# Meaning Conference hangout 6 @meaningconf

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [402]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2012-10-01 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Context.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - In a Page (2010): A series of one-page papers, mostly from spring 2010, each putting one argument on a single sheet. (suggested by machine)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A Feather for Lifting Anvils: EdgeRyders 2.0 (2012): The EdgeRyders plan for Venture Social Capital: financing local projects through a commitment-based social... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: meditation / lineage / spiritual (30%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: micro infrastructure (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); platforms (7 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); IPO (2 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Hub Westminster (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); Ireland (1 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); jobs (2 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated); accounts (1 here; 51 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); supply chains (1 here; 59 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); citizens (1 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): IPO
- Importance: core-text score 0.16 (1.00 is the top), number 410 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.93)
  - [272] Interview with Rob Knight (hexayurt vc) and Dominic Tarr... (2016): close in content (cosine 0.93)
- On the same works, just before: [322] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.md); [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.md); [407] [H4D2.eu Final presentations (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/407.md)
- On the same works, just after: [400] [http://hub.coe.int/forum-mondial-de-la-democratie-5-11-oc... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/400.md); [399] [Council of Europe World Forum for Democracy... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/399.md); [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Meaning Conference hangout 6 @meaningconf, video, 2012-10-01, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [402], https://guptaoption.com/texts/402.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=0s) everything has to be ma uh macro and huge industrial and I'm sure actually if vene can be lured into the sub subject of micro infrastructure he'll be able to discuss hugely about it but it's a good example and there's many others and there's examples all over the world belli which is effectively uh picking up bikes and repairing them and shipping and actually you know they're repairing lost bikes uh lost and stolen bikes and repairing them and putting them back out into the ACT shared uh shared infrastructure in Stockholm so these are lots of really interesting examples building whole new Supply chains again with Ghana as well and I can talk hugely about them but I'm not going to um spend a lot of time I do want to talk a little bit about the Hub um it's something I've been passionate about I've been part of for the last uh sort of nearly 2005 onwards and in a sense it's something that I think is fascinating because the Hub is uh as was ear described is is it's like a co-working space but for me the really fascinating bit about it is one it's Global right and it's not centralized corporate Global right it's locally owned but it's Global and this is what I I think is kind of like the fourth Horizon of globalization right microl local highly local but highly connected currently the Hub is just a movement a global movement yes there's a kind of global Association so all the the hubs together own the IPR and the assets right so it's a kind of mutual a global Mutual all the hubs are locally owned uh Hub westmin is this community interest company uh we were fortunate enough in month 11 to break even which was really remarkable but it was it's something that we built and the reason why we why I think the Hub is interesting whether the Hub survives or not and I'm not passionate about that my point is to HUB signals that actually you can build a Civic globalization a Civic Global a platform there's 31 hubs around the world with nearly 1,400 new inv invitations that have been pulled in now imagine what you could do with that with a university a microl local connected University imagine that what this is starting to prove and that to me is fascinating right now there's some key behaviors in this story and I kind of I think it's important to sort of talk about

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=150s) um micro massive I think the idea of resources how resources are pulled together is huge I think the aggregation of resources through micro actors is going to be very very important we're currently looking at IPS as industrial Province societies they're remarkable vehicles that are historic vehicles from the from the late 19th centuries but they're Cooperative Vehicles where you can do an IPO a public IPO and it's very easy you can raise Capital share accounts people can invest all of you could invest in an IPS and get returns as well but it's actually a cooperative and it's a very powerful ve vehicle for doing 21st century activity so there are ways that are now almost looking backwards are giving us new forms of organizing now imagine you could organize the Cooperative online right imagine if you could invest into a Cooperative online imagine if you could do the governance of the Cooperative online that's when it becomes huge that's what the Web is starting to do is allowing us to take these Cooperative structures and make them fractional and sh durble and scalable in a way they could never have been imagined but there are some challenges and I want to talk about those challenges as well later next I think there's a kind of pregnant question for me about the social Hydra we recently had the debate with a4e right with who were just recently uh um pulled out by the advertising Ombudsman for calling themselves the social outcome business um they claim they do social outcome work fair enough social in a way is now being defined at least five different ways from my perspective and why I think it's important it can be outcome focused it can be methodology are you social in your methodology it can be governance focused in terms of how do you open your uh your governance can be ownership focus and you can be input in terms of crowd sourcing now all these different things currently are thought about in different ways and actioned in different ways but fundamentally they're part of a different process and they're fundamentally part of the same Beast I think social outcome is inherently linked to all these other things so when I talked about me being actually castigated on Twitter to say hey where are you in theat L Weis school that's feedback loops that are driving this integration so when IBM talk about social business in one aspect of it for me these are all converging it's a convergence course whether we get on it I I reckon in 10 years time we won't be talking about social Enterprises we'll

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=300s) be talking about social business and just a it's the way to do business in a new way and these things are on an integration course and as a result of that everyone's your client there is no up or down everyone is part of that process everyone is part of that synthesis and increasingly at z00 for example we don't perceive the funer as your client funder is just one stakeholder in that process and you start to talk about these things in quite Rich ways and it allows for more complex Rich conversation with your partners now I said something quite um controversial at an RBA conference and I want to draw on my architect's hat on this I sort of said that and it leads on to this from this conversation I said Architects should be liable for the buildings they design socially liable I want them to be able to be sued why would an architect say that that was the question I got why would you say that I said well look at the bright side soon as I'm suable I've got to make sure I've got I've done everything that is possible to make that building public value so if if x person can sue me I have a legitimacy with my client with my investors with everyone that interacts to actually make that the best building possible in terms of social outcome that is what we can talk about when you start to perceive and I think it's going to require us to become genuine public value actors in terms of being able to address these things in more profound ways so I would encourage Architects to be actually suable because if AR if the local Authority could sue me as an architect I would have to provide legitimacy I would have to design in a different way I'd have to engage in a different way not because the developer said yes or no that would be what I would inherently have to do what would be the end result of the buildings I produce it's a counterargument right but you could then liberate planning you don't need planning as a regulatory system then why would you need it because I'm liable you can start to actually self-regulation is possible but it requires a whole new type of actually professionalism and professionalism in its original sense right in 1839 when the r Charter was said written it says I am responsible regardless whoever pays me for the public good that's what it actually says in the charter and I think that's really really important

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=450s) I've talked about that so I'm going to just jump I'm going to focus on some questions actually there's lots of things there um about team capabilities and new forms of leadership but I want to question end with some questions I've got six minutes and I think the questions for me and the challenges are really where it's at one is an example of Huffington Post and London Zoo and I I've used these examples before but they're great Huffington Post which has recently sold to AOL and the running gag is you can sell anything to a but there are but the interesting thing was 99% of their content was produced by bloggers free but it was sold for something like 320 OD million doar and at the point of sale the owner actually had a litigation suit put against her because she had a platform and she'd sold the platform with no distribution to the other investors which were the bloggers now that to me is a perfect Crystal example of effectively a 20th century architecture failing to know how to deal with a 25th Century platform model so that's just step one London Zoo everyone loves London Zoo right that's great it's charity it's fantastic but how about this I tried to leave London Zoo and the only way to get through out of London Zoo is is through um a pretty tacky disneyi shop right with a child this is a charity why would a charity force me into a consumptive model when I'm a member and I pay their fees but they pushed me through a little T what a nice tacky shop but it's a shot right to force my kid through that why because actually their trustees are bound by law to optimize the income for actually their social purpose single purpose there are single purpose vehicles that are optimized by law to do that and as as soon as a consultant walks over and says hey you can make more money for your charitable outcomes they pretty much have to do it in no uncertain terms it's quite difficult takes strong leadership to defy those Logics but it isn't that interesting for me this idea of single purpose Vehicles whether it's profit or a single outcome are part of the problem we have to talk about ecosystems and ecosystem value in a much richer complex way

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=600s) I think Finance is changing and I think it's really really interesting so and you know social impact bonds social outcome investment social investment this isn't just about and I think it's really important to realize this that I don't think this is just uh philanthropy or you know don't oh God don't we like this I think it's actually Capital starting to have to become intelligent VCS are moving into the space very smart VCS I won't quotee you this but actually a very very good VC in America um basically turn around said we were getting 40% returns better than any private Equity or working in the social space 40% better than private Equity it's not because they they they like this they think it's philanthropy they think this is the way forward this is what the future will look like and I think capital is starting to starting to become smarter about what it means to actually invest long and invest into the social processes and there's lots of innovation going on in the here it's worth keeping your eye on I think architecture will have to become more fundamentally linked to social investment if it's going to become purposeful as will all as will many things point three management management and co- venturing increasingly we talk about ourselves as co- venturing organization we actually Venture into into making things why because we realize that nobody knows what the future looks like so you have to become a venturing partner with your with with your partners and I think that raises some really interesting challenges about what does servant leadership look like and a lot of the role I I I I think we try to play is servant leadership but servant leadership which is what platforms require right you have to be quite dispassionate you have to push from the behind actually can be very easily destroyed it's a fragile thing because all it takes is for somebody to want to take reputational gains by themselves and serve at leadership ship dies very quickly so as someone wants to acrw reputational Value servant leadership diminishes and dies very very quickly so servant leadership is a very fragile thing and I don't know how to deal with it right now so you can behave like that but it's very easily destroyed and it's exactly what's required for the platform economy don't get me wrong but I think it's very fragile and I think we should start to think about what leadership looks like in these platforms and a funni story about stories I think we've got become much more careful about

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=750s) language um you know uh everyone talks about sharing everyone talk about all this stuff street car I use this example is not a sharing economy it's a rent economy right and we've got to be very careful about this and careful in language and also in the truth that we're talking to ourselves why do I make that differentiation there is a big risk that over the next 10 years we will be moved into a massive rental economy all of us where the assets will be held by fewer and fewer people right so street car if street car is a commercially owned vehicle and it's sold and you will rent it fractionally rent it means that you have no assets you're just accessing those assets you become Revenue Vehicles whereas if you share an asset I.E I share an asset with v and St that's different right because actually we're starting to share assets it's generally the asset uh relation ship is different because we are still building resilience by all of us having assets we're going to have to be very careful about what platforms really mean and who owns these platforms because if you're not we will find ourselves being actually very small ins significant renters on these platforms with very little power and that is a genuine risk that we face in the shift as a platform economy we haven't really built the 21st century governance platforms should be thought of more like States than they should should be as corporates I don't think we started to imagine what these economies look like and I don't think we've understood that if we strip away the assets from us as Citizens we'll be left very very vulnerable to actually any res uh to any shocks that emerge that's one of the key threats for us so there's a great movement coming on I think and I think some amazing stuff going on and lots of innovation and I talk about this from a hub Westminster perspective right hub westmin cic I worry about its government I worry about actually how much influence I have I worry about the fact that I can nudge things right I no I can I can influence quite a lot the first 12 members I purposefully put vene duil and a few other people into H Westminster why not because I agree with him V knows that um but because actually the plurality of discourse was really important right it wasn't about agreeing with me now imagine I wanted to create a platform for slowly agree agreeing with me how much influence I have in that

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=900s) process so platforms are incredibly powerful but there's huge amounts of soft power buried into them that they have we have very little transparency about so I'm really really purposely conscious about how do we build these platform economies and actually what responsibility they put on us to build a whole new form of transparency and discourse in The Wider world I think I'm done in a sense I think the future is not a panace here it's going to bring hell of a lot of challenges and I think together we're going to have to be open to those real difficult questions about what it means for us at least we get sucked into building our own uh negative future in the way which I think the platform economy could be far worse than the corporate economy if we let it go and I think it requires us to be quite quite open to those challenges thank you excellent I'm not sure how your brains are mine's like Wicked so next up we have a brilliant person good friend Karen Pine professor karenine who's professor of development Psy developmental psychology at the University of hartfordshire she's written five books she founded a very interesting company called do something different um who are doing groundbreaking work in the field of behavior change and when we were putting together this event and thinking about the facets of kind of information perspective approaches what do we have in the toolkit then surely if moving to these worlds that some of the speakers have been talking about this morning all of them require change change in units of one changing Us in me changing my habits so I'd like you to get Karen Pine

[17:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1031s) on stage to help us explore that very topic [Applause] Karen well you are a legend and hello everyone I'm really happy to be here no not happy actually I'm relieved to be here without getting lost I have a bit of a habit when I'm going to places that I haven't been before of getting lost I have a hopeless sense of direction and I was always rubbish at geography in fact it's a standing joke in my family that um I failed my geography O Level because I got lost on the way to the exam but I prefer alternative explanation I prefer to blame on my teacher say had a rubbish teacher because do you do that if you're no good at something you say oh yeah I had a supply teacher I had a Lish teacher that subject and I was I was talking to a friend about this last week and uh his name is Jonathan and he told me that he had I was envious he had the most brilliant geography he had this teacher the geography started off the boys would turn up this was back in the 70s boys look like this then didn't they my boyfriends did and he he the boys would turn up into class in the mornings and and Mr West who was the teacher would say all right boys field trip today off you go get us far away from this classroom as you can and that was it I F go and Jonathan said him and his mate would' go down the road and they would hitch a lift and uh go long get in a long distance Lorry a driver going long distance didn't know where he was going just knew how to get as much miles between himself and the classroom as possible and thought this was fantastic here he had the freedom of the open road he saw vast waves of Countryside that he' never have seen he felt alive with excitement Freedom can you imagine it can you imagine teachers getting away with that now

[19:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1181s) no Math teachers maybe say that anyway Jonathan go as far as Norwich yeah people name from Norwich yeah is that in Wales or somewhere anyway he he was he got one day his school was in sit and he got as far as nor and he was absolutely thr to bit now what he had to do though when he got as far away as he could he had to phone Mr West up Mr West said give me a ring when you get there and you can reverse the charges if you remember reversing the charges so before we had mobile phones but you could make a telephone call from a telephone box like this years ago and the operator intercept and ask the person on the other end if they would pay for your call so it went like this Jonathan phoned up Mr West and the operator said hello is that Mr West of Highfield School Mr West said yes the operator said uh Mr West I have a reverse charge call from Norwich from from of Jonathan Marshall will you accept the charge Mr West said no the phone down and then he wrote down J Marshall Norwich knew where everybody had been and then had to find his way back again and Jonathan has still all these years later really really fond memories of those days and he went on to become somebody who traveled the world who was never afraid to go into new territories get out of his comfort zone he met his wife Gillian and they've been on numerous Expeditions and she comes from Norwich actually and they are now in fact just planning their trip to the Everest Base Camp and I think either Mr West couldn't stand children and he was a really rubbish teacher or he knew something about learning and I believe a l I think he knew that we learn and we grow by doing things not by being told stuff not by be given reasons and rationality we learn

[22:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1331s) by experience and that's the first of the

[22:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1335s) behavior change principles that I want to talk to you about today just going to talk about three principles that I've gleaned over years and years as a psychologist of trying to understand how people change and how we work and I think we learn and we grow we develop by doing new things not by thinking or reasoning by having real experiences that exist outside of our normal range and yet what do businesses do when they want to grow and develop people they do the equivalent of putting them in a classroom they send them on a training course put them on a workshop might give them some happens what happens when we're exposed to those things is that we're not actually changing our Behavior we go on a course or our employer then can then tick the box that we've done that training then we go back to our desks and think okay now where was I what was I doing before I was so rudely interrupt you by that workshop I'll get back to my job now and we snap back to doing what we always did change is very difficult and the reason we go back to doing what we was did is because the brain is a habit machine brain consists of 100 billion neurons it's a fantastic habit machine whenever we learn something we we create connections between these neurons did I do that did you do that okay and we create connections the more we do something the more neurons the brain assigns to that action and with repetition the connection between those neurons becomes stronger and stronger until we have a neural pathway what you saw there was information traveling down a neuro neural pathway because the stronger it becomes increases the likelihood of that pathway being used again and again and again so whenever we come up against a situation that we think we've got the answer for we activate the same neural

[24:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1485s) Pathways and that's what we're up against when we're trying to change Behavior we're up against a brain that is hardwired for inertia and no amount of thinking or reasoning or appealing to rationality is going to change that brain its action Its Behavior that makes a difference and so we came up with do something different as a way of giving people the actions that are associated with any learning and we put it online and we distribute actions behaviors to people to say yes you know the reasons now go and do this do this today do that tomorrow and it might pop up in email or on their phone it's all about Behavior we had one guy his name was Tom who was an engineer at a company who were going through a lot of changes Tom was only 42 he looked a lot older he had a lot more gray hairs than perhaps he should have done because he was struggling he was very stressed and Not only was work difficult because of imminent redundancy and lots of pressure but home was tough for Tom as well he was married to Hazel he had three boys nine-year-old Twins and he had a seven-year-old boy Daniel who suffered with autism as any of you will know that can be very very challenging and demanding and Tom had kind of got into a habit of finding life difficult but getting home from work and feeling quite stressed out and pulling outside his own house and on the one hand thinking yeah I'm home great end of the day when the other hand thinking what am I going into because very often he would go home and Hazel his wife would be at the end of her teor perhaps in floods of Tears beside herself because of things that the children had been doing that day particularly Daniel who refused to eat his food or had locked himself in the bathroom or bitten his teacher it seemed there was always something and Tom was coping by with this by well not coping actually he was going in sitting down turning on the TV watching the news and and kind of just letting it all go over his head because he felt helpless he didn't know what he could do anyway Tom's company put him on a stress

[27:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1635s) program it was a do something different stress program so he didn't go on a course or anything he just started to receive dues every couple of days them different things to do and one day this popped up on his phone it just said do go for a 15 minute walk at lunchtime or after work today that's all looks so simple and Tom thought when he got home that day I'll try it he went in he showed Hazel the do on his phone that gives him permission to do something different he changed his jacket he changed his shoes put on his walking boots and he went out for a walk it was one of those nice evenings it was going to start to get now aren't we in October where we get brilliant sun uh sunsets and he was walking towards the fields behind his house and he thought this is good I'm getting a feeling I'm enjoying this he decided to do it more often he made a habit and new habit of doing it every day after work and then one day after work when he was changing into his jacket and his walking boots he noticed on the floor at the back door there was a little pair of train ERS and a little kind of kid's hooded jacket type they wear when they go out to play and as Tom went out for his walk Daniel trotted along behind him and they walked in silence for a long time for about the first 10 12 minutes and then Daniel spoke to Tom he told him about something that happened at school today that had never ever occurred before for the first time Tom had something nearing a conversation with his child that was a breakthrough moment and it led to other breakthroughs it led to better relationships at home in the family and Tom found that he coped better at work what Tom discovered is that it's really hard to make big sweeping changes in your life especially when you got a lot of crap going on in your life it's really difficult but what you can do is you can start to make small changes to behavior you can start to disrupt habit patterns and if you start to make small changes by doing something different you create a ripple effect you don't know

[29:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1785s) necessarily what the consequences will be but you can guarantee that if you did nothing nothing would change but you do something and there's a good chance that you'll get something different

[30:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1805s) so in order to change Behavior we have to break down old habits in that case all Tom had to do was just to stop ignoring what was going on and adopted new Behavior we had to do something different and small changes although they may seem incredibly simple at first can make big differences and they're doable they don't require will willpower or a huge attitude shift they're small things that are doable in our everyday life so we had another guy on a a do something different course his his company instigated a do something different program for bias and inclusiveness to make staff more inclusive in their relationships this Di stepen and Steven was tough decisive he knew where he was going in life he made sure he was going to get there and he had got there been incredibly successful he was director of operations in a very large organization and part of our do program every do program is that we try to get people to become more behaviorally flexible by that I mean we all have behaviors that we use regularly all the time theyve become hardwired into our brains but we have a lot of behaviors that we never use which could serve us well so Steven Was preparing for a very important strategy meeting one day with senior staff in his organization and he knew he had to drive through a new strategy but he was very confident win everybody over and move on to implement it and then just as he was preparing to go into the meeting he gets this doe on his phone it says do try out your unassertive side today for example stay quiet in a meeting hold back let others have their say well stepen showed this to a colleague and uh who told us what he said when he received it which I won't F here but basically it was why on Earth would I want to be unassertive he actually used the phrase I didn't get where I am today by being unassertive okay he prided himself on

[32:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=1955s) his assertiveness but the colleague who knew something about Steven said to him look you brought into this program why don't you just give it a word and he did Steven went into that meeting and at first he had to put his hand over his his mouth bite his tongue he was desperate to jump in but then he just sat and watched and observed and two guys were in that meeting who he thought he knew well he thought one was really on his side completely on his wavelength really on board as far as the strategy was concerned and the other guy he thought was a bit of a lightweight uh and probably quite ineffective when he sat back and didn't jump in and didn't put forth his own views and didn't try to dominate the whole meeting he found that he learned something about these two guys that the one he thought was on his wavelength actually started talking and he let him keep talking and the guy went on and practically hung himself and the other guy who he thought was inection lightweight he came up with a probing questions he came up with some real insights and eventually out of it came some really good ideas that would never have UR stepen so sorry what Stephen discovered is that if you keep reusing the same behavior the same behavior trait that you think has got you to where you are you only just stay where you are you won't learn grow you won't develop and you may may miss out on a whole host of new ideas and new opportunities that are there but you're not seeing them because you're being a habit machine because you're being behaviorally inflexible basically you'll stay on that same brain pathway and you'll stop growing and that's why we always get people on our doe programs to try another behavior and we have a very clever diagnostic on the online system which is developed here in Brighton I'm pleased to say that will identify the gaps that people have in their behavioral profile it'll find out which behaviors they're not using it'll make

[35:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=2105s) them use them it would send them those dues that say just try this today give a world see what happens and then the ripple effect takes over so these behavioral flexibility programs help us to grow and develop whatever it is that we're aiming to accomplish whether we want to be less stressed whether we want to improve relationships deal with companies with leadership green Behavior bias and diversity happiness is a recent one which we're working on we always include the principle if you just have one behavior and like it's like going around with a hammer and approaching every job that you come up with against with a hammer it do for some jobs but for other jobs it'll create the right up yeah the flexibility is like going through life with a full tool box so whatever situation you come up against you know that you've got the tool for the job because just having that hammer means you're going to keep doing the same thing you're going to use those same Pathways same way you went to work you're going to read the same newspaper you're going to trot out the same old solutions to problems you're never going to learn and grow and develop and this to me is what Behavior change is all about so to change Behavior we have to expand the person's behavioral repertoire have to grow their toolkit so they become more behaviorally flexible and we do that one do at a time and the beauty of this is that we now know is that video not playing doesn't matter oh there we go there are those lovely Pathways again same old brain Pathways but what is now known is that thanks to non-invasive neuroimaging techniques we can now look at the brain and we know a lot more about it its structural plasticity that is the ability of the adult brain brain to change to reorganize and to form new connections and thanks to neuroscientists originally this was a

[37:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=2255s) guy called Bogdan drinski the university in Germany who discovered this and brain science has come on in Leaps and Bounds ever since the adult brain can change it can rewire itself but you know how those new connections get formed they get formed from actions from doing things not from thinking not from rationality or reason it all starts with a behavior of course cognitive change follows on because once you've done something different you have new insights that's when your thinking changes but a lot of the mistakes have we made in the past have been to try to change people's thinking and as a result hope that they will change their behavior assume that if you send them on a course they will then go and do the right thing but no we change Behavior first then people have personal insights and then we see cognitive change it's like CBT but turned on its head really and this is so powerful so I said I started off and I've been saying to you that we don't change people by just talking to them and I'm standing here talking to you so I've got to practice what I preach yeah um like can't personally do a diagnostic on all of you though I did one two of you over coffee you didn't know did you um but I want you to think about what do you like on that one dimension let's take systematic and spontaneous okay you might think you can be a bit of both but you probably have a leaning either to being very systematic or to being very spontaneous how many of you would say you lean more towards a systematic side yeah okay a lot of name and how many of you think you're probably more spontaneous okay that's good that's about 50/50 but to really experience do something different you've got to take some something that you're not and try it so if you said you were spontaneous try and being systematic look at the Dos on the left hand side of that screen and select one if you said you were systematic look at the Dos on the right hand

[40:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=2405s) screen right hand side of the screen and select one and just resolve to do it just give it a whirl over the next day or two we usually give people one to two days to do a do it's a small action you don't know where it's going to leave lead but do something it feels a little bit uncomfortable as well don't pick the easy thing we want to push you a little bit off that old brain pathway into activating wider regions of your brain and you'll only do that by doing something different so write it down now the one that you are going to do put it in your phone if you're very systematic you'll have an alarm that reminds you we like you're spontaneous write it on a paper airplane and throw it at yourself it doesn't matter try it resolve to just give it a wh and see what happens because it's outside of your ual behavior where the magic happens it's out on the open road we all need somebody like Mr West in our brains saying just go out there get as far away from your normal self as you possibly can yeah and then have you all resolved to do one yeah good will you do it starting today that's so cool and then this is my thank you to you for listening and for being a great audience and I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference and you'll final do when you leave when you go out of this room two of my glamorous assistants Ry and Anthony will be standing at the door they'll give you a card that says thank you it'll have a stamp on it and what I'd like you to do is to write that card to somebody who's made a difference to you in your business somebody who's made an impact on you somebody that you've been meaning to thank and perhaps taken for granted just some somebody who's done something for you in your life you're going to thank them in an unconventional way and it's going to feel quite uncomfortable for some of you but I

[42:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcOaE9KqZWo&t=2555s) would say just do it just give it a wh and just see what happens because that's what doing something different is all about thank you ah yes again very good so hopefully due to the amounts of thinking you've been doing you're now hungry say I if you're hungry I good I like hungry people so have lunch um it's going to be great sit down you know do something different or don't um take your shoes off uh we've got an hour for lunch and then we come back and there's more and there's more and there's more and there's more and then we finish it's going to be great there are Nick and mckinness people here as well as event staff please put your hand up and in person if you have any problems ask these strange looking people around you with their hands up we are all here to help um please go and have lunch have a good time we've got an hour [Applause] go Hi how are you sir very well how you doing see hi the usual chaos uh I still I still have not anything likely covered from the sort of basically six weeks of continuous TR so Greece Ireland sorry Greece then Wales thenm all right folks see you later uh with all of this

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End of [402] Meaning Conference hangout 6 @meaningconf. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
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