A Talk with John Seely Brown

Haegwan Kim (HK); Today I’m going to talk with John Seely Brown, who is a co-chairman of the Deloitte Centre for the Edge. And he was previously the chief scientist of Xerox Corporation. Thank you so much for your time.

John Seely Brown (JSB); Greetings.

HK; Let me start by asking about your personal life. When and why did you decide to be in the field of technology and science?

JSB; I’m not quite sure I ever really decided that. I’ve always been interested more in the interface and interaction between technology and society with the notion of how does technology open up new possibilities in society and how has society shaped the way we use technology. So I’ve always been more interested in what you might you call a social technical system approach to the world rather than any particular silo of a technologist or as a social scientist.

And I think this happened through a set of experiences when I was fairly young when I was given problems to solve and they’d look like they were purely technological problems and almost every one turned out to be much more of a social problem than a technical problem, although it was always, always phrased as a technical problem. Let me give you the simplest example.

My first job from college was to optimize a huge bank of elevators in one the skyscrapers in New York City, which was the headquarters of Union Carbide in those days. It turns out that that optimization procedure is pretty complicated. They had many, many, many elevators, a building that’s 48 floors tall, and so there are a lot of things that you have to think about to make this really work.

This is a non-trivial problem. However, I solved that problem and then was stunned to discover, the first day I put it in, that I got a call, in essence somebody saying, this is terrible, the chairman on the 48th floor is having to wait for his elevator. And I said, I’m optimizing the flow of people to their work. I said, oh God, didn’t we tell you that there are certain floors that need total priority? Maybe you should just park an elevator at this floor.

JSB; And so it was like, I was given the mathematical problem and it turned out that no one had told me that there are these classes and that now every floor was equal and now I had to have a productive function that put waiting on different floors and someone was in the extreme cost of waiting. I had to rethink this whole thing. But as a young kid, it was an amazing event to go from a mathematically elegant solution to something that was amazingly intertwined with corporate politics and so on and so forth.

HK; Cool.

JSB; That was very, very first job. And it turns out that I can go through 20 different things, other jobs I did since then, and without fail, every one turned out to have a strong social component to it that no one wanted to talk about up front and mostly didn’t even know.

And in fact when I would solve the problem technically for them, it turned out to be a very suboptimal problem because they didn’t even realize what was happening when they were waiting for something to happen. So it turned out that the technically optimal solution, apart from class distinctions, often was not the optimal solution in terms of actually getting the real work done.

HK; I noticed that you studied mathematics in college. Did that help your career?

JSB; Yes. I was a student in mathematics, also physics too, but mostly mathematics, and went to graduate school a bit in that as well before I realized that more of my passion was oriented toward computing and the human brain actually. I was interested very early on in a systems approach toward problems, possibly because of that elevator experience. I don’t know.

But there is something always elegant about mathematics because you don’t have to be anywhere to think about it. It takes a pen and paper and that’s it. And so it is something wonderfully freeing in terms of studying mathematics because you always have your tools with you no matter where you are, walking in a forest, whatever. Yes, a very elegant way to be in the world and also to be thinking.

HK; You have been at the cutting edge of technology for a long time. So I was wondering, what was the hidden secret for you to achieve success as a scientist or as a researcher?

JSB; Well, to me, I think the key is two things, highly connected, and then I’ll expand. The first is never to take the problem as stated as the problem, and that is to say almost never does anybody really understand what they think the problem is. Let me put it different. Almost never is the problem they think they have, the problem they have.

HK: ???

JSB; It’s a question of unpacking the problem and better understanding what is the context that this problem appeared in, occurs in, and try to dig beneath it to understand what’s really going on, what are the issues, what are the value statements and so on.

I think highly connected to that would be the second issue. It’s a sense of listening, and that is not just intellectual listening but emotion listening. When we talk we give the information, we transmit information in all kinds of ways, through intonation, body language, gestures, facial expressions and so on, and that being attuned to those things helps you begin to understand what’s not being said. And so in some sense the most important information may be what’s not said versus what is said and understanding how to unpack that.

When I grew up I thought that IQ was everything, and after a while I began to realize that, no, intelligence and success maybe more an equilateral triangle, where one vertical may be intelligent IQ but the other two verticals of those equilateral triangle may actually be EQ. That is emotional intelligence or a kind of intelligence in terms of knowing how to read people and read the context. The other vertical is communication, what I call CQ, communication intelligence. So you have IQ, EQ and CQ. And some balance of those three turns out to be critical because, in a rapidly changing world, most of what I learn is from other people.

The EQ is very important to be able to build relationships with reciprocity, where I learn, they learn, where we have really interesting, grounded conversations, or working on joint projects together. But there’s a CQ, and that is if you want to change the world you have to know how to capture people’s attention, and once you capture their attention you need to be able to figure out how best to say an idea that actually penetrates their defense mechanisms.

If every person you talked to had a zen mind, so to speak, or mind of a child in terms of no preconceptions, then communication might be relatively easy, although that’s still tricky. But if you don’t understand the lenses that this person you’re speaking to uses to make sense of the world, then you have a hard time knowing how to connect and make personal your message to him or her.

HK; Oh inspiring. Thanks for your opinion. You published the book called The Power of Pull, and I was just wondering, the push economy in the 20th century has moved to pull economy in the 21st century, which you described as the big shift. Can you explain how we can take this shift well?

JSB; In our world, the big shift, basically we’re claiming that for as long as we can see you’re going to be having constant disruptions. The notion of living in a world of equilibrium is a 20th century luxury. In the 21st century what’s happening is because of the digital infrastructures’ expediential advance. Every couple of years the infrastructure is changing enough that business strategies have to change, social practices have to change, work practices have to change, and so on.

So we’re in a world of constant change driven by the expediential forces that show no sign of giving up for many, many decades to come. I don’t mean just Moore’s Law; I mean how we build new architectures. The dynamics of this infrastructure is very, very fascinating, but in this world of constant disruption, any set of skills, any of your knowledge assets, has a decreasing shelf life. That’s to say that the skills you currently hold are going to be obsolete faster and faster.

That means that you now have to be able to enter a world and a way of being that you are constantly learning, that you’re constantly challenging your own status quo, that you’re constantly challenging your own framing of issues so that you’re willing to think outside of your box as opposed to just inside your box. So this means that it’s increasingly important that each of us find ways to get outside of our own comfort zone. Most of us find a comfort zone, pick up a set of skills, build a certain kind of reputation and live within that particular rut. That worked very well in the 20th century. What we’re saying now is, no, that rut will be disrupted and you will be stressed out and you will have to run faster and faster, not just to stay in place but not to lose too much.

And so in this new world, or the 21st century world, you have to figure out how to pull new types of information and resources and people to you to help you work on your problems, but in return you have to be able to help people that you get something from so they get something back from you. So the 20th century might be characterized by what’s called the experience curve, from Boston Consulting Group, which really shows that you get better at something, like you can produce things cheaper and cheaper the more you produce those things. That was the underlying strategy for virtually every corporation in the 20th century. We call these things scalable efficiencies.

But today’s world, because everything’s being disrupted, you can’t get scalable efficiencies, and if you did they wouldn’t last very long, and there’s enough unpredictability that you have to now shift from just overseeing those resources, those stocks of knowledge that made you famous at one point, or productive, to now how do you constantly participate in flows of creating new knowledge.

It’s getting more and more important to go to the edge and participate in edge experiences with people, where there are many kinds of edges. They can be the digital age, they can be the emerging markets, they can be new technologies and so on. But that sense of participating on that edge in these flows becomes now the new mantra for us.

So, for example, since you’ve interviewed Joi Ito, he is always travelling from edge to edge to edge and he is participating on the edges. And he purposely goes out of his comfort zone. He moves to Dubai for a few years. That’s a shock to his system, but by shocking his system he becomes much more aware of what he may never have been aware of. So he becomes fundamentally more agile in his own ability to make sense of a rapidly changing world.

So there’s these types of strategies that we think are becoming more important. Quite honestly, Joi was, to me, a bizarre figure in the 20th century. He may be a prototype figure in the 21st century.

HK; Talking about our education system, there are kids – you call them the next generation – who are ‘living in the web’; what kind of things we have to teach them? What kind of change we should make?

JSB; I would reframe the question because I think your question is a 20th century question not a 21st century question, because you asked what do we have to teach? To teach is what you do to somebody. Now let’s frame it, how do we craft new kinds of learning environments that kids find their own passion and develop a disposition that goes out and says, let me find new things, let me build social networks, let me build communities of interest I want to join and work with?

So the shift is from to teach; rather it should be to learn. Now what we do is have you craft trajectories into productive learning environments, and what’s the role of the mentor, not the teacher.

So I think that very much of this mentoring can be done by your own peer group.This goes back to the social intelligence I said at the very beginning, is how do you learn to form groups, maybe study groups, maybe learning groups, that you’re learning from each other’s criticism? How do we make it more like the critique that happens in a good type of architectural studio, where you get trained to be able to give useful criticism to your colleagues but also to receive critiques of other people? Don’t view it as an attack but view it as a gift.

HK; SInce my background is from Asia, I would have one question, which is, are your mentors older than you?

JSB; Almost all my mentors are younger than I am. In fact the construct I sometimes use is called reverse mentorship. That is to say, how do I find somebody, often born digital, maybe 20, 30, 40 years younger than I am, that I can learn something from, but they can also maybe learn something from interacting with me? So this notion of reciprocity is very important, but I think in a rapidly changing world you have to be willing to get mentors from various edges. Another edge would be somebody in an emerging country.

Now, age there is not so important as how do you get inside the culture of that particular country and so on. I don’t think it’s age-dependent, although for an Asian, you’re so used to thinking that the seniors of your society are the ones to always be revered and listened to, if not worshipped. That’s of course a caricature. But I think, as I travel through much of Asia, you’re beginning to find the youngsters realize that they have to push back and challenge what’s being told them. I think you can’t be good at innovation if you’re not willing to challenge not only the status quo but your seniors, the people that you work with or for.

HK; That’s a very interesting point. Talking about politics, I don’t want to talk mainly about politics that much though, but just one thing. What kind of role China and India will play for coming decades? I know we cannot have a prediction in the 21st century. It is too uncertain to do. But I was wondering about your perspective on the future of the two big countries.

JSB; I think they will play a huge role in shaping what happens around the world and I think that they are the most important sources of new ways of being, new forms of production, new types of institutional innovations and capable of showing us, through the diversity of their types of governments, that there can be more than just one successful form of government.

So I think we have a lot to learn from each other.

HK; Oh then we can learn each other not only at individual level but at governmental level swell.

JSB; And corporate level. We call them collation spaces. We talk about them in our book, the Power of Pull. What is the firm going to look like tomorrow? It’s not going to look like the current firms we know, but they may look like more of the loosely coupled process networks you see emerging in both China and India.

I think that you’re going to see new institutional forms that we’re going to have to pay more attention to.

HK; Could you tell me your advice to be successful in general sense?

JSB; Well, it’s ironic because I don’t necessarily think about success as being a goal. It’s not something that I think a lot about. I think a little bit more about what’s having impact in the world and what do I define fun and what kind of taps the capabilities that I personally have, so I feel always being useful, and often useful to other people. That gives me a certain kind of joy. So I would ask the question, what creates joy and a sense of purpose? I would worry much less about what creates success, and success may follow as a corollary to those.

HK; Is your purpose to optimize your life?

JSB; Right, but not just for me but for others as well.