Collective Mental Health & Creating Positive Communication with Sir Geoff Mulgan

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This is a podcast episode titled, Collective Mental Health & Creating Positive Communication with Sir Geoff Mulgan. The summary for this episode is: <p>In this episode of The Future of Teamwork, Sir Geoff Mulgan, a Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy, and Social Innovation, drops by to talk about all things collective mental health, how to make positive change happen in the workplace, and what Industry 4.0 and 5.0 look like. Geoff works at University College London, and along with HUDDL3 Group CEO and show host Dane Groeneveld, he unpacks the impacts of addressing our human nature in the workplace and the effects on GDP, social relations, and more.</p><p><br></p><p>Episode Highlights:</p><ul><li>[00:45&nbsp;-&nbsp;02:25] Meet Geoff Mulgan</li><li>[02:58&nbsp;-&nbsp;05:02] Making change happen, and why the United States seems particularly pessimistic right now</li><li>[05:02&nbsp;-&nbsp;06:24] Business and the question of collective mental health</li><li>[06:25&nbsp;-&nbsp;08:00] A period of discovery with mental health, and knowing the questions but not the answers</li><li>[08:03&nbsp;-&nbsp;09:49] Mental wellness and addressing impact on GDP</li><li>[09:50&nbsp;-&nbsp;10:46] Understanding how mental health affects physical health</li><li>[10:48&nbsp;-&nbsp;12:24] Socializing, plants, and the effect on recovery and growth</li><li>[12:26&nbsp;-&nbsp;14:32] Being accountable for the experience of life outside the workplace</li><li>[14:46&nbsp;-&nbsp;17:07] Creating a safe environment for receiving feedback as a leader</li><li>[17:08&nbsp;-&nbsp;21:10] Net zero, democratization, and the availability to solve problems through people's specialties</li><li>[21:10&nbsp;-&nbsp;23:46] Co-creation and partnerships in education dealing with social problem-solving and engineering</li><li>[23:48&nbsp;-&nbsp;26:31] Project-based learning and the idea of Renaissance Studios for schools</li><li>[26:31&nbsp;-&nbsp;30:09] The containment theory of education and preparing children for the future of job and skills growth</li><li>[30:10&nbsp;-&nbsp;33:07] Industry specialization across the world, with Bangladesh as an example</li><li>[33:07&nbsp;-&nbsp;36:59] Auxiliary roles and micro-credentialing</li><li>[37:00&nbsp;-&nbsp;38:50] Anonymized assessments and pressuring teams to be mutually supportive</li><li>[38:51&nbsp;-&nbsp;41:38] How we organize meetings</li><li>[42:06&nbsp;-&nbsp;44:33] Understanding the differences in remote, hybrid, and in-person work and how to communicate better at each</li><li>[45:08&nbsp;-&nbsp;50:06] Industry 4.0 and capturing attention about what industry 5.0 looks like</li><li>[50:07&nbsp;-&nbsp;52:36] Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 looks different across regions of the world</li></ul>
Meet Geoff Mulgan
01:40 MIN
Making change happen, and why the United States seems particularly pessimistic right now
02:03 MIN
Business and the question of collective mental health
01:21 MIN
A period of discovery with mental health, and knowing the questions but not the answers
01:35 MIN
Mental wellness and addressing impact on GDP
01:46 MIN
Understanding how mental health affects physical health
00:55 MIN
Socializing, plants, and the effect on recovery and growth
01:35 MIN
Being accountable for the experience of life outside the workplace
02:06 MIN
Creating a safe environment for receiving feedback as a leader
02:21 MIN
Net zero, democratization, and the availability to solve problems through people's specialities
04:01 MIN
Co-creation and partnerships in education dealing with social problem-solving and engineering
02:35 MIN
Project-based learning and the idea of Renaissance Studios for schools
02:42 MIN
The containment theory of education and preparing children for the future of job and skills growth
03:37 MIN
Industry specialization across the world, with Bangladesh as an example
02:57 MIN
Auxiliary roles and micro-credentialing
03:51 MIN
Anonymized assessments and pressuring teams to be mutually supportive
01:50 MIN
How we organize meetings
02:47 MIN
Understanding the differences in remote, hybrid, and in-person work and how to communicate better at each
02:27 MIN
Industry 4.0 and capturing attention about what industry 5.0 looks like
04:58 MIN
Industry 4.0 and Industry 5.0 looks different across regions of the world
02:29 MIN

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to The Future of Teamwork podcast. My name is Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 Group. Today, I'm joined out of London by Geoff Mulgan. Geoff is a Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation, an author of many books. He's done a lot of work in government across Europe and even in my home country, Australia. I'm really excited to explore some of Geoff's work and insights on the world that we live in, particularly how it pertains to the future of teamwork. So, welcome to the show, Geoff.

Geoff Mulgan: Hi there. Good to be with you.

Dane Groeneveld: Geoff, perhaps for the benefit of our listeners, you could provide them with a whistle- stop tour of what your story, your background, what brought you to be doing all of this great work that you do?

Geoff Mulgan: Well, I've got a slightly weird, messy background. I mean, I've had many, many jobs, everything from cleaning and van driving to cooking. I've got a PhD in telecommunications. So I was at MIT in probably the early stages of the internet, and then much of my working life has been probably split about 50/ 50 between working top- down with governments, so UK, Australia, Singapore, many other countries, and cities as well from Seoul to Barcelona. Then, the other half working much with bottom- up on creating new organizations. Some public, some NGOs. I did a lot of work in commercial startup and in my last job, ran essentially a series of venture capital funds. I guess my linking interest is how do you make change happen? What's the reality of how you link imagination, creative ideas, and practical reality? In recent years, more and more interested in the whole field of collective intelligence. What's the emerging science and practice of how we organize thought at large scale, whether within a company, a city, or indeed the whole world? I'm convinced this is the great topic of the next 20 or 30 years, not just how we do AI well, which there's a vast amount of money and expertise going in, but if anything, I think more important will be how we organize human intelligence at scale, which includes teams, of course.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No. I love that, Geoff, and I got really excited as I continue to become a student of teamwork and social innovation, collective intelligence when I looked at some of the body of your work, some of your books because it's based in a lot of real science, real policy, but it's also very applicable. It's very accessible to the everyday man, which I've picked up a bit of a theme there. So you talk about this linking thesis of how do you make change happen, and I know... I was listening actually to your podcast with Mark Leonard, which I thought was brilliant, and you were talking about this era of crisis that we've lived through in the last 20 years and how, generally, a lot of people have been a little bit down. They haven't really been given a story of what the future could contain, and they've become almost concerned that their children are going to grow up in a world that is less enjoyable, less beneficial than what we're currently in. That's a sad statement, but you started to share some real practical insights from history, but also from existing projects on where we can be looking more into the future and creating in a small way, in an exploratory way what we think the world should look like. So perhaps you could touch on a little bit of the teams that you've seen doing some work in that regard, trying to project where we're going to drive better welfare, better wellbeing in our societies, in our communities.

Geoff Mulgan: So what you're referring to there is a recent work which I started, really, at the beginning of the pandemic on imagination, and that was prompted by these surveys which, as you say, show large majorities now expecting their children to be worse off than them. This is the first time in two centuries that's been the case. There are obvious reasons for that in a country like the US where half the population haven't seen any gain in income for a generation. In my country, in the UK, average incomes have been falling now for the last 10 years. So, in a period of retreat and reverse, so it probably is not surprising people are pessimistic, and then young people in particular, seeing the prospect of climate disaster and all of this, has squeezed out the space for, I think, a more positive imagination and I think, in some ways, has overshot. I think, in some ways, it's become unrealistic because I think we do actually have more scope to remold the world, our welfare, our health, what have you. So maybe let's talk about one topic, which I was working on this morning, which very much links to business, and this is a question of collective mental health. We become more and more attuned, I think, in the last generation to the fact that individual mental health matters, matters maybe as much as our physical health. We've seen lots of data on epidemics, and anxiety, and loneliness, and depression, particularly in the last two or three years, caused by lockdowns.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Then, the question flows, what do you do about it? In some ways, the answers are not the same as the answers for heart disease or broken limbs and all of those things. They involve the whole of society. In fact, employers often have a bigger role in relation to mental health than governments do because they are interacting with hundreds of millions of people every day. One part of that agenda takes you to what's a good employer look like who really cares about the mental health of their staff. About a couple of years ago, I wrote a thing for the World Economic Forum on what collective mental health might look like, how you'd measure it within companies, how you'd spot the problems, work on them, things like mental health first- aiders, and programs, and da, da, da, for which there's very clear productivity arguments within business for doing that well and doing that better.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: Then, a couple of months ago, we published a big global study on a systematic review on knowledge on population level mental health, looking much more at the formal research literature, what can be done in schools, what can be done in face- to- face therapy, or online tools, or mutual support, or self- help. We're now at a point nowhere in the world has done. This is, in some ways, a set of problems which in the past were thought to be just in the personal realm. They weren't the concern of governments or big businesses. Now, they clearly are on the agenda, and all over the world, we see experiment to try and do something about it. Your home country, Australia, is on the forefront of this with some of the states having quite sophisticated strategists. Some of the Scandinavian countries are doing great stuff. Individual cities are doing really imaginative work. But what's exciting is that although we know the question, we don't really know the answers yet, and so we are on a period of discovery, but hopefully, at the end of that, might be the reality of significantly happier societies without the chronic problems we see around us where sometimes a fear for third of the population really struggling with every day, thriving and suffering in silence in a way. These things are now becoming talked about visible, and I think we've got the prospect of really doing something about it. So that's just one example where, I guess, a bit more of a positive imagination can connect to real world innovations and practice in the present and can get beyond little projects to something which truly is systemic.

Dane Groeneveld: I really like that one, and mental wellness has been a big topic for us naturally through the pandemic, but we are seeing it in so many more spheres. One of my mentors the other day said, " You hire an employee, and a human shows up." The reality is, is that human is going to show up, and they are living through various anxieties and depression or their family members or community members might be, and that has a huge weight. That's a huge burden not only on the organization, but on your customers, on your suppliers, on people that are just touching your business in small ways every day. So I think that's a really important one.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, and just maybe put a little plug in about. So, 20 years ago, when I worked in the UK government, we did I think the world's first ever serious policy landscape approach on happiness as a policy goal. A little bit ahead of its time. The UK then started measuring happiness about 12 years ago. One of the first countries to measure it alongside GDP. Then, in 2010, we launched an organization called Action for Happiness with Dalai Lama as our patron which tries to provide evidence- based advice to businesses, or schools, or families about what do you do, about your own wellbeing, and try to synthesize the best available science to help people get by, support each other. In some ways, the demand from business has been extraordinary for that, again, for fairly obvious reasons.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Again, a bit of a generational shift. I think there was a previous generation of business leaders who thought this is... actually felt pretty uncomfortable talking about any of this stuff. But for the younger generation, exactly as you say, you employ someone, a human being with all their complexities and walks through the door. With an aging population, that's the other side of it. I'm always very influenced by the extraordinary research, I guess, 10, 20 years ago, which started showing that loneliness, isolation was equivalent to smoking 40 cigarettes a day in terms of its effect not just on your mental health, but also on your physical health.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: One of the little things that I've used with audiences, I asked them, " Do you think cold symptoms..." We're in the winter, so a lot of cold symptoms around there. "Are they more common amongst old people who socialize a lot or socialize a little?" Everyone says, " Well, of course, it's going to be more common amongst people who socialize a lot because they're catching colds." But in fact, the opposite is the case because being sociable is good for your immune system, is good for your health, helps you resist, whereas being isolated makes you very vulnerable. So there's lots of counterintuitive insights, I think, coming out from this focus on wellbeing.

Dane Groeneveld: I think that's fascinating. When I actually lived in London, my mother was a nurse. She was working with a outfit called The Haven, and they did a lot of work with breast cancer patients. In preparing those women going to their treatments, they'd bring them into a social environment, and they'd do a lot of things like art, and poetry, and cooking. They actually found that that directly impacted the results of their treatment, their chemo, their radio, whatever it was. So I think that's huge. Often, I guess particularly here in the US, we fall foul of just going down more conventional medical pathways and not thinking about that happiness or that wellbeing because that's where the dollars flow, which is interesting.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. You've got some plants behind you. So one little example which...

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: I remember being told about it by the then head of the Rockefeller Foundation. This again would be 20, 30 years ago in an old people's home. My daughter is working in one at the moment.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: They got half the residents to look after plants and water them, and the other half didn't. After two years, all of the first group was still alive, and nearly all of the second group were dead. That just sense of being responsible, of having something to care for is really good for us as human beings, and then very few offices actually asked their employees to look after the plants like the ones I'm seeing behind you and feel some sense of ownership for the environment, the space you're in. So there's a lot of knowledge there, which isn't really applied in our institutions, about how you make people feel more human, more meaningful about lives.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Which is big because one of our other guests the other day said never in history has an employer, a business being held as accountable for the experience of their workers as is the case today, and that's not just the experience in the workplace. That's the experience of life.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: So I think businesses, if they really want to invest in good teams, and healthy teams, and teams that can innovate and be changed... tolerant, if not change champions, then I think it's important we start to capture all of these different methods and best practices for our teams.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, and in this paper I did for the World Economic Forum, there's a dark side and the light side of this because we are in era when businesses can gather vastly more data about the emotional state of their employees. They can look at every Zoom and Teams meeting, and analyze the facial expressions, and the moods, and the responses. That can be used in quite manipulative ways, but my guess is over time, some of that will turn into standardized metrics for assessing businesses, how much they contribute to anxiety, wellbeing, et cetera. I think we'll get quite sophisticated discussions because this is where it gets really interesting. I don't think necessarily the best business is always the happiest one.

Dane Groeneveld: Correct.

Geoff Mulgan: There are many roles where you need a bit of stress, you need a bit of anxiety, you need a bit of tension to get the best out of people. Everyone being laid- back and chilled is quite pleasant, but maybe pretty useless if you'll try to really get to the frontiers of technology or creativity, whatever else it may be. So getting more sophisticated really debates about the kinds of tones, and moods, and emotions which are suitable for the very different needs of retail, or manufacturing, or R& D, or finance. It's a debate which is only just beginning. There's very little good research and writing on this. It tends to be much too generic in my view and not finely grained to the different needs of different tasks.

Dane Groeneveld: That's a big one. We had a guest come on the show, Eric Coryell, and he talked about the best teams that are really going to make an impact have to have some tension. They need to actually do some problem solving together. So, to your point, you can't just be happy, and you see it in sport as well. I remember my son, huge heart. He was five or six, and they're playing soccer. He's running round, and he's got the ball, and he's going to goal. There's one defender, and the defender falls over. So instead of carrying on to kick the ball and the goal, he stops, and he picks the defender up. I was like, " That's not the plan."

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. That's a very nice example, and as you say, I mean, in all the best performing sports teams, and you get the same in music and other fields, people have to be able to be very mutually critical and very critical.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: This actually came up in a team I'm working on, again, just a couple of hours ago. Universities have a slightly strange ambivalent feeling about this. On the one hand, informal academia encourages critical peer review. The way science advances is by you put forward a theory, and then your colleagues try and knock it down as brutally as they can, and that's how progress happens. But then, in other areas of university life, there's a real anxiety about ever arguing, or criticizing, or raising uncomfortable things. So only challenge is how do we create team cultures where people feel easy saying very blunt, critical comments to each other?

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: I'm a professor. I've got knighted and all that. People are much too deferential to me, so I'm always having to persuade them and say, " I actually want you to be brutally critical to me because that'd be more useful to me than you nodding your head blandly." But it's quite difficult constructing those team cultures I think in many fields.

Dane Groeneveld: It's really difficult. I know my personal challenge in life has always been that I go out of my way to create a supportive environment for my reports. So I'm diplomatic, I coach, but I don't want them to be diplomatic with me. I want them to hit me with as much noise as they have for me to know where things are at, and that's not always a great leadership trait because I'm bimodal. I need to be able to show both.

Geoff Mulgan: Wisdom is knowing when because there may be a day when you're already struggling with other things. You don't want your reports to really give you a hard time that day, so we all have to learn the empathy of knowing what's the right register for the right moment and the right person. Some people can cope with very brutal critique, others crumble on it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah. I know you mentioned just now about the power balance of who holds the data, whether it's the corporation, whether it's the government. I know I think in one of the other conversations I heard you having in a podcast, you're talking about hoarding responsibility for innovation. We're seeing, and I would assume, with collective intelligence, more intelligence being gathered, innovation happening in the fringes. Often, that means you are bringing PhDs into the room, you're bringing government ministers, but you're also bringing everyday members of the public or business owners together. Are there any projects that you've been working on or anecdotal tips that you see that help bring people together and allow them to have a voice and to start sharing what they're seeing as they start to construct these imaginations of what they want to see happen in the future?

Geoff Mulgan: So let's take the example of net- zero, which is another one I, like many people, am very immersed in, in how does the world get to a zero carbon or even net carbon economy. I just published this week a survey of some of the states of knowledge on net- zero, part out of work we're doing with a group of governments. Now, in some ways, that's exactly like the problems of mental health or in fact, any other field, but it stretches from issues on which pretty much everyone has an opinion and a relevant knowledge. If you've gone vegan, you will have a different set of insights than someone who never has changed their diet or if you've decided to give up a car. Maybe rather difficult in California, but many parts of the world where large numbers of people have made the choice to radically change their lifestyle. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, net- zero depends on some very, very complex, sophisticated technical knowledge about how you transform manufacturing systems or the details of recycling metals and plastics, and the trade- offs of carbon. They would be absolutely duffed to try and democratize everything, have everyone taking part in those discussions. So, in almost every field of collective intelligence, the task is how do you harvest the best of that very widely dispersed knowledge and experience, but how do you not overshoot and fetishize that? So you ignore the fact that we're in a very complex societies with very complex divisions of labor which require deep specialisms, in some ways, to give those specialisms enough freedom to get on with their work and solve problems. Now, both those kinds of knowledge, in my view, can be pulled, and shared, and collectivized, and in a way, the great insight of modern science was that science advances most by being as open as possible by organized as a commons. Indeed, you only get the intellectual property protection of a pattern if you share all the knowledge with everyone in your patent submission. So this was an extraordinary breakthrough, a few hundred years ago, to realize that our collective wisdom depends on not hoarding knowledge, not trying to keep it locked into one company or one person's brain.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: Going back to your question there, therefore, some feels like... Well, care is a very good example where so much depends on lived experience, but nearly all the best policymaking now is very much co- creation with the people who will be affected by the policy. But then, other things like monetary policy or as I say, the regulation of synthetic biology, you need deep, deep expertise to do it well. So horses for courses a little bit is what collective intelligence tells us about.

Dane Groeneveld: Interesting, and that theme of co- creation, I heard you talk about learning by doing, starting small, not coming out and trying to roll out one big change, but letting maybe the specialists and the users or the people who are receiving the care or whatever it might be coming together to just trial. Are you seeing more evidence of public- private partnerships or trials, pilots within organizations when you're looking at some of these shifts?

Geoff Mulgan: Well, I mean, the whole software industry in a way shifted to some extent from 20, 30 years ago. There was all massive contracts and all designed, actually, in secret and on paper, on screens before it was implemented, and then usually went horribly wrong once it was implemented towards agile iterative learning by doing methods. I think that was entirely good for the digital world, that shift. In principle, that's how, yeah, new kinds of childcare, or elder care, or whatever should be done. That isn't always the case. Sometimes people find a nerve to do that, and one of my big issues is, really, how we embed that more in schooling as well.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: The other thing I've been working on this week is we launched a new undergraduate degree in this autumn linking engineering to social problem- solving. Now, some of that, you can learn like anything else in a classroom, and you can look at case studies and so on, but a lot of that has to be learnt by doing, by working on real- life projects on... It could be solar power in a neighborhood of London or something like that. It's by getting your hands dirty and by working in a team rather than individually. Not just a team of other students, but with other businesses and governments. That's how you learn. Yet, in schools, the typical school still, the vast majority of learning is individual, on your own, and is a knowledge transfer from a teacher which is then examed to you on your own. Completely out of sync with the working world, which is much more learning by doing, much more team- based, much more collaborative. It really depresses me sometimes how in the US and the UK, many other countries have the... In a sense, the norms of schooling seem to me more and more out of sync with what we need in the world outside and especially the world of work.

Dane Groeneveld: With the real world. Yeah. You're absolutely right. I know you talked about writing a paper for the World Economic Forum earlier, and I read their 2020 Future of Jobs report, which said by 25, such a huge skill shift towards problem- solving versus some of the technical task- based roles that have been there in the past. If that's where the world of work is going, the world of education, particularly early education has to shift. Are there any good examples? I know I've seen one coding school. It's called 01Talent out of France.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Actually, they've got a school now in London, and it's all about project- based, team- based collective learning. So you're doing these raids and tasks. It's not" Sit in an online virtual model." It's" Come and work together in different teams." Are you seeing much shift on the fringes for that type of education?

Geoff Mulgan: Well, I set up a network of schools doing exactly this called... We call them studio schools.

Dane Groeneveld: Right.

Geoff Mulgan: The idea is to go back to the idea of the Renaissance studio, the studios of Leonardo and others where work and learning were integrated. You learnt by working. You worked and learnt. We set up these schools for 13 to 18- year- olds where most of the work was done through projects, usually working with businesses, learning the maths, and English, and so on through practical work. They had then different industry links. One with space, one with construction. Our problem was our education minister was totally hostile to them. We had an education minister who's still there who believes you should teach kids Latin and stuff like that in the old way and did everything they could to crush these schools. Because they were part of the state system, it made it very, very hard for them.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Now, I'm still convinced that is the method of the future for the teenagers is more motivating, more empowering than traditional classroom pedagogy, but there's an incredible inertia in the system. As you say, some of the coding schools are quite a few in the UK, and you mentioned the one in Paris almost by definition and started with a different method. You can only learn coding by doing it. There's no point learning it in theory, but they're very, very marginal, and in most school systems, the basic methods of pedagogy are pretty much what they were a generation, two, three generations ago, and most use of EdTech is, if anything, reinforcing that very traditional knowledge- based approach rather than project- based team learning.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: I'm not saying project- based team learning is everything, but it's part of education till college. The OECD, which measures school performance around the world in the PISA rankings, does now also measure collaborative problem- solving.

Dane Groeneveld: Okay.

Geoff Mulgan: Just before Christmas, I took part in an event with the 40 education ministers of the OECD talking about all of this, and they are actually, quite a lot of them, I think somewhere ahead of their school systems in realizing the need for change.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I read a great article once that talked about today's school system being looked at perhaps as unfavorably as slavery is now looked at because... and this is a harsh view, but it was saying the school system as we know it came about in the Industrial Revolution, and one of the big things was keeping kids occupied while parents were at work. We haven't really shifted whether it was the times that children are attending school and the way that they're learning. So that was a very dark, heavy view on education. Probably unfair for all the great work that a lot of educators do, but there is an argument that we're a little bit path dependent. We've got to be thinking if the future, like you said, if the future is more problem- solving or more about wellness, mental wellness, why aren't we talking about that in our schools? Why aren't we dealing with some of those realities that these young people are going to have to face when they become adults?

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. So then, there is the containment theory of education. Literally, there were containers to take the kids while the parents were at work. Then, I think that's probably the correct view that mass education played a cultural role in teaching children discipline, turning up on time, all these things, which are quite unnatural. They're not. They are unnatural that's forced on a population.

Dane Groeneveld: They are unnatural.

Geoff Mulgan: In a sense, what we need now is an equivalent acculturation for the cultures of the mid 21st century, which are different from the late 19th century, and that's the change which hasn't really happened. Particularly in a world full of smart technologies, AI, robots, and so on, the human role changes then, becomes even more important, but we do the things that even ChatGPT can't do, which are more often going to be roles of team roles, or of care, or of compassion, or problem- solving, or wisdom. We still don't have any computers which are even close to being very wise. So, in my view, that's exactly where a fool looking at education system tries to think, " Team, what can we guess about the world of 20 or 30 years time? It's not that hard. Therefore, what will change in relation to jobs, and skills, and needs?" Now, in my last role at NESTA, we did some big studies, including in the US and the UK, looking at huge data sets of current job demand, the skills being demanded in different jobs through analyzing adverts, and then using a mixture of AI and expert groups predicting growth and shrinkage of different skills over 10 or 20 years. It might not be right, but at least it was an attempt at providing a forward look, and most forecasters you say predict a greater demand for these collaboration, problem- solving, creativity, all those sort of things. It's sectors like sports, and education, and care, and health, and often, services likely to grow in numbers over the next 10, 20, 30 years. So it makes sense you prepare kids for those areas of jobs growth.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: A project I'm just starting or restarting actually next week we're doing with Bangladesh is on exactly this. They have, it's a country of a 170 million people, a potential for automation to destroy huge numbers of jobs in textiles, furniture, other sectors. Well, they're very smart, and they're wanting to think ahead to what will be the areas of growth in the future and how do they help their population prepare for the skills and the jobs of the future to do that now, not in 10 years time. In many ways, they're a lot more, I think, on the ball than many Western governments which are probably still trying to solve the problems of today rather than thinking 10 years into the future.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes. That's a really good example of Bangladesh example. It raises two thoughts. The first thought. I'd once seen... and you've talked a lot about care today. I'd once seen an article in The Economist that said Northern Africa is a perfect place for us to be developing more nurses and institutions to look after our elderly, and it's better climate, and they've got talent there, and we can... It's a different way of reframing the problem of a shortage of healthcare workers in some larger urban centers of Europe. That article, it captured my attention because they were imagining a very different outcome that would take a lot of steps to get to. Whether it was right or wrong, it was just good to see that line of thought. Clearly, Bangladesh is doing the same because they know what the heavy manufacturing production industry that they've got, that there's a lot of uncertainty for their people if they don't give them a pathway forwards.

Geoff Mulgan: I mean, this is beginning to happen, this new global geography on health services.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: I was in Southern India in December where cities like Bangalore have really concentrated on world- class health.

Dane Groeneveld: Health tourism.

Geoff Mulgan: Full of health tourists, exactly, and much lower cost than in California. Dubai is doing it quite well, and Turkey does it in dentistry.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: This isn't so much for permanent care because often, people want to live near their kids. That's the one downside. The US is the exception where old people go to Florida to be as far away from their kids as possible. Most communalized societies, people want to be reasonably close to their kids. But for particular operations and needs, I think we may well see this completely different geography of provision.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Bangalore, for example, has some of the world's most efficient hospitals by almost any metric. They're not just lower cost, but they're also higher quality. If you can do both of those, you're onto something.

Dane Groeneveld: It is huge, and it's often seen... It's easier to design Greenfield for a more efficient new way of doing things than to change the existing infrastructure and way of doing things.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: I wonder how that, going back to education, will play out. If you do start to see these spatial shifts, does that then create an opportunity, create a university hospital to be bringing people through into different auxiliary roles? Because a lot of the way we've done work historically has been driven by the qualifications, the certifications, what we expect. But if we really open up our minds, surely, there's a way to create more inclusivity to bring people into power roles in healthcare. We're seeing it, but I think we could still see a bigger shift in that space, and probably the same is true for more efficient, more environmentally- friendly ways of manufacturing.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. I mean, this is definitely a big issue going back to what we were talking about mental health, but also net- zero where ideally, it's quite hard to really train up very, very professional face- to- face therapists, but it's much easier to train up a lot of people to a lower level, but maybe supported by technology to help them with diagnostics, and support, and therapeutic method just as we all need to train up every electrician, plumber, builder to have a much deeper knowledge of low- carbon alternatives for retrofitting homes. So I think there's much more of a continuum from the very professional with a six- year medical degree, let's say, to a parent just busking it with their kids, and there's a lot of spaces in between. We're still very stuck on a small number of options like three- year undergraduate degrees rather than breaking them up, having micro- credentials, seeing the different mixes, which might be more efficient at scale. I think that will, in turn, create opportunities rather places to become education centers. At the moment, it's still the US and UK universities that do very well in the global rankings. Your home country does pretty well, but we're beginning to see a shift as some of the Chinese, and Indian, and South American universities are certainly going up the league tables. I hope some will specialize in very different methods of learning rather than just copying the Harvards, and Oxfords, and Sydneys, and so on, which is what most are still doing.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, and micro- credentialing, I think, is a huge part of the future of teams because it also allows businesses, not just learning institutions, to start taking more of a role in education, both providing that learning environment, creating some of the courses. I mean, you're seeing a lot more user- generated content in the learning environment now for how to do this task in this industry in this location. So I'm intrigued by how that can go in the right way rather than sending people on six- week heavy theory- based courses and hoping they'll come back and implement a little bit of that.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, and as I say, a lot of my experience, I teach a lot on things like civil service colleges and government courses from China to the US and elsewhere. I still think, actually, most people learn better with knowledge they apply quite quickly rather than even the month long or six- week course, which they may love as an experience, but the truth is they don't remember much of it six months later if you haven't applied it. So they're not all that efficient. Now, one other thing. I wanted to ask you about this.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: In the schools I mentioned, we tried creating methods of mutual appraisal. So as part of the assessment process, you'd might be assessed on your exams, or by teachers, or by employers you've been working with from 14 onwards, but also, by your team.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Geoff Mulgan: To me, it's interesting. In universities, this is now standard. Like our graduate students, when they work on projects, they mutually assess each other, it's called IPAC, in quite a robust way, but it's way which doesn't happen in many businesses at all.

Dane Groeneveld: It doesn't.

Geoff Mulgan: It's strange that these methods of anonymized assessment don't happen, but they're quite good because they do stop free writing. They are good pressure to make sure teams are genuinely mutually supportive, aren't lazy and relying on someone else to do all the hard work. So my question to you was going to be, are these going to become normal in the future? What's the blockage there?

Dane Groeneveld: I love that concept. I don't think it's there now. I think it should be. I think it would be hugely impactful. You think about a sports team. You think about that academic environment that you shared, and you see the results. On a sports team, if my neighbor who's on the wing steps inside and let someone goes around him, I'm going to go and tell him, " Hey, I think you could have done this differently. Can you please do it next time for the sake of the team?" In business, and again, Eric Coryell, who I mentioned earlier, he talks about this unwritten contract, which is I won't talk about what you are doing wrong if you don't talk about what I'm doing wrong, right?

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: Which is sad, but it's so true, and that's not just at a peer level. That's going up. You look at some of the big organizations, and there's a lot of parables about, " Well, we don't talk about what's not going well because we don't want the boss to be made to look bad, which means that all of a sudden, everything changes." So I think there's a lot of inertia in business. There's a lot of happy/ glad talk around the need to improve, but not really having those tents, honest conversations that you touched on earlier.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. So one of the things I thought might be interesting for this podcast is the question about how you organize meetings. In a sense, this has been a bit of an obsession for me for a few years. Partly, in my last job, we used to host innumerable conferences, and meetings, and seminars, and discussions. At one point, I asked my colleagues, " Okay. Well, what's the science we used to design our meetings?" They didn't have much of an answer. I went to Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, asking them, " Okay. What science do you use for all the meetings you organize?" None of them can answer that question at all. So I then did a study on meeting design, which I published as part of a book called Big Mind, but I also published separately. It was partly looking at business innovations. Amazon has a very peculiar approach to meetings with written papers read in silence. At the time, I think it was Yahoo who did every meeting was 15 minutes, and others do standing meetings and so on. They were slightly random and fetishistic, but at least they were trying to rethink the meeting. So I ended up concluding there were some quite basic principles of meeting design partly to ensure you didn't get exactly the dynamics you described where everyone edits out exactly the most useful information because they fear it will disrupt the hierarchy, methods which allow the introverts to speak because often, the extroverts speak far too much. The introverts, far too little. Often, we'd stop anchoring. So the highest status person is really bored. They don't speak first because that then inhibits communication. There were lots of other fairly obvious ideas, but since publishing that, I'm still struck that the vast majority of businesses, and business conferences, and of parliaments, and all sorts of institutions do meetings without any attention, whatsoever to the science of meetings. Then, more recently, we launched a new journal on collective intelligence a few months ago with SAGE and ACM, who are two big academic publishers. There's a wonderful now sub- stream of really rigorous research on team dynamics and meetings, and what it differentiates a team which really buzzes and interacts with each other, and you can measure this bodily. You know how much people are...

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Their eyes and their blood pressure, all these things are responding to each other, and this is beginning to feed this, the science of how do you construct/ engineer meetings which are, on the one hand, better at solving problems, but also energizing where people come out thinking, " Wow, that was great," rather than, " Oh god, that was so depressing," which is what so many people experience in their meetings. I have to say, in a university, most of the meetings are far too long and really bad beyond...

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah. I think that's a problem in every industry, in every business. Like you say, there are some that have got their little formula, but one of the things that I have seen through COVID which helped is the emergence of asynchronous meetings.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: We had Kian Gohar join us. He was former director of the XPRIZE, and he's really doing a lot of work on teams being able to, particularly virtually and remotely, be high- performing. That asynchronous meeting where you put some content out and you ask people in their own time, because some people digest in 15 seconds what others will do in 15 hours, to come back and make their statements, and then you convene for a meeting later, that's a hack rather than good meeting science to your point, but we're starting to see some shifts. I still think it's about holding leaders accountable. I think leaders hold the power. They don't really want to change their ways of doing things because it disrupts the balance, and I think that's where we need to go in society and in industry is asking leaders to be more accountable for trusting the people.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, some of the COVID stuff, I think, was very good. Just the fact you could have essentially a multimedia meeting where comments in chat could be at a different pace, a different tone, responding to the verbal interactions as well as much more use of visuals and those together. I had to give lectures through the pandemic, and I found it much better having students respond in real time in chat than you could ever get in a lecture room where it would be happening.

Dane Groeneveld: They'd have to put their hand up and...

Geoff Mulgan: Exactly.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Seriously. So the collective brain was, I thought, much more dynamic during some of those online meetings than face- to- face ones that we've just reverted to previous norms. But as you say, most leaders, I think one of the reasons good meeting methods have not taken off is also actually another little bit of science, which I think is intriguing, is social network analysis in businesses. I don't know if you've discussed this at all, but again, quite a few years ago, we started doing these exercises where you take a whole field, like all the people working in, I don't know, criminal justice or education in the city. You'd map them all and ask them, " Who's helpful to you? Who do you get information from?" You'd get this real map of the network, which actually makes stuff happen, and often, that bore no relationship to the hierarchies and those roles.

Dane Groeneveld: It doesn't.

Geoff Mulgan: Businesses often found this. At the time, I thought, " Oh my god, it's obvious. This is going to become mainstream because it gives you so much insight," but it hasn't become mainstream precisely because it is threatening to those leaders who are shown to be not leading well, or maybe they're the barriers to the system thinking things through.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: Anyways. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: I'm intrigued by that in a big way, and I don't think it's just leaders because we see in organizations and societies that there are entities. So it might be a big corporation that's the top customer in the chain, it may be a dominant player in a supplier of parts environment, but they also need to be more responsible, I think, in the future for helping not only teams within businesses, but teams across society and the community.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: That leads me to my last question for you. We hear a lot about Industry 4. 0 right now, so really applying data, big data, analytics, AI to existing business models and systems, which is what I largely see Industry 4.0 as. Then, there are some great books out there talking about Industry 5.0 where we become more responsible for societal value, businesses become more responsible for societal value over economic value, and it's more about shifting the focus on employees from a welfare standpoint to a wellbeing standpoint, which ties back to some of your opening comments on mental wellness. When you talk about another world and imagination into the future, there aren't a lot of good stories, good scenarios that I'm seeing out there that talk about what that could be in 2040 or 2050. A lot of what I'm seeing is about narrow verticals. What are we doing in education, or what are we doing in environmental or carbon emissions? But is there anything out there that you're seeing that captures your attention around this Industry 5. 0 around how businesses are really taking more care for curating environments for their people, for their employees?

Geoff Mulgan: Well, okay. Lots of issues in that. I mean, first of all, on Industry 4. 0, I think what that means is different in different parts of the world. For me, what's really interesting, probably the biggest challenge for, let's say, a Californian view of things is that often, the systemic shifts to truly 4. 0 healthcare, transport, or energy where you really are making the most of data and intelligence embodied in physical things as well as in software and so on, that requires whole- system shifts where you change not just the business models, but the regulation, the law, the behavior all in tandem. Certainly, in China, that's very much how it's thought about, whereas Western companies tend to think of just doing one part of that on its own like maybe a driverless car rather than thinking in systems. I think for the next 20, 30 years, it will be fascinating in the great geopolitical struggle how these two very different visions pan out. My bet is the more holistic one may win over the classic Anglo- American capitalist model, but who knows? Time will tell. Then, on the bigger 5. 0 question, in a way, there's two different stories. If you've sway the public of the world at the moment, they say... these remarkable majorities say, " We want business to lead on solving social problems," and in one view, businesses will be held to account for not just their ecological impacts, but their health impacts, their social... My guess is though, that's not quite a plausible route because I don't think business has currently constituted shareholder, publicly- quoted companies can ever either have the skills or the structural capability to play many of those roles. What I suspect we will more see, and this is what's happened in previous periods of profound transition, is the emergence of more plurality of different kinds of institutions. So alongside capitalist businesses, maybe different kinds of entities managing data, which may be trusts, or mutuals, or co- ops. Different kinds of entities perhaps doing neighborhood energy, or food, or healthcare rather than trying to, in a sense, fit this very standardized model of the, essentially, 20th century capitalist corporation and trying to get it to do all these new tasks, which it wasn't designed to do and probably will never do very well. So I'm entirely in favor of asking businesses to be more accountable for their impacts, their externalities as economists would say it. Well, I think if you really look systemically and structurally, you shouldn't put all your eggs in that basket. You shouldn't expect too much from that. Instead, and perhaps this is a final thing to say, I've become obsessed with the need. I think the next 20 or 30 years, we need a lot of new institutional organizational design, different principles of organizational design. The US is generational too since there were any big new public entities like..., or DARPA, or Medicare. A bit the same in countries like mine. We've depended far too much on one, let's say, business ownership model. We've had slightly crazy alternatives like DAO. So coming out of...

Dane Groeneveld: DAO. Yeah. I was going to ask about that.

Geoff Mulgan: But they're not based on any very good thinking or theory of what kind of organizational model works for what task.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: So if anyone is interested, back in the summer, I published a paper on what I call the new field of organizational architecture, and there's a lot of foundations, mainly US ones now, very interested in this space and trying to think through both the principles and the practice of the new generations of institutions. Some global ones on the oceans or data. Some at the city level. Some on particular Industry 4. 0 or 5.0, not issues like the management of energy. I would love critique if anyone wants to read my paper and tell me what's wrong with it, but if I had to bet, it is that we will get... and this often happens. More of the answers will come from innovations in organizational form rather than just trying to tweak the old organizational forms through the new tasks.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a great point to end on, Geoff. I really appreciate the way you bought out there that industry 4. 0 means different things in different worlds or different parts of the world and the fact that you took that into a systemic way of looking at things, regulations, law, behaviors, and what's happening maybe out in the East, and then look at what that means for institutions in the future that help teams and communities become more effective. I think that that allows me to go away and do a lot of research, certainly cover the paper, and I'm sure it encouraged our listeners to be thinking further afield as to what are today's problems that they're stuck solving, but what could they be thinking towards, and who should they be connecting with to become more of a change agent in their own industry or in their own locality.

Geoff Mulgan: Yeah, and imagine it's 2025. You've got to create a new organization for a new task.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Geoff Mulgan: DAO, as I say, are creative and interesting, but they're completely duffed because they've learned nothing from thousands of years of human experience with the organizations. So if we can have a bit of that creativity, but allied to a little bit of better theory, and history, and understanding, then we could really get some great new innovations.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, and that's exciting. When we do get stuck in the negativity of whatever we've seen in social media or today's problems, I think it's always a really good exercise to look out into the future and say, " I'm grateful for all of these people and tools that I have available to me, and what could we do in the future?" I think that's a great way to frame it.

Geoff Mulgan: Fantastic.

Dane Groeneveld: Well, thanks a lot for your time today, Geoff. I think it's remarkable how much your body of work is touching in the world, and it is very, very relevant to future of teamwork, and to our listeners' interests, and to a lot of other spheres of life. So thanks for all that you do, and if anyone wants to find more on your body of work and services, what's the best way for them to be connecting with that material?

Geoff Mulgan: I have a website, geoffmulgan. com. Some stuff still on Twitter, @ geoffmulgan. I'm always keen to have critique and response. If you do read something, please feed back what you think is right or wrong with it. All power to you. I'm pretty convinced the future is teamwork, and it's not just my colleague's show in business how the role of teams has grown. I'm in an engineering and science department now. The scale of the role of teams in science has completely transformed science in the last 50 years where many papers are now written with a thousand authors. One had 10,000 authors.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Geoff Mulgan: This is a complete transformation of the teamification of science, which maybe you should do a program on that at one point.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I'm going to put it down. That's a great, great tip, teamification of science. We are hoping to put a book together in the future, so I'll come back and bounce some ideas around with you on a good approach to that as well.

Geoff Mulgan: Great. Thank you, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: Thanks, Geoff. Appreciate your time.

DESCRIPTION

In this episode of The Future of Teamwork, Sir Geoff Mulgan, a Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy and Social Innovation, drops by to talk about all things collective mental health, how to make positive change happen in the workplace, and what Industry 4.0 and 5.0 look like. Geoff works at University College London, and along with HUDDL3 Group CEO and show host Dane Groeneveld, he unpacks the impacts of addressing our human nature in the workplace and the effects on GDP, social relations, and more.

Today's Host

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Dane Groeneveld

|HUDDL3 Group CEO

Today's Guests

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Sir Geoff Mulgan

|Professor of Collective Intelligence, Public Policy, and Social Innovation at University College London