The Decision-Making Studio Podcast
My recent conversation with Ben Cattaneo
“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds”. — John Maynard Keynes 1
I recently sat down with Ben Cattaneo of The Decision-Making Studio to explore the topic of future-fit cultures, why organisations need to create one if they’re to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, and how to get started. 2
The YouTube video of our conversation is embedded below.
It’s also available in audio format on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
In our 90 minute conversation we covered:
00:00 — 15:00 My backstory — from an early “human centric” school experience, via “organisational centric” top-down command and control cultures, to the “human centric” innovation lab here in Cambridge UK where I got my start helping organisations throughout Europe, Asia, and the US create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
15:00 — 17:00 Why organisations need future-fit cultures and what are they?
17:00 — 19:00 The 1990’s and Organisational Learning in a VUCA world.
19:00 — 24:00 The minefields of “Systems Thinking” and “Complexity”.
24:00 — 26:00 Leadership as “the capacity of a human community to shape its future”.
26:00 — 32:00 The legacy organisational dysfunctions afflicting sense making, decision making, and action taking. Why we must stop thinking of organisations as “machines for creating products and services” and instead see them as “human communities for creating continuous new value”.
32:00 — 38:00 The market context that makes it hard for organisations to become innovative, agile, and adaptive.
38:00 — 43:00 Why legacy organisational conditions make it more likely a CEO will be a sociopath or psychopath — compared to the normal distribution of those pathologies across general society.
43:00 — 44:00 “Episting contests” between “thought leaders”.
44:00 — 47:00 How well-meaning initiatives like DEI and ESG get bogged down in legacy organisational ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking.
47:00 — 58:00 The Five Fatal Habits that undermine future fitness whilst feeding the gargantuan appetites of mainstream Big Con management consulting firms. 3
58:00 — 1:00:00 Anyone and everyone can have a systemically worthwhile impact wherever they currently are, starting a ripple effect in their existing roles and through their existing relationships, by adopting a 2D3D mindset.
1:00:00 — 1:02:00 “Let’s just do another study” — the incessant analysis paralysis of never-ending sense making and avoidance of purposeful worthwhile action.
1:02:00 — 1:08:00 Joan Lancourt’s MIT Sloan study and the discovery of the Seven Channels of Culture.4
1:08:00 — 1:11:00 Assessing the BBC culture twenty years ago, now in the public domain following Dame Janet Smith’s Savile Review, explaining why the BBC keeps producing sexual predators. 5
1:11:00 — 1:13:00 Does it take “courage” or is it simply “clarity” that the old ways of being, seeing, doing, and thinking no longer work..?
1:13:00 — 1:20:00 The “miracle” of overnight culture change through the power of unlocking 2D3D mindsets — that each of us can undertake as individuals.
1:20:00 — 1:22:00 The innovation lab culture that launched 40 years of helping organisations create future-fit cultures of innovation, agility, and adaptiveness.
1:22:00 — 1:25:00 The current changes in the world and Eric Weinstein’s notion of the DISC — the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex.
1:25:00 — 1:26:00 You don’t have to “fix it all” to make a meaningful difference.
1:26:00 — 1:27:00 “There is one thing more powerful than all the armies of the world — and that is an idea whose time has come”.
Ready to take action?
My website provides a range of free resources to help you make the shift for yourselves, by yourselves, from “organisation as machine to be designed and operated” to “organisation as human community for shaping its future by creating continuous new value”.
Contact me to keynote at your next leadership conference or executive retreat, book one of my popular 90-minute "pick Geoff’s brains" sessions for senior executives, or tailor a custom coaching package for your development as a future-fit culture catalyst.
John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was a British economist who had a major impact on modern economic and political theory. The quote is from the preface of his magnum opus The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
You can find Ben on LinkedIn here and find out more about The Decision-Making Studio here.
Download the 22-page report on the Five Fatal Habits here.
See this previous article on the Seven Channels of Culture.
Download the Dame Janet Smith Savile Review report conclusions here