Charles Leadbeater (part 1)
Charles Leadbeater, author and consultant, talks about the political implications of new technologies.
Transcript:
(012 Westminster & Leadbetter)
Q. So what is the sort of what has caused this change what is is the change we are talking about the stuff you are excited about in your book is it a cultural change or a technology change would you say whow ould you define what I suppose what you describe as 'we think' what is this cultural movement, if it is that?
A. I think the internet and the web and everything we associate it with has allowed us to in some ways to rediscover older forms of organisation which are more communal and more sharing. So I think the notion of the commons and people sharing a resource in the commons, which is antiquated in some ways, has come back into fashion thanks to the net, so people are getting used to the idea that, through sharing, they with can create shared resources, whether it is Wikipedia -- an encyclopedia -- or a game or a way of sharing their car or anything like that. So it is something that is -- modern technology is being used to kind of recreate quite old ways of working which appeal to quite a modern sensibility because I think that the kind of generation growing up with this stuff are naturally individualistic in some ways but also naturally collaborative and they think in very social ways about how to get things done. So it is that combination of very modern young but very old enabled by the technology that is still emerging.
Q. Why are people doing this? Why are people doing these things for free, giving advice to each other for free, share their car -- what is that a change in people? A change in technology? Why is it happening?
A. I do not think it is the technology. I think that it appeals to some very basic motivations that people have. I think that three that really stand out: one is that these things work when they are really practical, they do doing something for people that is effective. So, if you are interested in developing software, then open source is a good way of to get softwear. If you are interested in finding out facts, Wikipedia does a basic job for you. So there is something very practical about it. I think people like socialising. They like social connection and in many ways they feel that in everyday life they are disconnected and so this is a way to resocialise and they like recognition. They like getting recognition for what they have given or what they have created. So this is working not because of the technology. It is working because it appeals to really basic motivations that people have. It satisfies the needs people have.
Q. But in the sort of blossoming of it -- the massive amount of it that was not going on before -- that is technologically enabled in some way? Is it because people have the technology now and can is it just that people have got the technology making it easier to do something nice and and that has always been part of them?
A. I think the thing about the technology and the thing about the web that is important is to look at what people want to do, not what it is. It is not just sort of modems, cables, browsers, computers. It is what people are trying to do with it and by and large what people are trying to do with it, I think, is they want to participate, they want to take part, have their say, get involved, rank, edit, dispute, share, whatever it is but they want to do something with it and they want to collaborate with other people whilst doing that and they want some recognition, some feedback, whether it is just a comment on your blog of what they have done and so it is allowing people to behave in that way and the technology of the television and even the technology of the telephone doesn't really allow you to do that. It leaves you really just as a receiver. This is something that allows you to be a participant and that is a really important shift.
I think my wife is about to walk through the door.
No.
Q. If we could get mumsnet, for example --
A. Yes.
Q. -- why do people you might not want to guess too much but that fits in, I suppose, to what you are trying to say?
A. Mums net is a very good example of people who have a real need, often they feel isolated and they want to connect with other people. There is massive professional advice from Dr Spok other people but actually what they want is to learn from people like them connect with them. And so it has provided a way for a mass of people to connect with one another laterally in a very practical but social way, in a way that makes sense to them, that talks to them in their language rather than talking down to them and it has exposed a huge need that was not being met and the technology allows people to play roles they had not previously played. So you can give advice to people but also receive it.
Q. The quality of information, talking to these mums as I have over the last three days, is absolutely incredible. They are unbelievably passionate about it. I mean we just said talk us to us about what you think about and it is unbelievable what they are saying. They are saying, you know, it is better for than the NHS for most things. It is better than all this and the quality of the information is really high. How does it get to be so reliable so responsive so effective?
A. Shall we wait for my wife to come in?
Q. Yes.
A. Yes, great stuff.
Q. Yes it is credible you get this torrent of amazing great stuff firstly it is?
A. I think, firstly, it is something they are passionate about. Secondly, there is a lot of knowledge that is not in books but it is in people's heads and is not necessarily professionalised and people care about it and so they care about what they are telling other people so there is an inbuilt kind of quality control and it is difficult to kid people, if you are a mum, about whether you know what you are talking about. Either it does work or it does not and it just builds. Mumsnet builds on what mums have always done -- in playgrounds, in parks, in groups. It takes that to a whole different level. So I think it is a very impressive example of the way that the web can create large communities of informal knowledge and systematise that and make it very useful.
Q. If you say people want to collaborate, people want recognition you said -- what does this mean about people and, basically, are people fundamentally good? Is that what these web sights are proving? Is this a big change in the way we conceive of -- what do you think?
A. My view is that people are fundamentally good. They are fundamentally interested in trying to help other people but they want recognition for something valuable that they create. So the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales says less than one per cent of the the people using Wikipedia might abuse it 99 per cent of people want to use it and treat it well -- don't try and redesign it to cut out that one per cent, try and design it for the 99 per cent who want to do a decent job and I think that is true in a lot of these sights. What it brings out is people want to give things, they want recognition for what they have given, they want to help other people often. These are rather simple altruistic decent and actually a lot of these sites exactly play to those motives.
Q. You can take that broad opinion that the world has been designed over the last hundred years for people who are going to be selfish and ruin things in a lot of ways in the public domain in a lot of ways. This is a broad statement. But I feel there maybe some sort of movement towards designing things for people considering that most people are going to try and ruin it ...?
A. There is a long history of thought that goes back at least to Adam Smith which says, if you want to look after something, it has to be owned by someone. So you are much more likely to look after your house if you own and it and that seems to be true of physical things. It is true of cars, of houses, of lots of physical things that are finite.
But if you are involved in ideas and knowledge, they grow by being shared and actually, if you control them too much, they just whither. So, if you are dealing in that economy, with the internet actually sharing makes a lot more sense to allow things to grow and gather momemtum in a way they won't if you just keep them wrapped up.
Q. So the key to making something successful, making something, maybe limits on what you are making successful is to some extent giving people the opportunity to collaborate to become recognized for their collaboration. What why does not everyone do this? Why is this not more a part of everything we create or we design?
A. I think it will become more a part of lots of things we do in that, as the technology spreads it becomes easier to collaborate with people in more sophisticated ways. We are getting more used to thinking in that way about how we might get things done ,how we might find information, or share ideas or develop things together.
It has to be, I think, quite practical. It has to deliver people real benefits. It is not just a talking shop. I think it has to be relatively easy to do. I do not think it can be too difficult. I think you you have to find people that you can share things with and who you like sharing things with and when you can get those conditions together -- and these things need to be goverened as well, they are not just a free for all. It is not just a sort of anarchy, there is a way of organising these communities from within, then you can get quite reliable things happening as a result of them: reliable advice, information, news, software, games, so on and so forth and that then seems to make sense.
Q. For an organisation then what is the different between the old type of organisation and the new organisation, very broadly? So things like Linex or My Football Club the organisation that runs Ebbsfleet United. What are they doing differently, how are they changing what an organisation is?
A. (33.03) I think our traditional ideas of organisations are very hierarchical. In our minds they look like pyramids or long chains or they are very mechanical and there is a top and a bottom. I think if you think about something like Wikipedia, it is more like bird's nest where everybody is leaving just their piece of information and it is all building up by this delicately organized thing being put together. It is much more like a community which needs to be governed in a kind of equitable and fair and legitimate way than a hierarchy and so all these things have some aspect of that. They much more like like self-governing communities than they are hierarchical communities in which you look up to someone to tell you what to do and someone is in charge in a very definite way. It enforces a much greater sens of self-discipline and self-control, self-governance.
Q. What is good about that?
A. (34.02) What is good about that, I think, is several things: firstly I think hierarchiess are very inefficient. They are very slow moving. They they concentrate power and information at the top and they often deny people opportunities to take initiative, to share ideas and to seek solutions themselves and they often rob people of a sense of agency. So one of the reasons that a lot of people hate working in large organisationses is that they get treated very badly by them. One of the reasons they like these communities is that they feel they have got some measure of control, they get recognition for who they are, they can be themselves.
Q. They can also be very efficient these new types of organisations with people selecting their own ...what they are doing I suppose being able to self select.
A. Just compare open source software and microsoft. Microsoft spends billions R&D to develop products which are les is less sophisticated than Linex. Linex is this large, open source software writing community. Linex doesn't have a head office. It doesn't have any corporate checks. It doesn't have any away days. It doesn't have any human resourcess department. It has none of the stuff that a large organisation has and yet it manages to produce something which is reliable and used by governments all over the world.
So in this self-organising model, it can be very low cost and efficient compared with top-down, bureaucratic hierarchy.
Q. Why doesn't every organisation just change tomorrow into this?
A. It is not appropriate in every situation. It is not going to work in every situation, this kind of model. There might be things that require a very technical knowledge or they might be highly risky or or they might be highly capital intensive. So it is not a recipe that is going to work in every situation but I think across the spectum from banking, education, health through to entertainment culture, you will see a gradual move over the next two decades towards much more open models of organisation because they are better of mobilising intelligence, initiative, loyality, engagement, participation and these create more creative dynamic organisations, often at lower cost, and that is a very powerful recipe.
Q. It is also pretty scary isn't it? I think when I am at work and you think, yes, actually I should ask everybody about this before I do it or ask what people think of me it is actually terrifying.
A. I think it is often more terrifying in prospect than it is in reality because the reality is that -- the reality is that if you share and put out ideas for other people to contribute to you, will get some hostile cynical responses and it is part of trying to be a more transparent world that you will get that. But you will also get a lot of support, new ideas, people suggesting how you can develop them and I do not think people can live their lives completely this way. We do need to keep some things private, some things that are ours, some things that are not lived out in the open and I think negotiating that will be part of what people will need to do -- work out what they want to keep private, what they want to share, whether they want to share it with one group or completely publicl. So a lot of that will need to be worked out, not just by organisations but by individuals.
Q. How do you think Liam Daish the ex-manager the Ebbsfleet United feels having his role now shared with 30,000 fans?
A. Meg Whittman who used to run Ebay said it was like leading a town meeting. It basically means that when you are leading anything it becomes a political job because what you are dealing with is not people who instruct and tell, you have to persuade and win their support and, when you are leading a community, that is what it is like and more organisations are going to be like that -- when you have to win people over and bring them alone along with you, rather than assuming you can tell them what to do. So we have grown up the last 20 years with the idea of the heroic charismatic chief executive who's going do ride in on some big white horse, tell everyone what to do, claim his bonus and leave and actually more of leadership is going to be like leading a community -- winning people over.
Q. What is that role in leading a community who what does that mean how is it really different ask it being a lead participant? How are you defined as a leader in one of those?
A. (39.00) The people -- I think if you look at the people who create and lead these communities, they are often from within, they come from within the community. They have legitimacy because of that. They continue to take part in the community. They are relatively transparent about what they do and they they don't try and hide things and they lead with a enormously light touch and generally they are quite quiet and humble and they are the antithesis of the charismatic shoulder padded quiffed charismatic chief executive who knows all the answers. On the contrary, actually, they recognise they do not know all the answers which is why they are open to the community suggesting (to?) them. So it takes a particular type of leadership and one quite different from that which we have grown up to -- used to -- in top down hierarchical organisations.
Q. That is one of the things -- I feel with the the the idea of when you talk of top down and bottom up specifically, what do you mean by that? Because in some ways this is exactly what is being eroded -- the idea of what it means that hierarchy whatever it means top down et cetera is that is being eroded. So can we not just do away with that in a way and it becomes who's good at what instead of having that sort of hanging on to that which is a well-formed hierarchy?
A. (40.44) It is a really interesting question. I do not think these communities work unless they have some sort of structure. I think the strucure comes from within and some of that structure is find the person who knows, go to the person who knows best, ignore all their titles, their history, their background, just do they know? Are they a good source of information? I think that is aprt of what the web is now encouraging. It is anti-credentialism almost or an anti-titlism, oin the sense that, you know, go to the person that seems to have at best ideas. But it is also, I think, respect people who have been around number longer, maybe, and also acknowledge that, at the end of the day, communities don't work unless decisions get taken and so the communes in the 1960s and 70s in America, thousands of communes blossomed -- most of them failed, largely because they could not take decisions. So I think there is a kind of hard-headedness about some of these communities as well which I think really counts. We have to choose is this a good piece of code or not? Is this a good piece of advis or not? If you don't make choices, you can not get things done.
Q. I think the new type of hierarchies, the different type of qualifications I suppose, the old way is I have done this this this and this qualification, me, to be here but it is a constant thing you are constantly proving it rather than any formal qualifications?
A. I think they are much more transparent, these communities, so you can see who does what and who knows what. I think they do, because there is a constant flow of information. You can not just rest on your laurels. There is a constancy about it which counts and I do think now, one of the good things, people have many more sources of advice to go to on any given subject. So if you want to talk to a doctor about something involving your child, you can. But, through mumsnet, you can talk to another mum who might be an expert in a particular aspect of child rearing and talk to you in a different way that is really valuable. So what you are getting is a much wider array of sources of knowledge that you can draw on, some of which are accredited and some of which are fantastic but not accredited but are now getting kind of way (inaudible) a way of airing themselves which is very powerful.
Q. So there is a enormous amount of information that you can turn to, how are we navigating it? How does it work? How do I find useful stuff on the internet?
A. That is one of the other things that is happening, because the web is now allowing more people to participate and more people to create, so you are getting more information, which in principal makes the world richer but also makes it much more unfathomable -- how do you find the right person. So we are now devising better ways to find who that is, better search engines than google's currently very crude version of that, ways of compiling noise(?) together like Wikipedia. Social networks do this, on line formus do it so the key thing is as we create more information can we find more ways of collaborating to organise it and make it useful for us and that is why participation and collaboration have to go together -- because without the collaboration you do not get the kind of organisation to make all this stuff useful for us.
Q. Can you talk about the economics of it, because this is not just the sort of lovely cultural and social project. There is a lot of serious stuff, serious companies making serious money. One of organisations we are looking at is Zopa?
A. Right.
Q. Who seem very exciting to me do you know much about them?
A. Yes.
Q. What do they represent to you in terms of new economic model?
A. (44.56) Zopa I think is really interesting because it not a new economic model, it is really a very old economic model which is to lend to one another without going through the bank and we have used the internet to create a trusted way for you to do that. So Zopa is a prime example really of how a lot of this stuff uses old ways of organising -- mutuals, credit unions, self-help, the grammine bank is very like Zopa without the internet. So Zopa has brought the internet to a very old form of organising and brought it back to life as an alternative to the bank and I think there are ways of assembling this much more peer-to-peer way of doing things, cutting out institutions which are very powerful. Ebay is doing that in many ways, cutting out retailers, allowing people to sell direct. Even some of the betting companies are in effect doing that. So it is a very strong economic model there, which is cut out the centralised costs, allow people to do it for themselves, create some tools and a platform in which they do it and then you can create some very powerful trading models which are market based and peer-to-peer.
Q. What has gone wrong then in between this time, when all of these things happened, and now we are getting them back?
A. (46.10) I think the late 19th and early 20th, with the rise of manufacturing, was a time when we created large and integrated institutions, virtical institutions that did lots of things. They brought in raw materials, masses of energy and people and machines and out of the other end came physical products. Those became the model we thought all organisations worked through and that hierarchy and organisation gave you economies of scale, efficiency, order, predictability and all these things. What we are witnessing now is both the growth of new forms of organisation out of the internet, the disintegration of that virtical integrated top down model and the recreation of much older forms of organisation, which are much more mutual, peer-to-peer commons based, which allow people to collaborate in new ways as the basis of their commercial activity.
So we have a much richer array now of possible models of collaborating at scale than was available 30 years ago when it was basically the big company or the government department, it was hierarchical, top down heavily institutional.
Q. How has that some how eroded us being nice to each other? Helping each other out -- a lot of these things are so simple like lending each other money or, like, I read if you read the internet the more likely you are to know the names of other people in your street?
A. Yes.
Q. How? What? It seems mad that there has been this eruption. I think something more serious than that. We are through globallings or industrialisation -- we have not had the ability to understand it using the things we accept the things that we affect so many people we don't have the able to to understand our role in that and now we're beginning to develop some global understanding?
A. (48.13) I think that we have got used to the idea that, especially at work, you either work just for money and you work more if you get given more money -- you respond to the incentive of money or, if you want to know what next to do, you ask your boss and it is either hierarchy, authority that tells you what to do or market incentives and I think what a lot of these web things are doing is opening up the fact that people respond to a wider range of incentives. They respond to the incentive to give, to share, to reciprocate and to trade and share with other people without necessarily exchanging money and they are much older forms of barter and organisation that we have lost and which, I think, are coming back and which we have squeezed out of society by a hierarchy on one side and the market on the other side and they are now forcing their way out into the open.
Q. What about responsibility is that I see that as key to why people are...
A. (49.19) I think responsibility and community go hand in hand. I think that one of the things that people don't like about the internet and it is a legitmate concern is that anonymity can lead to people behaving in irresponsible way and often these discussions on line seem more like barroom brawls than real discussions. So I think what is interesting about communities like mumsnet is that people know one another, they have relationships, and so they can hold one another to account and there is a sense of responsibility that you take responsibility for what you are saying because you will be judged by it.
A. I disagree with that I think because horses mouth people completely anonymous and a lot them argue that anonymity is what gives it that closeness and mumsnet they like it relatively few meet up -- they really like being able to say any problem...
A. Because they can share without worry about --
Q. If you don't like a community you can leave and go to a less moderated. So I think the anonymity stuff is not strictly true.
A. Right. I think there is a sense of what puts some people off all of this is the sense that the internet is a lawless wild-west, where, if you put your head above the parapet, you are likely to be shouted at and complained about or what have you and I think my experience of writing the book and sharing stuff on line, certainly when I first did it, you got some of that response. But after that initial response, you got to the people who were really interested in it and who wanted to have a conversation about it. So I think it is something about persisting and finding people who want to have a conversation with you and you will find that and so I think the web is full of people who don't know one another from Adam having conversations, basically, about things that they share in common and trying to share ideas and help one another kind of give one another tips in some crude kind of way.
Q. Back to the economic thing that Zopa are doing, their customers work much harder than any other bank's customers -- they don't actaully call themselves a bank but they are doing all the hard work, they are setting the interest rate, they are sussing people out, whether they are credit worthy -- what about that as a model, of getting the customer involved in doing something?
A. All sorts of companies want to get their consumers to become part-producers whether it is in self assembly products at Ikea or self-service in restaurants these but these web things are taking it to a new level I think -- they want to give people tools so they can do things themselves because that will make them both more efficient and allow them to create solutions which are much more tailored to them but it does mean they are not for people that want to be involved and feel they are getting something from it from it and feel they can do it and when you get that sort of momemtum then the you can get very powerful things happening because the consumers then become part producers of the product and they actually become part of the resource of the system rather than the end of the system -- people who consume the resources, they beome people who put stuff back in and if you mobilize large numbers of people to do that, that makes a company or organisation so much more productive. So if you have a computer game with a million players and one per cent of those players are creating content for other people to use, that is a development workforce of ten thousand people. So that logic of getting just even a small proportion of your users to become participants has a very powerful appeal for organisations.
Q. Are the best organisations not the ones that do that the best?
A. They can be. I think more organisations are heading in that direction and I think it does create dilemmas for people because I think some people will feel they are being taken advantage of maybe, because they are being asked to labour on behalf of the company. But by and large most experiments with this find people are happier, it is lower cost and they are more efficient if users can make the choice to take on some tasks themselves that they want to take on. So FedEx allows people to track parcels on line and it is more efficient and the user is happier as a result. If it is easy to do and they get something clear back then it is very very powerful model.
Q. Banking -- bloody boring, but people absolutely love love it -- a bit weird some of these people but you give them a bit of responsibility and they really run with it and they make it into this incredibly strong --
A. One of the questions is could Zopa replace mainstream banking? I doubt it will because there are so many people, even if they are disatisfied with banks, who don't have the time or the confidence to do what people in Zopa are doing but in every part of the economy, you will see Zopas emerging because they will organise communities of people who do want to do that bit extra, who are fed up with the service they get from big organisations and they just want to start doing something for themselves and are prepared to take a bit more effort and a bit more risk perhaps to do that but it is worth it.
Q. What about out sourcing, very trendy at the moment it is similar to the company B M W, letting other people do most of making its cars and those organisations seem to have more and more autonomy -- do you see that a extension of this sort of thing?
A. The big organisations have, over the last twenty years, increasingly out sourced a lot of their activities so hierarchy has been disintegrated into this networks of production and there is something similar in that to some of these communities that have been forming online but those outsourcing networks are still very hierarchical -- they are organised around big companies -- whereas a lot of the communities we are talking about are more self organising, self governing in their spirit. But what it is all part of is a sense that there is much more going on outside organisations than there is inside them often. There is more ideas, more capacity and if an organisation is going to draw on that it makes them richer, more productive, more innovative probably in some kind of way.
Q. Sorry to keep going on a bout Zopa but they have very few employees for the amount of customers they have. It is very impressive?
A. Are they still in Great Titchfield Street?
Q. Mortimer Street. It felt exciting and it felt like it is the right model and you also don't have to do all this you can just say here my money, can you ...
A. Yes.
Q. I think I am optimistic but I do feel the best company advertising is, you know, changing because the way that companies have to be is now vulnerable to what people thing think about them on the internet.
A. I think what is happening is in virtually every industry now, it is possible to ask could you do Zopa or could you do a Linex -- could you organise this in a completely different way and even if that doesn't have a huge impact on the industry, it could have a disruptive impact on quite a bit of it. After all Napster disrupted the whole of the music industry without necessarily getting very big. It is still a very small organisation. So I think you will find more of those efforts taking place in transport, with car sharing or different ways of generating energy, maybe. Could we do this in an Ebay or Zopa kind of way and that is kind of question that people will ask.
The person who founded Zopa Richard Duvall, who died, Richard started this by looking very closely at how people thought about money and what he found was people thought of money as a dead thing -- it was not theirs really -- but they wanted it to be something they could do something with they wanted. In other words, they could become participants in using. So he designed Zopa out of an interest in how people could reclaim a sense of control over their money which by and large people thought belonged to the bank they did not think it was their money, they thought it was the bank's money and he was designing something that would encourage people to become participants and see the money as theirs, that they could do something with and make choices about and the web became a tool for allowing that to happen.
(A short adjournment)
