Before Organisations: From Stone Age Tribes to a Fragmented World | Peter Garrett

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Welcome back to what we did before. Today we're exploring what we did before organizations. For hundreds of thousands of years of human history, we organized ourselves through families, tribes, kinship, and trust. Living in small groups of 30 or 40 people, this simple way was possible. But as populations grew too big to control, we needed another solution. Today, organizations shape almost every part of our lives, and they've become something quite strange. A kind of artificial person. They can own property, make decisions, employ thousands of people, and accumulate vast amounts of wealth. They can even outlive the humans who create them. But what was life like before organizations, before the likes of Apple, Amazon, and McDonald's? And what are the consequences of letting them rule everything? To explore this topic, I'm joined by Peter Garrett, author of a new kind of dialogue. Peter grew up in Rhodesia, modern-day Zimbabwe, where many of his thoughts on organizations began to take root. Now he argues that organizations have fragmented our world. What do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_01 1:19 Well, it it's it's an extrapolation, I guess. We the world we live in doesn't look like the world that people millions of years ago lived in. And it's not that they're different kinds of trees or different kinds of birds. It's that we've created an awful lot of stuff. As I'm looking at you now, I'm looking through a screen which never existed before. I look out, I'm in a building, I look out, I see roads, I see cars, I see everything that's created by thought, by people thinking, and then is actually brought into form through organizations. And when I say everything, is almost everything, what I'm wearing, what I think about, what entertains me, uh how I manage my money, my health, my uh uh it's hard to think of something which isn't essentially created by thought, by people thinking, and then made into form through organizations. So we've created a world around us. It's not a natural world, and it's very different from a natural world. A natural world, a tree, for example, take an oak tree, it produces acorns, and the acorns produce more oak trees. It goes on. We produce a building, and I don't know about you, but I'm I do regular repairs of my building. I'm doing guttering in the front door in the window at the moment, because buildings that we make fall apart continually. Cars we get last for a while, and then you have to eventually have to replace it. Computers run out, whatever. So what we make is very different from the natural world. So we have a very different kind of way of thinking about how we live and what we want to do, our aspirations, our fears, and so on. So that's what I'm getting at is that we don't notice how many organizations there are and how many we're involved with, and how much they affect our lives.

SPEAKER_00 3:19 What it makes me realize is that even trying to think of something which isn't bound by an organization in how I live is is nigh on impossible. But but also the way that I think is swayed by this organizational world that we live in. So I'm not even sure I could think outside of outside the bounds of organizations, even if I wanted to, because I'm always sinking within those constraints that we've built for ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 3:46 It's pretty pervasive. Uh you you could ask, is there a way out? And we can talk about it at one point, but I did try dropping out of life like it is now. Yeah. I can describe what what that involved, trying to step back.

SPEAKER_00 4:05 I I've certainly been tempted by the idea of dropping out of society, and and we'll definitely reflect on that because I think what I would love to do is talk about the rise of the age of organizations and what we did do before they became commonplace in our lives. Because as you say, we interact with them now on a daily basis, and there's good and there's bad that comes with the fact that we do that. You know, it's brought humanity, well, all of this that we can see around us, but it's also brought a lot of a lot of negatives too. But humans have been organizing themselves for thousands of years. So, what did humans do before organizations shaped our world?

SPEAKER_01 4:45 There are not any records from people before organizations to read or to watch or to review. So the question becomes, how do you answer a question like that? It happens to be a real interest of mine, and I think I'm kind of lucky because I was brought up in Africa. I went as a child. I'm now in my late 70s, but I went as a three-year-old to Africa. And when I went there, the country was not so well organized. By which I mean as a family, we used to go camping in what we called the bush. So you drive down the road, there was one road, no traffic lights, no turnings, just went down the road. And where you want to camp, you turned off. There were no fences, no gates. You drove into the bush and you thought, well, that what we call a copy, that hill over there might be a nice place to be. So you go over there and park under a tree, because otherwise your car gets really hot, and stay there for a few days. Now that that's kind of getting quite a distance from the civilized world. And of course you make a fire, because that's how you can cook things. If you have water, you put it in a canvas bag, and it the water is porous, it comes out and gradually cools down the water. But there you are, and you start to see what the land is like. There are no pavements, there are no streets, there are no road signs. But it's very interesting. There are not only very interesting animals, a few, but insects, snakes, scorpions, porcupines, all sorts of things. So you start to find in the wild there's a whole ecology, and i if you're aware, you can live a very interesting life in that ecology. But what your interests are are quite different from your interests when you're crossing the road in London, for example. I had the chance to explore that as a child. Also, where we lived, next door to our home, which was about an acre of land, was an area, several acres, which were just wild. So I used to climb through the French with my friend and spend a lot of time in there, where we would just get interested to understand what's there. Like ants make these big anteps. If you break them up, you watch the ants work out how to rebuild their anteap. It's very interesting how they communicate, because they don't talk, they don't write. But and as you get more involved, you start to see why insects, why animals do what they do. That kind of experience of nature led me to feel a kind of participatory experience. You're part of what's happening and you affect what's happening. And by seeing what's happening around you, being attentive to it, you see how to manage yourself well. That's very different experience from living in a civilized, organized world that we do. Then a big thing came was in Rhodesia they had what was called the Rhodesian School Boys Exploration Society. Sound like a good movie or a book or something, isn't it? Rhodesian School Boys Exploration Society. And what happened was the government funded a group of people to go to a part of the country that had never been explored. But basically there were university professors, and the university professors had each had half a dozen schoolboys, and a group went ahead and made a road and made crossings on rivers and so on. We lay on the back of a big lorry and kind of convoy into the bush and went to an area where there were no maps, and nothing had been recorded before. So they didn't know what the geology, what the rocks were, where the rivers went. They didn't know what birds, what trees, what plants around. And they would camp there usually uh two and a half weeks, something like that, three weeks, and all the groupings would be mapping and working out what was going on. And I went with the archaeology group, so archaeology had interested me a bit, and the professor from the university, a guy called Crane Cook. Um, Crane Cook driving a Land Rover, six university age guys in the bank, and we drive off, find a suitable location, which means there's a kind of rock that Stone Age people used. So his interest was to find evidence of Stone Age people. And you're in the middle of nowhere, where do you look? You look where the stone is, because they had stone implements. There's very little evidence of Stone Age people, almost nothing left behind, apart from there's mainly the debris of where they tried to make Stone Age implements and didn't succeed. So the kind of the default pieces are lying on the ground. But what he did was when we found the right area, he said, okay, I'm going to teach you how to make a Stone Age implement. But once you can do it and we could chop down a tree, he said, okay, that's that's what people did. They made implements like this. Now let's go and find some. Now, my experience of camping meant I knew my way around quite well in the bush. So though I was younger, if you're in the bush, you are concerned about the sun. It gets very hot. So you do need to find some shelter. You're concerned about the wind. The wind can be very strong. You want to be in a place where you have a good view, where if you were there for six or seven hours, you'd enjoy what you were seeing and so on. So I had a kind of feel for that, and we'd spread out, and I'd go to where if I were going to spend the next five or six hours working or making implements, where I'd do it, and they're on the ground with the bits of implements. And I'd kind of shout and say, hey, there's some of you, and they'd come. And on the ground, you could find occasional fully made tools, but mainly scrapers, small axes and so on, and reject portions that probably had could have been made hundreds of thousands of years ago. There's no reason for them to move, they're chipped and filled there. So that intrigued me. There am I uh a schoolboy, confined these implements of what were hunter-gatherer people, small, small groupings of people, and I thought, well, were they different from me? Or were they like me? If you read books and look uh at what historians think, they tend to say that Stone Age people were quite primitive. I'm not convinced of that at all, because they weren't exactly where I thought was a good place to go. They seemed to be quite sensitive. Now, I didn't know a lot that they knew, but I still want to take the view probably early hunter-gatherer people from millions of years ago were just like you and me. And if we stripped away everything, if we took away all the civilized, organized world around us, and you and I were wild in the bush surviving, but probably have an experience of a hunter-gatherer, would say, Well, I wonder if you could eat that. So we shall we try it and see, you know, and if you get stomachache or you're ill, well, then probably not eat that one. But you'd start to find what foods are good. And of course, if you've been alert, you would know quite a bit already. Not so much from reading, but from watching. You haven't got any buildings. You then there's there're no remnants of buildings at all. So where would you live? In a cave, under a big tree. So you're not repairing things, you're not trying to make things happen, but you're part of what's happening.

SPEAKER_00 13:26 Yeah, so you can almost imagine this sort of pre-organizational life being much more tactile, much more based on movement, and much more integrated into the world around you. Because I think what I I suppose the point you're making in terms of organizations, what they've brought to our lives, is there's much more time spent, well, within this imagination, this imaginary world that we've built for ourselves. There are things that we spend time thinking about which aren't aren't really things at all. They don't exist. There's not a physical manifestation of many of these thoughts and ideas that we that we spend so much time on.

SPEAKER_01 14:07 You can spend hours on a computer game which doesn't it isn't real. Quite frightening to think how much time and energy we put into things that uh are unreal. So it it seems that for most of the time we've had people living on the planet, like us, not not apes or monkeys, but people, most of the time have been hunter-gatherers, most of the time in Stone Age. So only very recently that changed, the last four or five thousand years that changed. And in that time, with no buildings, living, it it was a participatory life. So you didn't say, well, is it time to go to work? Like, what work?

SPEAKER_02 15:01 Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:02 You know how long it takes a hunter-gatherer to find their food? It's about four or five hours in a day. How long did it take us? Well, I've got to get up early enough to get ready to get there, to get out to yeah. I mean, we work ourselves crazy. Four or five hours and the feeding's done. Well, we've got better go to school. What school? Well, well, if we don't go to school, we won't be able to earn money. What money? Well, to pay tax. What what tax? And you you start to, if you take it more seriously, that kind of life is a very different experience. You're not trying to get more money, you're not trying to get more possessions. You see now people who have five cars and are trying to buy more cars, five houses and trying to get more houses. Why? It's a kind of illusionary aspiration to have more.

SPEAKER_00 16:00 Yeah, and actually, but the way you put it, I didn't I I don't think I quite realize that all of those things are mediated through organizations, and only possible to act that way in this almost illusionary sense because of the existence of organizations.

SPEAKER_01 16:20 So we we need to come to why it changed and how it changed, but just getting the sense of it is a very different world.

SPEAKER_00 16:29 Do you think you truly had a sense of it at the age of three, four, you know, growing up in the bush, getting to see these wild places where um there were no rules, societal rules as we know them. Do you do you think you were able to experience it as our ancient ancestor might have experienced the wild? Or do you think, I mean, you mentioned that perhaps we are similar or the same as our Stone Age ancestors? Some people think our brains have changed, some people think due to the collective nature of our consciousness and learning things via books and being able to go to libraries and all that, that's fundamentally reshaped the way that we think and perceive the world. So, yeah, I d I I are you certain that you could have seen at that age the way the ancestors did, or do you think your brain chemistry had already been altered and and and influenced by the modern world?

SPEAKER_01 17:24 Well, I think the way I'd put it, I was conditioned, having been brought up to live in a house and sleep in a bed and eat food that had been cooked in a particular way, and travel around in cars and fly in aircraft and so on. So I was definitely conditioned. So uh what I could see was um uh limited. And as I said before, if you and I were put in that situation, how long would we last? Not probably not that long, because we don't have that much experience about how to live in those situations. So yeah, I think the the big thing for me was just to the idea that we may not be different, that the difference may be what we've created around us in the world rather than us as as people. The numbers were quite not only very few on the planet, it seems, but the groupings were quite small. It's not easy to have a social grouping of 4,000 people walking around. And the social groupings, from all we can see, were more like twenty, thirty, maybe forty people, but not a lot more, because if you're hunter-gathering, you have to move around to find the food. And you move around as a group, and we have evidence, because there are still hunter-gatherer people. I got interested first reading Lawrence van der Post, who went into the Kalahari and got to learn a bit about the Bushmen. But the Bushmen are are still uh some are still living as hunter-gatherers. There's quite a group in India as well of native uh that I don't know what they call them, primitivos, something like that. They're they're primitive and have no experience of society at all, or of organizations at all. And they've had to seal the area. Nobody's allowed to visit it, because otherwise it disturbs their ability to survive. So there are a few, a few hunter-gatherers around.

SPEAKER_00 19:28 But even a hunter-gatherer tribe might organize itself in some way. So how do we define the difference between our human nature to organize and be organized and what we have now come to know as an organization?

SPEAKER_01 19:44 I think when organizing leads to an organization, then we're definitely organizing. So the social grouping is a participatory one. Everyone is affected by everyone else's behavior. And if you if, for example, you want to go hunting, you can't on your own, you're not going to catch very much. You need a group of you working in a coordinated way. And so you're interdependent, and also the knowledge you have you want to pass on so that other people and all of us can benefit from it. And that's done orally. So there there is quite a lot of storytelling, it seems, about the experience to understand what's happening around. But I wouldn't say it's an organization, doesn't have rules, doesn't say you can or can't do this. More like, I should uh I suppose, like watching animals. I mean, it may be as infants we have that experience. When we're ourselves very young, we may not notice that there are rules and people organize around us. We're just kind of there. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:54 I guess you could look at animals and and say, what did we do before organizations? Well, just look at animals and the way they behave. That that's what we did.

SPEAKER_01 21:05 Those Bushmen, while I've been alive, so the last one I think was in 1952, 53, licenses were issued by the government to shoot Bushmen. They were considered to be animals. So you could buy a license to kill Bushmen because Bushmen by that time were raiding farmers' cattle. And they believed that Bushmen were not people. Well, what I was thinking rather, maybe Bushmen were people like us. But their situation was rather different. Now, the change from small number of people wandering around in the bush and being part of what's happening. When there are good rains, there's plenty of food, when there's drought, the numbers reduce. It e it seems if you take the Bushman, the older people, when it's time to die, wander off into the on their own. Because they know they're becoming a weight for the group to carry, and the group won't do well. So as part of their contribution, they wander off and die. It's kind of like it's a very deep participation. It seems the change came with agriculture. When Europeans first came into South Africa in the 1700s, people had agriculture then, but it was very rudimentary. They farmed one area, and when the soil was depleted, they moved to another area. When that was depleted, they moved to another area. So they were still nomadic, but they did some farming as well. It's when people started farming one piece of land that then the change occurs.

SPEAKER_00 22:58 It's interesting you bring up agriculture because I'm uh planning a deep exploration of this idea. Um that's it's it's fairly popular, but um it is a bit controversial. And it's the idea that actually humans ended up worse off as a result of agriculture and not better off. And you know, it's hard for us to see it that way because of the uh very easy lives that we live as as we see it. We're very comfortable, um, affluent, we have plenty to eat, but there are a lot of drawbacks that come with all of those things that we've given ourselves as a result of agriculture and and all of the things that sort of filtered down from that. So, yeah, it's it is interesting. Uh, before agriculture, we had this disorganized world, and maybe it was a bit more chaotic. Um, but maybe that wasn't such a bad thing.

SPEAKER_01 23:50 I I don't think I'd call it disorganized, I'd call it natural. So you say we're far better off. We only have to work ten hours a day rather than four hours a day. We only have to hold all sorts of insurances and repairs, and we only have to obey all these rules. I mean, th the idea that we're better off for agriculture is worth looking at in depth. What happened was the numbers increased. Because of the ability to produce food, we had larger numbers. With larger numbers, we have hierarchy. So with hierarchy we have some who are more important in decision making than others. And therein, history is is not history of success, it's history of violence and failure between people. Almost all of history is the painful situation where we've detached ourselves from the environment and are in the process of destroying it. And we now say, can the world actually survive? That couldn't be a question for a hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherer's part of it. It's not separate from the environment, it's a part of the environment. So organizations have enabled us to separate ourselves from the environment and say, whatever the environment does, we can carry on anyway. And what we do is we create a whole lot of well, we create buildings to live in. We start to use the manpower of people. The hierarchy is the biggest challenge, I think, we find. We start to defend, well, we we get what we call the ownership of land as well as hierarchy. So this is my land, not your land. Um that's the start of war. There are other reasons for war as well. There is territorial war for food, but once we've got food sorted out with agriculture, it's then the ownership of land. And I mean, you look at the news today, it's about ownership of land and who makes decisions about what happens. It's a bloody world. It's a very difficult place for people to do well, really.

SPEAKER_00 26:12 But what confuses me though is that you paint this quite beautiful picture of you know, kinship and storytelling, inclusion, living amongst the environment, and yet we chose to move towards these impersonal organizations after existing for hundreds of thousands of years in this integrated way. So there must be some allure to it that that makes us want to move towards organizations and this structure that we've built for ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 26:43 The early allure seems to be to have consistency of food. If you think back and you read like Bible stories and you find there are seven years of plenty and seven years of famine, well, without agriculture, that means the population would be significantly reduced. And the population of people and animals is what the environment can manage. What we've done now is we can expand the population hugely, and the environment can't manage it. So we have to find artificial ways of ensuring that we can manage it. So I guess the allure I it's hard, it's very hard to say. It really is. Um it's not only agriculture and assurance about food. With the growth of numbers, there seems to become an interest in power and money of wealth. You can't get a uh a hunter-gatherer millionaire or billionaire.

SPEAKER_00 27:43 No, but you do surely you did see some sort of structural hierarchy. You know, I'm imagining like a chieftain, for instance, or or maybe I don't have a deep enough understanding of how true Stone Age people survived and lived, but there must have been some sort of hierarchical structure within a small band of 20 to 30 people. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 29:04 The best sense I have, and from what I can find of first-hand experience, is the people who were the wisest and most capable were the ones who held back. So you and I, being capable men, would eat last rather than eat first. We wouldn't say, well, this is all ours and give the rest to the leader would have the least comfortable time, would be most concerned with the well-being because they had more skill and ability to manage it. Somehow with agriculture, the leader may not even know how to farm, how to raise livestock. May be quite useless in that regard. But they have the ownership of the land, of the money, the control, and so on. The population increases, and that you then have to bring in social rules. You have to require behavior in particular ways. The bloodline relationship is the kin relationship. Kith is the social relationship of people that you're not related to in blood. So when you talk about kith and kin, kin, kindred is your your own possessions pass to your children through your family. Kith or Kuth is Kuth is part of the same origin of the word. We require people to behave in a particular way for society to work well. That all emerges. And then at some point we start producing excess and trading with other peoples. So now not only are we controlling our own land and our own production, but we found ways of communicating with others and trading with others. That gets rampant with numbers. Without numbers, it's quite hard to keep track of what's happening. With numbers and with hierarchy, we can not only control what's happening, we can start to tax people, we can start to do all sorts of things. And then written language, the written language then leads to the sustaining of the of the civilized groups. So in Radisha, in now called Zimbabwe, there are the Zimbabwe ruins. The Zimbabwe ruins are stone buildings, but the people there didn't have language. They had no writing. They spoke, but they didn't have any writing, and as a result, it just disappeared. So our organized world depends on hierarchy, it depends on social structure, it depends on numbers, it depends on writing, and then we start to get the kind of huge growth of numbers and the huge destruction of the natural world. It's um a very, very sad thing to think how depleted our experiences become. If you are in the wild and you meet wild animals, they don't harm you unless you're likely to harm them. I mean, you might be on the food list, it might be that they are hungry and need to eat, and so they might choose you or me. But if you watch animals hunting, for example, those that do hunt, they choose the weaker of the species. They'll chase the herd, and the weaker one at the back is the one they'll take. You might say it's easier, but it leads to the sustaining of that group of buck or wildebeest or whatever it is. So they participate, even though they eat each other, they participate in a real way. As we move on with civilizing the organized world, that becomes less and less the case. We're not really interested in what happens in the environment. We just want to have power for our we'll build a dam to have power for our factories so that we can sell and make more money.

SPEAKER_00 32:58 It it reminds me, um, and and and not in a light way about you know the message of the Lion King and the circle of life. You know, it's um it it seems like a child's film, but that message is is actually really profound when you look at it through this lens um that we've completely disrupted that that circle of life. Um, one way that we've disrupted our past experience as as a species is how we view time. Because you you talk a lot about these two different types of time that we live by. We've got Kairos and Kronos. So one is clock time, and the other is like felt or embodied time. And obviously, in the modern world, clock time is the ruler. You know, we do everything by the clock. We this meeting that we had today, we did it and based it on clock time. And I'm really fascinated to look, especially another deep dive episode into what humans did before clocks. But as a as an entry into that discussion, really, Peter, what is your view on these two different types of time and how we feel them and experience them and what organizations did by removing that embodied time that we had?

SPEAKER_01 34:12 I think there are probably more than two kinds of time, but you'll find depending on your age, time feels very different. I recall as a teenager leaving home to go to university, and time was a very big animal in front of me. It was like time hardly mattered. I I wanted to run into the world and see what was going on. Um so but time later in one's life is slightly different, uh and so on. So I think there's we each have our own personal experience of time as well. But the question you're asking was um two words used by the Greek, chronos and kairos. Kairos is more timing. It's the moment uh that you choose or that arrives. So you decided the moment in this conversation to bring in this question of time. Had a feel it would probably be a good good point to bring it in, and you did, and I think it works quite well. So that that's a sense of timing. But talking with my wife, uh, we're refurbishing a house, and I have some ideas about ways we might have furniture with changing walls and things. But there's a time to raise that with her. That's stupid. There's another time where it's an idea she wouldn't like to think about, but yeah, well, we could think about it, I guess. Then there's another time when I think we need to make a decision on this, you know. And so that sense of timing is part of relationship. It it's also we'll go for a walk today. When do you think we should go? Well, it looks like it's going to rain for a while, probably not yet. But the around us, it's more natural to do something at a particular time. And that's not at one o'clock or three o'clock. It's when it feels right. Well, we we had a long breakfast, so let's wait a while, now let's go for a walk or whatever it might be. So that sense of timing, I think, is natural to living. When we get it most is on holiday, isn't it? You go on holiday. Uh if you're on a beach or somewhere, when should we go down to to the sea when we feel like it? And when should we eat? I don't know, when we're ready. It is not to organize, certainly in more recent times, it has required time, chronological time. And that chronological time means that we'll do certain things at an agreed time. Early on, I mean we had the it's the year, it's the month. The year is the circuit round the sun, the month is a moon around the earth, the day is sunrise to sunset, then we had the hours, then minutes. All around the UK, the clocks in different towns weren't synchronized. So noon in York was different from noon in Bath or in Oxford. And eventually they had to synchronize when they started, people started moving around and so on. But now with time, we can agree to do something. As you said, we could agree on the 3rd of July to meet in Parish at a particular restaurant or museum, and we we'd achieve it. We'd get the right flights, the right metro and everything, and do it. So time is a chronological time is a really big, big factor in organizing things, and we become very sensitive to it. Formula One racing measures a hundredth of a second. It's quite extraordinary the degree to which we've we've gone for uh chronological time. The other side of it, of course, is you can say, well, you know, I have uh an aim to get so many listeners to my podcast by the end of the month. So I'll invest this or do that or whatever it is. I and we create what we call a deadline. Well, you can't you haven't got a deadline in nature. You've got spring, you've got summer, you've got autumn, you've got winter. Now, that kind of time is common in agriculture until quite recently. So I spent time on my grandfather's farm, which became my uncle's farm, and there they hired people, all the hands were hired for one year. They hired at Michaelmas at the fair, you got your hands. They prepared the land, they sowed the seed, they harvested the crop, made the money, got paid off, and then another year. And that that was the way to do it. Then my uncle decided to go for bird's eye peas. These are frozen peas. What do you have to do? He had to spend nearly a million pounds on equipment. He had to plant them, and down the road was a bird's eye factory, and all the farmers around had to keep that factory going 24 hours a day. So he'd be told at 3 a.m. in the morning you need to be delivering X tons of frozen peas. And he'd go out after midnight with the honest machine and go and harvest. It had nothing to do with what was going on. So these deadlines are creating all sorts of pressures in us socially, in us personally. I've I've worked in organizations that had a uh a forecast, they they had their arranged budgeting and their forecast to make a million pounds. They only made 900,000 pounds and everybody's depressed. We missed our target.

SPEAKER_00 40:18 Yeah, and also it sounds like um in some ways you sort of chunk up life and you you give it these sort of hard-defined moments. Whereas for before organizations and for those hunter-gatherers, it would have been a much more blended experience. Everything rolled into the other. And I guess by the time the end came and your time was up, you died of old age, or you were attacked by a lion or whatever the case might be, maybe maybe it just felt like all part of that blended process, you know, and it was it I think maybe even death has become more of a an occasion of a of a deadline in the modern world due to this way that we've organized ourselves. What do you think?

SPEAKER_01 41:10 I think not only is it a natural process, but it's also quite subtle and quite sensitive. What you do in the evenings, you you look at the stars and the weather. So the weather is not separate from you. The weather is part of how you think and feel and what you choose to do. And if you take the farming experience, so hunter-gatherers are rare now. They're thing of the past. Agriculture is quite common. There are people in almost every country in the world living on farms, growing food and so on. It's still the case that your time and energy is producing food and food that you eat. Once you get into real chronological organized world, you're not producing food. Very few people are interested in producing food. You you and I might choose which market we go to to buy that food. Oh, I got Bulgarian yogurt or I got beans from Kenya, or like and literally they are flown in from another continent, and our relationship is to buy packaged sliced ham. But did we ever slaughter a pig? Or you know, like we're very, very detached from the flow of food, and rather in our organized world, in a very abstract way, dealing with all sorts of painful challenges. Now, you could say we're better off, we have we live longer, we have hospitals to look after us, we and um when you do your podcast, I'd be interested to see where you come out on it. I think we're far worse off for a more good organized world than we were. But we're also at a point where we're saying, can we sustain it? Is it possible for the to survive with the environment gradually deteriorating? We were very concerned about the ozone layer and the warming of the planet and the impact on food production until the last couple of years. Last couple of years we said, no, the value of oil is far more important. We need money from oil. What's going to happen in ten years' time, twenty years' time? Like so you had a long-term vision, really, uh, in the wild. I tell you one other pointer to me, why I believe that, is I did some work in India in a state called Orissa, which is a very poor state. It was funded by the British government, and we were looking at poor landowners. They were eating two meals a day, so not much income, and illiterate. They couldn't write. But they owned land and the land was passed on. So if the father had three sons, the land was given to three people. So gradually their landowning was smaller and smaller, and they had wasteland. So we worked with them on what they could plant on the wasteland they earned. They owned. The quickest return was to plant reeds to make paper. And within three years they could be selling to paper companies and getting an income. The middle area was fruit trees, mangoes, things like that that would take longer to produce a crop, but will be sustained longer with less work. And the longest term was cedar, which is a hardwood, where you wouldn't get any return in your it would be your children who get the return, not you. We went through this process with all of them collectively and individually in different villages and got. Got together with all the experts because it was such a big project, it would affect the co the price of mangoes in the state or they or paper because they were importing pulp and so on. About 70% of them opted for cedar. They they wanted the hardwood. On two meals a day. Uh that link that that's that's the investment. Now I don't think you'd find many businessmen now and who who are interested in what happens the generation after next.

SPEAKER_00 45:38 No.

SPEAKER_01 45:39 So our mentality about the well-being of all has gone. It's the well-being of me. Either me or me and my people or my country, uh, my con my business.

SPEAKER_00 45:54 It's really interesting, isn't it, that you know, directly opposed from our ancient ancestors, we are so focused on like individualism uh and we're so egocentric, we want to do what's right for us and maybe what's right for our very small family, but really uh very directly opposed to our ancient ancestors who wanted to do what's best for the communities, who wanted to be a good ancestor, really, to those who came after them. What's fascinating there is that actually as organizations have been become bigger, so groups of people have become bigger, we've become more individualistic. You'd expect maybe that the more people we got surrounded by, the more we would feel a kindredness with our fellow human. But actually, the opposite has happened.

SPEAKER_01 46:41 Yeah, uh it may be that that's the characteristic of organizations, that the organizing that leads to organizations, organizations try to develop, perpetuate themselves, but they're not interested in the whole. They're interested in what they're trying to do. So in a way, that's uh natural spin-off from organizations is that we say, well, I I want to do what I want and what I need. So if you look, for example, in architecture, the early, if you take early cathedrals, you don't get the name of the architect. The architect saw himself as part of a group of people helping what in that case was to create a building for worship. Now, with more and more organizations, people see themselves as having to create their own brand. My my brand, Peter Garrett brand, you know, my book, my this, my that. It's extraordinary. I just think back to being in the bush, for example, walking round, climbing on some rocks and meeting a snake. Snake looking at me, me looking at the snake, going and just feeling really honored that I met that snake. Like it's just a really powerful experience, meeting a buck. Having more money in the bank doesn't isn't an experience like that in any way. So it's a very depleted. What are we going to watch on TV tonight? We we've kind of lost our soul, I think it is, is probably what you'd say. We've lost our soul and ended up with uh trying to build our own shelf.

SPEAKER_00 48:25 Yeah, and I I think this links to this strange idea of the fact that when we create an organization or a corporation or whatever it is, we are almost bringing in a new existence into the world, which is this ethereal being that doesn't have a physical presence but has a very real impact on real living people. And what we've done over the course of uh a very short period of human history is we've created more and more thousands, hundreds, you know, millions of these empty people who don't exist corporeally but but influence everything that we do. And I don't know, maybe there's just something about humans being physical tactile beings that can't quite actually handle what we've created for ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 49:20 I mean there are I don't know how many, there there are hundreds of millions of organizations in the world, and we've given them legal rights. So a lot of the court battles are not between individuals, they're between organizations. And they own property, they own processes and so on. And it it is, as you say, all unreal. If we didn't have writing and forgot, there they wouldn't be that. They're they're illusory creations that have huge power. I think that in having this conversation it gives it leads me to say that being part of everything is very different from being detached from everything. The main experience we have in society is of being detached from the world, being detached from other nations, being detached from other organizations we're competing with. It doesn't bode well for our sense of confidence and our the way we contribute to the world. This lack of interest in the well-being of the whole longer term is quite frightening. I mean, financially, just to give you an example, in the 1500s, um a wealthy landowner down the road gave money to start a school that my children went to. He funded it not by saying there's the school, he funded it by putting all the money and the interest from the money paid for and built the school, and it kept funding it for another nearly 400 years. So when my children were at school, they were all given a mug which was still paid for by that original deposit. Now that's investing in a school for the long-term well-being of society. Now we see people they they've got an old people's home, they'll sell it off to a contractor to try and get the profit out of it, and that makes it difficult to survive and so on. I mean, everything is so short-term and with so little respect or regard for the whole. It's a tragedy. It is a tragedy, really, what's happened.

SPEAKER_00 51:44 Yeah, and this all leads to this concept in your book, and I mentioned it um at the start, which is fra this idea of fragmentation. And I'd really love you to delve into how you feel organizations have created this problem of frank fragmentation, because it was one of one of the bits of your book I just found really compelling.

SPEAKER_01 52:04 Well, the simple idea is that the whole has parts. And the parts are a part of the whole. It it all fits together, whether you talk about it ecologically or if you talk about your physical body. Your physical body has parts. There are organs and skeleton and all sorts. They all relate to each other. If you start running, you start breathing more deeply, your heart goes faster, you stop, it can slow down again. And you don't say, oh yeah, I must remember to slow down my heart. It's one process altogether, all the parts. When parts don't know they're take socially, don't know they're a part of the whole, and act just out of self-interest, then you call it a fragment. Fragment doesn't belong to the whole, it's not a part, it's broken off, it's separate. Um, if you break something up, like if you take a watch and hit it with a hammer, you can't put it back together, those fragments. They don't hold together. Well, we're having a fragmentary experience, not realizing that we're part of the whole, not realizing that how we think and feel and act affects other people. We're thinking, well, no, it's me. Um I people don't help me very much, so I'm gonna get on with what I can do. And it it's so embedded in how we think about our careers, about our families, about where we live and what we do. Even whether we pick up litter on the street, you know. If there's a bit of litter in your kitchen, you don't just ignore it. But it's not my street, that's somebody else's job. You know, in the kitchen it's mine, I suppose, I'll pick it up. But it's just extraordinary the fragmented experience we have. So the question is, how do you help people understand they're part of the whole? We c we can't wind the clock back and say we think we should all go and live in the bush for a while. If we you you can't you can't get away from the organized world we have. What we can do is start to s explore how we're all part of the whole and how we can contribute to that. It's natural at a certain age in children. Younger children don't have it very much. It's natural at a certain age and then it's lost again for some reason. But the question that I would like to explore with people is what is needed for the well-being of the whole? What is it that we really need? W we know we're on the edge of quite a few challenges that we don't know how to manage. So w what do we need? How do we need to manage the way forward? We certainly need to work with each other. Well, I did some work in the United Nations. The United Nations is countries of the world coming together for common good, but each of them has their own right to decision making. And it doesn't work. It's like my country has a sovereign right to make its own decisions. Why? There's one atmosphere. You could say you're going to make a decision despite the atmosphere. But there's something gone deeply wrong in our thinking about the whole. And we have a very fragmented experience, and we're competing against other fragmented pieces to try to manage to win.

SPEAKER_00 55:32 And an example, I think, that you give in the book, which really framed it well for me, was this idea of, you know, a company, uh, you're running the day-to-day business, perhaps it's a clothing store, for instance, and you're having to put out the clothes and serve the customers. And then you get some directive from head office. Head office might exist in a different part of the country, a different part of the globe. And the directive makes absolutely no sense or seems to be counter to what you're doing. It seems to disrupt the flow of what you're doing best. And because head office doesn't know the intricacies of the way that you work, the local flavor of how you work. You don't know what head office is thinking because they're detached. They're some to you, some ethereal part of the organization which only exists via um, you know, uh random emails that you might get every six months. And so that fragmentation there is very clear.

SPEAKER_01 56:29 It is organizationally, the different parts of the organization seldom work together well. Um I give you another example. I worked in property development, uh a very good company down near Park Lane in London, Mayfair. And the directors, and at the time I was one of them, the directors would be making decisions to make more money from how they develop land. We're developing commercial land. So I'd be in the boardroom, and the directors, you know what? If we didn't have two blocks but made it four blocks, I reckon we'd get a better return. What do you think? Oh, uh all agreed, done. So I drive down to the site, and there's a contractor and the people working on site, there are a few hundred of them. And I say the board have decided not to have two units, but we'll go for four. And they've got these two huge holes they've spent a month digging out to lay foundations. They're thinking, wow, that is a lot of work to move that to there, the implications of that. Like, do they know what's actually happening? Are they aware of what's going on on the ground? And clearly not. As a user, it's the other way around, isn't it? You order your goods from one part, you get them delivered by somebody else, and the two don't seem to ever talk to each other. You can work it out. But fragmentation is a very um wasteful experience, really.

SPEAKER_00 58:08 Yeah, you order your cler your t-shirt from some online retailer, and then you get it shipped to you by some courier who has no regard for the online retailer or their reputation, and then everything becomes a mess, you don't know who to talk to, it's one person, it's the courier's fault. And the courier says, Well, that's actually the online retailer's fault. As a result, fragmentation doesn't just create a fragmented experience in the way that we view it, it actually affects the outcome, the consequence for us, um, as the end user, but also the person who's perhaps causing the fragmentation or being the fragmenter.

SPEAKER_01 58:46 I was on holiday years ago in Greece, hired a car, and we didn't book anything. We drove until we found somewhere we wanted to be and then booked accommodation. We ended up in quite a remote little area on the sea, and walked down, and about half a mile from the hotel we stayed, there was one restaurant with very little choice. They had beer that they served in bottles rather than with glasses, had some wine, they had fish, and they had some vegetables they did. And they were very slow, but they were very much aware of what time in the afternoon it was, and you kind of could feel evening coming where the place would pick up a bit and so on, and a beer. And then I said I'd like some fish. And I could see as I was watching, there was a couple with their parents, and the the mother, I suppose, the older woman was gutting the fish, and the father was cooking them, and the other two were serving and making all work. So we ordered our fish and hear them talking, and uh, okay. They put out a boat and the guy rose out, had a net, and he comes back with some fish. Literally put down the boat, got out there, and gave the fish to the mother, and the mother gutted it. We're watching this, and then the father cooked it, and then we ate it. Now, that was an organization, but it was such a close organization. They all knew what was involved. They all knew he had to go and get the fish so they could serve it. And watching it was a real pleasure. It wasn't a fast food experience, but it was a very delightful experience to see how it worked naturally. And they didn't grow the fish, the fish looked after themselves. The fish came, they ate enough that there were always more fish, and and it were gone forever. So that's a non-fragmented organization. And you they can work, but as they get bigger, as they get into different parts of the world, different divisions, more hierarchy. You can't all sit in one room and talk together. You generally end up with fragmentation. And that that's of course the basis of the work I've been doing. Going back to hunter-gatherer times when we talk together a lot, and talk together about what's happening and how to participate in it, and also talk together so that we don't end up with fragmentation, but we end up being a natural part, and we each are contribute what we can to the thing working for everyone.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:31 It does make me think you talk about all of the global challenges like climate change that perhaps organizations are responsible for, and uh the organizations and giving rise to this individualism. But also, you know, organizations seem uniquely placed to solve these problems in a way. And I and I think, you know, if I think to the uh asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, for instance, you know, there's there's a good chance that in the future there will be a similar asteroid which may threaten the human species. You know, what's not to say that could that could happen again. As a result of organizations and the world that we've built for ourselves, we can now detect those asteroids, we can deflect them even, we can protect our species for potentially a lot longer than would have been possible had we continued in a hunter-gatherer-like system. So, you know, are organizations, I don't know, also the only things that can get us out of global challenges and catastrophes? Or do you think they create more of those catastrophes than they potentially solve?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:47 Well, I mean, the whole process is out is out of control. I know when I was a youngster, I used to imagine that the most intelligent people would meet and think, what should what's the best thing to do? And then talk with everyone about the best thing to do. Now, I mean, the people intelligent people who meet, how can we make more money? How can we be more powerful? How can we no interest at all in what well, I'm sure there are people who are interested, but generally speaking, there's no interest in. So the question is more if we keep creating problems and then keep trying to solve them, we just exhaust ourselves. So organizations, our organized way of working together has created the problems we're now trying to solve. We don't have an ozone layer problem. We have a problem of taking oil from under the ground and burning it. And in doing that, we we can all own cars and burn it. We can all share in the burning of it. And say how wonderful it is. My car, I can go 100 miles an hour, you know. It's so we're continually trying to solve the problems we're creating. It would seem the better way would be to not create the problems. Now, could organizations help us to stop causing problems? I think only if we started to think about the whole. I think without thinking about the whole, we're going to proliferate the problems. And that is quite a challenge to see how to shift the way of thinking, because our individual identity is quite embedded. I would feel a failure if I weren't doing well in my business or my career. Like I'm uh now it's not about doing well or not doing well, it's about what's the contribution that I make overall to what's happening. So my aspiration will be that your podcasts help people to think about what's needed for the whole. Because that's what we we require, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:02 You do that in the work that you do. You've created this field of dialogue, um, which I urge people to go and find out more about. Um, Peter, you've done some wonderful podcast series with me um as producer, and they really are worth worth watching and listening to deeply. But in dialogue, trying to heal that fragmentation, trying to see us come together as the whole again. Dialogue to me sounds a little bit like hunter-gatherers sitting in a small tribe and chatting to each other and and almost returning to our roots. This this I concept of dialogue is finding an ability, I think, to be in conversation with one another where everybody's views are heard and uh fragmentation sort of erodes.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:48 Yeah. Um there might be an kind of inspiration in the metaphor of hunter-gatherers, but we're clearly not advocating a new era of hunter-gatherers. No. But if we think of the whole, which hunter-gatherers did, I believe, but if we do think of the whole, we did some work with migration, for example. Now, migration is quite a challenging issue politically. There are millions of people leaving poorer countries, finding their way into richer countries to earn more, to manage, and so on. And there are all sorts of movements against migration. I mean, that's a basic one of the fundamentals of Brexit was let's not let's not remain trading with our primary partners because we might get more migrants or something. It's gonna control our borders. But what we did with migration was we worked with people to say how could migration be of benefit to everyone, or benefit to the poor countries that people are leaving, a benefit to the countries where people receive migrants, or benefit to the migrants themselves. Or the countries they go through. How could it benefit everybody? Well, it can, because we do need certain kinds of labor in wealthy countries. And migrants, countries like the Philippines, is dependent on migration. It has to have people go for the money to come back for the economy to work. And those people contribute hugely and go back and return to their homeland and contribute there again. If we chose to think that way and say, how can migration benefit everyone, we can find those solutions. If we have an organization to take advantage of migrants or prevent migration or whatever, we end up proliferating the problems that we're trying to solve. So that's the aim of the dialogue work, is to try to tackle real issues for the benefit of all. We're taking moment. Drain, my colleague, who's on the podcast you did for us, is taking dialogue into primary schools. We have a situation where education used to, a lot of it used to be about memory. Well, now with AI we don't need to remember, we can look it up. AI's got better memory. What do we need? We need to understand how to think. We need to understand how to develop. We need to understand what's needed for the whole. So education is a different requirement. And it's not clear that educators are thinking about that to any high degree. So we have to think, well, how do we take dialogue into schools where children start to learn how to understand each other, how to be interested in each other and find solution to work for for everyone? And that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:42 So do you think there's a a future vision of society that moves beyond organizations as we know them? Do you think that we can move past them? I certainly don't think we can move back. We can't suddenly abandon it. We've got too many people on this planet to feed to uh uh aband abandon it and go back to hunter-gatherers. But is there a way of moving beyond it?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:05 The fundamental of organizations at the moment is their self-centered interest. They're self-perpetuating. An organization like the United Nations is quite a heroic attempt to get together for the good of the whole, and it battles with the sovereign right of each nation. So it's quite hard to think how you could turn organizations for the benefit of the whole. That that would be the seed that would shift the thing if organizations were geared for the benefit of the whole rather than for the benefit of the owners or with some with the employees as well. Is that likely to happen? It's hard to find much hope, to be honest. I don't see it happening. Um I see things worsening rather than bettering at the moment, to be honest. Uh the idea that there might be um common law amongst all people and all nations to have a couth experience is being savagely thrown aside. Like now, I don't like that leader. Killer. I mean, this is this is really uh a very almost preschool mentality. Uh get what I want, destroy what I don't, who cares what happens.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:37 There is this um growing movement that I I discussed in a previous episode on what we did before capitalism, because I think capitalism and and organizations as we know them today are intertwined. Uh the growing movement is called degrowth, and it argues that you know progress doesn't have to mean more and achieving more and making more money and just sort of like forever expansion. Uh, the idea is that you know degrowth deliberately slows down production and consumption. So you might not get as many technological advancements, you might not see society constantly evolving at a faster and faster pace in terms of what we can offer and the sorts of technologies that we can create. But it also means that we are chasing a more holistic view of what success means or yeah, how to maintain the species in a way which works with nature. So we stop maybe maybe that's the that's the answer is to go post-capitalism. Um, if we are going to see organizations that view the whole.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:44 I mean that that sounds like thinking in the right direction to have a higher quality of experience rather than a higher quantity. Sounds like uh the essence there, isn't it? Do uh do I need seven million in the bank? Do I need more clothes and I can never wear more this and that? So in that sense, the the challenge is how do we take that to the hard end of society, to the political and economic end? Um we'll see. We will see, won't we? But it's not it's not that encouraging. The the idea, the loosening of sovereign rights is really the United Nations and the international courts, and they're not managing, uh they're not surviving at this point. So I don't know how how we're going to get there. But we certainly need somebody to start to think about it, start to work on it. I'm convinced the essence of it is for the good of all. For the good of all needs to be the suffix to anything we attempt.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:51 Well, Peter Garrett, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much for joining me on what we did before.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:57 Thank you very much for the invitation, Ollie. It's a pleasure. I look forward to talking again in the future. Go well.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:04 Absolutely. A massive thank you to Peter Garrett. It's been really exciting to welcome so many new people to the podcast recently. So thank you so much for joining us. Make sure you subscribe to What We Did Before wherever you listen. I'm Ollie and I will see you next time.