10 November 2020

Richard Ward, Head of enterprise filters, VR and AR solutions at McKinsey & Co.

Richard Ward, the head of enterprise filters, virtual reality and augmented reality solutions at Mckinsey and Company, speaks with Hannah Gutkauf, Manyone's lead extended reality strategist about how business can apply creative technologies today to get a competitive and valuable edge.

**Transcript. ** (edited slightly for clarity)

Hannah Gutkauf: All right, let's get started. Hi, Richard, nice to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on to this. I think that we should get started with the first question. And before we get too much into the subject matter, let's maybe take a step back and talk a little bit about, what we understand under augmented reality, virtual reality and lenses.

Richard Ward: No, that's a great thing, great place to start, one of the problems in the industry, is that it's taken longer than people wanted. And so the technology has evolved into different things, doing different things. And we those of us who do this every day keep coming up with new definitions to make sure we're keeping it all straight. But we've actually kind of confused the consumers and the enterprise market. So as soon - and a perfect example is when someone says what is augmented reality and immediately it goes into a discussion about "see through" versus "pass through" glasses or blah, blah, blah. So within the firm, McKinsey, what we have done, at least for our own purposes, is simplified it into three basic concepts which have to do from the user's perspective. So the first one is we talk about as filters. And when we talk about that, that's the basic concept of holding a phone or a tablet, turning the camera on and waving it around and then looking at the screen. And you're looking at kind of a pass through of the video stream or the camera in the photograph. And the computers have all added something to it. Could be bunny ears if you're if it's a Snapchat filter or it could be a sofa if you're using the IKEA app to put a new sofa into your apartment. The second one that we talk about is virtual reality, which I think everyone is very much in agreement on what that is. That's fully included goggles that are strapped onto your head. And one hundred percent of the pixels you are seeing are fake. They're all generated from a computer. And then finally, you have augmented reality, which we are reserving for the fantasy that Hollywood has been feeding us for 30 years of see through glasses that are normal shape and size. And all of a sudden we are able to see all this incredible information, just like the Terminator in the Terminator movies. We can see people's names, we can see street addresses, we can see all sorts of crazy stuff. And the truth of the matter is, that that product is not really on the market at the moment. There's industrial versions, there's prototypes, there is the Hololens. But in general, for ninety nine point nine ninety nine percent of the economy, that product does not exist yet.

Hannah Gutkauf: I completely agree, I mean, I disagree and I agree at the same time, because I think it's quite interesting that you see lenses as I think what a lot of people describe as augmented reality, because augmented reality can also be very simple, as you say, adding a digital layer to the real space. But what I really love about using lenses is it's something that people understand. It's the Instagram AR lense basically, and that's something that everybody is using already today. And it takes, it makes people talk about what's actually important. And that's to use case instead of getting wrapped up in all these definitions. Extended reality, mixed reality, the Mirror World AR, VR. I think at the end of the day, it's basically we are adding a digital layer to the real space. And in VR, you're completely wrapped up in the digital space and AR or in lenses, there's just the real space still here.

Richard Ward: Exactly, and obviously, you know, the technology between the camera and what you see on your screen with filters, when you're waving your hand camera around gets increasingly sophisticated because not only a few years ago, Slam was not even really possible with the smartphone. So you had to use markers or measurements in trying to do all of that. But now the technology has gotten really good, whether it's through machine learning or others, you know, that people are able to actually just wave the phone. Same thing. Photons coming into the camera, pixels coming out of the screen. But in between, there's a lot more new technology. And so the the the artificial part of what you see on the screen gets more and more sophisticated. Right. So now you have like a three dimensional object in the middle of the room. And it's also got fully occluded stuff. You could hide it behind the houseplant and still see it through the leaves is like, that's crazy. But it's just technology between the lense and the screen just getting better and better.

Hannah Gutkauf: That is true. I mean, I think at the moment specifically, we don't only know what the floor is, but we also know that the plant is a plant so we can only trigger a three dimensional object whenever it sees a plant. So there is definitely a lot of magic coming up because the technology between the lens and the reality, as you say, is just becoming increasingly better.

Richard Ward: Exactly, but but but but the human action is the same, waving your phone around.

Hannah Gutkauf: Absolutely, until we have those magic glasses that Hollywood is talking about and maybe some Apple people.

Richard Ward: And if you think about it, the magic glasses are really just hands free waving your phone around.

Hannah Gutkauf: Absolutely, and then the next Elon Musk version, which is the brain machine interface, having it directly in our brains, but I think that's really the Hollywood version.

Richard Ward: And that and that that would be hands free, no glasses waving your phone around.

Hannah Gutkauf: Yes, that's the way. Yes, I kind of agree, I guess. And onto the next question. So now we talked a little bit about what does it mean? What is AR and what is VR. But is it useful? I think that's the most common question. I think a lot of people still see lenses and virtual reality as a gimmicky entertainment solution. Where do you think are the biggest use cases today?

Richard Ward: Well, so we're going to split into pieces because filters or as you call lenses is big business today, and that is because it helps sell things. And so that could be things like sunglasses. So, you know, various glasses, companies now have a filter where you take a picture of yourself. So the camera takes a picture of you and it shows up on the screen. But they actually are able to put the glasses or the sunglasses on you, of different shapes and sizes. And if you move your head around, it actually moves around with it. It's pretty cool stuff, right? But the whole purpose is to help sell sunglasses. Same thing for furniture. You're finding increasingly pieces of furniture that people buy to put into their houses and apartments. There is a filter app where you can kind of scan your apartment and then put furniture in it and you can see what looks good, what looks what doesn't and move it around. So helping to sell things is a good, solid killer case for augmented reality through the filter's lens, waving your phone around model. Right.

Hannah Gutkauf: I agree. Also in the B2B, I think a lot of it can be used for furniture, but even now, specifically where companies can't go to fairs anymore, also showing off your product in an engaging digital way that's maybe not yet another webinar.

Richard Ward: Exactly.

Hannah Gutkauf: This is also a huge opportunity,

Richard Ward: And that's because it helps answer three questions that simple photographs on a Web page do not answer. For the consumer, whether that's an enterprise consumer or whoever is buying, whether they are an enterprise or a consumer. It helps answer three questions. Number one is, will it fit? So if you're looking at, like, putting a sofa into your apartment and the measurements are correct, but, you know, it just looks a little big, you know, maybe it's not going to fit through there or something. Same thing for like a huge piece of equipment. Will it fit through the doors and all of that? The second question that it helps answer, very easily is, can I see the back of it? Because a lot of products, people want to look at them from all angles because maybe if it's a piece of industrial equipment, you want to see where the electrical outlets are. And you could say, hey, you know, for example, like an electric car. So like the Tesla, the electric plug for the car is on the left hand side behind the driver in America. That's important to know because in my garage, the electrical plug for electric cars is on the right hand side. So I would not need to spend extra money to move, I'd either have to park the car backwards, which I'm not very good at. So I'll end up hitting the side of the garage or I've got to spend money on more electric circuits. So seeing where, so seeing all sides of it was important for me to be able to understand exactly that information. And then the last question is, is will things fit in aesthetically, which is much more for consumers, but even for enterprise? If you think about buying office furniture, there's that question of, hey, you know, we've got we already have a bunch of stuff in the location. Is this going to fit in or is it going to look ugly? And so the filters capability of being able to just point your camera, your phone at something, the object you're interested in showing up, being able to fit in with the correct dimensions and correct colours against everything else, you'll be able to see things like somebody I know that was going to buy a purple sofa, and then put it into the apartment through the camera, and they saw that that shade of purple looks really bad with the flooring that they have, which if all they did was look at the picture on the website, it had beautiful floors underneath it that matched perfectly. And so they avoided making a five thousand dollar purchase they would have been unhappy with.

Hannah Gutkauf: I love the second example you mentioned about the Tesla, because I think that's actually a very much overlooked also enterprise solution. It's this analyzing what's in the room and then doing checkups. So the example you had with the electricity plug that could just as much be used in the building sites or on a building site where electricians need to do all these checkups and walk throughs to make sure that all the wiring is correct and building augmented reality for that to basically like auto automating that process. So anybody, maybe even without an electrical degree, could do the checking and send it to the electrician for approval.

Richard Ward: Well, exactly. And in fact, I have a real world case yesterday we're looking at, because it's Corona and we're bored, we're looking at putting a new floor in our bathroom. We have a very ugly floor that's been there for 30 years. The company that came out to do the estimate had an iPad pro and the person came out and they stood in the middle of the bathroom and they scanned and did a full photogrammetry model of the bathroom and then used that to get all of the dimensions for measurements and to highlight all the problem areas and then put the quote in the estimate together. And then when they send me the estimate, I'm going to actually have a 3-D photogrammetry of my bathroom that I can spin, zoom in, zoom out and see that when they say that we're going to have to move the toilet by 10 centimetres, this is why and all of that. So now I'm fully informed, in a way that a written quotation that just had bullet points would not be right.

Hannah Gutkauf: That's beautiful because the same methodology could be used for consumer goods. If you're buying curtains, you need to know how much curtain material you need to buy. Instead of climbing up on a ladder and maybe taking out the measurement belt, you can just hold up your phone and like, let the phone do the math for you so it gives you an automatic price for all the different materials you can choose between and maybe even lets you preview how it's going to look in your window.

Richard Ward: So if we take that bit like helping people buy things or decide to buy things is certainly a very strong "you ought to do it right now case" for whether you're selling industrial or consumer goods. Once you've made the three dimensional models for that, you then can automatically and almost for free deploy the second big benefit of this, which is remote help. Because if you already have a system that you're familiar with, how Slam works and all of that stuff, and you can put a model in place, let's assume that somebody already bought one of your pieces of equipment, like a photocopier. And if you've ever worked with a photocopier, brand new photocopier are so incredibly complex who knows, I mean, they do more things than you ever possibly imagine, but you have no idea how to do them right. And so instead, what you can do is you can stand in front of the photocopier, open up your app or your browser, turn on the camera, and all of a sudden a filter's version of the photocopier pops up and it's got like a chat window. And you say, I need to know how to staple every other copy, you know, and then all of a sudden you get an animation that goes directly to the machine and points out, right, you need to push this button twice and then type and then push this button one time. And then you know put the paper here right, and I'm standing there waving my phone around. But now it's almost like having my own expert show me everything within the context and the reference. And this is a very valuable thing because of customer self-service, because, you know, YouTube has shown that people with some education and some tutorials on things can do a whole bunch of stuff themselves without calling your help line. I mean, I've done like things that would have cost thousands of dollars on my car because I just watch a YouTube video and a guy says, right, pull this, do that, you know, clean this and put it back. And it's like great you know, a cost. It took me two hours. And if I take it to the dealer, they would have charged me thousands of dollars to do it but YouTube had the knowledge

Hannah Gutkauf: And sometimes you need to fix stuff at 1:00 a.m. in the morning.

Richard Ward: Right there's nobody around.

Hannah Gutkauf: Exactly.

Richard Ward: And when you're fixing physical things, the which pieces which where is it? You know, is it the red wire or the yellow wire? You know, that type of stuff is all very kind of confusing because you don't fix that particular piece of equipment every day. So everything is new. And so by having the ability to kind of wave your phone at it and a magic system says, right, you want to click cut the green wire and it's this one. I mean, I'm not just telling you the green wire because the green and the yellow kind of look the same. It's actually highlighting and pointing to the green one so that you only cut the right one, you know.

Hannah Gutkauf: I agree, I think now is the time for every big company specifically producing physical goods to invest the money and produce 3D models. But I think even if they want to just tip the little toe before, that's just utilizing its existing resources, such as videos or text material and using the physical object to trigger the correct manual in the correct spots. So maybe going back to QR codes or scanability can also be done in a very and it's just it just makes things easier if you know, if you scan your printer and then you have to print a manual right there, and then instead of having to go to a website and having to find the model and then having to click through to the right to the right, how to video.

Richard Ward: Exactly. So so I think that's also part of the increasing magic between the camera and the screen. So you open up the camera and then some object detection system looks at what you're looking at and starts bringing in more and more reference and context information. And that's when it's like, oh, I can tell from just looking at the keyboard and the screen size and where the logo is that you have an X one carbon Lenovo laptop from the twenty seventeen edition. Right. And so then immediately and it's like, dude, I didn't tell you any of that stuff. It's like, no, but the 17 looks different from the 18. And I can I've got my machine learning vision identification system knows that. And so here, let me just bring up the help stuff for only that that that version of the computer. Right.

Hannah Gutkauf: And who knows which operating system or computer they have anyways. So that would be very helpful. What about virtual reality? And so now we talked a lot about augmented reality, I think because or lenses, just because it already has such a big use case. And I'm almost I'm so surprised that there are not more companies utilizing this way of communication. But what about virtual reality? Where do you see the biggest use case with this technology?

Richard Ward: So with virtual reality? You need to think about three groups of people. So there's the consumers, which everybody talks about gaming, which is great. But the next follow on there, which actually is probably got more benefit, is simple health. So people dancing to Beat SABER an hour every morning is quite honestly more exercise than I ever had before I had one of these headsets. So it's for my personal health benefit and it's fun. And then also eventually communication type stuff is getting better and more with VR, where people in a friendly game type environment talk to other people. Now, if you look at the enterprise side, we need to split into two groups. There's white collar workers and blue collar workers. For blue collar workers, there's it's very clear that virtual reality has two benefits or transformation capabilities for them. The first one is around training and assessment, which is answering the question, do you know how to do something? Do you know how to drive a forklift? Do you know how to fly an airplane? D you know how to replace the oil filter on a caterpillar d9 those things. And if the answer is if someone says yes, then we can say prove it and say what? I thought this was an interview. It is, now strap on this headset and you say, you know how to change the oil filter on this old piece of equipment. I don't have one right here, but here, strap this headset on and there's a full simulation up there. And either you actually know how to change the filter on that piece of equipment because you happen to know you have to you don't have to turn off this switch first and then unplug that thing, blah bla bla bla bla, or you don't and it's very clear. Or if you say no, I don't know how to change the filter on a D9 caterpillar, we say great we're going to teach you how. We'd like you to join the company. But here's a training program. Strap the headset on and you go through a full simulation system that shows you and teaches you how to do something you didn't know how to do and more importantly assesses how good are you at it. And so then you're helping the people with the training. But you're also helping management by gathering all this data to assess it. For blue collar jobs. If we look further out, I personally believe jobs where you are like the operator, driver or pilot of equipment is going to move to kind of a remote operation tele-operation situation. And people actually probably use VR rather than big LCD screens in the cockpits for managing and doing that. But that's much further out. Then if you look at white collar work, there's kind of like three areas there. One, they're certainly training for white collar people, but most white collar training is actually about how to do stuff in software. So actually zoom and two dimensional training is still better for that. Now, soft skills like inclusivity training and interviewing training, those work really well in VR. But then you move to the two areas where white collar work, I think is going to change quite a bit. And the first one is what we call three dimensional decision making. And so these are situations like, you know, if you're designing something or if you're evaluating something to purchase and it's a large physical item like an apartment or an entire business complex, or if you're picking up on the status of a construction project, you need to make decisions that are truly three dimensional and spatial. And at the moment, you're being forced to everything two dimensional or two point five, and so we see that that's going to change and an easy way to tell who's going to do that is walk around your company. And anybody who already has two monitors on their desk is probably a prime candidate for adding, not subtracting but adding a VR headset to their setup. So that they now have an even bigger monitor with true stereoscopic 3D capabilities to help them get their work done and maybe prepare for or execute three dimensional decisions. Finally, there's that group of jobs that are white collar jobs that we think will be truly transformed, just as I think that if you're like a tugboat driver or an airplane pilot, you may be doing it all on the ground with a VR headset. I think there are there's a very small group of white collar jobs like air traffic control, where it's a truly three dimensional spatial orientation job and people are being have been forced to do it using two dimensional resources for the last 50 years. When you strap somebody into a headset and show them like dollhouse view a God view of an airfield, they get so much inside, so much quicker that they move up a performance ramp very quickly. So blue collar, white collar, different, different, different use cases, different benefits.

Hannah Gutkauf: I think you're spot on there with the three dimensional decision making. We did just build a three dimensional decision making tool for Ørsted which is the sustainable energy producer worldwide. And they were there building a wind turbine park outside on New Jersey Shore. And people needed to imagine how the wind turbines will affect or influence their beach house views. And in order for the project to not be stalled and to have a stakeholder management tool, we simply had to build it in VR. And it was the only way you can see now how it will affect your view of how it's going to look like from your specific beach under different weather circumstances. And it will maybe save them millions of dollars because people know what is ahead of them. And it's very easy to put on the headset and then also have a conversation about it with politicians or with local communities. And I think the one thing, though, I would add as a use case, and I know we crawled a little bit about that before in another conversation, but I think attention is one of the use cases that bigger companies still have. So it's the novelty experience of putting on a VR headset and having somebody's undivided attention. So even though that might only work the first time somebody is using the VR experience for a situation where it's at a busy fair or I need to have a one on one meeting or I really need to make sure that this person pays 100 percent attention to what I'm saying. VR is still an amazing tool if we kind of count attention as a currency as well.

Richard Ward: Absolutely. And I would say that highly focused attention. Right. If you have a situation where that is very important and you can imagine something like, let's say an interview. So, you know, currently lots of interviews are done by zoom meetings and stuff like that. You could say, hey, we actually have a situation where we want you, we're going to send you a headset to put it on because we want your undivided attention for this part of the conversation, because we want you to show us with some exercises that you know how to do something. And we're going to do that together and talk about it. Or, you know, maybe like the classic problem of, you know, how many tennis balls fit into an airplane is an interview question. It could be together with an airplane and part of the question is, is how do you measure the volume of an airplane, is really what is going on? OK, well, you know, we can do this. We do that blah blah blah. So it's it certainly is. I think that's a case. But I think it's it's you run into this problem. Is it such a hard case that it's worth investing in the equipment for that? And the answer is probably not. But it's a case of once everybody has the equipment, then that's probably part of how society works.

Hannah Gutkauf: Or if you replace very, very expensive demo situations where you need to show a tool, but it's such a big machine that it's just simply not feasible to show it in augmented reality or it's so complex that you really need this other person to be with you in the room and point at different things, I think than in this case: virtual reality makes really good sense because, yes, it's more expensive than lenses or augmented reality, but you also have full control and full attention span.

Richard Ward: So, perfect example, there's a project we're working on right now in which we're trying to help people sell five million dollar yachts to rich people in Moscow. And the thing is, is that the way they used to sell these yachts was that people, rich people from Moscow, would get on the jets and fly to places like Monaco or someplace like that. That would have big fairs where people could see the yachts either on land or in the water and be able to walk around them. Right. And so what we're doing is we're actually building the photogrammetry models of the exterior and the interior of these yachts. And the use case is that the broker is going to FedEx, actually not going to FedEx, he's going to have a person in Moscow show up at your house with a headset and is going to set up the boundary, The Guardian. And it's a linear experience. So all they need is they need a hallway that is a 20 meter long hallway, which quite honestly, since most of these people are rich, their houses have a 20 meter long hallway in them. Right. Or they go to the office and they can find a 20 meter long hallway. And what you find is that people put the headset on and all they have to do is walk up and down the hallway because the other person is controlling: are they on the bottom deck? The top deck or whatever? And people get a complete sense of the yacht, simply by being able to walk forward and backward in a linear way up and down the middle of the boat. And that's a perfect case where the VR stuff really shines, because that's both basically a straight line. But, you know, they're not that wide. And so and so it really VR does way more then than filters or helping people make that three dimensional decision making for a buy decision.

Hannah Gutkauf: I think it's that experience specifically with luxury goods where it makes sense to invest in VR is, what's the experience to be on a boat or what's the experience to have a premium or like a premium and premium new house or apartment where you can overlook all of Manhattan? Like what's the view going to be from this apartment on the 20th floor that is not built yet? If that's what people sell?

Richard Ward: Well, like with boats, premium directly correlates to size. And so people being able to understand, OK, I'm walking and walking and walking. You know, this is I have walked enough. This is a big enough boat to satisfy my ego. Right. Or I've walked from one end of this boat to the other and I'm not impressed. I want a bigger boat, you know, because you find that that's a very interesting situation where the amount that people walk directly correlates to their sense of the value of the thing.

Hannah Gutkauf: So why do you think now is the time to invest into these technologies? Why not yesterday and why not tomorrow or has the moment come?

Richard Ward: Yeah, it's kind of it's classic sort of Moore's Law, the three hundred dollar point. So, you know, Oculus has pushed out the Quest Two now, it's at two hundred ninety nine dollars, which is one dollar below the magic three hundred dollar consumer goods price point. And you know, for example, I know a lot of people, a lot of men that are friends of mine and we all agree that we can buy anything under three hundred dollars and we don't have to ask our wife first. And so, but anything over three hundred dollars we have to like, it's a discussion, it's a committee decision, you know. And so for a lot of people, I think it's going to be it's at the right price point that you will see the propagation of it happening very broadly. And some more people have more experience, because the part that I find fascinating, there's a lot of people that are talking about VR that have never put a VR headset on. And it's like it's literally I mean, I think it was Foucault or somebody or Voltaire had a great essay on how do you describe chocolate to somebody who has never had chocolate? You know, and it's like, well, you know, it makes no sense, it's a thing you do need to experience. So with the price point and the fact that the technology and investments, all of that stuff coming together, benefits from the smartphone revolution on panels and the packaging and all of that, now is the time we've reached the price point at which mass acceptance and adoption could happen.

Hannah Gutkauf: I also think it's I think scale is the magic word, we're reaching a point where specifically also augmented reality, even a bit of VR is achievable on web and we have amazing artificial intelligence software that we can use to run on our web devices. So if I need to analyze the contents of my fridge, I don't need to download these clunky augmented reality apps anymore. I can just run all of the stuff in the browser, and having that scalability and accessibility for everyone just makes it so much more interesting for us to develop solutions, I think.

Richard Ward: Yeah, no, absolutely. So. So it's a case of now is the time because several things have come together and you find that actually almost all technologies are like that. No, technology is one thing. So, you know, the personal computer, the iPhone One, all of these things, several different things, all had to kind of reach a certain price performance capability. And then somebody bundles this collection of technologies together and now is the time. And that's and that's really kind of what we're seeing, I think, at the moment.

Hannah Gutkauf: So what which person in a big organization needs to listen up and kind of be active? Is it the head of marketing, is it the head of sales, is it head of human resources? Like where do you think is the biggest urgency for big organizations to educate themselves, create experiences, start to test some of these solutions?

Richard Ward: Yeah, I think I do think it's multiple departments. Right. So if you have this blue collar workforce, then probably your H.R. group that is responsible for human resources, human performance, are the ones that need to be involved in this, because here's an ability to do two things. You can either help train people more effectively or you can test them. You can actually find out if you have you know, if you have five hundred forklift drivers, it's impossible that all of them are the best. Right. So there's got to be a distribution. Do you know which one is like the bottom 10 percent of your forklift drivers? And do you either want, and the answer is probably no. And so here's the way to find out. And if you do have that information, you have a choice. You can either get rid of them and hire new people. You could train them and make them bring them up to the kind of like the average performance. You can reassign them. They're good people, just not great forklift drivers. Reassign them to some other function. But you have choices. But at the moment, since you don't know, your choice is to leave them at their jobs and there may be negative consequences from that. And then as we talked about, if you sell anything that's a physical product, whether it's enterprise or consumer, you need to be building up a database of 3D models of all your stuff now! I mean, now whether you deploy that to just web pages and people can spin it around. Fine that's a great starting point. But then once you kind of realize that, hey, we can turn on slam capability, if somebody is holding a phone and looking at the exact same Web page, that's the next step. And then you kind of move from there and build environments in which your product is doing something or is in context. And then people can either look at that through filters or if they have a VR headset, then they can step into it and be much more immersive. Right.

Hannah Gutkauf: I also think now is still a time where companies can actually have a bit of the blue ocean advantage. But technology is moving so far so fast that I think at some point it will really be a question of being left behind, like not thinking about how my brand acts in 3D or in physical space at people's homes, it's just not going to be an option anymore in the future, I believe.

Richard Ward: The other group that I think that you should look at is that if if you are a company that does three dimensional stuff, so you design your engineer, you all of those things. And like I said, just go look around your office. The people that have two or more monitors is who I'm talking about. Or they have one giant monitor in the middle, bigger than anybody else's monitor. These are people that you probably ought to look at saying, hey, let's start a program of introducing headsets as the third screen and how are we going to use this, let's work through our workflows and processes and get that part going. Because also, as you get more and more competent with that, you will find that not only can you use these capabilities and tools to talk to your customers, but also to your suppliers, because you can bring them in and say, hey, look, you see this bolt right here? It's too short. You know, I told you we need it. And they're like, OK. I said, well, we'll design a longer one, you know? And that's a pretty simple conversation.

Hannah Gutkauf: I agree. I think it's also the people who need to create interesting webinars, because I think we're all getting a bit sick and tired of the odd looking at hour long zoom meeting screens. So having the possibility to use augmented reality to enhance a zoom meeting or a keynote is also something that I'm surprised nobody is exploring at the moment, because people learn differently.

Richard Ward: People are bad to tell you, you know, you need to be careful with that, because the problem is that in order to do that, well, you need it takes a lot more preparation.We've gotten very good at creating two dimensional documents of PowerPoint and things of that nature. We've all gotten pretty good at it. We're probably all at the exact same level as like a top layout artist at a newspaper in the nineteen hundreds, you know, and now with Zoom, we're all getting reasonably OK, we are in about nineteen eighties era network television. Because, you know, I've got a camera in front of me, I know about lighting, I can do a picture and picture, I can put a green screen and do like replacement's of things. Quite honestly, if you look at that, you know, that's as good as like national television, Deutsche Welle is a national television broadcast in nineteen eighty. They would kill to be able to do what you can do with a zoom screen at the moment. Right. And so, so but then you say let's move on to that third level, which is the 3D stuff. I think the problem you're finding or I'm finding it is that people are throwing in a couple of 3-D things in, but if they don't think about it very clearly, it's actually it's like, why did we do this? The there's the novelty factor of being able to see a 3D thing and spin it around unless there's a real reason to talk about it, it's difficult. Now, where we see people doing that quite well is industrial products. Building, building environments and deploying them through WebXR systems like hubs or frame IO. Where, lets say you and I are in a video chat. I put a link in the chat window. You click on it, I click on it. Our avatars are in the same place and now I can literally walk with you and we go step by step through my company's five step fermentation machine, which is two hundred and fifty meters long.

Hannah Gutkauf: Exactly, I think this is the perfect Segway to, because I agree. I think all digital experiences need to make sense and need to be thought through. And we should only use technology if it makes sense. If a keynote or zoom conference, does the job. There's no reason to spend more time on something else. But what I want to hear now or what I would love to talk about is I have two more questions. One, what are you really excited about when it comes to future developments specifically for enterprises? And then I have one more question that I need to wrap up with, but I think I should ask that.

Richard Ward: You got a trick question at the end?

Hannah Gutkauf: Exactly.

Richard Ward: Yeah. So I'll tell you this. What am I really excited about? Two things really. I am excited by from the VR side of things, I am excited by this idea that there is a set of professions: like air traffic controller and airplane pilot and things like that that I do think we will be we are in the early stages of beginning to radically transform those professions and transform for me very clearly means that it is different on Monday than it was on Friday. And you don't go back. And you make the change, and so, in a perfect example, is like Uber has radically transformed the taxi industry. Nobody picks up a phone to call up a taxi kiosk to ask to tell them your address to send a taxi anymore. You whip out your phone, you push a button in a car, shows up. Right. Even if it's a taxi service, they now have an app where you just push the button in the car shows up. Right. So that's transformed. So these professions that are in the beginning stages of being radically transformed by the ability to be in an alternative reality of virtual reality, where instead of driving the truck, I actually am the truck that I can literally look around and three hundred sixty degrees and I have x ray vision and I can integrate all of these things and I can go all the way down to the ground or I can go up into the sky and all of that. I think that's going to be really I think that's really exciting and it's and it's starting to happen. That's one thing. The other thing that I think is very exciting is, is the the the transformation, I think, for being at home that comes from this. In my particular case with Corona, I stopped going to the gymnasium and I've stopped paying for a gymnasium because I work out in VR. And I do business meetings in VR and I go play golf with clients in VR and I do a whole bunch of things that previously I had to travel a lot and I'm really quite happy about it. And I think this is going to progress further. And I quite honestly look forward to sort of a day where I'm doing a lot of my value creating activities inside of a VR context. Because where it works, it works great and it kind of integrates with a bunch of stuff. And I think there's just a lot of things coming down the pipeline. In fact, one of the things I'm talking to is a games provider, that play, that has a game that's very sort of social amongst adults. So it's not like Call of Duty or one of those things is kind of like playing chess or something like that. And I said, look, you need to be able to summon, like, snap, snap a white board and show some PowerPoint, because when business people get together, this is like the replacement for a lunch meeting. And so let's let's play let's play golf or let's play go fishing or something like that. But we still need to talk about business. And so here's a way for me, like Harry Potter to just wave my hand and there's a whiteboard. Right, and draw pictures and stuff. So I'm very excited by all that stuff quite honestly.

Hannah Gutkauf: I love that we're excited. We're both very much working in the same industry. And while I can hear how excited you are about VR, I think I'm way more excited about AR and spatial applications giving me digital experiences that make sense and then predict my behaviour. So I don't need to decide that I need to open my app to unlock my shared car. But it understands that I'm standing in front of a shared car. And usually, when I do that, that's when I need to open it and it's connected to my account anyways. So I'm really looking forward for us to getting a bit more into the area of developing smart application layers to the physical world and we're getting there. So that's really excited. Exciting. But to wrap up last question, looking back, which piece of advice would you give your younger self looking back 10 or 20 years?

Richard Ward: I assume, kind of technology related or just in general?

Hannah Gutkauf: In general.

Richard Ward: In general, I would say. It's a very good question. I would say the most the most important thing that I could tell myself from 10 years ago would be believe in yourself. If you believe something is going to happen, it may take longer. So it's that classic problem of, people always massively overestimate technology in the short term, but then underestimate it in the long term. That play the long game, that if you see a vision of the future that is going to happen eventually, stick with it and see it to completion and then you will be very satisfied and rewarded for doing so. And so I found a couple of times where things hit sort of the trough of disillusionment and I jumped off to whatever the next wave was. And I probably should've just stuck with the first one for a while, and then I probably would be talking to you from my yacht in the Bahamas, you know that sort of thing.

Hannah Gutkauf: I think that is wonderful advice. Thank you so much, Richard, for this conversation.

Richard Ward: No, absolutely. Any time.

21 October 2020

Lisa Witter, Co-founder and Executive Chairperson at Apolitical

Lisa Witter, the Co-founder and Executive Chairperson of Apolitical, a peer to peer global learning and intelligence platform for governments discusses what's next for public design with Global Partner at Manyone, Jens Martin Skibsted. They touch on the role design plays in politics and public policy, and the use of human-centred design today.

**Transcript. ** (edited slightly for clarity)

Jens Martin Skibsted: OK, yes, so I'm going to kick it off with you know, design tends to be user centric and of course, in public design, that seems to be the citizen. But I'm thinking, you know, can that continue? As you know, if you look at a lot of the challenges, such as global warming, today are manmade. So so why would we have the man or the human, rather, in the center of things?

Lisa Witter: Well, what a provocative question Jens Martin, I love it, so let me just give a bit of a context to my answers. So on one hand, it's a dispositional context. I am an impatient entrepreneur by just by material. I, I am an American, which that used to be a thing that was optimistic. We'll see what's going on in that. But I tend to be quite optimistic. But I also have spent twenty five years in and around government and I have a deep background in brain and behavioral and decision science so that that gives you context. Also, I've spent the last six years deeply listening to and engaging with governments around the world. At Apolitical, we work with public servants from more than a hundred and seventy governments. Let me tell you the good news. The good news is, is that this concept of human centered design is in vogue. And and it's kind of ironic that it's in vogue that government is deciding to put humans at the center of how it thinks about its policymaking. But it important and why that is the case is that in the old days, bureaucrats were seen as people who developed laws that may be influenced by the politician and then just cascaded them down and didn't sort of have any of the processes that designers do. Where you come up a hypothesis, you define a problem. You come up with some ideas, you experiment and then you test it. And then you revise. That whole idea of that whole method, the agile method or the design method is new to government. And that being brought in much more. What I don't think has been brought in as much, and Jens Martin, this is where you're going to the to the dark side of all of this is just how hard it is to get people to change. And if you look at evolutionary psychology, change is dangerous to people. And there are some people that we think that are more open to change than others. And then getting change on mass scale is even harder because that's more scariness and more change. So there's a lot of work that we need to do to really understand where people's fear is coming from. But I think the optimism in all of this is - just just as a side note, I was reading a piece in The Correspondant, which is a great new news outlet called Unbreaking News, so kind of slow news. And they were talking about the post-modern human, post-modern human knows all of the solutions but doesn't want to do anything about it - and I kind of feel like we're we're a bit in that space. And that's we're like a clarion call for designers to make things. And this is what you all do to make things that don't feel like we're changing, you know, to invent things that don't feel like I have to sacrifice things that we really need to be pushing on the innovation front. And I've worked a lot in government where we had citizen centered activities. And the problem with that is that it's not every citizen that gets involved its usually people who either have too much time or have a particular thing that they want. And so there's a need to be more inclusive, but that will probably come for much more observational work than actually asking people what they want, because who has time to answer those questions? So it's a long story short, but I'm a little. I'm a little nervous Jens, unless we have some breakthrough design, I think counting on the people for massive changes is a lot to ask of them in their lives.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Yeah, yeah. Well, I hope I hope I'm not the proponent of of being dark or distopian. But I can tell you on a positive note that in design itself, you know, within the industry, there's this whole, people are getting tired of, quote unquote design thinking where it's very much this based around the user centric approach, not because people are necessarily going away from having a citizen or user in the centre, but it's it's going away for what you would call this inaction, the post-modern, inactive persona and starting to focus on how, you know, how to do design doing. And part of it might be this sense of being unnecessary, because designers used to be the guys that just did whatever industry asked of them and didn't have any doubts that they should do a beautiful packaging for, let's say, tobacco or whatnot. And so I think that that kind of sense of of wanting to change things gets in, at the same time, or kicks in. And at the same time, you you have this massive acceleration that, you know, that all of society kind of goes through technological, you know, in terms of technology, but also just in general, things are getting more fast paced. So there's no time to sit around and do the thinking, you just basically have to iterate as it happens. And in terms of it, so that's being positive about this, having, you know, being inactive. But I think also in terms of not having the person or the human as a center, I also see some development there that I also see as being meaningful. So if you take Ecuador and Bolivia, I think the spearheaded this thing of having ecosystems, giving equal rights to ecosystems, they should have integrative respect. And New Zealand later on had kind of a similar approach specifically to the I don't know if I can pronounce it a similar name, Whanganui River, where it didn't have in itself an integrative respect, but it got acknowledged as having the same rights as a person. So basically this river got personhood.

So what does that mean for public design? Could public design be about something else than civilians? And the institutions, for instance, could a tree be treated like civilian? How do we go about public design? For whom do we design, etc. when when we're no longer having humans and users, et cetera, in the center of things?

Lisa Witter: Right. Well, I think this question, Jens Martin, about to whom or for whom do designers design for in a eco-system is a really interesting question at this time. I think, thinking in the time of covid, people, it seems, are much more aware of their ecosystem, including nature, partially because either they're stuck in it more or they crave it more. So there's this awakening, I think, much more to nature. And and as you've discussed, nature is being given rights along with people which which to me, just personally makes a lot of sense because we have to live interactively. I think an interesting question to think through is this: I talk to younger people about what the future holds. They are calling, some of them not all, are calling for rights for robots. So meaning, that if robots take over, if you've read Yuval Harari and Homo Deus, there's this real interesting sort of future where right where robots become very much a part part of our life. We've seen in Japan actually at Apolitical that the use of robots have really helped with loneliness with older people who live remotely. And so, I think this is an interesting question: to whom do we design for and how big is that ecosystem? And I am sure if we were to do this podcast in 10 years, we will be debating about non-living things, things like machines or not having rights. But I think it's a it's a growing movement to think about the ecosystem and how it fits in with us.

Jens Martin Skibsted: But I mean, yes, or so. I mean, with robots is actually funny because I've written a blog post for the Huffington once about how we actually should tax robots. But, you know, so so the interesting part of this is that obviously when you give rights, you might also want to give certain obligations. Right. So I don't know how that would how we would give nature, rivers, ecosystems, certain obligations. But, um. Yeah, I mean, the whole challenge I agree with you, this is somehow going to happen. The whole challenge, what has to happen, because we're destroying our planet, so if we don't design for it, just design for ourselves, it's not going in the right direction. But it's also how do we you know, how do we actually start these processes? I mean, when designers say we're going to do this, when you ask how are you going to do this? They you know, they look like deer caught in the light.

Lisa Witter: Well, it's interesting. I mean, one on nature, I think nature has been, we've been taking from them without giving. So, you know, they've been, she has been holding up on her obligations to us, but we haven't granted the rights in exchange. It's been an unbalanced relationship, which is why we're a bit in the mess we are in. And I definitely I have had the privilege for the last 13 years of working with National Geographic explorers. And there are a number of these explorers. We have a friend in common, Enqirue Sala, who is working on, in different ways, sometimes they use the words rights, which for some people may seem radical, but for other people they just use protection, which is actually giving them the right to sort of flourish and sort of be in their own healthy ecosystem. And I think, you know, it's our job: I've spent my life in political communications really wanting to advance policy ideas. And I think it's our job to not just be against, but to be for, and to make new ideas popular. And these ideas are becoming popular, but they only become popular, if they don't, if they're not owned by a particular group. So designers need to work, as you all do in coalition with other people, advocates, hunters, farmers, indigenous communities. And perhaps we should start talking about and testing if the language of rights is the right way to have the end result that we want.

Jens Martin Skibsted: In terms of getting designers involved in policy, obviously, you know, there's a bit of reticence because it's not a cool chair. But at the same time, this search for meaningfulness also draws more and more people in towards that. And of course, there's a bit of a learning curve, but there's also a weird reality hitting designers. So so, one, if you look at laws, a lot of stuff is actually predesigned, you know, so so so, for instance, if you take a bike helmet, you know, I'm from originally from from the bike world. So if you take, the bike helmet is defined in a certain way, so is a motorcycle helmet. And, you know, if you if you just follow what it says in the law, it's actually kind of a recipe for specific design. But if you take the most efficient piece of protection for your head when you cycle around, it's a an airbag that sits around your neck and that would not be labelled as a as a helmet. So so the reason that I, you know, say all of this is basically because the politicians just didn't write the intention but wrote in, it actually has to be in a way, they took out the room for innovation. They took out the space that designers could feel so so that there should be this countermovement. Another example, I mean, they're tons of examples of what but the one that relates to democracy specifically. So so a designer would not understand why you just take something and make it whatever you want to be. So so I spoke with a friend of mine who is a politician, and I asked him, so how are you? It was just a polite question. And he said, ah, I feel really bad because now there's a period of election. So I have to seek constant conflicts and lie about whatever I'm going to propose to people, which was very open hearted. But, you know, I think people can recognize that, that while there is, you know, just up to an election, politicians are going to come up with all sorts of weird promises and they are all going to fight. So, you know, an easy way to solve that is basically you you only vote on your birth day or something like that. So there's no real election period that would be super easy to implement today with the technologies we have, you know, so design, not that this is a thing we need to implement, but just just that there isn't this openness towards this. I think it makes it very hard for designers to engage.

Lisa Witter: I hear you. So number one, if anyone can make politics cool, designers can do that. So that's that's a call right back at you all. Right so, I mean Jens Martin, you took the concept of a bike and you made it so frigging cool that it became a fashion statement. Right? Like it became a statement of life, its two wheels and some stuff, and then you get around. Like so I'm confident that designers can can make politics better by actually helping those of us who care about democracy change, change the rules and change the system a bit, and it is prime time. There is hunger for twenty first century democracy. There is no doubt about it. Tech is one of the things driving it, but not the only thing. And I, I hear you about the the pre-baked regulations that you have to design against. But that revolution is changing too. We see this in Apolitical every day. One of the reasons why my co-founder and I started Apolitical is we wanted to also influence what we call the procurement market, which is the ten trillion dollars a year the government spends on buying things, not to mention the fact that governments spend 40 percent of the GDP. So there is so much power for for doing good things and room for design to help be part of that within the government system. And so the revolution we're seeing isn't just around human centered design or whatever you want to call it, but it's also instead of having pre cooked regs and rules, having outcome based design challenges. So if you take like the government of Scotland, they have this govt tech challenge. So same with the UK. They put out - this is the problem we want to solve, companies. Now, you come back to us and tell you tell us how you solve that - instead of us saying these are the five things you need to do to solve the problem. So it's really becoming much more about public private partnership. It's really about problem solving versus sort of being to the rule of a regulation. And there's great opportunity and you're going to keep getting the same things if we don't actually go in and change the system from the inside out. So it's hard, it's not sexy, but if anyone can make it better and make it sexier, designers could. So I really hope people will think about doing that. And I am here to talk to anyone who wants to get involved in politics, because you just gave me a story of a person who is tired and exhausted. But there are lots of stories of other people in the political system that would give a different answer at that time. There's a new movement of politicians happening, and I want to share their stories as well.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Yeah, no, I really appreciate that and also, you know, the huge effort you you're doing with Apolitical, because you're you're trying to make, or you are making innovation cool also in the public sector. I mean, but I still think that there's a huge cultural shift to happen because innovation isn't necessarily a good thing within a public realm. So if you have most companies would embrace innovation, many would think, OK, that's a super cool thing. We might just check it out before we implement, but at least let's throw some ideas up in the air. I can speak from from a Danish side, you know, we've had a couple of parties try that. And one of them proposed the thing where he said, OK, let's let's have this flat tax, as is called flat tax in English, you know, where everybody pays the same percentage. And and he proposed that we did it on Fiona, which is a medium sized island in Danish terms, and then we could test it out. And, you know, I'm not sure that it was legally possible, but I mean, every politician went out in the media and ridiculed him and nobody felt they had to explain why they ridiculed him. Just the fact that he was coming up with something new was ridiculous. And I mean, I have other examples. But but if you take this in a business context, we're going to find something not too small because otherwise it's not a meaningful experiment, not too big because we don't want to damage our whole company and we test it out. Right. In a business sense, that that makes perfect sense. But for some reason, it doesn't make sense. You know, you just can't have sand cassing at the level you need to have it, as I understand it. Right.

Lisa Witter: Well, I think there's a couple of things going on. I mean, number one, innovation needs to happen carefully in government because of its responsibility to the citizens and its scale. So one of the things we try to do it Apolitical is de-risk innovation between governments. Let's see, Denmark did an innovative project, you don't need to recreate the wheel and a Columbia, you can learn from Denmark but you can learn from what Columbia did in Saskatchewan, Canada. So really sharing and risking or lowering the risks of trying carefully, trying new things is something that definitely can be solved through technology and collaboration. So that's one thing we're trying to do. But I also think and this is where I love politics and policy, I know that's a weird thing to say. It's not a popular thing to say, but I love it because at scale, it's where you help improve people's lives. And and I think a lot of it falls down because people aren't effective communicators and they don't understand brain and behavioral science and they don't fight back against people who are ridiculing them with with a good opposite retort. And we're not telling citizens, hey, if you want things to change, we've got to try different things. You you don't like the status quo, but we suggest something new. You say that there's something against it. And frankly, it's usually not even citizens saying something against it. It's the opposition. And if you're a good politician, you know how to rebut. You're the politician. So I think so much politics is really about communications and persuasion and so many of our politicians aren't great at it. And if they were and I'm not saying spinning or lying, but if they understood what are the core virtues and values that really drove them. And you saw this with President Obama, right? He was driven by a positive narrative. He beat his opponents and he was able to put forward a positive message. He is not the only person that could do that. There are plenty of people can do that. And that's part of the training that we want to give people, is you can be driven by those principles. And still win, you do not have to lie and cheat, is it easy? No. Should it be easy? No, the stakes are too high, but it's absolutely possible.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Mhm. I think it would be great if these lines between those different types of innovation or the risk profile got broken down. And I think that's where you can probably speak better to it. But that's what we see between, you know, in pvps, oryou know, hat the distance between what's public and what's private is shortening. It almost sometimes seems irrelevant. But there's still some some ground to to be taken.

Lisa Witter: A lot, a lot.

Jens Martin Skibsted: But I have a funny example, well, I think an interesting example myself from the work I did with Ogojiii, the the design magazine on the African continent. So we had all sorts of different examples of design thinking from all sorts of different countries on that continent. And one thing that was common for many countries and many cultures across the continent, was that intellectual property was not a personal thing. So so in in a Western context, who owns intellectual property is a person or set of persons or, you know, some some very one juridical entity at least, whereas here it would be the village or somehow whichever community and often guided by the elders and passed on by the elders, which is a completely different concept that, you know, if you had to change the IPR globally, it it's almost unthinkable. Right. But but these are the very fundamental things we need to look at. And people, often from these areas, tend to not even reflect upon this possibility. And what you really need to do if you come in with a design mindset and a mindset where you want to change things radically. But I think in a way, this specific example could solve some of the things where you really distinguish between what a person owns. So it could be, let's say, a house, whichever like something personal and something that's part of the commons. Right. So we tend in the Western countries to have very, very sharp distinctions between what an individual thing and what's a common thing. And this is really a kind of a third thing. And the closest I can think of it in Western terminology would be a terroir. You know, I don't know how to pronounce it right in English, but terroir in French, where it comes from originally, where you have these specific cheeses or specific wines for an area. So there's a lot of intelligence and passed on tradition, uhm that's not privately owned. It's not commons either. So, so, so breaking up some of these barriers, I think is like a huge challenge because so much is engraved in fundamentals.

Lisa Witter: Well, I just I'm so interested in this question because it points out a larger or your point that you're making. It points out a really important thing that I find that it's key to effective government governance, but also just, you know, an important first principle. And I know that's important to design and that is what value are we building for. Right. And so are we building for look, I'm American and we are building for liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is sort of individual freedom and our own individual pursuit, where if you look at the Chinese value, they just take those polar opposites. It's really about social cohesion. And until you say, OK, what do we collectively want as a society to build from you can't have effective legislation unless we agree on what we want. And I think it's one of the reasons Scandinavia works so well. It's I know it's not perfect. And I know Scandinavians can be cynical, but there's a sense of kind of shared shared values that really make sense. And those are the discussions. I want to go back to first principles as we look at how capitalism needs to change because of our climate. What happens is that the smart minds that the PhDs, the academics, the problem solvers start looking at changing policy instead of having these deeply fundamental talks, even sometimes against people who are polar opposites of the political spectrum and say, what are our shared values and what do we really want? And can we can we recommit to that as really where we want to go and really get to know each other there and then move from that place of of of shared values? And I think that that's what you're talking about at the core of it is like, what do we want? And then make changes. And I often find Jens Martin, that it's once, you know what that is. And I'll just give you a quick example. It can be quite easy to do in a very sometimes non sexy way to solve it. So one of the issues I've worked a lot on in my life is ending violence. And I love working on violence because of the opposite of violence is love. And I want a life and a world with love to one another. I think it is the molecule that lives forever, is love inside of us. And one of the things we found in doing this work. And places like India, is that the value that really drove a lot of the people working on this topic was of of women should have the agency to solve their own problems and sort of women first. And not everyone in India has taken that. But enough people began to take it and some activist somewhere decided to change the inheritance law. It's like stupid. You know, it's not stupid. Some small little, you know, in the back room, no one would pay attention, but it changed the incentives around where the inheritance went, which reduced violence. So I really like where you're going, or talking about values, but sometimes maybe the values can be nudged or articulated in reformulating what intellectual property law means to whom. And I think we need to sort of combine the dorky laws with the big picture values.

Jens Martin Skibsted: I totally agree. I totally agree. I mean, one thing about values, and we really need to have that fundamental discussion of what people actually want and desire and think, but I think often when you see it in the public and political scene, it's very, very influenced by the partisanship and that, again, it's completely random to a designer. Right. Why don't you let's say, for instance, we would want to design a simple society. You would have to pick from either side, you know, from you might want the flat tax, which is very kind of libertarian. You might also want what you call equal pay, equal salary, or what do you call it, this thing where everybody has a:

Lisa Witter: Universal basic income?

Jens Martin Skibsted: Exactly. Universal basic income. And those seem to be opposite because people kind of assume that they got to fold into these party lines anyway. I have to ask you, like a last question here. And so what would a one to two decade younger, Lisa, have done differently? And also what else in terms of your career, which steps would you wish you had taken that you didn't take?

Lisa Witter: Well, I can't help but say a lot of ideas start off controversial and then they end up not being after our time, so keep putting out ideas. And it used to be controversial to have to put the idea of free universal education for children and now it's not anymore. So we can't let the fight discourage our values and our and our idealism, which we should hold on to. But in a very practical way, I in general, as a human being, try not to look back and not to have regrets. I don't have time or energy for it. But I would say that the two things that just spring to mind that I'm like, oh, that would have been cool. First is I'm one of those people that knew what I wanted to do at the age of 12. I kind of, I loved winning and I loved helping people. And so politics was what I started doing at the moment. I had consciousness about what that was about. And I've been working on campaigns and politics and building businesses that make government policy better from from that moment, like on a sprint. And I wish I would have taken more time off the float. I really like to take a year off to be more creative, to do things, to rest, to sleep, to surf to, you know, I really wish I would have taken time off between big things that I did to really reflect and codify my learnings more of that quiet time. And I really I'm trying to and everything I do going forward to breathe and process a little bit more and seeing that as the cycle of the sun and the moon and the light, the dark and the the seasons, I'm trying to live more in the seasons going forward from that. The other thing is there is a couple of y's in the road in my career where I was asked to run for political office and I thought the first time I was asked that I was too young and didn't know enough. So I went off to Washington, D.C. to get much more involved in understanding the way the world did. And another time a friend of mine was sitting showing me the internal polling of her running for Congress in New York. She's now a US senator who ran for president. And I have been recruited to run for president on a reality TV show. And she's like, don't do that. Go home and run for office. And I chose to run for president on a reality TV show. I people told me that that was a good way to get involved in politics. I still think it was quite ironic, that that's how we have Trump. And I kind of wish back at that time that was a Y in the road where I don't regret because I've done incredible, I think humbly, incredibly fun and interesting and meaningful things. But I wish I would have jumped in sooner to really dig my heels into a candidacy. We have a mutual friend, Ida Auken, who is a politician in Denmark, and she's been a life long committed person to politics as a force for good. And I am too. But I wish I had I wish I would have done those things - not wish - it would have been interesting if I would have done those things earlier. So more rest and more candidacies.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Very, very cool. OK, I think we'll we'll wrap this up. Thanks a ton, Lisa.

Lisa Witter: Yeah, how would you answer that question?

Jens Martin Skibsted: I’d probably say I would have wanted to dance more.

18 August 2020

Lars Redeligx, Chief Commercial Officer at Lineas

Lars Redeligx, Chief Commercial Officer at Lineas, and Guido Woska, Global Partner at Manyone, discuss the future of freight transportation. Lineas is Europe's largest private rail freight operator, and they look into how rail freight can play a key role in a future with greener transportation?

**Transcript** (edited slightly for clarity)

Presenter: Welcome to everything that's next ... in freight transportation.

In this episode, Guido Woska a Global Partner at Manyone, met with Lars Redeligx, the Chief Commercial Officer in Lineas. They met for a conversation about innovation, politics, climate change and of course, what's next for freight transportation. Lineas is Europe's largest private rail freight operator with operations across the continent. Lars has background in aviation with a long stint in management at Lufthansa.

But as you'll notice in the conversation, he's held many roles during his career, which have all added to an extensive resume in transportation and logistics.

Guido Woska: Hi Lars, welcome to this week's episode of Everything that's next. And this week, we want to talk a lot about what's changing in freight transportation and transporting goods around the world. And your career has a lot to do with transportation, but in a very different method of transportation. So you've just recently switched to rail, but your history is in aviation, that's right?

Lars Redeligx: Yeah, hey, Guido, first of all, great to be here, thanks very much for the invitation to the podcast. And yeah, that's right. I spent over 20 years in aviation in all kinds of functions in the Lufthansa Group, also in cargo, but also in the passenger division. And indeed, recently I switched to Lineas, which is the biggest private rail freight provider in Europe.

Guido Woska: And was it always a dream of you to one day work also with the railway industry? Because for many boys, many kids, when they grow up, they all want to become a train conductor or the train driver or something like that, where you always fascinated by trains like I was, because when I grew up, I was totally fascinated by these huge trains, these huge locomotives that went by very close to where I lived. And I was always wondering, maybe one day I can drive such a locomotive. Was it similar to you?

Lars Redeligx: A good question. Well, look, surely I, as a small boy, also liked locomotives and was reading stories. But I'll be honest with you, when you're 20 years in aviation, of course, you love planes and everything that's related to flying. And I have to say the thought of switching sectors really came when I started to make myself more known with the sector, but also especially about Lineas. And in the end, it was not an easy decision to leave aviation after such a long time, but a deliberate one, because I really thought, wow, this is a great opportunity to experience another sector and also to be part of something very entrepreneurial, but also with a great purpose.

Guido Woska: Yeah, there's a big shift in the last few years in how transporting goods has become more complex with more complex supply chains, with more interconnected ways of different forms of transportation, of how goods are being transported even more just on time, even more, connected to the supply chains of your customers who are depending exactly on when what type of good is arriving at the destination. So so ultimately, the transportation and the freight transportation industry is definitely not just about locomotives and about freight and cargo, but a lot about data and knowing when what has to be where and how. So so how did you understand or what was your impression on the complexity of the industry? That is, to most people, just and I say just in a very nice way, a train on the rail with a lot of wagons behind. But in reality, there is so much complexity behind that industry. What was your first impression when you entered that industry, how the industry feels and breaths and how complex it actually is?

Lars Redeligx: Yeah, indeed. I think it's a complexity you don't really see from outside. And if we're honest as individuals, we think more about mobility in terms of what it means for ourselves. What are our new modes of transportation and how will mobility look like in 10 years? And actually, you've been talking about that here on the podcast. But indeed, if you look at supply chains today, those are highly complex operations, multimodal operations. Rail is a very important part in that. I obviously think that it needs to become much more important and we'll think about that to make transportation more sustainable. But indeed, it's the complexities overwhelming. And I'll be honest with you, I started in Lineas at the beginning of the year and I'm still learning. Still discovering. Let's not forget that train is the oldest mode of transportation, with the first trains starting to run at the beginning of the 19th century. It's 50 60 years younger than cars and almost 100 years younger. Excuse me, older, I should say. So it started almost 100 years earlier than aviation. And the trains started to run in a time when Europe was still very much divided and countries had no interest to create accessible railway networks. The last thing you wanted was that your neighbours could drive into your country during times of war. You cannot imagine these times anymore, but it was a reality back then, which leads until today to an unbelievable complexity. I just give you one example. In Belgium, our train drivers drive on the left side of the tracks, if you will, in Germany on the right side of the tracks. Now, if you have a locomotive which has a hud on the right side of the train because your driver needs to look to the left, then you really have a problem using that locomotive in a country where you drive on the right side of the train, off the tracks.

Guido Woska: But, does it call for more standardization around forms of transportation? Does it call for more flexibility? Does it call for more innovation to be able to connect different countries, different forms of transportation, different technologies even better? So is there naturally a complexity that the industry will have to live with? Or do you see the industry being more and more standardized across borders, across countries so that the way of moving goods around Europe becomes faster, less complex, less difficult? Do you see that there?

Lars Redeligx: Absolutely. We need to take out this complexity here because it doesn't add any value and just creates unnecessary cost and delays. And you could also see during the corona crisis right now how fragile logistics still are in Europe. The moment you start to have border controls and you have trucks queuing for 60 kilometers on the German-Polish border, that's just not sustainable. And the same is true for rail freight. We want to make rail freight the backbone of a multimodal logistics network for Europe in the 21st century, because there is simply no other way how we will make road transportation, freight transportation in Europe sustainable and how we will achieve, for example, our Paris goals. And in order to to achieve that, a lot of things need to happen. Rail freight companies need to become more innovative, more customer-oriented, infrastructure operators need to harmonize legislation and standards, like you say. And also, obviously, authorities need to create the right framework that will push for a shift from road to rail.

Guido Woska: It's an interesting point that you're making there about becoming more customer-centric, because it is, of course, the freight railway industry is, of course, a pure B2B industry. Right. Because your customers are companies that are transporting goods or supplies or any form of off of items from A to B, but then you also have the end consumer. And the end consumer in the future might actually demand from the companies that they buy from the brands that these brands try to look at every aspect of their sustainability concept, not just to say the product has been made sustainable or the packaging is made out of carton box instead of plastic. But also, how does the product being shipped to me, how has it been flown around the globe? Has it been shipped or has it been manufactured literally 200 kilometers away and been taken to me in a form of a very sustainable mode of transportation, which is rail. So as a railway company, as a logistics company in rail, are you only looking at how your direct customers are behaving and what they expect, meaning the industrial clients? Or are you also trying to understand what happens on the consumer side, what their demands are and how that may have an impact on how your business is developing?

Lars Redeligx: I think that's a clear direction for development. Indeed, right now our business is B2B and will remain that way. But it's fair to say that in this context, you have more and more customers, shippers, consignees that are talking to us directly to see how they can make their transportation, their logistics more sustainable, and how they can put more freight on rail. And I think they are doing that because of what they see happening in the society, how our next generation wants to have answers, how you can reduce our CO2 footprint. That they see that there is a growing preference of consumers for sustainable products. And I think ultimately railway undertakings like ourselves need to also be able to facilitate that discussion more directly. Because if you think about it, why, if I care about how the clothes that I'm wearing are being produced in another country, I think it's normal to at one point in time also ask how they got to where I bought them. And the reality today is that if you look at transportation in Europe, a big, big share of that transportation, maybe seventy five percent is done by trucks. There's real urgency to act right now if we want to achieve that modal shift, and I think we have to look for a land based transportation in Europe today, it's creating eight hundred eighteen million tons of CO2. And according to the Paris convention, we should come to 660 million in 2030. But the reality is if we continue with the current share of transportation. So. Seventy five percent on trucks in Europe, we will rather add 80 million tons of CO2 and not reduce CO2. And it will mean another million, a million trucks on the roads of Europe. So I think the time is now to drive that change.

Guido Woska: OK, what do you think would be the key solutions to that ambition to transport more goods sustainably on rail? Is it simply to say we need to add more infrastructure? So is it I don't know, asking governments to build more rail tracks? Is it purchasing more locomotives and wagons or making it longer, or is it also to innovate around how different steps of producing and distributing products are better connected to rail so that, for example, you have less empty wagons going around or you have a better way of using the infrastructure that is today in a more productive way. So so does that innovation or that progress of transporting more goods on rail happen mostly when the outside stakeholders are doing their homework, meaning governments adding rail tracks and stuff? Or is it also primarily the railway companies that need to innovate around how and what kind of products and services they offer in the future?

Lars Redeligx: Working with partners is is really important. At Lineas, we are committed to build the rail freight company of the 21st century, but we won't be able to do it on our own. We are working with our customers to achieve that transformation, but we are working also with other rail freight operators across Europe, including our competitors. And actually we created an initiative called Rail Freight Forward Initiative, where as a sector we have defined the ambition to increase the share of rail for freight transportation in Europe to 30 percent in 2030. So 30 %, by 2030. And of course, if you push that agenda as a sector, it's much more efficient and you get much more awareness than if we would be doing it on our own.

We need a common sense of urgency. And that's means to start with the why. Why should we really change as a society, why should we push for more transportation being shifted from road to rail, if we can speak about that? And the other thing then is to conclude that it's about an integrated action plan. You cannot achieve this shift only from the side of the rail freight providers, but you need really a holistic approach that also integrates the infrastructure providers, because without an efficient railway network and harmonised standards, it will be very difficult to achieve a step-change. But you also need to ask what is the right framework that politicians need to put in place? And I think we have with the green deal for Europe by the European Commission, but also with the initiatives that are now being taken in most of the European countries, like the master plan Rail Freight in Germany. A good starting point, however, then deeds need to follow words. And there I think we sometimes still struggle.

Guido Woska: But I think we can agree that the core idea behind Europe, the open borders, the way of easily transporting goods, but also people, of course, between countries and stuff like this is fundamental for the future of the railway industry. Right. It doesn't work if the best thought after logistics chain will end at the border, because then the train has to stop there for two days before it can be transferred to the next tracks, etc.. So when we are when we're looking back at all the challenges that we have recently in covid-19 times with partially borders being closed within Europe and things like that, are you afraid that this will disrupt any short term innovation or do you believe that the idea of Europe as it is, so fundamentally stable that no matter if there are times like these that in the future all of the innovation will be on such a big level that it will not be hindered by borders, that it will not be hindered by governments to change from one year to the other in one of the other countries. Is it possible for rail to really innovate across countries, across borders to ensure that you have a system that works anywhere in Europe so that that that this form of transportation becomes really flawless?

Lars Redeligx: Absolutely it's possible. And, you know, we have a good argument made during the crisis because actually at all times, freight trains continued to run in Europe. And I mean, we all saw that amazingly, we managed to change the way of working. And also in our company, we very quickly moved to people working from home. We created safe environments for our drivers to work in. But you need transportation to continue. And the great thing about freight trains is with one freight train, you can replace 50 trucks. And during corona, of course, people realized that you can much better control a logistics chain, transportation chain in rail freight than having 50 trucks with 50 drivers driving around in Europe and having to move across borders. So I think rail freight gave a statement there, and there was actually a period in time where we saw an active shift because of that lower perceived risk from road to rail. What worries me right now more Guido, is that because we don't have that overall framework in place right now, you'll rather see a reverse shift back from rail to road. And why is that? Well, the industry is obviously still being affected. So you right now have an overcapacity in the market of transportation solutions. We have just in Germany, four point three million euro, four point three million trucks driving around. And so there's a lot of forwarding companies, a lot of truck operators, that now put transportation capacity on the market at very, very low prices. And to some extent, we cannot compete with that today as rail freight operators. You know, we pay access charges for every single trip, whereas in Europe, still ninety five percent of the roads are toll-free. And we even pay for access to tracks when we cancel the trains. So there is no level playing field today when you look at legislation, you need 15 times more documents to run a freight train than to operate a truck. And all of that on short term now, combined with overcapacity, leads to a reverse modal shift, which I think we don't want as a society.

Guido Woska: In an ideal world or an ideal society, we would, of course, have different forms of transporting goods, but they would all have their very specific or they would play the very specific part in the overall logistics and supply chain. So trucks would maybe not run for five hundred kilometers, but they would run for the last 20 or 50 kilometers or maybe 10 kilometers, and rail would run for certain elements of the supply chain and other forms of transportation as well. You know, talking about the last mile, talking about the last meter. So is it even possible for a rail freight company to really innovate, like really change their business model without having other players, other parts of the supply chain and other forms of transportation being connected? Because in the end, from a customer standpoint, meaning your industrial customer, for them, they don't care how that box or how that container arrives at their facility. For them, it's important that it arrives and not who's taking it from where to where. So can innovation in rail freight happen without really connecting different forms of transportation to the entire supply chain?

Lars Redeligx: No, it can't. I would start by saying they should care. With everything that I said about the external costs of transportation that today you don't see. Like pollution accidents, the amount of time we waste in traffic jams. I think companies should care about mode of transportation. But you're absolutely right. It will remain a multimodal or intermodal transport solution. And I think for the last mile, short distances for pickup of single shipments at a factory just in time delivery, the truck is a very relevant solution, transport solution and will remain important. But we need to work towards a consolidation of freight, especially on the medium and long distance stretches on rail. And that's where indeed you can innovate. We're talking about innovation in loading systems. We're talking about digitalization of train operations so that's a lot of cumbersome and manual processes today like checking brakes or checking if a wagon door functions, that can all be automated. And that means you take complexity out and you take costs out, and that means that rail freight will become more competitive. You can also create additional value for customers. But of course we will also work together with other railway undertakings and also with other transportation modes to create sustainable solutions. I'll give you one very specific example. Right now it's we are here in Frankfurt. It's hot outside. What's happening right now. There is a lot of less water on the Rhine. And the Rhine is still a very important transportation way in Europe. And water levels are falling. And we are cooperating now with big margin companies to say, OK, if water levels fall below a certain level and barging becomes restricted, we can provide additional rail capacity on services that we have towards Switzerland, Austria, etc. And so by combining solutions and working in an agile way, you can create better transport solutions for the customer

Guido Woska: On an entirely different topic. We know each other for many years. Right? And when I learned about your move into the rail freight industry from the aviation industry, I was totally interested to understand after a while, how would Lars, how would he arrive in there? How would he take all his experiences from another industry and learn about the current industry? But then when we talk right after you started Linias, you are faced with an entirely different challenge because you didn't have time to deep dive into the industry. You didn't have time to understand all the complexity behind the business models and everything else because you basically started your new role a few days before corona hit. So how is the beginning of your new role in Lineas, how did the first month, the first three months feel like? I mean, it must have been like you felt almost like I'm in the wrong movie. Like this is like what did I sign up for going into a new industry and all of a sudden facing a world pandemic that that that puts our whole operation at risk and challenges me every day. How were the first hundred days or so at Lineas for you?

Lars Redeligx: Yeah, look, I think nobody you will find nobody who wouldn't say that this is a very challenging time. Of course, the same is true for me. But yes, I am still getting to know parts of the company because I'm also a believer in seeing things in understanding how operations work and meeting clients. And we have operations in France, in Belgium and Germany, in the Netherlands. So you need some time to make yourself familiar. And I had luckily, let's say, six weeks. And that was at least a starting point. But then probably that was the fastest unsolicited training program that you could ask for, because obviously when such a crisis hits. It requires that the whole company gets together and you have frequent exchange on a day to day basis because there are just no reference points. So like every other company we had to come up with solutions that simply didn't exist before. How can you continue driving your train? So do you make driving a train a safe thing? We had to provide documents at borders. We had to work with partners so that terminals keep open. And yeah, for me it's I like to work hands on and I enjoy very much the positive spirit we have in our company, so that was a challenging but good experience. Of course, what you don't what you're not able to do then is to take time and observe and learn, and have your hundred days before you come up with conclusions what you want to do. I clearly didn't get that time that's true.

Guido Woska: I mean, you probably learned, but in a very different way. Right? You learned every day because there was always something to decide, that didn't have or there wasn't a lot of time to prepare where there wasn't a lot of time to deep dive. So you were probably learning as well, but in a very unexpected form, which is sometimes very good for a for people to maybe get away from the traditional way, as you said. OK, here's your first hundred days. Why don't you get settled in? Why don't you get an overview? But now all of a sudden we're in crisis mode. It's you have to take charge. And that's also part of leadership. This is part of skills of leadership. So do you feel when you look back at at the times, also, of corona, on a personal side, on your personal experience that you have quickly developed into different leadership mode as well? Did it? Did you manage or do you manage until now, the corona times differently from a leadership perspective than you would maybe have done it in non-corona times. Have you seen personally that you have like developed other skills, other forms of communication other leadership mentality or do you just feel that it's just adopting, using your current or your previous leadership style, but it's just adopting to different topics? Or how is that feeling for you?

Lars Redeligx: I've been surprised by myself, as I guess many people have, or maybe everybody. First of all, of course, you also change how you work. And I work in Brussels most of the time. That's where our headquarters and part of my time I spent here in our offices in Mainz, and suddenly you find yourself working from home. And I think that requires a different discipline, a different form of organization. But there was no other choice. And I have to say for me, it's really impressive, something that I take along also as a long term question, how do you organize working in the future for your company? We have to question that. I think having office space will still remain important, especially if you're going through such a big transformation as we have been and we continue to go through, to create a company culture and a sense of belonging to a team. But I think we also realized that it's amazing what possibilities digital workspace offer. So that that for me was the biggest space, excuse me, the biggest change in the sense of leadership style. Look, I've been a long time in Lufthansa, which is a fantastic group of companies, and I have different experiences working in headquarter functions. I've been chief commercial officer of an airline. I've managed a catering company. So I've always liked to look at things from different perspectives. But for me, what I really like to do is to work in an entrepreneurial environment. And they're my expectations have rather been confirmed and that's why I joined Lineas. So it's, I would say rather a project. And because we really want to develop, we've made a great transformation already, but there is so much change going on right now. And I like that. And I would say in times of crisis, the acceptance of change and the possibility to rethink how you work becomes even bigger. So, of course, we have to be mindful of our resources right now and we continue to be affected by the crisis and have less demand. Not as much as my previous company, of course. So you have to be very mindful of how we do things. But the possibility for change is great and that rather helps me to do what I want to do. I would say.

Guido Woska: This is actually a perfect handover to the final question that we always have. It's always almost been almost become a little tradition in our podcast that when we talk to all these fantastic people, we always ask them at the very end, what are the top two or three pieces of advice that you would give yourself at the age of twenty five when you were at the beginning of your career? So looking back at all the different positions that you had, at all the different companies and all the different people that you worked with, what would be these two or three most valuable advice or most important pieces of advice that you would give to the twenty five year old Lars?

Lars Redeligx: Yeah, I've been warned about this question. What two things to come up from my side? One, you know, my background. I've done an apprenticeship program and later on I studied economics sciences. And I really encourage also young people in the future to gather experience, really experiencing the product, experiencing customer service, being in sales, I mean..

Guido Woska: Hands on experience,

Lars Redeligx: Hands on experience. I've done that. I sold tickets when I was young. I checked in people at the airport. I created freight letters for cargo. And it has always helped me. Because you develop that understanding that, you really know what you're talking about and has also made me always want to understand how processes really work. And I think when you have that mindset and for you, it's not good enough to just, you know, look at things from a strategic perspective, which is, of course, the most sexy functions that all trainees in Lufthansa always wanted to go into a corporate strategy, M&A, etc.. I also like that side of the business, but I think you do yourself a big favor and you make yourself credible and you can better make your arguments if you also understand practical details of the business you're in. The second thing I really encourage young people I work with to change perspectives, and that's discussions I constantly have with my leadership team, with our young talents to say, OK, you are probably a great salesperson, but what about some experience in customer service or in operations? Or you may be a star in a local company that drives our business in France, but why not come to the headquarter? Because in the end, I think company culture is driven by attitude and by people. And when you have seen two sides of the coin, then I think you get to better collaboration in a company and you always have these discussions about functional silos or P&L (ed. profit and loss) egoism. I think in the end you want both. You want functional excellence and you want P&L ownership and responsibility. You want local market knowledge, but also overall strategy. And you, from my experience, best get that from people who have worked in different environments and who don't have religious discussions about one thing or the other.

Guido Woska: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode. It has been also really insightful for me to understand the complexity and learn more about the complexity that that's behind the freight transportation and logistics operations on an everyday basis, but also what the challenges are going forward for the industry. So thank you again for joining us. And it was really great to have you on the podcast Lars.

Lars Redeligx: Thank you Guido. And all the best. And thanks for everybody to put their freight on rail in the future.

Guido Woska: All right, super.

Lars Redeligx: There's real urgency to act right now if we want to achieve that modal shift, and I think we have to look for a land based transportation in Europe today, it's creating eight hundred eighteen million tons of CO2. And according to the Paris convention, we should come to 660 million in 2030. But the reality is if we continue with the current share of transportation. So. Seventy five percent on trucks in Europe, we will rather add 80 million tons of CO2 and not reduce CO2. And it will mean another million, a million trucks on the roads of Europe. So I think the time is now to drive that change.

28 July 2020

Monica Dalla Riva, VP of Design & Customer Experience, Deutsche Telekom

Monica Della Riva, VP of Design and Customer Experience at Deutsche Telekom, and Guido Woska, Global Partner at Manyone, discuss design leadership; how the role of design in corporations will evolve and how it impacts the future of management in large organisations and society.

**Transcript. ** (edited slightly for clarity)

Presenter: Welcome to everything that's next in Design Leadership. This episode features a conversation between Guido Woska, a Global Partners at Manyone and Monica Dalla Riva. Monica is currently Vice President of Design and Customer Experience at Deutsche Telekom. And before that, she's worked in design leadership roles across a variety of industries and in companies such as 3M, Samsung and Whirlpool. Monica and Guido will speak about the role of design and management in large organizations and on how good design leadership can drive innovation, strengthen collaboration and create meaningful solutions for the user and the organization. Welcome to everything that's next in Design Leadership with Monica Dalla Riva.

Guido Woska: Hello, Monica. Welcome to this episode of Everything that's next. It's great to have you on this week's podcast.

Monica Dalla Riva: Thank you very much for the invitation, Guido. I'm happy to be here with you.

Guido Woska: Wonderful. I think we have a very interesting 30 minutes ahead of where we today wanna talk about everything that's next in design leadership. And design leadership has been a pretty hot topic in many organizations. And we're going to explore today what role design can play in organizations. What is behind design leadership? How you build organizations that are themselves built upon design. But, of course, if we want to talk about design leadership, I think the very first question we have to answer is what is actually design? Because there are so many misconceptions about design, especially when you talk about design in a corporate context. In the context of having design teams embedded inside organizations. So to start off with, Monica, what is design for you? The way that you define it and the way that you lead it in your everyday professional life at Deutsche Telekom, but also before in the many other organizations that you worked in?

Monica Dalla Riva: Look, I got very passionate about design when I decided to study it at the university. And I learned from great designers, different meanings of design. Well, there is one that I'm really close to. And for me is the real design word comes from the Latin language, it means designare and designare means creating meanings. I am a believer that design in organizations are having a role for creating new meanings in products, in communications, in strategies, in user interfaces, in experiences. So it's very important that we go for the core messages. Which meaning are we going to create for the future and which meanings are we going to create in the organization to drive their value? So when you go in corporations, it's a very different approach, to be a designer, I believe than in other contexts. And the reason why is because in corporations, especially, you are one of the many functions that needs to collaborate with others. And what I've learned in my four corporation's experiences in four different industries, is that most of the time, design is being perceived, at least at the beginning, as a function able to create just an aesthetic layer on top of the product. While usually collaborating with business leaders, engineers, software developers and many other functions, you also get the chance to explain what design can do for improving the meaning of the products and then entering in different conversations. So what I've really learned is that design can be many things in corporations. And for me, design is a lot about also helping the company to drive innovation from the strategist standpoint as well. But especially from the customer perspective. So designers learn from their education, at least this was my personal experience, to consider very well the point of view of the customer. And it's always been mentioned like outside-in-view. But actually, I think it's a lot about the ability to put themselves in the shoes of the customer and looking with their lenses to judging the product developed by a company. It's absolutely important to avoid to have a product that looks fantastic from the team that is developing, but they are quite hard to be understood from the customers. That's the specific point where designers can help dramatically their organization to get closer to the real way in which customers evaluate their own products.

Guido Woska: So ultimately, what you are saying is design starts much, much earlier in the strategic process of organizations and also in the way of working of organizations. It's not the final touch. It's not making things look good, but it's identifying what is that thing that we need to produce? What is the service that we need to have? What is the experience that we want to provide? So design starts basically as a foundation of building a product experience eco-System for organizations and is even part of the corporate strategy of developing the organization forward. Right.

Monica Dalla Riva: Well, actually, I think that like every other function, design needs to create an impact for the corporation and for the market and even more for the customers. And that means that if we can help in different layers of the process of developing new products and usually this starts with the strategies, we should contribute like all the others. I want to make very clear that my experience in more than 20 years now is that it's a lot about also related on how you enter in a group of work. And I always highly respect all the other functions. I just think that design can add a layer more, that helps the company to take even more the right decision or considering a new aspect that maybe they haven't considered before. And this is creating new possibilities to create really meaningful products. I don't believe generally that designers can do it by themselves. This is something that I learned on the job. That, especially we need to get as much as information as possible from a technical aspect, from a business aspect and also from a customer experience aspect. From insights to be able to take the right decision, you know, thinking about the future. It's very complex because we don't have data about the future. We can just make predictions. And when you strategize, you make a prediction for the future. And there is a high possibility that these predictions are not feasible or not predictable. But there is also highly possibility that if you take enough information around the customers, the technology and the business, you get closer and closer to create the product that is meaningful for people. Therefore, it's also creating a business success.

Guido Woska: Yeah, totally. I think that one of the points that you're making is also very important for me, and that is, design is not a lead function within an organization. It's nothing that stands out from the rest. And once you embed design into your organization, everything else will flow by its own. But it's the collaboration. It's the way of connecting designers with strategist, with engineers, with product managers, with marketing and all the other functions to enable that. In the end, something lands in the hand of a customer, or a product is being actually released to the market, because one of the big, big challenges for design inside of organizations, inside of corporate organizations is that it needs to produce some output and that output needs to be tangible. It needs to be adding value, ideally to the PNL, and all of these things. So to me, it's important that the role and the function of design within an organization is to create output in the end and produce something. It's not just innovation theatre that you're playing. It's just not another layer that you're adding to a complex system. But it has to prove itself. It has to prove its value. So what do you think is the most important value or what are the most important values of having corporate design teams, teams embedded in the organization rather than buying that from the outside world?

Monica Dalla Riva: Well, you know, I've been working four corporations that were in a different stage of embedding design in their way of operating. And I've seen different stages. And I think this is a super important point where you need to understand also in which stage the company is of their development about the design maturity, and understanding that helps to also understand which role the design organization can play in that exact moment. I know that in some companies it's even more evolved. But my experience is that in most of the companies I've been working in, they started inputting design on the execution level. So it means like exactly adding this aesthetic layer, some many years ago was very important in some categories of products. And then just delivering the final, almost final drawing, technical drawing to designers to make some colourful touch or some more smooth curves or just a little bit, some more wow effect on top of that. But if the collaboration with other functions like business and engineerings and development, even manufacturing,works very smoothly and nicely, this move back from execution to have also designers at the strategic level and even before on a corporate strategic level or on the leadership tables. And I think this is very important to understand where the design organization can make an impact, to support the company to achieve their goals. And that, of course, is all about deliverables. All the other functions have the same problem, like the design function. Everyone needs to deliver and everyone needs to prove their impact, how they are making impact towards the customer success in the market, but also towards the company's strategies, even towards the culture of a company. That's super important as well. Like how much design fits in the culture of a company? It's one of the fundamental questions to understand. If the function is going to be supported by the top management or not. And that is also a lot helping to understand if the function can create an impact. Bigger than the one that can be just like a invisioned at the beginning.

Guido Woska: Yeah, totally agree, but that also lives with the leadership that you bring in to the design teams, right, because you need to connect, as a design leader you need to connect the teams to the rest of the organization, to the rest of the leadership of the organization itself, to ensure that the teams can basically fulfil that mission that you just talked about. So, you have you've got over 20 years of experience in different organizations and different leaderships role in these organizations. So so when you look back at that? What what do you think? How is design in organizations best managed? Well, what are the core leadership principles that you have developed for yourself on how to successfully manage design teams and embed them into organizations?

Monica Dalla Riva: It's a very interesting question and thank you for asking that, because I think it's something that I changed towards my experience and where I am today, I realize that some of the core beliefs is that, first of all, we are one of the many functions. And in this mindset, we collaborate with all the others very openly. We need each other. This is the reality, especially in this complex moment in the market. All the functions need eachother to be relevant in the market. And therefore, I have a passion for people in general. So I like to connect with people. And I think that the organization needs to connect with the rest of the company. One of the things that I also realize is that being a design leader was not enough, just knowing about design. I had to learn a lot of other skillsets, but also disciplines that were not properly maybe thought that designers should do it, like business or like being very technical and getting deeper on understanding from a technical level, what does it mean? And in this case, a core belief is being curios and learning from others. Learning from others, put yourself in a perspective that "you don't know it better." You just know one part of the story, but you can learn a lot from others. And therefore, even the attitudes that the design t$eam has towards the right organization, the whole organization. For me this is super important. I believe in respect. I believe in empathy, I believe in open collaboration and even more. I believe that everyone can create, can be part of a success story and they can create their impact according to what they know best. Designers, what I learned is that they tend sometimes to feel themselves special. And this, if it's one side, can help them to be more courageous and propose new innovations and things that others have not thought about. On the other side can even create for them a lot of complexity in dealing with the relationship, with dealing with the stakeholder management in corporations. And I think attitude is one of the main driver to also help and support the full organization to be accepted and therefore also able to sit on the right leadership tables.

Guido Woska: Yes, I totally agree. Attitude has so much impact on how you deliver the projects in the end, because as we learned earlier, as we both agree there is no way of successfully designing experiences, like meaningful experiences for customers or for people in general, if there is no collaboration across everyone who is involved in making this product or this service or this experience come to life. So when we think about how to organize design teams inside organizations, inside corporations, where do you think that the corporate design teams are best suited or best placed inside the organization? Is there a secret sauce to how you make sure that the design team, in your opinion, is basically suited at the right spot to deliver the most impact? And maybe you can even give us a small piece of insights from how you do this every day at Deutsche Telekom, how the design teams are placed, where they are placed, how they collaborate, where do they fit into the organization best?

Monica Dalla Riva: I think that the design in general as in an organization, should sit in the right place for the strategic goal of that organization. I will explain a little bit better. I have the feeling that depending on the goal the company has wanted to reach. Design can support this journey of the company in different ways. There are some industries where I've been working, where design was placed in, for example, very close in the marketing teams and that was perfect fitting, some others where it was absolutely independent and being like on the same level of the other business. I think also that's the other types of design organizations are considering design according to what they can deliver is just communication, is just designing experiences, is a marketing tool, or is that a probably innovation area? In my case, it's about innovation. At Deutsche Telekom, we are part of the innovation function, and actually its there were I believe we are able to create the bigger impact and that we are able to collect the insights coming from the customers and transform them in products with the help of all the other functions, with the help of the software engineers, we the help of all the others. And just like going to really making an impact on that. So to be sure, I will say that every organization can have a fantastic opportunity to embed design functions in the right place, but should be very much linked to their strategic planning. In our case, we are a tech company, an innovative company, so we sit where the strategic focus is more valuable for us.

Presenter: You're listening to everything that's next. A podcast by Manyone.

Guido Woska: I mean, you said earlier, right? It's very difficult to really predict what the future looks like and to design exactly what fits into the future. But just for a moment, let's try you and me to look into the future and the future role of design in organizations. If we're looking a few years ahead with all the changes that we see going on in how organizations are changing, how work is changing, how speed and context and relevance has become very decisive factors in getting products out to the market quickly, or gaining relevance in market shares. What do you think in that future the role of design will be? How will design maybe evolve in its function, in its purpose, in its value that it has in organizations? If, let's say we're looking five to 10 years ahead from now.

Monica Dalla Riva: I believe that design is going to change a lot its own role inside the corporation. And the reason why is because we are going more especially, I'm referring to tech companies, to development of products that are digital. And this means that a big, big part of this development is in the hands of the software developers. So also this is a very important point. And in the future, I believe that they will be adding in another part of this process, and that is the data analytics. Designers need to adapt to this new world where data analytics is going to become a very important element on predicting the future, but also collecting insights to design the next generation of products. So if I can tell you in the next five to 10 years, I believe that design will have other two chances. One, to become more relevant in these new categories and new functions, and sitting on the right table to continuously developing products in the right direction. So like in a collaborative way, but also learning a lot about what does it mean, software developer, development or what does it means data analytics or how to use these competencies to develop better products. Or there is a second scenario, that I see very clearly, that design will become less relevant. Because it's becoming more going back instead of being on an aesthetic layer, but can become even less relevant in a world where a software developer can even take up the role of designers at a certain point.

Guido Woska: And if that's the case, then the role of design leadership will ultimately change as well. Right. You will have, you will need different skills and you will need today. You will need skills that are probably more wide-spanning than you would assume today. So how do you think the role of design leadership is then equally going to change in the next couple of years? What kind of soft skills, what kind of hard skills do you need? What kind of knowledge do you need to really be an impactful design leader in an organization?

Monica Dalla Riva: I believe that to be an impactful leader, you need to know more about business, you need to know more about technology, you need to know more about many topics than before. And I think also that there will be a differentiation between the ability of the leader to understand how to navigate in a complex environment and complex market with a lot of changes happening and with a lot of new situations happening and how to still continuously focus to create impacts for the customers. So design leadership will change a lot about also how much they will be part of the right conversations. This means also technical conversations. I truly believe that all the world is going to become more data-driven. Is going to become more technical, is going to become more flexible and fast in delivering digital products, especially, and digital solutions. Therefore, the designers need to adapt much faster and the design leader needs to convince and be also more into the content creation. I would say that probably one of the major things is that in the future, I don't foresee any type of leader without content creation. Management is not enough anymore. It's a lot about creating content that are meaningful for the people and for the market and also for this society. We have a responsibility role. And that should be really elite.

Guido Woska: And to me, that responsibility, a role that we have and where design can play its part in creating something impactful in regards to that responsibility, I believe has also the opportunity to span beyond the, let's say, traditional understanding of corporate design or design within corporations. Because right now we're talking a lot about design teams being embedded in commercial organizations, being embedded in companies that sell products and services and experiences. But I believe that the value that will be proven on having design inside the organization will span into other forms of organization in the future. I personally believe that five, six, seven, eight years from now, basically every government in the world should have its own design team because learning from how companies change to create more customer-centric products and services should allow government and governmental organizations to understand how to create more citizen-centric products and services. To not start from the process or bureaucratic way of doing, but actually starting from a human aspect. And that means understanding what citizens need, how they want to have services designed, how they want to have problems solved. So, I believe there is a role in design that will go beyond the commercial side of corporations and into governments and non-commercial organizations.

Monica Dalla Riva: I think that in the future, everything that should be designed, that means it could be a product, a service, a new policy might need to have more insights coming from the people using this, from society, from future technology. And thats exactly where designers can play a role. Not every designer has the same ability to connect the dots in this way, but for sure, they learn the tools on how to do it. And as much as the complexity of the world is increasing, we need more people that are able to connect the dots in different ways. That's the reason why I don't separate private or public or governmental versus corporations. But I believe that in general, where there is something to be created and something to be designed, the tools and the skill set of designers can be incredibly valuable.

Guido Woska: Yes, I totally agree. And I believe in the future, some of these jobs that we see today will become less frequent and less relevant because they will be replaced more and more by artificial intelligence and other forms of technology. But everything that's suited around tech, creativity and connecting the dots and finding human-centric creative solutions to problems is going to stay there for a while and design and designers, the role of designers are certainly going to be part of that future, where there is still a need to have humans doing a task or fulfilling a job. And so I think that the skills that you learn as a designer will always be relevant or will also be relevant for a lot of other roles in the future, even if they are not called a designer. But they have skills, or they are being taught skills and tools and technologies that they can basically take from the traditional designers into their other forms of jobs and other forms of tasks that they have. Would you agree that design will evolve also beyond the traditional role of a designer into other aspects of employment and jobs?

Monica Dalla Riva: I think that design training, design skillset and design tools will be applied widely to many other functions. Something that before was merely, like very functional and very vertical focused on creating these design practitioners or professionals is going to enlarge to many other people. And on the same time, designers need to embrace many other aspects of the business side, for example, that today I don't believe it's enough embedded, and so for sure, some of the tools and the capabilities of connecting the dots are going to be applied in many other functions. But I want to make also a point here. I don't think, that this is just coming by doing a training. I think it's coming a lot by solving a lot of problems and therefore practising a capability and a skill set on the job. I think this is one of the major differences between the job of designers and others. Is this a practical side that we need to have in building solutions or building products or building something that then goes in the hands of someone else. That is not us. And I think that is exactly one of the major skill set, really the ability to think about which is the real challenge that needs to be solved, because solving a problem is not that complex, it's solving the right problems that is very complex. So I believe that designers can help to identify the right challenges that should be solved in the future and create a bigger impact in many, many functions.

Guido Woska: So last question there. Do you think that means that in the future, even on a corporate leadership level, like on a top corporate level, will we see more designers or will we see more people with design skills being appointed to run entire organizations, entire companies?

Monica Dalla Riva: I will believe that we might see more leaders that have acquired the design skillset. I think it's very rarely we will see it, I don't think it's believable that we will see a lot of CEOs that are designers, especially because, as I mentioned, there is a lot of more complexity from a financial standpoint, from a business standpoint negotiations, sales and other things that, during the timing of designers evolving their own careers they don't really never, ever have the responsibility of. And I think this is something that we need to be very much aware. It's not enough just to have a strategy in mind. The difference is made when you do the execution and taking from strategy to execution. It's a lot of work. So I believe that in the future we will see much more creative mindsets, creative attitudes, skillset and tools in a lot of leaders in the different industries for sure.

Guido Woska: So now we've talked so much about the future, and I, of course, cannot let you go without having at least one view into the past. And you have so far, you've already had a super interesting career going through many different industries, working for many different companies. If you take a look back and reflect on how your career has evolved, what would be the top, let's say, two or three pieces of advice that you would give to the 25-year-old self, if you would be able to start that career again?

Monica Dalla Riva: That is a very interesting question. By the way, I never thought I was going to have a leadership career. I knew for sure that I had an extreme passion for design, for solving the rights problems. I still do have it. I love to also work on content. So for me is, the first thing is like to follow your passion and making sure that what you do, you really love it. Because when you love what you do, you go beyond your job description. And I think this is super important because you become a happier person, and you can create a bigger impact when you're happy versus then when you're frustrated. Honestly. The second advice will be to focus on the next three years, not more than that. The complexity and the reality we are living today tells us that probably we cannot even go more than the next five months when planning things because there might be big disruptions. So three years is a solid experience for learning a lot and then deciding what's next. And the third advise is not to be scared. Jump on opportunities. I changed four corporations with four different, absolutely industry and backgrounds, too. I learned a lot. I started from scratch a lot of things, and I feel that that was the very important things, like not be afraid to jump into a completely different environment, because today, if I look back, that is probably the most important learning curve I had on my experience. I developed that inside my day by day job in different industry. And I would never expect that before when I was just probably the green from the university and my design school. So the future is on the hands of who is going to jump on opportunities and not be afraid to make changes. That's my advice.

Guido Woska: Super wonderful. Yes, I think this is a perfect way to end today's episode where we talked about everything that's next in design leadership. Thanks a lot for participating Monica, for giving us all the insights into how you see the role of design today and in the future, and how you envision that design will play a role in shaping organizations of all kinds in the future. Again, thanks a lot for being our guest today. And it was a pleasure having you here.

Monica Dalla Riva: Thank you very much for the invitation. I really enjoyed our time together and our conversation. Thank you.

Presenter: You've been listening to everything that's next. A podcast by Manyone. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And we hope you'll stay tuned for more episodes in the future to discover what's next in business design and strategy.

06 July 2020

Mik Strøyberg, CEO and Founder Good Monday

Everything that's next in workspaces. Rasmus Møller Sørensen from Manyone speaks with Mik Strøyberg, the founder and CEO of Good Monday - an office service and management platform. They discuss how COVID has altered the face of work patterns, planning and office setups. With a special focus on the creative industry, they discuss what's next in workspaces.

**Transcript. ** (edited slightly for clarity)

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: So Mik, it's great to have you here on the podcast to talk a bit about the future of workspaces. Spaces where we've spent so many years of our lives. Right. But before we get started, I would like to ask you something. So, as human beings, we often try to look for the silver lining when things are otherwise pretty grim, like the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Right. We have people losing their lives and their livelihoods, their freedom. But a crisis can also bring positive change. And sometimes in surprising ways. So for you personally, what has the past couple of months been like?

Mik Strøyberg: Thank you, first of all for having me, Rasmus. I think the last three months have been, like I'm a reflective person, but the last three months have been all about reflecting on everything that's happening. And I think the cool thing about the last quarter has been that everybody has been in this together. It hasn't been a group or an industry or something else. It has been everyone. And when everybody stops to reflect, then suddenly change happens. And I think that we have seen a lot of change that was supposed to happen, that is suddenly happening now. And I think a lot of it is about moving from a work-life balance to a life balance, where one of the elements in that life balance is work. I think that's the major thing for me and for the understanding of what we're doing. And it's been something that we've been moving towards since inception of Good Monday. And it's something that is close to my heart as well.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: So so, I mean, so you are basically in the business of servicing physical office spaces, right? I mean, that isn't totally wrong to assume that.

Mik Strøyberg: That is correct.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: Yeah. So so isn't this situation super bad for you?

Mik Strøyberg: No, actually it's not, because we're working with workspaces and workspace is all about where you want to work. So it's not office management, it's workspace management and the office will always be something that is dedicated to strengthening community and company culture. It's also where we develop and everybody needs a physical workspace to be together. That's why when you see freelancers, even though they could work from home, they're still going to cafes or renting something in a flexible office or being in a coworking space. Because we need to be with people. We need energy. We need each other. So part of what we're doing is all about figuring out how to create the most efficient and happy employees within the workspace. But looking at all offices closing down almost simultaneously was not fun for a second. But then on the other side, like what happens is when everybody stops. And they need to reconsider what's happening. Then they often choose the smart solution, and in times of a boom, you hire a lot of people, more people than you need. So you can always have two extra hands to do something. When a recession hits, then suddenly you need to reconsider your current structure and figure out like, how can I do stuff smarter? How can I make sure that I have the most flexible setup and I have control and I have the flexibility to adapt. And that's where we came in. So we've actually grown 15 percent through this quarter.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: OK. Amazing. So but I mean, let maybe just zoom out a bit. Right. We have both spent years of our lives building companies and teams and cultures and I mean trying to make and the environments, the working environments as exciting and attractive as possible. Right. We've done that in Scandinavia and we've also done it both of us in the U.S. And we also know that know that density getting people together. As you say, it just plays a big role, but it also plays a big role for cost saving, for cost saving purposes. And, is this changing? I mean, we are, of course, still in the midst of the crisis. Some countries, some regions are still in lockdown mode. Some countries like Denmark, for example, is is very much open to business again. But there are a lot of precautions. There are a lot of restrictions still in place. What will the future office look like? I mean, will we just go back to the old normal. I mean, if I look out in Copenhagen today, rush hour looks like rush hour before Covid-19. I mean, here at our office space, we are, of course, practicing social distancing. But the office is more or less full again. I mean, if you didn't know it, that something bad had happened, you wouldn't really notice it. There's a lot of hand sanitizer everywhere. But, I mean, besides that, so are we just, like, slipping back into the old normal or will we see some substantial changes? What do you think? I mean, increased flexibility? Will the location, the footprint of the offices change? What do you think? And do you see any tendencies among your clients?

Mik Strøyberg: Yeah. Like you said, it's like, we have offices in London and in Copenhagen. And in London they're just in the midst of breaking out of the lockdown. And in Copenhagen, businesses is back. So everything is just that business as usual. And we see that there is a ton of companies where they've changed the way that people interact with their work. But it hasn't, it's not about the office or the workspace in this setup. It's about the work culture and how we want to set that up. And again, just to pinpoint on the social distancing, it's one meter. And some would say that if you're closer than one meter, you almost too close. So I think, like, everything is to normal here in Copenhagen

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: True.

Mik Strøyberg: But we're moving. So within what's happening and how the world would look. And before Covid 19, everybody knew that we were moving towards a work culture that is remote first. We had remote first before Covid hit, which made it extremely easy for us to run our business during lockdown. And remote first is not about everybody needs to sit at home. But this means that every company as standard will offer a combination of workdays at home and days in the physical workspace. Everything depending on what you need the most. For example, if I come to the office and I say I don't want to be disturbed today, it's weird that I actually went to the office. Because that's a place where you get disturbed. So for the large group that is perfectly able to do their work from home, the traditional office as a place to tap into the knowledge of colleagues, etc., plus where your boss can check up on you becomes unnecessary. Increasingly, the physical workspace, as I mentioned, will be dedicated to strengthening community and company culture. Well, basically, why show up if the quality of the overall experience is not something special? So my best guess is just to go back to the whole work-life balance versus life balance. I think we've been looking at we need a 40-hour workweek, which is, again, for a fun fact. It was invented in 1926 by Henry Ford, 100 years ago, almost exactly 100 years ago. In the meantime, we landed on the moon. There was something Internet happened and a ton of other stuff. Right. People didn't change, the whole thing about getting up early on Mondays and going home in the afternoon on Fridays and having that work thing where you couldn't do anything else. So, your day, your life is all depending on your health, your love with your family, making sure you're a great dad or a great mom, like setting everything up for you to have, like this 360 life. That is perfect. One of the things you need to do as well is to make some money so you can pay your rent. But you also need to develop, which is like a great place to do that is that the workplace? So I think we're looking into. Okay. I could actually work from home and Covid drove people home. And now they suddenly realized it's not one day, once in a while where you kind of slack and you feel like everybody's watching you. It's actually much more. Now you can see that you can have a new life within this and that life is better. And also for the company. So the big thing that's happening just to take that one, is the new role for leadership, the whole trust and transparency comes first. Because trust is about trusting that each employee knows what they do best and then providing them with the tools so they're able to deliver on it. And there is a ton of stuff in all that.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: It's funny that you mentioned that, because I read somewhere that I think it was like it Gartner report that said that these tracking methods. Or like data collection of employees are actually on the rise. I mean, maybe that's definitely not in small creative companies. It might be the bigger corporates, but you're seeing a lot of data tracking happening too, because suddenly if the boss cannot see people and cannot measure their productivity, they have to monitor them. I mean, that's pretty dystopian, but it's probably true that we'll also see those tendencies. I mean, more snooping into e-mails and the tracking of what's happening on the person's computer is probably not the best way to build a culture of trust, as you are talking about. But that's probably also a tendency, though, that we will see, or are seeing.

Mik Strøyberg: Well, I hope not. So if that happens, then we're going away from everything that we actually want to build and create, because what we want to do is to make sure that all employees know exactly what they're doing and why they're doing it. And then we need to trust them to actually reach their goal. And to do that we need to give them the tools and the trust and the time. And there is something in who can you hire within this structure. Because of your straight out of college. And you need to get onboarded into a new industry, new area. And you need to learn stuff. It's super difficult not to sit next to someone who can actually make sure that you get in that right thing. And stress during Covid has been humongous because people have been sitting at home not knowing what to do and they don't know if their manager is going to fire them. And like it's been like a catastrophe for the companies where you actually have micromanagement and people hovering above you and telling you what to do every single hour, because then suddenly when you're home, you don't know what to do and you're not thinking for yourself. I think it's not about data collection or monetizing, like looking into how much the employees work. It's more about how can we actually build structure to make sure that we get the most out of every single employee and make that they are as efficient and productive as possible, so they can be as happy as possible. And again, with us it's not about working Monday to Friday. It's about figuring out how to reach your key results. And what are you going to deliver on? And do you think it's the right thing? If you think you could do it smarter, do it. If you work best Sunday evening, work Sunday evening. Just make sure that we reach the goal together. And I think there is a ton of ways to do this.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: Yeah. So. So we're both in the creative industry, right? I mean, coming up with new solutions to big challenges. And what do you think the creative office space of the future will look like? I mean, will we organize ourselves differently around our work if we have all this flexibility? I mean, will we, something that I'm imagining is that that we will, and we're already beginning to see it actually here, when projects start, when you sort of kick things off, you come together physically. To plan and to ideate, and then you go remotely maybe during execution and then you meet up maybe on virtual whiteboards. Virtual brainstorming sessions. Sometimes you reconvene physically, but it'll be much more in flux. So so if that's the case, I'm really thinking, and we are discussing this, actually, we were discussing it this morning here at the office, should we have a completely different layout? I mean, right now our offices , are more or less like seventy five percent workstations and the rest this is like common space. Should it be the other way around? I mean, should we have maybe 80 percent collaboration space and with virtual whiteboards and the AR headsets and always on video conferencing. And then the rest should be old school workstations. So, I mean, I don't know. And of course, it will also take a lot of money and efforts to get it to that stage. But what do you think? What will the future office space look like? The actual layout.

Mik Strøyberg: Yes, so and that's a great question, because what we're seeing is that there is first of all, there is a ton of different divisions within a company and they all act differently, like tech has been remote first for the last 10 years. So for them to sit up in a nice manner has been super easy. They've, like Covid didn't even hit them because they're just, it's business as usual for them during that entire period when it comes to actually working together across borders, but also just doing everything online. But when you look at sales, it's a different story. The same with marketing and customer care is out there and customer success. So I think we need to treat all the single divisions in a new way. On the other hand, what we're looking into at good Monday, because we're actually also moving office here September 1st. Is we've divided us into three different groups. One is "I never want to go to the office again because I have a two-hour commute and if you don't need me there, I'll only be there when there is big happenings and Friday bars and because we need to sit down and brainstorm and we need to be together. But I'm going to be at home visiting once in a while. The other one is I want to be 50/50. And the last one is I want to be at the office every single day because I love the office. My apartment sucks and I don't know where to go with anything else. And I have my best friends at the office as well. And again, according to Gartner or some of the other ones, like it's still like there is a 50 percent chance, like there's a 50 percent higher chance for you to actually retain your employee if they have a best friend at work. And there is just something in creating that community around having it. And we can see in Good Monday its 60 percent who wants to be there all the time. And we have around 30 percent who wants to be there, like either one or two or three or four times a week or five times. And then we have like the rest is remote only. So they are going to be there once in a while.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: So how do you plan that? I mean, how do you plan the space then? Because then you obviously don't need as much space. Right, you don't need as many square meters?

Mik Strøyberg: So we're building it up around having like a free seating setup. For a ton of people, and then we have a dedicated space for the ones who want to be there. And then we have, we know exactly who to hire the next year and we're going to have five or seven extra confirmed spaces. So if we hire someone that wants to be there all the time, they can be there. But also, if someone wants to move, like, suddenly not be remote, but wants to be at the office, we can get them in. But we're going to have 50 percent of our office, is going to be creative space for people to just be more creative and have room to think bigger thoughts. So I think that's going to be a major thing for us.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: So you're actually also looking not only in a pandemic reality, but space as a luxury.

Mik Strøyberg: It is. We can see that with our current clients. So you would think that when there is less people at the office, they would spend less on the office services. But it's actually the exact opposite because now you really need to cater to the ones there because right now the office is actually competing with the home office. And you actually need a lot of people to be at the office once in a while to make sure that it can be there. When Copenhagen opened up again. The companies where we could see the least people coming back to the office were the ones where lunch wasn't back because their employees were kind of like, if there isn't lunch, why should we even bother? And you they are eating at that moment, right? Because you actually need them there. You need the DNA. You need the direction. You need to make sure that they can be with their coworkers to develop. And you need to compete on that. So you need the best coffee. You need the best lunch. You need to throw even better parties. And you need to make sure that everybody gets united around the office because or else it's just a workstation that doesn't contribute with the brand, with the DNA. With you, with the heart and soul of the company, which is extremely important when the world is upside down.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: Yeah, that's a very good point. And super interesting. I mean, we have lunch. It's lunch packs right today. So we went from the buffet to lunch packs. Individually wrapped. It's not really the same. Still, still delicious and nutritious but it's a different experience and there is too much waste. So hopefully we can change that soon. And we also took away breakfast. So that's why I didn't have breakfast this morning, because it's such a normal thing for me to do it at work. So, so interesting, because I think you're right.

Mik Strøyberg: And another thing that happened during lockdown is, we missed each other. And we actually missed going to the office. And when we do polls right now, it's 80 percent who can't wait to get back to the office, which is a lot, because if you ask them, pre covid, What would you rather? You would see different numbers? So I actually think that the longing and the whole thing about us being human beings who need to interact, we're social creatures and we need each other. And we also need each other to actually move forward, to develop and just get things done.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: But, it's human nature, right. It's human nature to be together, to socialize and to create together. And here at Manyone, right, we live off that. I mean, we're creative company. We solve problems for our clients by being together by co-creating as teams, as a team of teams. So it's, it's been difficult. And speaking of working remotely, I think we have to talk about video conferencing. Just quickly. How has that been for you guys moving everything onto a screen? Well, how's that been?

Mik Strøyberg: But that's been super easy because we went remote first, before lockdown. So it was a natural step. And like the change to remote first has been on our agenda since last year. So it's the natural next step, especially within the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Right. Remote team members in other countries have been a part of the culture for several years. And what is important is that everyone, no matter location, has the same authority within the company. So one fix for all of this is having everyone check in on their own laptops for all hands meetings. Also the ones sharing the same location and actually being next to each other because otherwise, the biggest group checking in can seem more important than the individual team and a remote team member. So before we went into lockdown, we still had all our town halls and all hands and our check-ins where even though we're sitting together, we were on separate computers because we need to build up this leverage around everyone having the same authority. So everybody doesn't feel that they're left outside or doesn't have a voice. And so this whole remote thing is something that we've been doing almost since inception, even though we're at the same office, because we we're going to move into other countries and other cities. And therefore, we had to start with remote-first.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think it's been a shock for a lot of companies and a lot of people. I mean, and also ZOOM fatigue. Right. That's a thing. I mean, if you spend eight to 10 hours on a video call or video calls everyday, you simply get exhausted. Right. It's tough looking at a camera that's looking at you, or looking at a screen that's looking at you all day. So I think that's also something that people have, you know, at least our colleagues here have been longing to log out of, even though not for good, but just to get back to real meetings. But it's interesting also. I mean, how do you, what do you think? So, I mean, I've seen places where they have these always on video systems, so people can see what's happening at the office. No matter when they log in. Will, we see that I mean? Will the physical virtual divide sort of disappear, or be blurred a bit. Or what? What do you think?

Mik Strøyberg: I don't think that's going to be a big thing. You know, like Bjarke and BIG. They have a screen that they can kind of hover over. But I don't think that there is going to be anything. Maybe it would be a fun feature but it's not a key grip. So I think there is like, I think people are more important than space. And I think one thing that's happening with us is that when we're at the office, instead of using meeting rooms, you often do just full meeting in the full room with laptops open. So it actually seems like you're with the other people. So it could be two people sitting at the office with three computers just because they had like, they have to touch base. So it actually seems like they're more people at the office. We're just jamming right.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: That's a good.

Mik Strøyberg: But its a virtual thing.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: Yah, cool. So just before we wrap up, I have two questions for you. First, is what's next for Good Monday? What will you look like a year or say five years from now? What will your business be like in this post pandemic reality, but also just, you know, with with a lot of things having sort of sped up just in a matter of months, that sort of alters the way the way we come together at workplaces, or come together for work in the future? What will Good Monday look like?

Mik Strøyberg: So in five years, which is, right now, we're looking at like three months at a time, but in five years. How I see it, like the office is not disappearing, having a gathering point to be social in is not something that is disappearing anytime soon. And what we see right now is people are more hungry for the office than ever before, which is also why we're growing rapidly right now. I see that our platform and Good Monday will be going towards network effects in a new degree, where local providers, local service providers and office suppliers and vendors, in general, are going to be using each other much more. So where we would enter London and then take a ton of vendors on board, we would probably see London as 15 different geographic locations. Because then we want to make sure that we can help and understudy local providers that are special to make sure that the office becomes more special and more relevant. So it's more customizable. But instead of us going in there and creating the framework, we're going to let the vendors and the service providers come together and see how they can build new products and services, to make sure that the office is more interesting. Like a fun thing about the office is, when you invite someone home, it has this vibe of you. They know exactly who you are. They can feel you inside. You have picked the furniture. You have like this special thing, you have your coffee and there is all these things. And now we get to know each other. And now there is this sense of belonging and we know each other. At the office it has to be the same in the future. Because you need to know why you're actually in there, which is going to take a hit on some of the stuff out there, like being in a general non-company branded coworking or flexible office space, its going to be difficult? Because why go there if there is no identity? If you can't feel your co-workers. So there is going to be this big new step. And I think that we're going to be much more on point with having something that special, connected to the company.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: That's a super interesting journey. So a final question. Something that we ask all the participants in this podcast series. If you could give your 10 year younger self, a piece of good advice about the future, something that you should have done differently. And knowing, what you know today, what would that be?

Mik Strøyberg: I would probably have started a covid 19 vaccine, and I could be in front of it. No, if I could go 10 years back. The one starting with home delivery of groceries back in early 2000. Everybody was kinda like we go to the supermarket. We can't, like, see ourselves buying groceries online. That seems so weird. I want to see it. I want to feel it. Like everything that is within that space. From Zoom callings to Ocado, nemlig dot com, as it is called here in Denmark. Like all this stuff. Where we can actually see convenience. And because we trust in products and because we've seen the online market move as rapidly as it has. I would probably have been working much more on that and looking into taking the hit of not being, of the world, not being ready for what I had to provide, but actually me being ready for what was about to happen and a thing like what's just happened with Covid. It's not like suddenly they're all taking off because it makes sense, its because now everybody suddenly gets it. Like there's a ton of people who ordered online for the first time in their entire life during Covid. And when you've done it once and you see how seamless it is, then you do it again. And it's the same with our platform. When people suddenly engaged with our platform and they see, oh, it works. Like, it's so easy to use. I thought it was going to be difficult. And suddenly they get to the new world. So I would probably tell my 10 year older self to be even more ready for an online world. And like again, 10 years ago, I would have believed in flying cars more than anything else. And before the Internet, I wouldn't ... that either. So new stuff happening that's moving much faster than you can grasp.

Rasmus Møller Sørensen: Yeah. And I mean, the office space is no different. Right. I mean, this is where we still will be spending a lot of our time. Of course, flexing in and out, even more. But we'll still be spending a lot of our waking hours working, and then creating together with other people. So, super interesting conversation Mik, and thank you so much for joining. And good luck with Good Monday and then your expansion.

Mik Strøyberg: Thank you. And thank you for having me.

29 June 2020

Bjarke Ingels, BIG

Jens Martin Skibsted from Manyone and architect Bjarke Ingels are friends who together share a passion for creating better urban livelihoods. In this episode, they discuss how science fiction plays a big part in creating visions for and designing what's next in urban mobility.

**Transcript. ** (edited slightly for clarity)

Presenter: Welcome to everything that's next .. in urban mobility. This episode features a captivating conversation about transport, cities and science fiction. Jens Martin Skibsted, a Global Partner at Manyone, and the designer who created the Biomega bike and the Biomega electric vehicle, will be speaking with the architect Bjarke Ingels, the founder of BIG architects. Ingels is firmly one of the most renowned architects globally, with a too long to mention list of iconic buildings and urban projects to his name. They both share a passion for creating solutions, that are not only pleasing to the eye, but solutions that also improve everyday urban life. And that makes this conversation especially captivating, as it centres on visions for the future of urban mobility, and how these visions are created. Welcome to everything that's next in urban mobility with Bjarke Ingels.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Hey, Bjarke. How are you?

Bjarke Ingels: Very good. How are you, Jens Martin?

Jens Martin Skibsted: Great. I'm great. So I want to ask you, like, a ton of questions about the future of cities, the future of mobility in cities. So I think I'll just jump right ahead. Obviously, it's also my field. So I'm going to give my points as well.

Bjarke Ingels: Please.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Thank you. So just to start with. I was very impressed with the car that you were part of. Part of doing the scenery for Westworld. And you had this fantastically designed car. Could you tell us more about it?

Bjarke Ingels: Yes, so Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy Nolan, who are the showrunners and the writers of Westworld, have become very good friends of mine. And I think what impressed me when I saw the first season of Westworld was that for the first time in a long time, I saw a vision of the future, including, let's say, the advent of artificial intelligence and maybe consciousness in an artificial mind that was seemingly free from all the clichés that you normally find when you see science fiction or read science fiction about the future and how the robots are going to take over, etc. And I think they succeeded in creating, like a very beautiful and very plausible vision of this kind of future theme park where AI-powered robots become self-aware. And I think the genius that they put forward was that you were actually empathizing with the machines. So rather than the robots being these kind of evil, ugly Terminator's and Skynet being this kind of sort of cold global entity, that as soon as it switches on, starts like killing all the people, you are actually understanding how these sophisticated, autonomous, almost individuals that are the artificially intelligent robots suddenly start seeing that they are kept captive by this other breed, that they are actually slaves. And beautifully, you actually find yourself sympathizing or at least empathizing with the machines. So long story short, we start having a lot of conversations. We have a lot of mutual friends and we become friends. And when they are about to start season three, they are now leaving the confines of this theme park and they have to show what does the future look like 50 years from now. And, um, and of course, we have a lot of conversation about them. And the conversation quickly starts being about urban mobility, because. The interesting thing about the season three was that he was shot in the year 2019 and it takes place partially in Los Angeles, and Los Angeles 2019 was actually the year that Blade Runner took place, the first Blade Runner. So this kind of archetypical dystopian civilization that has completely collapsed, flying cars everywhere. And I think we can all testify that Los Angeles of 2019 looks very little like Blade Runner. But, um, so then we thought, like what are the things that might actually be true? And we've been looking a lot at urban mobility. We've been looking at urban mobility together with Audi, like almost a decade ago, where we if not predicted, then at least made a big bet on driverlessness. And we've been looking lately with Toyota on creating an entire city based on innovations in urban mobility. And one of the paradoxical consequences, when you focus on urban mobility and when you work in this case with a car company, is that the future is not going to be more about cars and, you know, electric cars and flying cars. It's probably going to be a lot less about cars. So what we're finding is that there'll be more of the space that is currently dominated by automobiles, like the typical street is going to be converted into new forms of urban space, more like parks or promenades. So when you see Westword Season three, it's a very pedestrian future. The urban environment is is much more green. It's like parks and plazas and then mobility and the vehicles that are there, and this is back to your question, are much more like mobility as a service. So it's when you need to be moved in a confined environment, maybe with a larger group of people, you summon a vehicle and it arrives and picks you up and takes you elsewhere. Or maybe there's other forms of personal mobility, different kinds of segways, different kinds of scooters, different kinds of bicycles, that can magically be summoned. And then once you've made the jump from one place to the other that you need to go, they sort of dissipating. And then, of course, I was trying to show them things that I felt were emblematic or prophetic about what I believe the future might look like. And I showed them your, uh, your designs for the Biomega car because I think the Biomega car in many ways includes a lot of the elements that I think will be part of a future where it's not about private car ownership, but about mobility as a service. So also, anyone who has studied a Tesla or any other electric cars has seen that the engine is no longer under the hood. It's actually some servos that are located in the wheels and the powertrain is no longer some big mechanical thing. It's actually a plate of batteries that are located underneath the floor. It's almost like just like a thick floor-plate. So suddenly the elements that used to be an important part of the mass or the volume of a car can now be completely hidden. And all you need is a frame that protects the passengers from accidents and that maybe keeps the wind and the rain and the weather out. So in that sense when you look at at some of the design innovations that you've done with the Biomega car. I think they are going to be almost endemic for what the kind of future of cars is going to look like. Also, with Toyota and the Toyota Woven city that we've created with them, they have something called the E-palette that they've been putting forward over the last couple of years. That is also of a similar, a similar nature. It's essentially a kind of wireframe with a lot of glass and a solid plate of a battery. That is very free and flexible to be organized internally in many different ways. So not just the typical four seater with four passengers looking the same direction. It can be more like a lounge. It can be more like like a pop up store. So essentially, suddenly the car is much less like this traditional vehicle that we think of when we think about urban mobility and much more like a small space that can be moved or that can move itself around the city.

Jens Martin Skibsted: So, yeah. So I mean, you've made quite a few points, and I would tend to agree with just about all of them. And just to kind of rewind with regards to Westworld. You know, I love your vision for it. I mean, to me, Westworld is still a bit like a movie I saw on a colour TV that we proudly had acquired when I was a kid with a bald guy running around shooting all people. But, you know, obviously, the new one is a whole different level. And, you know, Nolan is a genius within this field. I tend to, you know I also like this kind of super constructive vision that, you know, the world is not just gonna happen to us and it's going to be whatever we want to make of it. If we want to make something great, we'll just make something great. I do feel, you know, having studied philosophy, that this whole assumption that the machines will become self-aware and sentient, all of that, you know, is a cliche. We just simply don't know. I mean, of course, it's science fiction, so we can assume it. But for some odd reason, every sci-fi author assumes that having more computational power will, you know, automatically result in some kind of self-awareness or sentient being. So so I'm fairly sceptical about that part. And I'm not sure of the implications it's going to have for urban mobility. Obviously, the more data we have, the better, the challenge is going to be not to put the historic biases of data in there. So, you know, for instance, that there's kind of a racial bias. You know, I think that is oddly a thing we really see in a lot of urban mobility, or at least urban greenification projects where in the US by Afro Americans, it's considered like a white thing, that now it's going to be gentrified and they're going to be pushed out. And they hate cycling lanes. I mean, you know, obviously exaggerating, but there's somehow these kind of old patterns have been built-in, even to such a kind of an agnostic thing in theory as mobility and urban planning. So obviously that's going to be a challenge with a lot of data. But, you know, the more data, the better. And it should just be made kind of as little biased as possible. And also totally agreed with this kind of vision of us being in a turmoil. We don't know if we're gonna have side by side scooters like the segways. We don't know if we're going to have these mini scooters, I don't personally believe in them. You know, the whole field is kind of being, you know, is in a turmoil, in a positive way, typologies are being reshaped. And I agree that with regards to bigger types of car-like things, I say car-like because I think this kind of duality between cars and non-cars is going to dissolve. And right now it makes sense. In 20 years, it's probably gonna be just like an odd anachronistic thing to say. And obviously, the Manyone car that was made for Biomega is an example of this kind of service approach, which I also totally believe in. One thing that I really miss is the whole cycling aspect. But I'll get back to that and ask you about that. And also, I think, you know, what happened when we went from horse carriages to cars. We made cars that looked exactly like horse carriages, wooden things with roughly the same wheels. Some even had horse heads for petrol tanks like wooden horse heads. So, I mean, it was a joke to us now. Right. But if you think of it, that's what a Tesla is, right? It's something that's easy for us to adapt into, like rather, segway into sounds weird, but, you know, it's an easy thing to adapt because it's familiar, but it's in a way, the same as these horse carriages or these early horse carriage like cars. Because, you know, it has this hood in front. I mean, I never used the hood. I know they say that there is a storage space in front, but obviously I have an umbrella up there and nothing else. So it is just like a hood that's supposed to be there, but for no reason now. So and actually, in the same way, but you know, it serves a purpose. It serves us going towards a future and the same actually with Elon Musk's Hyperloop. You know, obviously it's a great thing, but in theory, it's just a car put into a tunnel. I mean, I know you want to comment on that. But, you know, when I was a kid and rode the metro, they already talked about these metros in vacuum tubes. So I think that makes way more sense, that you have communal transport in tubes and not ineffective, kind of personal transport. But with all of that, what I can see is that the existing technology out there, are the bicycless. And actually now even more so, the electric bikes . They are just way more effective, than efficient sorry, than anything else on the planet. You know they're twice as efficient as walking around. So, so basically, it's better to bike than to walk. And all the others, they just come way down, they're just way less efficient. Right. So I think that's odd, that that's always taken out of sci-fi flicks and the future we envision. And, you know, to me, that's also a future that you envisioned. You know, with your first humongous project, the iconic 8. What's it called in English? But ottetallet in Danish, where you could bike the whole way up, you know to the entrance of your apartment. So it's, you know, so what what's your take on these? The bicycle, whether it's self-driving or electric or not. And you know, obviously, this kind of car, kind of car biased vision of mobility?

Bjarke Ingels: I mean, I think, first of all, you're absolutely right that, I think the best way. One of the most insightful things or predictions about the future is the famous statement from William Gibson when he explains the sensibility of Cyberpunk Where he says "the future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." And, of course, what he means is that, and I think this is very true when you think about the city of the future, is that the city of the future is the city you are already living in. And if you come back 50 years from now, you're gonna be able to recognize, like a lot of the things, most of the things, in fact, because even just numerically, we're now seven and a half billion people, almost eight. And the United Nations believe that we will flatten out around 10. So let's say 80 percent or 75 percent of our cities are already here. And then secondly, like you're saying: The bicycle, we've been sort of champions of the bicycle, and maybe it's a sort of Danish bias, like obviously 50 percent of the Copenhageners commute by bicycle. And by consistently investing in, let's say, giving people a choice, we have made it more and more attractive for people to choose the bicycle. And just like you make highways with dedicated on and off ramps. and you know, commuter tracks, et cetera, like there are bicycle superhighways that have like little resting plates for the bicyclists when they stand and wait for the for the traffic lights, that have additional width.. et cetera. So there's all these, and of course, like we've been building bridges over the Port of Copenhagen the last decade and they have all been pedestrian and bicycle only. And it just means that we're moving people, not cars. But you can actually move so many more people when you don't have to move a giant shell of metal around them. So that's obviously one thing. And actually, in 2010, we designed the Danish pavilion for the Shanghai World Expo. And the subject of the pavilion was sustainable cities. And we thought, paradoxically, China, when I was a child and you would watch documentaries about China, you would see these sort of incredible recordings of entire streets with like what looked like thousands or millions of bicycles and almost no cars. Fast forward, economic development, the economic miracle that is China. And suddenly you have traffic jams everywhere. And because of the perceived low status of the bicycle, it had become almost forgotten. So one of our gifts to the Chinese at the World Expo was actually to remind them of the thrill of riding a bike through the city. So that everyone who visited the Danish pavilion could actually bicycle through the entire exhibition out on the roof and back again. And I think in that sense, you're seeing now, in sort of modern Chinese cities like for instance Shenzhen, that the bicycle is coming back. So I think there is also these kind of perceptions of what is high status and what is low status. And I think those fluctuations needs to be funneled out. But...

Jens Martin Skibsted: Sorry to interject. But, yeah, I, I totally see that. I mean, I when I started, when ever I've been coming to China for the past some 20 years and I remember at some point there was a declaration from the city of Shanghai that by 2010 there would be no bicycles in Shanghai anymore. And the whole point of this was basically to say in 2010, no Chinese or no Shanghainese, rather, would be poor. And obviously, that's a huge challenge. I mean, the social aspect that poor, like developing countries rather, want to have what the West had. But it's still time to change all that. The more we wish for bikes in our cities, the more that's going to trickle down. And, you know, if you look at the future, I mean, not the future that's here, but the future that's, there in less than 8 years. The third biggest country in the world is going to be Nigeria. The first is going to be India. So, I mean, China is no longer going to have a prominent role in terms of, you know, massive growth. And so how do you accommodate? How do you make the bike aspirational? But also, how do you solve the kind of mobility challenges in a complete different environment? When it comes to cities, I mean, if you take Nigeria, I mean, obviously, you have one of, if not the biggest city in Africa and that continent being Lagos. But in Nigeria. But also, if you take Nigeria in general, it's not really that urbanized. And of course, it's gonna get urbanized, but you're still going to have a lot of peri-urban type situations and how, or even rural situations, so how are we going to solve that? Is that all of a sudden going to be these drones flying around and, you know, basically creating havoc beneath them? Or, you know, how is that future going to look, you know, rather than the driverless car that we've seen countless of times or the bicycle-friendly city centers that we're seeing over and over, how is kind of this peri-urban setting going to look or mobility going to look? And how does that fit with, for instance, the mayor of Paris's vision that everything should be of some kind of equidistance to each other, at least within a certain amount of time? You know, within a circumference that you can get to all points within that circle.

Bjarke Ingels: I think, like before you were talking a little bit about the fantasy of intelligence and let's say self-awareness being a product of a certain quantity of processing power, maybe. I think one of the things that, that we do know to be true is in the field of emergence, that we know that "many" is different. That when you have more of something, then at some point it starts having or exhibiting a different behavior than the individuals that constituted it. In this idea that a school of fish behaves differently than individual fish do. That there is a you know, a whole anthill is capable of solving problems that each individual ant wouldn't be capable of solving on their own. And I think the same is going to be true in urban mobility, that, um. And this, in a way, the core of the project that we're doing with Toyota, that is called the Woven City, is that I think one of the sort of cheap truisms about the future of mobility, is that it's not a single solution. It's going to be a complex ecosystem of different ways of moving around, that are going to characterize the future of how we move around in both cities and suburbs and rural areas. And I think because everything becomes connected, and increasingly everything becomes sensory, and everything becomes increasingly intelligent, and maybe not only is it sensory and intelligent on its own, so that my phone can detect your phone, if we're in the same room, and my scooter can detect the electric car on one side and the bicycle on the other side, but also they will share their observations to what could be seen as a hive mind. That in the future, we believe that cities will have an operating system and there will be what you could call the digital twin, that for every city there is a virtual city that is constantly updated with all the information it's getting from all of the sentient or sensory objects that are moving around in that city. And that's going to make it much easier for every individual to move around in a multi-modal way. Because what's problematic right now, is that in the morning, I have to choose. Am I going to take at the bicycle to work and then I have to take it back, or if I go out, am I going to take the car and then I shouldn't have more than one beer because then I won't be able to drive it back and blah, blah. So this kind of multimodality right now is cumbersome. Because we have to organize it ourselves. And I think what we're going to see in the future when mobility becomes a service, that transition is going to be enabled by the fact that everything is sensory and there is this kind of hive mind at play. So it's going to be so much simpler for you to just change your mind. And it doesn't mean that you have to get up at six o'clock the next morning and go and retrieve your bicycle from where you left it yesterday. Because somehow it becomes part of this emergent fleet of different ways of moving around a city, that you can opt-in and out of.

Jens Martin Skibsted: So, I mean, I totally agree with that multi..., I mean, if you have to come with one answer for what's going to happen. I'd also just say multimodal. The thing is, it's just that, it's so incredibly complex, that no one would know what that means. Right. But there is, you know, so I also agree with this, this incredibly digitally interwoven transport, transport systems, you know, is it is going to enhance this. And it might even be not just digital. It could also be biological. Right. We haven't even seen the top of the iceberg when it comes to what biology is going to do for design and mobility. And I also believe that actually bicycles will become not just electric, but also intelligent and digital. In a way to me, it's kind of almost coming back to the root of it. In the sense that, when you went, you said China had this biking history, I mean, so did a lot of cities, Ouagadougou, Hanoi, and I actually rode in Hanoi, like in the eigthies or something. And it was the greatest experience I had. I rode a bike and it was the greatest experience I had, because everything moved like a fish shoal, you know, no traffic lights, no keeping to the right or left. I mean, everything was just interwoven. And somehow humans have been more akin to this kind of social fish-like behaviour or tribal behaviour. And so in some senses, in some ways, this is kind of getting back to a stage, we were. I mean, that said, I really think the electric bike has the upper hand because it's so efficient and so ubiquitous. And actually, the Toyota you mentioned, Toyota is an example of how electric bikes and specifically electric cargo bikes is the aspiration even for cars. You know, electric cars, so few of them out there. We all talk about them, but there are actually a hundred times more electric bikes. And if you take the Toyota i-Road, which I rode a TED, actually, I think you probably also tried it when we met over there. That's an example of a small three-wheeled car that leans into corners, is electric, driverfull instead of driverless. I also think driverfull has a future. And you could see how it wanted to act like a bicycle in the city. Individual, personalized, fast, you know, given traffic circumstances and still full of the freedom driverfullness gives you. Which ultimately driverless is gonna take away from you.

Bjarke Ingels: Yeah, I definitely also think that there's some. I mean, that's maybe, if multimodal is one of the things that you inevitably will see, there is maybe also an equally sort of uncontroversial statement, is this kind of idea of hybridization, right? I've been spending the last two months in Copenhagen. Because of the pandemic, I can't return to the United States. And of course, the first thing I got was to get myself an electric cargo bike. And it's so, it's so small that it can comfortably drive on the bicycle lanes with, depending on the degree of assistance that I'm choosing and amount of my family that I end up putting in the cargo bin, it can actually compete with the car, at least in an urban setting, because you're less, less stopped. So it ends up being infinitely more spacious and fast and comfortable, than a conventional bike, but infinitely smaller than anything that would require a car. Right? So I think, it's very true, what you're saying is that every time you think that now we have a fixed set of categories that you can choose between something wedges itself in between, and suddenly combines some of the attributes of what you would normally think of as mutually exclusive, or at least very different forms of transportation. And I think that the electrification of the fleet of bicycles is beginning to create these kinds of hybrids that, you wouldn't really know where to place otherwise.

Jens Martin Skibsted: So, yeah, I agree with it. And we should actually, you know, every time you see a charger for an electric car, you should at least have one for an electric bike, right? Or, for whichever hybrid. But I mean, I just want to ask you one last question, given that even 20 years ago, the future was unevenly distributed. So what is the piece of advice, you know, regarding urban mobility or anything of your choice, would you give to that younger self?

Bjarke Ingels: I would, I would maybe say one thing that is, I think, true. Is that 20 years is, It's not so far from now. And we tend to think about. We tend to be very timid about making plans for the future because it's so far away. And I think that's why, when we were thinking 20 years ahead, 20 years ago, we were probably usually thinking about, you know, flying cars and sentient robots and a lot more sort of activity in space, than we are than we see now. Definitely human presence on other planets and blah, blah, blah. And somehow we never get that far. And I think that the big thing that we should be thinking about, about the future right now is actually climate change. It's kind of interesting, in nineteen ninety-three, I realize that that is 27 years from now. I wrote my thesis for high school. If you can say thesis, my third-year assignment, and I wrote it in political science as a follow up on environmental policy. Back then, in 1992 in December, they had the first United Nations conference on climate change in Rio. Where they introduced Agenda 21 and the whole idea about sustainable development from the Gro Harlem Brundtland report. And it was like, it was like this kind of new and relevant thing. And I wrote the whole thesis about political, environmental policy at the global, regional, national, local and individual level. And it was a very sort of interesting thing, just to really sort of dig into this kind of new thing of global environmental awareness. And the greenhouse effect, and the hole in the ozone layer, were like relatively young subjects in the media. I wish, I would have known that it was going to remain the most important challenge that somehow remained relatively unaddressed for the next three decades. With a result that now we, we haven't really moved incredibly far. And, increasingly, a meaningful action, that is required, is going to take almost science fiction-esque proportions of what what is necessary to be done. So, in a way, the advice I would have given myself 27 years ago was that. That this subject I was doing for school, because I had to choose something, might have been one of the most interesting things. And if I wouldn't put it away, but actually keep it on the top of my mind for the next three decades. It would be a very, very powerful tool to have.

Jens Martin Skibsted: Cool. I definitely think that's our generation's task. The big challenge we need to solve.

22 June 2020

Jeffrey Goh, CEO of Star Alliance

Everything that's next in aviation with Jeffrey Goh, CEO Star Alliance.

In this episode, Guido Woska from Manyone, and Jeffrey Goh discuss opportunities and related strategies for the future of the aviation business. In the discussion they touch on topics such as the changing scope of customer service and loyalty, giving you a clearer picture of what the aviation industry might look like in the near future.

**Transcript. ** (edited slightly for clarity)

Presenter: The world is changing faster than ever. Global markets are moving, consumer habits are changing, and technology is empowering new experiences. What will the impact of this fast paced change be on your industry? Our perspective is that opportunity will be shaped by adaptability and exploration. And that is the theme of this show. From leading designers and industry executives, you'll hear how they are exploring new opportunities and adapting to everything that's next.

Presenter: Welcome to the first episode of everything that's next. in this episode, Guido Woska, a global partner at Manyone with more than 20 years of experience working in strategic design and more than a decade working with the global aviation industry. We'll be speaking with Jeffrey Goh, the CEO of Star Alliance. Jeffrey Goh brings vast experience and pedigree from the industry with a career that includes academia , working as a practising lawyer specialized in aviation law, a senior position at the International Air Transport Association. And finally, a long stint at Star Alliance, where he's now the CEO. Star Alliance is a member organization counting 26 airlines as full members and 40 affiliate airlines. So if anyone knows what's next for aviation, then it would be Jeffrey Goh. In the next 40 minutes, Guido and Jeffrey will discuss opportunities and strategies for the future of aviation. They'll be touching on topics such as the changing scope of customer service and loyalty. And once you're done listening to them, you'll have a much clearer picture of what the aviation industry might look like in the near future. My name is Thomas Noppen. It's a pleasure to introduce you to everything that's next in aviation.

Guido Woska: Jeffrey, welcome to our podcast. It's really great to have you here today. And looking at the crazy times that aviation is in right now, when was actually the last time that you have been on a plane?

Jeffreh Goh: Well, thank you very much Guido, for the opportunity to join your podcast here. So to kick off, when did I last fly? You know, it's it seems like a while ago. Now, if you look back. So much water has gone under the bridge. So I was just trying to think back. It was probably the end of February. So that's a good, you know, three months. And in this job, that is almost like an eternity. You know, when I was probably in an aircraft in the air twice a week, perhaps on average, at least once a week. And now we're looking at, you know, almost three months without being in the air. It's been different. And I'd say it's refreshing in a way. It's sort of test to see your character about how you adapt, even in this in this kind of change, really. So it's very interesting.

Guido Woska: Yes, of course. But at the same time, I assume as the CEO of the world's largest airline alliance, you still miss flying, right?

Jeffreh Goh: I think I would say I miss flying only to understand how our member airlines are doing, how the service is being provided on board. And, of course, you know, our job is about carrying people, right? Connecting people, connecting businesses connecting cultures. And we need to be part of that, you know, participate in that environment too. So it is awfully strange. You know, there was a point as I speak to you now, I kind of reflect on. One of the things that when flying returns again, one of the things that I would probably need to think harder than I ever did before is how do I actually pack my luggage? If you fly, once or twice a week, you kind of go into a routine of, you know, which side of your suitcase you put your running shoes and your jacket in the suitcase. Not having done that for about three months or more. I got to think again at how you get back into that routine of doing so.

Guido Woska: Yeah, exactly. I have to say, I've been on a plane for the first time since the beginning of the corona-crisis about a week ago. And it was a very mixed feeling, travelling for the first time and also almost three months, just like yourself. On the one side, it was very familiar. And on the other side, it was very different because of all the different elements that have been added to the experience, to the journey. So let's elaborate on that for a moment. So, you worked with airlines all over the world? You talk to CEOs of airlines that transport hundreds of millions of people every year. What do you think will be the customer experience right now in the next, whatever, three months, six months, nine months, twelve months, a year and a half or two years in which airlines are recovering from, on the one hand side, the situation of the economic crisis and not being able to fly and on the other side of passengers, probably travelling with some sort of fear of how the whole situation is going to evolve for them. What do you think the customer experience will be like in the near future when we step back onto a plane when we travel between continents?

Jeffreh Goh: Yeah, that's a fair and interesting question. I think, before getting to, you know, observing what that new experience or the experience during the recovery period might look like. I think we perhaps, you know if we take a step back and look at how, what's the context of where we are today? And it is really almost a cliche to say that we are in unprecedented times, but truly, truly this is a crisis of a scale that has never been seen before in depth and in breadth, I would say. And particularly for the airline world and the travel industry, you know, it was the first to be hit by this crisis and it probably will be the last to emerge in terms of the recovery pattern. Because, having said that, though, I mean, you know, we need to recognize that this crisis is not just a kind of a financial crisis or a regional crisis. Right. It's it has wider socio-economic impacts, more than many of the crisis of the past before. And there are a lot of uncertainties that remain. And at least in the airline world, we don't know what the ultimate landscape is going to look like. After all, the shakeout has taken place and all the fallout we're beginning to see already. And you know there was a prediction that when the crisis first started, you know, it will take two to three months before we perhaps see the fallout begin to take place. And so if we look at March 2020 was when the crises really took off, March, April, May. So you are into May, into June now, two, three months down the road, you're beginning to see some airlines, some of them you probably never have thought before in the past, filing for bankruptcy protection proceeding. You know, within our alliance we have a small number, a small number of airlines who have already filed for bankruptcy protection. But all across the world, there are some airlines that you'd never expect would ever go down this road, but they have had no choice but to do that. And so the recovery pattern is going to look a little bit uncertain at the moment, although everyone is talking about what are the things that they need to do, the measures that to be taken. But I think that there are three things. When you talked about recovery, What is it going to take? I think that it revolves around maybe three things. If you look at kind of the drivers of travel, the drivers of flying in the past. One is, when and how soon do the governments around the world remove the border restrictions, particularly for international travel? Remember that not every country has the benefit of a domestic market where domestic travel and flying can happen within your borders. So domestic travel will come first. You know, it was the last to go out and you'll be the first to come back. But there are many countries and airlines and markets where they depend on international traffic and international passengers. And if it borders remain closed, then that's going to be a problem in terms of recovery or challenge or recovery. The second is, I say, because the crisis is so deep and so broad, it is not just the airline industry that is affected. And, you know, the broader, broader society, broader economies are also impacted. You know, businesses are closing down, you know, from restaurants to small-medium businesses and enterprises, which means that we're going to have some economic headwinds. People are going to lose jobs. People are going to lose their businesses and disposable income is going to take a hit. And, you know, in normal life, when your disposable income gets hit, you're going to perhaps travel less. You're going to ask yourself whether or not this is essential travel. You know, I used to go on holiday four times a year. Maybe I have to cut it down to two times a year. Maybe I cut it down all together and I just go by car, you know, to some scenic places. But that's two, and then a third one, I say is, psychologically there will remain, you know, I suspect the fear, for as long as a vaccine is not available and even if vaccine was available. How soon will confidence return? For the passengers. Are you okay sitting three passengers across a row there? You know, is the empty seat important to you? Those sort of things. I think that's going to take some while for that confidence to return. And for as long as you can see the media playing out about this country and that country, where there are more cases of infection, there are more fatalities, the fear is going to remain and difficult to go away. Even if, in your immediate country or immediate region, you know, a number of cases may be going down, the number of fatalities will be going down. But you keep hearing and listening and looking at reports from other parts of the world. I think it will play in the psyche of passengers and customers, and their confidence in returning to travel.

Guido Woska: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think that you know, having the experience of having worked with airlines around the world in a very different context, I feel that no matter what you do right now, no matter where you invest, where you innovate, where you improve the core element, the core question will always be, how can you create trust? How can you bring trust back into the system? Because as you correctly said, even if borders are opening up, even if airlines are bringing up sales to activate bookings, stuff like that. The core element will not go away, and that is the uncertainty of not just being on the plane, but also being at another location, being at another city in another place that I'm not familiar with. What is the situation there? Et cetera. Can I trust the process? Can I trust the system? So bringing trust back into the system of travel to me is an essential part for recovery for all airlines. And that has to do with measures that are taken on the ground. It has to do with measures that are taken on board. That has to do with communication. And it will change the customer experience on board. In the coming, at least in the very near future. It may not be as relevant for myself that I have a specific type of seat when I book a premium ticket, but that I know that this seat has been properly disinfected, that I'm being given access to disinfection opportunities on board of the plane, that may be a facemask as part of the overnight amenity kit So these small things put in the right context, will have a very big impact on how people think about travel, how people think about the system and how they put trust back into the system. But at the same time, because there is so much need for rethinking every aspect of the experience. I also believe that we will see a boost of innovation coming on the back of that. Because airlines just can't go back to what they did before, because they have on the one hand side the need and on the other hand side the opportunity to radically rethink many parts of their experience right now. And I think this is also a big opportunity for the industry itself.

Jeffreh Goh: Absolutely. Absolutely right Guido. I think, you know, you touched on some of the key points of what I think, in the recovery period, in the period where we are trying to restore confidence, where the green shoots are taking place in terms of the return to travel. And the one thing that is going to change dramatically is the expectations of customers, in terms of hygiene safety. You know, when the unfortunate tragedy of 9/11 happened, you know, airlines and airport and many other authorities boosted in terms of security safety: you couldn't get on board with more than 100 ml out of gel or liquid or aerosol. You couldn't bring sharp objects on board and so on. Now we're responding to a different kind of safety. It is about hygiene safety now. And, you know, is that seat, as you say, properly clean and disinfected. Is that a trade that we're so used to just picking up at the security cue, before we go through to the other side of the airport? is that properly cleaned, is that properly disinfected? And so these are going to play in the psyche of of many customers and passengers. I do think that there are measures that will need to be temporary. You know, there are measures that probably will be more permanent in terms of aligning customer expectations. So wearing a face mask, OK. Maybe you talk about this for a year or two years until the time you get vaccination available. Social distancing on board, I mean, is a very tricky, sensitive topic that has been percolating around industry, the travel industry at the moment. Is that sustainable? Do you still need to have that when there's a vaccine available? So some of these things, I think we need to take it in stride. During the recovery period, they are necessary and important, but whether they're sustainable or required in the longer term, I think we need to make sure that we don't either self-impose or government impose burdens on the industry beyond the period that is necessary. Now, some of these experiences, I think, are going to be more permanent, that changes will be more permanent, you know, expectations of less contact, touchlessnes in the airport environment through the use of technology, for instance, more biometrics applications, more facial recognition. And as customers get used to this, even during the recovery period, because we want to create confidence. Right. And so you roll out some of these contactless and touchless experiences, customers are going to get used to that. And as we get used to these things, as you know, it becomes more and more of an expectation. And I think that will probably stay for the longer term in terms of the of the customer experience that will transition from the current to the future. And the other is, I think, you know, as we go down the road of touchless and contactless, it also means that there is more kind of a self-help experience for customers in the travel experience. So as we get used to that and more and more used to that, it will become part of that, embedded in the travel experience. Customers today are very savvy, right? I mean, they are all mobile phones, always connected. They want information at the fingertips on their mobile device. They want services on demand. And I think it's going to simply slide in, that self-help experience, that experience which you as a customer takes control of. In a way, take back control of their experience. So, some of these things are going to be more permanent as we slide it into the travel experience. But one thing I think, you touched on earlier about the efforts to restore confidence is communication and information. It was on the one hand, you talk about disinfection. How do you know? How can I give you the confidence about the seat that you're about to sit on has been properly disinfected and cleaned? And so I just tell you from a letter, if I just write you an email. Will you have that confidence or do you really need to see it for yourself? Seeing is believing, right. Do you really need to see for yourself that, this is being clean and is being cleaned regularly and we have people blogging all over it? Ahh, today I saw it being cleaned, tomorrow I saw it being cleaned. And how do you create that momentum of restoring confidence? And the other part is, you know, so often we think about: so I'm going to get on a flight now. I'm going to leave, I don't know, London. I'm going to fly to Shanghai. So you think more about your departure point in terms of information, but I'm sure it also becomes a very important operation in terms of information for your return flight. What happens if I develop symptoms? I may not have the virus, for example, but I may have a fever. But it doesn't mean that I'm infected, but I may have a fever, and if my temperature was taken on my return flight from Shanghai to London and the airline says: well, your temperature is thirty-seven point nine degrees or an airport official takes the temperature and says thirty-seven point nine degrees and says sorry, sir. Sorry, madam, you cannot fly. So what do you do then? You know, what are the consequences? Do you know have to be quarantine yourself in Shanghai? Go find a hotel yourself. So I think those kinds of information will need to be made available in a seamless way almost, even before you fly or even during your inspiration period of trip planning. You know, where can we find all this information? Handily and conveniently to say: OK, if something, if I am denied boarding if something happens to me in Shanghai. These are the rules that that apply in Shanghai. I'm going to have to stay there for 14 days. I got to be prepared for that. And that's going to affect confidence. That's going to affect your trip planning, I suspect.

Guido Woska: Absolutely. But this also calls for another perspective, to touch upon real quickly here. And that is, who's going to provide that information in which kind of context and does that in the end call for a much wider customer journey that we need to discuss? Does it mean that airlines need to own a much wider part of the experience that I have as a traveller? Do I expect that there is a connected experience that allows me, not just to book my flight to check-in and then, you know, speed through the airport? But is there an expectation from passengers in the future that the customer journey is then taken care of from a much wider perspective by airlines, for example. Who provides you with exactly that information that you just referred to, who provide me with services that start much earlier? Talk about regulations, talk about, you know, having access to real-time health data, so that I'm confident that I can book my ticket, talking about new models of providing insurance in case that I am being quarantined and stuff like that. So will we see a much wider experience framework that has to be provided by airlines, so that they not only provide confidence, but they also tap into opportunities for owning more parts of this journey with the customer? Having additional sources of revenue, having additional sources of loyalty? So is that customer journey going to get much wider from an airline perspective?

Jeffreh Goh: It is a good observation? And I think. Absolutely. I think there are a couple of ways of looking at it. First of all, from the very broad perspectives that I think airlines have a great opportunity to engage with customers more, particularly with the availability of technologies today. I'll come today in a moment, on the wider thing. But the crisis itself is I think, in terms of information provision is a small part of this whole wider opportunity of engagement with the customers and creating that loyalty, that confidence, that belief again. so there are different ways you can deliver that kind of information. I think airlines have a very important role to supply customers with information. Not so much information on your departing point, because you're probably familiar with that. It's kind of your borned point for the destination information. And I think that there's certainly a lot of mileage in providing that in a way that is seamless. It's at your fingertips, on your mobile device. And just call upon it anytime. But that kind of slides into, I think, a concept that I personally share and a much wider concept that in and of itself is important in terms of customer engagement in the future. And I look at this from the point of view of that seamless experience. And often we talked about seamlessness, and about, you know, how can I just move from point A to point B in a seamless manner? But I'm a great believer also in seamless transactions. I mean, how often do you get onto a website or get onto an app and then you found out, ah, I can only do this particular thing on this app. I can only do this particular thing on this website. And then now I have to come out again and download another app or find out another URL.

Guido Woska: Exactly

Jeffreh Goh: Or another website and complete the rest of that transaction. And so this really fits into what I call the travel experience ecosystem. Right. Part of the platform economy, which has a lot and much, much more to offer to the traveling public, to customers, to passengers. How do you conduct your experience, your transactions? All as one-stop shop as possible, really, without having to download multiple, multiple apps? And, you know, speaking of it from a Star Alliance point of view. And that's what we've been trying to do with our platform, particularly our digital platforms, where our ultimate aim is that, you don't have to download 26 airline apps of our members. You download one app and that is a super app where you conduct all your transactions seamlessly. You book your flight, you select your seats on multiple airlines. You can even check-in using that same app on multiple airlines. And so you would also, in this case, be able to access the information, in this case, for example, awe talked about Shanghai. Right? In this case, you will also access the health information, quarantine information about Shanghai from the very same app, that you used to buy your ticket, that you get the information from. And think about it more broadly. The ability perhaps, using that same app in the platform economy, the environment, the ecosystem of buying your insurance? in case you are disrupted in Shanghai. Or being able to book your last-mile transportation, for example, being able to book the hotel that you now have to be quarantined in and so on. But beyond the crisis, even in normal times. Isn't it an elegant and convenient solution if you stay on that app. And the airlines are able to engage with you, where you can not only buy your airline ticket, you buy disruption insurance, you book your Airbnb in a treetop weekend on that app, you book your last-mile transportation. Either with Grab or Uber. Even buy the opera ticket for the evening there, because your meeting has finished early in your destination.

Guido Woska: Exactly

Jeffreh Goh: So all of that. I think is calling to order if you will, in terms of providing a seamless experience, but also then enables the airlines to engage in a much more intensive way in understanding their customers?

Presenter You're listening to everything that's next. A podcast by Manyone.

Guido Woska You made a super important point here, Jeffrey, by saying that this should not be just seen in the light of the crisis, but that should be the overall motivation of an airline of an aviation partner nowadays. To start thinking beyond their traditional customer journey, to start thinking about what kind of services should be integrated into owning the experience for the passenger. Because one thing to me is pretty clear that as an airline today, you still have one part of the business that's very hard to disrupt. And that's flying the plane because it will take it, in theory, it would take, you know, anybody a very long time to acquire planes, to acquire crew, to acquire infrastructure, to acquire all of that. Right. What it doesn't take competitors or even companies outside the airline world very long is to disrupt part of the journey where you own information around the passenger, where you own the experience that you provide to the passengers? Anywhere right before and right after the flight. So if airlines don't understand that they need to to ensure that they own the passenger along this very, very far fetched customer journey in the future. They might be left with transporting a person that sits in their seat, but not owning the relationship with the passenger, because that digital part, that interaction part, that communication part, that booking and sales part, even that loyalty part, could be handled by somebody else who doesn't need a plane to provide that experience, but just fills the seat of the plane with people where they own the relationship. Do you see that as a potential threat to an airline? Do you talk to CEOs of airlines about, you know, owning that part of the passenger journey and making sure that they are not left with only transporting people in the seat?

Jeffreh Goh: Absolutely, Guido. You talk to the airline CEOs and you talk more broadly, you know, to the stakeholders in the industry as well. You know, in this concept here, that ecosystem, there is a great opportunity to manage that end to end experience for the customer, to deliver personalization, to deliver customization after a period of time. And I think this is a, you know, a great opportunity with or without the crises. I mean, obviously, you know.

Guido Woska: Exactly.

Jeffreh Goh: I've said so many times already before, you know, never waste a crisis. Obviously, the crisis can, in fact, fast forward some of these considerations and these concepts and their execution. And I think the airlines or the airline industry or airlines are so well-placed in this. Because, you know, going to Australia from London by boat is going to take a while to get there. You cannot cycle there either. Going by road, it's also not possible. Flying remains the fastest more convenient, efficient way of getting there. And so buying that ticket to fly there. The flying part, I think it's still very much the sticky part of that travel experience. Yes. You get that treetop experience when you get to, you know, Wollongong in New South Wales. You will still have that experience in a treetop for the week. And you can go to Safari in Australia. But getting there and buying that airline ticket plan, planning that airline ticket, searching for the flights, that is still very much the sticky part of that of the whole travel experience. And I think airlines have a great opportunity to engage with the customers pre-flight, obviously, over time you can have a lot of understanding of your customers, so you can personalize and customize the offering. And then you have the flying part and then you have the experience part for the customers at the destination. And the airline can be part of that because you know if I'm going to book my safari in New South Wales or in the Northern Territory of Australia. Perhaps. And if the airline can offer me the opportunity to book it through the airline app or the airline website. For me personally, thank you very much for that. I don't have to go out to Google and search for other websites. Or go to the App Store, to look for other apps that will find out, what are the safari options for me in New South Wales, in Australia? So I think and then because the airline is in the centre of this, I think the airline can actually help the customer on the end-to-end experience. So I think that's a that's something that is an opportunity to be thought about.

Guido Woska: I totally agree. Totally agree. If we look at that future that you just described, then we also need to briefly touch upon a topic that's also essential to airlines today. And that would probably radically change as well. And that's the topic of loyalty. Nowadays, loyalty is...Let me rephrase that. Loyalty has really not evolved a lot when it comes to airlines. Over the last couple of decades, after it was basically brought to life with the first frequent flyer programs, it was always about collecting points. Yes, the ratio has changed. Initially, it was based on, you know, certain miles per destination, stuff like that. Then it has been turned to a revenue-based loyalty model. But essentially, what hasn't changed is the core part of it. You've been rewarded for flying or for spending with partners through credit cards, etc etc. You have not been rewarded for the extended experience, the extended customer journey, very much. And you have only been rewarded for very short term transactional values. So in essence, all of the loyalty systems have one thing in common, and that is, that airlines look at it more as kind of an affair and not as a lifelong marriage. So if you're doing very good right now, you are attractive. But that can all change next year. And when you expand the customer journey and you feel that as an airline, you have to or you can own a much wider part of the journey with people. And that doesn't always include flying. They aren't maybe the traditional mechanisms of a loyalty program isn't fit for the future anymore. Maybe it's not just about the ticket price that you spend or it's not just about if you fly X, Y, Z times on a specific route. But maybe loyalty will change, the philosophy of loyalty, what it means, the definition loyalty, but also how loyalty becomes an instrument in engaging with customers. What's your point of view on the future of loyalty from an airline perspective?

Jeffreh Goh: That's a super question, a great question and I think provocative in many ways on a topic that has been floating around for some while. And I think if we take a step back, obviously a loyalty has come a long way since it was introduced in the 70s, but a lot of the changes we have seen. Perhaps one could describe them as incremental changes rather than a big bang, a wholesale change in its composition.

Guido Woska: Exactly

Jeffreh Goh: And you're quite right. I mean, generally speaking, the loyalty schemes in the airline world is very much about buying and earning points and using the points to fly again. That's pretty much the kind of the generality of the ecosystem. But, you know, and I think it, and as I said again, I mean, you know, let's not waste a crisis. But I think that the loyalty, kind of world, is on the brink. Airline loyalty, sorry, the airline loyalty is probably on the brink of that seismic change, that route, you know, the kind of big bang change and the crisis may well be the propulsion for that to happen. I say it for a number of reasons. I mean, if you reflect on this. For some while now, at least in the airline industry or more generally speaking, in the consumer industry, we've been talking about a generation, an emerging generation of customers or consumers that are brand agnostic, you know: get me the best price, the most convenient, I'm happy to go with that. And we've had literature on that. We have studies and reports on that, particularly with the younger generation where perhaps, you know, brand and loyalty is not that critical, as long as it meets my instant gratification. And I think that the postcrisis world for the airline industry needs to address this market segment, this emerging market segment much more aggressively than perhaps that they have been in the past. S I think there's a great opportunity there for airlines to prepare to adapt to that new world. Because as you put it. Right. I think there could come a point, where travel, or flying, for instance, is just a piece of that big jigsaw. And what is it that you can offer me, what is it that you can offer me to get my loyalty? Beyond just about sitting on that seat in row six d.

Guido Woska: Exactly

Jeffreh Goh: Sorry, I think that the main part here is perhaps the dimension of loyalty is about loyalty to the experience that you're going to provide me rather than loyalty to the fact that, you know, that I fly two times a week or three times a week. And if you give me that experience, that seamless experience, if you give me that fulfilling experience, not just in the flying part of my travel, but across the board. Right. I'm able to buy insurance. You take care of that. I'm able to book my treetop vacation with Airbnb, you take care of that in your app and so on. You know, I will stick to your app. I will stick to your website, and that is where my loyalty will come. So I think there is a segment of customers that, maybe the airline world may need to prepare to adapt or to address to come out of this crisis. Did I interrupt you?

Guido Woska No, no, no, sorry. No, no.Because the point that that you were making there is a super interesting with the new expectations of a new generation of travelers, which probably is less driven by the old status benefits or status elements that are important to another generation of travelers and probably more focused on ensuring that the experience is always the same, that the experience is always trustable, that the experience never breaks, that the experience is always interconnected with all the individual steps that are taken on my journey and that generation, they will, for example, they will compare the digital experience that they have with one airline, not so much with the digital experience they have with another airline, but the digital experience that they will have with their Spotify account, or when they make a payment on PayPal or using other services. And they use these services because they are so convenient, they are so specific, they are so individual, they know the users so much that they provide an experience that is tailor-made unique and outstanding and that drives loyalty as well. And that's going to change. So so I think and I believe that airlines need to reposition their focus of what loyalty really means. Loyalty doesn't necessarily mean I am able to transfer points for something that I've, that I know I'm going to use as on my next trip as a suitcase or a free flight or a hotel voucher. But that loyalty is also defined on how I interact as an airline with my passenger. That defines loyalty. What services I provide them at every step of the journey. Every time they use that journey. That will have a huge impact on loyalty. And not just do I give you a thousand points for this trip or two thousand points for this trip, because if the experience on the trip fails, it doesn't really make a difference if I earn a thousand points or two thousand points.

Jeffreh Goh: Yeah. I think there is something to be said about that. I think this fits into, you know, what we're talking early on about the travel experience ecosystem, the platform that enables you to engage with the customers in a much more intensive and a much more constructive manner. And loyalty fits in very nicely into this experience ecosystem, I believe. Right. And you're right. It's not just about buying, and earning my points and then I use my points to redeem. But, you know, it's about the experience that I get from you is about the care and the engagement I get from you. And of course, if you make my life easy, I will stick with you, I mean, you know, I think that happens in many facets of our lifestyle today. Right. And so can we think of a world where you let me earn some points when I use Zoom, and I'm not flying across half the world for a meeting. Let me perhaps earn points when I you know, book that treetop experience with Airbnb. So the opportunities for me to accrue perhaps more value. But then maybe, you know, there might be a segment who will say, well, let me also use these points beyond getting a seat on the flight. You know. We see today there are many other sectors of the economy, where you can use the points or the dollars that you've accumulated in other areas like you go into Amazon dot com. You can use your American Express points to pay for that. I know of many technologies out there were, or companies out there, where they have on the one side, a portfolio of merchants, where you can sort of earn points. And then on the other side of the equation, you have a portfolio of merchants where you can burn your points or your coin or whatever the denomination is. You know, this could be, for example, you know, you earn 20 dollars when you shop at H&M. That's not going to give you too many points or coins. But then you redeem or use it for something else. But then, if you can combine the power of that 20 points on H&M shopping and then your thirty dollars, pumping of petrol at a Shell Station or, you know, you go to Pizza Hut and you spend 40 dollars on dinner. So all those, perhaps if you add them into a point system, a currency system, you know, coins, for example, and then be able to use those coins in a currency: Now OK, I have a six dollar voucher, you know. Let me go to, I don't know, Ralph Lauren and buy a pair of socks that I've been wanting to buy, or that Longchamp bag, that I can buy for all these points, I've collected. Because 20 points, from H&M, is not going to get me very far, perhaps, or two points from the petrol station are not going to get me very far. But if I could combine these and consolidate these, I could stay pretty loyal to you in the retail world at least. So airlines have a great opportunity to think about it. And certainly, I think, you know, the crisis perhaps has fast-forwarded it. But I think, in and of itself, this is a great opportunity to leverage that platform, that platform economy and have an ecosystem where you engage with the customers much more constructively, much more personally as you move forward. And that will in itself, I believe, turn into loyalty with regard to the customer.

Guido Woska: You're right. You're right. We've talked so much about the future right now. That I feel I cannot let you go without asking you. One final question.

Jeffreh Goh: But this is all about what's next?

Guido Woska: Totally. And this is wonderful. But, you have such a longstanding career in the aviation world with Star Alliance, with IATA and others. But I can't really let you go without asking you. You know, the final question about, like, looking back at your career, what would be the top three advices that you would give your 25-year-old self, the 25-year-old Jeffrey, that is starting his career in aviation? What would be those top three advices, that you would give yourself if you look 25 years?

Jeffreh Goh: So, you know, as I look at my career, I started out in academia. You know, I started teaching at university. I started as a law teacher at university. And I went into private practice in a law firm in London. And then from there, I went in-house as a lawyer to the International Air Transport Association in Montreal in Canada. From there, I joined Star Alliance in my capacity as a lawyer at the time. And then, you know, I rose up the ranks of the company. And then into a management role today. So I've kind of been through, as many sections that a lawyer can get to, really, in a way. And if there were a couple of things that would define how I got through these different hoops or different stages is - and as an advice to a 25-year-old, is that I don't think we need to be afraid to be a bull in a china shop sometimes. I think one of the things that I learned is that, to be a strategic partner in an organization, to be a strategic colleague. You've got to be able. And you've got to be wanting to ask questions. And I don't mean questions about what did you have for your pizza topping the night before? Questions that are beyond your business unit, for example. And so and so, you know, don't be afraid to ask the questions that perhaps people are afraid to ask. And so that's one of the things I think define some of the ideas I've learnt in the past. So. And that I think then will fit in quite naturally into what my second piece of advice would be is. This will take you in the learning zone. And I define my sort of leadership experience in three circles. You know, you've got your comfort zone. You've got your learning zone. And then you've got your panic zone. And, you know, you should never stay too long in a panic zone. But don't be afraid to get into the panic zone, because you will come back into you're learning zone. But if you're never in the learning zone, you'll never get out of your comfort zone and you'll never be able to progress beyond your own boundaries, never knowing what your abilities are. So that's how I kind, in a way, transitioned from a lawyer into a management role. You know, playing in H&R matters. Playing in procurement matters. Playing in finance matters. Playing in I.T. matters, in my management career here at Star Alliance. So even though I was a lawyer, you know, I was for a time responsible for I.T. So I think that, will drive your, you know, your progress. And the third, and I think probably, the most important, no matter how much of a bull you might be, no matter how much a learner or a panic'er you might be: Humility. Humility, wherever you are. Never forget your roots. Never forget to respect the other side. And I think that is very, very important for reflection. And I think part of the leadership journey, is always about the power of reflection. And I think humility is the key anchor to that to that reflection, that you need to have. So those are the three things. Don't be afraid. Be the bull. Make sure you are in a learning zone as much as you can. But at the same time, do it with some humility.

Guido Woska: Especially the last one I think is super nice. And it's super-valuable because we very often forget the human aspect of everything we do in business and especially airlines, because airlines when you look at it, they don't fly planes. Right? They fly people. And we have to understand that everything we do is about how people are being treated, how people are being served and in how we interact with people.

Presenter: You've been listening to everything that's next. A podcast by Manyone. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we hope you'll stay tuned for more episodes in the future to discover what's next in business, design and strategy.