Indy Johar

"I think at the centre of it, is a new recognition of who we are as human beings."

In the first episode of series 2, creative studio Accept & Proceed’s founder David Johnston meets with Indy Johar, architect and co-founder of Dark Matter Laboratories.

The duo discuss Sikhism, running Dark Matter Labs, the values and rationale behind running a business in an untraditional way and reconfiguring the ‘normal’ structures that exist within a company.

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[00:00:13] Welcome back to Endless Fight Selectivity, Conversations to Inspire Radical Action. I'm David Johnston, founder of Accept and Proceed at Accept and Proceed, we believe the cross pollination of minds and ideas is vital and we can't find solutions in isolation. Connexion and collaboration are critical. Throughout this series, we will engage in wide ranging conversations with radical thinkers, artists, scientists and activists about the problems we have been given to solve. We are seeking new perspectives to reimagine our world. Today I'm talking to Endi Jowhar. Endi is the founding director of Zero Zero and Dark Matter Labs. An architect by training, he is a thought leader in system change, interested in radically redesigning the bureaucratic and institutional infrastructure of our cities, regions and towns for a more democratic, distributed great transition. I love chatting to India about radical creativity, how to drive deeply democratic society and the transformation in perspective and relationships we urgently need with ourselves and our environment. 

[00:01:30] Well, India would love to kick off by talking about your relationship to the work that you do. Was there an event early on in your life which acted as a catalyst for it's an awakening or a calling to do this work? 

[00:01:41] The nature of the work sort of comes from a very young age, I was I was born a Sikh and have grown up into the Sikh faith and Sikh and into that thesis. There is a fundamental question that actually there is. Great capacities and equitable capacities in all of humanity and the world we see around us and democracy is not just a democracy vote, but it's a democracy of how we can contribute to the making of society and not sort of as a thesis, as being an underlying belief that actually we have to create a new invitation for all of humanity and beyond to be involved with making the society, the world that we are part of. 

[00:02:39] And there was a kind of a young as a young boy for me that was very much in existence of how I my relationship with my friends, I saw the incredible loss silk that I wanted that to be recognised by everyone else around them. 

[00:02:55] And that has manifested in a very particular way of how whether there's a you know, we have been very focussed on the idea of how do you democratise the capacity of building society around us, whether it's a built environment or buildings or whether it's actually a public space or on new types of institutions, the democratisation of that capability to build societies. Fundamentally, the question that we've been interested in, and I think it's part of the long heart, in a way, if you would argue that we are no longer the arc of justice is both long and bends to it towards. I think I think that possibly the question have been really interested in and I fundamentally believe in and I would say that is the kind of destiny, if there is a destiny, that humanity is to operationalise that arc. And I think technologies and other mechanisms are in are creating the conditions to create that environment. And I think that's what's been motivating me. And that's been kind of, in a way, the centrepiece of all our designs and work that we've done has been focussed on that kind of understanding and one of the kind of different layers and situations that drug understanding about sits in a kind of new recognition of a kind of model of the world has been constructed around seeing humans as units of labour, command and control know you've all seen the paradigm of a paradigm, but the kind of. The meme that's going around of of a young architects sitting in front of the computer and more, quote unquote, senior architect standing behind them, going left of it right to their right, to the left of it. And in a way that. 

[00:04:55] That perfectly illustrates a systemic challenge of society where we are moving into a future which is going to be driven by creativity to complex cognition, yet we're deploying models of management, which are both from the 19th Industrial Society of Control, where actually one person perceives that they can understand all the situational reality of another person to give control decisions. And I think that's a fundamental misunderstanding of being human and the kind of incredible capacity of of every human being in the world, which is more powerful than any general artificial intelligence that's ever been created. There's likely to be crisis for the next 40, 50, maybe even 100 years. 

[00:05:46] So I think there's just a you know, we're in the middle of this transition. 

[00:05:51] And I think I think our language, all mechanisms are all locked into very old institutional ideas of power, control, centralisation. And the creative field is actually perhaps even the worst in some of that stuff where ego and power becomes massively centralised in what is increasingly a complex and tangled world. 

[00:06:14] And actually, we need a whole new operational theory. 

[00:06:20] Absolutely. Yeah. And I think creativity, I hope, has got a large part to play in a positive future. You mentioned that you were raised a Sikh. How does your your kind of practising of your religion affect your work on a daily basis now? 

[00:06:37] For me, it's me, Sikhism, as the thesis that you can see the incredible beauty or capability of everyone. 

[00:06:52] So Sikhism doesn't define by others and somebody asked me, who's the best Sikh I know? 

[00:06:58] And the best you can do is pull cardinal. It was a Catholic because his brother is an incredible human being. So it's not it's a definition of how we see ourselves in the world. Different relationship to the world. And I think that for me is how it defined me in trying to find a new way to drive this kind of democracy of agency and deep respect of everyone being your your equal and beyond your equal, because they're chontosh and contextually the right of the right person to lead. So I think for me it transforms. And it wasn't just me, it was also tax my colleague fundraiser's. Or, you know, there was an alignment that actually if you wanted to be a new type of organisation, we have to live a different type of values. And if we genuinely believed the world was complex and imagined, then you have to create an organisation which wasn't a foundation founded on, you know, the ego of the founders. But actually the role was to create an infrastructure for a whole bunch, a whole group of and innovators to be able to do what they do best. So and that requires new power, new relationships, new kind of compensation. Because since all the way through because I think that's a different way of organising for radical creativity. And I think that doesn't just stop at the scale of organisation. I think the big question is that there's a challenge it throws for all of society, because I think a society is not geared for an age of creativity, care and cognition. I think that's the big transition in the middle. So I think it manifests the Sikhism for me as it manifests in my decisions of actually how to drive a democratic, deeply democratic society as opposed to one predicated on the basis of those. Moku. 

[00:08:52] Absolutely. I mean, that resonates with me hugely. I think that having been on quite a journey, running a business myself over the last 14 years, and probably that being a process of detaching my ego from the business completely and now seeing that it can be so much more than just the perpetual growth of revenue and headcounts and actually seeing that we can have majorly positive impact if we rethink that. 

[00:09:17] What we exist for has been certainly a journey I've been on. In terms of your journey, it's been fascinating to this point starting out in architecture and now you advise governments with multiple points in between. It's been very much a journey of learning by doing. Can you talk about this experience a little? 

[00:09:35] Yeah, I mean, for me, this whole journey has been about. 

[00:09:40] And we started by we I trained as an architect, I sort of came out of architecture and worked on fantastic architectural studio with General Basad of the back that recognise that there were other things that we wanted to do. We recognise that the field of architecture was constructed was increasingly narrowed to the thesis of just making a building, not the goal, not the services and the contacts that make buildings either. 

[00:10:16] You know, we sort of certainly my experience where we were building six, rebuilding 1960 boxes with shiny materials, not necessarily dramatically changing either outcomes or services. And that sort of pushed me to sort of expand the conversation, ended up working with demos in the UK, and this was in 2004, five with a with some wonderful people, including Muslimeen and various other people. But that gave me an unconventional policy of thought. We collaborated. We realised that you would be able to you wouldn't be commissioned for radical innovation because commissioning is an act of understanding and commissioning is largely in fact, historically has been in many ways has been. 

[00:11:00] It's a commissioning of what you do. So you're going to be commissioning what you know. It's very difficult to commission for discovery and most people don't commission the discovery. 

[00:11:10] So we ended up doing the Bristol Beach with demos where we turned around and built a Brazilian beach physically on site. And we were the commissioners and the entrepreneurs behind it with demos. And then of the back of that, we turned around, you know, got involved with the impact of network and office and various other people and helping build the impact of on building up themselves and Merrilee and off the back of our site to learn how to operationalise these sort of realities. Then built, you know, we were setting up Wiki House, which is open source housing sort of institution, which has got chapters around the world. Then it opened as an open source venture company and then helped build to social structures. So we've been slowly doing is using what we know and building the next, building the next, and then from building social investment structures where you could have one of my big realisations, that we need a different thesis on the future in terms of looking at the world that we saw in the products that we were making were undermined by some of the decoding society. So the idea of property rights or how we create quality assurance, these things were constructing the world around us, these deep coatless. And that's basically where we thought there was a whole bunch of innovation and thinking and design redesign work that's required. We built that matter so much. Our journey has been very much about doing things, learning, understanding the next obstacle and building that and then understanding the next one and addressing that. So it's kind of obvious this change. And my biggest experience has been that actually it is important the craft as everything is your ability to craft and learn in context, to differentiates everything and the privilege of having the capacity to have access to those relationships. And you can see all the opportunities. 

[00:13:07] So I was deeply privileged to be part of the impact of that work building that in 2009. What about sort of four, four, five to 2015, 16, 10 years with the experience of being part of it was just extraordinary because it also meant that when you ended up building automats, we were able to build a global institution with 40 of us all around the world and build a kind of decentralised, distributed network studio in a way that was that was relatively easy because I had learnt so much about what does work and doesn't work and the role of kind of hosting and what sort of energy has to support different organisations and what the challenges are. 

[00:13:47] So I think the number one side is the privilege of learning and context, the privilege of actually then looking for the anomalies that actually resistant and building for footway must be a lot larger. My journey today. 

[00:14:00] I'd love to talk a bit more about dark matter. 

[00:14:04] I think something that you that you said earlier when we were talking about the values and the rationale behind actually running a business reminded me of a quote that I found very inspiring recently by a philosopher called I may pronounce this incorrectly, but I think it's Yasuhiko Kimera who says that business is a creative and therefore spiritual endeavour. 

[00:14:26] Great entrepreneurs into the field of business in the same way that great artists went to the field of arts with their business creation, entrepreneurs express their spiritual desire for self realisation, evolutionary passion for self-fulfilment and creative vision of a new world. The entrepreneurs business is their artwork. The creation of the business is as creative as any creation of art. In fact, building a business may be the most creative human activity. And for me that was incredibly inspiring because having, you know, creative backgrounds, I always felt that I was I suppose I devalued part of the bits that I had to do around, actually, you know, the kind of administrative parts of running my business. But as soon as I saw it as one big piece of art, it suddenly unlocked a whole new way of thinking about it. Have you got any thoughts on that? 

[00:15:16] Yeah. I mean, there's lots to sort of. Say about that, because I think you're right, there's. 

[00:15:27] I think if we're going to produce a different world and make different contributions to that world, we will have to change our tools and mechanisms of producing that change. And I would say our organisational models of these are fundamentally locked into old paradigms, whether it's kind of an employment contract. An employment contract is, you know, is qualifying a kind of thesis of slavery where you you give away your time for a certain amount of time and the outputs of that time and you reduce your ability to speak. You know, you get rid of your freedom of speech and you subsume it to an employer in a basis in exchange for money that you need to survive. 

[00:16:17] So, I mean, I think if you look at the constructs that many businesses work very hard to manage themselves out of it, so, you know, everyone will say, you know, the employees and our employees are our number one assets. 

[00:16:34] Then if you say show me on the balance sheet where employees are and it's very clear employees are an overhead on a business. So I agree with you. 

[00:16:46] I think the question that I think I have is that the redesign the organisation as we have it, I think is a fundamental challenge we all face is we have to redesign it. And it's a bit like you, you're flying a plane and you're baking at the same time. That's the real problem. I think many of us are facing, you know, a simultaneous lack of. Operationalising a different way of doing it, so we're trying to constantly sort of involve ourselves, so, for example, you know, in a decentralised organisation which isn't based on a model of control, how do you build accountability? How do you build how do you build Decision-Making structures? How do you build how do you know? How do you create mentoring structures which aren't about soft power in the system? So how do you avoid structural flaws in those sort of decentralised, decentralised models? How do you build equity and justice when some people are working massively hard and some people are working hours? So what are the new relationships that we want to each other? So and how do you do that over a situation where everyone's working from home and also working on laptops, working different hours, you know, looking after kids and grandparents and other things. 

[00:18:06] So the design of an organisation inherently is, I think, really, really important. Probably one of my strategic investments that we do. The question I think I'm always sitting with is that the investment that we make into the operationalisation studios is often and we invest probably more in. 

[00:18:26] Fancy buildings and and all used to control things and sort nice furniture I symbols, but actually very little in the kind of organisational models and theories of how we operationalise ourselves. 

[00:18:40] And often we're so caught by very 19th century paradigms of ego and control. 

[00:18:46] So I think you're right that the challenge that I think is that we have to do this simultaneously, simultaneously between the making of things that we do, as well as actually changing and building the plane as we do it. And that is that that is a tough act. 

[00:19:02] It certainly is, absolutely, I would love to get your take on our living business plan at some point system I mentioned previously, whereby we've developed, I suppose, is borrowing from the metaphor of ecosystems, so interdependent themes which all relate to each other and allow us to really focus on balancing each individual aspect of our business to keep Itzik our ecosystem healthy. So we've identified nine key elements within our business ecosystem that are crucial to our studios long term business strategy. So things like birth and death and influence and enlightenment and income, of course, which is a crucial one based in the current systems that we live within, but only one of nine within our system, along with art and love and excellence and earth. So it's really this idea that ongoing on a daily basis, we're actually monitoring how we're achieving, you know, objectives that underpin those themes. But but I'd really like to get into the genesis of your lab dark matter, which focuses on working to transition society in response to technological revolution and climate breakdown. How did it come into being? 

[00:20:18] Like I said, I think we came into being very much on the basis that we were building open source furniture, we were looking at open source housing and doing that, and we were looking at social investment structures. 

[00:20:32] And we started to realise that actually behind the visible forms and products and services that we see around us, there is a whole institutional economy, logics and structures which are coded and which are actually the they are they implied they create the implied order of the world we see around us. 

[00:20:54] And unless any form of deconditioned climate change itself is this is a symptom. 

[00:21:03] Of a much deeper failure, climate change itself is not it is not the source of the problem. Fixing climate change won't fix the world. Climate change is a symptom of a failure. The failure of the more fundamentally is a failure of our ability to govern ourselves in a complex, imagined world and decentralised world, increasingly a multipolar world. And we don't know how to govern. And by governance, I mean that actually, whether it's climate change, which is externalities of CO2, whether it's plastics and pollution into our food supply chain, or whether it's effectively inequality, whether it's biodiversity losses or whether it's any of these big issues that we've got, which is to realise that these are fundamentally linked to a thesis of how we govern ourselves and also fundamentally linked to a thesis of how we understand ourselves. So if you're going to reimagine how we govern ourselves, we have to start to challenge fundamental sort of hypotheses. The first one is, you know, humans are rational economic instruments. So if I can incentivise you with money and that's the mechanism of organising humans at the same time, actually, I can. I can. So we humans are driven through external incentives. And that's one way of seeing the world. And humans are actually not a good or bad. They just are incentive systems. That's one model. 

[00:22:36] But actually the data shows that's not necessarily true. We know that a certain economic point actually money as a as a financial motivation is a very poor way to actually money is the motivation for complex High-Performance collective cognitive function, the very core motivation. So what you start to realise is that there are money is an incentive to a very poor old fashioned economy isn't necessarily an incentive to a modern twenty first century kind of idea of human development. Will you very quickly start to understand that it's not just money, it's even off pieces of what it means to be human is largely outdated. So our thesis of being human is is constructed on the idea that we are separate from nature. 

[00:23:22] We are we have dominion over nature and we have control over nature for separation, dominion and control as a language and a philosophical structure has was kind of at the root of how we saw the world in kind of the enlightenment root, of how we started to see the world through the Enlightenment and that separation, dominion and control language, thereby then permeated through our institutions. The reality is we are not a separate but deeply entangled as all the science is telling us, whether at the quantum level or biological level, we are deeply entangled with our world around us where, you know, and the thesis of actually whether we have control or whether we can treat you with is probably up to challenge. And actually we have to cohabit this landscape if we're going to survive. So what you have is a foundational challenge happening to our cells, our relationships, to the world and our relationships, both to nature, our relationship to the future, which is not colonising the future, but actually bringing in respectful cohabitation for other people's rights and top features, as well as future generations that also have futures, but also looking at the kind of our relationship with things. So not being actually consumers of things and holders of things, but being stewards of the kind of designed world itself and then being in a new relationship to ourselves and the people around us, which is kind of new organisational theory. So when you start to put all that stuff together, what you start to realise, and certainly from our perspective, that we're in a deep structural transition and that structural transition is about re embracing a brief, embracing and recognising the incoherence in our current real relationship with the world around us and recognising that some of the transition and that of scaffolding that both in terms of culturally, in terms of how we govern, how we contract, how we organise, I think is going to be the big revolution that we'll see around us. And the work that we're doing is largely focussed into those areas, whether it's kind of micro treaties, looking at new contracts with nature, new ways of supernatural assets and natural infrastructures. So looking at how we reconstruct, conceptualise and structured, these realities becomes vital. And and our work, whether it's that or whether it's looking at how you practically do, you know, sort of a new idea of housing. 

[00:25:57] In many ways, perspective is central to this transformation, right? 

[00:26:01] Yeah. And perspective, and this is why I said the culture work is critical. 

[00:26:07] So this is why I think we have to rebuild our perspective, our relationship of you to the world and our relationship of ourselves, but also our relationship with the things, the environment around us. And that transformation of perspective is foundation. And I think that's where questions have a real critical role to play, to challenge the orthodoxy of the vision that we create in the relationship that we create with things. 

[00:26:34] And that, I think, is a really powerful vein of gold in there about new ways of looking about which I think will be critical. 

[00:26:41] And how do you think the politics of fear have impacted our ability to have a deeper engagement with our planet? 

[00:26:47] The politics of fear designed I mean, the politics there is a designed and because and I would say that the question is what is the leadership? 

[00:26:59] So are we are we carriers and containment mechanisms for fear or are we something more? 

[00:27:05] So I think fear is a construct of of our economic thesis and our geopolitical relationships that extend around that. 

[00:27:13] So I would say that we have constructed an economic environment which is about precariousness and making sure people live in precariousness, not precariousness, must be build a foundation for that and build a foundation for reception to to all sorts of instruments of being hyper, hyper vigilant to threats and to fear reactions. 

[00:27:40] But also trying to short-termism as well, both in terms of how we see the world and operationalise into it and also thereby creates a you need to fix our precariousness with emotional goods which effectively puch are are our vulnerabilities. 

[00:27:58] And so what we have is an economy and a labour market basis and which are driven through an economy of fear. So we know chocolate buying, for example, goes up in recessions. We know, you know, whether it's kind of fast fashion goes up in recessions. So we know there's a very particular economy geared to a thesis affair and a thesis of short termism. And I think that's the real structural challenge. So I think it's becoming aware of this kind of social neurological context for certain societal level, social or neurological decision making, and then the economies that we create as a result of it. Those are those are massive dependencies. The data is increasingly there. The question is, do we have the Decision-Making capacity and the leadership to look at that and what what those mechanisms are available? 

[00:28:52] Yeah, I mean, it sounds like one of the first steps is really recognising our entanglements in these structures and governance and then building more accountability, right? 

[00:29:01] Yeah, I would agree. It is really important that we that we become conscious of this reality. But even I think it's there's what I'd call a consciousness that about half of the podcast like this versus a consciousness that happens in an everyday reality. I think there's one level of interest in doing these sort of conditions, but then there's another type of consciousness that we have to dance every day. 

[00:29:28] Reality becoming aware of those entanglements and a much deeper level, and it feels like movements that are emerging like extinction, rebellion, for example, in season one, we spoke to one of the founders, Claire Farel. They seem to be tapping into something that is kind of almost waiting to be burst in that respect. 

[00:29:46] Yeah, I mean, I think we've got many, many movements around the world in Central America, the incredible one as well. 

[00:29:52] And I think I I think this is a structural transition. 

[00:30:00] I kind of keep saying I think this is not the world. I don't believe this will be achieved through protest. I think this requires. Sort of not just a fight against the old, but an actual proposition of the new. And the proposition of the new is not that decarbonise, that's, again, a fight against the old, it's recognising systemically we need a new relationship with the world around us and then building that with a propositional vision. 

[00:30:37] I think we're starting to see some of that language in some of those frameworks. And I think that will create the politics of the pathways of our future. And I think that's one of the key role, the provocative agents of creativity is to to challenge those positions and to open them up and to drive the optimisation different forward. 

[00:30:57] Yes, absolutely. And for me, this connects to censoring empathy and enabling richer discussions which challenge the states in the system. How do you think we can go about that? 

[00:31:08] Well, I mean, I think empathy is a really powerful tool, but also a tool of it's a dog pattern as well. 

[00:31:17] And empathy can be used. 

[00:31:22] InDesign, when we use empathy to what ends up we deploying it to its purpose, to which transference of power, to which, to which end, and I suppose I say that is that empathy in itself is a tool and it can be used for good and bad things. 

[00:31:44] In fact, I think it creates I'm very wary of both of those tools because they create they are currently badly governed and they create transfers of power in a way that we don't understand and operationalise and can't manage. 

[00:32:08] So I agree. I think the sort of advanced forms of relationship are really critical. I think it's also very vital. And we as leaders, I think we have to be very careful as to when and how we deploy them, what the ethics and morality of deploying those tools are. 

[00:32:26] You know, there's that kind of classic moment where somebody you know, you've probably been in organisations which are highly hosted or sort of, you know, led by imports. And they will go, how are you? All right. I know how I am, really. How are you? And the third point, you'll tell them something you say, well, you know, feel a bit further. 

[00:32:48] And they become you know, they they are empowered through your telling of what you feel. 

[00:32:56] And then they go forth and tell somebody else. And while you have people in the organisation are really happy about this. 

[00:33:03] So this kind of this kind of empathetic extraction to create new power, not in organisations, I think is also problematic. 

[00:33:14] And and and so how do you do that? What does that mean? Is that person, you know, is there a saviour sort of complex going on there which has its own insidiousness and into its own problem? And I've seen many organisations get corrupted by exactly that thesis, a it to save your relationship and powers. A series of them actually talk to people who believe they understand the problem, but perhaps they do. Perhaps they don't. 

[00:33:41] And so so I suppose I'm just putting an arc on this conversation that I think we have to be careful of. These tools are very powerful tools with huge social effects and drive huge amounts of ego central them as well. 

[00:33:56] Yes, yes. I mean, it's a very tricky subject there. I mean, an impact leader. I wonder if I consider myself to to be one. It's quite complicated to even be able to interrogate your own authenticity on certain subjects in India. I'm really interested to know, you know, from your perspective, what does leadership look like in a more interdependent world? 

[00:34:17] Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest thing I can say, and I think it's it's quite challenging is firstly, I think leadership recognises that everything is leadership post office space. 

[00:34:32] It's that leadership is not sitting on top of other people. It's recognising that everyone operating in the organisation is a leader in their context of their situation. And I think that's a really, really important point. So I sometimes talk of the kind of pieces of leadership which still falls back into hierarchical languages. 

[00:34:55] And so that's one thing. The second thing I think leadership is, is it is what I would call a dynamic role. 

[00:35:04] Sometimes you're leading, sometimes you're serving, sort of provoking all sorts of things which are different relationships to that future. 

[00:35:13] So I suppose I would just frame it through that lens. 

[00:35:17] Or I think if you want to look at I would say the real power of a leader is to support the learning development function of the nation. I think in the central future, organisations will be learning development functions as opposed to command and control functions. And I think that will be the real transition pieces of future organisations. 

[00:35:37] So, you know, how do you think we can create new ways of organising that can unlock everyone's capabilities? 

[00:35:43] I think it starts by respecting that knowledge, design and creativity is contextual. So I think that's one thing. I think it sort of starts with that reality, and I think it also starts with actually the second part that's become very clear to me is that I've seen so many, quote unquote, mediocre people who have been given great context to learn in five, six years become almost world class. 

[00:36:23] At the same time, I've seen some great people we thought were world class, sitting in very exalted chairs of power who have lost their roles, look very mediocre very quickly. So what you start to realise is that actually it is your privilege to be in relationship with context that gives you your power and your recognition and your comprehension and your capabilities. 

[00:36:53] And so I think that's a really key point. I think there's a humility that that brings that is not my brilliance or your brilliance, just just the privilege that we have to be able to experience things and learn things that puts us in many of these places. 

[00:37:08] So I would say that probably those are some of the key points for me. 

[00:37:12] Thank you. Yeah, I mean, beautifully put. You know, I've got a I've got a further question on behalf of the business owners like myself amongst our audience, as so many of these symptoms are desperately needing reconfiguration. How do you manage those realities and their urgency as a company? 

[00:37:32] Yeah, it's it's challenging. I think the reality is we I mean, I often slightly worried that people say, you know, I do this to earn a living and I do this to do good. 

[00:37:45] And I was like, well, what does that really mean? I think these offset business models are just not real. 

[00:37:53] I think that they're kind of deeply. Certainly now, right? 

[00:38:00] I think that's like, you know, flogging a dead horse alongside and trying to say, well, I've got just enough meat so that I can carry on planting the vegetables on the outside. I think it's it's an excellent I think what we're talking about is probably the largest transition of society that we've we've certainly witnessed in our lifespans. I suspect it's many, many generations before us as well. So globally, we're going to see a massive transition. So for leaders in business, my number one thing would be there's a new coherence to it. And that new leadership demanded a new capabilities, demanded new veterans describe and provoke that world to being. I think there's more work than anyone can ever imagine. I think in the opinion work and I think this idea that we must work to persist, the old economy, I think everything has to transition and it will transition very quickly. So I suppose I would be challenging all over all of the leaders that you have on your podcast to be talking about much more structural transition and a deeper sense if they're going to remain relevant or as we're going to see, are we going to see a great dying out of organisations that can't transition? And that's also likely. And. 

[00:39:21] And as designers and creatives, how do you think we can better support this transition to a better world? 

[00:39:27] Well, from from my side, I think designers synthesis, they synthesise things and I think and they also make things possible and plausible. 

[00:39:39] They get things for elegance and for. 

[00:39:44] So I think one of the big roles of design is to is to show them plausible and the possible. And that, I think, is really critical and also to stop the child pathways into that future and build out, so I would say designers have a key role in visualising that future, but also making it plausible, because I think this will be a journey of discovery and design as opposed to management and execution and to the wonderful need and requirement for this to be designed as opposed to execution. And that will need to be an exploratory journey. But I think the limits of the capacity and the capability that needs to be able to paint the pictures and talk about the need to create sets over that period, I think that's the key, the key story. 

[00:40:38] And can you share any smaller, everyday actions that people could take to lay the foundations for a more positive world? 

[00:40:45] I think it's manifest in every one of your relationships. 

[00:40:52] Markussen Everywhere you organised the business, it manifests in how you pay your staff. So what is your reward mechanism? 

[00:41:04] It manifest in every one of those relationships of. 

[00:41:11] Are you learning development organisation at root? So I think the first thing I'd say is that look at the organisational behaviours and structures, because I think that there's massive opportunity for transformation in that that are, you know, every root and cause that will that will ripple out into everything you make designed afterwards. The second thing I would say is that I think we're moving away from from design being based on fields or architecture communication, but actually much more around design being based on sort of polymathic design and sort of the intersection across these fields. And that, I think becomes more and more critical as we start to chart these new territories. And I think there's a you know, I think some people call it strategic design and things like that. But I think there is a there's a field of hybrid design which is emerging, which I think is going to be very critical to the future. So I would look at some of those things and I would also, you know, become I think we're seeing it and we certainly see at the end as a studio, we all don't match up with our studio. We've got codas data scientists, designers, anthropologists, lawyers, the lawyers on the team recently. You know, we've got to the hybridity capabilities in the team is critical to doing the design work that we do. So it also requires financially different capabilities to a traditional design studio, which is for a lot of designers and potentially a few coders or one or two sort of girls like mine. So I think what we've found is we have to build new capabilities into organisation as well as that transition. And finally, I think the nature of the work is changing. I think for us that's largely about working at scale, looking at designing new financial models and new financial institutions and getting into the actual legal technical design of these infrastructures, which is really critical. So I think from my work, you know, designing redesign property rights over property, property rights and how they're bundled is a full system problem, both from the legal documentation to your access to new economy solutions and looking at the system level response to the strategic growth process design in terms of the nature of of your work changing that you mentioned there at dark matter. 

[00:44:01] And I mean, we're all on a on a journey, I suppose, and have a certain direction of travel. But do you ever find yourself compromised, you know, making decisions based on commerciality versus, you know, what you intend to do more of in the future? 

[00:44:17] We don't tend to RFP for jobs, so we're not going for jobs. 

[00:44:22] What we're largely doing is doing the work that we want to do and then other people join us on the journey. And that's kind of almost the business model we've set ourselves out from. And once you start down that route, you know, we write a lot on top of provocation. People, devout or medium people find those ventures to work with us and we collaborate to build some of these micro institutions with them and learn and develop over that time. So in a way, we're not operating from the typical thesis I'm getting from work. Well, the offices of creating a hypothesis of what the world looks like and people coming to us on the basis of that and the expressions that we're doing and the line that we have and then developing further. 

[00:45:12] And in terms of the way that you run dark matter, I'm intrigued. So as part of our Enlightenments theme that I mentioned within the living business plan, we do a lot of things as a team that we never did, you know, four years ago. 

[00:45:24] So we every month have a breathing workshop, for example, which we've been doing remotely during lockdown. But we also just we kind of do things as a team which help us explore what it means to truly be a human, whether it be movement or kind of nutrition or all manner of different things that we're exploring. 

[00:45:43] And but what are the metrics do you build into dark matter is as an organisation that maybe are against the kind of accepted norms or traditional ways of running a business? 

[00:45:57] Well, with that's quite a few. But I mean, the ones that you cited are really great. I'd love to hear more about them. So so, for example, we tend not to. You individual project based accounting and microlevel profit profit loss sheet that we can avoid, and that's largely because what we're trying not to do is create create scarcity models of how we design and not create scarcity based context for design innovation. 

[00:46:31] So that, I think, is one key component. 

[00:46:36] Secondly, I think we do all the stuff that probably not normally that we do in terms of actually we're completely decentralised organisation. So before covid, we were meeting every quarterly so welcome quarterly to every three every four months where we would and everyone would come together from around the world, physically echolocate for a week, which is all about sharing, learning. So learning at the centre of the organisation that's supposed to control that means it's a fundamentally different process. We have even our organisational development lead, a traditional chief operating officer or whatever that you would say is actually learning. It's learning orientated role as the administration role or pay structures are based on. You know, our pay differential between the highest and lowest paid employees is nothing more than two. So we have a completely different pay structure based on experience after after 18 years old, which means that actually plus plus the next factorial. That's a mechanism to not differentiate people on the basis of sort of a quota. But it's based on the idea that we're trying to give people like a tenured professor, sort of a personalised basic income that allows people to live the lives that they want to live around the world. So we're trying to build new pay structures. We're trying to do different ways of operationalising. That probably gives you a bit of a feel for some of the stuff that we're doing. 

[00:48:25] It does. It does. Well, as you asked about it, the I can tell you a little bit about the things that we're doing within the the living business plan, two of our themes of birth. 

[00:48:37] So birth is really around this idea that we encourage a steady rhythm of new non-commercial initiatives to begin within the organisation. But but part of that is just is just kind of newness within our organisation. So the objective that sits under bus or one of them is to do something new as a team every month. For example, last month we did Shaolin Kung Fu in Towns Park here in Hackney as a team, which was really interesting. And we learnt from an expert, a Shaolin Kung Fu master, around not just the movement, but the way that you can kind of observe the energy with your own body. And he also went into breathing. But then also within that theme, we also have passion projects, I suppose, art based projects that we initiate every every three months. So we've got four year of those. And then the other the other thing that relates to this is enlightenment. So so this idea that, you know, I suppose when we were brainstorming the themes of our living business plan, enlightenment was more associated with education. But we didn't think that that captured enough of what we want to really explore as a team. So what we do is make moments of enlightenment possible for everyone in the team by exploring the fundamentals of what it means to be a human. And of course, we know those things like breathing and eating and moving and loving. You know, these are all parts of the fundamental human experience. So so part of it is, I'll be honest around enlightenment is things like training. So people learning after effects or accountancy packages, project management packages, all sorts within that objective. Well, that theme, but also nourishment or wellness. And in that vein, actually, almost a year ago now, we started doing breathing workshops as a team. The first few were in person with an organisation called Breathe Pods, and they were very, very powerful. I, up until that point, had never really practised intentional breathing. And as a group, we you know, we went through an experience. It was about two hours long. And at the end of it, some people looked like they were distraught. You know, some people had unlocked lots of emotion. Some people looked like they'd done very, very good drugs. And other people just looked a bit dazed and confused. But whatever happened that day, it was the beginning of a sharing something that is not the normal experience of the day to day of being in a studio together. And that's something we've continued to do. And personally, I found the practise of breathing and exploring the different ways that you can you can kind of affect so profoundly your own mental state and emotional states through breathing. It's be incredibly enlightening. 

[00:51:15] Amazing. So good to hear. 

[00:51:18] I mean, it's so good to have you have a great experience that you've had and it takes a lot of care to do all that stuff. I mean, it's easy just to have put down a checklist, but the care it takes to be able to execute that stuff is questionable. 

[00:51:34] Thank you, Andy. That's very kind of you to say. I suppose I suppose my my final question for you, because we've covered a lot of ground, but indeed, if we can work together to realise our interdependence and build new systems which recognise everyone's potential, which I truly hope we can, what comes next? 

[00:51:54] So I try to resist asking that question because I think I think it's something beyond our imagination, things, you know, I think there's a degree of the certainty myself. 

[00:52:09] I think we've been born in a world of competition. And if we can create a conditions, this is why I think, you know, universal basic income is really interesting because a great decentralised, autonomous and decentralised. Sovereignty, in a way, and sovereignty allows us to then become aware of our interdependence is not through a thesis of of competition, but through a piece of care. And actually so I think that transition will unlock things in human civilisation that we've not been able to unlock. I think it's a paradigm shift in human civilisation to make that claim. I would. And and I think it opens up worlds that we cannot imagine. You know, I think it's been you we've seen glimpses of it. You know, I think some of the work that's happening, the speed that the human civilisation is because the vaccine is based on massive global collaboration at a scale that we've never witnessed before, but we've never witnessed before. 

[00:53:23] I think we're just at the beginning of that. And I think that was just an example of that story. So I think there's a great capacity for human civilisation to transcend itself in a way that we've never imagined. 

[00:53:34] I suppose I don't want to sit here and draw a picture of flying cars and and and shiny skyscrapers, because I think it will be a different type of world where we actually live in quite a different relationship, both to the future, to nature, to the things that we have around us and to each other. And I think and at the centre is a new recognition of who we are as human beings. The rest of it will be the the implicate order that has formed from those relationships. 

[00:54:04] Indeed. I just want to say thank you. You know, it's been a fascinating conversation. And on behalf of our audience, it's a great pleasure to have this conversation with you. And thank you for your time. 

[00:54:15] Not at all. It's a real pleasure. And thank you for inviting me to be part of this conversation. I really appreciate it. 

[00:54:21] Thanks for listening to our conversation today. I hope you find in these words work and outlook is inspiring, as I do. Endless vital activity is brought to you by accept and proceed to remember, creativity can reimagine our worlds.