The Strange Attractor
The Strange Attractor
Building Trustworthy Organisations with Nate Kinch
How can organisations build trust in a world filled with scepticism and uncertainty? Discover the answer with socio-technology ethicist Nate Kinch, who shares his expertise in integrating philosophy, cognitive science, and systems theory to operationalise trustworthiness through design thinking. Nate offers a compelling definition of trust as the willingness to be relationally vulnerable based on positive expectations. He reveals the foundational elements of trust—benevolence, integrity, and competence—and how these can enhance an organisation's social license to operate amidst varying perceptions and definitions of trust.
Journey with us through Nate's inspiring shift from a promising golf career halted by nerve damage to an entrepreneurial path that led him to create the Sports Performance Accelerator startup. Using machine learning to predict and prevent athlete injuries, Nate's venture uncovered unhealthy dynamics in sports, sparking his interest in social theories and responsible innovation. His experiences paved the way for his role as an entrepreneur in residence, where he applies ethical principles to support startups and larger corporations in fostering trustworthy practices.
Explore the profound challenges and potential solutions for transforming organisations towards sustainability and ethical frameworks. Nate and I delve into the necessity of re-evaluating deeply ingrained metaphysical assumptions and shifting from profit-maximisation to participatory value systems. With practical examples and philosophical insights, we highlight the incremental process of building trustworthy organisations, the unique hurdles large versus small entities face, and the critical role of participatory leadership and experimental approaches. Tune in to understand how ethics and a holistic value system can drive impactful organisational change.
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Hello and welcome to the Strange Attractor, an experimental podcast from CoLabs, a transdisciplinary innovation hub and biotechnology co-working lab based in Melbourne, australia. I'm your co-host, sam Wines, and alongside my co-founder, andrew Gray, we'll delve deep into the intersection of biology, technology and society through the lens of complexity and systems thinking. Join us on a journey of discovery as we explore how transdisciplinary innovation, informed by life's regenerative patterns and processes, could help us catalyze a transition towards a thriving future for people and the planet. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Strange Attractor.
Speaker 1:For this episode, we sat down with our ethicist in residence, nate Kinch. Nate is a socio-technology ethicist and what that means is that he draws from philosophy, cognitive science, systems theory and a whole bunch of other disciplines in a truly transdisciplinary manner and helps ambitious organizations become trustworthy by design. He does this through starting with a process that enhances an organization's capacity to do ethics really well, and from that sort of basis he works with design thinking to find a way to operationalize these features of trustworthiness so benevolence, integrity, normative confidence and then finds ways to ensure that these are consistently expressed to enhance both the trust and reputation of an organization. Enhanced trust and reputation creates a far more favorable social license to operate, which is kind of necessary for any organization that is trying to thrive and do well by doing good. As you can imagine, there's a big, big overlap between, I guess, nate's worldview, our worldview and, I guess, our ways of trying to operate as an organization in this world.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, we love his stuff, we highly recommend checking him out and we actually are going to have a series of events with Nate coming up soon which will be focused on, I guess, practicing applied ethics. So if that's something of interest, yeah, stay tuned. You'll see that getting released on our newsletter and on socials and we'd love to see you at one of the events getting released on our newsletter and on socials and we'd love to see you at one of the events. Anyway, let's cut to the chase and jump into this conversation with nate.
Speaker 3:All right, nate, welcome good to be here, mate yeah, it's uh, it's been a hot minute.
Speaker 1:I mean, we've going through so much stuff at the space, going through our purpose principles, all of these sorts of things, um, and then it's just been kind of been inundated with things and I know we've been working on acacia stuff as well, but it's it's been a long while since we've had this conversation planned to have for a while talking about trustworthiness and transformative innovation. I guess, given the fact that this kind of what we're looking at doing here at colabs is supporting that transition towards a more viable future, which is going to be based in some part on technology, whatever that looks like, who knows. But then I guess the concept behind this conversation was that there is a thread that weaves it all together and we're going to kind of be talking about what it means to design trustworthy organizations. So yeah, like maybe that's something that we can kick things off with.
Speaker 2:Do you want to just start there and just get straight into it.
Speaker 1:Let's just get straight into it, let's do it.
Speaker 3:So trust is something that we just see a sort of like preponderance of memes about. We don't have enough trust, we need to earn back trust there's a trust deficit, et cetera, et cetera. Trust there's a trust deficit, etc. Etc. And um, depending on where you look, I think there is a different sort of like quality to these varying claims. Sometimes they're a little bit more substantive, uh. Sometimes, uh, the intentions behind some of these narratives are maybe a little bit questionable. But also we just have confusion and what we might formally call equivocation, like where we all say trust but actually we kind of mean different things. Now, I know we want to make this particular episode reasonably short, something that's digestible, something that people can metabolize and then ultimately use energetically to support their endeavors in designing a more trustworthy organization, and I'll speak very specifically to what I mean by that in a moment, yeah, but perhaps I can try and usefully define trust upfront recognizing it's of course
Speaker 3:an approximation. We don't have a broadly agreed definition. The one that I'm working with at the moment is that trust is the willingness for one party to be relationally vulnerable to another, based on positive expectations. Now, when you actually get into the trust literature whether that be the philosophy of trust or the sociology of trust or whichever field or discipline that attempts to study and make sense of this phenomena, that ticks most of the boxes that we think are reasonably important. So there's something relational about it, like there has to be more than one party in most senses. Now we could, of course, flip it and say there's something like a trust in self, but I'm just not going to go there today because we'd end up being Alice and we'd dive down the rabbit hole and we don't know what we'll find. So there's something relational about it. There's more than one party, there is sort of an intent to go on a journey together. So there's almost like a shared goal orientation, even if there are different motives that might lead the parties towards that shared goal orientation. Often there is something like a power imbalance, which is where we get into vulnerability. So one party will often have more resources, more financial, economic, like financial economic, obviously, technological, scientific, etc. And that's particularly present or prevalent when we think of like a person to organisation relationship, like me and my bank. The bank is the beneficiary of a huge, very significant power imbalance. Beneficiary of a huge, very significant power imbalance and the relationship tends to be entered into based on some idea that life will be better, in a broad or narrow sense, as a result of going on said journey together. So that definition again, the willingness to be relationally vulnerable to the actions of another based on positive expectations, that kind of captures a lot of the important stuff. Now there's a couple of slightly nuanced things that I'll touch on really quickly. That approximates trust. It doesn't really tell us what trust is Like. Is trust primarily psychological? Is it mostly sort of emotional? Could we describe it through something like 4E or 6E cognition, where cognition itself is embodied, embedded, enacted, extended, emotional and exacted, and I actually quite like that way of looking at it. So there's lots of things that remain unanswered there. A couple of things I'll touch on really quickly.
Speaker 3:So another big concept in the trust literature is trust propensity, which you can almost think of as like. So for me as an individual, like the baseline propensity that I have to trust others, and that seems to vary quite significantly from person to person, from culture to culture, to context to context, and that massively influences my trust judgments. And what seems to be directionally truthful about trust as a phenomena is that there's lots of different things that influence it Our historicity, like our entire past, which would include gestation, our parents' lives and stuff like that, potentially our DNA, our cultural narratives, context, etc. Our socioeconomic background, the types of relationships we've had in the past, context, et cetera. Socioeconomic background, the types of relationships we've had in the past.
Speaker 3:And then that combines with something like a rational process or process of reasoning where I'm attempting to assess the trustworthiness of another party, and there are three main concepts that I think are important to understand when we talk about trustworthiness.
Speaker 3:The first is benevolence, and I'll describe that really simply as that party acting in the public and planet's best interests.
Speaker 3:Integrity, that there is a tight relationship between what someone says or an organization says and what they do, and I would frame it as normative competence, but typically it's just referred to as competence or ability, and that really means like can the person or organization consistently deliver the value it promises?
Speaker 3:Is it good at doing stuff Like the stuff that it says it's going to do. And I add normative mostly because there are many ways to be good at things and many of those things might not be normative. They're probably not the right things to do, like not what we ought to do, because they're good and right. So that's kind of how I'd start it off. I think there's lots of issues, there's lots of equivocation, there's lots of confusion. I think there are ways to practically define trust and understand trust, as in have something like a true and justified belief about trust that can inform how we show up in the world in almost any relational setting but, importantly, can positively influence how we design our organisations, our, our organizational cultures, the tools and technologies that we use or design for the benefit of others, et cetera, that probably have some positive effect out in the world.
Speaker 1:So you've spent most of your career kind of focusing on what this means to design trustworthy organizations and how that relates to technologies and systems more broadly. It'd be nice to get a bit of a background, I guess, on yourself Very non-linear here. Normally this would go first, but I like that. We just went into trust, like we trust-fold, into trust straight up, which is great, and then, yeah, I guess where you came from, what inspired you to enter this field, and then what's kind of what makes you feel alive now as well so I I spent most of my early life thinking I was going to be an athlete and, uh, for a number of different reasons, I couldn't continue pursuing that.
Speaker 3:Now, a little bit of a complex story. But I was diagnosed with nerve damage between my L4 and L5, suffered through that sort of like repeat injury process, if you will, from about the age of 15. And by 18 or so I just couldn't really do what I was doing. I wasn't getting better. Everyone around me was getting better. I was constantly in pain. I just kind of hated the thing that I thought I loved. When I look back on it now, given and it's probably not something we're going to have the time or affordance to get into today, but the sort of biopsychosocial nature of complex causality in the context of health, well-being et cetera, I actually think there was probably more a psychophysiological expression rather than some like acute tissue damage that kept recurring, and I'd be very happy to rigorously qualify that, but it's just not the purpose of today. So I had this thing that I thought was this injury caused by rotation around the axis of today. So so I had this thing that I thought was this, this, um, injury caused by rotation around the axis of my spine because I was a golfer. Um, living in the states at the time, came back home no idea what I was going to do, like proper identity crisis. Who am I? If I'm not going to be this athlete flying around in g5 jets hanging out, fist bumping Tiger Woods, then what am I? And um had the good fortune of joining three mates and built a clothing label and that was fun and interesting and um kind of got me uh, interested in, I think, some fairly naive ideas about entrepreneurship. I think some fairly naive ideas about entrepreneurship, but the injury thing like stayed with me. So I found myself in this kind of like recursive narrative going if me, then who else? How significant of a problem is this? Who's it affecting? Like to what extent, et cetera, et cetera. Anyways, having no idea what I was doing, I was like I want to build a startup, like a technology startup, and I was probably using very basic language like this at the time. I think I was 18 or 19. I want to build a technology startup that, like that, helps with that problem and fumbling through lots of different mistakes, somewhat autodidactically, learning lots of different, like listening to stuff, talking to people. You could then argue the definition of autodidact and stuff, but you know, mostly self-directed learning, reading like crazy.
Speaker 3:I had this voracious sort of appetite and raised venture funding and built a company called Sport Performance Accelerator and we were using machine learning to predict the propensity that elite athletes had to incur soft tissue injuries. So this model would give us some type of forecast, if you will, based on lots of different factors total tonnage, sort of like stimulus to fatigue ratio, yada, yada, yada, all these different sort of sports and science and exercise physiology concepts and, um, from there, you know, a team would sort of intervene hey, let's decrease your load, whatever. Whatever the appropriate intervention was. And the idea was that would reduce the injury risk, which would be highly beneficial to the athlete because they can continue doing the thing that they love, the thing that a lot of their self-worth is wrapped up in, and the sporting team would get the economic benefits and other benefits of having the athlete healthy and capable of performing. Because when an athlete, let's say, tears a hammy or something like that in a sport like Aussie, rules football weeks and weeks that they're out for, and that's effectively the equivalent of a loss of like productivity for the organization, which comes with economic correlates.
Speaker 3:But what really interested me through that process was the relationship between the athletes and the teams, and often it was very unhealthy. It was almost like the athletes were being treated like this is a bit crude, but pieces of meat. And I'm not saying that that was necessarily like nefarious individuals, like, oh, we hate these athletes, let's treat them badly and make them suffer. Not at all. I think it was more like the system dynamics. But I became became very interested in that and as this sort of like very naive at this point maybe 20-year-old CEO of this startup who was not formally academically trained or anything like that, I started becoming very interested in different social theories, different branches of philosophy, particularly sort of axiology and moral philosophy and applied ethics in this particular case, and different sort of like sort of social theories, critical theories, like all this different, and I just go, oh my gosh, there's this whole world of stuff out there that I've never had any interest in.
Speaker 3:But now, like it's the most interesting thing to me ever, like I just want to, I just want to try and understand stuff. And um, yeah, and that started. That started a uh, uh I don't know this word is so cliche but like a journey, um, of trying to relate to these bodies of knowledge and come into healthy or right relation with them and then put them into practice. And um, that is not one thing. That is kind of like many things. It's like a mycorrhizal network of like exploration. It's something like that. And um, yeah, I had the fortune of um then becoming an entrepreneur in residence after that, which was sort of like both an applied research role and, um, uh, kind of like um, a consulting role, because we were doing different stuff at the time in this organization edge labs. So I was able to spend a lot of deep time learning about these things and applying them in different contexts, um supporting both startups and larger corporations in doing what we're sort of calling like responsible innovation, which is kind of like applying I don't know something like a practical axiology to the process of trying to do something that's new, that's additive, that's valuable for society and, obviously for the organisation that's resourcing it society and obviously for the organization that's that's that's resourcing it um. After that became a like a 2ic at quite a prominent aussie startup. Um, uh, that was doing sort of like personal information management, digital identity, these sorts of things. So it was building upon my applied data ethics work.
Speaker 3:I then built a services firm called greater than x and we were doing sort of like applied ethics, um and socio-technical design and stuff like that for larger organizations typically. But we worked across public and private contexts and also applied research contexts, um, and, uh, yeah, it's just, it's just been this, this sort of like unfolding process I've worked with. I've worked with governments, I've worked big corporations, I've worked with startups, I've worked with vcs, I've worked with um across pretty much every applied context you can think of, other than I haven't. I've had like no-go areas like military, tobacco, etc. Etc. Um exclusion criteria, if you will, normative exclusion criteria, um, that's not to say that you can't repurpose narratives, ideas, resources etc for something like a more normative purpose. But I've sort of had exclusion criteria and now I attempt to spend most of my time bringing together philosophy, cognitive science, system science or complexity science to support the process of designing more trustworthy organizations.
Speaker 3:That starts with the process of teaching the organization to do ethics better. By doing and I'm happy to define ethics if it's useful, but by doing ethics better, we can more consistently design and then exhibit organizational features of trustworthiness, benevolence, integrity and normative competence. By doing that we are far more likely to sort of like enhance trust, like the belief that other people have in the organization's trustworthiness. Trust and reputation have similarities but but also probably useful differences. So trust is more what people believe in some uh respect and reputation is more what people say.
Speaker 3:And then the combination of what, uh, people believe and say is almost, like almost makes up like social license to operate, which is generally thought of as like the level of acceptance that the market big picture has of the organization's practices. And that's really what, like, boards and executive committees care about, because if they have favorable social license they can do the things that they want to do. And the mistake that they often make is they start there. They're kind of like hey, you know, let's start with, we need to improve social license or enhance trust or reputation, and they don't actually do almost like the deep inner organizational work to cultivate organizational character that can then be expressed in various different ways that people then experience. That in turn enhances trust and reputation and creates this favorable social license to operate. So looking back on it now, I can describe what is almost like a linear progression. It wasn't like that at all, it was just a very messy, you know. So that's the sort of 38,000 foot TLDR summary.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, it was a really good summary. I'm just I love it because it's fascinating to me, because I mean both Andrew and myself again similar to that, like not necessarily academically trained, you know, did our undergrads, but then very much had the proclivity to learn and do and act and then reflect and then look at, still you know, very much applied research sort of approach. So it's always fun hearing and finding other people that similar sort of, I guess, approach, um, because there's few and far between but um, yeah, it's. Oh, hang on, I know we're good. Um, anyway, I'll just cut some of this out.
Speaker 3:So leave it. It's so real like is someone gonna walk in?
Speaker 1:yeah, pretty much looking through the little porthole, just glanced and made eye contact with someone I don't know who it was. Um, all right, well, that's good to understand how they, I guess, how they like all kind of relate and why that's, I guess, important for an organization. But I guess, going back to that, um, what do you think? So you've got all these things and they all interrelate what are organizations currently kind of doing well and what are they struggling with? And when it relates to these sort of concepts, you've said, like, is it and you kind of alluded to this a little bit before when you were saying that people kind of think that it's a mechanistic, command and control, top-down thing that you can do, whereas it's probably more emergent, relational and holistic. Don't want to put words in your mouth, that's just what I interpreted. But yeah, I guess, going back to that sort of question, how are organizations relating to this content at the moment?
Speaker 3:Yes, look, it's a great question. I think the biggest difficulty that we have is and I'll try not to use too much sort of like formal parlance here but um, and we can describe this in different ways. So so philosophers of science will sort of describe it as something like metaphysical assumptions, systems, folks might say like sort of paradigm, other folks might say into subjectivity or myth or narrative, deep narratives.
Speaker 3:Different ways we could describe this um, but sort of like the narratives, the beliefs, the assumptions that gave rise to the or narrative, deep narratives different ways we could describe this but sort of like the narratives, the beliefs, the assumptions that gave rise to the modern corporation are a real hindrance on our capacity to transform such that we become really good at doing good, so like we can wisely steward our resources, such that we we operate within ecological limits and we distribute resources in such a way that that pretty much everyone can live a really good life, which feels like a very normative teleology, like goal orientation, um, and I think the story, if you're listening and you're not really familiar with this, a simple way to look at it is, um, and and please don't think that, uh, a critique like this is as simple as anti-capitalist and therefore I'm a goddamn kami, or you know what I mean, because we have these very binary ideas and I think that that what we really need is yet to be invented and it will will require us to more healthily relate, to, learn from and radically accept what has happened in the past, so that we can ground ourselves in the present and act, hopefully, towards some type of better future.
Speaker 3:But it isn't necessarily a returning to.
Speaker 3:And it certainly won't be some techno, instrumentalist, optimist type, uh, biophysically illiterate sort of, and I've written about this rather extensively. But um, so, if we can think of the basic premise as, um, humans being sort of like radically individual, so separate from one another and I'm not going to get into Cartesian dualism and these different things but so you and I we're separate beings and we're separate from each other and we're separate from the world and nature, this thing, like everything other than humanity, if you will, or human civilization, is out there for us to use for our benefits, extract, exploit, etc. And the purpose of life is basic, like human life is to kind of be wealthy and powerful. And we know that sometimes that's referred to as the story of separation or the modern story of separation. It has no distinct starting point. Many will claim that throughout the Western Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that, say, rené Descartes' work solidified that narrative in a particular way. There's a huge amount of historical analysis that we'll just have to skip over.
Speaker 1:More like a spectrum right. Totally, totally, you could say it was the plough you could.
Speaker 3:it was thomas aquinas and scholasticism totally yeah but it's all slightly nudged us towards this exactly like, like you know, um complex causality, lots of different um causal contributions. There's no one point that you can like and and sometimes we do that for the sake of simplicity like like oh, this was a really significant turning point and this is kind of what's happened from there.
Speaker 3:And that's okay in a practical sense, as long as we don't hold on to that too tightly. And what that supports is this idea that something like the ultimate good is capital accumulation, is capital accumulation, and therefore say the purpose, the teleology of a corporation, the goal, orientation of a corporation is of course to accumulate capital, and it does that by extracting resources, various different production methods, encouraging as much consumption of the stuff that's produced as possible and ideally growing that month on month, year on year, decade on decade, et cetera. Lots of different challenges with that. We know that we can't, unless we did something like sufficient absolute decoupling, which there is not even close to adequate evidence of. We know we can't do that forever. So lots of problems here.
Speaker 3:And you could argue that our assumptions or, like our metaphysics, the deeper beliefs that we have about stuff are misaligned to biophysical realities and therefore the modern corporation is misaligned to biophysical realities and almost certainly like sort of like what I would suggest ought to be like a normative orientation. And that's really hard, because when I go in and talk to corporations people kind of feel this, but then with their work, hat on, they have certain incentives and disincentives and goals and systems and structures and tools and procedures and stuff like that that constrain their ability to act in wiser relation to some of these other ideas that we're talking about, and it's almost like they're fighting against reality itself. We need to keep this thing alive. We need to keep it growing, even if that's not actually big picture. The right thing to do? That's really hard. Big picture, the right thing to do? That's really hard.
Speaker 3:Now, that isn't necessarily to paint a binary sort of perspective here that there is only one way to do right and that has to be done radically and overnight. I don't think that is correct or even possible, but there's a real deep tension there. And then we have lots of other issues like so, because of that goal orientation, when the corporation tries to do more good and many of them are trying to do more good, particularly the people like because the corporation is some abstract entity, right it's a object.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly it's. It's like this, this organism of collective intelligence or collective orientation, or there are many ways that we could try and describe it. It's a hyper-object, it, but other than that. Um, so there's many good people within these organizations that are trying to do good, but again, the good that they try and do, if you think about the something like transformation, is having to have a the right direction, the right magnitude and the right speed.
Speaker 3:I realize I just hit that. So the right direction, the right magnitude, the right speed, um, because of those deeper assumptions hindering the direction, hindering the magnitude and hindering the speed, it means that we are not making the type of progress that we know we need to make, because, you know, we computationally model this stuff and, of course, that's just an approximation, it's not the real world itself, but it gives us a good enough, a useful enough picture, a sense of what trajectory are we on, like where have we kind of come from? What trajectory or trajectories are we on, what might we be able to pursue? And then we can basically look at the gap, uh, between where we probably have to be heading and where it looks like we are heading, and that gap's fucking massive.
Speaker 1:That is a wide delta. It's so big yeah.
Speaker 3:And that's scary as shit as a parent, as a living process, like it's really scary. And look, I'm actively hopeful, like I believe in the possibility of better and I'm living in relation to that, I'm trying to do my little part, whatever that ends up meaning, and I'm absolutely not defeatist. I'm certainly not pessimistic. I'm also not optimistic. I think we can do better. But yeah, there are lots of tensions, there are lots of hindrances and I think if we fail to really get into that deeper stuff over time again, it's not going to happen overnight, overnight. But if we fail to get into that deeper stuff, if we fail to reorient how we really think about the world, the universe and our role within it, I don't think we are going to create the right direction.
Speaker 3:Magnitude and speed of change. What that ends up meaning could be anything from the collapse of a complex civilization and thus much smaller human populations, less richer in some ways and I mean richer in a more holistic sense not just fiscally, but some of the existential sort of risk literature suggests it could mean the end of Homo sapiens, sapiens completely. You know we've seen at least 70%, but probably a little bit more, of life on this planet lost within approximately the last 51 years or 52 years, you know, like it's really consequential. Maybe I can just really quickly paint a. So the fact that we're even having these conversations, the fact that people are aware, the fact that people are aware that there's a tension, the fact that we're trying to do good, even things like ESG, which you could argue has failed in lots of different ways, we're trying and we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves, like we shouldn't be, like oh fuck it, our efforts have failed. Therefore, we should give up. No, that sucks, that's not helpful.
Speaker 1:You know what I mean it's back into the narrative as well, because if you have a defeatist mindset, then you may as well just keep you know doing the mountaintop removal and exploitation of people from the global south, or what have you?
Speaker 3:And then just protect your own. And you see this with the billionaires.
Speaker 1:I'm just going to build a really big bunker in New Zealand.
Speaker 3:Not just one. We need to hedge our bets. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Build a 40, 50, 100 million dollar deal as well?
Speaker 3:Oh, you don't have a bunker.
Speaker 1:No, oh, weird, poor you. Yeah, exactly, I've got three. The yeah, poor you. Yeah, exactly, I've got three. The new flex is not how many billions have you got? It's how many bunkers on different continents do you have?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:How are you hedging your existential bets? Anyway, given, I guess, the trajectory of where we're going, all of these competing ideas and narratives and ideologies and sort of what's sort of happening in the world right now, what do you think needs to be done for us to be able to see these benevolent and integrous and competent organizations coming into existence? Like, I guess, if we were going to overlay a theory of like I don't know, like I'm sure you know the I think it's Mervyn Harris. It's like the infrastructure, social structure, superstructure, levels, like you know, is this something that is going to have to have a change, you know, in the infrastructure layer, the social layer. Is it a biological thing? Is it a cognitive thing? Is it a social thing? Is it an ecological? Like? Where is this? Where do you think is like a leverage point for change?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, like you, you I probably look at those as being largely interdependent and inherently relational. I think there are many ways we can more wisely act to increase the probability that, uh, we have not just a future but potentially a really wondrous one lives that are immaterially abundant but probably materially much simpler, on average, for people that live in countries like Australia than they are today. It doesn't mean we're going back into caves or anything like that, and actually these are often quite radical misinterpretations of things like different policies or proposals within, say, ecological economics or degrowth scholarship or whatever it may be. I think that there are things that we can do at the level of our almost like our inner self. There's work that we have to do on ourselves, and that's been a significant energetic effort for me personally. I think that there are things that we can do in the household. There is so much that we can do in our communities, kind of like hyper-local stuff, things that we can do bioregionally, huge amount of things, and a lot of this stuff is probably going to happen bioregionally. There then, of course, needs to be a coordinating architecture, like we wrote about in response to the Department of Industry's science and innovation priorities research science and research priorities for the next decade or so.
Speaker 3:But if you talk about organizationally, the reality is some organizations we could call it they need to biodegrade, so they need to look at this strategically and they go all right, like over time, whatever that timeframe is we need to kind of go in this sort of direction.
Speaker 3:You know again, direction, magnitude, speed, and that means we need to sort of do much less of these types of things and then transition potentially our knowledge and networks, our resources et cetera, towards this type of stuff, and I think that's totally possible to do resources et cetera towards this type of stuff. And I think that's totally possible to do. And I think that for organizations, one of the most challenging things that they need to do is step back and really radically and by radically I don't mean in sort of like an activist sense, I mean going back to the root of their value system. Because even though most organizations and corporations have value statements we value integrity or truthfulness or excellence or whatever it may be when we look at the empirical literature, there tends to not even be a statistical relationship for corporations between the values that they state and how that shows up in their corporate conduct, how they collectively behave, which is a huge issue.
Speaker 1:So this is like the ethical intention to action. Yes, exactly it's exactly that.
Speaker 3:So they sort of have good intentions, but various different things, including that paradigm or those deep assumptions or whatever we were talking about before, they limit the capacity for the organization to act on those ethical or normative or value intentions. And I think one of the things that we really have to do and this goes back to the organizational design work that I do we have to step back and we go all right, let's be real with ourselves, like really real At the moment. Our organization is a profit maximizing machine and even the idea of machine is inherently problematic. I don't believe that the universe is computational. That's not my philosophy of science. I know it's a very popular philosophy of science.
Speaker 3:Actually, I think we're starting to see very good, good philosophy of science that is the wholesomely pushing back against that um and providing, uh, and still a naturalistic account of phenomena, um, but, but that is not computated, that's, that's, we won't go down that rabbit hole, but um, so so we, we really step back and we go all right, we are a profit maximizing machine at the moment and and we have to just be okay with the fact that that is where we are now and that's what we have been like, that's where we've come from and we can't keep playing this blame game with the past. We can't fucking change the past. We have to accept it like acceptance before agency, acceptance before we have the capacity to exert some type of influence on the present, slash future. Um, and then we have to do work on our value system, and there are many different approaches that I use to do this. I tend to use something like an approach to participatory ethics, which is not this top-down paternalistic command control approach to hey, this is our value system, now, everyone do it.
Speaker 3:It's a much more participatory approach that encourages the organization to invite effectively, like a representative, sample of people that represent that organization into a process. But we don't stop at the organization's boundaries, recognizing they're pretty darn permeable. We invite stakeholders from outside the organization. You could have customers, suppliers, an independent advocacy group like, say, like someone like I don't know, the Consumer Policy Research Center, or something like this in an Australian context. You could have a regulator you could have a representative for, say, the Bureau Runk. So one of the things that we know is happening here in Melbourne is there's a particular organization that's looking to um engage in lots of different processes with the long-term um challenge or goal to make the birrarung swimmable. Amazing, like very complex, but amazing um, why not have a representative that speaks for the bir right?
Speaker 3:so now that might sound quite abstract or esoteric for people, but we're trying to um, uh, really open up the possibility space and have lots of different values and perspectives, contributing to the process of defining a value system which is not a uh, a sort of like linguistic game that then ends up with some written statements on a wall. It's sort of like a living and breathing thing. It's almost like a socio-technical system. It's a reference point that we exist in relation to and it informs our work going forward. It's not static, it's living, breathing, kind of just like us. It's a process, and so we engage in this process of participatory ethics. We then describe and there are many different ways that we can describe it visually. You know, I don't know, you could describe it in dance if you want. Right, probably not a popular way to do it, but we don't have to be dogmatic, it just has to be words. It can be expressed in different ways, ways, and we use that to try and start redesigning different areas of the organization.
Speaker 3:Organizations don't transform everything overnight. You often start somewhere. Hey, let's try and express this value system over here, let's frame an idea or hypothesis or assumption, however you want to describe it for how we can express that value system and act on it, build some new organizational capacity or feature or product or service, whatever it may be. Let's actually then do that thing, let's put it out into the world, let's try and demonstrate integrity like verifiable integrity, and then you do that and then you learn from it. You build some type of observational infrastructure that's qualitative, quantitative, attitudinal, behavioral, etc. And you go huh, how's this?
Speaker 3:thing working, is it? Is it actually sort of moving us in the direction that we want to see? How do we like? What have we learned from that? How do we take those learnings back into the organization?
Speaker 3:And in this way, the organization arguably, probably out of necessity can continue doing some of the stuff that it's that it's currently doing, like um, which is sort of this um, uh, extract value mindset, because we're not going to get rid of that overnight whilst it's exploring how to create more holistic value and contribute to more holistic value. And over time, if they're doing that really well, they will be building more organizational features of trustworthiness, many different expressions of benevolence, integrity and normative competence that that play out very practically like they're. They're tangible expressions like their, their products, their services, their policies, their incentive structures. Right, the yardsticks pretty wide here. And over time one year, three years, five years, whatever that time frame is what we hope to see is that the organization is doing significantly more of that holistic value stuff than that narrow value stuff, and we've effectively transformed the organization through that process. We have, we have unlearned and relearned. We have de-skilled and re-skilled or up-skilled. We have built like a life-affirming rather than a life-eroding organization. We are more wisely stewarding our resources, we we are respecting people's agency, we are inviting wider boundaries of contribution that represent important cultural differences and geographic differences, generational differences etc. And we're building slowly something like an expression of a more beautiful, integrated together, yet inherently pluralistic way of being in this world.
Speaker 3:And that sounds super grandiose, right, and it sort of is Like I think we ought to have a radically ambitious vision for what's possible in our future, but then we have to be super fucking pragmatic about how we act on that daily. Those two things are two sides of the same coin. They don't compete with one another. In order to achieve a radically ambitious vision, we have to be inherently pragmatic in the here and now. We have to actually do stuff. We have to do stuff differently, and I think that's an important mistake that often organizations make. So they're like, like I often get asked things like what's the value of philosophy or whatever, and I won't describe that right now, but because people think it's this abstract, esoteric linguistic game that actually has no practical way of showing up in the world.
Speaker 3:And Margaret Wigley once argued that philosophy is like plumbing, right, actually, she's written very beautifully on that, and the analogy, like all analogies has some limitations, but practically it works really well. And it's like Dennett's quote that there's no such thing as philosophy-free science, only science with unexamined assumptions. There is no society or culture that is free of philosophy, but there are unexamined societal and cultural constructs and principles and actions, and I don't think that's the best expression of humanity. I think we want to be examined, but we want that examination to be thoughtful, participatory, embodied, connected, representative of a system's view of life. And I fundamentally believe that if we can do the practical yet philosophically informed work that I'm talking about, we can progressively and very tangibly redesign organizations so that their resources are utilized and directed in such a way that they actually help rather than hinder all life. On this, planet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean everything, I guess everything you're saying I'm like I totally resonate with all of that, right, but I I guess where I'm going with this is that it it's it seems like it's really bloody hard for any. So we managed to implement this sort of stuff because we are a we could design this from the onset, right. We're, we were a startup and we sort of grew all this and in and this systems, view of life and ecological design, thinking, all this sort of stuff informed how we relate to others, to stakeholders, to the world at large as an organization. So we've kind of that was baked in from the onset, which means that it's really easy for us to do that. We're also a small organization and you know.
Speaker 1:So I can see how scale would drastically impact this, and this could be much more difficult for organizations that already have patterns of procedures and ways of doing and being and seeing in the world that have been that way for I don't know, maybe multiple generations, if it's like a long-standing organization, and I can see that there could be a big difference. Or just like maybe like the the larger you are, the larger the inertia is and all this sort of stuff. And I'm wondering, from your perspective, is there much of a difference when we think about how this content and the trustworthiness relates to those looking at starting an organization versus those who are looking at shifting an existing organization?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a really good question and I've grappled with this for at least the last decade and attempted to apply it in various different sort of like iterative formats over the last decade. I think that there are incredible advantages and disadvantages to being a resource-rich organisation, ie a large organisation with established infrastructure, ways of working people etc. And there are incredible advantages and disadvantages to being a very small organisation. I would say for a large organization, the biggest challenge is like the lack of um, sort of like collective flexibility, adaptability etc. And there's a there is yeah, there is a stuckness in its way and so we have to sort of like enhance the progress-making forces and effectively counter or hinder the progress, counter, excuse me, the progress-hindering forces towards this sort of directional goal or vision, and I'm not convinced there's anything close to one right way to do that. There are so many different organis, organizational theories of change as well, and it's hard to really get a grasp on the robustness, like the relative robustness, of different theories of change within a complex organizational context.
Speaker 3:I think there are sort of principles and patterns that probably play out like I don't think the machine view, military command control is anything close to best servicing that possibility of transformation no, it's actually actively hindering, I think it is in many ways, even though it's a little bit counterintuitive for some folks, because it feels like, well, we just describe the vision, because it's very sort of like um, almost like newtonian deterministic type approach, which even newton's work was based on metaphysical assumptions the guys are mad alchemists as well.
Speaker 1:Lots of yeah, yeah lots of people aren't.
Speaker 3:You know, if you haven't studied the philosophy of science at all, you don't really, aren't really aware of this. You just take that as being how the universe is.
Speaker 1:Um, that's not to say that it's not highly predictive and useful, and all of those different things incredibly useful as a as a way, like I mean, we wouldn't have gps, all these other things, because of it. It's an incredibly useful thing. It's just acknowledging that when you use this process it's very scale dependent and you might actually not be able. It doesn't take into account emergent properties, all these other things. It's really good at figuring out point for point things, but it's not so useful with complex adaptive systems or living systems or anything that is really of interest. But it can still give you an approximation. So that's kind of the reductive science is really good at approximations and that sort of stuff.
Speaker 1:Maybe not so good at predictability and I think that's where, like the heisenberg uncertainty principle, all this sort of stuff comes into it. But yes, it is something that, um, I do see. There is this kind of paradigm like coonian paradigm shift, happening very much at the forefront of science and acknowledging that you know what. It is way more messy and complex and we have to learn how to embrace and deal with the unknown and even with running an organization. It's like you can't command and control your way out of this.
Speaker 1:It is very much like how do I appropriately participate with the whole that I'm embedded within, acknowledging that I really don't have that much control at all, and it's more of like a of a how do I weigh this or how do I steward this, you know, in a way in which it's gonna have its own, a life of its own, let's say yeah, and you could describe leadership as almost like modeling slash, attempting to construct enabling constraints or something like that, seeding initial conditions and then obviously participating in what emerges from there creating the conditions for emergence.
Speaker 3:Totally yeah, and you know that's been written about very eloquently, I think, by a number of scholars and authors about the role of leadership, in kind of like leadership's role in social change, right, and yeah. So I think sometimes people think that well then you have to go to sort of like radical decentralization or holacracy, or maybe that's helpful, but not necessarily and certainly not straight away. I think that there are different types of leadership behaviors that can be modeled and you can become a more sort of like contributive, participatory leader than you know, just sort of like this, because the paradigm of like outsourcing everything and scientific management and all these different things have been part of, I think, hindering some of this. But yeah, so if you're a huge organization, incredible challenges you're going to face, including those outside of the organization that influence the organization, ie shareholder expectations, narratives in market, all that type of stuff. But push that to the side for a moment.
Speaker 3:I think the way that I described it previously, if there is some type of courage at the level of the board and executive committees and there is a real sort of dialogos, if you will, between those parties and those outside of the organization that are effectively funding the organization's existence, particularly institutional shareholders, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 3:We can create the authorizing environment for doing that. All right, let's define a holistic value system, let's do it in a participatory way and then let's progressively change the organization through like a highly experimental, rigorous approach. So again, this is not about like. When you start talking about these ways of working people, because of the way that we sort of like relate to ideas that aren't, say, the predominant idea that we have about mechanistic causality or whatever it may be, or simple causality like strong determinism, it's like, oh, everything other than that's woo-woo, it's like no, I think this is going to be a deeply scientifically informed approach to what we do, we can conduct even in an organizational setting, like good quality experiments to help build our confidence, knowledge, like have this true, justified belief, if you will, about the fact that we are making the right type of progress.
Speaker 3:Um, and I think we can do that very well in organizations. And it starts with, you know, seeding different sort of conditions, recognizing that the organization is many parts relating to a whole, that that whole has something like a goal, orientation, um, and that it's okay to sort of like practically carve out a part of that and go, hey, this part, like we can change this part, like we can experiment with this part, we can see if that's working and then we can feed learnings into other parts and then we can figure out how to better integrate them. Um, it doesn't have to be this whole like, oh, all right, all we can do is sort of like try and change the initial conditions and then it's just emergence from there. It's like it's not that. So I think it's some type of courageous dialogue between leaders of the organization and those that are effectively funding the organization, if we want to think about it that way, and this is definitely multidirectional. That way, and this is definitely multi-directional, it's not just those privileged folks at the expense of everyone else, but they do need to take some type of stand or stance that can create what we would formally call the authorizing environment or favorable conditions to do this value-sensitive sort of design or values-led work.
Speaker 3:We describe this value system and then we take a small part of the business, the organization, and we try and bring that to life. And we do that experimentally. We do that in a way that is supportive of something like emergence. We don't try and control it right, but we do try and observe it, learn from it, iterate on it, improve it, et cetera. So there's stuff there. And then for a small organization it's really hard because you're still playing the finite game. You're still playing game A, you're competing for resources. You're getting wrapped up in memes and narratives like everyone's an AI startup. Now you're competing for resources. You know you're getting wrapped up in memes and narratives like everyone's an ai startup. Now I'm not even going to get into the problematic nature of that, but so you have really challenging practical decisions that you have to make every single day and it's like well, but if I do this, values work, there's an opportunity cost there that might mean I can't eat next week, like kind of literally right yeah, it's very relatable.
Speaker 1:I mean structuring our entire organization based on optimizing for the system as the whole rather than maximizing return on investment means that you know we're pulling minimum wage to ensure that we can provide free space or free support to people doing impact-oriented initiatives. Like yeah, you suffer.
Speaker 3:And minimum wage in Melbourne is fucking hard. It's gross.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but it's not forever. It's a very short-term thing, because it's just not sustained. You have to be ensuring you're sustaining yourself to be able to give back to others Totally.
Speaker 3:And I think it's a super important principle. It's hard. I struggled to relate to that for most of my life and found a healthier relationship to that, maybe like a year, year and a half ago. I'm not always doing a great job of that, however, in many ways, but that's a different story. But what are the benefits? Well, you don't have to do it all overnight. You can try B and expression of your values. You're incredibly adaptable. You can basically evolve how your organization operates on a near daily basis in response to like it's almost like niche construction, right, think it like the agent acts on the environment.
Speaker 1:The environment acts on Absolutely Agent arena relations.
Speaker 3:We describe this in different ways, but there's a mutual shaping going on here and it's much easier to be in that process and go through those adaptation cycles or whatever we want to frame them as, as a small organization.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Just way quicker feedback loops.
Speaker 3:So much quicker. And again the same sort of approach, though Like you're not going to. It's like, think of it as almost like the cultivation of character, right the way that Aristotle may have described it. So, not to get too much into Aristotelian philosophy or metaphysics, or virtue, ethics or anything but so virtue is basically the golden mean, the wise operating space, if you will, between different extremes, um, and the reason that we cultivate character is to try and live the good life, be a good person. Um, because often we have personality challenges and deficits, and yada, yada, and an organization has something like an inherent personality deficit because of the paradigm that gives rise to it, because of its legal constructions, because of its technocracy, et cetera, et cetera. So we try and progressively, which is a day-by-day, step-by-step process, cultivate the organization's character, and we recognize that that is something like a lifelong pursuit.
Speaker 1:It's an ongoing process, it's not a destination.
Speaker 3:And there's no end point, and so, oh my God, that's actually like really stress relieving in some ways, because it's a process that we exist in relation to that we commit to daily, and for some people, I think there is a way to look at that that would be sort of like stress inducing. But I actually think that the best way to look at that that would be sort of like stress inducing, but I actually think that the best way to look at that is a way in which it becomes sort of stress reducing which just allows you to let go of the need for control in a way and and I think that there's actually some incredibly powerful thing, because, I mean, people go oh, how are you not stressed?
Speaker 1:how are you not stressed with everything?
Speaker 1:but it's, um, it's actually not that stressful sitting with the uncertainty and complexity of everything and all of this stuff that's going on, if you just know from the onset that that's what you're willingly walking into and that you're having to deal with this through an emergent strategy approach and it's actually kind of liberating in a way of being like, well, I really don't know and I don't have to have the answers and we'll just see what happens. But it's not like you're doing that from a wishy-washy way of like let's just see where the universe takes us.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I'm just going to put an idea into the universe and then it will.
Speaker 1:No, there's still, it's not that form of manifesting it's, it's like a mix between wu-wei and yu-wei. It's effortless action, with effortful action in some ways to help guide it. Which?
Speaker 3:is basically like a description of mindfulness. To some extent it's almost like being focused without effortful. It's a very simple description of something like a Vipassana. I think that's maybe a nice, almost take-home message is that we can't solve all these problems overnight.
Speaker 3:The goal of being a virtuous organization, of cultivating character, of being verifiably trustworthy, is not an endpoint, but rather a process that we exist in relation to, and every single day we do our best. We're going to have some days that are better than others. We don't want to be, we want to be critical, but we want to be constructively critical. We don't want to be self-shaming, we don't want to just succumb to the guilt of not doing enough because these can be like like sort of like anti-productive and those sorts of principles, that type of orientation, I believe, applies at every level of civilization's infrastructure, down to kind of like the deep inner self.
Speaker 3:Um, and you know I often argue in different settings that um, um, a world that is uh, that falls back in love with the process of wisdom seeking, is a world that has the opportunity to not just survive through the metacrisis but potentially thrive. And is that some self-serving way of saying more philosophy? Give me some money, um, so that I can put food on the table. Maybe it is, and if you want to give that, I can put food on the table. Maybe it is, and if you want to give me money to put food on the table, I'd be very happy for that. But and that's that's really challenging as we, as we know, and we've discussed as friends very often.
Speaker 1:Especially trying to do the impact oriented work. There is a super hard. Yeah, it's, it's a struggle but it's. It can become the norm. Like I think that the balancing of environment, economics and it can become the norm, like I think that the balancing of environment, economics and like social good can be done. It requires doing things differently and more people doing things differently make that much Totally.
Speaker 3:It's got to be sort of collective. If you're going alone, it's really hard. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And that's why places like this sort of exist, totally, totally.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I think we all have the capacity to within reason. We all have the capacity to within reason, we all have the capacity to cultivate our character. And there are many different caveats that I could add to that. I'm just not going to for the sake of simplicity. As a result of that, because an organization is something like an organism, an engine of collective intelligence or an organism of collective intelligence. It is the combination of our ideas, our contributions, our information exchanges, our energetic flows, etc. Therefore, it can cultivate character too, and I think if we do that, if we exist in relation to that process consistently and we do that daily, and there are many different practical tools, techniques, etc.
Speaker 3:So, if you want to talk about how to do participatory ethics robustly in any context, it could be in the context of synthetic biology, it could be in the context of transforming away from sick care towards healthcare enhancing wellbeing. It could be about responsible AI. There's many different application contexts, right, so you don't even have to start at the level of the entire organization. You could actually start with a functional business unit, right? Um, you could start with a team, you could start with one product like it's kind of scale invariant.
Speaker 3:You can start anywhere and it'll have ripple effects totally, totally and don't let the idea that it is so huge and monumental and scary and challenging and near impossible seeming at times, get in the way of starting and doing a little bit better each day.
Speaker 1:Love it. Nate, thanks so much for joining us again for a conversation. I feel like we're going to have to come back for around two of this and dig into a little bit more of maybe some like let's really go, rubber hits the road applied sort of stuff. But for this part, one thanks so much.
Speaker 3:I really appreciate it. I think next time, if you, if we're willing to do, what is it? What does it look like to do? Practical ethics in an organization of any size. Let's do that. That'd be so exciting.
Speaker 1:I'd love to do that, and we can even use sort of collabs as an example potentially. I just think it would be really good to, because it's people hear this and go, fuck, yeah, that sounds great, but then they still might be like, ah but you haven't given me the roadmap and part of that's purposeful, understood.
Speaker 3:Um, part of that's purposeful because I can't actually do it for you. No, like, if you bring me into your organization, I can help create the scaffolding. I can help bring methodological rigor to something like participatory ethics. Um, I can help the people involved in that process up skill but I still can't do it.
Speaker 1:You all still got to do it it's still your journey you know what I mean.
Speaker 3:Like I can't cultivate your character for you, but you can and and maybe I can be part of stimulating or seeding that process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the facilitator Love that. Is there any advice for folks or anything else that you think you'd like to end the chat with, or are we just going to put a pin in it?
Speaker 3:I would handsomely encourage folks if this interested you or intrigued you, or inspired or motivated you, and you're immediately just one of those people that like, yeah, I just want to get practical, please reach out to me, I've got a bunch of resources. You don't have to engage my service. If you want to, I wouldn't say no, but I've got a bunch of resources, I'll just send them to you and, honestly, there's a lot of stuff that you can do.
Speaker 3:That's self-service, that is deeply practical, that has very few opportunity costs, which is a really important thing for a lot of folks to consider. I'll send you anything I've got. I'm an open book.
Speaker 1:Rad, and where can people find you? I know you've got Substack.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I publish quite regularly like on issues of sort of like practical philosophy, on Substack. I'm on LinkedIn, I'm not on any other social and that just feels like a necessary evil. And then my website is trustworthybydesign.
Speaker 1:Rad. Thanks so much. Appreciate it, mate. All right, man, bye, ciao. Thank you for joining in for another conversation on the Strange Attractor. We hope you enjoyed this conversation with Nate. And yeah, as I said at the start of the podcast, if any of this interests you or is something that you would like to do, you would like to do ethics or find ways to apply this sort of concept in your organization, or just fascinated by the concept of applied ethics? Yeah, we have a collaborative run of workshops coming up in partnership with rsa, nate and colabs, where we will be exploring the applied side of ethics and exploring ways to build trustworthiness by design. So so, if that's of interest, check out the link in the show notes. And yeah, until next time. Thanks for watching.
