Boundaryless Conversations podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous. 

Human organisations are today pressed by the need to reinvent themselves, in ways that are profoundly unclear and, at the same time exciting for the promises they bring.

This podcast is brought to you by Boundaryless, the company behind Platform Design Toolkit an open methodology to design strategies that mobilize ecosystems through scalable efficiencies and scalable learning.

https://www.boundaryless.io/resources/podcast

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast

work

This episode frames the Boundaryless Conversation podcast: Simone Cicero, the original creator of the Platform Design Toolkit, and co-host and team-mate Stina Heikkilä present the main research questions that guide this exploration. 

Boundaryless Conversations podcast is about exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous. 

Human organisations are today pressed by the need to reinvent themselves, in ways that are profoundly unclear and, at the same time exciting for the promises they bring.

This podcast is brought to you by Boundaryless, the company behind Platform Design Toolkit an open methodology to design strategies that mobilize ecosystems through scalable efficiencies and scalable learning.

Here are some important links mentioned in the conversation.

> The Platform Design Toolkit - Boundaryless website: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com 

> The white paper 2020 launch - Simone Cicero, New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/new-foundations-for-platforms-in-the-2020-d785276c390e 

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast 

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio find his portfolio here: https://audiojungle.net/user/liosound/portfolio?utf8=%E2%9C%93&order_by=sales

Liosound

Opening episode: Exploring the future of organising at scale with Boundaryless conversations

In this episode, we have a boundaryless conversation with Arthur Brock, chief architect of Holochain. Holochain is an alternative to blockchain for running fully Peer-to-Peer distributed applications and is shaping the social dynamics of our emerging post-industrial economy. 

In the show we widely cover the concept of Unenclosable carriers and how new technologies that are more inherently contextual and agent centred - instead of universal and global consensus-based - may open up new possibilities for coordination and organising, enabling governance through feedback loops. 

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Arthur Brock, The Future of Governance is not Governments https://medium.com/metacurrency-project/the-future-of-governance-is-not-governments-9c894e17b1cd
> Arthur Brock, Unenclosable Carriers and the Future of Communication, https://medium.com/holochain/unenclosable-carriers-and-the-future-of-communication-4ac6045ac894
> Holochain: https://holochain.org/
> Holo Host: https://holo.host/
> Affordance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast 

Music by liosound.
Recorded on March 10th 2020

Ep. 01 Arthur Brock - Rewiring the technology to rewire the way we organise

In this episode, we have a boundaryless conversation with James Currier one of Silicon Valley’s foremost experts in growth and network effects. James is a four-time CEO of VC backed companies and a pioneer of user-generated models, viral marketing, A/B testing, crowdsourcing, and myriad of other growth techniques that have since been adopted by nearly all technology companies. In 2015, James co-founded NFX, a $150M early-stage venture capital firm focused on network effect businesses along with Pete Flint and Gigi Levy Weiss. 

In this conversation - which was amazingly insightful - we explore the real and so far unseen boundaries of the transition towards an economy more heavily based on marketplaces and market-networks, and how this transformation both shapes and is shaped by the major shifts and challenges that are currently emerging in the global society, including environmental, social, political, regulatory. 

We talk about the need for strong and charismatic leaders to steward these shifts, as well as the need to re-train people to gain the right competencies to deal with an increasingly digital, networked economy and transforming industries. 

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Ben Evans’ presentation “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” during the World Economic Forum in January 2020, https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations 

> Simone Cicero: “Why the Next Paradigm Shift may not be Technological”, https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/paradigm-shift-regulation-af48b87a0eeb 

> Ben Thompson, The End of the Beginning, https://stratechery.com/2020/the-end-of-the-beginning/

> Niall Ferguson (2017), The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35629744-the-square-and-the-tower

> Libra cryptocurrency, https://libra.org/en-US/

> Lambda school, https://lambdaschool.com/

> Incredible health, https://www.incrediblehealth.com/

> Hire.com, https://www.peoplefluent.com/ 

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast 

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio find his portfolio here: https://audiojungle.net/user/liosound/portfolio?utf8=%E2%9C%93&order_by=sales

Music by liosound.
Recorded on March 18th 2020

Ep. 02 James Currier - Unveiling the math behind society (and what to do about it)

In this episode, we have a boundaryless conversation with Tomas Diez, a Venezuelan Urbanist specialized in digital fabrication and its implications on the future of cities and society. He is the co-founder and director of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and is a founding partner of the Fab City Global Initiative. 

In our conversation with Tomas, we explore the democratization of the production of goods, mainly through technological progress and open knowledge sharing, and how this might affect the evolution of platform-enabled ecosystem driven production. We ask Tomas - through the lens of this transformation - what new subjectivities and constituents are empowered to organize in ways that are different, whether synergistic or integrated, with current globalization and digitalization trends. Of course, we cannot avoid touching on the changing landscape of risk and policy-making, as we connect with Tomas in the midst of the global pandemic. We also talk about the future of education and the need to reconsider Western-centric values and ways of knowing.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Fab City: Locally Productive, Globally Connected, https://fab.city/

> Wendell Berry (1977): The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/146191.The_Unsettling_of_America

> Peter Noak (2010): Sex, Bombs and Burgers, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7829730-sex-bombs-and-burgers

> Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore (2017): A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet,
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34525475-a-history-of-the-world-in-seven-cheap-things

Dr. Zachary Stein on education in a changing technology landscape, http://www.zakstein.org/

Ep. 03 Tomas Diez - From Fab Cities to Fab Citizens: remaking organising

In this episode, we have a Boundaryless Conversation with John Robb, the owner and principal analyst for the monthly Global Guerrillas Report, that covers the intersection of War, Politics, and Technology.  Its goal is to provide people with the frameworks needed to make sense of our relentlessly chaotic world. In other words, John helps people think clearly at a time when that kind of help is in short supply.  

In our conversation with John, we explore how the rapid power shifts we're witnessing towards open source, and self-organizing networks are going to change the way we organize society and the economy.

We touched upon the fact that the emergent future of organizing may not disrupt or obsolete the existing markets, but rather coexist, and that there's no way we can get away with ignoring the question concerning technology as society literally "becomes a technological artefact" as John said.

Here are some important links from the conversation:
> John’s patreon page https://www.patreon.com/johnrobb
> David Ronfeld, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf
> John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt (eds): Networks and Netwars, The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382.html
> Marshall McLuhan, whose ideas were frequently mentioned in the conversation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
> The Cynefin Framework for Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic domains, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8
> Examples of games mentioned that allow modifications to be developed in the kind of open-source community: Fallout and Skyrim: https://fallout.bethesda.net/en/; https://elderscrolls.bethesda.net/en/skyrim
> Code Academy, https://www.codecademy.com/
> Cameo, a new platform for getting personalised messages from celebrities, https://www.cameo.com/
> The company where John in 1996 wrote the report “personal broadcast networks” https://go.forrester.com/
> How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables, a multi-author future fiction imagining cities being run by different companies https://shop.meatspacepress.com/product/how-to-run-a-city-like-amazon-and-other-fables

Music by liosound.
Recorded on March 26th 2020

Ep.04 John Robb -Beyond markets: sense-making and organising, in a world of open networks

In this with Michel Bauwens, we explore both the Epistemological and Political/Regulatory layers of the transition from the “old” to the “new” ways of organising society. We dig into concepts like “trans-national institutions” and explore the changes we could expect in both regional and international governance of the economy and society. 

Michel Bauwens is founder and director of the P2P Foundation, research director of CommonsTransition.org (a platform for policy development aimed toward a society of the Commons) and a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group. 

Michel is a real lighthouse when it comes to collaborative, commons-based production models and works tirelessly since more than a decade in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property.

Here are some important links from the conversation:

> Michel Bauwens, Corona and the Commons http://liminal.news.greenhostpreview.nl/2020/03/23/corona-and-the-commons/

> Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos, “The pulsation of the commons: The temporal context for the cosmo-local transition” (Draft), https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sHhuecKxfB8HRH8o9aOfdlKNqaPQ8lc91502FXXv8e4/edit#heading=h.99i7fcsrn7tf 

> Bologna regulation for the care and regeneration of the urban commons, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Bologna_Regulation_for_the_Care_and_Regeneration_of_Urban_Commons

> P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival - Commons Transition, https://commonstransition.org/p2p-accounting-for-planetary-survival/

> REPORTING 3.0, https://reporting3.org/

> Robert I. Moore (2000), The First European Revolution: 970-1215, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/712195.The_First_European_Revolution

> Bernard A. Lietaer, The Mystery of Money, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8198838-the-mystery-of-money

> Material flow accounting, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_flow_accounting

> Resources, events, agents (accounting model), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resources,_events,_agents_(accounting_model)

> David Ronfeldt, Tribes, Institutions, Markets and Networks, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2005/P7967.pdf

> Jamie Wheal in Rebel Wisdom: War on Sensemaking 3, The Infinite Game, https://youtu.be/mQstRd7opv4

> French land trust “Terre des Liens”, https://terredeliens.org/

> Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40203892-the-neganthropocene

Music by liosound.
Recorded on March 31st 2020

Ep. 06 Michel Bauwens - Commons-based peer production at the edge of a chaotic transition

Stowe describes his calling as “the ecology of work and the anthropology of the future”. He’s founder of Work Futures, where he explores critical themes of the future of work, and top writer in Economics, Leadership and Futures on Medium. He also writes extensively about work technologies and serves as a Gigaom editor.

In our conversation, we talk about how platforms contribute to changing the relationship between consumers and producers and how this — in turn — leads to re-shaping organizations, as firms optimize for a low transaction cost economy. We also talk about fairness and the importance of distributed governance to be transparent and reliable, allowing the players in an ecosystem to operate without constantly “covering their backs”.

How to find Stowe Boyd and his work:

> Medium: https://medium.com/@stoweboyd

> Work Futures: https://workfutures.org/

Mentions and references:

> Rent the Runway: https://www.renttherunway.com/

> Amoeba Management | Management Philosophy | KYOCERA, https://global.kyocera.com/philosophy/amoeba.html

> Stanley McChrystal, Chris Fussell, Tantum Collins, David Silverman (2015): Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex Worldhttps://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22529127-team-of-teams

> Carlota Perez social and economic impact of technical change (including S curves): http://www.carlotaperez.org/

>Follow the work of Ben Evans and Ben Thompson: https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter; https://stratechery.com/

> "In all chaos, there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order." - Carl Jung, https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/carl_jung_157280

> Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Cindy Gallop in HBR on female leadership https://hbr.org/2020/04/7-leadership-lessons-men-can-learn-from-women

> Participatory City: http://www.participatorycity.org/about

Music by liosound.
Recorded on April 3rd 2020

Ep. 08 Stowe Boyd - Ecosystemic Organizations and the Future of Work

In this episode we have a conversation with John Bunch, Lead Organizational Designer and Adviser to the CEO Tony Hsieh at Zappos. John joined Zappos.com in 2009 as a Software Developer and moved on to lead the Public API team. John was the Implementation Lead during Zappos’ shift to Holacracy and self-organization. Coming out of the rollout of Holacracy, John transitioned to leading internal infrastructure and systems design.

In the conversation, we talk about how Zappos - through the application of Holacracy and marked-based dynamics - is becoming a thriving entrepreneurial organization. We use the city as a metaphor for the high diversity, high productivity organisation that Zappos strives to be, based on shared enabling services and micro-enterprising. 

We also explore the concept of the “triangle of accountability” that guides the organizational development and the specific hiring process that helps make sure that people who join the company are aligned with the values and ways of working applied in Zappos.

Remember that you can find the show notes and transcripts from all our episodes on our on Medium publication. 
https://medium.com/@meedabyte/a2aaa916663e?source=friends_link&sk=3c1f7e1c2614731316fb0700295f982a

Here are some important links from the conversation:

Find out more about John’s work

> LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-bunch/

> Zappos: https://www.zappos.com/

> Zappos Expertise: https://expertise.zappos.com/

Other references and mentions:

> Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose.  https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446576220

> Zappos Adaptive: https://www.zappos.com/e/adaptive

> Nassim Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, https://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446576220

Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/podcast

Thanks for the ad-hoc music to Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: www.platformdesigntoolkit.com/music

Recorded on June 11th 2020

Ep.18 John Bunch - Building Complex Organizations through simple constraints: Zappos

Boundaryless helps global customers with Business Strategy and Organization Design for the age of Ecosystems.
We do it by creating openly accessible frameworks and by supporting a community of organizations, institutions, and individuals through workshops, training, and consulting services. 

In this space we host all our audio recordings, including the Boundaryless Conversations podcast, a show focused on exploring the future of large scale organising by leveraging on technology, network effects and shaping narratives. We explore how platforms can help us play with a world in turmoil, change, and transformation: a world that is at the same time more interconnected and interdependent than ever but also more conflictual and rivalrous. 

We used to be online at platformdesigntoolkit.com... now find us on our new website: www.boundaryless.io!

Email: hello@boundaryless.io