>>Eddie Obeng: Reset, rethink, educating the next generation.
But what if the next generation happens to be us?
The world's changed.
everyone says that.
It keeps changing, it's been changing for ages, but look, organizations, they can't
learn.
Institutions can't learn.
Governments can't learn.
The only thing which can learn are you, people.
And they're all grownups.
The people making the decisions and deciding what we should do with the world, we're all
grownups.
We hear inspiring stories from the youngsters, but what about us?
How are we going to learn?
What do we need to learn?
And that's what I want to try to take you on a journey to try to discover.
We've got to understand, I think, how to make adults, grownups like us, want to learn, become
curious about learning.
And then we've got to think about, because most of you, I know, are in organizations,
institutions, businesses.
Am I right?
We say how do we use this in our organizations to transform our organizations?
How do we make it something better rather than just continuing with what we've always
done?
And the third thing, as Jon said, is I'm going to try to mix-in a little bit of what I have
been trying to do.
So that's the plan.
That was my plan.
I made it before I met you.
So now, please, for me, I want you to imagine the next time, and this is brilliant, you
learn stuff about -- I don't know what it is, but it's fantastic it makes the best nine
hours of the last of Zeitgeist.
The best nine hours of Zeitgeist.
What is it you want to learn?
What are your biggest hopes?
And I want (indiscernible) the next nine minutes is really terrible.
It's not just bad, it's awful.
Worst nine minutes of Zeitgeist.
What went wrong?
Please think a bit, talk to two or three people.
You have 15 seconds.
The world is moving fast.
I'll collect two or three, and then I'll make the presentation out of your thoughts.
Shall we go?
Go.
Come on, talk!
Talk!
Good grief.
Speed up for goodness sake.
Talk to each other.
Engage.
Okay.
Time's up.
Let's go.
What hopes?
What hopes do you got?
What do you want to do?
Go!
Just shout.
We haven't got time.
>>> Inspired.
>>Eddie Obeng: Inspired.
Anything else?
>>> Reset.
>>Eddie Obeng: You want to reset your brains.
I will do my best to reset your brains.
Fantastic.
One more, one more.
That was stereo.
Go.
>>> Solve Siri.
>>Eddie Obeng: Solve Siri.
And yours was?
>>> (Off microphone) >>Eddie Obeng: Okay.
I think that's the long version.
I'm doing that over lunch.
[ Laughter ] >>Eddie Obeng: Great.
Anything you don't want me to do?
Go, go, go.
We're running out of time.
>>> Embarrass people.
>>Eddie Obeng: Embarrass people.
Anyone in particular?
I should stop now, shouldn't I?
Embarrass.
Great.
Let's go for that, then.
I guess learning.
Adult learning.
Let me try something on you.
Very, very quickly, don't shout out the answer.
Just give me the next in this sequence; okay?
Don't shout out the answer.
We're going to do it together so no one is embarrassed.
Okay.
Next one is -- Shh.
Don't say it yet.
You've got it in your head?
Are you ready?
We'll shout out the answers together.
Okay.
So let's do it together.
1, 3, 9.
>>> 27.
>>Eddie Obeng: And?
27 and?
Fantastic.
It's a bit difficult and challenging.
2, 4, 16.
Okay.
It's not too bad.
How about A, E, F. A, E, F, oh, come on.
You see what happened is the first one I put you up, oh, I can do that, it's easy.
Then I put the second one up and you go it's all about sums.
I know that, I have to multiply stuff up.
Then I put a third one up and you're, oh, my goodness, what's that?
So you say to yourself A is probably 1, E is 5, there's got t be a 4.
You start doing sums.
These are just capital letters with straight lines.
There's no connection between them.
But see the first two formatted your brains, and that's the problem with you as adults
and with me as an adult.
We're all formatted.
We take the learning and then we extend it.
Now, this might not be dangerous except for the world which we actually live in.
I don't know whether you've noticed or not, but if I take for example now over here, I
stick 30 years in the middle, and put over here the past; can you imagine that?
I will do it in black.
It might be easier.
So this is now.
This is the past.
Are you happy with that?
And this is 30 years.
And on this axis, all the stuff people have been talking about.
The pace of change, the complexity of using technology.
That's what's on this axis.
Now which is higher?
Now or the past?
Come on!
Math.
Fantastic.
How do those two points join together?
Come on.
Don't be embarrassed.
Let's go.
Straight line?
No.
Technology, more people on the planet.
Great.
(Indiscernible) interesting point.
How fast, how fast are we learning and changing over the period?
I know many of you do things like budget and planning and forecasting, which means once
upon a time that must have been useful.
Remember there was once upon a time you could look one year into the future and you could
see what was coming.
So your ability to learn was much higher than the pace of the change of the world around
you.
But what's happened to our ability to learn and change over the same 30-year period?
I'm going to move the pen horizontally.
If you want it to go up, shout "up."
If you want it to go down, shout "down," and we'll get a shared view and I can publish
the results.
Are you ready?
Okay.
Let's go.
Action.
Okay.
So we have a situation where the lines cross over, and when I'm talking with audiences
with a sense of humor, normally I describe this crossover point here as midnight, the
points on the two lines, because I talk about 15 years, what happened while you were asleep
you didn't notice.
But what's really, really important about this is these two environments work to different
rules.
You see, if you can learn how fast the world is changing, knowledge is important.
It's useful to you.
It lasts a long time.
If you have a question, you go why are you questioning it?
It's (indiscernible) so relevant.
The world is changing faster.
Not only is it complex and ambiguous and confusing, but everything you know is probably already
obsolete.
I don't mean to make trouble but it's my job.
So if you want to know a little bit more about this then what we could do is we could probably
experiment a little bit.
Things you can look up later.
That's why we have Google.
Isn't it just marvelous?
So in a world where you extrapolate into a Colorado which you don't understand, what's
the impact?
Well, let me try and walk you through it.
I meet people, strange people.
You probably know some of these people.
I call them time travelers.
What they're job is they wake up in the morning in a house with a perfectly good connection
to the Internet, and what do they do?
They get dressed, get into a car, get into a train, jump on a bicycle.
They travel for 36.2 minutes, if you are in the U.K., in order to go to an office.
In this office they have a computer which is locked down in the 20th century.
You can't download to YouTube.
You can't to did anything.
There's no space to store your emails.
So you can imagine the reason they traveled all the way to these offices is so they can
do something other than use a computer because there's a perfectly good one at home.
21st, 20th century.
You think they would be working together, white boarding, sitting with your colleagues,
drinking coffee.
No!
They send each other emails.
Bizarre!
And when they send the emails, no one reads them.
And then what's even funnier about it, they then discover the people they want to talk
to, who they'd like to get to meetings with are in different offices.
They've traveled to different offices.
So they have this thing called audio conference.
My definition of audio conference is one person talking while 12 people continue to do their
emails.
So eventually they say -- let's say the day ends.
They have to travel back to the 21st century.
They are time travelers.
These are bizarre people.
And in the U.K. they even do other things like they're building more railway lines so
you can do more time travel.
And what's bizarre is because they're so bored on the trains, they have to take up (indiscernible)
and mobile phones (indiscernible) content.
Do you understand how mad the world is around us?
We've built a multi-million pound industry on the basis that we haven't moved to the
21st century.
Look, what I'm trying to explain to you is not only is that crazy, your own organizations
are probably also crazy.
Most of you, even the ones who think you're really cool, probably still work in hierarchies.
Do you do this funny thing with hierarchies?
Where you have these ideas; again, a little old-world idea.
We could learn how fast the world is changing.
We put the most important person in charge.
They make the decisions for everyone else.
We build one of these things.
Have you seen one of these things before?
Okay.
And then we build it, and it's huge.
And young people come in and where do we stick them?
We stick them at the bottom.
We tell them a specific lie.
The lie is one day you, too, will be on the top.
You with me?
It's a lie because they're never going to get (indiscernible) because you guys are there
and you're not going anywhere.
But they never notice because what happens is next year younger people come in, because
we're doing more of the same.
We're doing growth.
More of the same is the safest way of growing our businesses.
So you have younger people coming in and you know how when you're on a train and the train
next to you moves, you think you're moving forward?
So these young people, next year younger people come below them.
They've suddenly got their own department.
They go home and celebrate.
They imagine they've gone up.
They stayed in the same place.
The organization grows below them.
Now what this does is it means you're locking people into a particular environment.
I'm going to tell you a little story.
I worked with one of my clients in the construction industry, and one of the things they discovered
is about 10% of the cost of the construction project is just inspections.
Can you imagine that?
Inspecting stuff.
So one of the youngsters about here, we'll call him Bob, he came with the idea that he'll
take his iPad on-site, do the inspections, photograph it, update it.
Solved.
No.
Unfortunately, bumps into somebody who discovers that's all they're supposed to do.
Let's call this guy Bill.
He's in the IT department.
He complains.
He doesn't complain to Bob.
No.
He complains to who?
Bob's boss?
No.
To his boss.
How crazy?
Why?
Because in this organization, they do this thing, they call it reporting lines.
I don't know whether you've come across this.
400-year-old idea from naval history when the ships used to have sails.
You remember that?
(indiscernible) move the sails so the ropes don't get tangled.
Issues an order.
It's noisy at sea.
Nobody can hear.
(indiscernible) "first officer here.
Pass it on."
(indiscernible) goes all the way down the chain.
The guy who does the work he has to report back so they can move the next rope.
(indiscernible) "hoist the main sail."
That's it.
They didn't have mobile phones.
They couldn't communicate.
That's why they did that reporting stuff.
Anyway, these guys do it.
It goes up and up and up.
Each time, they change the story.
By the time it comes to you, it's all about bring your own device and stuff like that.
So you say "No way, no way."
So two lightning bolts come down.
One drops Bills.
One drops Bob.
Do you understand what this does?
It means that Bill is never going to show anything, never going to learn anything and
Bob will never try anything ever, but (indiscernible) to get revenge on Bob.
So what happens here is you are the ones who drive the learning.
You command learning and it happens.
So it used to be in business schools that you would incarcerate people for a minimum
of three weeks.
We'd send them off.
We'd choose them individually.
We'd send them off into different parts of the business schools.
We'd lock them up.
Nowadays we just do it at corporate universities and the centers are just more linear, so they're
shorter.
Basically 3 to 5 days.
So having done that to people, we then expect them to come back and learn.
No.
In the new world we're living in, you can't do that.
You have to learn and apply at the same time.
The learning isn't about the content, not what's in the professor's head.
The learning is about what we create together.
That's why I wanted you to talk to each other.
If I've done a good story -- job with a good job with this particular story, you will have
gone through a number of things.
The first is confirmation.
I had to convince you what I was going to say was useful.
By doing that, the only way I did it was to make sure that you did something which you
thought was right and was wrong.
The AEF8.
Then I had to make you curious by making you laugh at your own behavior, working on -- you
think "Why do we use reporting lines?"
I'm making you curious.
And then I gave you a framework.
Think about your hopes and fears.
Therefore, we could align large numbers of people to collaborate to work in the same
direction.
Are you with me?
And then finally, I have to make absolutely certain that you actually followed through
the story and that's why I was making jokes.
I have to give you more emotion, so this confirmation doesn't upset you.
So that's what I spend my life doing it, but I do it virtually.
I spend my time, I built a platform called Qube, qube.cc, if you're interested, but it
allows us to go into an organization with all the stakeholders, so Bill, Bob, the software
programmer, the client who's going to use it.
You bring them all together with frameworks so they can learn new behaviors and transform
their businesses.
You bring the learning into the organization.
And what happened to me is, having set off to try and do this -- it's taken about 20
years to build a platform which is good enough for my clients, but then we started using
it on our own business and I discovered something really amazing.
My own business, I thought pretty cool, was actually pretty old world because we were
still having meetings and doing some of those behaviors.
And by transforming how we learned, I then managed to do that.
So I only have one request.
Later this year, I'm hoping to do -- to start something Hub Cue, which will be a start-up
hub which I'll put on Qube for people who are starting business.
I'm basically looking for mentors.
So if you get an email from me, it's because I'm looking for people -- grandmothers, effectively
-- to come and help people who are trying to start businesses.
I've had a blast.
I hope you found that interesting and useful.
Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]