Nobody Knows Anything (About Business)

So you probably all have one or two friends that you kind of text all day long. John's one of mine and I cannot tell you how lucky I am. By the way, tomorrow is his birthday. And, all of the speakers this morning, you were all amazing because it was kind of like listening to a lot of stuff that I know is going through John's head but coming out of people's mouths. It's brilliant. So let me see if I can start to tie all of this up because what I want to do By the way, how many of you were in the room last year when I talked? Okay.

This is part two. That was part one. That talk was called And Now for Something Completely Human. We're moving on. Now it's Nobody Knows Anything About Business. And you will be convinced halfway through this talk that nobody knows anything about business. Why? Well, we have to start at the end. When the world ended.

Let's see. Do I have that? Wrong one. Thank you. Let's start with the day the world ended. Now, you were all there for it. The day the world ended. Mark, what are you talking about? I'm gonna mention a date to you, and we'll see what comes to mind. The date is the 03/25/2020.

On the 03/25/2020, every one of us were looking at our television sets when the prime minister got on and sent us all home to our separate individual baits. The world ended. We didn't know what was going to happen next. And that wasn't just true here in Sydney or in Melbourne or in Australia. It was true everywhere in the world.

And it's uncomfortable. We tend not to focus on this. And I'll come to some reasons that we probably should in a moment. But that was the day the world ended. Now, do I mean? Well, it was we were completely off the map. But the thing that we did was we took the normal ebb and flow of the entire civilization, and we completely interrupted it.

And there was a real deep deep fear because no one in any of their predictions, oh, maybe the bird flu will come or this or that or the other thing, had actually ever thought about what would happen if a pandemic was global and instantaneous and everyone had to socially isolate at once. No one had thought about that.

And that was where we were. And what happened was all social activity came to a halt and all business activity simultaneously, globally came to a halt. We all remember that we were just sitting there staring at our television set seven by 24, wondering if this was truly the apocalypse.

And a lot of people started to think very hard, very quickly because the world looked like this outside. Completely empty cities. We saw the photos on our TV sets in London, in Paris, in New Delhi, in Melbourne. That's what the world looked like. What's going to happen to us? We were facing a problem that strategists call the dead in the water problem. When you stop something completely, if it's very complex, getting it restarted again is incredibly difficult to do.

And we were stuck in this. What do we do? A lot of people in a lot of governments everywhere said, I know what we need to do. We need to start printing money. And they did. In fact, Australia got its basically its own version of universal basic income for a couple of quarters, which was great for people on Newstart, by the way.

They finally had enough money to live on. All the rest of us made do. And we spent the first couple of days just staring at the TV set. And maybe what happened, somewhere in there, maybe you got a text from someone at work. Hey, can we do something here? Can we Do you want to jump on a call?

Maybe we can. There's something we have to do. People started to reach out a little bit and networks started to form. And it was very different than anything we'd known because all of our lives had been structured around a specific idea of what work was. Monday morning, you got up, you left home, you commuted to the office, you went to the office, you worked for eight hours, you got out, you commuted home, and you slept.

And you did that Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. And every single person did that, and no one gave it a second thought because that was simply the way the world worked. And it was the way the world had worked since at least the end of the First World War. That normal nine to five Monday to Friday form was absolutely what we thought work was.

That was how work was done. That was where work happened. And all of a sudden, none of that was true anymore. None of it. Here's the interesting thing. The day that the world ended also turned out to be the day that the world began because all of us sitting at home had the benefit of three huge infrastructure changes that had happened in the previous decade that we hadn't actually noticed.

We all had the NBN in one form or another by 2020. We probably all had some sort of laptop that we dragged home from the office when we left or we just had one there that had a webcam in it. And we also all had some sort of video conferencing software. And all of a sudden, people put two and two together, and they started video conferencing like mad.

And all of a sudden, work that used to happen in an office or in a meeting room or at a desk was now happening in people's homes in the midst of their lives. We all did this. Right? Every single person in the room did this. And all of a sudden, work was happening again.

And it was happening not because we had to go out and buy a bunch of stuff, but because we were able to utilize the resources that ate we actually already had. Keep that in mind. That's an important point. Now, I'm not saying that it was easy or perfect. We all got Zoom fatigue because the social cues that you get from a video call are very different from the social cues you get from embodiment. Certain kinds of business didn't work well at all.

Going out to restaurants, certain kinds of retail could not thrive in that environment. But by and large, the kind of work that every single person in this room does was basically perfectly adapted to this switch. One of the things that bubbled up almost subconsciously as this process happened was that there was a change in emphasis on what work was. It was no longer about output, output, output, output.

It was about outcome. People were able to think of work differently because the way we were doing work had been transformed. This was the beginning of an enormous transformation. And we expected everyone, every economist, every government person expected the economy globally to flatline. And you know what?

It barely skipped a beat. This is the single most important fact about business that will ever happen in our lifetimes because we change absolutely everything about work and nothing changed. That's the first point I'd like you to remember.

Because it opens something up that we haven't been looking at, and so I wanna look at it now. So what it opens up is an interesting question that we don't ask. What's work? On the March 25 in 2020, all of us leapt into the abyss.

We had no choice. The COVID was right behind us, and it was gaining. We leapt into the abyss. We fully expected that we were going to hit the bottom and smash into bits. Them's the brakes. It turns out in mid flight, we look behind us, and we find out we have wings, and we've had them all along, and maybe we should use them, and we start flapping ourselves away, and we fly out of the abyss long before we hit the ground.

Two things did make it to the bottom of the abyss and smash. The idea that work is intimately connected to place and that work is intimately connected to time. These, to quote Xavier, were some of the cargo cult ideas that had deeply infected our notion of work.

We always thought that work happened in a place and that work happened in a time. In fact, on the 03/25/2020, the link, which was only ever in our heads, between those snapped, and it's broken. It ain't going back. So what is work? If you strip away everything else, work is a set of relationships. Work is something that happens inside a relational field.

It could be a sole trader in clients. That's how I normally work. It could be a partnership. It could be a family business. And remember, every family farm in Australia and every family store in Australia is a family business. Could be a small design team working together. Could be a department in a big org. Each one of these are characterized not by transactionality, but by relationality.

The work is inherently relational. And there is a lot of play here of rearranging deck chairs on what work should be. Should it be four days in the office? Should it be five days in the office? Should we be working four day weeks? Should we be working three day weeks?

None of that actually materially matters, and you need to keep that in mind when you see people having these kabuki type discussions. That's not what work is. That's not how work does. It doesn't mean that we don't want to occasionally be together to work. That work and place can come together. Work and time can come together.

But it's can. It's not must. It's about agency in our ability. So work is now, as we understand it, a set of relationships. It can happen here or there. It can happen now or then. But the key thing there is relationships.

Okay. All of that is true. Now we need to take a look at the world that we're functioning in because we're kind of in a zombie universe now because what I've told you, while it might have shocked you, has already been true for five years. We just haven't done very much to actualize it.

And the reasons for that have to do with institutional inertia. And the institutional inertia we're talking about is fundamental corporate structure. Fundamental corporate structure is a 400 year old institution that descends from the very first chartered corporation, which was the British East India Company, chartered by Queen Elizabeth the first on the December 31 in the year 1600. Modern corporations all descend from that form.

You know what the world was like then? It was feudal. Feudal relationships. You have a prince, which can be a king or a queen, and you have the barons declaring their fealty. It's a transactional relationship. I will give you some of my power. You will come and protect me. And they will swear fealty. And then each of the dukes have their retainers who swear fealty to them. And those retainers have retainers who swear fealty to them until you get down to us peasants.

That was the world of four hundred years ago. That was the form that almost every organization in the world today has inherited and propagates in its basic structure. The org chart is the map of the feudal relationships that we have inside our organizations.

All of our organizations that are structured like that, and not all organizations are, all of the organizations that are structured like that are holding at their heart a 400 year old conception of power and transactionality, which is inherently not relational. So if we're saying that we now need to be working relationally because all of the rules of that feudal system have stopped working, and we'll come to why in a minute, what replaces all of that transactionality in the relational field?

Negotiation. Negotiation feels dirty. You know why? Because negotiation is only possible between parties who are peers. Every negotiation has to be between equals. Otherwise, it's actually ultimatum.

And we get confused about this because if you don't like the offer that the boss is putting to you, it's their way or the highway. It's not a negotiation. But relationships are inherently, and if you're in a permanent sort of lasting romantic relationship, you know that the relational field is continuous negotiation.

Right now in our work, negotiation, if we're lucky, is half a percent of our total time. In fact, in the world that we're going into, negotiation will make up probably the bulk of the activity. But of course, it's not going to be this horrible dragging on trying to wrestle from people. It's about getting into other people's heads and hearts to be able to work with them together.

That's the essence of negotiation. We will be negotiating everything in the relational field of work all of the time. That's what the future of work looks like. Or if you want, you can just go back to sleep, pretend the world is the same as it was in 2019, and obey your masters. The problem here is that while that looks appealing, the world has moved on.

And so let's talk about the world that we're actually operating in because we now need to understand why that system, which disappeared, evaporated. Remember, it evaporated in 2020, and we've kept on running as if it still exists. But it evaporated. How are we able to do that? What are what's going on here?

What is the world that we're in now? Well, reflect on the entire morning that we've had here where we're starting to understand that there are different ways of working, different types of groups working who can work together. Now I've been at the coalface of this version of AI since it started. One of the things that became completely clear in my work was that it was possible for a single individual to really fully augment themselves with really high quality AI tools, and that person could get a 10x, possibly even 100x uplift.

And I called that person a one man band because that person would be able to run on their own something like a small to medium sized business just on the quality of the tools that they would have access to. And we see some examples of this now. There's a price that you pay for that, which is that you get very close to the machine in order to be able to do that. You cyborg yourself.

And some people are fully happy to do that, fully capable of doing that. Most of the rest of us want a position where we get to retain as much humanity as possible while we're getting the full benefit of the team. And we have a name for that new form of organization that's emerging. It's such a sweet term.

It's one that I truly love. We call it the tiny team. The tiny team. As Xavier has said, two, three, four, five people working in close concert with high quality tools to achieve amazing outcomes.

Now there are emerging tiny teams everywhere. And if you scan the QR code on this page, you'll find latent spaces, tiny teams playbook, which is a really nice set of tiny teams and what they're doing. I pulled out one set of findings. These are the findings from the relational field. Low ego, high trust.

Radical transparency and accountability. Camaraderie. Those are not transactional elements. Those are relational elements. A tiny team does not operate in the transactional field internally. It might externally. The tiny team operates entirely in the relational field of negotiation internally. This is why it's capable of doing what they do.

So tiny teams, and mark my words, you've seen it. Xavier pointed it out. This is where we're going. We will all be working in tiny teams. It'll happen gradually and we'll barely even notice it, but we'll all be migrating to that because that's where the tools are telling us we need to be, because that's where the world is telling us where we need to be.

Those teams are always relational. And so it's now up to us to understand how to operate in the relational field. And this is where it gets a little sticky for us because, well, making money, Radical honesty with a tight team of people, which is not just a one off. Relationships aren't a one off.

Relationships are a continuity that builds honesty and trust, And we're not perfect. No one in this room is perfect. We're all carrying our own neuroses and traumas and all of the other things, and we're going to act those out when we get stressed or tired or all of the other things. And part of the point of the relational field in the tiny team is that it's going to create the space for that to be imperfect too. The deeper the relational field, the more resilient it is. And so to be truly productive in this future world, we have to be deeply relational.

And we see people trying to sort of tune the feudal mode. They wanna do this thing called bidirectional accountability where your boss is as accountable to you as you are to him. Good luck with that. I'm seeing another thing pop up, autopoietic mutualism, which is multidirectional, unidirectional accountability, where every peer is equally accountable to every peer.

Is that more work? Yes. Is that what it takes? Yes. Is that why we're gonna be spending most of our time negotiating? Yes. Now it's no joke. You've seen the glimmers of what's going on here.

You should scan that QR code. That QR code will take you to a new book called The Last Economy by Ahmad Mustique, who's the founder of Stability AI. You may not agree with everything in that book, but he makes a fairly compelling case that the entire economic structure is in the middle of a phase transition, and there are about a thousand days until the new processes are so bedded in that we've started on our path into a new kind of economic order.

If that's the case, then the relational field isn't just a nice to have. Oh, we'll get there someday. The relational field is something that we need to start working on now because that's going to be the key skill that we need as human beings to be able to thrive in a world where the AI has gotten very, very good.

The key thing here is that the Aeon needs us because we bring the reason. We bring the fertility. We bring the magic ingredient that makes the AI useful. And so our depth in the relational field to build the teams is the element that sparks that fertility for the future.

And what it means, and this is the great, beautiful paradox of AI that I've been seeing across many domains. The better the AI gets, the more it forces us to be completely human. Thank you.