(Re)Building Trustworthy Institutions with Nathan Kinch

drawing on 4e or 6e cog-side that proposes that cognition doesn't occur exclusively in the head, but is variously embodied, embedded, inacted, extended, emotional, and exacted. And I really like that. I think it's a really useful way of thinking about this because it situates ethics in a more useful idea of what cognition is. And I think ethics is more of a cognitive phenomenon.

It's not entirely rational. I think that maybe that's a bit of a Cartesian jewel-less type hang up. I think there's a lot of unhealthy slash useless baggage there. So just a touch on that reference.

Now, if we come all the way back to the beginning and getting into definition of trust, so my definition being relationally vulnerable to the actions of another based on positive expectations, it touches on a lot of the stuff that we think seems to be relevant to the phenomenology of trust. But it is by no means perfect. And it's not that different from, it's actually very aligned to other ways in which trust has been described, definitionally. Welcome to episode 32 of Humans on the Loop, where we explore the edge of the known and knowable, and how to navigate our age of exponential technologies with wisdom.

I'm your host, Michael Garfield, and today we're in conversation with AI, ethicist, and organizational trust expert, Nathan Kinch, asking questions like, how do institutions made up decent well-meaning people continue to behave out of alignment with their stated values? How do we dig ourselves out of a catastrophic collapse in trust? How can we design practical, participatory, living labs for organizational reflection and facilitate convivial, playful environments for working together? As we frequently observe on this show, we need to rework our ideas of agency and identity to adapt them to advances in our understanding of complex systems.

Decisions emerge within a nexus of nested, multi-scale dynamics, and our species, flourishes, or fumbles in intricate symbiotic relationships with the collective intelligences embodied in cultural technologies like states, markets, corporations, and social clubs, being as that, by any reasonable account, live in worlds alien to our own lived experience and demonstrate their own goals and values. Getting them to behave in ways that nourish us requires a much more nuanced theory of change than that which created them in the first place, perhaps even a radically different vision of the links between biology, psychology, society, and environment. And given that AI is a beast of a similar order to these other agregors, the entities of collective computation that arise from our efforts to coordinate its scale, and then impose their own top-down causal influence on our own thoughts and actions. Learning how to align individual and organizational purpose can give us profound insight into how to live well alongside or in the proverbial guts of newer, more obvious forms of non-human intelligence like LLMs, that amplify our biases through lossy compression and feedback, and shape both our desires and view of adjacent possibility.

In other words, the intent to action gap in corporate ethics and the paperclip machine problem in our built wilderness of black box super machines are structurally identical. And if we contain the secular gods of the modern industrial era, our self-domesticated species may actually still get a chance at living in a zoo of our own choosing. What follows is a much more grounded and soulful discussion than the above might make it seem. If you are caught in a system of technologically mediated social dilemmas, and who isn't, this will speak to you, and I'm excited to share it.

But first, I want to thank everyone supporting the show on Substack or Patreon. Somehow, I've managed to keep this monster I've created from bending to the will of the attention economy and still, 10 years in, abstain from polluting this well with ads. Only with your monthly contributions is it possible to carve out a safe space for the brave investigation of today's biggest and most urgent issues. I run this ship on an incredibly lean budget, still do all of my own research and production, and take a big hit for the luxury to devote every minute of every episode and all of my writing to the uninterrupted flow of exploratory discourse.

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And I thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy the stimulating dialogue with Nathan Kinch. Awesome. Nate Kinch, you're on the loop.

Welcome. Nate, thanks for having me. It's a great pleasure to be here. Yeah.

I feel like this show is skewing heavily toward Australians, and therefore represents not exactly a like in network come offally, but a clear bias, a fondness or a shared aesthetic with kind of thinking. I think when we first spoke, I said for whatever reason, I keep having with these folks I find online and then realizing you all know each other and hanging out. Yeah, I think where I would like to start is by humanizing all of the ideas that we get into in this conversation, by inviting you to tell your own story and filter that prompt through a focus on maybe early life events that have shaped your light cone of attention on complexity of our world. Why is it you care about what it is that you care about?

Why certain events in your life have inspired and motivated you to be passionate about ethics and everything else, trust and all the stuff that we're going to talk about. Yeah. Yeah. Cool place to start.

One of those tricky things though, because it's kind of like how much kind of useful depth and nuance can you give to something like that. So maybe I do this sort of like gestol or the 38,000 foot view and then if there are things that are interesting to get into them, we can absolutely do that. You know, so I was born like way up north in a place called Darwin, which is especially at the time was still very rural and remote in a lot of ways. Then grew up much further south on the eastern coast, a place called the Gold Coast, kind of like a it's almost like a big surf town in some ways.

And since then have had the good fortune of living and working all around the world and now reside in Melbourne. When I was younger, you know, a fairly normally family, you know, a couple of parents, two younger brothers, my mom and dad separated. When I was 11, you know, all of these interesting quirks and idiosyncrasies and trying to find myself in the madness of that familial situation and a lot of difficulty in that situation actually. And I didn't realize until I was about 30 or almost 31 how significantly a lot of that had shaped me kind of for the worst and I'll qualify what I mean by that maybe a little later.

Anyway, it's fast forward to when I'm like 11 or 12, I become obsessed with golf. I fall in love with golf and that was kind of like this passion I was introduced to the game by my dad and actually my middle of the three brothers, my younger brother, Alex had started playing first. And I then went on this journey to try and become a professional golfer for lots of different reasons and the simplest explanation in the end is I struggled with basically recurrent back issues from the age of 15. And it looked like I was probably going to be pretty good and maybe could have quite a decent professional career but by the time I was 18, it's like I wasn't getting better.

I was in pain all the time constantly having to take time off and some of my mates were just becoming world-class players and still to this day, they are. I was actually living in Alabama at the time when I was giving it my last little sort of crack and got on the plane barely able to walk home and I'm like, what am I going to do with my life? Because I literally saw myself as being this professional athlete that was flying around on G5 Jets and then I come home, you know, moved back home with Mum and my brothers and I was in a relationship and had done the long distance thing and I'm like, am I going to do it? And I had absolutely no idea because I suppose at the time a very immature sense of my own kind of identity.

Anyways, I get a job and I start trying to think more deeply about what is it that I care about and I joined three friends in building a sort of like a fashion brand I suppose called the Dash range and that was cool and it did well in different ways and I suppose I was really intimately involved in that process for a good part of a year and a half but I suppose in the back of my mind in my body wherever it's situated not to verify this inappropriately but I couldn't stop thinking and feeling about the injury thing and I was like, this is a big problem, like lots of people I know even have struggled with this that had seemingly great possibilities ahead of them, like what can I do about this? And I may be 19 at the time and I sort of go, I'm going to build a company that super naive, super ignorant, I'm going to build a company that attempts to kind of like solve this problem. And you know so I end up raising venture capital from investors in the UK and I build this company called Sport Performance Accelerator and we were really trying to use machine learning to predict the propensity that elite athletes had to incur soft tissue injuries and you know so we sort of start that process as a small team of four of us intimately involved in attempting to do that and we're trying to work with different football codes particularly largely because globally there's a lot of money there and so these teams can pay for like SaaS products but the thing that really stuck out as I started getting into that process was like what's the dynamic between the athletes and the teams? There seems to be this really unhealthy kind of like power imbalance and this will be a bit crude but it's almost like athletes were being treated like pieces of meat at times like they were these resources for the corporations, the sporting teams to use to their benefit.

Now it's a gross simplification but it just didn't quite feel right and then I started all of these I don't know areas of inquiry if you will asking these big philosophical questions that I'd never had any interest in. I go down all of the different rabbit holes or I get the blue pill red pill situation like I don't know quite how to describe it but I just became really motivated by things that I didn't just have no understanding of I didn't even have an awareness of up until this point when any awareness of and I got me into lots of different areas that you know the different branches of philosophy but particularly looking at the time you know we didn't have what we call now AI ethics you know we had information ethics and then from that emerged data ethics and we had a lot of work around information security and privacy or things like privacy and security by design which were directly relevant to this software we were building then getting into different critical and social theories and I was just like oh my god this is all crazy and I kind of stumbled into this process of trying to do what I'd now sort of refer to as like socio-technical ethics and and yeah and I just you know I look back on it now and it's like it seems like this coherent sort of narrative or this coherent kind of like career art but it wasn't at all I was just like stumbling through these different hurdles and trying to jump over these roadblocks and and yeah but looking back now I've been trying to do this work formally and very deliberately for over a decade and I've had the opportunity to do it in so many different contexts I've been really privileged in that regard you know advising governments advising major corporations doing lots of different forms of quite participatory you know almost like action research in lots of different contexts contributing to standards in different parts of the world and and for the most part been able to earn a living through that process and support my family and which has been absolutely wonderful so I know I referenced that stuff a little bit earlier about those difficulties and how I didn't quite realize how they affected me and I don't know trauma responses and stuff like that I don't know maybe we get into it or not but that's a really high level kind of like overview of I got to where I am today and what I'm interested in. So to get from your observation that sports teams like frankly many institutions have a fundamental tension between the well-being of athletes and the goals directives perceived well-being of the team itself to get from that into this work that you cite George Engel 1977 thinking about biopsychosocial models talking about trust as a biopsychosocial phenomenon I'm curious yeah how it is that you move from that because it sounds to me like what you're saying is that you may have realized that there was something about what you had internalized as a desirable life for yourself without realizing what success in that trajectory would mean as measured by the costs that it would incur for you on your own body and your own mental health as a related factor in how easy it is to simply be an animal. I'm curious about that move from seeing what I'm inferring you're saying is a violation of an implicit contract between athletes and the business and this broader thinking about trust and failures of trust in the way that it arises in different settings.

Yeah so bringing up Engel's work is interesting so I was first introduced to that when we were we were trying to basically model athletes using this thing that we call the single athlete view and we were drawing the biomedical model as a kind of like a paradigm of biomedical science you know which is based on different underlying philosophical assumptions and whatnot or presuppositions is really useful in various different contexts but limited in others and in our attempt to best predict different sort of like undesirable scenarios the more inputs we could feed into that process you know the better view we would likely have so you know we were drawing on a slightly broader paradigm and in this case the biopsychosocial paradigm to look at lots of different factors not just the normal things that you do in sports science and exercise physiology which will include like I don't know total tonnage or percentage of like when you look at like running sports like the percentage of low-mid high-speed running these different types of factors. All right variability but also drawing on like more psychological factors relational factors and stuff that's often outside the purview of the team so our sort of theory was like the more holistic view we could get of the individual in relation to the dynamics of the team the more likely we would be able to predict different risk factors and then meaningfully and thoughtfully and in a way that the athlete participates in intervening in that process you know for the benefit of the whole right for the athlete their longevity their well-being because so much of their sense of self and self-worth is tied up in their ability to perform and that was that was the case to me that was something that I'd really internalize that I didn't start unpacking until my early 30s I realized that I'd sort of internalize this idea that if I didn't perform I wasn't worthy of self-love and that create or rather love of others in parents and whatnot and you know so there's lots of different stuff that I'd internalized there that I saw I think reflected in many other athletes and it took a really long time for me to become and a number of fairly significant crises for me to become aware of that. The trust stuff I sort of again I kind of stumbled into that because you look at the kind of like the dynamics between the athletes and the teams and it's not necessarily immediate that like like trust becomes the thing and that wasn't necessarily it what was really interesting was as I was looking at like how do we build a technology that can serve these purposes. I started then looking into a lot of the literature on trust in information communication technologies and that sort of landscape and what are the factors that might make a technology more or less trustworthy what are the design tactics that can seemingly reliably enhance the trust worthiness what's the relation between the trustworthiness of the product or service offering and the organization that's actually designing it what's the relation between the trustworthiness of the product slash service the organization and the broader kind of like system or quote unquote market dynamics you know that sort of stuff because it became clear that if we weren't doing something a little bit different to what was common at the time we probably wouldn't have some type of like enduring contribution to the problem space that we were working on and just to cut a slightly long story short that the company ended up failing because I've made some I think some really significant mistakes very very early like we were in the right place at the right time which was super crazy we didn't really have like the SAPs and the Microsofts and stuff like that because a lot of the folks doing those advanced analytics in professional sports now are the big players and there are some smaller players with a company from Australia called catapult that's not that small they're pretty big now but it's full compared to Microsoft and there were some companies in Ireland in different parts so we were in the right place at the right time but I made some horrible decisions just because I was again really naive and ignorant and we'd had a really messy cap table and we had a couple of co-founders that weren't performing and the board wanted me to buy them and I didn't quite know how to do that and that meant that we because we didn't do like a proper vesting schedule in terms of equity allocation and stuff like that we basically became uninvestable and like there's all this type of stuff that now I would never make those mistakes again I learned really hard way you know this thing that I was trying to build and thankfully you know we managed to actually return the funds to investors so we kind of walked away like there was lots of opportunity cost and time had gone by and stuff like that but in turn we didn't create this massive financial hole thankfully because that often does happen with startups but yeah so it wasn't actually the the work on state of bias like a social model as opposed to the biomedical model that led me to the trust stuff it was actually questions about how do we build this technology well how do we build it the right way how do we build it in a way that is most likely to fulfill the kind of like purpose that we are trying to kind of internalise into this organisation that was what got me really interested into the trust literature which is actually quite messy in certain ways and I don't think we have a particularly good understanding of the nature of trust at present I think we have a good understanding of the function of trust in many different contexts but because we're trying to map whatever the territory is we have many different maps and many of those maps are based on different assumptions like a lot of research in the previous century on trust was based on things like prisoners dilemma iterated exchanges game theory which is one way to look at it but actually based on what I think is happening in kind of like real world so like trust phenomenology playing out like like so limited it's crazy you know and one example is in trust games you just have two parties right but in the real world you have the end body problem you know what I mean and I became fascinated with all of that and what became interesting and you know completely circumstantial a lot of people so like medically it's like people started as I became fascinated by it and I started developing I'm going to use this very loosely to have like some expertise in the space in terms of interpreting in the context of like designing sociotechnical systems how we could interpret some of this literature it's like the market started becoming more interested in that stuff you had BCG talking about it world economic forum talking about it lots of different independent researchers talking about it you know more peer reviewed articles talking about this stuff the relation between trust and you know I use slightly formal terms the design of sociotechnical systems basically like you know we had social media and all these different types of things gone crazy so it was like chance or whatever we want to refer to it as but the timing kind of worked so I started developing some expertise at the time it's seemingly became interesting for the market so I kind of lucked out in that way and as a result of that and the opportunities that I had after sport performance accelerator the skill set that I was really trying very hard to cultivate was something that people were looking for and that very thankfully that's what's at least for the last 11 or 12 years given me you know the opportunity to travel the world and you know pay for rent and all these different types of so yeah I know that was all over the place but yeah that was kind of how that stuff sort of emerged I want to pull a couple of rails out of the piece that you wrote for VRSA and what's trust got to do with it that I think are useful to formalize and constrain what we're talking about here you say a useful definition that you work with for trust is the willingness to be relationally vulnerable based on positive expectations again because trust is something that arises through relationality that we should maintain humility when we describe this phenomenon and its implications that it requires approximation that like you said it's an end body problem and we've got to work within that sort of any kind of formal definition is going to miss something but you also talk about a five layer framework that you use for trust and without getting into excruciating detail about all of that one of the most interesting things I think you touched on this already one of the most interesting ways of understanding trust is through social license to operate the as you put it the ongoing acceptance of a company or industry standard business practices and operating procedures by its employees stakeholders and the general public the fact that the world is even allowing you to exist as an organization or for that matter as an individual in a tightly woven network of interdependencies in like tribal structures right I think a lot of us have in our bones the fact that through most of human history you weren't trusted that you were expelled you were like let out into the woods or walked off a cliff or whatever and yet I want to add to that that we live in a world now where it's funny because we actually place a lot of implicit trust in systems organizations individuals that we can never properly audit but with whom we have no direct relationship I've heard so many interesting stories about you know the unsung heroes of the Cold War who prevented humankind from destroying itself in a nuclear exchange because they violated an explicit pact that they had with their supervising officers and refused to press the button and now you're in a system where you know the executive command chain gets somebody to actually launch a warhead is enforced by you know these people don't get to make these decisions anymore they don't get to you know there's somebody standing there with a gun making sure you press the button so I don't know there's one of the things I'm thinking about and I would love to solicit here is reflection on all the ways that we trust other people without realizing it or we trust other people simply as a matter of practice because we have no other choice because we don't understand the systems in which we are placing our trust or in what we're relying on there are plenty of examples where work that is being done to support or protect others is done in secrecy as a matter of necessity and I'm always interested in playing the devil's advocate and saying in the United States we don't a lot of people don't trust the Department of Homeland Security but we don't know how many horrible situations have been prevented to know that would jeopardize their ability to operate we find it really interesting speaking to the messiness of the calculus of trust that I watch a lot of arguments on social media between people who for instance say that they've heard something about the cost in the utilization of water for computer cooling systems and say that therefore given that everyone seems to be aware that we're on the cusp of a global clean water crisis that certain computer operations upon which many of us do not even realize how dependent we really are are inexcusable because they use too much water but that claim is being made on a very low-dimensional assessment or electricity for that matter that doesn't think about how much the systems that we're already using actually require a lot of people like do you realize how much Bitcoin mining takes how much electricity that actually takes and then people on the other side are saying do you realize how many resources it takes to enforce the value of the dollar through a global military presence like backing up the value of the petro dollar with force with one of the world's most if not the most polluting and wasteful systems we've ever known I don't know I'm like again I'm meeting it yeah totally I love it but it's interesting because I think a lot of people I speak to would agree that we are in a crisis of trust and that the crisis of trust has to do with how poorly we understand what we really depend on what the work of other people in this massive and opaque infrastructure are actually doing what the true costs of modern life really are and that again gets back to at the very beginning of when you sign a contract you know it looks really good you know you see the dollar value and you don't realize what that contract is going to do in terms of rewading your obligations that are distributed between your employer and your family etc so this is just an invitation to riff on on humility and how we work through these complex or sometimes even just like totally chaotic this is where we cannot make it's funny because like your site to just put a bow on this you say trustworthy by design design is a funny thing but it's like one of the premises of this show is that no inventor really knows all of the ways that their technology is going to be re-appropriated and put to different uses down the line that William Gibson says the street finds its own uses for things and use site in other work you cite John Brevaky and X-Saptation and the emotional as to of what you call the six E's the six different dimensions where we can think about ethics in the way that all of this stuff is going on so yeah hey this so yeah check that we will okay I'm gonna try and do this somewhat sequentially if that's okay because there's so much good stuff in there but but I reckon we can I reckon we can kind of tie some of it together so yeah so just really quickly on that last reference what I'm what I'm attempting to do because what I'm what I'm attempting to do with that is talk about what ethics is in a in a different way so ethics being something like the deliberative process through which we reflect on our first order beliefs about what is good and right in an in an attempt to align our you know our decisions actions and likely consequences to that which we believe to be good and right so what I'm attempting to do there because I think in a lot of literature when we talk about ethics and many philosophers will claim something like you know ethics there's no there's no space for a in ethics and it's an entirely rational endeavor and there's a lot of equivocation even in these areas so we say ethics but we might mean kind of different things and it does get used sort of differently sometimes morals and ethics are used interchangeably I actually sort of draw a distinction between the two morals being those kind of like first order deeper beliefs and ethics being the deliberative process and and there's a hopefully if things are working well a really nice relationship between the two through this deliberative process we're reflecting on our first order beliefs what we believe to be good and right etc we do stuff we see how it works you know it refines what we believe to be good and right and I'm drawing on 4e or 6e cogside that proposes that cognition doesn't occur exclusively in the head but is variously embodied embedded in acted extended emotional and accepted and I really like that I think it's a really useful way of thinking about this I'm not saying it's right but I think it's a really useful way of thinking about this because it situates ethics in a more useful idea of what cognition is and I think ethics is more of a cognitive phenomena it's not entirely rational I think that's a bit of a Cartesian jeweless type hang up I think there's a lot of unhealthy slash useless baggage there so just a touch on that reference now if we come all the way back to the beginning and getting into definition of trust so my definition being relationally vulnerable to the actions of another based on positive expectations it touches on a lot of the stuff that we think seems to be relevant to the phenomenology of trust but it is by no means perfect and it's not that different from it's actually very aligned to other ways in which trust has been described to definitionally what I'll do really quickly is just talk about a few key concepts in trust so we have this idea of like the mental process that leads to a trust judgment and that's what most people think of when they think of trust they think I'm assessing the trustworthiness of the other party and making somewhat of an informed decision about how to like relationally engage with them and that does seem to be a really important component to this biopsychosocial phenomena or a transjective phenomena however we want to describe it that is trust or the thing that we're calling trust rather this process that we're calling trust another important concept is what's called trust propensity and trust propensity is almost like the foundation upon which an individual engages in that mental process to assess the trustworthiness of another party that they want to relate to in some way shape or form and that seems to be impacted by like everything our entire historicity and so this huge individual variability but we also see important cultural differences and stuff like that in terms of trust propensity so trust propensity is really hard to usefully model because of all of these different variations down to the level of the individual and if we say that that an individual says to ricity it massively impacts and we think it does massively impacts trust propensity then again it's really hard to sort of computationally model this stuff in a population and I'm not saying we can't do it or we shouldn't attempt to do it but again that's where we want to bring humility into play then there's another thing that you talked about sort of explicit versus implicit trust now this is a tricky one mate because I don't know whether because it depends what we actually mean by trust so if part of the phenomenology of trust is the deliberative process that leads to some type of reasonably informed trust judgment and we're saying that there has to be some intentionality to that process then implicit trust is not trust it's something else if the process doesn't have to have any deliberative component then it could be trust and actually there are different ways in which this is sometimes sliced and diced there was a resource that was published a few years ago Hillary Sutcliffe and another colleague that might have been 2020 it was published called tiktik.org trust in the governance of technology and they describe trust states as being sort of like non-binary so they describe many different trust states from kind of like passionate trust all the way through to passionate distrust and then they have reserved trust passive trust so they describe these different categories and I actually think that's a really useful way it's not necessarily right per se but it's a really useful way of thinking about it and what you're probably describing in terms of the implicit trust is what they would refer to as something like passive trust so it appears to be trust in terms of how we relate to it behaviorally but it's not the result of a deliberative process it's the result of kind of like the social contract that we've been birthed into that we didn't choose that we didn't really exercise agency over etc etc etc so there's some interesting stuff there that you've picked up on again one of the reasons I really try and approach this with a lot of humility all right so then when we come into that five layer thing now I'm going to try not to get too technical but I'll just describe the five layers that Michael was referencing speaking to the audience as if they're tuning in life so the top layer and this is I'm using the limitations of the English language so top to bottom left to right type of thing so all of those nuances and caveats but the top layer using the limitations within which I'm attempting to describe is social license to operate and that is what organizations care about because that's effectively the market saying yeah keep doing what you're doing so boards that are responsible for corporate governance they care about social license to operate sometimes they talk about trust or reputation or whatever it is but they really care about social license to operate below that is reputation and that's basically what people say about the organization below that is trust that's kind of like very simple terms for now that's the belief that the market has in the organization's trustworthiness below that is organizational features of trustworthiness specifically the organization's benevolence or lack thereof integrity or lack thereof and competence or lack thereof now I add one little nuance to that I describe it as normative competence because we can be really good at doing bad shit but what we want to do is get really good at doing good shit and then below that I talk about ethics this deliberative process of reflecting on our first now organizations they want social license to operate and often they try and get it by going out into the world by changing their messaging or trying to understand their customers differently or whatever I think they've got it the wrong way around my theory is basically that in order for an organization to benefit from favorable social license to operate the best way to do it is to start within the organization to reflect on its its character and to better cultivate its organizational character so we do that by deeply reflecting on our values what we believe truly matters we use that reflection on our values to inform how we do the process of ethics better by doing the process of ethics better we're more likely to build these organizational features of trustworthiness more likely to consistently express benevolence integrity and normative competence by more consistently expressing benevolence integrity and normative competence we give the different stakeholders that we serve and that we relate to good reason to to trust us to pass these favorable trust judgments trust and reputation in a very simple sense that maybe two sides of the same sort of coin so trust being kind of like the belief in the organizations trustworthiness again it's about what people are believing in a very simple sense and reputation is kind of what people are saying and those two things seem to be tightly correlated like if you believe in organizations trustworthy when you're talking about them you're probably going to talk about them rather favorably so again this seemingly type relation between the two and what I propose again in a very simple sense because this keeps us nuanced all of this and I try and approach it with as much practical humility as I can because you don't want to have too much episemic humility because then you can't act right so it's kind of that balance but the combination of trust and reputation basically equals social license to operate so that's the kind of organizational design approach that I take I go I know you want this you want favorable social license to operate here's my empirical reasoning for not starting outside of the organization and encouraging us to come in and deeply reflect on our character and yada yada yada I think if we do these things reasonably well we have good reason to believe that these are the types of effects we will see outside in the world and here's the sequential approach that I would propose said organization in order to cultivate character get better at the process of doing ethics build these features of organizational trust worthiness express them out in the world consistently and then these are the things that we want to pay attention to or observe or approximate out in the world to try and determine whether or not this in an organizational development is having positive outer world effects hopefully that builds on some of your briefing in a useful way and you know you can get really technical and I'm drawing on all these different theoretical contributions and here's how they relate to one of that but I found that to be actually quite a nice way to talk to boards and executive committees because I can end up using reasonably simple language I've got this five-laid system you want this thing out here but the way to get the thing out here is to start down here and then we basically work up and they're like oh that makes sense and then we can start you know situating different investment or resourcing decisions and the way in which we do it we don't want it to just be top down we really want it to be quite wholesome it's like top down bottom up it's middle and out so we want it to be reasonably diverse inclusive participatory etc you know we can we can start with just a slither of the organization in fact which is one of the ways that makes it more approachable for orgs because they're always doing organizational transformation but they're never actually doing organizational transformation because it's always the McKinsey approach to organizational transformation or whatever which I don't think tends to be a particularly systems-literate approach it tends to be quite mechanistic it doesn't tend to be particularly efficacious as a result an organization is more like an organism than it is like a machine but one of the ways that we can do it is we can say hey this is part of the organization that we're actually going to treat as its own sort of whole and we're going to test this stuff with and if the effects are reasonably favourable then we can start integrating that into other parts of the organization or internalising that so yeah that's my riffing response to your riff hopefully that helps yeah there are a lot of ways I could come into this I think what I want to focus on that you mentioned in another RSA piece on three reasons why AI ethics is struggling to narrow this into the show's principle focus on technology in the way that we think about the way we theorise and practice technology and how the built environment constrains or affords different ways of thinking about who we are both individually and collectively and what is possible in that because we're spending a lot of time talking about failures of trust the let me actually let me start with an example of when I talked to Rajiv Seti the economist on police violence and we're talking about the ways that a history of deepening distrust between police and the people whose job it is for them to protect leads to situations where crime gets worse in an area because people don't expect the police to respond appropriately when violent crime occurs and so more violent crime occurs because people feel like they have to take it into their own hands criminals act with impunity or vice versa that the police feel that they can violate the rights of citizens within impunity and so this leads to situations where trust is incredibly difficult to rebuild and there's also the fact of human psychology that we tend to remember the negative more easily than we remember the positive and yet like one of the things I'm trying to do with this show is to ask the question of how we can tell better stories it takes a lot of work even in a marriage to start from the place in a case where it is at least on first approximation a two-body problem you're saying like I trust you and you trust me and we've exchanged vows we're going to assume that we are in this together and yet everybody comes into these relationships with baggage and you know what I'm thinking about the statement about relational vulnerability with positive expectations and how that links into the question of how it is that knowing our expectations either funneled and amplified through language models as a statistical correlations that come out of those as in predictive policing in the way that it ends up reinforcing that there are bad neighborhoods often through some spurious correlation that then becomes reified and aggravated or whether it comes from any of the different sources that even starting from a position of neutrality positive expectations are a hard compass bearing to maintain and then let's articulate that with and you've made this point in sort of inner work outer work you know as above so below stuff that in a way the emphasis like I just listened to a really excellent conversation between Tim Logan and Dave Snowden on how the emphasis of education in western civilization quote unquote on individual learning is this sort of weird curiosity given that most human societies ever have not regarded decision-making as a phenomenon engaged by individuals or that the notion of the individual as in that famous study on how like Japanese versus American people interpret visual scenes differently where if someone standing in the front of a crowd is smiling and everyone else behind them is frowning the Japanese will see that person is disingenuous whereas Americans interpret the scene completely differently because we've been primed to understand the self in a much more individualist format so there's like a way in which talking about it as inner work is weird in the first place because our perceived experience as individuals is a hallucination of all of these encodings of the stability of environments over different time and spatial scales and so I don't know I guess I'm just thinking of what does it mean for an organization to engage in to take as you say like a hard look in the mirror when we complicate the idea that there is such a thing as an in here or an out there in the first place or in what ways do you recognize to put it in a kind of more protopian sense of new technologies afford new ways of taking a look in the mirror new ways of seeing constructing defining and acting selfhood that you know there's a way to see the self that was simply impossible before the invention of the microscope we could think of ourselves as like part of a sort of fabric of ecological relationships but it wasn't obvious that the self is a complex modular, colonic structure composed of collaborative relationships between things that are like agentic in their own regard yeah and cognitive like that your cells are thinking and making decisions and that's coming together as a person so yeah again huge question but I guess if you want to just ask me for a grand unified theory come on mate yeah I guess what I'm asking is like how do you actually do this work with your clients in a way that solicit or encourages quote unquote inner reflective process in a way that doesn't reinforce the idea that they somehow exist as closed systems or that understands that all the categories that they're using and the world model that they're operating on is itself groundless that it's been trained on a limited like the historicity piece of it and the open-endedness of all of us yeah let's such a fascinating area of inquiry and what I would say is like I start with trying to work with useful models of these things you know I'm not trying to sort of like overly ontologize them but let's take it like a sense of what self is in the context of a quote unquote individual as in you or me as this sort of like complex technically multi-species biological organism so there's a thing called a tripartite model where you have like an experiencing self a narrating self slash ego and then a public pacing self the way and there's you know the thing called the Rogerian filter between the two the way that the experiencing self the narrating self expresses itself in the world right so whether that's right per se as in whether that's actually how our psyche is construct totally different story but like there can be a real usefulness to that in a clinical psychotherapeutic context you know what I mean so I would say I'd be trying to do something similar in an organizational context we have many subjects cohearing around different goals so I don't want to sort of reify or overly ontologize what the inner versus the outer means but in a simple sense we could say the inner work is about like looking within recognizing an organization's boundaries of semi or very permeable right looking within the organization which means like how does the organization describe its purpose what are its incentives and disincentives what are the implicit and explicit sort of like cultural artifacts that seem to be most impacting the way that people think about themselves in relation to this subjective thing called the organization or the ways that they're relating to one another what is the way that the organization is functionally sort of constructed as in it doesn't have a reasonably quote unquote flat sort of structure is it quite hierarchical recognizing hierarchy seems to be sort of property of the universe but using that in the more mechanistic sense in terms of command control predict control sort of hierarchical sense so taking those things into consideration it would be playing with that stuff as as well as possible so let's try and make this practical so let's say there's an actual activity and the activity is the equivalent of the kind of like the the you or me looking in the mirror looking into our eyes and engaging in that type of process right that hard look in the mirror so we might say so first of all the organization has to commit to doing some type of meta cognitive or reflexive or self-reflective type of work right and there's a process through which i would attempt to support an organization in becoming agreeable that that is in fact really valuable that's not always successful but let's just say it is let's say the organization is all right we're going to take a hard look in the mirror for all of these different reasons and some of them look at because maybe we have some moral dissonance within us this is really common within an organizational context the values that people have as individuals the things that they believe truly matter often come into direct contact and it's an unhealthy tension that's often unresolved with the things that the organization values they're not necessarily what the organization says it values but what it enacts now i'll clarify this really quickly so there's a body of work led by Donald Sull at MIT Media Lab that was published in 2020 that looked at the relation between corporate value statements and kind of like corporate conduct and they don't even recognize the statistical correlation so most organizations have these really nice sounding value statements right like we care about integrity or diversity or whatever it is but then the way that the organization sort of collectively behaves like its culture doesn't seem to to accurately reflect and this is endemic right this is everywhere so we would bring a group like ideally something like a representative sample of the using these terms employees of the organization into some type of sort of like fairly dialogical setting right and let's say we know i'm just going to really simply describe this is like over the course of five weeks or six weeks there's a little bit of prep work there are five two-hour dialogical sessions and then there's pre-post preparation integration between the sessions right and there is some sort of way to observe what's going on like capture document what's going on and reflect on that through through the process and let's say there's 25 folks that somehow usefully represent the diversity of the organization in terms of worldviews functional areas of expertise functional goals contributions to the whole you maybe have a couple of board members two or three executives you know and then within the hierarchy people who are quite senior people who are quite junior then across the organization different functional skills right so you bring them in now i'll also add it's doing this in organizational work better if you have folks from outside the organization too because they provide a different way of looking at what the organization is what the purpose is how it can enact that whether it's doing a good job presently etc but push that to the side for a moment so let's say the first session is something like reflecting on the organization's purpose for existence or mission and there's some type of radical organizational self-inquiry that asks how well are we fulfilling this like we say our purpose is to connect the world or i don't know whatever it is right or organize the world's information whatever the purpose statement is or mission statement and those two things can probably in this case be used somewhat interchangeably how well is the organization doing that and there would be some type of dialogical practice if you've got 25 people maybe they're broken down into five groups of five where there are sort of prompts there's some type of facilitation and there's also meaningful sort of self-organization that process is documented and then reflected upon by the group in some way either during that session itself depending on how the two-hour session is structured or afterwards right and through that process the organization will have some type of sense it's not perfect but some type of sense it's at least a more explicit sense of whether the organization is doing a good job of enacting its purpose or mission right then we can start diving deeper into that we can say all right well what are the ways in which we can more effectively enact our purpose or mission well we can try and express and enact our values more consistently well what our values well we say they're these things at the moment but are they and what's the relation between our values and our behavior at the moment because we're behaving in all of these different ways but they don't seem to be a particularly good reflection of those so going through this process right and you might do it multiple times what I would hope we come out of that process with is a clear review of whether we are being purposeful whether we have integrity as in is there a tight relationship between what we say we value and how we behave if there is to what extent if the gap's quite significant what are the things that we think we can do to try and start closing that and then the outputs of that process hopefully can start affecting things like what the values are in the first place and whether they need to change or evolve or be communicated expressed integrated in different ways then there can be more functional stuff that comes out of it well shit you know we've got these values but actually our explicit and implicit incentives incentives are structures within our organization are contradicting those at the moment all right well let's start playing with that and there's lots of different ways that you could look at how do you start attempting to enact some changes within the organization I'm not going to dictate the ways in which that can be done because there are so many different ways to do it many of which I'm obviously not aware of but you know so I'll have my preferences or proposals for how to do that and then that body of work can get communicated throughout the organization ideally it starts becoming like a living thing so one of the things I do for instance Michael with say AI ethics I've been doing a lot of that AI ethics work for more than a decade it didn't even used to be called that but you know is try and build like a living lab like the socio-technical architecture of a living lab so that this process isn't just one and done it's something that we participate in in sort of like a longitudinal way and our longitudinal participation enables us to become better at self-reflection and metacognition etc and this process of reflecting on values conducting little experiment to try and live value better observing whether that has like the desired effect if not we try and learn from that and then we feed that back into the organization this inner work can become something like that so we become more of a learning organization and that's the type of thing that I'm talking about in terms of inner work and hopefully if that's done well that can also encourage the individuals and you know there are important preconditions like if the people participating in this process don't genuinely believe that they're safe to authentically express that you know that like it's a non-starter right so there are certain almost like preconditions of this being quite a helpful process and we want to do up front work to try and get a sense of whether those conditions are true or false or whatever that's a little bit complex it's a little bit messy and I'm not looking for perfect but I am looking for a lot better than it's previously been done commitment to the process commitment to each other commitment to kind of like honesty and integrity within the process and it's my hope that if we start those processes in kind of like a microwave that they can evolve to become a more kind of like active part of how the organization as a whole kind of like operates into operates etc and that in doing that we're probably going to over time improve that anthropomorphizing to something but hopefully take this with lots of salt improve the character of the organization over time and as a result probably improving inner workings of the organization like how all of this stuff actually works how we collaborate the tools and processes and practices that we use the way that we incentivize and disincentivize and through that process hopefully we see like a positive correlation between what we call inner work and the effects that the organization has outside as in like what its products and services do for the people who choose to use them whether it's reducing its scope three emissions or its effects on planetary boundaries that type of stuff hopefully that's an appropriate response to it's tricky right every day I'm learning I think how to do this better but I know within myself that I think I have some good practical ideas and that's based on a lot of theoretical contributions and then me just trying to integrate them every day over the course of my career but yeah hope what I would look back on the work I was doing five years ago and I'm like and I hope in five years I look back on the work that I'm doing now and I'm like and I think that's a good approximation for the fact that I'm working through this process reasonably wholesomely and I am actually learning and becoming less susceptible to that sort of done in Kruger effect right yeah I guess I want to ask another related question which is equally tricky and it's about as you put it longitudinal relationships in some sense afford a longer but you have more time to try things out to explore to adjust incorrect but often okay so there's a tension that I want to call you into to talk about which is that a lot of what remains fixed in our relationships is like non-consensual or it's based on a matter of dependency or need I'm thinking really specifically about an article that Corey Dr.

Rowe wrote on why he will never join blue sky because it's not a federated platform and he already learned from Twitter that he's like I'm stuck on Twitter because like you know the cost of exit is too great this is true lots of us especially the lack of interoperability yeah I think about this like about switching costs and years and years ago I read a comment on you're talking about these like toy models that don't really explain things about the tragedy of the commons by Sylvia Strela at all at it's called environmentally mediated social dilemmas in trends in ecology and evolution and they noted that this idea about the tragedy of the commons is based on some inadequacies in the model one being what co-author Michael Hooper called perpetual interactions in a given space so this gets back to the issue of switching costs like the tragedy of the commons assumes that no one can lead and so part of it has to do with like you're saying earlier about implicit versus explicit you don't really have trust between parties if people can say no it's like this idea that we're saying yes to adoption of new technologies assumes that it's possible for someone to participate in the economy without a smartphone or without using AI or these kinds of things there's so that's one layer of it another layer is that if you invest whatever billions of dollars in training some language model and then later people figure out how to audit it and realize that it's fundamentally flawed but at that point the company's gonna stick with it or the company's gonna stick with it the original charter or menu of available corporate practices because the cost of actually making the transformation means that the company has to go down into a trough has to become less successful temporarily in order to make this long-term adjustment and so it's funny because you know on your site you say well the most commercial trustworthy organizations outperform the market by 30 percent that's great but if your board is gonna kick you out as the CEO by trying to make a long-term bet in a higher performing organization because you're gonna go through a five-year period of like pain and adjustment then it's not up to you as the ostensible leader of the organization it's a multi-color trap of sorts yeah yeah exactly I just I also want to link in the amber case and michael's argument worked on this thing called terms we serve by which is revicable data permissions for people that are using software as a service where if you decide that you want to pull out that you can reliably remove your consent but there's this thing about like when you quote Donald Sol et al about how it was he as you put it still there's still found a correlation between the values of company emphasizes in its official company corporate culture and how well the company lives up to those values in the eyes of its employees and when I talk to people again and again in the show about well I would like to make sure that my buying patterns or that my voting patterns or that the way I live in this world is a net positive to all the systems of which I am aware of the relationships of which I am aware but I still have to live in a flawed system and so all of us be we people teams companies states are compromised in this way and I guess the tension that I was originally calling you to was that if it's easy to exit then it is also easier to just say screw you and not participate in these long relationships in which you are learning about one another in developing trust so in a weird way like there are factors where that actually afford trust at one level because you know that this is a relationship founded on consent because either party can pull out at any time and then those same factors trouble the interdependence or at least the perception of our reliance on one another wherein trust becomes a necessity and so I'm curious what you have to say yeah that's super interesting let me just clarify the outperform the market by 30% just so that there's a reference for that so it comes from the trust across America Facts framework about only about 13 years of public company performance and it's based on a specific methodology with therefore underlying assumptions but the reason that I add that to my website is because almost everyone thinks that the work that I'm doing is going to hinder their capacity to operate effectively now I'm not suggesting that we don't need a fundamental paradigm shift in what it means to organize and collectively coordinate and the goals that we have and we do like we absolutely do I think if this current paradigm of corporatism continues and we want to continue and I know that's a huge claim but I think it's a lot that we can call upon to justify such a position but I don't think it necessarily has to be that way and I know I don't have all of the answers about the future so I don't want people to think that this work is anti-certain types of performance I think it will transition our focus away from very narrow goal orientations towards broader goal orientations it will better enable us to internalize rather than externalize so it'll encourage us to get closer to true value or true cost accounting and it can able us to better holistically perform but yeah so I just wanted to qualify that because I think referencing is important but okay so the thing that you're referring to here is really interesting because you know let's take a simple example so let's say this is process of relational co-development in kind of like a romantic sense and people come into a partnership and maybe build a life together and then that becomes interdependent in various different ways financial relational reproductive and so there is a deep incentive for each party to remain benevolent as long as many other things of course such that willingness to continue being vulnerable to each other is based on justifiable positive expectations so each party has good reason to trust the other party but that's an interesting example there where the more into it we are the more incentive we have to keep trusting but it's probably also still based I think in many healthy relational context on the possibility that if it really isn't working that we can divide and do so in a way that's reasonably amicable and the interesting thing about that is there isn't necessarily hopefully there is going to be in some context a significant power imbalance between the two parties now there can be in a financial sense depending on the world that your in gender can make a difference and we don't live in this perfect world where everyone is treated equally and beautifully and love to imagine that one day we could live in something closer to that but in a person to organization relationship the power imbalance is so wild it's crazy right there's so much information asymmetry like this is such a big resource device like you're engaging in a relationship with a bank like the bank is this multi-billion dollar corporation that has so much of a capacity to act in this world relative to you it's crazy right and this can get us into and you know I've done a huge amount of work on consent and permissioning in the personal information economy for the last decade or so working at the very leading edge of that in life management services and personal information management services and digital identity and self-sauve and identity and all these different types of things and working to improve the ways in which in a socio-technical system individuals can helpfully relate to organizations where they can be meaningful mutual progressive disclosure that is met with information exchange and when a relationship inevitably eventually comes to an end that there can be parting of ways that is healthy and amicable and respectful but which brings us to limitations of consent and which many of which are epistemological because a lot of the literature on consent it's largely based on stuff like rational act of theory which is ridiculous how consentful a process is I think needs to be more grounded in real world stuff and this is where literature on things like behavioral economics and cognitive psychology and stuff like that brings more nuance into these equations but yeah so the area of inquiry is really interesting I don't think there's any particular thesis statement or anything I have that can simply clarify my views on this complex area but maybe I could share some learnings about the work that I've done in this space so like Nora Draper I think is the leader author there's a paper maybe 2016 or 2019 titled How Corporations Cultivate Digital Resignation something like that I think if you search for it you would find it I'm not sure if that's the exact title and what this was basically about was this idea that organizations through various different tactics techniques etc. exert these power imbalances in such a way that people don't really have choice you know when there's a new social network because of network effects and all these different types of things it becomes almost impossible in a practical sense for people not to participate because otherwise they get ostracized it can erode certain aspects of their well-being obviously participating in the platform can also erode certain aspects of the well-being but the idea is that corporations are really doing this knowingly and I believe this often to be the case now I'm not suggesting that individuals within most of these corporations are acting very seriously my experience is the opposite actually at almost every level of most of these organizations you have good kind caring people who experience a lot of moral dissonance in their daily work because they think that the way that the corporation is acting at large is actually at odds with the way that they think it should probably be acting but they also feel that the organization is locked into a trajectory oh well no the corporation's purpose the business of business is business and you know this is what we have to do and so they sort of justify for the organization and and I'll wrap up this point by saying there's a body of work that I did for the CPRC here in Australia to try and better understand the inner workings of the programmatic advertising industry and the ways in which that influences people's lives and I did that with a couple of colleagues Matthew Micker who you know and another colleague Nadia Lee and what ended up coming out of that was this really interesting sort of like sequential mental model that people go through so when people are engaging with these complex information ecosystems we did this sort of like blended hybrid research methodology where people engaged unimpeded in these workflows that were enabled by these complex information ecosystems and then after the fact they go through the same process again and we described what is actually going on under the hood sort of surfaced the quote unquote black box that they were experiencing in this case and it was absolutely fascinating to see how people relate to what they feel are very creepy data processing activities but what's interesting is even though they believe that these processes are really creepy and not particularly normative is in not what organizations ought to be doing because they're good or right they actually believe they're creepy because they're kind of like bad and wrong and not to suggest that's a binary it's more like some type of complex spectrum what they end up starting to do after they get into it is self justifying the organization's behavior and I've written a summary of that research that I could dig out and send you and so they kind of go through this process of going oh wow this is horrible but yeah you know that the corporation kind of has to do this and I don't really have any power anyway and so they become apathetic and they feel like they don't have power and then they sort of rayify that right like so they feel like they don't have any power so then they act like they don't have any power and then when everyone does that collectively organizations continue doing what they're doing and it's interesting because what if we actually stepped up and we were like if we collectively coordinate as individuals based on our belief that these organizations are acting immorally in various different ways holy shit we could change the way that they that they we really could now there are certain costs to us doing that there would be a lot of disruptions there would be a lot of tension but we could in fact do that if we solved certain collective coordination failures you know right if big if but I don't know it's really interesting and when you bring this into an organizational context the people that work within these organizations often feel very confronted like yeah shit this is not ideal but then they get stuck into that cycle of sort of self justifying and and then getting stuck on their sunk cost fallacy path and we're locked in here and you know there are all these market dynamics and if there isn't a strong enough regulatory driver we're not going to change and guess what when there are these regulatory drivers like we're seeing with AI stuff at the moment it's all opt in and there's no meaningful accountability or oversight or recourse or consequence to organizations so ah shit they're just going to keep doing what they're doing and it's like god damn you know we're like a self-fulfilling prophecy but if we're able to step out and go like we could change the way that these relational dynamics work we could change the the way that organizations operate we could change the way that we coordinate as individuals in order to try and encourage more normative kind of like actions from these big powerful organizations we could change a lot of stuff I know that's not like a direct answer to your question but it's more like playing with and then trying to build from but I think there's something to that that's really interesting and powerful and although you know our technologies are almost certainly especially these ones deeply axiological and we use them and they use us and and you know our values are reflected in them and then the way that we use them and the way that they proliferate you know it encourages to sometimes reflect on our values and the challenges of our values and sometimes we evolve our lives and all of that stuff is usefully true I think in that sort of sense like it's like but but it doesn't always have to be that way we do have agency we can change a lot of this stuff organizations have the capacity without completely destroying themselves to progressively evolve the way that they operate in almost like a three horizons framework type of sense you know they have their BAU they know that that BAU can't continue they have some state of the future and they can actively engage in increasingly H2 plus innovations you know like there are lots of different frames of reference for how this can be done and maybe over time there can be this dynamic where trust where the organizations are the ones that benefit and Baroness O'Nora O'Neill who's a quite a famous British philosopher she talks about this rather beautifully I think and she has a TED and it's kind of like we don't want more trust we want more intelligent trust judgments we want market dynamics or system dynamics where the entities that are worthy of trust are the ones that benefit from positive trust states and that's the type of thing that we want to work towards so and I think in some theoretical well that is absolutely possible and because I believe that's possible I think that's what I'm trying to commit my life work to you know what I mean in the sense that hope is something like belief in the possibility of better active hope is living your life based on belief in the possibility of better you know I'm actively hopeful that even though there's going to be difficulty ahead of us in various different ways biocentric instability social injustices was we might be able to go in through and beyond that madness and over time there is some kind of fundamentally better world where humanity is in fact humanity in civilization is in fact civilization and we live healthily and well and beautiful and creatively in rich lives largely within the safe operating zone of planetary boundaries or something like that so anyway so yeah that's great I don't know if you the last question I have for you again I don't know if there's a way to answer this easily but one of the dimensions or themes of inquiry for this project is about gaming and reward systems and addiction and economies of scale favor inconvenience low-dimensional value you know like metric systems that tend to mine things out with diminishing returns there's another way and the way is like when you talk about vervakie and the inherently emotional dimension of cognition one of the things I keep coming back to you thinking about is how Emma Goldman who says if I can't dance I don't want to be a part of your revolution and this question of shifting the system whether it's your own personal habits or whether it's the practices of an organization often just seems like work and the question is how can we make it easier for people to regard it as play or technological adoption learning re-skilling oneself is exhausting how can we make it fun repairing trust in broken relationships seems like why do I even want to relate to you at all you screwed me how do we elicit curiosity but make it interesting for people to engage with these situations for which there are no easy answers and you have no guarantee that there's a clean solution and so you realize that you're opting into something that is an ongoing process that may never find you know an equilibrium where everyone just gets to say okay we're cool the last question I have for you is if you've identified any patterns in your work that excite that stimulate people that get people enthusiastic about doing this in the first place then I feel like you will have offered some kind of insight into the there's much bigger question that I have about how we can design ethical games enjoying quote-unquote saving the world for committing to the stewardship of all of these different dimensions of our lives rather than you're talking about like it's not checking boxes totally checking boxes feels good because you feel like you've achieved something yes you've achieved something like how do you make it fun to play the infinite game where the best you can really do is be like I'm tired I'm tired I'll tap back in when I can because I love the game so yeah it's such a good question I actually think in this context Matt and Alia from Tethics doing some interesting work I don't know if you've if you chatted to Matt yet but I'm sure he'd have a very interesting take on this as with his colleague Alia because of the socio-technical system that they're building but it's almost like how do we bring conviviality to the process well I think it can happen at different levels so one of the things that I find really interesting when attempting to do this in an organizational context is just get people out of boring buildings right like take them somewhere fundamentally different and make the environment more interesting differently stimulating playful etc it's still be playfully serious as you're like you can be deeply caring about what you're doing right so that's one and then the way that you facilitate within that environmental context can be fun you can make humor okay like we can express ourselves in lots of different ways but honestly that's a really simple one like we can make the environment the context we can set things up like set and setting to be quite convivial because often when we think of ethics we equate ethics to governance and we equate governance to boring as batshit and it's basically some old people are cricketerizing here but I don't think this is that far off what a lot of folks see in some boardroom making some very high profile decisions about things that have billion dollar implications and I think that especially if we're going to do this proactively like I'm not saying there's some crazy scandal or something like that and a corporation's just going to go into the woods and take mushrooms you know not that mushrooms are necessarily the best way to have fun because obviously that can be very difficult in different ways you want to be prepared but just let's like get radically out of our context and take our shoes off and be in the woods or on the beach or whatever it may be and then within that environment it's actually easier for people to take their work hats off and be a bit fun and playful so I really like that approach the other thing is I think kids are really awesome at doing this so that there's kind of like multi-generational approaches and what places to intervene in systems and within an organizational context for me the most reliable way to make it more convivial get people completely out of their usual context and then actually try and make the process fun and then as a facilitator I try and model those behaviors I make fun of myself I'm calling into question my epistemic limits and doing so in a playful way so I'm trying to model certain types of behaviors and to suggest in a really embodied way in a sort of like in that the conviviality like this is fun this can be playful and I find that much easier I find that happens much more easily for folks when they're outside of their work context because it's almost like the way that through that regarian filter the way that our experiencing self and the rating self expresses itself through its public self because public self has many different domains, dimensions, representations etc it expresses itself in a very particular way based on lots of different subconscious or unconscious drivers right some of that we're attempting to be conscious of and deliver it about but a lot of it which is not aware of right and we express ourselves in a reasonably consistent and uniform way in a work context so we get ourselves outside of that context but I also think if we're people that are trying to be playful about system transformation and how do we have a socio-technical society that is also ecologically sound we've got to do that at different levels you know kids are really awesome at being playful so let's learn from and with them I have a six and a half year old like she would have no problems you know like with her friends doing something that is truly convivial and laughing and being hysterical I also comedy is one of my most important kind of like outlets and not everyone understands that and that's not necessarily going to be for everyone and everyone's comedy is somewhat unique and slightly different which is one of the challenges for professional or even amateur comedians right you have a hundred different sense of humor in the room and you're trying to find a way to bring joy to all of them but but I like to bring humor and silliness and even like use a lot of profanity and you know Australians are known for that and that so this is a social affordance there but like so I really actively try and bring comedy in and of course want to be sensitive to the context and the subjects and stuff like that that is really important but yes that's something that I do personally I'm not suggesting that others should but I feel quite comfortable being a bit comedic and Rachel Donald and I when we were talking on really awesome planet critical podcast and publication like we were talking maybe after we wrapped about this idea of being a jester and I sort of look at myself a little bit that way and you look at the role that jesters have played historically it's really interesting they were able to speak truth to power using playful sort of comedic practices and it sometimes held up a mirror to these people who are in these positions of power and eroded some of that hardened surface that they often have you know so those are things that I do I don't know whether they'll work for others except I would strongly advocate for the get people way outside of their typical context and then try and facilitate in a way that is playful and interesting and then ecologically appropriate like if you're at the beach it'll be different to being at the forest and mountains or like you know I found that to be really effective and then I add a few other things like you know the playfulness of a kid or a little bit of comedic inclusion I really like that and you know maybe that could work for you as well yeah what is the one thing that we can change to shift perspective and process without making everyone nervous that we're removing a load bearing pillar yeah well this is awesome Nate I really appreciate you taking the time I appreciate the work that you're doing I thank you for sitting with me thanks mate likewise the project overview that you shared a few minutes in the loop I think is truly wonderful it's sorely needed and anything I can do to continue supporting a will awesome thanks again for listening if you enjoy this conversation please consider liking subscribing and commenting on your favorite podcast provider humans on the loop is made possible thanks to the support listeners like you explore extensive archives and find the members only discussions I just posted on Alexander Douglas's against identity and Wendell Berry's Standing by Words at http colon slash slash humans on the loop.com in our next episode we are going back to our super trippy future fossils roots and our conversation with DMT neuroscientist Andrew Galimore exploring how brains make world models how reality is metabolic and why figuring out what's up with psychedelic entities matters to mundane technology discourse if you enjoy bewilderment as much as understanding I love this conversation until then take care remember attention is our greatest natural resource