Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
An unusual business conversation, with Nathalie Nahai
36 Plays4 months ago
When it comes to emerging technologies, businesses think a lot about commercial and operational tactics, but often forget to consider the cultural changes that new technology will bring, and the responsibility for guiding those cultural shifts in a positive direction. We may be making this mistake with AI – there are a lot more reports on how your business can use ChatGPT than there are reflections on how AI will change how we live, love, and learn.
There is no one better placed to consider the intersection of technology and culture than Nathalie Nahai. Nathalie is a rare polymath with deep expertise in tech, marketing and psychology. Her first book, 'Webs of Influence', went on to become an international bestseller, and, alongside her new book, ‘Business Unusual’, serves as the cornerstone for her work with clients including Google, Accenture, Unilever, and Harvard Business Review. If that’s not impressive enough, she is a talented artist and musician to boot.
Get in touch with Acquis Cortico-X here.
Follow Acquis Cortico-X on LinkedIn here.
Visit Nathalie's website here.
Follow Nathalie on LinkedIn here.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Cordico X and Podcast Purpose
00:00:00
Speaker
Cordico X is an experience-led transformation business that partners with clients and technology companies to drive digital acceleration. We are experience activists, passionate about elevating everyday human experiences through the belief that what's best for people is what's best for an organization. Reach out to us for a chat. A link is in the show notes.
00:00:35
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Speaking from Experience from CorticoX, where we speak to the people with experience of experience. I'm Will Kingston.
Impact of iPhone on Business and Culture
00:00:45
Speaker
The iPhone was released in 2007. In some respects, the business world was quick to recognize its potential. I still recall commentators and consultants talking about how mobile first would change customer service, and how apps would revolutionize purchasing journeys. and how Apple would conquer the world. All largely true. But in another sense, there were a lot of things we missed. We underestimated the impact smartphones would have on children. We didn't see the scale of the addiction that so many would have to their phone. And we didn't prepare ourselves for the cultural and social changes that this new technology would have on how we live our lives.
00:01:29
Speaker
It's a consistent theme of corporate responses to new technologies. We think a lot about business tactics, but we often forget to focus on the cultural changes that new technology will bring and the responsibility for guiding those cultural shifts in a positive direction.
AI's Business and Cultural Impacts
00:01:46
Speaker
I fear we are making the same mistake with AI. There's a lot more reports on how your business can use chat GPT than there are reflections on how AI will change how we live, love, and learn. To help me on that front, I am delighted to be joined by Natalie Nahai. Natalie is a rare polymath with deep expertise in tech, marketing, and psychology. Her first book, Webs of Influence, went on to become an international bestseller. And alongside her new book, Business Unusual, serves as the cornerstone for her work with clients, including Google, Accenture, Unilever, and Harvard Business Review, among others.
00:02:28
Speaker
If that's not impressive enough, she is a talented artist and musician to boot. Natalie, welcome to Speaking from Experience. Thanks for having me Will, nice to see you. Lovely to see you. Your LinkedIn is wonderful for a lazy interviewer like me because you put up excellent questions every week. So I've just shamelessly lifted a few of those. Excellent. To start, I want to think about creativity. So I know that you're passionate about how generative AI and emerging technologies might influence the creative process.
00:03:02
Speaker
My first question
AI and the Nature of Creativity
00:03:04
Speaker
would be, and it may be a provocative one, is is will AI spell the death of creativity? No, but it could certainly hobble it in the short term and augment it in other ways. I think it's such a tricky one because first it has to be this question of what do we mean when we talk about creativity? Because creativity can mean many things depending on if you're thinking about specialisms such as art, music. theatre, poetry, or whether you're thinking about it in terms of its application to the ways in which we think about the world, solve problems, the ways in which we live. And a beautiful book that's obviously become very popular in recent months, The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, talks about creativity as
00:03:44
Speaker
almost like a way of living, being in service to life. And so I think if we think of it from that perspective as something that we engage in as a process, then if we outsource that process in large part to any kind of external tool, in particular, if it's something which which has the sort of muscle as many of the generative AI platforms that exist out there, then we're impoverishing ourselves of the process that can lead to internal change, different ways of conceiving different ideas, and that can well, cause perhaps unintended consequences. So if we become used to just outsourcing the creative process to our tools, we stop doing it ourselves. And then I think actually on an existential level, it can leave us feeling really hollow. And so that's one aspect. On the flip side, if you have people who didn't get the chance to learn an instrument as a kid, or they don't have access to creative tools that otherwise, you know, they might have had access to if they'd been in different circumstances, and then you get
00:04:43
Speaker
the ability to play on, I don't know, it could be any of these creative platforms, to create music or to express yourself without having to lift a paintbrush, but you can still play with color. but that's That also speaks to the soul. So I think there's kind of, it's a complicated one. Being someone who likes to make music in an analog way with voice and guitar and with others and to pick up a paintbrush, I personally think that there is beauty and value in the slow and sometimes grinding aspects of the process of creativity, and that that also can serve as an antidote to the rapidity with which we engage with the world at large.
Learning vs. Innate Creativity: Can it be Taught?
00:05:21
Speaker
So that oh yeah, there's a lot to unpack. I feel like I could go on quite a lot longer. I'll throw the poll back to you.
00:05:26
Speaker
And we we will unpack those elements, but a more foundational question about creativity came to mind for me as you were speaking there. You obviously are passionate about the creative process term that you mentioned. And this came up in ah and a conversation I had on a different podcast with the author, Jeffrey Archer. And I posed the question to him as someone who is obviously a creative person as you are. Do you think creativity and that creative process is something that can be learned? Or do you think creativity is innate? I'm really curious what he said. Do you want to share?
00:05:58
Speaker
so you don'tbi my once so He thinks that you can get to a a baseline level, but true creative genius is probably innate. Interesting. So I kind of think with this, it's kind of like, and I like this idea when it comes to things like capacities that we have. If you think of a specific creative capacity, almost like a rubber band and someone might have a really stretchy long rubber band that can go on and on until it snaps and other people might have a smaller, tighter rubber band, what have you. I think there is always capacity for growth expansion, for augmenting our natural tendencies and abilities.
00:06:40
Speaker
I think some people, as far as I can tell, are born with a greater propensity towards certain creative pursuits. So for instance, in my household, my brother was just more adept at the piano than I was, even though I love the piano, but he would pick things up in a different way, whereas I was more adept with the paintbrush and the pencil. And yet, if you put both of us
Can Machines Achieve True Creativity?
00:07:00
Speaker
in the right kind of context, we can both augment our capacities in almost an unrecognizable way. Like, for instance, when I came to Barcelona to do the Barcelona Academy of Art term out of the three and a half year program, three year program, the paintings and drawings that you did at the beginning
00:07:15
Speaker
By the end of the programme, we've spent three and a half years from morning till evening, looking, drawing, refining, having a breakdown, and then starting again. It does really speak to the perseverance, the application of skill. And when you think about people like Yo-Yo Ma, for instance, are people who are pillars of technique and creativity or the great jazz musicians who have extraordinary technical ability. It's that kind of, I think with a certain focus, it's that kind of ability to commit yourself
00:07:47
Speaker
to technical brilliance that allows, if you let it, the flow to happen when you can just surrender yourself to whatever wants to come through you. Which sounds quite woo, but it's it's an experience which I think many artists of various stripes would would give voice to. now i So when it comes to machines, you know it could say, okay, well, it can create something which is extraordinarily impressive, but it's creating that from the directions and prompts for now of a human. So it's is kind of working off a basis of instructions. And it can combine novel ideas together, which is another way of forming creativity, but I think often creativity comes from a desire to express or sublimate
00:08:34
Speaker
an emotional state that we're in to be able to give it life, to give it some things, to give ourselves respite or to capture something beautiful. And I wonder if that kind of quality of emotion could ever exist. I mean, maybe it could in machines, but I mean, that's a fascinating question. the It's a dramatic simplification, but at the moment, you look at a large language model, for example, and it really is an aggregator. It takes all of the different pieces of information that are out there and then it puts them together to give you an answer to a question. And I wonder whether AI will get to the next step of being able to create genuinely new mind-blowing things because at the moment,
00:09:19
Speaker
you know If you ask Chachapiti to give you an answer to a question, I actually think you get a solid but largely beige kind of bland answer. Whether it will actually to be able to create true creative genius, you know whether we will get the next Shakespeare from ah coming out as a machine, that to me is an interesting question. I don't know whether you you have an answer to it. I've had a few common debates on LinkedIn about this. like I think that a lot of creativity, and this is a subjective sense, is connected to the inherent chaos in the world. So there's chaos and order. and We can think, I mean, obviously everything is connected, but there needs to be an element of openness to chaos for things to those come to be destroyed and then something new to emerge. And I think with machines,
00:10:05
Speaker
I mean, I am actually a sci-fi nerd. I loved Star Trek growing up. And one of my favorite characters was Data. And he's this humanoid robot who is always striving to become more human in his way of relating to and understanding the world. And I always had a soft spot for him. And I think it's because there is something about the, maybe this is going off on one, but like the beauty and finitude and complexity of human life and the struggle to orient towards love in a world that is unpredictable and at times painful. But that kind of, I don't know if
00:10:41
Speaker
unless we're able to create some kind of interiority for machine-based experiences to kind of insole the machine, which may well be possible. I don't know if they are capable or would be capable of real creativity because there has to be that interiority, I think a desire for connection to express one's experience, an openness to that chaos.
Art vs. Automation: Beyond Efficiency
00:11:02
Speaker
I don't know. But then, you know, if you think about how i Yeah, I mean then you get into questions of things like sentience and I'm not particularly well equipped to talk about that so much. What are your thoughts? I had a ah dark thought in a conversation with Agnieszka Palat, who is an artist who is very well known for basically using
00:11:24
Speaker
robotic dogs to help paint artworks. um It sounds apocalyptic. She's just finished a residency at SpaceX as the in-house artist, but she had a thought. She said, if we do get to that point of sentience, Even today, you know it's not outside. Who knows? There could be the little odd flicker or spark of sentience in some of the machines that we are using, for example, you know that she would use in her exhibitions. Will future generations of machines look back at our treatment of machines today as the equivalent of slavery in this generation? and She said, this is not as extreme a thought as you may
00:12:03
Speaker
I will take us to a creative sphere that you are passionate about, just art. There is a lovely line that I've heard from you. Art is the antidote to automation. What do you mean by that? So art, the process of creating, and I don't mean just painting or have it could be music or poetry or the art of making a beautiful dinner for your friends or the art of conversation. So anything to which we we lend a quality of attention that seeks out that which is beautiful or meaningful, because sometimes art can be devastating. I think there is something about the quality of attention and engagement which we need to be able to offer or step into that is the opposite of the state in which we are when we automate things. So automation to my mind
00:12:54
Speaker
conjures ideas of repetition, of predictability. If we think about it from the perspective of the earliest machines, industrial revolution, I'm thinking of perhaps like assembly lines. And so there is a very repetitious element to things where the constituent parts of a machine might be dealt with separately. And so there's a reduction of the whole into smaller elements. And then people are kind of invited to just do or instructed to just do one tiny part of the much bigger process. Yeah,
Balancing Creativity and Process in Business
00:13:23
Speaker
and obviously creativity and art, it's not at all like that. And I think sometimes, especially in times when we are so focused on efficiency, predictability, optimization, performance, that kind of that that drive towards production, which can also impact the art world. But when we've got all of those things kind of hollering at us saying, you know, you've got to be a more efficient human, be a more efficient cog in the machine. Art demands something different. It's about stepping into a space in which
00:13:53
Speaker
We're confronted with ourselves, I think, and with the questions that perhaps we might normally distract ourselves from or the loss we might feel or the beauty might aspire to. It's kind of all of those things that I think lead to a greater engagement with the eudaimonic, the meaningful, the the good life, let's say, what it means to be alive. And I think a lot of automation takes us into a space where we're We're kind of just engaging in repetitive behavior without thinking too much about it, without having to feel. And you could even say that about you know the ways in which we get entrained by the media that we consume. It's kind of just, just keep scrolling, just keep scrolling before you know it. You've done nothing productive. You've hijacked your your nervous system and you're not in a space to create because you're so kind of wired.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah. An interesting analogy. This represents a challenge for businesses, right? Because so much of business is based on automation and process and standardization and efficiency. Right. To a large extent, that is that is reasonable and necessary. But in that type of environment, perhaps on an individual level, how can successful business leaders go about creating or cultivating a spirit of creativity in that process and automisation heavy environment.
00:15:13
Speaker
Yeah. So I was chatting the other day with a chap called Adam Hawkins over at LinkedIn, and he said something very interesting about the future of work. It was for an event that I was speaking at, and he was talking about how up until now we've been thinking about recruitment in terms of roles and responsibilities. And when we're thinking about augmentation through technologies, it can be more helpful to think about skills and tasks. And so to your point about the automation, you can say, okay, well, I naturally know I could say I could do these sorts of tasks. I'll write posts on LinkedIn or, you know, research something for a book or, host a conversation, whatever it might be, that the kind of the tasks that need to happen of those tasks, many of them will be something that we can automate through AI tools. On the flip side, the skills, so the interpersonal connections, the emotional intelligence, the ability to banter, to look at the zeitgeist, to infer based off of perhaps somatic sensations what might be going and on in a conversation that
00:16:04
Speaker
a machine might not pick up or um an ability to think about things from a novel perspective, which again comes back to a point around creativity. All of those sorts of skills or capacities are the domain of the creative of the creative mind. So it's not just about
00:16:21
Speaker
It's not just about kind of augmenting everything through tech, but of saying, okay, where are the areas where businesses and leaders thinking about how they deal with the the organizational culture? Where are the areas where they could really benefit from unusual thinking, creativity? And I think actually, when it comes to even road testing, what AI and emerging technologies can do, a lot of the creativity within a culture can come from how do we test these things to see if they're trying to do, to see if they're achieving what we want them to do. So designing road tests for them, saying, okay, well, we think
00:16:53
Speaker
this particular platform can do X, Y, and Z. This is what we'd like it to do, the impact we'd like it to have, and come up with creative ways of testing it. so it can It's more an approach than anything else, and then knowing that actually tasks and skills are potentially different sets and knowing when to bring AI into the mix for the tasks and when to increase the creativity on the skills. Follow up question to that. What I've seen in my career is that there are organizations that are quite good at having a test and learn mentality in a part of the business. So an innovation lab, for example, or a customer experience team or a digital function. Then they really struggle to scale out that way of thinking or that approach to the core of the business. yeah what are What are some ways that you can go from taking test and learn and creative thinking from the periphery to the core?
00:17:46
Speaker
I think it's interesting in answering that question to look at what are the different contextual constraints and expectations within each. so I've also been to some of these companies where there's like this this kind of R and&D department, which is literally in a different building and they get totally different incentives. in terms of how they approach a particular challenge. So it might be, well, we're not going to penalize you if you fail. We're going to give you this much budget. And if over the course of usually a longer timeline over 18 months, let's say, you have managed to figure one thing out that is really beneficial to the business out of maybe 10, then we'll reward you. So that in itself, you're creating an environment which is one of
00:18:24
Speaker
greater experimentation, you're not penalizing quote-unquote failure, you're incentivizing behaviors that lead towards learning and that any sort of failure is perceived as something constructive if you're then using it to inform your future decisions. And so there's something around ways in which risk and creativity are perceived and responded to. I think the other thing that I found in those sorts of groups is there's more of a flat kind of decentralized decision-making ah would you wanna call it like a fabric so like instead of it being very hierarchical where you've got one person saying right well the box stops with me and i'm gonna make the decisions and that's it so i'll listen to your opinions but if i don't agree with them. It stops here instead of that the most successful ones tend to devolve.
00:19:09
Speaker
autonomy and agency more evenly among the participants. So it's more of a flat structure, which means that people generally step up and take greater responsibility. If something goes wrong, often they'll voice it sooner. And so you end up with this much more resilient, flexible, ecosystemically resilient team where everyone's pulling in a more positive direction. And if we want to expand that to other parts of a business, you have to figure out how to move some of those cultural norms incentives approaches, that psychological safety of if you speak up, you're not going to get penalized in terms of your prospects going forward. All of those qualities need to be somehow brought into the wider organization. But of course, then you've got issues around control, around leadership structures, and it can be quite difficult, especially in a company where there's lots and lots of managers.
00:19:58
Speaker
to encourage people to give up a little bit of that control and give it back to the people who are their quote unquote underlings. So there's, yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot that's involved in that transition.
Maintaining Human Connection in a Digital World
00:20:11
Speaker
Hmm. I want to turn to a separate but related area to creativity and that is human connection and how we engage with each other. And again, I will lift a question from, ah from LinkedIn. It's a really nice one. How can we prioritize human connection in an increasingly AI mediated world? So do you want me to talk to my own question? Yes, please please. Well, I've been having lots of conversations about this recently. I've been to various symposia and conferences. And one of the things that keeps coming back, actually, and especially within the context of there being so many elections this year. So in terms of things like political manipulation and how do you get people to, to foment some kind of resilience against
00:20:54
Speaker
undue influence from virtual agents, let's say. So like it it spans all sorts of different territories. But one of the common threads, which sounds extraordinarily simple, is community. It's repetitive, coming together, having rituals together. It could even just be like a cheeky drink down the pub on a Friday night. Or you know if you're not drinking, it could be like a ah Friday afternoon walk around your local park or whatever it is. But it has to be in-person gatherings which are regular, which are intrinsically motivating, and which orient towards creating shared experiences and a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. um this is This is one of the oldest, oldest, oldest lessons. It's just that it's so easy for us to get so distracted in
00:21:40
Speaker
You know our devices which seeks to kind of hook us in and then atomize us. It's such an easy thing to forget and yet it's one of the most fundamental powerful ways of getting people to remember what it is to belong and to prioritize that in terms of the the ways in which they relate to others and it translates on zoom like you and I have actually met in person and it makes a difference in terms of knowing where our bodies are situated in space. I know that you're taller than me. I mean, it doesn't take much to be taller than me. I know that you're taller than me. I've shaken your hand. We've shared food together. And that makes for a much richer interaction once you move back online. And there's some interesting research that backs this up. So it's taking things offline and having that interpersonal connection, those sort of unexpected moments of banter or, you know, I'm quite a clumsy person. So, you know, if someone drops something and then you get to see them in a different light and it ferments that kind of, you know, connection that,
00:22:29
Speaker
that might be endearing that you would have no access to on just a basic screen communication. All of that stuff makes a huge difference in terms of enabling us to retain and prioritize that human contact. Potentially a provocative follow-up question to that is, do you think it is harder for a remote business to build a great culture? And let's let's say a remote only business to build a great culture. I don't know about this. so i've i've heard I've heard lots of different things from different people. I've heard some some advocates for the kind of people have to be in the office at least three days a week, because otherwise it's really hard to kind of get that sense of belonging. And then I've met other people for whom even before the pandemic, a dispersed remote team was the norm for them anyway, because they were international and they're coming together to work on projects. I think it's a case by case type of
00:23:24
Speaker
situation where some companies and some individuals don't miss it so much if they have it um if sorry if they don't have it. That being said, I would tend towards the idea that the most exciting work happens when you're with others. So I think the best approach, the more fully satisfying creative approaches would be one that is a mixed one. um Because it is nice to have the flexibility to work away, but I don't know. Yeah, that's that's quite a subjective one to answer, I think. Well, you've built your career and your reputation on an expertise around online spaces and how you can build or or create experience in the online realm. What are some principles for businesses that are trying to create cultures and create engagement through the online realm? How can they do that stuff well?
00:24:19
Speaker
So I think, so maybe let's specify specific realms. I think one of the things, especially now that is different to a few years ago is I think many people have a sense of fatigue of doing things online all the time when they needn't be done online all the time, which is why we're hearing a lot more about the rise of digital doubles or agents. You could send your virtual double to go and attend meetings because you want to be stuck in it all day. So I think we have to be very intentional about how we use virtual spaces the most effectively as possible and that means probably reassessing do we need to be sending all these emails or do we need to be having x number of meetings when actually these are the most important things will only have very specific meetings that are high impact with all the people who need to be there at specific times they're well facilitated so that you're making it count because I think a lot of the issues that we're finding with maintaining that human connection through virtual means
00:25:13
Speaker
is that people are just so bored and tired of staring at their screens all day you're not gonna get the best from them so it's about how do you reduce the amount of screen time while making the amount of screen time that people have when they're online making it count and that's gonna look different for different companies but then there's also other things that one can do so if you're thinking about psychological safety if you're thinking about things like making sure that the quietest voices are heard making sure that honest feedback is invited if you're at the early stages where you're a bit scared of not being able to speak up, making sure that you can give feedback anonymously.
Ethical Concerns of Data Use in AI
00:25:45
Speaker
But the the ideal would be to have a system in which people feel like they are valued contributors and encouraged to share how they feel and what they want from their company and where they see mistakes happening, et cetera, and to offer other suggestions of how to do things differently. But all of that takes time. So it's about knowing where you're at,
00:26:04
Speaker
actually being open to the feedback of your employees and realizing when you actually need to cut back on the amount of screen time because it's diluting its potency, so to speak. And there's some really, I think, simple things that companies can do to that effect, like encouraging people to go for walking meetings or doing an old fashioned kind of walking meeting and chatting over the phone as opposed to a Zoom meeting. yeah Um, I think we can sometimes over-engineer this sort of stuff. And there are some really simple things you can do. Let's go to privacy. I've heard you discuss, it was either a keynote or an interview, the the dark side of personalization. What is the dark side of personalization? Oh, I mean, there's quite a lot of dark sides, but personalization is predicated on the ability of a company to use data about you, to offer you experiences, content interactions.
00:26:55
Speaker
that you are more predisposed to respond to in a positive manner or to give your attention to, let's say, because sometimes it can be about, you know, moral indignation or outrage, and that's not going to be particularly positive, but it is going to give you that desire to connect to the content. So I think it's about the data issue. Who has access to your data? Is there transparency about the players involved, what they're doing with it, how it will be used, how it's being stored, your ability to I suppose stop, stop certain parties from accessing it informed consent. So for instance, with a GDPR and with Instagram recently, and now with meta more broadly. And also there's some queries around Apple and AI with AI platforms.
00:27:37
Speaker
many of them scraping indiscriminately all kinds of data. I mean, that goes into all sorts of issues around copyright and fair use and all this stuff. But in Europe in particular, many citizens have complained about the practices going against GDPR, invading people's privacy and taking data without their consent. And so they've had to roll back a lot of their ah features, let's say, or approaches which I think personally as someone who cares about privacy is a really good thing because I think one innovates really well if you have constraints that are pro human. For instance, seatbelts in cars, you know, if you can innovate within the constraints of safety, you end up with extraordinary vehicles who can go fast and the death rates come down or in planes, what have you.
00:28:20
Speaker
And so that kind of question of who gets my data, how are they using it, especially in a world in which hyper-personalization can be so persuasive and we don't really have the means with which to increasingly with which to assess whether the content we're watching is deep faked or not. I mean, we're at quite a critical point in terms of how we approach data persuasion, synthetic relationships and privacy is at the heart of
Embedding Ethics in AI Adoption
00:28:47
Speaker
that debate. So it's really important. Yeah, and I would add to that as a practical consideration for businesses, is the value exchange with data worthwhile for the customer? So I think if customers go, well, you're getting all of this personal information from me and really you're going to use it to try and flog more products or you know to try and inform your own business strategy.
00:29:10
Speaker
me I don't think that's a fair value exchange, but I'm more willing to give you certain personal data if that then will say improve the experience that gets delivered to me or improve my specific relationship with you. I think it has to be quite sincere in that regard as opposed to just a kind of a shameless attempt to try and monetize data for a business's own purposes. Yeah. And then if you're locking someone in, I don't know if you were kind of witnessing them the debacle around Adobe's terms of service that. i had read in some places were ostensibly because they hadn't actually updated them. i I don't know. Whatever the reasons, there was an outcry and I cried out against it too a couple of weeks ago where in order to keep using the Adobe suites um the the adobe suitese of tools, which I do on a frequent basis, people had to consent to new terms of service. It basically meant that they could use AI to
00:30:04
Speaker
Scrape anything so straight away. You've got all these people who are working on sensitive information who may have signed and ndas with clients that are having all of these Legal contracts breached because the company that they're working with have made them sign terms of service that contravene the ways in which they have pledged to their clients, they will deal with their data. And so yeah and obviously now they're sort of ah they kind of got back to people and said, no, no, no, we didn't mean it. We're going to fix this. But it's that kind of thing. It's the kind of more than anything else, it's this this just laissez-faire approach of large companies who just go,
00:30:42
Speaker
we're just gonna suck it and see it's better to ask for ah forgiveness and permission and it shouldn't be something which is left to customers to point out and to hold up a mirror to companies and say look. Sort it out specially people who. paying Yeah, I mean it's just, ah but I think this is a really interesting stage that we're going through where more people are starting to recognize the value of privacy and we're going to see, in my opinion, more companies that deal with privacy, well, start to challenge the bigger players because there's so many issues around it.
00:31:16
Speaker
Well, the the Adobe example raises, I think, a very important question. That is, what are some practical ways that businesses can go ah about embedding ethics and set of values into how they pursue the adoption of AI and new technologies? I mean, that's, again, that's a tricky one because I think outside of the realm of legislating for these things, so bringing values into actual principles and practices that you can account for. it's You're kind of basically asking people to do the right thing for the right reasons. And there will be companies that do. i mean Look at places like Patagonia, where there's there's a fierce sense of adhering to certain values. In the book in Business Unusual, I was talking about ways in which to
00:32:00
Speaker
ensure the integrity of a business by looking at the four C's framework and that might be helpful here. So the first C is making a public commitment to certain values and being clear about how they translate into actual principles and behaviors. So if we value honesty, what does that mean? Does that mean we're going to start using blockchain technology so we can demonstrate provenance or whatever it might be? So a commitment to specific values. The second one is congruence in word and deed. So once you've said you're going to do something, do it. The third is around consistency. So building that track record. So when, if at some point the ah the shit hits the band, people are more likely to go, okay, well, but we can see from your record that you've been trying for this and we'll take it within the wider context of your behavior. So third part, you can establish the integrity of the consistency of behavior. And the last one is coherence. So doing the right thing for the right reason. And this is harder, but it basically means
00:32:52
Speaker
at times doing things that are perhaps financially costly, but that prove that you care about certain values even over and above your bottom line. So if that means protecting customer data, but it means that the valuation of your company is a bit lower because you're not giving access to these big companies that want to gobble you up to all of the data, um whatever, you're going to take a bit of a hit in terms of valuation or perhaps quite a bit of a hit, but then you're building trust with customers into the future. And then we know that Gen A and Gen Z are particularly sensitive to the ways in which companies can abuse customer data. So it goes without saying that you're probably future proofing your business if you take those values into consideration.
00:33:34
Speaker
Yeah, I haven't heard that four C's framework before. I think that's excellent. And you're right, that final C around coherence and having the guts to be able to take a short term hit, knowing that it's the right thing to do, but also being clever enough to say, look, this probably in the long term results in more value for us because doing the right thing is is not just the principle thing to do, but also I think in the long term, a good business decision.
Conclusion and Follow Natalie Nahai
00:33:59
Speaker
Natalie, how can people stay up to date with what you are doing and get in touch with you? Well, I'm quite active on LinkedIn at Natalie Nahai. I'm also on nathalinahi.com. If you're interested in my art, go to nathalinahi dot.art. And to set up to date with the different interviews, exploring our relationship with technology, one another and the living world, check out In Conversation with Natalie Nahai on Apple, Spotify. And whenever you find your, wherever you find your podcasts. Thanks for this these questions. I've been so interesting. well
00:34:25
Speaker
My pleasure, Natalie. All of those links are in the show notes by the books. They're wonderful. Subscribe to the podcast, pick up an artwork at the same time, whilst you're at it. Natalie, I think you are one of the most fascinating thinkers in the business world today, and it is the ability to bring together strands from so many different areas. I think Einstein called it combinatory play. I just find it fascinating. You do it so well. Keep doing what you're doing and thank you for coming on the show today. Thank you.