Good morning.
Hello, everybody.
Can you hear us okay?
Perfect.
Great.
We wanted to get you a little woken up this morning, so here we go.
So, I'm Leetha Filderman.
I'm the President of Pop Tech, and we would love to welcome you here.
We're delighted you took time of what we know are busy schedules to join us, and we've spent
the last year or so, really looking at this phenomena of the reach and exponential power
of networks, and everybody sitting in this room really exemplifies that.
There are people here that are harnessing networks for enterprise for humanitarian issues,
and to solve some of the really tough problems that are confronting us.
So, we're delighted you're with us, and we're going to learn a lot from you, and we hope
you learn a little bit from us along the way.
As Howard said, in the opening part of the video, [00:01:00] this notion of networks
is not new.
It goes ... If you look back to the dawn of humanity, human beings operate in tribes,
communities, and networks.
That's how we've survived as a species, in so many ways.
And, when I took a look back at my own experience, over my what I would call the adult side of
my career, which started about five miles from here in the early '80's, at the dawn
of the AIDS epidemic.
I was like a lot of other health care workers, when that epidemic started in 1981.
I was sort of standing at the right place at the right time.
And, the enormous immensity of that challenge required people to step out of silos, across
all kinds of disciplines, to find ways to deal with what was truly an enormous challenge.
And, we did that by calling each other on the phone.
There weren't technology tools, really.
And, we found each other by hearsay, word of mouth, and picking up the phone.
And that little collective, in 1981, turned into the amazing teams that ended up really
making huge strides in that illness.
And, I took that experience, [00:02:30] which spanned more than a decade, and I started
applying to everything else I did.
And, the work I do today at Pop Tech, which is also now a 21 year old organization, that
started as a small network, that really wanted to look at the impact of rapidly emerging
technologies on people, what would that mean?
What would all of this mean, if you go back 21 years to privacy, connectivity, how we
relate to one another as humans?
And, we took those early conversations, and started applying our network, and leveraging
our growing network, to how can we take this enormous talent we sit on, and leverage it
to look at big challenges that confront society today, not just here, but across the globe?
And, through all of that, we ended up having a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with
the envisioning team at Microsoft, [00:03:30] and Anton Andrews, who directs that team,
and Harold Becker and Ming-Li, who you will meet later today, have really been wonderful
partners in the journey that I would say has blended us in our teams, and we're delighted
to be here today, to talk about our work, and to invite you to join us along the journey.
Thank you, Leetha.
Yeah, so Leetha and I will be your hosts today.
I'm [00:04:00] Anton, I run the envisioning team, as Leetha said, and we're looking forward
to I think a great morning of speakers, and then some really good interactive sessions
in the afternoon, and Marion's already started playing with one of the walls back there,
so you'll get a chance to do that in the break.
Did everyone get coffee?
You're coffeed up?
Got enough breakfast?
Fantastic.
All right, so thank you, first of all, for being here.
We're all busy, so thanks for taking a day out of your lives [00:04:30] to come and network
with us.
We, at Office Envisioning, we look at productivity, and the future of productivity in the changing
world of work.
You know, talking with Leetha, a few years ago, we decided to make this an open investigation,
rather than doing it behind behind closed doors.
And so, we've been working on this for a few years now.
We've been interviewing practitioners, experts, thought leaders, movers and shakers [00:05:00]
all over the world.
And, we've made all that available, and we intend, this is part of that same rolling
process.
And so, you're here today.
Again, this is going to become publicly available.
And so, I think there's a URL that we'll show, in a second.
So, if you go to that website, you'll find a lot of the work we've done today is up there.
You can also go to the Pop Tech website, same thing.
Pop Tech editions recently did a salon on super creativity.
That's all up there, too.
So, why are we doing this?
We think there are some really big shifts and changes happening, in the world of work.
And not just ... When I say "world of work," it's not just enterprises and organizations,
but just how humanity achieves things.
How we tackle our big challenges.
And, we both believe, I think quite sincerely, that tomorrow's challenges, the impending
challenges, are going to be more complex and more difficult, and are going to require us
to step up to them in a way that, the way in which we work today can't really manage.And
so, when we look at that, you know, today ... There's a Gallup Poll that comes out every
year, that basically says that 70 percent of all people in the workplace are completely
disengaged.
So, 30 percent of us are engaged in the work that we do.
That's terrible.
And, work is such an emotional part of everybody's lives.
You spend eight hours, ten hours, 12 hours, I don't know how many hours of a day you spend
at work.
Probably a lot.
And yet, we come away disengaged from something where we really want to contribute, we want
to something significant, especially when we look at the younger population coming into
the workplace now.
Want to be recognized.
Want to make a difference.
And, at the same time, we're sort of worshiping this cult of efficiency, and we've been worshiping
the cult of efficiency for about a hundred years now, ever since the Industrial Revolution.
Ever since Frederick Winslow Taylor showed up with his stop watch at the workplace.
And, we optimize everything.
We teach our managers this way, we run our factories this way, we run our organizations
this way.
We even educate our children this way.
We optimize everything around efficiency.
Around doing the same thing repetitively, at scale, with maximum efficiency, in this
very mechanistic way.
And, it's all about squeezing margins out.
And, that may have made sense at the time, and it may have made sense for quite awhile,
but it simply doesn't make sense anymore.
And, the reason it doesn't make sense anymore is that, when we look at the world as becoming
more interconnected.
There's more data, more information.
I mean, a car today produces a 100 gigabytes of data a second.
It's unbelievable.
So, when you look at your business, or your network, or your network fighting AIDS, or
whatever that is, there's just enormous amounts of data being produced.
How do you handle all of that?
We're more interconnected, there's more data.
And then, finally, technology is advancing in a much more rapid rate than it ever has
before.
Some people say it's exponential.
And so, when you put those things together, we end up with what we're seeing now, which
is a very uncertain, unpredictable world.
And when things are uncertain, unpredictable, and changing all the time, changing very rapidly,
if what you're focused on is efficiency, you can find yourself locked in, and you can very
efficiently be doing the wrong thing.
It was the right thing yesterday, but it's the wrong thing today, because the world just
keeps changing.
And so, how do we respond to this?
How do we survive?
You know, we believe, and Ben Waber's going to be up in a minute, we believe this is a
survival question.
And, it's not just the survival of organizations.
Organizations that traditional hierarchies can't keep up with this pace.
So, if hierarchies can't keep up with this pace, that's one thing.
But then, it's also the world at large.
How do we gather around tomorrow's challenges and meet them head on?
So, we believe, when we look at this, we interview people around this, the word that keeps popping
up for us is networks, as you just saw in the video.
And so, we believe that networks provide new strategies.
Collaborating is obviously much better than struggling alone, when you simply can't get
your head around all of the information and data that's available.
Networking and trust are better strategies than protectionism.
Pushing decision making to the edges, where everyone has a sense of the common purpose,
and you're empowering people at the edges to make decisions is faster than command and
control, and results in a more engaged workforce.
So, all of these things really point towards networks as something tremendously valuable,
and we thought that it would be really interesting just to super charge the discussion around
networks, and bring a whole variety of different network perspectives to the table this morning,
and today.
And so, I think we have a very interesting set of speakers lined up.
There are a lot of questions, when we think about networks, and that's why this event
is called Tensions, because there is no ideal network.
There is no average network.
There is no perfect network that works for everything.
And so, this idea of tensions is going to be really important.
And, as we go through the morning, think of questions that you'd like to ask the speakers.
We're going to make this a very interactive day.
This is a salon event, after all, so we're going to ask you to engage with the speakers,
and also in the afternoon.
And, one quick logistics thing.
You all have these name tags, and on the name tag is a little badge.
Do not lose that badge, because that is your table for this afternoon.
So, there are some exercises that we're going to do with buttons and so on, but don't take
this one off.
You need this one.
Harold and Ming-Li have some fun exercises lined up for you guys in the breaks, as well.
And, we'll introduce those as we roll forward.