Neale 00:00
Hello and welcome to another episode of Another Bright Spark Podcast. I’m Neale Mighall, and my guest today is board veteran, John Zafar. John, welcome.
John 00:08
Hi Neale!
Neale 00:08
I say board veteran. It’s more like board superhero. I’ve done some research and the number of companies and organisations that you’ve worked for and that you’ve gone into mentoring. It’s quite extensive. 25 years plus without betraying your age, obviously.
John 00:23
Yes! There’s a range of emotions that come to mind with that sentence. Well, one is it makes me sound as if I can’t commit to a relationship. Two, the word veteran makes me feel very old. And then when you say 25 years, I definitely…
Neale 00:40
It puts the nail into the coffin.
John 00:42
… feel very old. So, but thank you, yeah.
Neale 00:45
I mean, you’re… The organisations that you sit on board, that you’ve gone through, certainly in the recent years, are profit for purpose and organisations that make a difference. I read an interview that you felt work was an inclusive place, DEI is a big thing, and it comes from childhood. Are you happy to share that story? It felt really powerful.
John 01:04
Yeah, of course. No, thank you. Blimey, we’re getting into the emotional stuff straight away.
Neale 01:10
It’s a hard hitting podcast.
John 01:12
Can I make you cry? Maybe. It’s very straightforward. But so inclusion, yeah, massively important to me. How I came about to become Chairman of Inclusive Employers. So just a bit of background on that first. Inclusive Employers is the largest training consulting company in the inclusion space in Europe. And it was acquired by Palatine Private Equity’s Impact Fund. And that’s a fund that invests in companies where it is profit for purpose. I’ve known Palatine for 15 years. And unbeknownst to me, my name was put forward as somebody they thought might be a good chair for the business. And it was one of those situations where the founders were staying on for about a year. So the chair’s role was to work with founders who’ve never worked with PE before. And then also to help them to find a successor, a leader for the company, which we did. But firstly, to be asked to be on the shortlist was a surprise. And then to actually be offered the role was an honour, really. And everybody in Inclusive Employers has some form of lived experience of exclusion. And that could be gender related. It could be other aspects of protected characteristics.
Neale 02:40
Sexual orientation or…
John 02:42
Absolutely. And in my case, so my name is Persian by origin, apparently, which is now Iran and Iraq some time ago. And my father was born in India. And my mother was English, Irish, and German. They’ve both sadly passed away now. But my brother and I were brought up as mixed race children in a village in Hertfordshire where there were very few brown-skinned people. And so consequently, we sort of had, this is in the early 60s, I was born in 62. We had all different kinds of reaction to that. And some of that was as benign, if you want to call it that, as people stopping in the street and literally staring as we walked by. My mother was blond, green-eyed. My father was a very brown skinned black hair. He was Indian. He looked Indian. So we were an oddity. And that was for grown-ups. And for children, there were obviously some kids who thought, because we’re different, that we can be…
Neale 04:01
… you can make fun of and pick on and yeah
John 04:02
So that resulted in some form of, you’d call it abuse these days, you know, or bullying and that would either be verbal or some form of psychological, often physical. The most extreme thing that happened to me was one boy at the school started trying to strangle me with my own tie in a woodwork lesson and the woodwork teacher was at the back taking bets with the kids to see what would happen next.
Neale 04:29
So sorry!
John 04:30
So that’s as absurd and as crazy as it gets.
John 04:52
So so I was very fortunate, however, that when I entered the workplace, for reasons that, you know, I just can’t quite figure out, but as soon as I entered the workplace, all that skin, you know, having a bronze surname, yeah, and as you say, point of difference, different colour of skin, just suddenly seemed to vanish. And I was never knowingly aware of being, if you like, racially profiled or being excluded because of my skin colour and my name. I might have been excluded because people thought I was a blithering idiot. I was incompetent. I had no experience.
Neale 05:35
Poor personal hygiene. Yeah, yeah.
John 05:37
A range of different options there, yeah. I could have been excluded on very, very fair grounds. But I never experienced that in the workplace. So, although, you know, my childhood was, you know, not easy, challenging, you know, for 10 years, 5 to 15, roughly, my adult life, from that perspective, I only have ever had one incident which occurred in a bar and some guy decided that he didn’t like the look of me and, you know, and was rather obnoxious. But other than that, yeah, it’s been better. Yeah, I’ve been okay. But the opportunity to work with Inclusive Employers, you know, fundamentally is about making a difference. And if I help them grow, the way I talk about performance for us is that it’s a coin with two sides. So on one side, you’ve got financial performance and on the other side, you have impact. And it’s really trying to make sure that these two things work in lockstep together.
Neale 06:16
And grow together.
John 06:16
And grow together. So it can’t be one that leads the other. If you haven’t got a commercial business, you can’t you know
Neale 06:48
Justify the inclusion and inclusivity…
John 06:50
You can’t sustain it.
Neale 06:51
If you can’t increase the inclusivity, then why are you in business to make profit?
John 06:56
Indeed, certainly, so the other thing I’ve learned about that part of the world and from a business point of view is that Inclusive Employers, is interesting enough, it’s in the minority of companies working around training and consulting in that whole space because typically organisations are working around one protected characteristic, Stonewall being one of the best examples of that, supporting the LGBTQ+ community. So for inclusion, everybody has a seat at the table, that’s what we fight for.
Neale 07:35
It’s interesting, you know, I was just thinking while you were talking about, you’re saying about the benign sort of, we’d call it racism because it was, or the exclusion. I think sometimes if you’re walking down the street and someone avoids you or doesn’t say anything, looks shocked, and not just in racism, but in any sort of prejudice, that can be just as cutting as, you know, verbal abuse or physical abuse, that sense of not belonging.
John 08:02
Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. I suppose, you know, one of the things that it ended up doing for me, you know, there’s an old-fashioned expression of what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And in that sense, being more self-sufficient, you know, being okay, being in my own company, that actually turned out to be very good training when you become a CEO, or even as many chair people will tell you.
Neale 08:34
It can be lonely.
John 08:35
It can be very lonely in those roles. So actually, in many ways, psychologically, that sort of was my training ground.
Neale 08:44
Fantastic. Okay, let’s get into it. There’s lots of questions that I want to ask you about your opinion on being on all these different boards, your experience, but let’s go straight into inclusivity, DEI. What are the benefits of being inclusive and having a wide range of different individuals working in an organisation? Give me the pitch. Come on, John. Give you the pitch. Give me the pitch. Because there are going to be lots of people watching this who work for organisations. Why should they have a more open approach?
John 09:15
Yeah. And there would be different voices in my head in terms of how to respond to that, some of which would be…
Neale 09:22
…diverse voices.
John 09:24
Well, some of which would be, you know, why does that question need to be asked? So you start really with that, which is why would inclusion need to be a thing? And, you know, that’s I think quite a powerful point, which is that if we’re an inclusive society, then actually we’re not asking whether we need to be inclusive or not. So I think that that’s, you know, pretty key in terms of fundamentally understanding, well, so what is inclusion? Inclusion is what it says on the tin. Everybody around the table is included. You’re not looking for reasons to exclude or to include. But in terms of, so again, you’ve got broadly speaking, two or three different lenses that you could look at that question. One is the sort of moral and social purpose that says, well, everybody can be around the table apart from that person there. There are many people that might say, I agree, but there would be as many and hopefully more people that would say, I disagree. Everybody has a seat at the table. So you’ve got the moral sense, you’ve got the social sense, which is that culturally, we are a better society or better environment or a better group of people if we have, if we are inclusive, if anybody is able to become part of whatever activity we’re doing. Then you’ve got the commercial lens, which is, you know, SFW, so flaming what, what if we are inclusive, what does that really mean from a bottom line perspective? And again, there are different parts to that. One is, if you’re an employer, then your employer brand is represented by the level of inclusion that you represent as an employer. And so if you’re saying we’re not inclusive as an employer, then essentially in your employer brand, you’re saying you can come to work here, but you can’t and neither can you. So therefore for employers that want to be competitive, they have to attract the best talent. But if they are exclusive or excluding, then of course they are limiting, you know, the talent pool they can draw people from. That also reflects in terms of their customers. So again, you know, is it important to their customers and their supply chain that they’re inclusive? In some cases they might argue it’s not important. I would argue it always has to be. There are many commercial studies that have been carried out by business schools, by consulting firms, McKinsey’s for example, that would show evidence that those companies that are inclusive attract better talent and grow faster. So then you’re starting to look at the kind of bottom line. Other aspects of that of course include retention. So if the business has a sort of shop window that says, oh, we are inclusive, but you arrive and find that actually the company supports practices where there are microaggressions or lack of inclusive behaviours…
Neale 12:59
They aren’t going to stay long.
John 12:59
Then of course they are going to leave. Again, that provides a cost. So from a financial perspective, you do start to see that there’s a wear and tear on profits, on balance sheet, on cash, and fundamentally on shareholder value or the enterprise value if it’s a public sector body or a not-for-profit organisation.
John 13:21
The third lens is then around what’s effectively now called cognitive diversity. And again, it’s another sort of form of study which says that if you have people in the room who may on the surface appear to be diverse, but are all thinking in the same way. So a good example of that is a company that employs people from the top 25 universities, they must have a degree from top 25 universities, they’ve got to have certain grades, probably middle class, and therefore even though they may have different ethnicity or different gender.
Neale 13:59
… but the same lived experience.
John 14:01
They have very similar lived experience, same values, same outlook on life, and the same form of education, same life experiences. So consequently, they think and act the same way, and that lack of cognitive diversity is something that can really generate a cost. The cost isn’t always realized immediately, so you’re not seeing examples where you point it out and say, that’s because we didn’t have cognitive diversity.
Neale 14:32
But there’s a lack of maybe thinking outside the box, you think in the same way then. Absolutely. The way I was, so Ignys, we have, I mean, it’s very, what we call ‘neurospicy’. I love that. No one has like, well, some may have a diagnosis, but clearly, you know, I can tell, I can recognize my own. We have a lot of people who, you know, are certainly on the spectrum, I’ve also been rollerblading across the spectrum, but they think differently to other, you know, to each other, but also to other organisations. So when we come to find a solution for our customers, I’m not doing a sales pitch because I don’t like to do it on this podcasts. As an example, they, you know, they can think outside the box and we’ve, there’s actually a case study, one of our customers, Howler, they’ll come to us with a problem and idea, we’ll get a couple of our engineers around the room within a couple of hours, they’ll have a different outlook and again, because of cognitive diversity.
John 15:29
There was two examples, just to support that point, if I may. One was I am very fortunate again to meet a founder of an advisory firm that only employed people across the spectrum, and it is a sort of classic lay person’s view of neurodiversity and an application, in that they carried out different forms of due diligence around technology and around software. Now, when they set the company up, they were fortunate enough to get funded through an early stage venture fund set up by GCHQ, and so they were also screened to provide services into the intelligence community. The team, as part of the screening, passed every test with flying colours to the point that they were then given a test from the bottom of the drawer at the back of the company that nobody… it had been dusted off. No one solved this. In nine years, it hadn’t been solved, and they solved it. It took them six weeks, but they solved it. They broke the code that nobody had done in nine weeks. So that’s one example of that capability. The second is, going back to my point about the price you pay for lack of cognitive diversity, in a group of people that are performing whatever that performance, however that performance manifests itself. It was an example given by Matthew Syed in one of his books, and it was related to 9-11. It was about the CIA, and essentially it was about the profiling of their talent, their employee base, which was quite narrow, and consequently didn’t include anybody that had a cultural perspective of what was going on in the Middle East, a historic perspective.
Neale 17:49
Couldn’t understand why they would want to be attacked in the way that they were and yeah.
John 17:54
And also couldn’t recognize the threat of a small group of people as opposed to, you know, sort of mass mass military machine and…
Neale 18:02
Obviously they’ve never seen Star Wars either – the rebels destroyed the Empire!
John 18:06
I mean, clearly, they liked Star Wars and Star Wars. And the Force. And the Force. So, no, no, no. But he makes the point that the CIA recognized that one of the things they needed to do was change the filters with which they were both attracting and hiring talent. Yeah. Because, consequently, if they continued to hire in a certain mould, they would isolate themselves from the development that was going on around the rest of the world. So that would be a classic case of a lack of cognitive diversity that leads to a limited amount of thinking.
Neale 18:47
And huge consequences.
Neale 18:48
I want to move on to your involvement in women’s sports but before I do you were talking about society impact of diversification. My two biggest things that I think of as an inclusive society. One is the gene pool, the smaller you have a gene pool genetically, we talked about dogs before, dog breeds, human breeds, the smaller the gene pool the worse it gets so the bigger the gene pool the better really and also the bigger the inclusivity the better the food right I mean bringing all different cultures and all different food those two alone.
John 19:23
You’re talking to a foodie, so…
Neale 19:24
Fantastic. Well we’ll take that to a different podcast. So women in sport, ‘The Lionesses’, the women’s England football team obviously have a huge impact I think certainly over the last couple years people are re-engaging with women in sport. Can you tell us a bit of your involvement, your mentoring in the women’s rugby?
John 19:44
Yes so again it was by chance that my name had been put forward and the background to the situation was that as I understand it the DTI had allocated a fund I think it was about 150 million pounds quite a sizeable fund which they wanted to use to promote the commercialization of women’s sport on the basis that the more financially successful women’s sport is the more sustainable it is and also the better equipped it is to continue to grow so that was kind of self-fueling machine absolutely absolutely and and yeah I don’t I think it’s very hard to argue with that when you look at their success recently yeah so so the so they then commissioned Deloitte’s to set up a mentoring program to support the female leaders in women’s sport and I was put forward as somebody as a potential mentor which was which was very very I was very honoured about and and I was matched to Sarah Massey who is the managing director of the Women’s Rugby World Cup. Who is a force of nature she is an astonishing woman the thought of you know she she creates world-class events and the thought of you know you sort of have passport have a suitcase will travel yeah and you take your family to somewhere where they’re going to run the Commonwealth Games and broadly speaking you’re the first person into the office to say ‘And now make it happen’. Yeah and and the thought of of that cripples me with fear and anxiety personally but for Sarah would put a smile on her face yeah
Neale 21:40
The challenge and the opportunity.
John 21:42
So it’s been my pleasure and I’ve learned a huge amount from the mentoring process. It has been two-way and I hope that I’ve been able to give some value to her as well.
Neale 21:58
So you’re leading my next question, so you got a lot from her. Is that why you mentor or why do I mean, you’re a really busy man. I mean, we had to organize this. This isn’t a criticism. We had to reorganize this quite a lot of times to get you here. You don’t have to apologize. It’s our pleasure. You know, you work on a lot of boards. Why take the time to mentor? What do you get out of it, John?
Neale 22:21
And why should other people get with a, you know, get out of it?
John 22:24
A quick shout out to Natasha, my colleague, who organised this.
Neale 22:29
Natasha has been brilliant, yeah, yeah she does, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John 22:35
So, in terms of why and what I get out of it, personally I think it’s a privilege for another person to say, I would value your time and I value your advice. The key thing is making sure that if it’s the true mentoring as opposed to being a shoulder to cry on or an ear to bend.
Neale 23:05
Or someone to do all the work for.
John 23:07
Or someone that says, well, here’s all your answers, you know, yeah. That you’ve got a sense of, you know, what is it I can do to help you with? And there are times where maybe I’m not, you know, the right person and I’ll recommend somebody else. But broadly speaking, I find mentoring just really enriching for me as a person. I think it’s very educational. I think it stretches me, it forces me to think about other people in other situations. And that can only be a good thing in terms of building empathy, building up your sort of, almost your case study bank, more stories of the situations people have found themselves in. Often if someone’s seeking a mentor, it’s often because they are struggling with something. And so it’s very rare, I think, that people come off the back of a major success and say, oh, I know what I need right now. I need a mentor. It’s normally when, you know, the chips are down, yeah. Or it just isn’t happening. Or they’re feeling, you know, imposter syndrome or they’re struggling with one thing or another. And therefore the mentoring need becomes more sort of important. And that also is another part of this, that if you find that as a mentor, essentially you’re just having a chat. That’s good, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the value between the two of you…
Neale 24:48
Needs to be…
John 24:51
It’s no longer that you are sort of in my view you know you’re providing a mentoring
Neale 24:55
So is it easy to know when to step away or is it sometimes difficult to know when to step away?
John 25:00
Great question. Let me think about that for a second. Is it easier or is it hard? I think it’s case by case to be fair. I do. You don’t have to name names. No, no, no. I’m just thinking about the situations I’m involved in now. I think they do come to a bit of a natural end. In Sarah’s case, it’s the Women’s Rugby World Cup. That will end. With regards to supporting her post the Rugby World Cup, that’s very much dependent upon her. If she said, John, I really appreciated your time and your support and advice. I’d be delighted to support her in whatever challenge she has next. Alternatively, I feel completely okay with her saying, that’s been great. Really helpful for what I was trying to do in this particular challenge. Let’s go and have a beer sometime, a glass of wine or a shandy or whatever. A cup of coffee. Nice to stay in touch but we don’t need to carry on with that slightly more… The other thing about mentoring is that it differentiates it from a chat. It’s normally scheduled. That’s another rough indication as to whether, am I really mentoring here or am I just filling time? I’m picking up the phone and going, I’ve got a problem in which case. You’re more kind of being a friendly ear to bend.
Neale 26:42
So I can see why organisations would be drawn to you, obviously you’ve been honoured to be given lots of different positions. What draws you to a business?
John 27:07
What draws me to a business, broadly speaking, it’s a few key things, but chemistry is always going to be a huge part. Whatever else is going on, if you haven’t got the chemistry there, then naturally that tends to feel like quite hard work. So regardless of anything else, there has to be chemistry, I think. Secondly, from my perspective, I’ve got to believe that I can add value. So if I don’t think I can add value, again, I’m very happy to say, you know, talk to Neale or Neil or Mark or somebody. Here’s somebody who really can help you. So I have to feel like I can add value.
Neale 27:50
Which is a value in itself.
John 27:51
Thank you. Well, no, no, thank you. And I think the third thing then is, you know, you’ve got to have some degree of excitement for whatever the adventure is going to be, because obviously you’re going to commit time to that. I’ve been just, blessed, lucky if you want to put it in that way, that in the last five years, through accident rather than design, I found myself being involved in those companies that are trying to do something good and they’re moving the needle on social impact.
John 29:04
So what I’ve found is that working with companies that are profit for purpose, or profits with purpose. It no longer feels quite like work. So this is a bit of a revelation for me, because I’m 63 in July. And so if you can imagine, I came to the end of a sort of 20 year career as a CEO, five exits under my belt, six, in fact, and sorry about that, and you’re looking for something that gives you inspiration. And as a CEO, you’re the person driving yourself, you’re trying to drive the business, you’re trying to bring other parties along with you, shareholders, obviously, and investors being a key part of that. So the emotional price you pay for leading in that way is huge, and it’s cumulative. And after 20 years, I have to say, you know, I was really, really thoroughly drained and emotionally exhausted. Yeah, I think to a degree, and I suspect, you know, many other CEOs might feel the same at times in their career. They’re also very, very good at regenerating, almost like in a video game.
Neale 30:30
Or Timelord, just sort of, yeah, that’s right.
John 30:34
Another different scarf, but they do have very powerful, they’ve got great powers of regeneration. But even so, after 20 years, you do find yourself…
Neale 30:47
There’s only so many times you can regenerate.
John 30:49
And I’m very lucky that today I work across several companies, most of which are focused on having a positive social impact on the world. And that can include patient health, for example, in health care, which is really the sector I’ve been most involved in for the last 25 years. And yeah, like I said, when I wake up in the morning, I’m not thinking about work. I’m thinking about what is it that I can do that’s going to, you know, coming back to that coin, you know, help improve financial performance, but also improve impact. And that has made me feel young again. It’s probably the best way to describe it.
Neale 31:30
Do you think as well, not to the end of a career, but to a certain, you’ve had a chunk of time and now you’re looking to the next 20 years, maybe more, maybe less, that you want to give something back, that social impact has been more prevalent later on?
John 31:48
I think I think the giving something back is something I felt that I was doing through the mentoring and support as a leader building teams where I’m developing people in their careers. I’ve always felt that I was giving, maybe giving’s not the right word, but but actually being a positive influence in other people’s lives but often that would be people very close to me and then more indirectly as a CEO you know it would be about patient care it would be about trying to make sure that those patients that interacted with our clinicians had a better outcome as a result of our clinicians and the work that they did so there was always that other sort of larger extended impact point but but I would say that the the sense of wanting to give something back now yeah it’s an interesting question I think I’ve always had it so I don’t don’t feel like it’s something new yeah and therefore it’s not something that I think about a great deal because I feel it’s something I sort of instinctively… you know I like to help people if I can.
Neale 33:12
DEI politically is getting quite a knock with the change of political climate. Obviously, we’ve got a very right American president. Reform party has now got several MPs. I think Nigel Farage said anyone when he got elected, anyone with the title DEI supporter, better watch out. And it turns out there is no one with that job title in his council, well-researched Nigel Farage. Obviously, we know there is a sort of political bias, are you seeing that impact real world now and where do you see inclusivity in the workplace in the next five to ten years?
John 33:50
Yeah wow, you’re asking me that at the end? Yeah so uh I’ll try and be brief.
Neale 34:00
No, you take as long as you like. I think it’s an important question.
John 34:05
Well, I think it’s massively important, it really is. You’re looking at the news today and you know every day in fact it’s a feature right now. To be successful in politics now appears to be more about messaging and perception rather than values and truth. It appears to be and I’m not the expert I know you know politics is not really something I’m hugely strong at and spend a huge amount of time you know sort of. Studying. Exactly yes I’m trying to be more in the real world of. So my sense is that in order to gain support and we have to come up to the question of why is that support following certain messaging. But it appears that you know the right-wing politicians as we’ve seen before and decades past can gather support at times of difficulty.
Neale 35:36
Through populism, simple messaging.
John 35:40
Absolutely. And they’re to blame. Yes. So I think…
Neale 35:43
…famous photo, isn’t there, of Rupert Murdoch where he’s got a big pile of cookies, he’s got middle class, or working person with one cookie, then he’s got an immigrant saying he’s trying to steal your cookie, he hasn’t got anything and that kind of, using fear.
John 35:58
Using fear, absolutely. So I think that DEI as a phrase, is now being weaponized. Like woke. Like woke. So the question is, what does it really mean? It doesn’t really matter. Because if it’s a word that can trigger a certain response, and as a politician, you want to create that response, then you’re going to use it a bit like a bullet fired at a target. You’re trying to hit a certain target to trigger a certain emotion and a certain response. And words are powerful, hugely powerful. And it is, at the moment, one of those terms that actually is incredibly powerful at polarizing people broadly speaking to those who disagree and those who agree. So I think that the, I think a natural response to that is to start thinking about, hmm, well, if it’s just the label that is being weaponized but not the principle or the issue, why can’t organisations continue to support the principle and do something different regarding
Neale 37:21
the labeling of the message.
John 37:23
Indeed. Indeed and you know you then come on to the question well why why would they not defend DEI as a label and I think that what we’re seeing is that there is more pressure being brought politically against that as a value system and so employers and it this is in government this is in third charities sport as well as business and education it is it is across every walk of life that politics sits and therefore can be influential in a positive or negative way and for employers within those different walks of life you know who are trying to be inclusive they’re trying to do so in a way where they themselves are not triggering from their stakeholders a similar polarization if that word has now been weaponized against a value system that they believe in and so that that sounds a little bit fancy and I apologise if it’s not too…
Neale 38:33
No-no-no, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head because I can think of certainly extended family members and I can think people in social circles who would say it’s all gone woke or there’s you know or DEI or what a waste of time and money however they would be aghast at of the idea of homophobia or racism or someone with disabilities not being able to get a job so they’ll you know it’s like you know it’s a red flag to a bull they’ll go oh it’s too woke it’s too DEI but they’ll support someone who needs help.
John 39:06
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think, I do think it’s an instinct, I think it’s an instinctive human reaction. I think that, you know, we’re sort of, you know, we’re, we’re, we’re social creatures. And, and in order to be social, you know, you, you have to, you, you do need to help others in order to receive help yourself. So, so I feel like, the idea of not helping people seems to fly against, you know, that sort of almost a biological aspect of what we are as human beings. And then obviously, you’ve got the cultural moral and commercial and the other layers on top of that. But so I think labeling and messaging weaponization of terms is something that is now very much part of today’s politics. And I think the way in which employers, again, across the different spectrums of activity are responding is that there is a degree of polarization. In my experience, what one is seeing is that there are some companies who are, feel that they’re probably being forced to having to almost relabel that support and activity, but are persistent in doing it. Yeah, a rebrand. Yeah, thank you. The second form are those that have just gone, screw you. I am standing for what I, you know, if, if fire the bullets at me, and they’re going to bounce off because I am, I’m, you know, I shall not be moved, a bit like Gandalf on the bridge.
Neale 40:50
Thou shall not pass!
John 40:53
Thou shall not pass! That’s right. So you’ve got the Gandalf reaction, you’ve got the sort of slightly more, for want of a better phrase, a reaction where people are sort of dodging…
Neale 41:04
…willing to move a little bit. The Frodo reaction.
John 41:08
Yeah, moving out of the line of fire, anyway. So and then you’ve got those people who may feel that for their reasons, they support the agenda that sits behind the weaponization of those phrases. And therefore for those people, by people I’m talking about employers, actually this is a call to arms for them to now come forward and say, I never really believed in it. It’s not something I want to do. We are going to do and therefore we are going to declare ourselves as being against, you know, we’re in favour of this idea that this is the cause.
Neale 41:57
Call themselves no nonsense and all the rest of it.
John 41:59
So, and then of course there are different shades in between and then right right right out at the end over here of course are those that say you know there can only be one type of person and if you’re not that type of person what you don’t really you don’t really register as human, you don’t register as a person, you certainly don’t register as somebody sometimes that even should be alive. So the right at the far end is that huge level of, deadly level of extremism.
Neale 42:43
Do you think there’s enough hope, there’s enough people willing to bend to make it work and move things forward?
John 42:49
I do. I absolutely do, yeah, and I see that every day, you know, I’m an optimist and I do believe in the human spirit, so yeah, I do believe in, believe that people are good, bad press sells, so it’s much easier to promote a story about something horrible than something good.
Neale 43:16
A reaction is a reaction.
John 43:17
A reaction is a reaction. There’s some study about why our brains are wired like that for survival purposes
Neale 43:23
Some people like to gossip, I’m sure.
John 43:27
There’s that aspect as well, but yeah, so I still see a huge amount of good in the world. And what’s really inspiring for me are those people that have said, you know, thou shall not pass, or we’re going to keep, you know, if you want us to relabel this, that’s fine, you know, but you are not changing our values, and you are not changing our support, and you are not changing the way in which we’re going to treat people around us. You know, you don’t want us to use this phrase, that’s fine.
Neale 43:59
So obviously you have a lot of recent experience with AI. There’s a lot of fear around AI about taking jobs, you know, it can write copy very quickly, it can create media, videos, content. You’re all about inclusivity, people. What do you think the impact is of AI? Is it going to exclude people going forward or do you think there’s space where everyone, can it be used as a force for good? What’s your hard take, John?
John 43:59
If I may, a tiny bit of background to Mindset AI. The founder, Barrie Hadfield, this is probably his fifth or sixth company that he’s founded, so he is a technologist. He has experience. He has experience, he’s always been a programmer, you know, he gets up early in the morning to code that, that’s his way of…
Neale 43:59
A cup of Java in hand, I’m sure. Yeah, I know the type.
John 43:59
And he’s built other AI companies very successfully. And so he’s somebody that I personally regard as an AI expert. So I’m hugely privileged to just be in his presence and that of his teams as well. And that also includes some people who are, you know, really at the sort of bleeding edge of, in particular, large language models. So Mindset AI focuses on what’s called LLMs, but otherwise more and more commonly known as chat GPT or Microsoft Copilot, for example.
Neale 43:59
Gemini, et cetera, et cetera,
John 43:59
Gemini, thank you. And the way in which, so this is the kind of idiot’s guide to AI based on, you know, what I understand. So with the internet, what the internet did was it created a place where you had a lot of information and then, but you had trouble searching it. And there were some search engines quite early on, which you may remember. Go Fish?
Neale 43:59
Go fish, yeah! Ask Jeeves.
John 43:59
Ask Jeeves, yes, absolutely. And then suddenly out of nowhere comes Google. And suddenly Google is around the world and it was…
Neale 48:24
Which is now just a search term, I’m gonna Google it.
John 48:26
I’m going to Google it, or like, I’m going to hoover…. So what we saw with the internet was this kind of step change, a huge sort of pace of change in a very short period of time, culminating, obviously, in Google, dominating the search space. But that’s been the status quo then for a number of years, where search actually has been the most used capability, or user requirement for the internet. Yeah, of course. And what large language models have done is actually add on to that a second capability, which is that you can ask. So you could say, what do you think? Or can you tell me about? And so that’s really been the second sort of phase of, I call it a revolution. But again, the…
Neale 49:25
It’s giving something back as well isn’t it? So it’s the first phase search engine get the information. What’s your opinion on this information? Can you help me digest? Can you help me create based on?
John 49:37
Absolutely, and of course that’s been facilitated also by voice technology, Alexa and all that sort of thing. But you’ve got this ask, and then that capability, then with agent-based AI, you’ve got ‘do’. I would now like you to not only search, I want you to tell me, rank the information or create something meaningful from that information based on the following parameters. And I now want you to prepare for me a document that I can use for other people. It’s a perfect example. It could be a marketing presentation.
Neale 50:18
It could be yeah or some data or whatever a bit of code or yeah whatever that could do.
John 50:23
So that’s the ask and then do and then agentic AI is where you can start to program agents to actually not just do but to carry on doing. So for example in a particular area of research or a piece of information or something for example around inclusion, if you were gathering information about inclusion and you wanted to prepare reports around that, with agentic AI what you’re going to say is I want you to carry on gathering information and updating what you have created for me and I want you also to reflect to me if there is something that looks as if it’s escalating and it could be by individual, it could be by theme, it could be by country, by publication, by political party. I want you now to be intelligent about engaging with what’s going on in the world and then coming back to me and telling me what’s going on. So that seems to be the sort of next step. The other part of that is what’s referred to as hyper-personalization which is where the AI and agents and agentic AI is now working exclusively for you and therefore delivering to you hyper personalized content and information. So that’s the sort of journey with large language models and that’s very much part of what Mindset provide. And so when I look at that and think about the power of that and the applications, it is sort of Pandora’s box. We don’t quite know what’s going to be good, what’s going to be bad. There’s a number of people involved in looking at the bias in AI that’s already there. We see stories about AI hallucinating and various other challenges with that. But I think these are, if you like, factors that will exist with anything, broadly speaking, that’s new technology. The bias issue is the one that worries me probably the most, hallucinating – I’m not technical enough to know if that can be addressed. But the bias issue does worry me because at the end of the day, how are you going to remove that from AI? One of the things that they had to do with the Hubble telescope when it was launched into space was actually it was cross-eyed. So the vision that came through this amazing piece of technology was it was all blurry. And despite the fact you had this, again, leading edge technology launched into space with a view of seeing further into the universe than we’ve ever seen before, and then they turned it on, and it’s myopic.
Neale 53:16
I bet the call-out time for that guy to go and fix it is astronomic.
John 53:21
Well, what they had to do was put another lens in front. They effectively gave the telescope glasses. And as a result of that, it could then see. So I wonder if there’s something equivalent to that that can be put at the front end…
Neale 53:36
For the bias. Yeah.
John 53:38
For the bias, for example. I don’t know but it’s again it will be a reflection of humanity in terms of how it’s used.
John 54:23
So will AI make our world more complicated, make it easier? Will it threaten jobs? Will it make life more fun for people? I think it will do all of these things. The challenge is trying to make sure that enough of the good people are at the forefront of that to help ensure that it does more… Good than bad. Yeah, it gives more help than not.
Neale 54:58
Well, thank you very much. Here’s to the good in people, the human spirit, the wide genetics pool, and the better food. Thank you John. It’s been a pleasure.
John 54:58
Absolute pleasure. Thank you.