper with the three speakers that you just heard and invite another so we can make this real so we can really delve into the choices that we can bring back to our organizations I'm passionate that these skills are teachable and learnable this is what I do every day in my work teaching futures and Design Thinking both at singularity University and at Stanford at the d.school so please join me in welcoming our fellow panelists that we'll have this conversation with I'd like to invite Ricardo Vargas to join us to the stage he's the executive director of bright line thanks so much for card oh and I'd also like to invite back Charlene Lee John Hagel and Nick Davis come on by so I'm gonna try to keep this super real on this panel we've had a chance to listen to some of the great research and work you've been doing and I want to start with you Ricardo we haven't had a chance to learn from you yet you do wonderful work at bright line trying to imagine reimagine how work gets done empowered by technology but fundamentally about people and you come to this work from doing transformation work at the ground level doing work with the UN and in refugee camps and I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about the work you've been doing and how you see transformation play out at that level yeah so what I can say it's when we think about transformation many people may think okay one of the roadblocks of transformation is money or is this technology and and I can tell you I base it on our research and of course my experience it's all about people and when I say people many of you say Ricardo this is absolutely obvious you are talking about people and I'm not talking here about motivating people inspiring people this is of course something you should do but I'm talking about bringing people along with you so transformation is something if you were a senior executive here that you cannot outsource it's your responsibility to drive people forward and bring them together and I'm not saying this because this is something nice to say it's because if people inside your organization if they don't become your volunteer army to drive things if they don't see that there is something for them in that they just don't move and I can tell you a very practical example let's go back to 2014 well when I was I was for almost 5 years the global director for project management and infrastructure at the United Nations we were in Haiti after the earthquake in one of the poorest neighborhood of port-au-prince called fort national and it was devastated most of the people living in absolutely misery and in Khartoum attend you know for years and we got funds from a foundation to build homes and what is the logical thing you do you hire a construction company you go there you build and you give the keys to them right and then we started doing that when we arrived it there with the workforce and saying look folks we need to build a house here they said we don't leave and I say why you don't leave and no we don't leave because this 2x2 square of land is all that I have left in life I don't know if I leave and come back next week some will not take I don't leave so what we had to do in order to bring them on that this is just a sim we hired them instead of an external company we hired a thousand people every single month so we brought them to the work we show the idea to them of having a new home for them and for their neighbors we brought the money to that society we developed that community we got their support and with that we built hundreds of houses by doing that you cannot bring a contractor and say okay good do the work and deliver to that you need to engage them and I think this is one of absolutely the key topics if you want to make transformation happen I so appreciate that Ricardo and it really ties into something that Charlene was talking about around the importance of empathy and the importance of deep listening and Charlene you talked about in the context of your customers knowing what they are and having a customer map but I think Ricardo's point is thinking about empathy on behalf of the people within your organization that need to transform it can be easy for all of you coming here Silicon Valley learning about the future and technologies and what's happening all the people that are not here they're worried that you're gonna go back with a totally new idea that's gonna change everything they thought that they knew about their job so Charlene I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the importance of empathy as it relates to culture and relates to transformation well I think I talked about it from the customers point of view but I think empathy is one of the hidden superpowers that people naturally have and we don't think that we can be empathetic but if you think about the changes that have to happen inside an organization I think about in particular the frozen middle the middle managers executives loved it the phone line people loved it the middle people hate it because their jobs are going to completely fund fundamentally change they power came from being a gatekeeper and now information flows all over the place so having empathy for how they think about the world I think in many ways is absolutely crucial because unless you do they will become the permafrost and you nothing will move it's just completely frozen so having that empathy understanding how they think about things how do they think about their place and their relationship to the rest of the organization they're no longer gatekeepers how they became facilitators yeah and by having that and saying how do they rethink their jobs essentially the same jobs but a very different outcome that really many ways breaks through that ice I think you bring up such a good point about language right and about making ideas visible with language and with form and I really appreciated your perspective around connecting beliefs and behaviors as fundamental to your culture and having congruence before them right if you say if you say that you care about your customers then you have to do some of the work that Ricardo was saying around going out and really listening and and caring for your customers I also think John that ties into a big point that you made around the transformation to ecosystems and platforms which is enabling learning in a different kind of way I mean what Charlene and Ricardo are talking about is discovering new knowledge about employees and about customers in a different way and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how we create cultures of learning and who's responsible for learning in that context know if in our view it is a fundamental transformation that's going to be required in all our institutions our belief is our institutions today are driven by a model of what we call scaleable efficiency and that the key is how do you build a model of scaleable learning in our institutions and it challenges every aspect and I'll just give one example in terms of leadership what's the mark of a strong leader in a scaleable efficiency institution it's the person who has all the answers no matter what question you can count on the leader to have the answer and by the way if they don't have the answer maybe it's time to get rid of them and get somebody who does have the answers that's scalable efficiency in a scalable learning world our belief is the mark of a strong leader is the one who has the most powerful questions and who will freely admit they don't have the answer and even more importantly ask for help say can you help me this is really an important question if we could figure this out we could accomplish amazing things and it builds by sharing vulnerability at the leadership level it builds trust you know I think one of the issues just a bit of an aside but you know one of the issues today if you look at the surveys that are done is Trust is eroding in all our institutions every institution companies government's media you name it why I think one reason is because we have leaders of those institutions who say they have all the answers and we know there are only two possibilities one is they're clueless about the changes that are occurring in the world and think they have the answers but don't or they're lying to us in either case Trust goes way down so I think that's key I think that the way that leaders show up as learners is so fundamental and I encourage all of you to think about a leader that you know of or that you think of in your organization or that you watch who demonstrate great learning capabilities and you can see that you can see that for example Brian Chesky the founder of Airbnb one of the first things he did was create a personal advisory board to help and learn about all the things he didn't quite know or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates who are voracious readers that are constantly showing how they are learning and modeling that as a prized behavior which again connects beliefs and behaviors I know that my mom who's watching this right now is a chief learning officer for 25 years is very happy about the idea of an exponential learning and it's really a challenge to all of you to say who is responsible for learning it in your organization is it just your chief Learning Officer which tends to work in the back office er cuz if that's the case then you have an opportunity based on John's wisdom to say learning is all of our responsibilities what are we doing to foster questioning as part of our culture and I think Nick this comes back to some of the things you shared with us on your research around innovation minds and how important it is to have congruence in the organization and you talked about innovation theater which i think is rampant this idea where a leader comes back and says we're gonna be innovative and everything stays the same I sometimes call that the audio/video disconnect right that that yes we want to change but actually nothing suggest that we really want you to change so what have you seen work to overcome that I mean how do people get aligned around really being willing to do some of these changes that we've been talking about yeah for me the alignment question is a huge one an example I often tell is we were working with a financial services company last year and we had them down to you know a program here on campus and we had one of our quantum you know faculty members talking about the future and Robo advisors and the impact of their business and we got to the end of the talk and we asked the question who believes that future is the reality right you get the CTO CIO and the executive leadership team for all technology for this very large fortune 50 brand everyone agreed that that future was pending right we all believe that this future with a robo advisor for our business is going to happen when was the next question and not one human in the room agree don't win and you'd imagine if you're trying to lead a global organization through this time of disruption and transformation and none of you agree on the outcome of when we should start working or when we're too far behind it makes it extremely difficult for any person or in an executive or any leader to navigate that change as a group and so for us it really starts smooth to say do we believe that this is the future ahead for us how can we lean into creating it and then ultimately how do we get alignment so we're all running at the same speed because when we get out of tune with each other is when you can fall I could not agree with that more I actually wrote a book entirely about these kinds of strategic conversations and we found that there were different kinds of conversations there were conversations around building understanding this alignment conversations around shaping options what should we do and conversations around making decisions and we're so wired for action and movement that we forget about that first category we move quick into the exciting shiny new options that we try to implement and that everything falls apart and we wonder why it didn't work so make your point about slowing down to get real a shared understanding about why we're doing what we're doing what it might look like and and what's really motivating the change is absolutely so critical and so Ricardo I want to bring it back to you because I think some of the work you're doing now around using technology and exponential technology to really unleash human potential and moving some of this transformation forward is really groundbreaking and I wonder if you could share a little bit about how you see that connection between technology really unleashing the human potential I think that technology what we can see here and I think all of us will agree I wasn't and in the public scene is that it's amazing what what is going on but at the same time it's frightening what is going on right I had a discussion in our mood panel down talking about people living 200 years and one of our colleagues said I think this will happen in the next 10 years and they say I'm sure you know and then there is this all this and imagine all the impact of that so what we need to understand and one thing that why I'm talking a lot about people and bringing people together is that we need to have the awareness that people don't follow Moore's law machines follow machines become faster but we I'm saying not we maybe we hear a thousand two thousand people we we are not the word we are just the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg we are talking about billions of people that have no clue of what we are talking about here and in these people you know imagine how they feel about what is going on in very simple things when we when we spoke about I was talking to some colleagues about uber you know and see the main challenges of uber and not necessarily the technology that technology is there but what do you do with unhappy drivers what do you do with regulators what do you do with text drivers what do you do with them it's not improving the GPS location so I can find you in one this is not the core of the problem the problem is much bigger so what we are trying now to connect this how connect these technologies and the advancements of technology to provide a shared future and in a better future forever so we can bring together everybody everything we see this is my personal everything that we see today in the world on the politics and this it's generated by the disruption we are seeing because a lot of people is moving but a lot of people's falling behind and this is what is creating this disparity between extremists and and how we can reduce this gap and bring more people along and this is one of the key aspects of our study today it's a great tee up for something I know John is very passionate about around creating a positive narrative around really making sure that we can see the future and it pulls us and John I can't believe your book is ten years and if you have not read power pull put that on your list but if you could talk a little bit about why you're so passionate about positive narratives yeah it starts with the fact that throughout my business career I've basically been a business strategist it's been all about strategy and over the years I've come to believe that it's much less about strategy and much more about psychology and that if we don't understand the emotions that are driving us and by the way start with yourself what are the emotions that are really driving you and dive deep don't just take the surface emotions you'll never accomplish what you what you want to accomplish and in that context I'm struck I travel around the world and I've struck over the past several years of the increasing amount of fear as the dominant emotion that I feel for across the world and I think it's understandable given so the rapid change and the mounting pressure there are a lot of reasons to be afraid but I think if we if we let that fear build it's going to lead to very bad outcomes and in that context to get to the question about narratives I've become a big proponent of a very specific kind of narrative most people use stories and narratives to mean the same I believe that stories are basically self-contained they have a beginning a middle and an end and the story is about me the storyteller or it's about some other people it's not about you in contrast the way I think about narratives narratives are open-ended there is no resolution yet there's some kind of big opportunity or threat out in the future not clear whether it's going to be achieved or not and the resolution and the narrative hinges on you it's a call to action to say you can and you need to make a difference and I think one of the things that's feeding the fear around the world is more and more of our political environment and I don't hold any side more or less guilty I think all sides have fallen on what I call threat based narratives the enemies coming to get us we're all going to die we need to mobilize now and resist I was right to be afraid him he's coming to get me it feeds the fear who is articulating an opportunity based narrative that says if we all came together what amazing things could we accomplish together my belief is that's the key to moving us from fear to hope and excitement and if we don't do that we're in deep trouble so that's why I'm so passionate about opportunity based there it is I think it's so important in it yes I agree I think Charlene shared some really exciting examples of how organizations can give form to an opportunity based narrative in the form of you talked about the power of a manifesto and then I think one step further and my passion is designed which allows us to give form to those ideas in ways that trigger positive responses is how those then get translated so that they can support a culture so you talked about the orange code and these signals even the dress so I wonder if you could share a little bit more about how we can take some of the premise of an opportunity based narrative and think very practically about what are some some ways we can embody that and so ways that we can then signal that to our colleagues to our customers and other ways that can get them excited yeah I think in many ways I've been challenged on because the opportunity based narrative is that future customer its embodiment of that and the reason why I love that as the narrative so to speak is that people can understand that and see it and the hard part is organizations do not take the time to figure out I mean how many people know who their future customer is here you know because don't photo with how do people know their current customers eat your customer right which we actually take for granted so that way and so I think in many ways the way to do this is to constantly ask as the leader so what are we working towards we love to ask why I mean to work on purpose statements and everything but it's too high level we need to break it down into these really tangible bits so we talked a little bit about some of the ways to do this but I think of organization how do you organize yourself to be oriented towards the opportunities because it's not just around the organizational silos but how will we actually work together the process of how you actually do this how do you take a learning of a customer from the edge when you identify that and bring it back into the organization and that's where I think AI and all these other new technologies to be able to make sense of all of that huge amounts of information and turn your organization into a sensing organization of all these opportunities and then finally the last part the symbols the lore is what I call it the mythology go to around the stories the symbols and then the rituals the rituals are so important so I look at those kind of factors organization process but also the lore as areas where companies can really start pulling these levers to change their culture to be more opportunity oriented yeah it's so powerful I mean one theme across many of the conversations we heard earlier where's this sort of paradox between thinking big and having clarity about purpose but then being able to translate it down to a small behavior and that's that's a lot of altitude to cover right today you have to have clarity on that and you have to think about well how does that then translate into this small choice I can make so that others can make it too and I think that is the secret to maybe unlocking unlocking scalable learning and that really brings us back Nick to a point you made around the explorers mindset which again can be so tricky when we have calendars that are filled with meetings and meetings and meet like weird when do you do your exploring like 11 o'clock at night when you finally got through all your email I mean it just we have to build that in can you share some strategies that you've seen working with organizations about how they bring exploring to the table whether they bring you know new ideas in or they go on learning journeys or what are some some sort of approaches yeah I mean for the work that we're doing it's probably a multi-pronged approach ultimately and so you know for us we're but we're using narrative to go build sci-fi stories and so we do a lot of sci-fi design intelligence work there's a workshop on that tomorrow and that's allowing us to start to build that future vision with our clients so they can gain that alignment that I was talking about but that's just one step right we're just starting to see a phase where new now 10 15 20 years out we have a shared common understanding of the future that we're trying to build but then now what right ultimately and for us what we're doing is then we'll bring it back to the lab and we'll start actually running sprints and prototyping around what can we be building today to realize that far-off future and how do we start to build that muscle and so a question I'll get often is like when do we begin right and what I will tell our clients is if it's probably going to fail a lot in the beginning but the main point is can you start to catch that speed right because the really difficult thing is if you start to fall too far behind you're ultimately not going to be able to catch up right there's a point of no return with an exponential curve where it starts to kind of get away from you and so for us it's that that that as John says often the zooming in and zooming out back and forth for us to be able to help our clients understand with sci-fi what the next phase looks like what am I going to build for and then bringing it back to today to run on a really quick Sprint's to to realize that future yeah which again speaks to that rigor right because the Sprint is actually rigorous there's rules there's standards to unleash the learning and the creativity and again Ricardo I want to come back to you around your real focus on project management as Kahn was like fulcrum to unleash possibilities that we might not have existed leverage leveraging technology yeah I think a project management and I'm talking in a very broad sense of project management so everything you do to connect ideas to reality is what we are talking about so we are not talking about just planning as a gifting control like a more traditional way but all the things you need to do to get ideas from reality is what we are talking about profit economy or project delivery and this is the key aspect of bringing things to reality and what I said here last time and I want to repeat I'm not saying that having ideas and innovation is easy it's not it's it's a massive work but getting things real is where the benefit is so where the benefit for your organization for your society is when you turn that idea into something tangible and the only way of doing that is starting working on it it's starting developing your MVPs and bringing bringing people along reducing the resistance and moving on you at some point you need because you know what what I really struggle sometimes when I see people saying oh let's change the world and then you present a super nice PowerPoint and say and so what okay and so on so what we'll do in in reality very down-to-earth and I had this experience at the UN because you know sometimes you just receive a memo from the Security Council or let's build a refugee camp that I'd say do you have an idea of what does it take to do that do you think it's what is just okay put the tent there and do with that for 150,000 people it's not like it's far more complicated its social it so we need to get real and only by experimenting and doing that we can build one thing and and I want just to make one final point a jump you said one thing that I really just love this opportunity mindset and this positive mindset and I'm absolutely on that think that is important it must be authentic people are not dumb people know when you're not being honest with them and this will act on the up and so you need truly to be passionate and believe on what you want to do because it's not just by saying because it's very easy to come here and say in a very motivational way what we should do but you need to really feel that passion because otherwise you don't get there people don't buy and don't go with you right which contributes to the trust breakdown that John was just talking about absolutely John you want attack no I was just gonna say that one of the things that I talked about zoom out zoom in as a strategy and that's my strategy hat on let me shift and talk about it from a psychological viewpoint the key value of a zoom out zoom in strategy is on the one side the long-term it focuses on a big opportunity an inspiring opportunity that it can help us overcome our fear and really get inspired and motivated to act and it's I think that it it too many companies that I see today are focused on driving change through a threat base narrative you know if we don't do this we're gonna die well I think the most powerful way to motivate people is with opportunity but to the point the power of the zoom out zoom in is the zoom inside demonstrates the authenticity we are committing a critical mass of resources in the next 6 to 12 months to get tangible impact this is not just words and PowerPoint slides this is real we're committed and I think that's powerful it overcomes the skepticism that people and fear that people naturally have that these are just words and fantasy well I think the other thing that it does is that it actually you start to shape the future by creating evidence that you can get there I mean you're creating your own pull towards there and I think you know in addition to the threat based to create urgency to do something is we get reliant on what we know and what we see we get comfort in numbers when in fact so much of this work and just playing back some of the language I heard from you earlier encourage around taking risks around leaping around imagination where's the number score on imagination so we have to actually invent these new metrics on learning on return on humans let's create that as a metric so that we can start to pull and build momentum to go forward but Charlie Andy wanted to add something there I think one of the hardest parts is to to next print people like they hear this they go yeah 100% agree how do I get started whenever I get started when am I ready and I think it's a crisis of confidence in many ways and because if I go out there and I fail am I going to be less credible is my leadership going to be calling the question and then the research that we've seen with almost all of us are talking about is that the your leadership credibility doesn't come from you being right all the time your leadership credibility comes from you being and this is the research be honest being fair being authentic that's all people are asking you to do as a leader and when you have confidence in that and more importantly in the relationship you have with people we think about leadership as a title and actually it's a relationship with two people who aspire to leading people who are inspired to follow them right so and think in many ways what I see the best leader is doing is they make at the time they set aside the time you were asking before how do you find the time to do this when your day is segment into 15 minutes segments you're going for 12 hours a day you can't and what I found the most destructive leaders their calendars are actually really open they have half of their time blocked out to think about the future and the pushback I get from it it's like wow how the house is burning down how do I do this this is about being a really good leader is especially with large complex organizations you have the delegation and the further up you go the more time to setting aside to think about these big strategic issues because if you don't who will yeah it's so true I don't have time to make time one thing I often say is you know take a look at your standing meetings you're just you're standing meetings and ask yourself what value are they create is that the best use of our time could they get that information elsewhere and what a gift you could offer your employees and your colleagues to say I'm going to give you back that time I'm gonna give you back that time so that you can start to imagine that you can think about the the the new initiatives that you might want to investigate to cultivate that explorers mindset so we are just about at a time but I want to just end this wonderful conversation with maybe a last word of advice that you have to these leaders that came here to create the future we have two days ahead of us of incredible learning and just very quickly from each one of you what's that one lasting thought or suggestion you have to really maximize this moment of learning Nick I'll start with you yes so for me that the common thing that we've been seeing with our clients all year has been speed right and it's probably an assumed thing that you would think for us but ultimately that aligned decision making to be able to actually take action as fast as possible as the common thread that we've seen for the companies that are successful yeah can they get aware of what's going on around them all the opportunities out in front and can they make a collective decision and take action and it's that speed of reaction that's separating the ones that are successful from not so it sounds like a healthy dose of going slow to go fast yeah great John I'll just build on my earlier comment I think the thing I would ask all of you is not to focus on what you've learned although that's important it's focused on what's the one really big question that you come out of this with and who can you connect with to start to drive an answer to that question wonderful Shirley I think the next two days are a really unique opportunity to create a safe space where you can be vulnerable feel very it's gonna feel awful but put your messy on the table tell people like this is what I'm working on I don't know how to solve that and be really vulnerable and authentic in that and when other people are doing this around you you'll get so much more out of the next two days yeah fantastic I'm Ricardo and for me I would go back to my first statement is that we are accountable so what is importance that after these two days we need to go to our life and and make an action you know and make an action share what we learn talk to people about what we learned what we are making as afraid and and get real because we are really privileged to be here in and there is a lot of people that will not have this access so it's our obligation to go there and bring other people along fantastic well thank you so much for this conversation I know Nick John Charlie and I'm Ricardo are all doing other things throughout these two days so don't miss an opportunity to continue to learn from them thank you thank you so much [Music]

Channel: Singularity University

Views: 4,302

Rating: 4.9058824 out of 5

Keywords: Singularity University, Singularity Hub, Education, Science, leadership, technology, learning, designing thinking, future forecasting, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, SingularityHub, 3D printing, AI, artificial intelligence, AR, augmented reality, VR, virtual reality, automation, biotechnology, blockchain, computing, CRISPR, entrepreneurship, future, futurist, futurism, future of work, future of learning, genetics, health, healthtech, medtech, fintech, nanotechnology, robotics, talks, Global Summit

Id: 94l-QlzZDeU

Length: 34min 16sec (2056 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 22 2019