asking you a question and to shout out
the answers to me what do you think the
future of human well-being depends on
brilliant audience when I tested this
out last week the first answer I got was
Wi-Fi and the second was Manchester
United wait who knew the future of the
planet is dependent on Manchester United
but actually I think we’re in a time
where we have to be really mindful of
what the future of human wellbeing does
depend on and I think it’s quite simple
I think we can summarize it in two ways
it’s if you like on the one hand the
human rights projects of the 20th
century all of the basic human needs
that every country in the world agrees
everyone on the planet has a right to
some of the things that you spoke about
food health water shelter protection
security but on the other hand on the
other side of the equation is the blue
planet we’re all lucky enough to live on
and that’s about thriving ecosystems
healthy soils healthy oceans about our
healthy atmosphere and we’re only just
beginning to understand these days how
interconnected those two things are and
on the one hand we’re still in
undershoot when it comes to delivering
on the Human Rights Project in many
countries in the world and we’re in
overshoot when it comes to our planetary
boundary particularly around carbon
dioxide in the air and healthy soils and
I’ve always worked in business and I’m a
passionate believer in business as a
force for good but at the moment in
terms of how we view business and how we
view work
a bit of a fly in the ointment around
getting business behind working on this
great equation that is probably the
generational challenge that we all face
and once you start digging into
statistics around the future of work you
start to come up very quickly with
statistics that show us that 63% of us
are disengaged with work that’s two out
of three people that hate their jobs 50%
of people who have a bad relationship
with their manager and that’s 50% of
people don’t have any trust or
respecting the company that they work
for now how are we going to get business
behind some of the grand challenges that
we face if two out of three of us hate
our jobs and when you start to look at
what is behind the statistics there
they’re complex reasons but there are
two things that stand out and the first
is that organizational hierarchies and
management systems that we designed in
the 20th century when there were many
fewer people with good education and
more people doing menial basic tasks
aren’t really fit for purpose in the
21st century they don’t allow people to
self actualize they don’t allow people
to access those more mature human needs
that we have like purpose like meaning
like wanting to work with integrity like
wanting to be honest decent people and
the other side sometimes if the
organizational structures do it’s a bit
like if you’re squeezing an orange
you’re hoping for a glass of Tropicana
but what you get out are the pips
the dark side of human behavior like
anger distrust greed which we’ve
recently seen in companies like Karelian
mara was researching the qualities that
business leaders and organizations might
need in the future
my inadvertently came across three
different types of companies that are
trying
in there very different ways to deal
with the different levels of
disengagement that we have and the first
kind of company is redesigning the
creativity in autonomy through shape you
might have heard of these types of
companies under the title of Halak recei
or sociopathy or teal but for the
purposes of today we’ll call them
self-managed businesses and I’d like to
introduce you to a company that’s based
on the south coast of Dorset and Paul
called matte-black Systems matte-black
systems produce the the guidance systems
that go in the vast majority of the
enormous planes that fly very regularly
over our heads in Kingston and when I
was interviewing them I did ask if it
was possible to engineer in a little
divert but apparently it’s not possible
and it would be illegal if it was and
seven years ago matte-black systems was
a company that was in trouble although
they had great relationships with their
customers they were always late they
were late 83% of the time not one week
not two weeks but sometimes eight months
and the people who ran the company
lovely couple that you can see behind me
had tried absolutely everything that
they could
they had tried expensive management
consultants they tried hotshot MBA
graduates they tried reorganizing the
company based around agile systems but
literally nothing had changed the dial
on productivity for the company and just
as they were about to completely give up
they noticed one thing that in all the
upheaval had stayed consistent and that
was the fact that they always had a
backlog of work and that their engineers
were always being paid overtime now this
might sound really simple but when
you’re an engineer you don’t look at
this sort of data so they thought they’d
try one last experiment and that was to
ban overtime which as you can imagine
went down like a dog poo sandwich
but they said to all their employees
that they would still be able to earn
the same amount of money but there would
be a bonus for finishing work on time
and they try this for six months so very
reluctantly the engineers got behind it
and at the end of the first month one
person finishes work on time went home
at the end of three months 50% people
finished their work on time went home
and at the end of six months there was
only one person who was still coming
into work late and he was going through
a messy divorce and he just wanted to
escape his wife and productivity had
gone up by 20% and this encouraged the
team at map back systems to try
self-management very seriously so they
set up a first experiment with just one
team and they gave them responsibility
for purchasing and profit and lost and
he didn’t go too well at first when a
truck turns up outside the door with a
million pounds with the component parts
on it they neither needed or could use
because one of the engineers had got
very excited and carried away with his
newfound power he then had to practice
his negotiating skills to get the
company he bought it from to take it
back but productivity went up they then
turned the company all into all into
teams and they gave them total
responsibility to go out and get their
customers for the HR function for
profitability for performance for how
they worked amongst each other for the
roles that they did and product service
he went up again they then decided to go
the whole hog and give them
responsibility for their own salaries
because they mean by now how much money
they were making and whether they were
losing money so they knew what they
could afford and then they gave them
responsibility for their own time come
into work if you want between midnight
and 3:00 a.m. in the morning if it suits
you take four months off if you’d like
work only for eight months as long as it
doesn’t compromise the team agreement
you can do what you like and
productivity went through the roof by
the end of a five year period of doing
all of these experiments they had
reduced their staff by two-thirds
they’d reduced their cost by half and
they had upped their productivity and
profitability 300%
and they were the best supplier in the
business but it wasn’t without pain the
people who simply didn’t want to step up
and do sales who would rather stick
red-hot needles in their eyes than have
responsibility for the profit and loss
of the business left the company and in
all of the self-managed companies that I
interviewed and they’re not all small
some are large like WL Gore who make
gore-tex I’m sure you’re familiar with
those people left the company and the
compassionate kind individual in me
wanted to explore whether it was
possible to find types of companies that
could not only support people who didn’t
feel that they could step up who didn’t
have the confidence just to to be sales
representatives of their company that
could help them with their psychological
insecurities and psychological
development and if for no other reason
even if you want a compassionate person
you really don’t want a bunch of
disgruntled egotist they’re unemployed
wandering around because you never know
no one might take it into their head to
apply for a job like president sorry I
couldn’t help myself just had to get it
in there somewhere so the second kind of
company that I went looking for a
companies that are really dedicating
themselves to developing the level of
consciousness of the people that are
working for working with them and to do
that they have to do two really
important things they have to shine the
light onto our weaknesses and they have
to make weaknesses normal and so you
have to start by having a very deep
psychological profile of everybody that
works for you that goes way beyond
normal psychometrics or even discs or
strengths finder profiling you have to
really tap into the subconscious drivers
and desires of individuals and I’m going
to talk to you through what ideas
in my company because I’m not the sort
of person who’s terribly touchy-feely
and when I decided that I would expose
my psychological history and background
to all of the members of my team I
genuinely really wanted to hit myself
around the head with a brick but but we
began we started doing the work and you
have to start with a deep profile of
each individual so what everybody in my
company knows that on the good side
I’m very good when it comes to service
to others with purpose with meaningful
work I’m very good in a crisis I’m very
good when it comes to mental resilience
I’m a great problem sufferer but they
also know that I have real deep issues
with trust with control with listening
to people with with a very very
incredibly long list of things they know
why I have those challenges they know
where they came from
and so when everybody inside your
company knows inside out of your history
and your life what you can do is put in
a series of practices that help you
practice those weaknesses so these kind
of companies turn from performance
orientation to practice based
organizations you get to practice being
a better human if you like so one of my
key practices because in my long list of
failings was empathy compassion for
others impatience all sorts of other
things I’ve started by doing something
called an empathy walk and an empathy
walk is where you pick people who are
completely different to you different
views different values different
backgrounds and you commit to walking
with them for an hour maybe two hours
and listening to their story I started
off doing them once a week I’m down to
once a month now so I am improving
and one that I did last week was with a
farmer who believes deeply and
passionately in the future of industrial
farming and pesticides and fertilizer
and all those kind of things and I am
somebody who believes that if I met the
devil in person tomorrow he would
probably have glyphosate tattooed on his
forehead and Monsanto tattooed on his
chest so that was quite a struggle for
me to do that one we also have practices
like talking partners anyone ever heard
of talking partners where you have
somebody again who’s diametrically
opposed to you and the first thing that
you do in the morning when you come in
is you talk about what’s going on for
you outside of work
trouble with the kids problem with the
husband beloved dog is about to go over
the Rainbow Bridge
and the way that in doing that that gets
rid of the fears and the tensions and
insecurities about what’s going on
outside work and when you talk about
work maybe for five or ten minutes and
it’s the civic duty of everybody in the
company to push the other partner for
greatness
so my talking partner for example is not
going to save me yeah Jenny your TED
Talks great they’re far more likely say
Jenny this is crap work a little bit
harder try again this is not quite good
enough and push we push ourselves for
greatness we also have a practice called
talking circles where when we have
learned something about our weaknesses
so if I have managed to get over my
impatience with somebody who doesn’t go
quite as fast as me will sit down in a
circle together and once a week we’ll
talk about how we’ve overcome different
challenges that we faced and we’ll film
them and we’ll put them onto a website
that’s available for anyone whoever
joins the company so they can see if
they have had a problem with the fear of
speaking in public how somebody overcame
that companies like Google like
Atlassian who make Trello any Trello
users in the house yeah they’ve taken
this a step further because they’re way
bigger than my company is and
they have automated these processes so
that instead of now having the painful
horrible annual review where everybody
gets terribly tense and your manager if
you happen to have a not-so-good manager
uses it as an opportunity to point out
what your weaknesses have been all year
you can now just simply use an app you
can tick did we do well as a team are we
open are we sharing are we trusting and
it’s open completely to everybody inside
the company so that you can work and you
can practice all of these kind of normal
hiding behaviors that we would all like
to get away from so that’s two types of
companies the first one that redesigns
four redesigns its shape for to release
creativity to release innovation to
release self responsibility the second
kind of company that helps with
psychological safety and psychological
soul development but to come back to the
beginning where I started that’s not
necessarily going to help us with the
grand challenges that we face so we need
one more type of company and there is a
companies that design for Planetary
purpose not just purpose or any old
purpose but Planetary purpose and to
help us do you we have the UN
sustainable development goals all 17 of
them but neatly encapsulate all of the
basic human needs that we talked about
earlier and what we need not just
existing companies but all startup
organizations to do is sit and look very
carefully at all of these goals and ask
all of the stakeholders all of the staff
in the organization activating all of
the kind of collective intelligence
inside the organization a simple
question what do you care about and when
work out what people care about
then he map it to what your company does
and where your company can have an
impacts to give you an example let’s
think about the humble condom there is a
father and daughter combination in
states that have set up a company called
sustained sustained condoms he is very
passionate about environmental
protection in forests of South America
he wanted to find a way to harvest
rubber and latex in a more environmental
fashion she is passionate about women’s
health and the freedom to be choose how
you want to be sexually reproductive how
many children you want to have and she’s
also passionate about freedom for women
in Africa so their company makes condoms
from sustainably sourced rubber and
latex without carcinogens because in
case you didn’t know most condoms
contain carcinogens they market them to
women to get over the issue of it not
being okay for women to carry a pack of
three and may give their profits to
charities in the United States who are
working with women’s freedom and
emancipation and to Africa and I’d like
to leave you with three questions that
you could take into work tomorrow or
whenever you next go for a job interview
that you can ask people number one how
can we redesign for autonomy and
creativity how can we redesign our
management systems take out management
and give us more freedom and autonomy
how can I help me be a more conscious
person how can you help me be a better
human and how can we activate the UN
sustainable development goals and have a
planetary purpose I really do believe
that every single business can take part
in this generational challenge that we
face and it’s really only
up to each of you as an individual in
the companies you either own or work for
to make that choice to thank you [Applause]