We exist in time where change is constant, and there is no going back. But just how radically improved will the new world of work be due to what we have experienced from a global pandemic? Gary Burt provides perspective on the "Future of Work"; the future workplace, how people will do their work, and the socio-cultural, economic, political, and technological implications.
Creativity Without Frontiers available at all relevant book retailers
Stay in touch with Unknown Origins
Music by Iain Mutch
We exist in time where change is constant, and there is no going back. But just how radically improved will the new world of work be due to what we have experienced from a global pandemic? Gary Burt provides perspective on the "Future of Work"; the future workplace, how people will do their work, and the socio-cultural, economic, political, and technological implications.
Creativity Without Frontiers available at all relevant book retailers
Stay in touch with Unknown Origins
Music by Iain Mutch
Hello, I'm Roy Sharples, and welcome to the unknown origins podcast. Why are you listening to this podcast? Are you an industry expert? Looking for insights? are you growing your career? Or are you a dear friend helping this four year old pile on? I created the unknown origins podcast, to have the most inspiring conversations with creative industry personalities, and experts about entrepreneurship, pop culture, art, music, film, and fashion. Here we stand at the beginning of January 2021. at a time, right for putting new bold dreams into action. I'm joined with erudite and culture, Gary Burt, to discuss the future of work, where we will explore the front of main topics about the workplace of the future, how people will do that work. And the socio cultural, economic, political, and technological implications. We exist in time for change is constant, and there's no going back. But just how radically improved will the world of work be due to what we have just came through and experienced from a global pandemic; that is COVID-19? Welcome Gary Burt!
Gary Burt:Really good to be back.
Roy Sharples:How has the global pandemic impacted? How work is done? What changes has this brought? And are these changes sustainable?
Gary Burt:Wow, a lot of questions. So I guess, you know, if I start with myself, so for me, this, there's not been a huge amount of impact. So what's happened is, you know, I used to be able to work remotely and different, different jobs over the last few years and different roles, that sort of moved on a continuum between, you know, in the office, sometimes in the office less traveling more, but there's always been an element of working from home. So what's happened is the slide has just gone right up. And it's working from home full time. But it has changed work. I think, to me, one of the things was in the early part of COVID. So from the march to July, what happened was most of the people who were working remotely, were finding themselves really getting burnt out, they were doing many more hours, they were really committed to the job, they were focusing on really trying to keep things going. And it was really hurting. So I think one of the things that I saw as a change over the period was a very definite shift in the after the summer holiday. So as we went into September, we saw a really big shift, because what we saw is we saw almost a higher level of maturity. And certainly at my org, my company, my organization, they were there was a real recognition that we had to learn and evolve from the way we've been doing things. So we've started to make some changes, just not just around welfare, but around working practices to encourage people to lock time out in that day, so they weren't doing these ridiculously long hours, particularly in a global organization, where you're trying to meet calls it you know, other ends of the world. So we I think in the second half of the day, we really evolved to it a more mature form of working now, that suits the company and the business that I'm in, you know, a technology company. But I think for a lot of other businesses, this is really catching them on the hop. So I mean, to answer your question, I think the changes a couple of things, I think the changes that we are we have seen with COVID, they're not going to reverse quickly. The question is, how much of the company is going to fight to pull back? versus how, how much are the people going to anchor in and want to keep some of what they've got? So I see I see this as a continuum. So if you think of at one end, we have, you're in the office nine to five full time, you're in the middle of a city, the other end your full time home. So what we had was we had people at different positions on that continuum, but I think everybody's found that it shifted more to home. I mean, will organizations go back to full time working, you know, full time city office block based nine to five working? I don't think so I think many of the changes that we're seeing are going to is going to remain for some jobs. Not so it's going to be there for some jobs, but he's not going to be there for all. I mean, you and I are we're very privileged, you know, we're lucky, work hard, and study hard, but we're still very lucky to be an industry we're in so we can do this, but a lot of people aren't a lot of industries aren't. And it's those that are really going to feel the impact the most. So, you know, I can keep working during this as well. You know, quite a lot of people can but that's still a small subset of the total number of the population. So when we look at the changes, it isn't people in my type of work that are going to be that are going to see massive change. It's it's just simply, it's more of what I was already doing. It's the other organizations that are not able to do this. How are they going to adapt? Are they going to want to go back to having people? Or will the next few months, as we get into a year of COVID, will this really get to a tipping point where the organizations will need to reinvent the way that they work and actually embrace this, so that even even people who want to work remotely will find that the opportunities have changed? I want your thoughts, right.
Roy Sharples:Having recently came out of the technology industry, companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google have invested billions and building Central Campus office environments for employees for their employees. For example, Microsoft is in the midst of modernizing 2.5 million square feet of new office space, that constitutes to over 130 billions within their 500 acre headquarters in Redmond near Seattle, designed to inspire innovation, foster collaboration and improve productivity. However, up until I worked within a campus environment, almost every working environment that I operated within was open plan and built for human interaction and collaboration, typically, within a flat horizontal structure, and layout that was transparent, and real. And visual factory. For these buildings, were designed to mirror the culture of the company, and its people and designed to help cater for their various needs. And their their various interactions amongst themselves. They were more dynamic environments rather than static environments. That helped bring people together to collaborate, make decisions, and then move on quickly into action. And really empowering people to work from wherever they want wanted, whether that was within the building environment or at home, or coffees or whatever made most sense for them to do their best work. And so things like working remotely, working virtually, and embracing the technology that enabled that was just the norm at a personal level. That way of working really suited my lifestyle, and work preferences, I found it very liberating and empowering. And from a teaming perspective, very collaborative and productive. And so what COVID has helped accelerate is the broader application of, of these technologies, but also to drive more empowered work life patterns that suit people's lifestyle choices, whilst explores the need to modernize, and rethink how work gets done.
Gary Burt:Yeah, I think that, you know, I think the key thing for this that you said before, was the word culture. So I just, if I compare, so I left Microsoft, about 10 years ago. Now. So if I compare two or three different countries, so if I compare the US, the majority of the campus, you know that so the Redmond campus, the HQ of Microsoft was maybe a collection of 50 buildings, maybe more across a number of sites, close close sites, with people largely in dedicated or a couple of weeks sharing an office. But actually, that isn't a model that was ever used in Europe or the UK. So if I look at the UK, when the UK renovated its offices probably in 2008 2009, and it built, it built the latest building, that was the opposite. It was all built for collaboration. So the the building was essentially open spaces and meeting rooms. There were very few dedicated offices, really few. And the idea of everybody having their own office was just it was the opposite way. I then look at Europe and Europe had gone. Some of the European buildings, absolutely embraced that creative aspect. And again, what they've done, they really gone to town in a positive way on building create, you know, intentionally creating spaces. These weren't passively designed, they were really actively designed and involving the people who are going to be working in them to build what went on to become award winning workplaces. But the workplace if you look at this, it was all about collaboration. The You know, there were buildings, there were rooms, but the last time certainly when I went to the last The Amsterdam office and I've visited as a client and a customer several times since, but you had buildings with, you know, without, if you think of a traditional meeting space, you've got a, let's say unit six, six room, six people room, you've got an oblong table and chairs around the outside. And 10 people in the bigger a bigger square, you might get to 20 people who got a whopping great bloody big table. Yeah, but it was always the same model, you then look at, you know, flexible spaces, and you looked at, you know, oh, well, we need to be building next generation office and you you built that big square table with smaller tables that you can move around and reorganize, or you could put it beside and just have everybody sitting on chairs in the big circle. But deleting offices, what what they Microsoft done in the Netherlands was made these much more like social much more social spaces. So you have sofas in their you had chairs you had, it was intended to be a much more relaxed, and lounge space, it was close to a country club, or you know, like a big, shared dorm apartment, you know, where you could have, you know, 10 people lounging around on big servers? Very, very different environment. So the question is, for me, what culture do you want? Because I don't think you're right. I think, you know, individual offices are great for head down getting on with it. But is, is that what you want to do? And then if you do that, does that push your collaboration to being online, even though you're physically close, you're pushing your collaboration to be online, which is a really interesting thing. So you're pulling people together into a physical space, like the campus, but then you're isolate them with the, the offices, whereas you have the opposite view on the other side of the side of the world, but you're in Europe, in the UK, and many other countries, which is people are isolated, but they're collaborating online. But when they do get physical toasts in the same office, they're not separated, their their time is together, it's a real question of culture, which do you want? Yes, it is also picking up on a few of the key points you made there, Gary, how remote working it actually feels and accelerates collect collaboration. And what I found as well is when I was collaborating with people that were remote, when I was working in a campus environment, the relationship, the collaboration, the innovation, and transparency was significantly better than working with people in the physical space, which was ironic, but it was proven year in year out that those were the most productive relationships on multiple levels. The other point you made there, around the technology companies where they just got it right, where the regional offices were spectacular benchmarks for how the new world of work should be done. And you give a great example there of Microsoft's office in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, which was a, which was a real signpost for how productivity and collaboration should be, should be done, and how, you know, creating the right spaces that stimulated creativity and innovation in terms of, as you said, the design of buildings, the air conditioning, the space, the color, the aesthetics all played a critical role, combined with how technology is then used and an intelligent way to enable that experience. And I think you know, where we're at now, in terms of technology application, you know, we pretty much have everything within our capability to be able to do what we do remotely as opposed to having to go into a physical space and do work. So the technological tools or software, and how we're able to equip our home offices. In many cases, our experience, working from home is better than working in an office environment, not just aesthetically but technologically as well. Now, you're right, you're absolutely right, I was thinking about this at a personal level in terms of how my office has evolved. So if I go back 20 years, you know, my home office was working in the dining room. I didn't have a dedicated office then. But it was working largely in the dining room. And you know, at the end of the table with my laptop, and my mouse, if I look at where I am today, now clearly there's there's a benefit of aging moving to do that. But if this is still even this is gonna apply to young people entering the workplace as well as they start to think about their work upon but if I think about now, it's a dedicated office now it isn't big, it's what was in the UK we'd call a box room, it's a small bedroom, it's, you know, 10 by seven, something like that. It's it's a, it's a small bedroom, inside the office, it's just got computers. But if I then look at what's in there, you know, I've got 1234 monitors, I've got a separate personal machine in there. So I keep the world very separate, there's lighting in there. So the quality is better. There's hopefully a good quality might be your hearing there as a professional, quality video camera that if I need to, I can stream at 4k, I can certainly do a webcam at that, you know, HD. So you think of this. And what we've got is, is these home offices Now if we look at what they are, they sit at home working, isn't you at the end of the table? It's you in a home studio in a home office, a true home office? Yeah, it's a it's a micro office, I know you're the same Roy, you know, like you do you share the photos. But I mean, you've just, you know, set up your organization. So you can talk about what your home offices, it would probably be better, designed, better referred to as a home studio as much as an office, because it's about creativity. It's a creative and collaborative space.
Roy Sharples:I know it's became a cliche. Nevertheless, we are able to do our work from anywhere at any time on any device, combining that with the advances in home technology, smart homes, like network connected products to control, automate and optimize functions, such as temperature, lighting, security, safety, or entertainment, or all through a phone, for example, or a tablet, or a computer or laptop, whatever the system may be, this is really appealing, because it's allowing people to control everything through through one device, whether it's that appliances, thermostats, lights, or other devices, remotely with our phones, or tablets, connected to the Internet, and the convenience and cost avoidance within that is, is becoming substantial. And in many cases, our technology at home has become so much more advanced, as well as our workspace at home. It generally Trumps what most people, but many, many people can experience within their within an office environment. And it can affect our productivity. And it should be entirely down to people to choose their work life location, and balance patterns that suit their lifestyle and preferences and feel empowered to do so. No and kind of going forward. What are they going to be the different scenario is that technologies like emerging technologies like virtual reality, and the immersive experiences, technologies, how can they be applied to effect to help stimulate and mimic realistic experiences that can be delivered artificially through artificial standards, to represent real life stimuli within a natural environment, and so that we can experience time at home versus having to go into an office space and hate if I'm saying if I'm zoomed in, far too one sided and biased about working at home? I absolutely don't mean, you know, looking at things around the explanation that I can create and how important physical interaction is. I'm just drawing parallels here. And the distinction around those just as good, if not better experiences to be hired from non traditional office environments.
Gary Burt:Oh, yeah, I'm old enough to be able to have seen this flip. So when I started in technology, 25 or so years ago, the most advanced technology was in the corporate space. That was where the servers were, is where the high powered machines were, you know, we were seeing the emergence of portable laptops, but they weighed a ton. They were, you know, small screens, not great quality. So the portable wasn't possible, it started to come 20 years ago, but when, what we what we've seen during that time is a flip. So when I started, you know, it's probably closer to 20. But when I started the corporate specs, that business environment was the place where new technology arrived, it was where the innovation happened, because that was where it was painful. That's not the case study. And I think there's a really big question here for people. And it's this. So what we've seen over the last few years, we've seen this flip between the innovation happened initially in the corporate space, and then it's in the consumer space. So clearly the majority of innovation now happens, certainly in terms of personal productivity in the personal space, and then it goes into the workspace. So what happens when, you know, people are being asked to go back into the office? And, you know, instead of them getting a dedicated 50 megabits per second, or, you know, my, I don't know, a few 100 megabits per second, you know, or if you live in the Netherlands, you're getting over a gigabit, you know, in certain cities, you go from that you go back into the office, and, you know, you're getting looked at, and no, we don't get to play music, okay, we don't need to play headphones. No, no, you can't listen to the music you want, you can't work in the way that you want. There is a dress code. More importantly, you then expected to work on your single monitor, or your single monitor, you know, your laptop and one monitor rather than the two or three you might have at home. But also when your internet connection is rubbish. So this is the flip the flip is the office is a lesser environment than your home office, because your home office is adapted. The home environment is adapted. You know, if I listened to the advertiser, there's an advert running in the UK for bt their national telco. And it's going if you want to work from home, and it's essentially mimicking all the dropouts and the problems with a poor internet connection. And this is absolutely true that the advertising is absolutely on the money. You want to work from home, get a decent internet connection, we know that it's taught you WiFi, etc. But, you know, once people have done that, are they going to want it hold on, let's look at what this experience is you want me to go back into the office, you want me to spend an hour in a traffic jam or more, you always pay a fortune for parking, or, or tolls or I've got to be I've got to sit near people. So if I can't drive, I've got to sort of train and hopefully we'll get past COVID. But that's, that is not going to be a comfortable experience, psychologically, for quite a while, I then go into an office where you know, I can't do on a warm, I've got a very strict dress code, the Wi Fi is rubbish. Yeah, it's not going to flip back to that, that's going to be pushed back. And I think, and this is this comes back to your point about computers at the start. These companies have made huge investments in real estate and working spaces. And what we found is that in many industries, they're simply not needed. They may be a nice addition, but are people want to going to want to go back, the one thing we know there's a, there's a there's a good example of trying to reverse a change. And that's Yahoo a few years ago. So Marissa Mayer, you know, had the policy of trying to pull people back into the office trying to dissuade remote working. Now, it wasn't the cause of this. But that was absolutely correlated with a lot of internal problems at Yahoo. Now, their problems were much deeper, they started before that time. But there was a huge amount of pushback on trying to pull people once they'd worked remotely back to that central point. And what we know is that people will put their work priority, they will put their personal life support their work, so they'll do what they need to do to keep the money rolling in. But that's not going to buy loyalty, you know, and what it does is it you start to ask people to do something they're not comfortable with, all they do is they start a timer on leaving, and that's what happened, you have a big talent loss. So as soon as you're not putting your people first, which is certainly going to be the case, if you're if you start to force people to come back, you're going to you're going to have those problems have a lot of people who can go No, my life, my new life is a better fit for me. And if you're not able to accommodate that, then I'm going to work elsewhere for those people that can. Now I think that now that that's one change. The bigger question, though, is, for me is the other 80%, what's going to happen to those that are not in the tech industry, not in the IT services industry, not in marketing, not in, you know, in call centers, but not in roles where they either have the ability to do that, or it doesn't fit with the work, the question of evolution is, how are those organizations going to evolve? Because even if even if the organization wants to go back to what it was pre COVID, does the customer base is the people who are interacting with you who if your company's still going you're largely working remotely, certainly in a lot of Europe. So is your customer base going to want to go back to what he was? I think that the questions are we a lot of the questions are being looked at from a technology perspective, but they go much, much deeper. And I think it'd be want to start you start to look at those organizations that are not technology centric, but have become much more technology centric and technology savvy. They've had to work around. Are they going to revert back to what they did before, are they going to continue this evolution? And if they do, which I think that well, that's where the biggest changes are going to happen.
Roy Sharples:Yeah, I think the other thing and you made this point strongly, but just to underpin it is, I think what this pandemic has also bolstered is that it's further reinforced that people are really no in a position to choose their work life location, on balance patterns that suit their lifestyle, and preferences, and feel empowered to do so.
Gary Burt:There's no excuse now that employers can come out and see are but you can't, you really have to be in the office to be able to do X, Y, and Z. While wrong, it has been proven that you absolutely don't, the pandemic has obviously forced the adoption of, of having to adopt and drive through new ways of working. Let's be honest, you know, many organizations have been able to step up and adopt and acted really swiftly to safeguard employees, and to migrate to new ways of working, that even the most extreme business continuity plans hadn't envisioned. I mean, who the heck would envision Who would have guessed that 2020 whatever it ended up being like, what it what it was, I think you're right, I mean, I'm a, I'm a big believer that we won't go deep on the philosophy of technology. But I do believe very, very strongly that we determine whether technology is good or bad, it's when we become passive, to owning that choice that we do, we have the problems, that's when we have the issues. And what I mean by that is, I'm not gonna go deep on this, but essentially, we have the choice as individuals or society to really make technology work for us, or to see this as a harbinger of doom. And it's neither, it's down to you making it work. And so give you a good example of this. So a colleague of mine, because of COVID, he's had to in the children being from home, he's had to spend more time and this is one example of many, but you know, he has to spend time at home with his children in a way that he didn't before, he's got to look after them much more. So what he does is he chunks his day up and says, look, for this period, I'm available for this period, and maybe a block of two hours, three hours in the day, I'm not available. And then for this period, I'm available. And what he does is he stretches his work life out. So instead of working, perhaps in nine to five, you might do a seven to seven, but he's taking these two hour chunks out of the day, to be able to dedicate time to his family. Now, that is a different work environment, and would not have been a conversation he could have easily had beforehand. Now, you know, this is this is the dialogue has changed the dialogue is, you know, thankfully, in in good companies, let us know what changes need to be supported to allow you to be able to work and have an effective home life balance. And, you know, when work is your home, we can shorten that to life, how do we allow you to be productive at work and have a functional, efficient, caring life that's not going to see work destroy that. So that's going to be different for everybody. So my colleague for being able to take these two hour locks out, he can go look at one o'clock till three, I'm not available, you know, I will decline every meeting. And if the CEO, you know, in theory, the CEO goes, you're not gonna be able to book his time. Why? Because he's prioritize that to his family. That's a real positive step for me. One other example, and this is this is I had part of this because when I was hired, I was only right at the final stage, where I actually said, Look, I want everything until the last sort of stage had been all remote setting telephone calls that zoom interviews, and that was simply because and so this was mid 2019. That was simply because the logistics of trying to get the right people together at the right location, were proving difficult. The company was already distributed. It had a number of offices, they had a couple of key offices in the UK, but actually getting people to the right time, together at the right time to be free, at the same physical place was going to take too long. So what they did was they said, Look, we want this to move quicker. So we're going to do it online. And it was only right at the end. And thankfully, I got the offer. And I said look, the offers great, but I'd still like to see the office. Can I Oh, yeah, absolutely. We're not hiding anything. So you know, then go in and visit the office like to get a feel for their culture. But we've seen that go even further now and I'll get onto the positive. So we've seen people certainly my company and many other companies have hired people purely remotely for remote working and they've joined the company. They've never ever physically met anyone from that company. And for some people, that's. Now lasted months. So they've been with the company months, and they've never physically met anybody. Why? Because the company closed down the offices and couldn't open them, possibly, but, you know, it's actually much easier to leave them closed for the moment and, you know, make the savings to be able to plow that back. But you've got people who are hired. Now, here's the other, here's the thing where that starts to become positive. This source of places you can look for those people are anywhere, if you don't need them to be within an hour or two London, or you don't need them to be able to be within traveling distance of Warrington, then they can be anywhere. And they are. So what's happened is to benefit two things. One, the company has been able to employ and make work hiring people that it wouldn't have been able to previously support. So people who've had who can right at the start, go, look, I have a caring responsibility, this is what I can do. This is what I can't do, I can't be available on Fridays, I can never be available before 10 o'clock, but I can work in the evenings. That's fine. So we've adapted. So what we've got is this massive, opening up of opportunities. The other point is we lost. So we've lost the physical boundaries of where the people need to be. Now, the moment we're still seeing some timezone biases. So if you want it the UK is largely hiring, you know, in the UK, but it doesn't need to. And once we evolve to the point of having a much more integrated and fluid benefit and taxation system, so it is all there. The trouble is it differs by country. But once we start to get a grip on having that standardized, at least in terms of the lever pulling in the HR department, you'll be able to hire anybody from anywhere. And this, this is a huge positive for people. Because not only does it mean for organizations that you can find the best talent, which is exactly what you want, but you can find the best fit now. And that's that's a very different thing. So not only you could say, look, I want the smartest people I want the best people. But actually widening the talent pool allows you to bring many other things into this, I want people with with a certain set of values. And if you go to a big enough pool, you can encourage people to be open about those. And that works the other way too. So people looking for roles, hopefully will have a bigger pool of where they can look. So they're much more freer to be able to define who they are at the start of the interview. So rather than fit themselves to a job, because they want to get hired, because there's a limited number of roles in the city 30 miles away that they normally commute to, they can be themselves, they can be honest and go, look, this is who I am, this is what I do. This is how I can work. And they can make themselves available to a huge number of organizations. That is an unbelievable benefit in terms of fit. So yes, there are a lot of downsides with working remotely and we can have if we're not careful, they can be mental problems, mental challenges, there can be behavioral issues, certainly, you can have that there are downsides in terms of some disciplinary processes that is much harder to deal with, you know, problems. And you can have performance issues, and that can become more challenging. But there are a whole range of different balances that if we take it, we take a real step back. And we look at this at a human level and we go, we're going to allow people to find a much better fit to where they want to work, because there's a much bigger pool that can be much more open about who they are, we have the tools LinkedIn is great for this. There are others about which allow you to put on your personal characteristics to be found. Not only your experience, but they can find it search on many other criteria that we know we previously couldn't because the tools have had to adapt. That's a huge positive for me, you know, being able to have people want to be to be honest about who they are, and be able to join a company not just because the salary and the location, the job, but because the values, the culture, the belief systems, this is this is huge, huge benefits that I don't think we've really got our heads around yet. Maybe it happened in a very small number of companies. But I think we're seeing this much, much wider distributed. And for me that's a that's a huge positive.
Roy Sharples:To counter the many positives, there has absolutely been downsides to what we have experienced in terms of isolation, social anxiety, mental health, and equality and unfair access, the fear and anxiety about what could happen over you or your loved one's health, your financial situation or job or loss of support services that you that you rely upon. Social distancing is a relatively new concept that the world has. To adapt to, and that can make people feel isolated and lonely, and can ultimately increase stress and anxiety.
Gary Burt:Now you've Right, right, I think in terms of remote working, certainly there are very real downside. And it's, it's really essential that we're open about those, we're honest. And I think it's it's a positive outcome for, from a very low, a large number of negative reasons. So COVID has not been a positive, but we can take positives from this for throat. So I think one of the things is recognizing mental wellness, recognizing stress, recognizing overwork, recognizing isolation are all key, and all dental positives. And, you know, going back to what I said before, they are positives, if you choose to act on them, you can make them a positive. So the fact that people are working remotely will, will bring a lot of problems, it absolutely Well, it works better for some people than others. But the positives that can come out of these very real issues are in actively solving them. So not to pretend that they don't exist, to acknowledge that they do exist to encourage an open dialogue. And actually, to shift this, to be honest, to a conversation that's human. And I think the companies that do that are going to they're there, they're going, they are going to become beacons of the future, you know, they're going to become the ones that are going to be the ones that our people are going to be attracted to. So solving your problems, solving the problems that we as humanity are going to face in terms of working, and living through this, putting the effort into doing those is going to pay huge dividends, not in terms of reputation or brand value, but in terms of being the type of company that the vast majority of people that you would want to hire, are going to want to work for you. And I think, you know, it's a brave thing, to be able to do some of those things. But it's easy, once you start to be very clear about what your values are as a company. And I think there's a real potential here for companies to, to want to become more human. You know, some of the companies you'd mentioned were at the start where that big, large technology organizations, and I think the potential is, we will see the innovation in working in some of the much smaller companies that are able to make those changes or recognize the importance of them, because they can't not make them, they have to look after people. So I think when we start to see those problems acknowledged and actively solved, and I don't mean, actively solve by tasking an executive saying solve this, I mean, having an open dialogue inside the company, with the people who work for it, and here's the difference their families, the people who they're responsible for, you can come up with some great solutions and do this, you know, I don't think and also, I think remote working doesn't mean that you never meet, it just means that your slide has moved. One of the things that are certainly the division had the SVP said hi. And actually they think of the title, but the head of product development said, Look, we are where we are, you know, clearly, it was a much longer speech and talk to everybody who's an active, you know, engaging discussion, but the crux of this was, we are where we are, and we're going to do everything we can. So if you need some help reach out, that's, that's a positive, that's not a negative thing. It doesn't mean your HR file, it's, that's their job. Now, the job of HR is to help you with these issues. But you know, there was a cheer on the phone when said, Look, you know, what the future will hold, we don't know. But we do recognize that people are important. So as soon as we can get together, we're going to do that, not to pull people back into the office, but to find somewhere that we can all get to. And that might be London, it might be Birmingham, it might be Barcelona, and the purpose of that will not be to sit down and do a load of workshops, it will be to re humanize the group, we will put time aside because as an organization, we recognize there will be a time that we need to put inside in the calendars. And we'll give people plenty of notice that they can sort out Karen holidays, as they always would, but that you can reconnect and start to rebuild those human interactions. So this is where I think that companies who do actively look to not embrace the problems but certainly not deny them and say, Look, these are here. What can we actively do? You know, and they're going to be limitations on resources are going to be limitations on time and people. But when we can actively look at these problems, and how can we start to make this better? Not at a corporate level, but a human level, knowing that if you get that, right, the corporate box just gets ticked. So that there are signs of that. But again, I think, you know, I'm also minded to look at this is the niche, but there are things that we can do. But I think, as we've said many times, it's about putting, putting human putting people first and redefining that relationship to be about seeing people not as resources, but as assets. That is that are, you know, essential cogs of the machine not to be replaced, but unique cogs that fit together to get the optimum impact.
Roy Sharples:The other thing is it started started, it should start to purify the fundamental role of management, which should be around removing barriers to make great work happen. And by doing that, it's it's about creating an environment where people can do their best work, that they feel a sense of belonging, they feel valued, and they're able to express themselves and create without fear. And I liked your idea there around the humanizing a team humanizing an organization, and how you can do that you do it through you, you create these key moments throughout the course of a year, and an event, such as Barcelona, or London, or wherever it is a team event, I mean, where you bring everyone together, and you inspire and you engage, and you revitalize the team. And those momentous in a moments that are much more purposeful and meaningful. How is this going to affect creativity, innovation, and collaboration, if you look at global economic growth in 2020, it has declined. And organizations are obviously being forced to make really tough decisions about how to really prioritize what to invest in, how they should be managing cost. And therefore, the effects from an investment perspective on innovation are unknown, really, at a global level, because many organizations are having a pullback that anticipate in further financial losses. And they're being significantly challenged in how to generate revenue and income. And also, organizations will view investment and innovation spending as as critical for the plans for recovery and long term growth. So it's like conduit, it's a balancing piece where they have to balance risk of varsity and efficiency with longer term innovation and growth and survival.
Gary Burt:Think I think you're true, I think you're right, and how do you innovate in an environment that's forcing you to cut costs, that's, that's always been a challenge. You know, if you want to innovate, you know, you can take the gold plated option of, you know, you can go in and say, I want to, you know, hire, you know, frog, or IDEO, or Accenture, I want them to innovate, and I need you to redesign my business? Well, for many organizations, that's just not going to be an option. their pockets are not that big. But that doesn't mean to say you can't innovate, I think what you need to do is you need to go back to the core of what you want to do, and shift your model of trust. So if you want to, you know, none of those organizations are going to be hireable official, an account manager will contact you and say, No, Gary's absolutely wrong, we don't cost anything like that. But none of those organizations are seriously going to be hireable in terms of getting real outputs for less than one quarter of a million dollars. Well, if you want to deliver that innovation, just get creative with not just what you want to achieve, but how you want to achieve it. You know, if we were saying what can you do? Well, take, take what we've got today, take the low tech approach, start to empower people and drive that innovation. So the change that you make is not to do it in the way that you did before. What you have is the opportunity to rethink the way you do it. But maybe shift the resources, shift the allocation of resources to a much lower level than you would have done. If you want instead of having service design organization read D You know, do a six month piece of work to redesign your service experience. Take it low tack have people you know you're going to need some facilitation, but look at how you can empower people much lower in the organization to be able to to play into this. This these are the experts in your organization, start to think how could you help them create well, and this is where we start to get into the what is possible and how do things change? So instead of you know hiring a large agency, don't find a really creative professional, individual go and find some freelancers. Go and find the skills out there. And, you know, it's gonna take a bit of time to find the right person, but go out there, find the person who is an excellent fit for what you want to achieve. But instead of hiring, you know, the frog or the idea, and they are both fantastic companies. But instead of hiring those go and find a fantastic designer who's really publishing, who's making waves in what you want to achieve, and bring them on board, because the cost of doing that is a fraction of working with as a scale solution, then the other thing is start to think about how you can empower network effects. How can How can you fund a network of innovation? How can you start to make the connections and allow the connections to be made between a small fab and you know, a fabricating company, a small design company, maybe a individual freelancing Product Manager. So instead of hiring these big organizations, what you start to do is you start to look around and go, there's a lot of creative people, let me try spend some time finding the best people giving them the resources. You know, we talk about production values, you know, and, and I'm amazed that how, you know, real, you know, footsie 100, you know, s&p 500 companies will do calls and the calls clearly made on a rubbish webcam, why have you not thought it important to send the person who's doing a broadcast that's going to be on TV 100 quid, a Logitech webcam, why have you not sent them, you know, for 500 quid 1000 pounds, you could have a broadcast quality camera, it's the same broadcast quality, but you couldn't be able to do HD and 4k, why are we not getting those resources down to people trying to create and innovate, provide the tools, don't force them to go and hunt around for software, start to make those licenses available, if they're not working out, you know, ask them, if you're not using it, let us know. So we don't need to pay the subscription. But I think there's the big point about innovation here is to start to make is to start to rethink innovation by reducing the barriers, evolving your culture to welcome it. And, you know, we all know, that means welcoming a failure, but then putting some skin in the game, not at a macro level, but at a micro level around the resources to help that. So give some, you know, give some people give people the freedom to take some time out, give them the kit budget to be able to buy the kit to at least mock up the concept, you know, encourage those connections with third parties. Look for small local organizations, they don't need to be local. But it might be that what you want to achieve is going to require some physical interaction. So find those organizations. And this is where again, it becomes a positive, because there are going to be many more of them out there, the changes that we've seen in terms of employment patterns, we're only seeing the start of this. And this is it's a very painful point in the short term, and hopefully a positive one in the long term, we're going to see a lot of evolutions in working practices, you know, organizations are downscaling people are going to be that's an opportunity if we get it right to innovate at a much smaller level at an individual level. So start to embrace that, as an organization, be proud of the fact that you're hiring, freelancers and individuals. That's a massive asset. So I think it is possible, but it needs us to be innovative in the way that we innovate. I don't know, Roy, you mean, you've done a lot of work on this? If you were given us to do some of the things that you've done with, you know, 30% of the budget, does that fill you with dread? Or do you go No, no, I can I can, I can make that work. It's not a maybe not a 10 out of 10. But I can do a great eight out of 10 for that a fraction of the budget. I mean, what are yours?
Roy Sharples:I would say almost all of the innovative, creative, inventive initiatives that I've been involved in has involved next to nothing in terms of, of budget, you know, a great ideas, a great idea. And you can make things happen in very creative ways. Where budget has been handy is when it came to help in scale and the execution of the idea and making the innovation happen. And what I find is when organizations have just throw in resource and money into something without fully critically thinking something through end to end, or you know, throwing money into something and they think well, if I go and acquire this if I go and subscribe to that if I go and source This is going to make me and I deploy it is going to make me an innovative company. Absolutely not. So you know, I don't think when it comes to building creative and innovative teams. It doesn't have In massive budgets, is not a critical success factor to coming up with game change and coming up with Big Gold ideas. So um, and I also think as well, when you look back at the history of time, in terms of companies that have been the Phoenix that's risen from the ashes, and in times of significant challenge or recessions, and the likes, I mean, Microsoft, for example, was, was started was born out of a recession 2008 many other social media platform companies like like Facebook, and the likes were born out of that. So I think, with adversity comes disruptive innovation. And like I say, going back to the point, it's, you don't throw money into it, history tells us as well, you don't throw money into something if you don't have novel ideas, and great talent behind that to make that happen. The other thing? Yeah, sorry, go going. The other thing, Gary is, you know, thinking parallely, but connecting a lot of the themes that you were speaking about there, and crystallizing that around, talent, nurture, and then dovetailing that into helping shape what the future of work looks like, all jobs that can't be automated or done better, by artificial intelligence and robots will become the norm. But where does that leave the role for humans is creative excellence, the bare necessity for human survival and unique differentiation in the workplace. industrialization transformed the world from agricultural work predominantly done by people to mechanize production, people were replaced by assembly lines to improve operating efficiency and increase production speed and a predictable, scalable, and cost effective way the industrializing of a business at scale is about mitigating uncertainty, ambiguity and judgment into a fine tuned formula of simple building blocks that anyone can do. Starbucks and McDonald's and much of the fast food, retail corporate media and entertainment companies are based on these industrialized principles of mass produce, and mass consumed business models. And products are one size fundamentally fits all cookie cutter model that starts with a service design by defining every process and then mapping every process to roles. These types of business systems are designed for automation for repetitive robotic work, not for people. The bottom line, all these tasks can be automated and performed by AI and robots. And because it is based on predictability, speed and efficiency, machine machines can do it better than humans to provide a specific example of Process Excellence that drives customer experience. I was involved in an engagement at Starbucks, where we conducted observational research with Starbucks employees and customers within their stores. Starbucks are very focused on the speed, it takes an employee and to mitigate as much of the process steps as possible to get the coffee to the customer as quickly as possible, because less steps means improvement on the bottom line. It's more cost effective and profitable. The way that Starbucks map out their service design, and in the context of the customer experience journey, they have a deep knowledge and insight to what constitutes a baseline experience. What constitutes a poached experience? And what constitutes an enriched experience for their customers? And what are the levers to make that happen? It's a good example of a company that's find the equilibrium between scalable service design and customer experience.
Gary Burt:I think you're right. I'm, I think, you know, if I compare a couple of coffee shops, and I think when people talk about automation, there's a couple of ways you can see it. And the really simple question that I always would ask somebody, what do you want to automate? Do you want to automate the person out of the experience or do you want to increase or maximize the efficiency of the person doing the experience? So if you see the experiences as ultimately a human experience than the role of automation. Should we just support that, if you, if you want to make the experience, if the experience essentially isn't human centric, then the role should be to get rid of it. So a couple of quick examples of this is, in a in a, if I'm building a car, for the most part, I want that to be automated, I want robots to do it. Yeah, if I'm buying a car, I don't want it to be automated. If I'm talking to somebody about something which is human, it has a human emotion. I don't want that to be automated. You know, I much prefer, you know, so let's take two examples. Take Starbucks, I much prefer going into a Starbucks, speaking to a barista, having a conversation and I want the conversation. Even if I choose not to have a, I want the offer of that conversation. Rather than going into a drive thru petrol station, in a fuel station, putting pressing the pressing the button on a screen and seeing my drink, you know, dribble out under the cup that I've put in, you know, ultimately, the two outcomes are the same, but the experiences are a world of difference. Now, I know I'm not a coffee person, I'm a hot chocolate guy. And for me, a hot chocolate is likely hot chocolate. And it's long as you stare at and stuff. But, you know, could I tell the difference? I probably couldn't. But do I care about the experience? Absolutely. I do not want a functional hot chocolate, you know, I want the human experience of going in. And I think if when we look at look at org organizations, and environments and businesses facing automation, what they should be doing is not is not looking to, you know, fight the automation, what this should be looking at the same how to embrace the automation. Without that, without with it, sorry? How do we embrace the automation as a way to improve the human customer experience or the human experience the human interaction? Now, how could that work? Well, if I want AI on the, if I want to put AI into Starbucks, I want that coffee machine to be perfect, I want it to be predictive. So it's never breaking, I don't want them to run out of cream. I stated the other day, you know, a couple of days I waited, I thought in on this day, I'm not going to have a you know big hot chocolate with the loaded cream on every day, I'm going to wait a couple of days and I go in, I waited a couple of days, and I've just done a walk up a hill. So I'm really ready for this hot chocolate. And they go Um, so we don't have any cream. Massive fail. Yeah. And of course, it's not important, but it's a failed experience. Now, you know, when you talk about ai, ai should have been in there going, let's, let's ensure we never ever run out. We don't know, overload you don't cream to go off. But let's never ever run out of cream. Why cuz Gary might want cream when he's hot chocolate after going for a walk in the snow. And that's where AI should be coming in as a as a way to make that experience predictable, high quality, but it should be invisible to me. And, you know, another couple of examples of two coffee shops. So the coffee, and I'm not going to name the brands here. When I go into it. The people are very friendly, and they're great. And they the drinks great. But when I go to sit down, the chairs have got rips on and they're just tatty. And the floor is not being swept another one equally good drink equally friendly. The the you know, the, there's no rips in the chairs. There's no there's no dirt on the floor. And the point about this is to focus on the whole experience. And and this matters. You know, one of the things I always think of with shops in and retail establishments or anywhere on buying services from is if you came to my house and you found some furniture ripped you might do I'd like to think that I was going to realize that that was an issue that I would want to fix in time. I'd hope it wasn't. And I'd hope that you could come to the house and it wouldn't be dirty. But if it was I'd hope that the next time that was at least in cleaning in place that that was going to be cleaned up. So you you allow some bumps in the process, but what you do is you focus on having that consistency. And what I think of what I think this is how important is the customer if I go in in your seat is how important am I to you as a customer if I go in two weeks later, and that's not fixed. That wasn't important to you. You can you can serve the coffee you can serve the drinks, but that's not important to you. I mean, it's a bit of a divergent warm but when we look at experience, it has to be the whole experience because these little things can cause you the bump. I think there was always the danger there. And, and this is perhaps why we can probably right back to where we started and what's important in the organization. And it's in having all of it work as a system, having everything work cohesively. That's why the collaboration is critical. Because you can't have a great coffee making process. If the floors are not done. If the cream is an audit, it all starts to fall apart. So this is why that when you start to look at innovation, you have to involve the whole organization, you can't do it in isolation. But I think there's a lot of experiences, you know, I've been trying to make this useful for people. If if, you know, I work for a company that does software automation, if you want to Inigo Gary, well tell us about the future. Okay, tell us what your software could do. Tell us why we should buy it. Okay? Don't start with the software, start with this, how do you make a better customer experience of what you do whatever you're the heart of what your business is, at a human level, look at how you can make that more efficient, and then plug the automation into that. Don't start with the automation, because there's a risk, you get the automation, right, and you really mess up the experience. There's a lot of companies that have had a very bumpy road that have done that. So I don't, I don't see automation is something to be feared. I think the problem is that a lot of people, and a lot of organizations, they miss what it should be used for it should be used to improve the human experience. That's it. That's it, you know, the best quote, I mean, we you mentioned about AI. The best quote I've ever heard about understanding AI is AI. As soon as it's useful ceases to be AI. It's just whatever the useful thing is. So you look at Amazon's AI powers the recommendations engine. It's not AI that people are seeing people are seeing great recommendations engine. But why does that matter? Because it's helping me as a human, yes, you're helping sell more books or CDs, and buy CDs, you're helping sell more assets, open some goods. But ultimately, what you're doing is you're trying to help me with the experience. It's how it's helping me improve a better experience, use AI to find forging reviews, so I can believe what I read, not to write them to keep the quality high. And I think when we see when we see AI used and we go How does this help the user? If you don't know the answer to that, then AI isn't the right solution. It's somewhere else. When applied properly, AI has had significant impact within the workplace in terms of how it improves business, and also how it enables employee productivity. And it will continue to have a significant impact on the workplace, and how work gets done in a way, just as the automobile did when it replaced horses. But the net effect of that for humanity was that significantly improved life and society in so many different ways. The future is unwritten, and the jobs of the future have still to be defined. But I do think it's a very exciting prospect for humanity, and the more abundance of creative oriented jobs that should exist, because robots and AI has taken over more of the mundane, repetitive tasks, freeing up humans to be able to do more critical thinking and creative types of professions.
Roy Sharples:Is this the death of the monolithic organization as we know it? And will this constitute a greater rise in the gig economy over corporate jobs? in the future? May there be a stronger entrepreneurial culture where people can make a living from doing what they are naturally good at, and want to do than what they are made to be good at. Good this fuel and all encompassing gig economy where people have multiple gigs, simultaneously, for a variety of employers at the same time driving the need to be a true expert in your craft.
Gary Burt:This is a massive one. So I'm going to start with what I hope and then work this back. So I hope it does. So if you know. You know the quarterback in your field tries to predict the future. Well, the problem is that we've both been in that field for a long time and we continue to do that. But I think what are we going to see this year? You know, if we look at a logical progression and what we've seen and the outcomes we've seen, certainly in a lot of your we've seen a lot of jobs furloughed what we've seen a rise in unemployment. So what's happened is the investment in the economy by the government has helped take off this the the worst edge of what the public would like to happen with unemployment that's been less so in the US, as one of the investments we've gone to, they've not been at the ground level they've been made to organizations directly have not, not always passed those on. So, you know, what was the outcome of this? We've seen, you know, financial distress for a lot of organizations, though, certainly a lot of smaller organizations, a lot of individuals in the US and across the world, so that that is not going to disappear. The the acceleration that COVID brought, you know, I think it was Scott Galloway, who's he's, he's really used a quote that goes up much further, in saying that what COVID was, was was decades of innovation in love. Yeah, horribly, paraphrasing, essentially what he said, but what one of the things that COVID has done for businesses is, is accelerate the changes, if you will, looking at the clock spinning around, you know, in an accelerated time, what happened during the COVID was they started wandering around on packable pipes. And that's what's happening with businesses. So what they've done is they've seen the trends that the changes that were going to happen anyway, accelerated. Now, where will that lead to, it's going to lead to a lot of organizations reinventing themselves. And that will mean in the short term, some organizations will hire but also means a lot of organizations are going to lose people as well. Now, those people who are leaving have a choice. And I'm not oversimplifying this, but you have a choice between do I want to go into finding a job again? Or do I want to take more control of my own future, and, you know, work in a much more freelance independent manner, I really hope that we see two things, one, organizations, sorry, people reach out and start go down that entrepreneurial lifestyle, and it's not for everybody. And it's bloody hard. We've both done it. And it's an it's an, it's tough, but it is ultimately rewarding. But we also need to change in terms of organizations and critically government to make the changes to embrace those as well. So certainly, in a lot of economies, there are tax benefits and tax breaks for big organizations that just don't are not accessible to smaller organizations and individuals. And that needs to change this complexity in terms of legislation, which it's very difficult as a small, small organization to get past. So I think we are going to see, we are going to see a lot of organizations, a lot of people start organization starts take more control. But if this is to be successful, we need to see governments and businesses evolve that they work as well. And a good example of this is if you I mean, you'll know this because you you dealt with big it engagements, if you want to, if you're an organization looking for services, and you put out a contract that requests so the in the UK and our request for information or request for proposal, a formal tender document, that starts to say, you have to have a turnover turnover of 5 million, you just wiped out the ability of 99% of the people who could apply to that to apply, because you can only deal with organizations. So if you put those contracts, those clauses in your contracts, you are denying any small organization to be able to apply, you're denying any freelancer, and therefore you're denying yourself a huge amount of innovation. So if we want to see these changes, we're going to need to see, you know, people are going to need to put themselves out there, but also organizations are going to need to be able to are going to need to make the changes to be able to allow these individuals and these small organizations to apply. I remember when I had a small consulting company years ago, you know, we would look we will look and sometimes be invited for work. And they might say you, you would have to have a turnover of x. Okay, that's, that's tricky. We're not gonna do that. And you need to have the ability to provide a certain number of people now that we could do so, we could have had a great discussion, because what we could have done and we looked into this was we could have had several individuals and small to three man companies work together and collaborate to solve the to solve the need of the big organization. But if it writes that organization writes that contract in a way that To be honest, the there was only one of 20 organizations in the in the country that could have done that. You just defeating the whole point of this. Now, here's the irony of this. It was the organization I was working up and doing most of my work for and as an independent freelance a gig economy person. It was a small company. So I'm providing services to the company, along with several other people who are the organization is happy with what's being done, but it wants more formal structure. So what it does is it writes a contract and says that, well, we need this to be done more formally. But it writes the contract and he in a way that has these stipulations and requirements and stops any of the people doing the job, forming an organization to actually supply it, which is ridiculous. So I'm careful not to name the company. So what happened was, it goes through with the tender, the majority of the individual contractors leave, it goes to a large company. And what happens, it the cost of providing the service goes right up. Because, you know, if you want a contract to be effective, you're going to need to know every condition. And this is a services business. So what happened was, there are loads of things that it didn't ask for, and then it got hit with change controls and additional costs. So anyone in IT services will have seen those many times. So and house builders as well. So any anything that requires you to have a detail of everything you're going to do, if you're not comprehensive, you're you're gonna get caught. So what the end result was, it ended up paying a lot more for a worse service that was far more inflexible, the opposite of what it wanted. And why did this happen? Because whilst it wanted the consistency of a single, accountable, entity, NT to deal with, the way it did, that precluded, a whole range of options have to been formulated to do that. So I think this comes back to if we want to see where the future will go, it needs the parallel push and pull to happen as well. And if one happens without the other, it's not going to be sustainable. If we see lots of people go into forming one man businesses, but we don't see evolution in terms of the buying, or the procurement, or the taxation, or the innovation or the legislation, then the majority of those are not going to be successful. And likewise, if we see the changes in organizations wanting to buy, but we don't see that support, in terms of how people can find out get financed, that's going to restrict it as well. So it needs the whole system. And I think what's going to happen is is, for me, a lot of this is going to be come down to actually political leadership, it's going to come down to creating the environment where we start to normalize what is going to happen. If we, you know, if I look at the news, and it's like, we start to talk about jobs. And the only concept when we talk about jobs, we heard a politician talk about jobs, when we heard them talk about jobs. And when they talk about jobs, they mean being employed by a large organization, if that's the only definition that they're focused on, then we're gonna find a really difficult, you know, few years, if we start to say, we start to talk about jobs and employment and working and economies and flexible way of delivering services, then we start to create the environment. And I think this is why that, that political leadership is going to be key to this. So you know, should or should people form their own businesses, you know, I think, look very carefully at what you can do. And if you, the other thing is if we go back to where we started, if you if you are finding that there are going to be some real challenges, you know, there's nothing to stop you having that conversation with organizations, and pointing out some of the things that you need to have changed in terms of unit contracts or restrictions to be able to make that work. And, you know, to bring this full circle, about individuals being productive. If you're finding that your organization, you don't think it's particularly innovative, have that conversation. There's nothing to stop you there. The one of the good things about COVID is, it's a great time to have a conversation of Have you thought of what about if we did this, this is a perfect time to start to have those conversations. So how do you know let's broaden this out? How do you start to rebuild and reframe your job, get creative, think about what you can do and then start to have that conversation. You know, the old adage of the worst thing they can say is no. There's there's worse than that you can but you can have the conversation in a way that's only positive. You know, is this a conversation that you're prepared to have? No, okay. They don't want to have it. You can make your choices about where you go next. You can carry on doing it, you can start up a side gig, you can decide to stop playing for other roles. You can start on a company you can start to collaborate, build your brand range of options. But I think one of the positives if it will take a positive really tough situation is, now is the time for anybody in any organization if you have some ideas to start to surface those in a respectful way using the channels that are there. But don't be shy about having that conversation, because I think you may be find that the organization is much more willing to listen to those. It may not listen to it the first time, but certainly persistence will pay. I wonder if the net effect of kind of what's happened, Gary is that it will reduce the need for mass urbanization. And therefore people will migrate to where they actually want to live. In contrast, up until the Industrial Revolution, you know, the majority of people lived in, in rural areas lived on farms, for example, where they lived off the land. And then, when the Industrial Revolution came along, it created urban centres as a magnet for factory production and employment where there was an enormous influx of a diversity of people from all over that flocked to live and work there. And then the post Industrial Revolution, which is obviously the world in which we live in today, has led to the emergence of digital societies, especially across America, Europe, and Japan, for the most part, and although the Industrial Revolution was driven by technology to enable mass production that supported a monolithic, labor intensive population. In contrast, the post industrial revolution has led to the services industry producing more of the wealth than the industrial and manufacturing industries. So companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, have overtaken the likes of General Motors for General Electric, based on technology that won based on digital technology, information and services as a core assets that they produce. And the largest an influential hub of creativity for those sectors. Now, our Silicon Valley is an example in the San Francisco Bay Area. I wonder if there's going to be more people migrating out to rural areas where central hubs and urban spaces become significantly less as a result of kind of what's happened. I think of everything we've talked about, that's probably the one prediction that I would throw the most money behind. So I think, and it's not a negative, or a positive, it's an evolution. So, you know, he talked about you talked about the Industrial Revolution of, you know, various symbolizing Now, a couple of 100 years, you know, we are and this is the season. But this is why it's critical, though, you know, pretty early podcast, you've talked about Manchester, you've talked about, you know, a lot of the urban industrial revolution in the UK, and across Europe and American how it happened. I think, I think we are absolutely at the point of we talked about what COVID has done is, first of all, it smashed down a lot of barriers that were there in terms of what was possible. So I couldn't work from home. More than this, and I can't do that, and I can't work collaboratively. And I can't do this. Well, we now know that a lot of those are not true. So take the counter that we now know that for a lot of people working remotely is possible in some form, and to some level of effect. Now that needs them to make some changes to make some adaptations in their life, in some cases to maximize it. Now, we've talked about technology, but also I know of people who are engineers who've got home workshops. And what they've done is they've just built their home workshop, they can actually do a lot of the work that they can do in terms of finishing at home rather than in their shop. So there have been some evolutions. But I think what it's also show what it's also done is brought a big mirror to a lot of people to go, Okay, if I'm not shackled for the better word by this lifestyle. If I don't need I'm paying a lot of money for my city flat. So I can be near to my banking it job. Well, if we start to break these relationships down, so I, my banking job can be done anywhere. And why do I need to live in a city flat because for the price of this city, apartment city flat, I can live in a nice house in the country. And now that's not for everybody. But it means that and this is the positive change for this. It means that people are able to reevaluate what's important in their life and make. Work fit around that not have their options in life limited by what they want to do. Now, clearly, if you love the theater you love eating out. It's not you know, living in a rural area is not going to be for you. You know, you might find one pub, and it's the same regulars all the time, if that's not what you want, and the rural life isn't for you. But I think it's, I think we absolutely are going to see and this is this is going to, it's not going to ripple across, it's going to put a thunderbolt across a whole range of industries. So that realization, that rebalancing of life that refocus on Who am I, what do I want? What is the sort of life that I want? And what are the options that I have for earning an income? I think those discussions are going to reverberate through housing, not just housing location, but also housing design, ultimately, because most houses are awful, in terms of being flexible for the people living them, they're not. And I think this is going to have repercussions in terms of transport, I think this is going to have repercussions in terms of city and urban architecture, both for small towns for miles, four mega miles and for urban, you know, cityscapes. So I think I think this is the biggest factor that's going to drive to change that for many people, they have reevaluated what's important in their life, the options that they have for delivering that, and then the flexibility that they can operate within that. And that's what's going to deliver a huge number of changes. And the changes, this is where, for me, the changes, this is where the biggest changes will come from, because they're going to be much more sustained. So if you think about that, you, you can start to work some of these changes through so if you think that, well, I wasn't, I was in a city center apartment, I've got a small family, I want to move out, I want to move to an urban area, okay, so I need to go somewhere that has more space, I need to go to somewhere that is perhaps connected, that I can actually drive drive to the ability to get in. So I may not want to drive into the city, I might want to get trained. So it means that we need to think about, you know, urban networks need to think about parking. Well, if I'm going to be traveling much more not walking around the city, I might need a car mine in a different car. And I'm now prioritizing some personal pursuits. So I want something that can carry a canoe because that's no important. whereas previously, I've hired one or thought that that was not practical. You know, where I shop, I have a choice of, instead of just going to the local supermarket or the local mega Mart in the in the city, I can have a choice of whether I go to a local village to shop a small town that you know, retail, a drive to retail area or a big mall. So which do I go to and why. So the design and those is going to need to change because if you're going to need to attract people, you're going to need to evolve what you do, the car that you have the school, this will ripple this will be the biggest change. So when we talk about the Industrial Revolution, you know, the fourth industrial revolution, I think that it's COVID that will drive this, it's the changes that come from the reflection of COVID. Together with automation together with the changing demand for jobs that go together with the changing, shift to a lot of things going to automate it online. This is the changes. This is the actual catalyst of what will be the change. And that means that if that's right, then most of the big changes that we've seen are only just starting or haven't started. There are they're you know, they're there to be made. But they're not to be feared that to be embraced because if we get it right, it means that people are happier in a place living doing what they want to do working in a way that they want to work. That's that's got to be a good thing, right? Don't focus on the technology shift. That's a mistake people make when they make prediction and get it wrong, folks and human need.
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