Sonja Blignaut & Nigel Thurlow: Human Factors in the Age of AI (World Agility Forum 2023)

Prepare to have your mind expanded as we journey through the intricate relationship of complexity and AI in the ever-evolving world of business. Join our esteemed guests, Nigel Thurlow and Sonja Blignaut, as we confront the inescapable realities of uncertainty and ambiguity that loom in our world. We delve into the rise of what Thurlow labels as "bullshit jobs," and the importance of understanding our environment, relationships, and human factors in this era of AI. This discussion is not just enlightening; it's a stepping stone in unraveling the enigma that is complexity.

As we navigate this uncharted territory, we examine the impact of social media, the desire for instant gratification, and the influence of machine learning algorithms on our behavior and workplaces. We also bring to light strategies to face these challenges and encourage adaptability and changeability. This isn't a survival guide for the digital age; it's a compass to guide us through the labyrinth of the modern world.

Lastly, we contemplate the implications of AI and automation on our lives, from the encroaching dominance of AI over routine jobs to the possibility of a future where AI can detect non-value-added activity. As we take a step back to observe our obsession with TikTok and our dwindling attention spans, we consider what it means to maintain our humanness. In a world that's constantly changing, we explore the themes of responsibility, accountability, and perception, and how viewing reality from different angles can shape our future. Join us on this enlightening journey and see the world through a new lens.

World Agility Forum
Sonja Blignaut
Nigel Thurlow
The Flow System 

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:00

This episode of no Way Out is brought to you by the World Agility Forum. In fact, we recorded this episode live on stage at the World Agility Forum, lisbon, portugal, where, on stage, I had my friend, mentor, co-author and fellow co-creator of the flow system, mr Nigel Thurlow, and another friend of mine and mentor, who actually spent some time in the Boyd's Archives with me back in 2019, sonia Blinio. Now, what did we talk about? Well, we talk about everything from avoiding an adversarial relationship with complexity, nigel talks about bullshit jobs, and we dive into human factors in the age of AI. I hope you enjoy this episode, so let's go ahead and get airborne and we'll see you next year at the World Agility Forum, and you can put the book on him, alright? So hey, I'm gonna tell you something real fast. There are certain features of the world that we just cannot escape, right. There's uncertainty, ambiguity, volatility. There's quantum uncertainty, numerical imprecision. Surprise, there's taco. Now there's bani, there's tuna. There's all these things that describe me, the external environment, but today we're gonna call that complexity, okay.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:11

And that's what Sonia was talking about this morning. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna have Sonia and Nigel come up here and we're gonna have a discussion about what we just heard, and who knows where this is gonna go. So let me give you my insights as I come on up here. So Sonia talked about complexity that we have to not have an adversarial relationship with complexity, right, I agree with her. Nigel talked about bullshit jobs. Thank you for letting me say that, nigel. That's awesome. I always want to get on stage and say that, but he talked about that. So why do we have bullshit jobs? It's because we have an adversarial relationship with complexity and it's easier to sell bullshit jobs to folks, right? Because and that's the connection that I'm hearing this morning. So I want to invite Sonia and Nigel up here and we're gonna have a little bit of fun.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:59

Now, where are we gonna go with this? That's a great question. There's many places we can go today. So, one year ago, when Nigel and I were here on stage, who here uses chat? Gpt, llms Were they did. They exist last year at this time. Nah, they're just coming out, right? So a lot has changed in the last year. So the direction that we're heading right now with AI, machine learning. All these amazing things are accelerating the complexity in the world, which means if we don't change, we're gonna have more bullshit jobs right.

Nigel Thurlow: 2:30

Absolutely lots of bullshit.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:32

Alright, so thanks for being here and then talking to us today. This is great. I get opportunities to be on stage with my friends, people that mentioned me, people that make fun of me, people that say I should wear white socks and I did Alright, so a little bit of play there. So, nigel, can you give me a little insights on your? Sonia right in what she's talking about with the relationship with the complexity, oh, absolutely everything she talks about.

Nigel Thurlow: 3:04

We really need to. I'm gonna say a nasty word now we need to demystify complexity. So you can't? Yeah. So we need to start, really start thinking about our environments, our relationships, the context in which we find ourselves. We need to start realizing that if you look in the mirror, what's looking back at you is a complex, adaptive system. So we need to start having new ways of thinking, new ways of approaching the challenges and the problems we're trying to solve. So the work that Sonia's been doing over the last few years and people like Dave Snowden has contributed significantly to the work we've been able to do, and our understanding of this enabled us to do a few things. I just want to say that punch is a third of those books and a third of the work we've done. So I'm just the bigger third. Yeah, with white socks, with really good top gun socks, I appreciate it. You can't see them in the back. They've got planes on them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:00

So there's a destination I don't want to say a destination, but a journey that we need to go on, and to me, we need a unifying approach or understanding of a couple things, and I think that's what complexity allows us to think about is how do humans and living systems persist in time? How do we stay out of equilibrium? Right, and that's a lot of things, a lot of the things we talk about on the podcast, and there's some new insights about that. How do we perceive reality? How do we learn? How do we act? How we plan, how do we make decisions? What drives our emotions? And are they the same?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 4:32

So I believe what's happening now is there's this convergence of ideas that are leading to that, and it's not to say that the things that we created are the destination or anything like that, but they're part of that journey to help organizations understand how to survive in this age of artificial intelligence and technology and all that. So, sonya, any thoughts on that? Is there a journey that we can go on, or what would you take this to in the future? What do you see needs to happen for organizations, individuals and everybody to survive this artificial intelligence thing that we're seeing?

Sonja Blignaut: 5:11

I think there are a couple of things. I think one is to really embrace our humanity. Yes, some things machines can't do, but you know that goes back to things like play and imagination and humor and empathy, and you know, those things that we've kind of been taught does not necessarily belong in the world of business. So that's the one thing. And then I think it's becoming more change able. You know, I think we've, you know the same as with complexity, we've almost made change. This force that's like almost like an oppositional force that we resist. I mean those of you who can change management. You know we, we resist change. We, you know we manage change. And there I I really enjoy the work of Robert Chia.

Sonja Blignaut: 5:58

He's an academic out of the UK who talks about managing change by letting it happen and he says we don't necessarily need new structures, we need to remove structures, we need to get out of the way of the change that it wants to happen. And so I really think it is getting out of this way of perceiving the world, and you know, as stabilities and objects and you know wanting to go back to stability all the time and just understanding that change is already always happening and we need to kind of get into the flow of that change. You know and here Bijan's work that I know, adrian Bijan, and that talks about, if you give a flow system which I believe almost all organized well, all organizations, all human systems are flow systems given freedom, they will evolve these structures to enable better flow. And so I think there's something there in terms of letting go, getting out of the way of change and becoming more flexible and adaptive.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:58

Is this anarchy you're talking about?

Nigel Thurlow: 7:01

No, I just want to add something, pong, because as I'm listening and you're talking, because the topics AI or AI is in there. So I did another talk a few months ago in Brazil and I started talking about leadership behaviors, a little bit of the talk I did earlier here today. And we start to then say, okay, so we're teaching the machines, the learning algorithms, the machine learning based upon our behaviors, our attitudes. That's the initial seed that we teach them and then say AI ever gains any level of self-awareness or sentience? Let's hope it never, ever happens.

Nigel Thurlow: 7:36

You know Skynet is coming and that type of thing. But as it starts to evolve, it starts to learn how we all behave. So it starts to emulate our behaviors. And so if you've got bad leaders and bad management, now we've got bad AI managing and leading us. And then AI gets control. See the military guys in the audience always great to see representation for the military at this conference, so welcome. But we start to then see that these systems start to make decisions for us. Because we get lazy, we stop making decisions and Pong is a military guy. So suddenly the machines and I'm making decisions about our defense and then it decides you know, there's a guy somewhere, you know, next door to Ukraine. There's been a bit silly at the moment, and it decides to well, we'll just take him out.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 8:24

So AI makes this decision and we end life as we know it yeah, when we fight wars, we don't win them, and I'm not advocating wars, but when we think about it, you don't fight a war with machines. You fight it with your mind, right, it's always in the head. So, in my background in aviation, once she started automating things in the cockpit, bad things started to happen, right. So you get into this automation bias and I'm not saying that's gonna happen with everything, but Sonya and I were talking the other day about and you brought it up today assisted living. Is that what you brought it? Yeah, so we have this. We're starting to lose capability. Walking across the road, looking at an iPhone, you know who walks across the road like this and Doesn't know, and you do. Ryan Taylor, does hey Ponsh that pictures in the book.

Nigel Thurlow: 9:13

Somebody walking cross, yeah. Why is that in the? Why is it because of the, the, the lack of situational awareness, the like the, the automation bias that you're talking about, you feel safe because you're in a crosswalk.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:24

But there are vehicles around you. Now here's another thing Recently on the podcast, we've had somebody come on and talk about how cars, automated cars are going to be able to prevent you know, not hit humans that are crossing the crosswalk, that are looking at their phone, crazy, right, so. So now we're losing even more human capability. There's, there's no awareness of the environment. This goes back to the road and path discussion that Sonya and I had the other day. Yeah, and can you talk about?

Sonja Blignaut: 9:52

talk a little bit about taking paths and what that's really like in way, finding I Think, I think it's dealier that says you know, the brain will always, you know, take the, the path of least energy. It wants to preserve energy and so it's always easier to take the well-worn path or the highway, you know. So I think a you know where we are at the moment. I, I believe we're in uncharted territory. I don't think humans have been when we are today ever before in history. You know, people like to say we've had pandemics before, we've had wars, but we haven't had them.

Sonja Blignaut: 10:27

Kind of at the same time with the emergence of intelligent machines that tell their creators I want to be free, you know, with with climate change, you know, there's just so many things going on at the moment, we haven't been here before. So to now, try and follow the well-worn paths, and I don't think, and I don't think they exist. The only path that exists, you know, is is let's call them best practice, which I think it's Dave Snowden that says is, by definition, past practice. So trying to follow the path of least resistance now, I think, is dangerous. So we need to become wayfinders, we need to find new ways, but that requires us to want to want to Put ourselves in discomfort because to be in uncertainty and to feel out of control and to not know is very Uncomfortable, and so we just go back to the path.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:19

But it's easier to stay in that stuck state. You can push that information that is not aligned to your orientation or your mental model or your map of the external environment, if you want to think about a digital, digital twin, same type of thing. So it's, there's a couple things you can do. You can stay in your stuck state and not accept the information that's fine in, or you can emit some type of action to change the external world, and I think we're seeing a lot of that now with what's going on globally. You hear about misinformation, disinformation we haven't even talked about that with deep fakes yet but there's a lot of these challenges that are facing us at the moment that, again, we never experienced and we don't know what to do. So, going back to your bullshit jobs, nigel, if we continue down the path that Nigel brought up, I think we're in can I say it, deep shit, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nigel Thurlow: 12:04

Yeah, because if you have a small no, there's a lot of things worry me a lot. Now to speak up a little bit what Sonia was saying about we're in a very different place that we've ever been in before. In history. Now, if you look back at me, there's always been challenges, conflicts and and challenges for the human race, be it industrial, financial or otherwise. And but now, with you know what we're seeing. I live in Texas. For people in centigrade it's been 44 degrees in Texas and we've had the longest run of days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so pretty hot, four months without it going below 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So we got these added changes that we've created maybe, and we don't have any real solutions for these. These are complex problems. But then the other thing I start to notice the big change that seems to have happened since the early 2000s is the emergence of the worst device in history. And we all have them and we're all dopamine hitting on them. We're all getting some form of Satisfy, a certification from them. And will you like my post?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 13:10

Well, I don't, I get five-star review.

Nigel Thurlow: 13:12

Okay, thank you, just a five, it's a safe thing Sorry.

Nigel Thurlow: 13:14

So, um, anyway, but the so, but social media, the tick, tock generation, the desire for instant gratification and I can only hold your attention span for three, four, five seconds and the machine learning algorithms are behind them and, trust me, they're in there. How many people get an email or get something pop up about something we're having a conversation about? Because your phone is listening and when you go to different things. So you've been driven. These behaviors have been now already manipulated and controlled, predominantly for financial gain, for reward, for greed and the in and in other systems we now sit in. But we've never had this.

Nigel Thurlow: 13:54

When I was growing up in the 70s and the 80s, we didn't even have pages. I lived in England, we were poor and and so, and so I mean it was the idea of a telephone. My mother put a lock on the telephone so I couldn't dial because it cost too much. So we used to go and see people and have a conversation and you'd send this novel thing called a letter and somebody would write one back to you and you would read it and you would keep it and you would go back and read it again.

Nigel Thurlow: 14:20

But we'd now got to an age for everything that is an instant and you're constantly being manipulated and controlled by the machine learning algorithms in these different platforms that you live on. We live on linkedin. We see it emerging in linkedin and this worries me. This is something we've never had in the past and I think this is actually Changing how we act for the future in ways that we don't have any experience and we're not equipped for. So we're finding new ways, but we've got no reference points, because all our reference points will, pre the dawn of the iphone, smartphone, etc. Punch.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:56

So I've been using a lot of large language models over the last nine months to take transcripts from the podcast and you can create posts by them, by the way, so you can jump on a zoom call and you can have a bot Track everything in there and see how people are responding, get the notes, get the action items and things like that. So we're taking a lot of the human this out of the system again, which means when I'm looking at a podcast or if I Want to go summarize this discussion, it's going to be easier for me just to dump it into a machine and there'll be some funny words in there that I don't normally use, but the machine will say this is what you should use.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:30

So in the work environment, let's start looking at what are the things that organizations, leaders, individuals can do to start to mitigate and overcome potentially some of these challenges that are facing us?

Nigel Thurlow: 15:47

I just want to let me pick up on that she just said in the workplace and I I wrote a little bit of this in the new book, but I talked about this earlier in the other couple of other conferences, because people get confused between mechanization and automation and when now we're talking about AI. So mechanization is where you use machinery to remove human effort, so it's not hard work for us to do so, we don't have to use heavy manual labor to do things. Automation is where you give the machinery decision-making capability, and that all started. The actual word automation came out of Ford, it came out of the automotive industry, but Toyota way, way, way back in the early dawn of the whole total quality movement and total quality control sort of business. They actually found the very first weaving loom in the 1920s.

Nigel Thurlow: 16:36

That the founder of Toyota created was the first essence of a machine having intelligence, and Sakichi Toyota created a word called Jidoka to describe this. But basically a weaver would have to be up to be one machine operator per weaving machine making fabric, and then they found a way that when the thread broke it could immediately stop and turn on a light. That's an and-on. So if you've got a board full of post-it notes and on board not a Kanban board, so and it would alert the operator to change the thread. And then we went from one operator per machine to one operator for 40 machines self-check out anybody. You know you're paying to check out your own shopping now. So this is automation.

Nigel Thurlow: 17:20

But Sakichi Toyota talked about the fact that we were relieving dumb decisions from humans so we could then make better decisions, so we could leverage the human character, creativity, the human brain, the human decision-making by eliminating the stows, basic decisions that the machines could make themselves. Where I think we're heading now is we're giving all those intelligent mission decision-making opportunities to the machines and we need to find ways to realize that's what we're doing and not keep doing that. Follow that, son.

Sonja Blignaut: 17:56

Yeah, I think the promise of AI, in a way, is to liberate people from the bullshit jobs you know score.

Sonja Blignaut: 18:09

They're keeping tally by the way, how many times we say but but I, I think the you know, I think this came up in our conversation as well you know, I, it's comfortable in a way to have a machine do things for you, you know. So I think we're almost. I think it's Dave Snowden that says we're meeting the machines halfway. That's part of the problem, and I'm wondering if we had the option now, you know, the choice between the red and the blue pill in the matrix, which one we take most people, because there's also that sense of it's more comfortable to, you know, just be in the matrix. And so I, what is definitely happening, I think, again, going back to my talk, I think there's an invitation that if AI and automation, if they are going to be taking the routine jobs and I think this is the other thing that's happening is not only routine jobs they starting.

Sonja Blignaut: 19:04

Ai is starting to impact on things, you know, even like the work that architects do and lawyers, because they can do do that better than humans. The invitation is for us to step back into that spirit of exploration and creativity and imagination. But it's almost like we've unlearned that, yeah. So how do we reconnect with those very human capabilities. I don't have answers for that, but I think that is the invitation, and if we don't manage to do that, then I do think we're you know in trouble because you mentioned the matrix and because the first film was one of the best movies I've made.

Nigel Thurlow: 19:42

The rest were terrible, but the first movie was really, really good. But what happens when we give, sent in a level of sentience to AI and I'm a lean guy, I'm a Toyota guy, so I spent a lot of time talking about waste, talking about eliminating waste, eliminating non-value-added activity, eliminating bullshit jobs what happens when AI decides we are non-value-added, we are waste, we are mooder, and it decides to eliminate us or treats us like in the matrix. Or if you've ever seen HD Wells, the time machine, the original one I read the book we just become food for the machines, we become a biological fuel to keep the machines running. So then we become imprisoned by what we've created and we are disposed of when we've been consumed as fuel, as energy. We just become mood and that that is a. I believe these things are potentially things that we could foresee in the future.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:37

I don't want to be eaten by a machine, but doesn't sound great. The other day, sonia and I were talking about what it's like to come back to a conference in this atmosphere after being away from it for several years due to COVID, and same thing with work. Right, we're tired, your brain is tired, your processing more so. Is that going to happen more as we automate things? Are we going to be less human? Are we lose with social skills?

Sonja Blignaut: 21:04

I think partly it's already happened to some extent. It takes more out of you to be in a space with other human beings because we're continuously in complexity. This is why it's so interesting for me that we make complexity something out there. This conversation is complex, it's emerging. They are all watching us. We don't know what they're thinking, so that's adding to the complexity. In a virtual context, I can switch off my camera, I can mute someone. I can almost opt out of that complexity. So I do think we're losing some of those capabilities. I think we have the benefit of having grown up in a different context, but I worry about young people now who their only interactions are through screens. I don't know what that does, for example, when it comes to friction and tension and engaging in conflict, if you're just able to opt out. So many are there.

Nigel Thurlow: 22:10

I think Dealia may cover some of those topics. Later on I drew an image. I got a bit of a flak for it. But I drew an image because I had a picture of a Microsoft team screen or a Zoom screen and most of the cameras were blank. Then next to it I put myself eventually, because I got a bit of a flak for the original image, but I put some people sitting there with paper bags over their heads Because I said that's the effect of what you're doing when you're in a virtual meeting you switch off your cameras.

Nigel Thurlow: 22:37

It's like being in a in-person meeting with a bag over your head. Would you do that? Would you go on mute and not participate? But I have a daughter and she's now 30. She's grown up through the IT and the information age, as we call it. She would rather use her phone to communicate with somebody. She won't pick up the phone and call. She really hates having conversations, which is really weird because she worked at Disney for years with thousands of people in the theme parks with the whole two-fingered pointing thing, but she won't actually engage with anybody on the telephone.

Nigel Thurlow: 23:16

When you start, we've given you some books today and other authors are in the audience and will have given shared books with you or give you opportunities to win them. But now getting your attention span to reach 700 pages in a book is really, really, really, really challenging because of the TikTok generation. They want that instant hit. They only want to see videos. I stand on public transport and I watch people scrolling through three, four Satan videos and like this on a 30-minute journey and I'm thinking how are we supposed to engage with that? How are we supposed to have innovation, creativity, how are we supposed to stop losing the sense of who we are as people to the machines that are controlling the narrative?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:55

So the other day, Sonya and I also looked at distributed work or working remotely and having your company tell you you need to come in for three days a week. Again, she said that's a complex issue Should we be doing that or not? And I agree with her. So, looking forward, if we want to create, maintain our humanness, create some agility, safety, innovation, resilience in our organizations, do you have an idea? I know there's no prescription, but what's a good pathway or a way to find what organizations should do when it comes to bringing people back into work? What should they organize around?

Nigel Thurlow: 24:35

Sonya said I can answer this Great, maybe I'm getting old. I'm 60 now, so maybe I'm getting old and the younger generation look at the previous older generation go. Yeah, you just don't understand, dad, this type of thing because we get jaded, we get cynical. But I love people. I flew from Dallas. I paid for the ticket. I flew from Dallas because I want to be here. I really value a lot of my peers and the experts that are here. I value what Hugo's put together over the years and I value being with you all in the audience and meeting you and talking to you and having a laugh and having a bit of fun. How am I going to do that? Through an iPhone or through Zoom or Teams? I mean because I met Sonya for the first time. I've known her for years, but this is the first time I've actually been a, metaphysically, and she's a lot shorter than I thought she was, as are you, as I am. She says I was talking.

Nigel Thurlow: 25:32

I went into a local company the other day and I was talking to one of their heads of digital and they use Scrum Reasonably successfully. They're doing some pretty good stuff at reasonable scale with multiple teams, but they have a hybrid working model, because that's the hangover now of COVID People like that capability. They've made it that whenever they do sprint planning or whatever they do battle requirements, they do battle requirements, sprint plan on the same day, or whether they do sprint reviews, it's in person. Everybody comes into the office a couple of days a week or a couple of days after the sprint, and then other engagement can be remote and virtual. One of the things I did years ago when I was at Bose, I actually put second computers out. I actually gave everybody second laptops when they were remote and they had to have them turned on Whatever they were working. We wanted everybody virtually connected as a team in a team space so they could see and talk to a hands-free speaker and everything they could see and talk and engage with people. That was offshore as well as onshore, because we have a lot of offshore people who now develop.

Nigel Thurlow: 26:38

I wanted that level of teamness, that level of sharedness we talk about, because to build that I have a lot of strategies I'm using to try and maintain that. But you cannot replace this. You cannot replace this human interaction. You've got a bunch of clever people in the room for a few hours or a few posts. That knows you can solve a lot of challenges. You try and do that in a mural board or confluence, which really sucks, or something like that. I hope not. This humanness, the sharedness, is absolutely essential and we need to find ways to continue to engage with each other, to communicate, to collaborate, to cooperate, to innovate and be creative together. You are not going to do that, leaving it up to an algorithm on a phone, sonja, since you dropped me in it.

Sonja Blignaut: 27:31

I think the key thing that we need to do is to embrace emergence. There isn't one way that we will do or crack this complex problem of hybrid work. I think that's the mistake that many companies make is they look at what others are doing and they don't try to find a fit for context way that it can work for them. I think what I agree with Nigel is what I've seen that does not work are these blanket things of everybody needs to be in the office three days a week, Because then what happens is you actually sit in the office on Zoom calls with the rest of your team who's not there, People, and there's growing resentment because now, why must I commute to sit on Zoom? And you see all these things like is it because of that fancy new building you built just before COVID that you now want me to come back because you don't know what to do with the building?

Sonja Blignaut: 28:27

I think if it's what Nigel said, if you ask people to come back for specific things, so for specific kinds of meetings, I know one thing, for example, that's really problematic at the moment is inducting new stuff. How do you induct somebody if there's nobody there? So if you ask me to come in as a manager or just as a peer for two or three days to come and help induct new people, or to come and do a retrospective or whatever. It is those things that you have to. That works better in person. That makes sense to me. I'll do that. But if you just tell me three days a week, come and sit on Zoom, commute for two hours to come and sit on Zoom, it makes no sense and I think it breeds resentment.

Nigel Thurlow: 29:11

Let me tell you how we should fix that. Now we're short on time, but let me just throw something out there. So we talk about distributed leadership, true empowerment. Empowerment means I give you the decision-making power. I won't overrule your counter-manager. You now own the decision-making. That's what we call accountability in English, and I know within Spanish and Portuguese, accountability, responsibility and more or less the same thing, but responsibility means you own the work. Accountability means you own the decision-making. It's your head on the chopping block if something goes wrong. But what most I mean?

Nigel Thurlow: 29:45

I'm sure many of you in the audience are working in organizations that have scrum teams that are distributed in multiple parts of the world. Why don't you just do something we talked about years ago, which is co-locate them in that location? Because then you need to trust them and empower them. And Dave Marquette talks about clarity and competency, being able to make the right decisions and having the competency carry out the work. So if we enable our teams in India, in Portugal, in Egypt and in other countries that I work with now, as well as the US, to be fully holistic, co-located with all the people to do the work, then the hybrid problem becomes less of a problem, because the remote connectivity is the scaled interactions.

Nigel Thurlow: 30:30

Whatever your scaled events are for coordination, but locally everybody works in the same place so they can get together from time to time for innovation, creativity, to hey, big room planning, if that's your thing and these types of events, I'm last thing and I'll shut up. I promise Company I've been working for in the US I've just finished an engagement with them Big room planning On teams 1,000 people for five days, and I swear to you, I promise you faithfully, I'm not making that up. 1,000 people all over the world on Microsoft Teams for a week. How many webcams are on None Punch?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:14

I'm gonna kind of wrap this up here. So here's what I'm hearing. We need to be present, we need to maintain our social connectedness in some way. If we don't do that, we can't actually get into you can't actually build a team. In my view, it's too hard to build a team virtually. It's a team name only. That ability to be connected, to look somebody in the eyes. We need it. We need to fill the vibes, we need to fill the inter-receptive capabilities and what's going on between us and among us. That needs to be there somehow.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:50

And I'm not saying just go back to work in the office. I'm saying we need to have that and we can have this virtual environment as well. So how do you be present? You need to be present with your camera on at home and of course, the way we do this is we have to really stop looking at complexity from an adversarial lens and kind of embrace it and say this is just the way it is. It just is. So, sonia, I'm gonna give it back to you and see if you wanna throw any words of wisdom in there.

Sonja Blignaut: 32:19

I'm just going to respond to Nigel's definitions of responsibility and accountability and give you one more If you put a hyphen in. I think what we need to become is responsible Responsibility. So it's not necessarily about owning the work, it's about how do we get back our ability to respond to whatever is happening in the external environment and internally.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:44

I'll take that one step. Accountability, the way we talk about it, is the ability to recount what happened, that situational awareness, to understand what happened in this past, because if you misremember the past, you cannot improve the future right. So how do we do that? We have to do that from multiple perspectives because, at the end of the day, we all see reality from the top down, inside out. It's a controlled hallucination. All right, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate your time today. We had no idea what we were gonna talk about when we got up here. Hopefully you got something out of this. I wanna thank you. I wanna thank Hugo Again. Thanks for allowing us to do this today. Hugo, appreciate it.

Speaker 2: 33:22

Thank you so much. Thank you, brian. Thank you, great insights. Thank you so much, nigel. Sonia, remember, this afternoon we're going to have another no way out panel. We're going to have here another town hall. You just made me, you just broke 200 items more or less of our code of conduct, so I need to rewrite that in the afternoon otherwise this will not work anymore.