Morning everyone, how are you feeling?
Great, ready, all right cool, this is going to be a fun morning.
I was talking with Joe this morning, Joe runs a really interesting place in New York called
The Office for Creative Research.
There's a weird tension in that name that we were talking about which is the word office
and the word creative right next to each other.
That's kind of why we're here today.
Typically we were talking with Stoe last night when we think about productivity,
work.
It has that barbwire feeling to it, right?
When we think about productivity we don't think about it that way at all.
The pope said, "Without work there is no dignity."
We think productivity is this massively important emotional thing in our lives where we're trying
to create something to be a part of something larger than ourselves, that sense of belonging,
that sense of achievement.
When we think about that world that we live in that really means something to us and yet
the landscape within which we're working is changing and it's changing in some pretty
dramatic ways.
Just to kind of quickly run through some of the things that are changing in the world
is much more interconnected than it's ever been before.
The speed and volume of data and communications coming at us is unprecedented.
Networks are allowing information to flow faster than ever before.
Even though, obviously in some parts of the world that's being tamped down.
At the same time technological changes happening at an exponential rate.
When you take all of these things together it creates a very unpredictable world.
You know, General Stanley McChrystal, when we talk to him, he told us about volatile
conditions on the ground.
The same thing applies if you're a start-up, a company or an enterprise.
How do you behave in this world?
For about 100 years Frederick Winslow Taylor introduced this model of efficiency, we've
run our companies the same way since then.
We've educated our kids in the same way.
Everything was sort of pointing towards this model of efficiency, this model of doing the
same thing repetitively at scale with maximum efficiency.
We train our works to behave that way, our management books train us to behave that way
at work, our companies are geared towards that.
Yet when the world around you is changing very very fast and very dynamically all the
time, suddenly you can find yourself doing the wrong thing very efficiently.
That becomes a real problem, becomes a survival problem.
When we look at companies, there are these questions that we have to ask ourselves, small
or large, start-up or massive enterprise.
How are you going to survive in this world?
How are you going to learn as a team?
How are you going adapt and evolve?
How are you going to respond creatively to the changes around you that are happening
everyday not once a year?
Add to that this whole thing that's happening now with automation and the fact that automation
is gradually eroding and probably will in the future continue to chip away at routine
work and road work.
That sort of almost pushes the window of human employability into a space which is about
creativity and social skills.
If you take all of those things together, creativity starts to suddenly feel tremendously
important.
We think to re-think education, we need to re-think productivity with creativity in mind.
We're going to ask some questions today and I'll just give you a brief preview of those
questions.
We're going to hear 2 amazing speakers, actually stand up and prime our minds.
Then we're going to split into working groups and dive deep on some of these questions.
Just to give you a taste some of these questions, as we shift from economies of scale to economies
of innovation, one of the questions becomes, how do we foster a culture of creativity at
work?
How do we get away from risk aversion?
How do we stop those [inaudible 00:04:11] that come in every year telling us that half
our workforce is massively disengaged and instead create a culture, an operating system
as Aaron would say?
Aaron talks about an operating system for our organizations.
How do you create an operating system that promotes fearless creativity?
Another question, when we're in this world of abundant real-time information, constant
information, constant data, how do we make sense of it?
Can we actually use it to increase the quality of our work?
Instead of our productivity tools just helping us document stuff, can they actually help
us think and be more creative at work?
That's going to be another question we'll dive into.
A lot of our traditional productivity tools were made for individuals sitting at individual
desks, working on individual computers, printing individual documents.
That made sense in a stable world but now that we have to collaborate more, now that
we have to work in real-time with each other, one of the questions becomes, how do we create
super rich connections between people?
How do we create high trust interactions within teams and between teams?
That's going to be another group.
Finally going back to AI for a minute and automation, this is something that Kate has
at heart.
What are the principles that we need to design into some of the new experiences that we'll
be bringing to the world that actually make sure that we don't remove human agency as
we introduce artificial intelligence and automation?
That's going to be a very interesting working group, I think.
Finally we have a whole bunch of people here today who are really about the physically
environment.
We're going to create a group that mixes some of those people in with the rest of you and
we're going to talk about the workplace.
Why go to work today if you work from anywhere?
What is the workplace for?
Why is it still important?
We believe that it is still important.
In fact, we believe that the workplace is a critical tool for knowledge exchange and
for creating togetherness, co-presence as Dave would say.
For that reason the workplace really should be a theater of innovation.
Clearly, today's paradigms of isolated offices or open plan chicken farms don't really create
a theater of innovation.
How can we rethink workplace environments to support both individual creativity and
team creativity at work?
Really creativity from many different angles, that's why you're all here, you're all different.
We have a very, very multi-disciplinary and cross-organizational group of people here.
Our aim as Lisa said really is just to have this discussion amongst ourselves.
We hope that we'll all benefit from this.
It should be interesting for everyone attending.