"Curious creators, business romantics, humanist futurists": Attending the House of Beautiful Business 2019

For the second time, I spent the first week of November in Lisbon at a conference I deem the best I've seen. For 5 days, people from all over the world and from all kinds of disciplines come together in the House of Beautiful Business: "Imaginative leaders, curious creators, business romantics, and humanist futurists", as the organizers say. This description already showed me I was in exactly the kind of company I love, and boy was I right.

For all of you who weren't part of this extraordinary and somehow indescribable experience, I want to share a few glimpses and take-aways, After all, one of the 16 principles of the event is "Whatever happens in the House should not stay in the House".

Mystery meetups, dancing and building bridges

Our first day started with a Mystery Meetup with another guest - great for both introverts and people who are at the House for the first time, as it can be overwhelming (there are a lot of very smart and very fancy people - I felt very inadequate in year 1. Gets better though!). So a "human algorithm" matched us, sent us coordinates where to show up and ta-da - I met a lovely Austrian who works in the sustainable fashion industry. We both knew quite little about our fields of work and had a nice Portuguese lunch before we entered the House with the 600 other participants for the official opening. One line from the opening sessions stuck with me: Anja Melander, Head of Culture at the Stockholm School for Entrepreneurship, talked about her difficult way of finding the right niche, the right work, the right group of people. She found it, but concludes: "Fight for the right to dance between the disciplines!" Being very much of a ropedancer myself (org development? innovation management? communications person? all of the above!), I struggle with this on a daily basis, but also always see the value of this multitude of perspectives.

Day 2 started with one of my highlights, Mathieu Lefèvre. He founded More in Common, an organization that wants "to understand the forces driving us apart, to find common ground and help to bring people together to tackle our shared challenges". Looking at the political rifts in the US, in Europe and in Germany, I feel this is one of the biggest challenges of our time. They do extensive research on the value landscapes of people. For example, they did a study on the US and - without grouping them by demographics - asked people about their opinions and beliefs. Afterwards, they grouped them by the values that they found.

One specific thing they found in the US research: the perception of the level of extreme perspectives and the difference between the differing opinions (i.e. Democrat/Republican) has never been higher. So the PERCEPTION that they differ in their opinions and values is way higher than the actual difference - and with everyone being in their filter bubble and targeted on Social Media based on these bubbles, we talk to the "other" people less and less. More details here: https://perceptiongap.us/ In Germany, they did similar research which you can find here: https://www.dieandereteilung.de/ Mathieu finished his talk on a positive note though: There are

"3 reasons to be hopeful. We all agree that:

1. The state of polarization has never been higher.
2. We must and can get through it.
3. It is a problem of perception only. (People THINK the other side is more extreme & negative than they actually are.)"

And, one insight that is not surprising but incredibly relevant: "In all movements (yellow vests, Republicans, #FridayForFuture etc..) I see: People want to be together. They yearn for belonging." One key call to action: We have to unite and share positive stories to solve our big challenges. "People are looking for a bigger story! This is the quest of our time."

The New Senses and Poetry in Business

Next up, David McCandless talked about visualizing complex information in a way we all understand it. It's always amazing how much a good visualization makes data more tangible. Two fascinating graphs:

1. The scientific evidence for health supplements - if you ever wanted to know which vitamins you should take and which you can easily get rid of (link):

2. Peak breakup days, according to FB status updates:

My key takeaway from David's session: "Through data visualization, you can devour, digest, ingest data - and it's even enjoyable!" Certainly necessary in times of SO MUCH data.

On Sunday, Dr. Clare Morgan, director of the Creative Writing Program at Oxford, gave a workshop on the value of poetry in business, and not only my inner English major was very happy about this. She said: "Poetry is very compressed - a poem is meaning in motion. Different tones of meaning flash at you when you turn it, like a diamond." She also talked about Sloganism - everywhere, especially on Social Media, we read easy-to-agree-with one-liners and statements. Clare said: 'You can't argue with a slogan - because there's nothing there." My three main learnings:

1. Dealing with poetry is an underrated skill. Sidney Harman, founder of Harman Industries, once said “Get me poets as managers. Poets are our original systems thinkers. They look at our most complex environments and they reduce the complexity to something they begin to understand".
2. There is scientific evidence that poetry activates the part of the brain that deals with ambiguity and uncertainty - exactly the characteristics of our current world. So it's great training!
3. Joined discussion and interpretation of a poem can open up new perspectives in teams: rational analysis, looking for right and wrong don't get you anywhere - you have to explore, accept multiple meanings and perspectives, and that there will be no final answer. Again, great training for our daily struggles.

I've always thought that we need more people with a humanities and arts background in business - being a Graduate of Languages and Intercultural Studies myself, I've always had a feeling that this "strange" (in business) perspective was very valuable. We spent a lot of time on looking at cultures and literature, nothing of which is black or white. It's all about interpretation, applying different perspectives, discussing freely. And those are the skills we need more than ever.

The Art of Transformation

In the afternoon, we hosted "our own" session - together with Lars Lehne, Yanling Duan and Jacqueline Dolinar, we spent an hour sharing our personal stories of transformation, be it in transforming an organization, questioning our own self-image or challenging the behaviour the society or our colleagues expect from us. One of Jacqueline's stories that I really liked: In art school, she had to paint an object that she didn't care about as if she loved it - talk about changing perception! In terms of organizational transformation, we all agreed:

Forced change does not work or at least isn't sustainable. You have to inspire, invite, listen, wait - beautiful business doesn't come with a hammer. (Even if we tore down that wall in Lisbon!)

Team Humanists

Two of my favourite twitter inspirators were also there: Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist, and Kate O'Neill, Tech Humanist.

Kate O'Neill, one of the first employees at Netflix and super-charismatic woman in tech, started her session with a not-so-simple question: What makes us human - in 1one word? Lots of different answers: Empathy, Love, Curiosity, Intent, … Talking about humanity in technology and the dangers we face sometimes, she used an example that made me think: the Amazon Go supermarkets (you know, the ones where you just put your groceries in the basked and you pay automatically, no cash register necessary). If you want to use the app that comes with this experience, you have to accept the fact that you can't reach for groceries for other people anymore - because it will be put on your check instead of theirs. Around the world, Kate then asks "who here has helped someone reach for something in the supermarket in the last year?" and it's around 75% of the people. In conclusion, she asks: If Amazon Go were to spread - would that erase the human phenomenon of helping each others in supermarkets? In this way, apps and algorithms already change our behaviour - sometimes we realize it, most of the times we don't.

One major consequence for Kate: it's a problem that at the moment, tech aligns mostly to business objectives. So human experiences are changed in a way that is good for business - that is exactly what we see. What we should do: align business objectives to human outcomes and scale with technology. So then if the business scales, humanity scales with it. We have to be more mindful what experiences we create, support, or disincentivize - because most of what we do with tech is creating new/different/optimized human experiences. And this "influences culture - because human experience IS culture" (Kate O'Neill).

My key insights from Doug Rushkoff: "Your business is more human if it's owned by the people in it". I hugely recommend his book Team Human - it's eye-opening and reminds of what it means to be human, how important connection and community is and how we can sort this mess out together.

Last but not least, there has been a lot of talk about the provocative and bold statements made by Anand Giridharadas - without getting into politics and if Facebook employees should attend a conference on Beautiful Business, I just want to share two memorable quotes: Commenting on the much-discussed book "Lean In" by Sheryl Sandberg: "I'm not going to listen to a book that tells me that 1000 years of patriarchy is a posture problem."

And, more importantly: "Real change involves a loss of power - we can't have a Win-Win. The abolition of slavery had to come with a loss of power. #MeToo only works with a loss of power."

Finally - thank you, you beautiful humans Tim Leberecht, Monika Jiang and Till Grusche, for giving us this experience. I hope all of you can take something away from this so it is not only memorable for us residents, but for others as well. #beautifulbusiness

P.S. One of the speakers I missed but whose topic and writings I nonetheless want to recommend: Jennifer Petriglieri on "Couples that Work")