OCTOBER 2023
In the ninth episode of our “In Conversation with…” podcast series for 2023, Lucy Lewis, partner at Lewis Silkin LLP, is joined by Paul Miller, Chief Creative Officer and Founder of the Digital Workplace Group.
“We are living in a time which is no longer the industrial age, it’s not even the digital age; it is the living age.”
Lucy and Paul discuss the need for organisational adaptiveness and resilience to better withstand and respond to the current disruption and pressure on business, and explore concepts from Paul’s book ‘Nature of Work: The New Story of Work for a Living Age’. In this book, Paul draws on patterns from the natural world to provide leaders with the language and questions to evolve their workplaces from organisations to organisms.
Key takeaways from the conversation:
Organisations are organisms: Companies seeking to build a sustainable organisation and to humanise workforce experiences can benefit from viewing their organisation as a dynamic and living thing rather than a rigid and industrialised structure.
Corporate purpose is key**: Companies must focus on taking corporate purpose from concept to practice and identify where they can have a direct impact at a local level.
Leadership today is challenging**: To succeed, leaders should consider adopting “servant leadership” and reflect on core values around meaning, purpose, empowerment and agility.
Advances in generative AI are deeply significant**: AI will change the way we work and raises important ethical and societal concerns. However, the current labour shortages experienced by many countries are likely to remain.
We may need to rethink tax**: As technology continues to significantly impact on jobs, debate is growing on the merits of an “AI tax”.
In Conversation with…Paul Williams
Season 3: Episode 9
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Lucy Lewis: Hello and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s “In Conversation with...” podcast. I am Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s employment team, and in this podcast series I will be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspectives on the longer-term trends and immediate drivers shaping the world of work.
We have seen some really dramatic shifts in the world of work over the past few years, and those have presented both opportunities, but they have also presented challenges for businesses and their leaders, and that has caused many people to re-evaluate the way that they look at their businesses, as well as the value proposition they offer to their employees and the value or proposition they offer to their customers and consumers.
And in this episode, I am joined by Paul Miller. Paul is a technology and social entrepreneur and the Chief Creative Officer and founder of the Digital Workplace Group. The Digital Workplace Group is one of the UK’s leading management consultancies in digital transformation, and in 2021, Paul co-authored ‘Nature of Work, The New Story of Work fora Living Age’ with the Digital Workplace Group’s director of knowledge, Shimrit Janes.
Now, we have talked a lot in this series about the need for organisational adaptiveness and resilience to better withstand and respond to the current disruption and pressure on business. So, Paul, I am really looking forward to exploring your perspectives from the book that bring in this concept of the natural world and encourage us to view organisations as organisms – as dynamic and living things, rather than, rigid and industrialised structures.So, welcome.
Paul Miller: And it is great to be here Lucy.
Lucy Lewis: Now, I said a little bit about your book, but it starts by noting that we are living in a time which is no longer the industrial age, it is not even the digital age; it is the living age, and it is such an interesting concept. I was hoping we might just start the discussion by you explaining to the listeners a little bit about what inspired you to write ‘Nature of Work’ and then the key concepts that underpin the book.
Paul Miller: Sure. So, near where I live, there is a ... I live in the Cotswolds in the UK, not far there is a copse called Widley Copse. I often walk through there, and just in a kind of random, sort of wistful way in 2019, I started asking myself, having written various books around technology and work, how is this forest different to an organisation? At first glance, even the question sounds absurd. If you think of something like IBM or Coca-Cola, there is no relationship between that and a forest, is there?
And then I thought well, actually, if you look at the forest, it has got roots. So if you look at Coca-Cola, they have got roots. There are unseen parts of a forest that influence the health of the forest. If you look at any organisation, you could look at the culture, i.e., you cannot point out and hold the culture, but we all know every organisation has a culture. Then, you start to look at the life cycles of a forest, and actually, its iteration, its growth, it can fall into disrepair, it can actually go through periods of regeneration, and the more that I started to,kind of, explore this concept, I thought “actually I think there is something to this”. You know,we are very used to the idea of health, but very much restricted to financial health. So, if we think of organisations, we think of their financial health, but are there other aspects of health? And this is all pre-pandemic.
So, I started talking to one of my colleagues, Shimrit Janes, and we had been thinking about writing a book together, and we had been sort of thinking about the idea of, kind of, hyper-technology, advances in AI, but we could not get that enthused about that. We thought that was going to be very important in the world of work (this is all pre-ChatGPT etc.), but we started exploring this concept of the organisation as an organism. That organisations were more like a forest than a machine and this concept of the living organisation, the organism started to really, I guess kind of, take on some meaning, and pre-pandemic we then came up with this concept of the ‘nature of work’. So, we knew about the future of work we said,but what is the nature of work? And this concept that we were not in a digital age, as you said, we are actually in the living age, and obviously, the whole relationship with environment, ecology was part of that. So that is kind of where the whole book idea came from.
Lucy Lewis: Thanks, Paul. It is so fascinating, and I love the story of the inspirations. So often, ideas about things come to us in that way. Now you will know, it is a really challenging time for business at the moment. There is a lot of economic pressure and difficulty, but we are also seeing - it is something that we have talked about quite a lot in this podcast - we are seeing this real shift and change in expectation and, I mean, both consumer or customer expectations so, what those customers or consumers expect from businesses, but for us at the Future of Work Hub also what employees expect of business, and that shift in expectation is forcing businesses to think about things like, corporate purpose much more. How does your focus on the natural world, the nature of work, some of those kind of things like roots, that you have talked about, health, how do they relate to this focus on corporate purpose?
Paul Miller: Yeah, well it is very interesting because then if you stand in front of a tree, if we ask ourselves what is the purpose of a tree? It has aspects to it, things that it does, such as carbon reduction, it has an aspect of beauty, but there is a sort of a sense of a deeper purpose in nature, and I think one of the things that people experienced and talked about a great deal during Covid was how grounding it was for them, being able to be in nature.
So, there is a sense, for example, in a tree that it has purpose. Now, I think, then when you start to look at it in terms of organisations, we have seen this rise of importance in the subject of purpose. So, we have 12 elements as we call them in the book, and the first one is what we call purpose or ‘deep purpose’. So, if we are starting to look at an organisation, and there is some great examples of this, and one of those in the book is called “Who Gives a Crap”, they make toilet roll. They are a very environmental, ecological, sustainable organisation. They are an organisation that has been doing extremely well. There is a rise of B corporations, or better corporations and we have it … you know, you can … you see these things seep into the media, this understanding that younger people are looking for deeper purpose and meaning. I think, as you said, it has become a very economically challenging time but, actually, if you roll back to before the economic problems we were in a kind of crisis of confidence really.
So, 2019 was very much defined by all of the ecological movements, started by Greta Thunberg, and there was a sense that younger people coming into the world of work are looking for deeper meaning, and I think organisations are starting to understand. I mean we have one of our member meetings happening at Intuit, the software payroll company based in Silicon Valley in September, and they are 40 years old. But if you look at the story of Intuit, I called them one of the older/younger companies who have now arrived and they have got this culture that is infused with a sort of meaning from the beginning. So, I think this idea of purpose and starting to draw from nature but also to seeing your own organisation, if you are expecting people to come and work for you, what are you going to give them beyond a financial reward for doing it?
Lucy Lewis: All of that makes perfect sense, and I think so often when you are listening to these things, you think, ‘this all comes together and I agree with you completely’, but going about it and doing it in practice, that is the tricky thing and you gave … actually some lovely examples there, including the “Who Gives a Crap” example, but I am interested if you have got any other tips or thoughts for our listeners about how they can practically go about … embracing the nature of work ethos in your book, within their businesses? And I mean that, in part, in terms of corporate purpose, but you have given us some lovely examples there, but also other things, things like sustainability, employee expectation, well-being, DE&I. What are your best practical tips for getting on and really embracing this?
Paul Miller: Well, one of the things that I think is very important is to think about the purpose at a local level. So, an example here is Cisco – large technology company, been involved with purpose for an awful long time. What they have done in order to, sort of, upgrade their purpose inside the organisation is look at what they can do within the local regions that they operate in. So, for example, they have had a programme running for the last few years with the city of Venice. We all know that Venice has become very diluted in terms of indigenous non-tourist economy, so they started to work – they called the programme ‘Venyware’, and they got people working with Cisco across Italy and beyond to come and relocate for periods of time to Venice. They then started to work with the local bodies in Venice to see what they could do to actually increase the vitality and the health of the local economy in Venice.
Another example that I think shows what, to me, purpose means - Microsoft are in a programme not only of getting to net zero, but they are, under Satya Nadella who I think has brought great purpose to Microsoft as an organisation - which I think is why it’s one of the most respected companies in the world - is going back and looking at the environmental impact they have had since they were founded, and repairing that. If you look at a company like Mindful Chef, which is a recipe company in the UK founded as a B corporation, every meal involves donations to poorer communities. So, in a way, the purpose that I like is where it is very evidenced. So, I would say to any organisation, look where you can have a local direct impact. Another organisation, Walmart, which has, astoundingly, I think it is 2.3 million employees, but what Walmart actually does is look at what it can actually do within the local communities and areas that it operates in.
So, I think you need to take purpose from concept to practice, and I do not know what that means for each organisation, but it will mean something very different for a large law firm like you, to a retailer, to a technology research company like the Digital Workplace Group so, I think that is probably where I would start.
Lucy Lewis: And that is really, really helpful advice and actually, I like the idea of thinking local, you know, looking beyond concepts, being local. I think that is important for some of the themes we have been discussing on this podcast series about, employee experience and employee expectation and it being meaningful to people and feeling something that is more than just corporate. So, I think it is really, really good advice.
Changing tack a little bit, Paul, but sort of following this theme of employee expectations, what employees are looking for from businesses because obviously, that underlines quite a lot of what is driving change. One of the things we are seeing, and I am interested in your experience, is the change in expectations and the pressure that is putting on businesses is, sort of, filtering itself down to leadership and there is a sort of, crisis in leadership. According to Microsoft’s most recent work trend index, more than half of managers, about 53% of managers, are feeling “burnt out” at work, you know more than stressed, really finding it difficult, and I wondered if you had any thoughts or observations about the key challenges for leaders at the moment, how they can adapt for those, whether there are any themes from your book that are helpful in terms of really grounding us. You talked at the beginning about roots for example?
Paul Miller: Yeah, well I think leadership today, I mean, I have been in the field of management consulting for quite a number of decades and I think leadership today is far more complex, far more challenging. I mean, when I entered the world of work, sort of, organisations could operate really within their own kind of boundaries. You know if you look at somebody like Jack Welch, who ran GE for so long, you know, he was able to operate a command control, quite a top-down approach and I think now leaders are in a much more complex environment. For instance, if you look at the range of social, political, environmental challenges that any organisation faces, I mean we do, quite a lot of work with Estee Lauder and the world’s kind of, social/political situation has deep effects and what they can do, and they need to be mindful of all of those things.
One of the leaders that I do like, who I think was somebody who took over just before the pandemic is Pamela Maynard, who is the CEO of Avanade (about 60,000 people in that technology implementation consultancy), they are a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, and she talks about servant leadership, and the idea of not espousing a version of leadership that is where all the answers are on you, but it is really about the enablement of people across your organisation. And she took over just before the pandemic and, I think for about 14 months she did not meet another person inside Avanade physically. How on earth do you lead an organisation like that? She is their first female CEO and, I think she is a great example of that different approach. If you look at somebody like Jack Welch and you look at Pamela Maynard, it is a very different approach to leadership.
I think Satya Nadella who I mentioned, again he took over from a far more directional version of leadership under Microsoft and I think the organisation at that time was struggling. I mean, the financial success of Microsoft, the culture of Microsoft has really, probably never been higher than it has been under Satya Nadella.
What has he done? He has looked at, kind of, core values around meaning, purpose, empowerment, agility and I think those are some of the kind of, characteristics of leadership. So, a kind of leadership where it can seem utterly overwhelming if you think all the issues that you face as an organisation are on you, try and simplify and think through, what are the kind of, core values? I mean, I keep reminding people inside the Digital Workplace Group – we are only about 100 people - and when I stood down as CEO I said, “You know, what we are about as an organisation is the interaction between human beings. Things that human beings invent in work, which tends to be technology and work itself. So, if you think of that triangle of human beings, technology and work and the challenges and opportunities that are posed by that triangle”. And it is in a way, in a world where an awful lot is changing trying to remind people, that is what we are about.
Lucy Lewis: Thanks, Paul. I think that is really, really good advice and really focusing on the purpose – it is helpful clearly for leadership and will hopefully address some of the challenges that leaders are facing at the moment.
Now, you circled back which was great for me to the Digital Workplace Group because I am going to take a change in tack and you talked about all the other things that you could have been writing about and one of the things you mentioned was advances in AI and given your experience, I did not really feel I could have you on the podcast and not talk to you a little bit about that. It will come as no surprise to you that technological development is something that we have discussed quite a lot on the podcast, alongside the continued, perhaps increased, need for soft skills and people skills and why those are going to be important. You mentioned ChatGPT, so generative AI is obviously something that people are talking quite a lot about at the moment and, because you are here, I am really interested to hear your reflection specifically on AI, what that could mean for the future of work. Should we be scared of it?
Paul Miller: Well, the analogy I have used…it is like weather. There is good weather, there is bad weather, what we can all agree on is that weather is significant and you need to really understand weather to operate, to live.
I see the advances in AI, and AI has been around for many, many decades, and I think what happened in November last year when ChatGPT got launched was that all of a sudden, we had an experience of AI, rather than the concept of AI. So, I think of it, rather like a weather system. The other analogy I use - imagine bringing money into a barter economy. Is that going to be good, is it going to be bad? It is going to be all of those things. What we can agree on is it is going to have deep significance. So, I think these advances in generative AI are deeply significant. I think the alarmist side has got its value because I think it is bringing, in my mind, a much more, intelligent approach to some of the ethical and societal concerns around it. So, I think some of the hysteria has kind of got a good place. I mean, I think we were very naive when social media arrived into our world in the early 2000s and I think that really has unstitched us and we are now trying to repair the damage. It would be nice to think that with generative AI, we would not fall into that.
I do share the views of Kevin Kelly who is a popular futurist, founder of Wide magazine, and he said generative AI is really like a very smart intern, it will help you a lot, particularly at the start of writing projects, of coding projects, but it is not going to do the job for you. We use something called Perplexity AI, which is quite a thoughtful and useful tool. So, I think it is deeply significant but when you think about it, I mean, Goldman Sachs predicted that by 2030 we would lose 300 million jobs and my sort of reaction to that was, well it is not that many actually. You know, there is about 3 billion people work at any one time, we lose about 100 million jobs per year anyway, but there is huge numbers of jobs being created at any time and I think we still have, in lots of economies, high levels of labour shortage and I do not really see that changing. I think we tend to factor in the things we are going to lose and not factor in the things that we are actually going to gain.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you. I love the idea of, well, the analogy of a weather system. I think that is a really interesting way to look at it and you are right about the fluctuation of jobs. It is something that we have talked about quite a bit on this podcast and, at Lewis Silkin, one of my colleagues, James Davies, has written a report on that, and I was discussing that with him. It is important that you are looking at the created jobs as well as the jobs that will be lost.
I have got a final question for you Paul. It is something that I have been asking all our guests on this 2023 podcast series. The last few years have shone the spotlight on the future of work and the huge number of opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, but what I would like to know from you is what you think is missing from the current conversation. What is not getting enough attention? What are we not talking enough about?
Paul Miller: Well, I am going to answer it in a couple of ways. One is that I think there is a lack of vision. I think we live in a world with a lack of vision. So, I think, if you look at organisations, they tend to have a two or three year perspective, but thinking in a clearer way about what kind … what do you want it to be like to work here in 2035/2040? What is the vision for the organisation? When BMW celebrated its 100th anniversary, they set up a project called the “next 100 years” and they got younger people in the company just to kind of play and imagine, and I think one of the things by having articulated visions of a more distant future gives people hope that we are actually going to get there.
So, what are some of the ingredients you might want in that future? I think, you know, if I start to think about a future for the Digital Workplace Group, one of the things I say to people was that, at the beginning of the last century organisations that became EY, PWC, McKinsey all started off and they were just small organisations, why couldn’t we be one of those organisations at the end of this century that has got that kind of status? And what are the impediments to that? There is always going to be people in work, I think that the idea of work disappearing is an illusion. There is always going to be challenges and opportunities in that.
And my other thought, which is more of a one for us to think about almost as a society, is that we see that technology will be replacing jobs, but what about the idea of a tax on technology? An AI tax? Maybe around about 5% of the annual spend on an organisation. So, if IBM are going to lose a third of their jobs to AI well, where does the revenue benefit of that go? The government does not get the tax, because those third of the people are not paying tax each month. What about a tax on the technology that replaces jobs? Because the money has got to come from somewhere, and just because this is a difficult problem to solve it does not mean it is not one that cannot be solved. In fact, Bill Gates was the person who started talking about a robot tax about five or six years ago, and I just think it is something there for politicians to start thinking about.
Lucy Lewis: Thank you, Paul. That is really fascinating and actually, really particularly interesting for me because, on the last podcast I did with James Davies, we also had a conversation about tax and the need for governments to think proactively about where tax revenues will come from as the world of work changes. So really, really, interesting thoughts.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If you are listening and you would like to find out more about the Digital Workplace Group and the Nature of Work, you can visit www.digitalworkplacegroup.com. Thank you, Paul.
Paul Miller: Pleasure Lucy. Thank you, great to be here.