Simon Waller (00:00.14)
I think that’s That better?

Yes, so far. Great.

Richard, welcome to the Future with Friends. Now I approached you maybe about six weeks ago and I said, hey, I’m doing this podcast called the Future with Friends. We’re kind of friends. Would you like to come on it? You thankfully said yes, because that would have saved a very awkward conversation otherwise. But it’s actually been really lovely. We’ve had a number of conversations over last six weeks.

Thank you,

Dr Richard Hodge (00:13.4)
That’s fine.

Simon Waller (00:31.438)
kind of exploring the topic about what we’re gonna talk about, trying not to have this conversation in advance because.

Yeah, that’s the thing.

But maybe just to start with, to give some context to people. So I met you a bit over 10 years ago, we were part of a community called Thought Leaders. I remember turning up there and seeing you, and I mean this with all respect, almost as like this wise elder of the community. I know. Perhaps though, you could share to start with just a little bit of the type of work you were doing at the time, or even some of the work you’ve been doing since.

Goodness.

Simon Waller (01:06.306)
that kind of maybe helps frame up the conversation we’re gonna have today.

Sure. Well, firstly, thanks very much for the thinking of me and inviting me along. I’m delighted to be here. Over the last 30 years or so, I’ve been working with large enterprises from within as a scientific advisor, and then later in a consulting world, and then later again with my own shingle on the door.

But the focus has always been with these large enterprises as to how to get them out of the mold of the, you know, the MBA world, which is just hammering for efficiency and actually get them to focus on the value that they were set up to deliver in the first place and recognize that that will change with circumstances. But there’s a lot then layered under that value proposition for each of these large enterprises. They’re operating in a complex world.

They can’t predict the future. None of us really can, but yet they, particularly if they are in government service, they are providing often essential services that regardless of the future, people need and people die if they’re not provided. So how is it that the thinking and learning within the organisation itself can rise to meet the challenge of those complex

unknown futures that they were facing.

Simon Waller (02:45.88)
I remember one of the lines that I remember, and I’ll probably just paraphrase it slightly, but it’s stuck with me from when we first met. And I believe at the time you were doing work with the Department of Defense. And you made the comment that managing people is not rocket science.

because relative to rocket science, managing people is far more complex and way harder. Absolutely. That difference between the complicated and the complex. Is that kind of what you’re alluding to there? Like some of that MBA thinking is it’s trying to be a little bit reductionist is trying to reduce this down to something that has direct cause and effect rather than acknowledging that the the system the biggest system operates in.

Yes, indeed.

Dr Richard Hodge (03:30.764)
They tend to ignore the bigger system within which it operates in because within these large enterprises, there are hierarchies of power and money, whether or not it’s public money or private money. watch where that power and influence flows and who gets the resources and why. And you’re often on the tail of what ultimately then is the pathology of the enterprise that is

from getting it’s, achieving the value that it was set up to deliver. therefore…

The whole idea of, you know, because I often heard from leaders that, what we’re doing with these people is not rocket science. Well, part of the trap that they’re falling into, and I’m sure everyone’s heard, know, well, they’re the soft issues. No, well, and that’s one, and that’s probably, I hope, the first and last time I mention that term tonight, because they’re anything but soft. Rocket science is known.

It wasn’t, but then it was. If you’ve watched that movie, the Hidden Women, that they started the Apollo program before they even knew the trajectories and the mathematics required to bring the capsule safely back to Earth. But once it was known, it was replicable.

Right, so rocket science has then been able to build on that and just go mission after mission largely without any major failures. But that is a level of analysis that is very rational, it’s concrete, and it can be done. You get beyond that, you’re getting into a pluralist world.

Dr Richard Hodge (05:31.052)
get beyond that, you’re getting into the social world. And by pluralist, I’m really talking about, you can think about a set of metaphors of plant, know, it’s blueprinted growth. But nonetheless, it’s still open and responsive to the external environment, and its blueprint is contained within its DNA.

Where’s that living within an organisation? You get above that. You go to animal. And now you’ve got not only multicellular blueprinted growth, but also a sentient being added to that. And then you wonder, they’re aware of.

their circumstances within the world, within their families of children and the like. Go one more above that and you’ve got a metaphor, let’s just say, human. And it’s not only a sentient being.

but it’s aware that it’s aware. So then we bring in all sorts of complexity like symbols, belief systems, heuristics, and those sorts of things that actually make it quite complex. And your belief systems would be quite different to mine. They might meet in certain areas, but not that.

Now, when we get beyond that, now we’re getting into social systems where humans congregate. And we’re then messing with a world that is more complex than ourselves. And the unit for that then becomes the roles that we each play within that society.

Dr Richard Hodge (07:28.13)
But then who allocates the role? Part of the challenge, as when we talked about scenario planning, well, who gets involved in scenario planning, right? Ideally, a hell of a lot of people. Mostly, only a select handful.

Well, what does that do to the thinking, the collective intelligence, if you like, of the social structure? And what I’m working on is, for anyone who would like to write down this note, it’s Kenneth Boulding’s Hierarchy of Systems Complexity. And he wrote that paper one year after I was born, in 1956. And it has been one of the singularly most useful insights in this.

world that has been repeatedly ignored as to the insights that it can bring in how you can think about large-scale organisations. And just to complete it, he does add one layer at the top, which he calls transcendental. And that then is the system of unknowns and unknowables. Right?

And that allows for religion and other things to, some might call it the ultimate complexity. Yes, to sit within it. So there, enterprises that we play within sit one layer down from the top.

We won below that, but all of the systems, including the rocket systems, you know, are many orders of magnitude below that in terms of the complexity that we’re dealing with.

Simon Waller (09:15.79)
Yeah, I think that gives you one of the things I’ve found.

We first spoke and we talked about, what? We could talk about the future of anything. We agreed on the concept of learning that has obviously a very poetic connection with Spill Haus tonight. One thing I’ve picked up since then is how vast the concept is. And in a moment, you’re going to share a little bit about your scenario. And what’s super interesting is what we both choose to include and also what we choose to exclude from that conversation. I think it may come back a little bit to some of the things

mention. Before we do that, though, a couple of things I want to just pick up on because one caveat you gave me at the very beginning was, if you’re going to do scenarios, you can’t do just one. And obviously, you’ve been involved in scenario type work at places like the Department of Health and the Department of Defense. Sure. And you mentioned in some cases, you might do what 10

or 15 more. Yeah, more kind of scenarios looking at different way that things could unfold. Can you share? mean, I know you, you mentioned that these things can become political that we choose to include, whether scenarios become reverse engineered. But tonight, we’re, I hope, exploring a version of scenarios that is a demonstration of a space for learning and growth.

we are.

Dr Richard Hodge (10:49.378)
Yeah.

Have you seen that in action? Like where have you seen that used well as a tool amongst your, in your career?

look.

within defence and within health. I should say that within defence, in the early 90s, they actually forbade the use of scenarios because, as you mentioned, people were writing scenarios and somehow getting them approved, this whole power of money thing, right? And then reverse engineering the scenario and going, look at that, I need a new squadron of…

whatever, right? And the public purse pays out billions and there you go. So that was squashed, and shows the ills of scenario planning.

Dr Richard Hodge (11:47.032)
Where we’ve been more successful in seeing it work is where there’s been a variety of them. And imagine if you like a ruler of intensity as to what’s a scenario that would cause just a little perturbation in this enterprise. And all the way up at the other end, what’s almost the worst thing that would be catastrophic to the enterprise.

look at how you can range down the intensity in the writing of the scenarios to actually then effectively set points on a ruler. So, and any one of those scenarios in and of itself is interesting but not really helpful, right? Until you’ve worked across all of them and then you see patterns.

in the thinking, patterns in the learning, patterns in the use of money, patterns in the use of equipment and resources, patterns in the way in which they engage with people. And then you can begin to see what is the actual DNA or coding of the enterprise through the conversations, so the scenarios have become tools for conversation.

much as we’re seeking to do today. And then health on the other side showed that actually, yeah, you guys over in defence can have 14, we’ll use three.

because they were then just looking at, if we have something that dealt with mass trauma, if we had something that dealt with communicable disease, if we had something that dealt with major industrial accident, then those scenarios pretty much would generate every condition that would come in the emergency department’s door. And that was enough, right? So it could be pruned down. What’s right for any one organisation? Pretty hard to say, really.

Simon Waller (13:52.866)
Yeah, and I don’t even know if there is a right, but I think it’s more, there is an intent behind what scenarios offer. And it’s this idea of can we create a safe space to have challenging conversations and through those conversations, learn and adapt or preempt some of the things that you need prepare for. Not that we can preempt it all. It’s not about trying to make a prediction, but it’s trying to create a space for us to have conversations that might otherwise be really difficult. Okay, so we’re gonna get you to read your scenario in a second, but before we do, so this is about

the future of learning. The other choice that you got on this though was around the year that you’ve chosen and you’ve chosen I believe 2043. Is there any significance of that to you?

Well really from a previous podcast that you had with, or two actually, with Jason Fox, and he had set his in 2043, and I thought, well look, that’s just far enough out, but the more familial significance for me is that in 2043, my oldest grandson will be 43. And I’ve written it with

with a little bit of a political context and right now he is working as an electoral officer for a federal member of the House of Representatives. So it is a bit of his life right now, but whether or not he stays in politics, I don’t know, but I just tried to bring that where he might.

There’s a scenario where he might. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Okay, people in the audience now if you want to open up your envelopes, you’ve got a copy of your scenario there. I’ve got my copy here. But whenever you are Richard, ready Richard, you are always Richard. But when you’re ready, please tell us about the future of learning.

Dr Richard Hodge (15:53.922)
The year is 2043. After years of exhaustion with politics built on power, money and influence, Australians chose more independence instead. They didn’t want stronger party lines, they wanted wiser people in power. Cameron is 43 years old, a minister in Australia’s minority federal government, and he’s learning cooperation is harder than conflict.

On Monday the 16th, 2043, his first meeting in the morning is at a forum, a learning in collectives. So morning light of autumn cools over the restored Maribyrnong wetlands. 50 citizens sit in circles, no podiums, no PowerPoint. Shared data glows on the wall panels. Water flows, soil health, ecological well-being, and trust levels.

An elderly woman begins. We’ve learned to grow food together, Minister, yet still we can’t agree on who decides where the water goes. Cameron listens. Fear speaks first. They’re taking our water. Then efficiency. Let’s optimise the allocation model. And finally care. The wetlands are kin. They decide with us. He waits.

lets them hear each other. He joins the conversation and makes it clear he doesn’t come with answers, but with care for a better way forward. By the end of the session, they agree to trial rotating stewardship, knowing it will be messy.

yet mutual and alive. A teenager lingers afterwards. Geez, you don’t sound like a politician. Cameron smiles. Maybe I finally stopped trying to.

Dr Richard Hodge (17:59.566)
2.30, the same in that afternoon. A debate. As Bright Studio lights, a televised national debate on energy policy. Across from him, the opposition leader chants the old creed. Growth, security, cheaper bills. The ticker feed explodes with emojis and outrage metrics. Cameron steadies himself in the noise.

What if stability doesn’t mean holding on to the past, but holding together every day? Silence.

Dr Richard Hodge (18:39.63)
three full seconds of it, enough for a crack of curiosity to open before the next slogan spews from the opposition leader. Cameron takes heart, a tiny moment of relevance realized.

Monday, 5.30. Evening in the outer district, still bruised from last month’s cyber crash. Three days without digital supply chains led to panic, hoarding, and blame. In the community hall, a young mother trembles. We trusted your systems. My son went hungry. Cameron feels the reflex to fall back, being defensive of the data, the audits, the promises. Yet he stops himself.

You’re right, he says, we built safety into the code but forgot to build it into our relationships. Silence settles, then slow nods ripple through the community. Outside by a fire pit, an elder awaits. You politicians think you govern, the elder says, but it’s the world that governs you, teaching you how to learn again. Cameron laughs softly.

then may I not be a slow learner.

Simon Waller (20:07.744)
Okay, one thing that I immediately picked up having read this was the vastness of the concept of learning. And I’d to talk a little bit about how you chose what to focus on in that space and also potentially what you chose to exclude. Like I notice in this scenario, there is no reference to formal education. There’s no reference to universities.

No. To schools. No.

Is there a reason or did that cross your mind? What were some of the decisions that you made in terms of choosing where to focus your energy, given that you only have a page and a half of content to share?

Well, that was an overriding caveat from you that you didn’t want four or five or six pages, which would have been much easier to write, But perhaps it came from, so I didn’t want to the large, the formal education systems, right?

One thing is perhaps a belief that I have, that they are almost an absolute irony, a model of irony in education, in learning, in that their whole game is around learning, but yet they seem to be the slowest to learn and change as a result of that. But.

Dr Richard Hodge (21:37.11)
that aside, and I don’t want this to be a let’s beat up education because there’s plenty of good within it as well.

But when I look back on my own career, the first 21 years was within the Defence Science and Technology Organisation, 2,100 professionals there, at least half of them PhD qualified or better. And many of them were doing wonderful things that had absolutely nothing to do with their PhD.

that they had moved on and it was their capacity to move on beyond their formal education systems that it was like, you know, it got them the first rung on the ladder. You couldn’t become a research scientist without a PhD. Box ticked, now move on. What are you going to do with it and where is that going to take you? I’ve seen chemistry PhDs come in and…

I had one come in and the first task I gave her was to actually look on the subject of verbs. Yeah, chemistry PhD who was looking at the biofluorescence of certain organic elements and brought her in and she reveled in that.

What?

Dr Richard Hodge (23:11.746)
because what I wanted her to focus on in the scenario creation is, what is the language that the enterprise that we’re dealing with uses to most accurately describe what they do? And in defense, like in health, and I think like almost everywhere else, the verbs they choose, like their acronyms that follow, are really quite specific and understood.

Right?

So, you know, securing communications or what have you will have a very specific meaning or denying access. But to the point of that those people then went on and did wonderful things that had nothing to do in Kim’s case with her chemistry degree.

She had then followed on and then went on from one research task to another that took her from the chemistry, like we were talking about earlier, that was down at the rocket science level, up into the social stratas, and really getting to understand the language and behavior that surrounded that language.

if we were going to have a conversation around that was effective to the leadership in the defence department and with health, right? Because when you’re having these scenario conversations, in defence we were dealing with all of the three stars and above. In health, we were dealing with the CEO of hospitals and the secretaries of the departments.

Dr Richard Hodge (25:05.42)
because they’re very political things. They’re because they understand the power of the scenarios and the power of the conversations that follow, and importantly, who gets invited to the conversation.

because if you go through the scenario conversation and then come up with what seems like common sense at the end, that can be defeated when it goes back up to the top executive if that top executive has no trust at all in the voice that was representing his or her part of the organisation.

So who gets involved in these scenario conversations was actually the critical vulnerability as well as a critical success factor.

I remember when I did my undergraduate degree and my dad, the way he framed it was, you go to university to learn how to learn. Right.

That’s a great way of putting it. I love it.

Simon Waller (26:09.134)
I do, but having read this and perhaps taking that broader view of what learning is, I wonder now more, especially at an undergraduate level, whether you just learn how to get taught. Do you mean like it’s not, I feel my experience of undergraduate study and I changed my masters, but undergraduate level, it’s still largely here is the information, you recite this back to me. I think when you’ve had.

Fair point, fair point. I would agree with that. My undergraduate was 50 years ago.

And I do wonder, like as much as I agree, I mean the choice to exclude formal education as part of the scenarios and not to beat up on it I think is fine and it’s your decision to include or exclude it. I do think though there are trends out there right now or signals out there that the relevance of, as you said, the inability of universities and formal education institutions to learn themselves and to respond to change in experience.

expectations within society to change to like this kind of rapid it feels like a rapid evolution of Information and knowledge. Yes, and being very much on the back foot in that situation

That is true, they are, and perhaps the MBA programs, classic case in point, that they have become so tailored and so focused on functional excellence, whether in strategy or…

Dr Richard Hodge (27:47.606)
operations, finance, all of those functional elements of business administration that …

They fail to equip the people to shift from analysis to synthesis.

so they can be experts in any of those functions. But then it’s almost as though they are let go back into their enterprises and it’s on their heads as to how they create some synthesis within the enterprise and that’s where damage is done time and again. But yet, you know, these MBA programs are cash cows for the universities.

It’s almost like there’s a deep, there’s a somewhere along the lines there’s a conviction in that if I’ve done an MBA that I’m now very capable yet in some ways what it’s doing is potentially deeply embedding a reductionist form of thinking that means you are less open to alternatives. Because if I’ve done an MBA, I mean, and that’s the pinnacle.

early.

Dr Richard Hodge (28:51.478)
And that’s why, so for part of my time, I spent six years with Booz Allen Hamilton, which was a global strategy firm. And they were in with the Australian Graduate School of Management and they harvested, along with Boston Consulting Group and others, the best of the master’s programme of the MBA students each and every year, because what they wanted, what they regarded as were fungible people.

that they could pick them up like that out of one program on Friday night in Melbourne and drop them straight into a similar slot in Bangkok on Monday morning, right? And so they’ve got many human robots in many ways geared around Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint. And that may…

be somewhat cynical, but that was the reality.

And I lived that after I’d left Booz Allen, which doesn’t exist anymore here in this country. But I met someone, an executive at AMP, who said, yes, well, we’ve had your alma mater in here doing some strategy work for us, and now we’ve got 800 PowerPoint slides, and we’re trying to work out what the hell to do with them.

So, you know, there was no transfer of learning and understanding in that process, even though they were highly educated by the traditional education system standard.

Simon Waller (30:39.426)
Yeah, there’s certainly an element of that where, where learning is almost a power play. Yes. It’s like if I can withhold the learning from you, then I becoming dispensable to you next.

Which is why in the writing of this scenario, I going to say, well, look, what would Cameron as a politician need to be able to do to be successful in…

2043 and I don’t know that I have any answers directly but I have some inkling as to what those skills and competencies need to be in how someone like Cameron and I think it goes to any of us not just politicians to engage in a complex world that’s becoming increasingly complex.

So when you go around creating scenarios, we often look at, we start looking at what are some of the signals of change, how those may roll up into trends that we’re seeing unfold, and looking at then some of those, the critical uncertainties, what are the high impact, hard to predict drivers of change that we might want to consider.

I like to at your face. It’s like, really, is that what we do, When you look at this, on one hand, you are describing some examples of how Cameron might engage in different forms of learning. And I would say, it feels like relative to what we often see in politics now,

Simon Waller (32:23.816)
or in management consulting, a more evolved version of learning or a more open version of learning. Do you actually see those trends unfolding at the moment?

Yes, I think we do. But I liken it to however evolved they are and they become, you’re still going to have to be the sort of person, whether you’re in a political executive role or an executive role or even just an engaging role.

in 2043 whereby you’re still able to deal with the fear, with the pessimist, the blame game, with all of the things that is wrong about today’s education system is likely to be alive and well then. It’s just like we could have a conversation on…

the next generation, Industrial Revolution, right? Where are we up to now? Revolution number five coming up. But Industrial Revolution number one is still going. It hasn’t stopped. Industrial Revolution number two hasn’t stopped. Three, four, five, it’s just adding, it’s accreting change upon change.

across the globe, particularly as it’s becoming far more globalised, then we need decision makers and thinkers to be able to have the capacity not just to be up with the latest, be able to deal with everything that’s gone before because it’s still alive.

Simon Waller (34:21.272)
talk through the first of these. you kind of create a vignette of three different.

situations that Cameron finds himself in throughout a day, a single day in his life. And I thought that was a very nice, sneaky way of getting away from just writing one scenario, at least just like, here’s some different aspects that we could consider. The first one, this idea of the forum and learning in collectives, and I see certain parallels between that and perhaps even tonight in terms of what we’re doing.

Absolutely.

One thing that came up when I’ve talked to you about this event is the concept of

in the salon of the 16th and 17th century, where often people would curate an evening of intellectual conversation with a variety of people and they’re bringing the painters and the philosophers, but there was a select group of people and we created this space to learn in. On one hand, this feels like, you know, in the sense of it being applied or that forum being applied in a political context, seems quite revolutionary compared to what we currently currently seeing.

Simon Waller (35:32.656)
yet at the same time it alludes to or kind of mirrors or rhymes or resonates with versions of this we’ve seen in the past.

Yes, I don’t think there’s anything new in here. I think that it’s just an example of what we might expect of the behaviour of the politician in order to be successful in the future, given the setting of the context of a more complex, independent minority government.

deliberately, I could have written scenarios without that political overlay, and I don’t want to get political per se, but I don’t want people either to forget the political overlay. in each of the, because politics is everywhere that we’re about. So I…

Dr Richard Hodge (36:41.468)
I kinda lost my thought.

Okay, like within this, so like where, you know, like you are a lifelong learner and a student of knowledge and history as well. Have you seen like, what is the closest thing to this that you have seen previously? Like I said, I make this parallel with the salon, but it’s not really that in some ways, it feels like a meat have its roots even in like ancient Rome, or it might be even like in some forms of indigenous society.

Certainly within the, I’ve been particularly taken of late, you know, over COVID since Tyson Young-Keporta wrote his first book Sand Talk. And I’ve had a couple of engagements, know, where I’ve met Tyson, but…

I’m particularly taken with the indigenous views. And my friend in Canada is a descendant from their first indigenous peoples over there. And very similar sort of things happening of the colonial genocides that each have participated in, but yet they’re

ways of being, their ways of engaging with the land, the ways of engaging with each other, their use of totems that achieve connection with the land. There’s multiple ways of learning.

Dr Richard Hodge (38:23.02)
that garner’s respect and connection before they even get into the conversation about what needs to change. And I think that if nothing else, that is such a valuable way of approaching things that what if our politicians did that? What if our executives just did that? Start with respect.

then a sure connection before you get into that. And then, lo and behold, in that co-creation, you’ve created the environment and the social license to get into co-creation, that when it comes to actually the doing, people will…

just do it. They can be self-motivated to drive because of everything that’s gone before it. And there’s an essence of that that I’m trying to pull in to, well, what is it that Cameron is seeking to do? And in this particular one, let each of them speak first. Not be a member of a 94 seat government.

that can just say, well, I don’t care what we promised, they don’t say that, but we’re just gonna do it anyway, even if it’s completely against what the party policy might have been. How do we get away from that grant of power being so overwhelming and lacking in integrity?

Hmm. So this came up for me. So two things that I’ve already connected with. I’ve referred to Tyson’s work a number of times on different episodes of the podcast and similar to yourself have kind of gone on this journey of, I don’t think he does a very good job. Obviously, he works at Deakin and part of his work is how do we reinterpret some of that indigenous knowledge and make it relevant to a modern world? Yeah. And you know, from reading his books, I think he’s also the first to say, I don’t really know yet. Yeah, like for sure. But there are certain

Simon Waller (40:44.176)
and things like I do, I’ve had this belief which when I’ve shared it, I don’t always get.

support for it. But if you have a culture that has managed to live within the boundaries of its environment for 50,000 plus years, and within that period of time, there hasn’t been extensive levels of conflict and war. If you think about how much knowledge you can build on knowledge and build on knowledge in that time, it is somewhat extraordinary. And we talk about how long it’s been since the Dark Ages. And we talk about Roman times as being

something exceptional when it was 2,000 years ago, what happens if you have that continuous learning experience that goes on for 50,000 or 60,000 years? Where do you get to?

Well, that’s right, but then when you get into his second book, Right Story, Wrong Story, he tells a story at the front of that about a fishing trip. And he tells it in traditional, you know, beginning, middle, end story that us white folk, know, Western minds have been trained to think that this is how stories evolve.

But then he makes the point that that’s not how they tell that story in their own indigenous culture. It’s patchwork of things and different speakers and people who know that particular part of the country or that inlet speak to it.

Dr Richard Hodge (42:23.262)
not just the narrator and that it is not in the same time sequence that we think of, because time has a different construct for them. And I think that that is also true for the way in which we need to regard the knowledge and the processes of knowing in the future.

You know, don’t expect to be completely rationalist about beginning, middle, end. A plus B equals C, or A squared plus B squared equals C squared. You know, that’s very formulaic, and we like the certainty of that. But actually, if we take a longer term…

look over it, we see these patterns emerging, as I was talking about with the scenarios, that enables those patterns to emerge. And only when you’ve got enough of the patterns together, that you can then begin to see the picture on the jigsaw that you didn’t know you had.

There’s another story in in Right Story Wrong Story, and he talks about the spear, the iron spear. And which also resonated with me about this particular part of the scenario. And they find some iron that’s from a ship that’s been rocked up on the beach and they’re trying to fashion it into a spear and everything goes wrong and the spear breaks and he goes, we just have to throw it back into the ocean where it came from. But then he kind of just

reflects on the concept of iron and steel in the first place. And is steel, has it been good? Or society? Right. Or not? Yeah.

Simon Waller (44:11.308)
And there’s pros and cons, right? And he’s saying, like, obviously there’s certain aspects of it that have led to some form of modernization, but hugely energy intensive. And we’ve had to dig these big holes in the ground. And he makes this point that perhaps in an indigenous world, we would have just left it in the ground until we could have worked out what to do with it. As opposed to, yeah, but there’s almost like a stewardship aspect of that.

Yes. Isn’t that beautiful?

Simon Waller (44:36.28)
that I feel is missing when we talk about modern political debate. I do a lot of work within the local government context and I’ve been ruminated on that same concept of stewardship and, you know, within the tech industry it’s all hell bent on move fast and break things without any real thought about whose things they’re breaking.

Leadership without stewardship is not leadership. Absolutely.

Yeah, what if it the opposite of that is to maybe move slow and care for things? You know, what does that look like? And what does that mean from a learning perspective that if we could slow it down, like slow learning as a concept, which I think you did talk about in the second part this break? Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting.

Yes.

interesting counterpoint to what we’re currently seeing with things like artificial intelligence, where I want the information immediately repackaged in the way that I want it to be repackaged. And in fact, I’m less concerned that it might be telling me lies as long as I can get it right now.

Dr Richard Hodge (45:40.398)
And that it reads well and that I can get it out. You’re right. Published or what have you.

But is that what is that? What is the value of that? If it’s not deep, you know, do we hold on to it? Does it have a lasting impression on it? But the people here tonight, for instance, is the fact that you were willing to leave your home on a Wednesday and come out and sit in this situation, on this conversation with a bunch of strangers mean that what you take away actually lands deeper or more has more lasting impact on you than if you’d heard the same thing.

even on this podcast or repackaged through artificial intelligence. Yeah.

Yes.

Dr Richard Hodge (46:22.626)
Yes. Yes. Well, I think that whole idea of slow, it’s not to say that there isn’t fast, one still has to respond. But within the, you know, from my defense background, yeah, it’s really nice to be able to go ready, aim, fire, but sometimes you’ve got to fire. As long as next.

You do ready, aim, fire, ready, aim, fire. The fact that you fired first doesn’t matter over the longer term, perhaps. But fire in the sense of an immediate response, not necessarily an explosive one.

Okay, let’s move on to the second part of this, the debate, you know, learning the echo chamber you talk about. So, so this is interesting when you talk about debate, and I actually feel like

I, when I talk about debate from a, like a government context, I see it almost in the way it’s been presented here, which is we are asking people to learn in a, know, public setting under scrutiny and fear of ridicule. You know, we played that little…

Thought exercise before we started tonight. Yes about how do you create a safe space for learning and what I’m is I get Where where’s where do I feel safe? Where will I not be punished for being wrong? And we certainly seem to create environments where there’s a higher level of Risk For being wrong in the current environment That was one thing I picked up in this But you use a line in here

Simon Waller (48:07.95)
He says, Cameron says, what if stability doesn’t mean holding on to the past, but holding together every day. And it’s almost like Confucius says, like it feels like it’s like a very deep philosophical thing. And I’m just like, maybe you could explain that to me.

Well, I think from this perspective is that where Cameron might be coming from is that perhaps one of the most effective levels at which to address even global issues is at the community level. But then how do you define community? then that could be, you know, the three choirs that I participate in or it could be

it the St John Ambulance Association in South Australia, it could be the local council community and community around your council area. It doesn’t matter, it provides a level at which people with a shared interest can hold together.

and then talk amongst themselves and generate the voice that’s needed for that community of people to be heard. And not only to be heard, but to say, okay, we’re not necessarily looking for action, it would be great if we could get that, but what else can we do to take action and do it anyway?

because I’m of a firm belief that politicians generally are not leaders. They’re followers. And if there’s enough people out there doing things that are getting attention, they will get the attention of the politicians. if that, you know, then garners political support for things that are done and done well.

Simon Waller (50:10.958)
Yeah, it feels like there is a disconnect there. We talked about leadership and stewardship. I don’t know if you’ve come across as Mariana Mezzano’s work. Mazzucato sorry, his work and the concept of value creation versus value extraction. And if we take those kind of

Mazzucato.

Dr Richard Hodge (50:28.514)
Yes, absolutely.

Simon Waller (50:33.908)
leadership roles in a commercial context, it seems perfectly legitimate to be in the value extraction business. You have to create value. It feels okay that you transfer the cost via externalities onto other people. But when you talk about leadership within a government context or a public service context, that stewardship part of it seems to be, it should feel like it’s more pronounced.

Yeah, but I think at the community level though, I think one of the things that challenges all community groups, however defined, is how do we keep increasing the common good? Either by getting more people and that provide community services, that provide care and compassion because it’s, you know,

At the top end, we might want ecological sustainability. But if people don’t address the justice issues before we get to that, then ecological sustainability won’t happen. But we can’t even address justice if people are not compassionate, because they won’t even see the injustice.

So that is where compassion typically will manifest within community groups. At a community level, you will get the manifestation of a shared compassion for a particular Advent. Now, you can then look at, well, are there some injustices in our community that we’re seeking to address? Then you can go from compassion to justice.

And only then, when you can see the injustices of the way of which we’re extracting resources from the world at a far greater rate than the earth can regenerate them, only then with compassion and justice can we address the ecological sustainability questions. So I think that that’s why…

Dr Richard Hodge (52:56.258)
community groups that have compassion, will learn together, they will identify the injustices and then learn their way forward in how best to deal with them.

come up with things that work for that community, whether or not it’s the Sudanese community in the Western suburbs. They will know what’s best for that. And we saw an example of that actually in COVID, right? Where, and I’m sorry, I forget the elder’s name in Canberra, who was the head of the…

Aboriginal voice on COVID issues who said, no, no, no, we’re not having white man coming in and we’ll get this dealt with at the community level. And it worked, right? Whatever happened there in the way in which they were able to have the conversations in a respectful, connected way.

that enabled COVID not to decimate communities, as was the fear early on in the COVID years. So that we can again draw a very near term example of how this community action, where there’s respect and connection, can work on something that’s even was at the time a global health issue and remains such.

So you’ve come up with a couple of other, you we played this thought exercise about what are the conditions that allow learning to take place. I think something along the lines of respect was mentioned earlier. And I do think that when I look back on those examples you’ve given about the Sudanese community and the indigenous community, I do question whether or not there is that level of respect necessarily that’s allowed, that we would normally allow for that, for them to have an active voice in this conversation. You also talk about compassion.

Simon Waller (54:58.48)
Are there other, like when we talk about, like what you’re talking about from this kind of community led change towards social justice and ecological sustainability, like you are kind of alluding to some conditions that might be required, learning being one of them.

Well, it’s creating the conditions for learning to occur. But take it out even away from the examples given and bring it back into a large scale enterprise, you know, within the defence organisation and we created substantial change within that. But that was a small community of us within the defence environment.

who saw an opportunity to actually change the way in which funding was allocated to capital equipment projects and…

That was from a point of view of, in those days, $60 billion a year being allocated. So not an insignificant amount of public funding. And we felt that it could be done better. we went even to, and so that we had compassion amongst ourselves and some care.

that we really gave a damn about this issue. And if we hadn’t, then it wouldn’t have happened. There were seven in my research group and five in the wearing military uniforms that actually then made that happen. So I think that the notion of community can be formulated and be transient for the purpose of getting a, call them project teams if you want.

Dr Richard Hodge (56:57.74)
but make sure that everyone that’s in that project team actually gives a damn about what it is they’re trying to shift. Because then there will be compassion for each other amongst that team. And then you’ve got the psychological safety that enables learning to occur. goes, shit, I really screwed the pooch on that. But here’s what I’ve done about it since, right? But it does mean that we’ve got to actually challenge this first principle that we talked about.

Right, those conversations then can happen in real time and in a caring environment because we were trying to fix what we saw as an injustice on the public in the way in which funding was being allocated.

I find that an interesting juxtaposition when you’re talking about a caring environment within the Department of Defense. we have an assumption. Yeah, exactly. And you know, like, we obviously with the US now is the Department of War, right? Because defense wasn’t enough, grab wasn’t aggressive enough.

that it’s a killing machine.

Simon Waller (58:04.59)
You know, so I find that such an interesting concept. A couple of things that came up, that was one thing that struck me. The second of all is we talk about psychological safety as being the problem, as opposed to being the symptom of something else. So can you just share again, like, what is that foundational piece that needs to exist for the layers of…

compassion and care and psychological safety and learning to take place in your experience.

Well, we had…

I’m thinking across a range of different things, so health, defence, transport and infrastructure. I can only go back to the fact that there was a small group of people who actually gave a damn about trying to fix an injustice that they saw and then brought a team together that shared that same level of care to fix that injustice.

that they, you know, because it takes quite an extraordinary effort for people to actually want, you know, and actually be enlivened by the work that they’re doing to create change in an organisation that’s far more complex than any individual in that small team.

Dr Richard Hodge (59:41.294)
So that is the thing, is to make sure that everyone actually gives a damn about fixing that issue. And if they don’t, then you’ll get white-anting and the like. So get that, and if that means you’re working with six people instead of seven, so be it. Much better to deal with that. And then compassion will, and the psychological safety will exist amongst those six or seven people.

There’s a problem.

Sharing a value set around and a mission focus, which is what Mariano Mazzucato talks about, a mission focus to actually fix that injustice. And it doesn’t have to be an injustice, you could be doing something quite…

utilitarian or what have you that is just a good thing to do.

One of the things that comes up in here in a couple of the different vignettes is Cameron’s presence in the system or with the community. The third one here about learning the ruins, it’s like almost like there’s a taking ownership, there is a visiting of…

Simon Waller (01:00:57.954)
know, visiting all the outer districts where the cybercrashes happened and taking ownership and being directly connected. Yes. Do you think like, from again, through the lens of learning, we talk about say, from political system perspective, we have politicians, you know, in Canberra, almost quite separate from the decisions that they make or the impact of the decisions they make.

the stuff that you’re talking about just previously with the Department of Defense, it’s like, like, what is that role of intimacy and immediacy in terms of creating learning opportunities? Do you think that matters? Do you think you can do this from a distance?

No, you can’t do it from a distance. You need to be able to walk into offices. You need to be able to catch people in the coffee queue or what have you. It is very intimate experience, particularly when you’ve got a small group. will not do it from… Because, and that goes to the point really in the third vignette…

that we built safety into the code but not into the relationships. You know, you need the intimacy or the connection in order to build the relationship. But they also need, you know, before you even get into that connection piece, to go back to Tyson’s work, if…

you don’t have their respect to begin with, then forget it. And you’ll only build the respect person on person.

Simon Waller (01:02:51.192)
So we talk about through the lens of say learning with inside organisations. And obviously since COVID there has been this ability for people to work remotely. And on one hand, I think that’s been a really valuable acknowledgement of the wholeness of people’s lives and the different things they have going on. There’s this real tension about having people back in the office. My issue probably has been is that,

Yeah.

Simon Waller (01:03:20.808)
when people are asking to come back to the office, it’s not done with any sense of intention or any sense of elegance in terms of, how would we use that time? Just ripping off what you were saying with Tyson, there isn’t that bit of embassy building. There isn’t a bit where we come together just purely with the intention of building the relationship. It’s like, come to the office with your laptop and sit in that little cubicle and do what you could have done from home.

Yeah, you see that’s very much a mechanistic view versus one that is beyond being pluralist in terms of engagement with the people, but actually enabling much more interpretive approaches to explore the space that is hidden, to see what is emergent.

and that each of us won’t do that, we’ll come up with perhaps with some insights sitting at home, working from home, but if that group has the freedom to understand, well, bound to the mission, compassion and care for each other, and they absolutely give a damn about what they’re setting about doing.

then give them the freedom of that tightly defined brief in order to, after David Ogilvy, to allow them to set their own program.

of where they work, when they need to be, where, and not put these mechanistic controls over them. It comes down to a different approach to governance and allow people to be more self-governing as they are driven towards mission assurance.

Dr Richard Hodge (01:05:29.154)
and assuring that they’re achieving the mission that they have set out to achieve. it’ll, my dear, having said all of that, none of my work that was successful could have been successful without sponsorship from the top. I should say that. It’s something we haven’t covered. And that if anyone here is leading change programmes and creating environments in which learning will occur to uncover a new future,

for an enterprise, for an organisation or the like, if you haven’t got sponsorship don’t even start.

So how does that translate into a social setting? Like there’s obviously a wealth of experience that you’ve had in terms of creating.

learning environments. I think we can talk about change. Change is a form of learning. It’s a form of unlearning and then learning something else. Undoing something and doing something else.

You also have this kind of broader concept of learning that we engage in socially and in our lives. That it’s almost in some ways, you know, we had this conversation about what isn’t learning, like where do you put the boundaries around this thing? But there’s also, even though we can, you know, that’s one question, there’s also, that’s like, at the same time, there is probably better learning environments and less healthy ones. There is, do you know I mean? Like, how do you translate?

Dr Richard Hodge (01:07:08.108)
The concept came up. Because, so I’m smiling because I’m thinking of, you know, my home environment and having worked 21 years inside the Defence Department, you know, and working with admirals and generals and the like, and then coming home only to be told…

very clearly you don’t get to make that decision here and there’s a neat little sign that I love that’s that’s hanging in our kitchen the opinions of the husband of this house and not necessarily those of the household management

Ha

Simon Waller (01:07:52.654)
You

So, you do things carefully, but I think it comes back to the Tyson issues of respect, but being able to move from one environment to the other. None of this is cookie cutter, and I think this is the leadership demand and the followership demand.

to recognise when I might have worked as a leader or come home and dropped into a follower role or at times at home being within a leadership role, depending on the issue at times. So, you know, it’s really quite an adaptive engagement as a leader to know when to let people, like in Vignette 1,

Well, try it. Try running that, you know, chairmanship, as it were, on a rotating basis for a while. Because it’s that participatory knowing that is the, you know, some of the best learning that we can engage in. I think…

an awareness. Does anyone aware of John Vervaeke’s work, Professor John Vervaeke out of Toronto? A couple of heads nodding. He hasn’t written a lot, but he certainly has spoken a lot, and there’s plenty of YouTube videos of him going into deep philosophy. But his simple point…

Dr Richard Hodge (01:09:51.558)
is that there’s four ways of knowing and only one really dominates in today’s Western mindset and that is propositional knowing and it’s the scientific.

method in many respects. know this and until we can prove that we don’t know this, that something else has changed, then we know this. So it’s all that propositional, unitary, rationalist world. And we try to bring everything back to that and run everything from that, which is why, as Tyson points out in the book, it’s not what you’re trying to do, it’s just that you’re going about it in precisely the wrong way. But because it ignores other

ways of learning, of knowing, like Tison’s, Viveki’s second way of, is processual. Now that’s about the doing of things, but you, the learning that you can only get, like from knowledge or learning transferred from master to apprentice, right?

when you think back of building cathedrals and they couldn’t even read or write, but yet they could draw sketches and what have you and yet still communicate and a cathedral could be built over 300 years with no one having the level of education. So where is that these days? It exists, but it’s not recognised as knowing so much.

and because it largely sits as tacit. And then there’s perspectival knowing that if you’re not with us, you’re against us, right? How many times do you hear that out of imperialist colonial presidents?

Dr Richard Hodge (01:11:49.556)
And so there’s one perspective, and you either share ours or you’re against us. But this whole notion of perspectival knowing is really quite opening, it functions around the question of why, but looking at it from multiple different perspectives.

Lastly is his participatory knowing and how many people in this room have had a baby, actually given birth?

two hands. So there are two people, there are only two people in this room that actually know what it’s like to give birth.

Dr Richard Hodge (01:12:44.142)
The rest of us could have read, heard the podcasts and read the books, been to the lectures, but we do not know to the level that those two ladies know. That’s participatory knowing. And that’s what scenarios help support. Because you’re creating an environment in which people can participate.

and create that participatory knowing that actually changes language. And I’ve heard it. I’ve seen it. The language that we used in the scenarios and then that emerged in conversations going back to the chief of army and then coming back in reports and you go, my, army would never have said that two years ago and now look. Right?

because of that participatory knowing.

So we’re going to close out the podcast in a second. One thing I just wanna pick up on, which I think is also very relevant to this future of learning space. We talk about this idea that history is written by the victors. It’s not just written by them, it’s taught by them. And you mentioned there is kind of like other forms of knowledge and information that gets suppressed.

in environments. And I think that that’s something that I see, you know, when we have, like, you even the role of big tech or powerful institutions, that they actually shape what you can, or what’s okay to learn. And again, it brings into a space of like, what is the opportunity for subversive knowledge to be created and shared, and how do we create the spaces for that to happen?

Simon Waller (01:14:33.58)
And I think that, you know, that stuff that you touched on around how to create that care, where are the people who deeply care about this thing with me and how do we get together? Before we close, I know there’s one last part to your scenario which you are going to share and this is gonna lead into the conversation that we collectively have afterwards. And in some ways, I take this almost as being the summary of your thinking or…

And again, that’s not advice, but it’s a reflection of different ways that this learning will take place. Do you want to share what that is? And then what we’re going to do after that is we’ll wrap up the podcast. We can give people a little break and we can come back and then have a conversation amongst ourselves about what this might mean for us.

Dr Richard Hodge (01:15:18.894)
Monday night, 16th of March, 2043. Back home, city lights shimmer across the wetlands. Cameron records his nightly voice note in a ritual every minister now shares publicly. Today reminded me, he says, that leadership isn’t one world. It’s a…

I should say at least three. In one, people fear the future. In another, they try to manage it. In a few rare places, they co-create it. My work is to move between them without losing compassion or pretending one cancels out the others.

Maybe learning now means staying awake amid contradictions, noticing what matters, reframing when it shifts, and correcting myself before the system does it for me. Some things move fast, others slow. But I wonder if slow learning can ever be as satisfying as slow food.

He steps into the balcony, below solar drones hum, laughter drifts from the rooftop cafe. The city still smells faintly of smoke, but the stars are visible. He takes that as progress in a fearful, transactional, and regenerative world.

Awesome. So please join me in thanking Richard for sharing some of his knowledge and wisdom with us tonight.

Simon Waller (01:16:52.366)
Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Richard’s going to stay around. We’re gonna have, as I said, we’re gonna shift the gears now. What I’d you to do is get a chance to stand up, stretch, grab yourself a drink if you’d like to do so. Come back and then sit down and then we’re gonna explore a little bit about this idea of what does learning mean for us in the future? How does the conversation that we’ve had and conversation with each other maybe shape our own perspectives on learning and what we might do with that next. So thanks again Richard for joining us on the podcast.

Thank you, Please take a break, jump up, grab yourself a drink. We’ll come back in about five, minutes time. Thank you.