Lee Bryant (Part 2) (026)
Lee Bryant, co-founder of Headshift talks about the abundance of information available on the internet and its effect on power relations.
Transcript:
Q. ... you are providing a new way of working.
A. Sure, I mean, in business I think the majority of internal costs for any organisation are transaction costs and coordination costs. So, you know, getting an project up and running structuring work, organising meetings, all this kind of stuff, accounts for the majority of costs in companies today and what we have learned in the kind of web world is that actually you can reduce those costs, not quite to zero, but you can substantially reduce them in most forms of collective action. So there is a good starting point. You know, if you can allow people to stay in touch without needing this massive coordination and the formality of process transaction, then you can reduce the cost of what they are doing and when you start to reduce the cost of what they are doing, it is not just a economic benefit but more things are possible because things that would have been not worth it previously, or too costly for the benefit, suddenly become doable, so you can suddenly engage in other forms activity that you have not done in the past.
Q. How are you (something something)?
A. (1.40) Well, I mean, if you look, for example, at a large company or even a small company -- 5,000 10,000 people -- if that, you know -- that is say a consultancy and they are all sharp minded people and they are coming in and reading things and reading the FT and reading research and they are sharing information on it, what happened in the past is that everybody does that on their own but they don't connect it up in a -- way for example like where you can get the collective benefit of what everybody else is reading so, you know, the first things which is really simple is that you just connect up their reading and writing so they can get the benefits of other people doing research in the company or other people reading that article in the FT et cetera and then what you start to do is harness the attention mass data that is generated from those behaviours. So if you know this morning 15 senior people have read this article in the FT, then that is a signal of relevance that should suggest that other people in the company might want to also take a look at that article as well. That is coming out of you know an indoor recommendation system within the business, based on what people are reading. So that is one very, very simple example of how you can connect up people's behaviours in a different way but then if you look at how you organise your time, how you organise projects, how you use Wikipedias, to build up documentation around an area instead of formally organise the writing of this documentation by one individual or a small team. That is another area where the coordination costs are lower and it is a lot more informed. You are just building up contents that you need when you need it, basically but that leaves behind a repository for other people later on.
There are loads of examples I think about how this is playing out inside companies but what it all comes down to is you connect up their existing behaviours better than before. So you don't ask them to create a new class of content or you go off and do this research or write on Wikipedia or whatever, but you just connect up what they are already doing in a better way but in a much more public way and so you get, you know, second order benefits -- like surfacing that X department is also working with Y department. You know, I am pitching to HSBC and they are also pitching to HSBC. So you are just creating more of a kind of a public realm, you know, inside the company which mirrors what happens out there on the internet in terms of how people work.
Q. From a employ as a pillow for one of these companies making that sort of change what is it like?
A. (4.21) I think it is slightly less alienating, in an sense that you are not, as an individual, you are not secondary to process. As a individual you are a source of value and what you write, what you read, who you communicate with, what you share in your networks, become a primary source of content and value in the organisation. So you are able to project your own personal brand within the company better than you could before. You can step outside the very strict kind of metaphorical cubicles created by internal process and you can just do what you need to to do to get your job done. I think you can also, let's say, share information in a more informal way. So for example if you look at the way that most companies strucure knowledge management at the moment, it is very good at dealing with documents. So when something is solidified into a word document an XL file or a powerpoint deck, whatever, then they know how to store that, they know where the put it, they know how to categorise it, how to organise it and so on. But the majority of knowledge creation takes place in the informal realm. Its, you know, it's conversations. It is water cooler moments. It's meetings. It's events and so on and at the moment the only technology that supports that is email and so at the moment the majority of knowledge sharing is sharing taking place in email which is not what email was designed for. So if you can take that away from email and make it more public and have it on Wikis, on social networks, you can have it on book marking systems internally, then you start to open it up in the way that Wikipedia has opened up data externally or the way that Delicious has opened up link sharing externally.
Q. So are you sort of saying giving people more aunt my to manage and distribute things that they have produced within their work role actually results in saving companies money and so on?
A. (6.23) Definitely, yes. If you do a time and motion study of most knowledge sharing processes in companies, you will see the same level of transaction costs in those processes that you see in all of the business processes. So if you can take away the process and just allow people to write and to share and to store what they need for themselves personally and then find more smart ways of kind of exposing that to their colleagues and exposing that to other people in the company, then you will see that they can do the same process or the same task much more quickly and at lest cost than they could previously.
Q. So you are describing the life of a company as more fun to work for more enjoyable you have more but also that is a better company economically. It is a sort of total win win for everyone?
A. I think so it is like as we were discussing earlier about rules -- what is the point of hiring the cream of, you know, the next generation of graduates, putting them through induction programmes and then sitting them down and treating them like children? What is the point? Why hire them, if they are the brightest and the best, and then give them work processors which are designed for ten year olds which fundamentally don't trust them and think that they need to subsume their own work to this god given process in order for it to be relevant. You should be able to trust what they do because people are no more likely to come into the business and start vandalising an internal Wiki, than they are to come in and spray paint graffiti on the walls -- they just don't do it. They have employment contracts and for the most part they are relatively mature and ambitious individuals. So there should be really few limits on the behaviours that people need to undertake in order to get their work done and I think stepping out of the process and transaction mindset and into the sharing mindset can be a source of real competitive advantage, I think, for knowledge based companies today.
Q. So are leading companies doing it I mean this is really I PHRAOEPB now sort of thing do you think is it significantly changing the business model of companies?
A. It is in a way. If you look at certain areas like R&D and innovation, many of the pharmaceutical companies already realise that in the future the majority of their R&D will take place outside the company. So they used to be paranoid about holding on to all of their intellectual property assets that they generate during R&D but what they have realised now is that all major R&D successes have resulted from either cross-company collaboration or or collaboration out there in the wild among scientists that they already exploit. So many of them are already putting in place processes whereby they can actually open up their R&D and innovation outside the firm, outside the walls of the company, and still get the same benefits but at a lower cost. If you look at certain sectors, you will find all the leading companies in a given sector replicate exactly the same research work so the same costs are being born by all ten of the top companies in the sector and it is adding no value and if they would just share it, you know, in some kind of shared environment or public realm, then they could all reduce their costs substantially but they have to be ready for the fact that if they are all using the same information. So you need to overcome this paranoia of ownership in that scenario.
Those are two examples where I think processes are changing and companies are changing but, more generally in companies, we are seeing lots and lots of adoption of Wikis and blogs and social networking and social book marking as simply more effective ways of doing what they already do so. It is not changing their business model. It is not changing what they do. It is just doing it more efficiently and it is doing it with greater emphasis on value operation through shared contact.
Q. The the boss of something is pretty scary if you are the PWO*S of a company and you have been working in one way for 50 years and you are used to it a lot of the stuff you are saying is probably terrifying isn't it?
A. (11.10) I think to some people it is terrifying, to some people it is iberating. What you will find is that many senior people in organisations are just as sick of internal processes and middle management as the people below. So they just want to get the stuff done. They want the company to be agile. They want to the company to be competitive and in actual fact, they see the bureaucracy and the institutions that have built up around the company as being a barrier to that in many cases. Similarly, people lower down the organisation who were on the front line or on the coal face or whatever, they also see that bureaucacy as being a problem. So in many cases this kind of dual interest, this shared interest in actually making things a bit leaner, making things a bit more fluid and getting real truthful information about what is going on rather than this kind of corporate speak that pervades many companies today. You know, if you look at society at large, there is a greater degree of media literacy that people that people have these days. People are becoming immune to these forms of inauthentic corporate speak. You know, they no longer take it seriously. They no longer think it has any intrinsic value and what they are looking for is just basic authentic human connection and I think that is fundamental to what is going on and even in companies the same thing is happening -- people want to break out of what the Americans call the BS kind of culture in companies and they just want to get things done and that doesn't need to cost the earth, it doesn't need to be beset by huge archaic bureacratic processes and so even at the top of the organisation I think many senior people are kind of ready for that change basically.
Q. Is it knowledge based changing do you see banking knowledge based?
A. (13.20) Yes, I think banking definitely will change. Financial services are very interesting because the pemium on information is huge. Liquidity of markets is governed by liquidity of information in many respects. I think the areas where it is hard is retail banking for example where you have a mass kind of body of customers who, on the whole, don't particularly like you if you are a bank. So dealing with those customers in this new way is challenging but, if you look for example at other forms of banking, so corporate banking and high net worth individual banking so on and so forth, then I think what you are looking at there is a greater emphasis on very tight and very high trust relationships and those can be facilitated much more easily using these kind of technologies than they could by the form old fashioned banking processes of the past. So I think that will change and I think inside banks there is lots of activities. So some of the big adopters of social tools internally are people like MOrgan Stanley and some of the other big investment banks and so on, because they love information. They are real information nerds. So anything that can give them better quality information more quickly, they jump at.
Q. Does this mean a change in the relationship with customers one thing we were looking at was STKPWHRAOP and they have do you think there is a generally trend to towards the customer playing a much more active role and banks making less many do you think there will be a million pound bonus TKAOUPBGS do you think we will get more out of it?
A. I do not think it will end because I think banks are extremely adept at adapting to changing circumstances so they will find a way of maintaining those kind of bonus levels and that level of income, come what may basically, but I think things are changing. There are very interesting websites like mint and like we are savvy in America and things like co-vestor, where people are opening up previously closed and tightly held information sources about investment performance, investment advice, how to manage your finances better how to get the most out of your income and so on and these are kind of, effectively, peer-to-peer systems that let banking services help each other get more out of the banking system and I think that is really interesting and I think we will see many more examples of that.
One of the examples I love is a very simple on line accounting thing called fresh books. Fresh books is a basic book keeping service but what it does is it anonymises and aggregates individual's information. So if I put my book keeping data in there, it can tell me you have 30 per cent of your invoices are outstanding compared to an industry average of 40 per cent because I am benefitting from all the other data that individuals have put in the system for their own reasons but it is it is anonymised so it can be shared shared safely. I think that is a really good use of data and that is a really good way of joining together the behaviour of lots of different people who are using the service.
So I think these are signed from changes to come from the banking industry for sure. Overall, as you open things up and make information more liquid, then I think that does start to reduce the power of major banks major but I think they will, you know -- they will be around for a while to come. Lets put it that way.
Q. Overall we were just talking about this much more openness who can access date who can produce date he can use date you can use it it what is your understanding of the benefits of this more global is this you know you also seem very principal about everything these are all just ways that work but are they leading towards generally a better rest of the world?
A. (17.57) I do not know about a better world. I think potentially, yes, but they are just the major change of our generation. We have seen lots of other changes in the past but could potentially lead to a better world but actually result in first world war trench warfare or genocide in the second world war for example. So I think we should be careful about having too utopian a vision for how these things will play out. But fundamentally I think what is interesting to me about all of this is the relationships of -- the power relationships between people. So the reason I got into all of this back in the mid 1990s is because I was working in politics and media and the strangle hold that major news organisations had over the representation of people's lives and what was happening in their lives was so great that I found that very frustrating and I started trying to build my own horizontal net works for disseminating information that were really peer-peer -- people telling each other exactly how it is, rather than being represented by the BBC or represented by a news agency or whatever an. I think what that does is it fundamentally alters the power dynamics between people and between people and institutions. In the past, we have needed institutions in order to organises collective life and society and economics (inaudible) and so on. These days we don't need institutions in quite the same way and we have mechanisms for joining together lots of individuals, based on their own self interest and using their own culture, on their own ground if you like, that are now competitive with the power of institutions. So I think that probably is the major change is: institutions are now threatened in terms of their power relations by groups of individuals who can actually organise to change things and I think is really interesting and I personally think that that is you know a force for good potentially, although it will also have a dark side too.
Q. If you were asked to do enormous consultancy job for the government and they said hopefully will you design this different how different do you think it would be who would it be like what you do?
A. (20.35) I think -- first of all, I do not think that is likely to happen because the government exists primarily for its own self perpetuation rather than to change society. It is an institution that will that will protect itself and continue by fair means or foul I think. But if you were to look at the work of government, I think you can split it down into service delivery, policy making and let's say governance, actually running the system, and I think those are different areas and so for example I think in service delivery I think there is a great deal of potential for involving individual citizens and groups of citizens in delivering services better and in improving the organisation of those services so that is one area of change. I think in policy making, the representative democracy model is potentially challenged by more direct democracy that is is becoming possible. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, I do not really know? And then governance is something that can also involve mass participation in different ways, so I think I would look at the actions of government differently. I do not think government is one single kind of entity across the piece.
Q. But you are saying that every one of those three elements has the potential to kind of bond in some way?
A. Yes, absolutely. So in a very limited sense we have seen examples of that. So in the UK we have had these my society projects. We have had they work for you. We have had other projects that seek to expose the workings of government and the debates within government to the oxygen of you know popular oversight and so on, which is very interesting. I think in terms of service delivery, we have talked about patient opinion. That is just one very small example among lots of other examples of now you can involve citizens in delivering services better and in terms of governance, I think government and policy making, these are currently the most opaque areas of government and I think there is a big challenge right now around the area of consultation because the government says it wants consult on things but actually it is not really able to honestly and generally consult because the policy making process is opaque to most people and can not really be influenced, you know. Since 1997 if you want to have an influence on government policy, then if you are a tabloid leader writer or you work for The Daily Mail, actually you have much more influence on government policy than any group of individual citizens can possibly have because this particular government is paranoid about the way it is portrayed in the media and that is really one of the drivers that brought it to power was media management. So for me that is very kind of 20th century and until we can move beyond that and have more open conversations between citizens and government, policy making will not change and we will move no further forward in conversation.
Q. Do you sea see that what you are saying about business is that they are being forced to make an change because it is better business and based on markets, market driven obvious.
A. Yes, they are not forced but it is that there is a clear self-interest for them to reduce transaction costs for them to be more efficient and for them to also provide a better environment for clever people to work in.
Q. But what seems to be the PROBGS is that government is in obsessed ... Government is in the best position to make the most of it because its users citizens motivation and KWRELT there is not the same type of driver for them to actually start doing that?
A. No they don't have to change because for as long as -- in the UK for as long as you have a two/three party system, as long as none of those parties has a radically different position on involving citizens and using these techniques then obviously there is no incentive or need for for them to change.
Q. I mean they are all talking about it now. Do you believe that things are going to change?
A. (25.04) In terms of the current nature major political parties I think, it is actually the conservative party who appear to understand this the best but I think that is partly because they have the advantage of being in opposition for a period of time so they can take different positions. The labour party is so obsessed with media management that they are not culturally able to have open conversations that are not full of corporate speak, basically, and I think that if you look at what George Osbourne is saying and some of the other people in the new wing of the conservative party, they appear to understand what is going on in the real world in terms of social networks and myspace generations and that kind of stuff. Whether they can apply that to government is another question.
Q. We are going to inerview George Osbourne for this and I read the speech he wrote and I thought it was incredibly exciting and it was a great speech but you wonder how much of an idea they have if do you feel that there is over time it will become EUR RE pressble?
A. It is depends when you mean by over time it could carry on for a couple of hundred years without necessarily changing. The time scales on these things are quite long. So if you look at the institutions of government today, the foreign office or the treasury or so on, they follow processes which are decades old, if not hundreds of years old, so the pace of change in government is quite slow and probably that is a good thing because that gives you a degree of stability and protection and I think government in a way should be a bit conservative because if you get it wrong then the impact can be quite great. So I think it will take time but I think what you will see is some of the activities and powers government moving into the public realm and they will be run better by citizens than they are by government. So for example They Work For You is a great example. Hansard had all this data about what people say in parliament and debates and the activity of MPs and so on but it took a group of concerned citizens to actually create that system rather than government itself and so now, effectively, a public service is being delivered by an bunch of well meaning citizens, which is fine.
Q. What is it that in terms of the potential though do you see this as a if I am time in which we (end end end end end end end)
