Greetings from BIOSS

Speaker A I wanted to invite Robbie Stamp, who's been with us these last few days, to come and say a few words to you because he's coming to sniff us out and get to know us. And I'd like for you to say a little bit about yourself and BIOS if you would come up for a couple of minutes.

Speaker B Jen, just a thank you to everybody, I've had a fantastic time, I think it's been terrific. And thank you to all the organizers. I'm actually heading off on a very early plane tomorrow morning, so I'll be here for the next couple of days, but thank you, everybody, I think it's been a terrific news and I'm really, really glad that I came. I'm the chairman of BIOS International for those who know a little bit of history, but for those who don't. BIOS was the institute that Elliot founded in 1967 at Brunell University in Uxbridge, just outside London, after he'd finished his work at the Tavistock. And he grew together after the work that he'd been doing with Wilfred Brown, a sort of remarkable group of thinkers and psalm, people who worked through and cared about hugely, creating organisations that induced trust, that tried not to induce incompetence confusion, did good work, contributed to the society in which they were in. And I hope that sort of spinning.

Speaker C Forward quite a few years. BIOS left the Brunell campus in 1999 and my mother and I and many others have sort of overseen a journey which now has a network of BIOS companies around the world. I think we've got presence in about 22 countries, we've got about 180 partners and associates in different parts of the world, we're building new partnerships and new relationships all the time.

Speaker B And when I started as chairman, which.

Speaker C I did about five years ago, I set myself one simple goal which I won't have achieved by the time I stop, which is more people in more context, touched positively by this wonderful body of knowledge around the globe. And by the time it's time for me to pass the baton on to other people, that work will very much be continuing. And I think it's a privilege to be involved in thinking through these kinds of issues which address, and aren't afraid to address complexity, ambiguity, uncertainty. I sometimes think of the position of the BIOS as being helping clients, not to do what I'm about to do in the face of uncertainty, just put their fingers in their ears and go la la la and hope that it's going to go away. And so I suppose a lot of it is really helping clients to live with uncertainty, to think about the decisions upon which chief executives and boards depend daily for reputational, risk wise investments, not wise investments. And I think, as we've been talking about today, clearly the world is deeply interconnected. I was having a conversation with somebody the other day as a sort of thought experiment about imagining the complex world of Caesar Augustus, one of the greatest of all of the Roman emperors. And clearly he had an extraordinarily complex world. I'm not going to get into the discussions about whether he had an 8910 twelve one two three job. He just had a very, very complex role to play.

Speaker B But I was thinking that modern day.

Speaker C Equivalents, whether they are national leaders, whether.

Speaker B They are CEOs, board chairman of very complex, very large transnational organizations have to cope with something that however complex his role was, he didn't. If one of his legions got beaten up in Parthia, he probably wouldn't know about it for several weeks. Today. If something happens, the markets might be responding before the chief executive has actually had the phone call to tell him what's going on. It is a blistering pace of complexity and change. And I have a little bit of a theory about centuries. I think that centuries tend to end in the second decade of the succeeding century. So if you think about the end of the 20th century, it was 1914, effectively think about the end of the 18th century, certainly in a European context anyway. It was very firmly 1815 when Napoleon was finally defeated and you had those seismic events, the end of the French Revolution. You could argue that the end of the 30 Years War in 1715 was the same kind of thing. And here we are, I think, with a world where the tectonic plates are shifting. That the certainties that were ripped up by the collapse of the Otoman Empire, by the Austro Hungarian Empire at the end of the First World War. The boundaries and the country boundaries that those set the way in which the rest of the world then, or particularly Europe then, dealt with its empire, its retreat from empire. You then had, if you like, both the certainties and the uncertainties of the Cold War, which kept a lid on certain things. And I think everything is up for grabs now. And you add to that the blistering pace of technological change, the fascinating areas about the interface between human judgment and decision making and expert systems. We had mention of the singularity today. The Ray Kurzweil thought that one day there'll be a point where machine intelligence suddenly arrives, whether it'll be friendly or not. That's the realm of science fiction. But in some ways, I think the singularity is already here in our financial markets, the way that, as we've been speaking, billions and billions of dollars have been traded in nanoseconds, which have got nothing to do, in a way, with the individual movements that any particular CEO is making. So it's a very, very complex world. I think it's a deep privilege for.

Speaker C All of us to be involved in.

Speaker B Thinking about these issues, these issues around complexity. I think having the opportunity to help leaders at all levels in organizations to deal with, manage, think about, live with that complexity and uncertainty to try and build positive organizations which do more good than harm. I think it's a great privilege. I'm privileged to be involved in it. And I just want to say thank you all again very much. I've had a fabulous few days. I did want to finish with one final thing, which is a particular personal thing to say, that we have been involved with Go through the years. We've had a few board members from BIOS on the board, but one of the people we've been most in awe of and remain most in awe of is Ken Craddock. We made some contributions a few years ago, but the work that he has done to gather together worldwide thinking and I've talked with Ken about finding the descriptions of General Katusov in War and Peace. If you read the Tolstoy's descriptions of Katusov and why he was the man to manage the defeat of Napoleon, you can read very high level cognitive capability and complexity, a capacity to live with ambiguity. And it was wonderful to have somebody with whom one could talk about that kind of thing, that he was genuinely interested in it. And I think that Ken's contribution to what we've all done has been absolutely astonishing. So a bit of a privilege to be one of the first to say tonight. Ken, thank you very much indeed, and I'm in awe of everything you've done. Thank you. It.