Future Forward

Seyi (00:01)
Hello, hello, hello Reza, how are you?

Reza (00:04)
I'm Goodshay, how are you doing?

Seyi (00:05)
I am doing very well today and I am as excited as we always are when we have guests.

Reza (00:13)
Yes, yes, we have a special guest today, Chris Tamjidi. Chris is a very old friend of mine from when I was in graduate school. We were roommates, very, very close friends even after that. Chris has written a book about resilient cultures in organizations and we're gonna apply that through the lens of a city and community. So I'm very excited about him talking about that with us. But before we do Shay,

Let's introduce our listeners to Future Forward and then we'll give chance to Chris to introduce himself.

Seyi (00:47)
Yes, Welcome to our old listeners. Thanks for coming back. We love that you always do. And to our new listeners, we're excited to have you on with us today. Future Forward is a conversation Reza and I had been having for years consistently around the topic of cities, resilient cities, what makes a city a city and...

What are the historical threads we can pull from the past into how the city as the system is operating today? And what recommendations, what strategic foresights can we share to help us build thriving cities, sustainable cities, thriving communities? And we're just excited when we can bring experts on.

to help us frame the conversation even more deeply than we believe we do every week. So this one should be a really good one today.

Reza (01:54)
Yeah. And you know, as we always tell our listeners, we're not the experts. We always approach this from a place of curiosity. so Chris is an expert on this, has done a lot of research. And so we're really curious to understand these facts, this research on resilience. So Chris, first introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about your book and then we can sort of jump in.

Chris (02:20)
Super, so really nice to be here. It's nice to make this connection around topics which are important to all of us. So my name is Chris and I think in terms of background, there's a few pieces that may be relevant. So I studied physics first and that has stayed with me in some sense. I tend to like to understand causality at a deep level. And then I did an MBA reservoir, you and I met each other.

And following that, I worked as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group for seven years. So again, that was a part of my life where I was, you know, really trying to understand things to try to, especially in complex systems, understand deeper causalities. And then actually I stepped out completely. And for seven years, I ran a network of meditation centers full time. And

So that was really looking at mind-body connection, practicing a lot. I did a lot of retreats during that time. must have spent maybe almost a year in retreat during that time. And then with Liane, my co-director and co-founder, we founded this company, AWARE is. And we've really been working with companies actually, and trying to bring together, I think, a deeper understanding of the human, human nature, how do humans function.

and the realities of organizational life. And I think that's really what brought us to this book. I think as a, I guess as a person who's scientifically inclined, I found a lot of the explanations and a lot of the discussion around topics such as wellbeing and resilience very poorly founded in science and in terms of causality that they're predictive.

And so it was really something that was, guess it kind of nagged at me for a long time. And we had a very good research. We have a very good research team. So we were really trying to puzzle that out and begin to work with people to not only build individual resilience, but build shared resilience in large organizations. And I think that that view of looking from the eye to we was a crucial piece, actually understanding how do you actually bring.

resilience to a system. And I think so the book is very much about, you could say understanding resilience, both a different point of view of resilience, perhaps than one which has existed out there. I think it's probably closer to, I guess, how you would think of resilience at the city level than how most organizations think about resilience. And above all, and I think that this will be an interesting conversation to explore today, above all the human side of resilience. So we're less into the system side of resilience.

or the operational downtime side of resilience, but fundamentally about actually how do you build resilience skills in people and how do you spread that into a large population? So that's what the book is about. It's based upon our work. We the resilience contract, co-holders of the resilience contract for the European Union. So that's for all 51 institutions of the European Commission, Parliament, and so on. And we work with a lot of companies, you know,

including I don't know HSBC, Bosch, Audi, BMW about these topics. So we have a lot of experimentation ground where we test stuff out and see what outcomes we come to. So that's a little bit the background. That's what we summarized in the book. And, know, over to you.

Reza (05:43)
Yeah, I really enjoyed the book and I love how you described the human part of resilience being a critical factor and understanding the causality of that. And we, you know, we are also thinking about systems in terms of cities and communities. And so I wanted to touch on, you know, how might we apply resilience to a community level? You talked about it at an organizational level or an individual level, like what does a resilient community look like?

and what practices should apply to that community level.

Chris (06:18)
Yeah, I mean, think what we found, you know, at the individual and at the organizational level, that again, you have to kind of, I think, start at a fundamental level. What does resilience mean at the biological level? And for us, resilience really is this natural situation that we have different states. Do you know what mean? We have different states. Sometimes I'm very, you full of energy. And sometimes I have no energy, you know, sometimes I'm very positive about something. And sometimes, you know, I'm in a negative state. Okay. So.

That's really the starting point for us. And as a physicist, for me, this was, sorry, that's nerding me. Like, okay, there are states which are high energy cost states, so high energy. then there's, upon some of those states have a high expectation of reward and a low expectation of reward. So this is a fundamental principle in actually metabolism. If you look at metabolism, human metabolism. So based on that, we understand resilience as the ability of a human.

to vary their states appropriately between these different extremes of recovery. We talk about regeneration, we talk about growth, we talk about stress or performing state, and we talk about letting go. And I think that applies actually to groups of people, that applies to communities of people too. And actually it's a very simple applicable model for any organism, large or small, fundamentally understanding the metabolism of it.

Is this expanding energy or is it, you know, recovering energy and is it doing that in the expectation of energy gain or energy loss? Okay. So this is something which is very applicable. have a subsidiary which works in climate change. It's called the Intervene deal. And essentially you see that actually it's very applicable as well in the topic of sustainability that actually the human system tends to consume too much energy compared to, you know, what it, what it regenerates.

And so I think that that's a way of thinking about resilience as not endurance, not maintaining operations in crisis, but actually this ability to vary states between states that are, know, kind of high cost states, but or between growing states, regenerating states and all the states of letting go and actually kind of, you know, giving up things. So I think that's something we can apply to communities that essentially any healthy community, any healthy society has to keep.

Seyi (08:23)
Thank

Chris (08:42)
going through different states. It's natural. any community or society that tries to stay in a high energy cost state with a low expectation of future reward is not going to have a good situation. I do a lot of work in China. And you can really see that when you think about it, there's a lot of people in China that are what's called the lie flat generation. Or in Japan, have the hikokimori, the people who never leave the house.

So 4 % of Japanese population never leaves the home. And I think it's an implicit response that actually there's a very high cost way of living, high stress way of living, which does not bring too much reward as a human in terms of satisfaction, meaning, you know, so, so therefore let's avoid that and let's just stay in a very low energy state and actually in a kind of negative state. So I think that

Seyi (09:27)
you

Chris (09:37)
It's actually interesting when you begin to apply this societally, you can actually see patterns in society that really reflect that.

Seyi (09:40)
you

Reza (09:45)
Interesting. So I love how you describe that resilience is not about endurance because that's the first thing that one comes to mind. It's sort of this movement between states. It's this circular metabolic, we also think of cities that way when we talk about cities. We also talk about things in terms of like if it's a monoculture, it's not a good thing, ecosystems.

thrive when there's variety. And so what you're saying, someone with resilience understands that variety, it can thrive through the various stages of that variety. And so understanding that is crucial. And what you're also saying is that sort of at a community level or society level, understanding that, you know, those states and how you go through them helps you determine how to, you know, whatever shape or design.

Chris (10:13)
at least.

Reza (10:37)
what that community is. You give examples of like China or Japan where there's a high cost to interacting in society just because, I don't know what it is, the crowds, the stress or what have you to where the reward is low and so you're not going to interact and you're losing out on that 4 % of the population that's not being interacting with the rest of society. So.

as an individual in a community, maybe I take this down to an individual level before we sort of go back to the community level, what are you doing to show up well in your community? Like how do you, because I believe as an individual you can cause change in your community, what is a good way to show up in your community to create that thriving state?

Chris (11:25)
Yeah, so we found again, this is again, I think very useful. There's different ways that you talk about one can talk about resilience. Some people talk about, you know, factors, other people talk about traits, personality traits that make us resilient. And we said, well, actually, we think it's important to about skills, skills in the sense of what are people doing? What's their behavior? And we identified 12 things that people do in life. And again, which affects their physiological state. Okay. So essentially, if you look at what happens,

Or which helps to move shift their physiological state So if you look at what happens a lot of the working population in corporates, for example is you know spending too much time in a high stressed negative state Okay, that's actually why you have the phenomenon of burnout and disengagement and so on because you know the the metabolism says it's costing me lot of energy It's not giving me much back. I mean, maybe there's money, but it's not giving me meaning. It's not giving me joy It's you know, just kind of so on so therefore you have a lot of people in these states, okay?

And so we said, actually, we don't want to look at traits or factors. We want to look at what are people doing, what helps them shift. And we found these 12 things that people can do. And some of them are individual. It's just sleep. Sleep is a very important thing for sleep and recovery. And we see systematically, we do a lot of measurements with physiological devices, heart rate variability measurements. We really see systematically a lot of people are sleeping too much. They have very little recovery in their days.

especially leaders, it's really, see very low recovery shares, okay? But that's a, you know, individual thing that you can do. But we also saw that actually there's a whole bunch of things that one does that are actually connection, because essentially, just like us now, when I'm connecting to you, my state changes, okay? So, you know, I had a day, I was very much out in nature today, the sun was shining, was one of the first real spring days here, okay? So I was in a certain state.

and coming and connecting to both of you is like, it kind of warms me. And actually what happens is not just warming, but actually if we were to measure our states, there would be a synchronization of our states. would, know, if one of you came in and say slightly irritated mood, one of you came in a very cheerful mood and I came in a slightly quiet contemplative mood, at the end of our time together, our states will synchronize. Okay. That's what happens when people come together. Okay. So that's what we see. We see that there's certain things that happen at the group level.

where our nervous systems will actually co-regulate. And this is crucial. That's essentially what happens in society. People's nervous systems co-regulate. And then of course the question is, does my nervous system connect to yours in the sense that are you determining the state of my nervous system or am I determining the state of your nervous system? And that really depends. That really depends upon, first of all, each of our own ability to regulate our nervous system. And of course it depends upon things like status, hierarchy, who talks more.

Reza (14:03)
Mmm.

Mm.

Chris (14:14)
Because of course

Reza (14:15)
Mm.

Chris (14:15)
at the moment you and I are doing most of the talking. So therefore we're having more impact on nervous systems. essentially what we saw is that when you begin to look at humans, and this is what I keep doing, we keep looking physiologically. So there things that I can do to change the state of my own nervous system, to change my own hormone system, approach or avoid positive or negative. But actually there are things that we do together. And when you look at that at the level of being a citizen, actually we see that

Reza (14:17)
Mm.

Chris (14:43)
social connection is a strong predictor of people's resilience. We know from numerous studies, especially the long-term happiness study that was done by Harvard, that it's one of the biggest predictors actually of longevity and of happiness. We know that volunteering, that expressing care, expressing compassion changes my state, changes other people's state. We know that connecting around meaning

are things that change both of our states. So there are a lot of things that one can do that actually help both individuals and societies shift their states, help us all actually to have this variety of internal states. And it's very interesting that you say ecosystem, because that's exactly what's happening, is that a lot of people in corporate life, and that's the life that I know well, are becoming extremely unidimensional.

And that's always actually being mirrored by the ecosystem in their, know, in their intestines that actually there's an interesting shift to their, you know, their, you know, intestinal biology that is also becoming actually more one dimensional. So these are interesting things that there's this deep interconnection between this kind of, you know, singular self-focused, you do dimensional unhealthy state. And that kind of repeats itself at the level of the individual.

Reza (15:39)
Hmm.

Chris (16:08)
at the level of a community, at the level of society. So all of these things that we do together, where we connect, where we positively regulate each other's nervous systems and outlooks contributes actually to variety and to therefore also healthy flourishing systems.

Reza (16:28)
Fascinating. love that you describe how physically when we connect, we actually affect one another and that you're taking it down to that human connection level because we talk about this often on Future Forward. We talk about a lot of things that would improve the system of a city, but we always come back to how is that affecting the community and how is that making the community better?

And so I love how you describe sort of at that connection level where we can actually affect one another. And there are a lot of factors that affect that and how it sort of manifests itself in these systems like organizations or communities and cities. That's fantastic. And I've been asking all the questions and I know that Shay had a few as well. So I want him to sort of pull some threads that he started here too.

Seyi (17:23)
Yeah, no, fascinating stuff Chris. Thanks so much for sharing. Two, what I think are relatively quick questions. The first one, how has resilience at a corporate, but maybe you can also go to the individual level, how do you, from your research, how do you see it's changed over time? As in, are we...

more or less resilient before maybe that's the than we were before is maybe the the better way to ask the question that's the first one and then the second one goes back to the system comments we're making before the beginning of the call how how how is it that companies it's

in systems thinking companies die but cities don't is a phrase that has come up a fair bit. So what's your take on that? Is there something companies need to borrow from cities or communities need to borrow from companies that can improve resilience across both?

Chris (18:44)
Yeah. So I mean, think first of all, question is interesting. Are we getting more or less resilience? know, I certainly can't answer that question. Definitely. I would have an instinct where the data is pointing and I'm sorry to say that the data is pointing that we are getting less resilient. Okay. Because if you look at what are the causes of behavioral causes of resilience, if you say, like I said, we've done quite a lot of research on this 12 things that people do rest and recovery is one healthy nutrition is another one movement and exercise is another one.

but also actually conscious breathing. One can regulate one's state very powerfully by how one breathes. Interreceptive awareness, one's own awareness of one's internal state is one. Attention regulation is a method. Some people regulate their state by attention. They just focus on something else. It's a valid method of regulation. If you look at the data for each of those methods of regulation, there is data generally available. So if you look at

rest and recovery people are sleeping less especially in Asia they're sleeping about an hour less now than they were you know 10-15 years ago okay so sleep in general is just people are struggling with if you're looking at movement that's kind of staying stable the data from the US for example from the health and safety kind of point of view says basically people are not really changing there's a 30 of the population is not very moving very much same as you look at fit physical you know nutrition there is

obesity is growing, that is actually declining in sense of are we doing that healthily? So if you go through all of those, if you look at attention regulation, people getting poorer at attention regulation, if you look at emotional regulation, people are becoming more negative, global data is showing that we're becoming more negative. therefore, if you just without looking at outcomes, but you just look at what are the factors that contribute to resilience, you can predict actually that some countries are going to be coming less resilient.

And less resilient means that more people will get stuck in a stressed state, in an unhealthy state, or in a very negative state, and will have difficulty moving. And I think that's what we see, societally, in many societies, whether it's in, you know, what's going on in perhaps in North America at the moment, when you follow what's going on in other countries. You know, it's really, honestly, and I work a lot in politics, I work a lot with parliaments. One summary you would say of politics, why is politics so crappy? Because it's a lot of

stress people who are not able to regulate their state. I mean, that's really what's happening. You know, you could watch them and you're like, okay, you're a whole bunch of stressed individuals and you don't know how to regulate your state, you know. So I think that, you know, like I said, I have no definite data on whether people are becoming less resilient or not. But certainly the circums, know, circumstantial evidence would suggest that actually people are becoming less resilient. And if you look at kind of the data that is available, yes, they are becoming more negative. They are becoming more stress on average, you see.

Seyi (21:16)
Yeah.

Chris (21:35)
So all of those point to the fact that this would confirm the fact that people on average are becoming more resilient, which would mean that it's harder for people to adapt. And I think a company is much more of a monoculture than a city is. A company depends upon its livelihood on products, on innovation. And in terms of culturally, they tend to be more uniform than cities are.

So I think why can a company die? Why does a city not die? Well, because, you know, a company exists in a market and the market can significantly change. So therefore companies can die. But I think it's also, you know, this interesting thing, which is actually what modern strategic thinkers are saying, that actually companies can only succeed in the long run if they serve a purpose in their ecosystem, okay?

And that is true that, know, it's very interesting that you see this, you know, like the Boston Consulting's and the McKinsey's of this world saying this, writing this now that actually you need to understand the ecosystem, whatever you and companies need to contribute to the ecosystem they're in. yeah, and I think that that's another reason why, you know, perhaps why companies do tend to fail much more than CSD because companies are fundamentally egocentric to some degree, you see, because they are in the end trying to get more resources for themselves. Okay.

It's not necessarily the case for a city. A city is not by its nature designed that way. So I think that certainly if you were to look at what will make a company survive, certainly that it has a niche in the ecosystem and it is serving its ecosystem well, then it will have a much higher likelihood of surviving. And that's what you see is cities that flourish. Basically they're serving the people who want to live in them and they're helping those people flourish.

Reza (23:24)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Seyi (23:26)
Thanks for sharing that.

Very fascinating.

Reza (23:29)
Yeah, I think the points around what the purpose of a company is and what the purpose of a city is, there's a contrast there. And cities aren't necessarily created with a purposeful thing to grow in a particular market in mind. They're formed for people to live in. And so it's a different kind of system.

With that in mind, we have our 21 laws of cities and I picked three of them that point to ways that cities can improve this resilience type culture. I'm going to touch on those three and then I would love your commentary on them about why you think they're good for resilience within cities.

So the first one is public spaces foster social cohesion. And we say accessible, well-designed public spaces are essential for fostering community interaction, civic engagement, and social cohesion in cities. And that's the first one. The second one is urban greening enhances resilience, increasing green spaces, urban vegetation improves environmental quality, residents' wellbeing, and cities' resilience to climate change. And then the third one is participatory governance leads to better community outcomes.

inclusive decision-making processes that actively involve diverse community members lead to more equitable and effective urban policies. So yeah, so public spaces, urban greening, and participatory governance. And I think there's some resonance with what you've written in your book, and I'd like to, you know, maybe you pull a thread on those.

Chris (25:09)
Yeah, and I think maybe just start with the cities in general. mean, I think, you know, those cities that were designed, we unipurposed, most of them have failed. All of those new capital cities that were put somewhere, you know what mean? Because they had no organic, you know, multi-purpose, multi-cellular life, you know? But I mean, coming to your points, I mean, I think one of the quickest ways of answering that is actually there's a fantastic video you can see on YouTube, which is called Seven Ways to Make Sure You're Miserable.

Reza (25:25)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Chris (25:38)
It's a good video. Actually, it's very good because it's really and it basically says, you know, basically says stay inside, you know, a lot of screen time, you know, have high unrealistic expectations, you know, try to be right the whole time. You know, it's kind of basically like this. It's really interesting because it actually describes the life of a troll. Actually, I don't think it was intended to do that because it was written, you know, this video was done, I don't know, 10 years ago. But when you listen to it, you kind of go, yeah, you're right. All of those things are fundamentally.

actually not healthy for us because we are social beings. are social beings. If you look at the design of our bodies, our brain is made for movement. So, know, our brain evolutionary where why do we have a brain first for movement and second for complex social interactions? Okay. So if you're staying inside sedentary and you don't have, you know, complex social interactions, you know, you know, the screen is not a complex interaction or trying to be right. It's not a complex social interaction. You know, then basically you're not

fulfilling the purpose of what this biological thing is, therefore. So yeah, I mean, think absolutely, I think that one can really look at cities like that. And in fact, look at cultures. If you look at all the cultures that have survived for long time, they all have these mechanisms. They have particular diets. They have particular exports that they do. Do you see what mean? They have particular internal practices that they do. They have particular ways in which they emotionally reframe things.

They have particular things that they come together to celebrate for. They have particular stories about their purpose and mission in life. You know what mean? It's actually very interesting. You can actually map those 12 that we found. And we found them just again to explain because each of them has a identifiable biophysiological correlate. You see what I mean? So when somebody does emotional regulation, we can actually see something going on in terms of their biophysical state. There's a shift, there's a change in their state. When somebody does attention regulation,

there's actually a state when somebody goes and connects with somebody and has a nice social time with somebody, there's a physiological change. And so it's interesting to see that, what are the predictors of longevity and happiness? Well, there are things like social cohesion and movement. And so once you understand that, what are the biophysical kind of things that change us to the positive, well, then you can look into the design of cultures and you'll find that actually healthy cultures have all of these implicitly.

Do you see what mean? And I think in some sense, actually, when people are rebelling against a culture, and I say this from all points of view, from all points of view, there is a healthy instinct in it. Because instinctively, their evolutionary programming or whatever they say their programming is from is saying, this is not healthy. This is not helping me flourish. They might not have the same, the right consequence. see, what's the right thing to do?

But you know, I don't know the situation in the US as well as I know the situation in Germany. But you know, in Germany, there's a lot of cities in Eastern Germany that have seen a massive population decline in the last 30 years. House prices have plummeted. They don't see community growth. They don't see young people. So therefore, they think everything's dying and therefore everything's terrible. And therefore, they're completely against everything because from their point of view, they can feel that they're...

Reza (28:44)
Hmm. Hmm.

Chris (28:58)
Community their social, you their community is not healthy. You see what mean? So You know, I do think it's very important to what you understand that to acknowledge that when people feel something is fundamentally unhealthy and there are many facets of modern life, which are fundamentally unhealthy, do you see? Then they are instinctively Instinctively going against that because actually they're looking for health and that's what I think is very important And that's what cities are in some sense cities are the crucial piece. Do you see?

Society is too complex and too large scale. But it's very interesting when you look at cities, you really have a sense of that they can impact a lot of things to the good. There's a lot of examples of cities that have made a big difference in terms of, as you say, the quality of the greenery, the quality of the childcare and the education, know, the quality of the sports facilities, the quality of the bike lanes and the walking paths. So if you go to certain cities,

you immediately feel it. Wow, this is a nice place to live. I feel good here. So yeah, I think that there's a tremendous amount that can be done on the city level, because essentially what a city does, it hardwires actually certain behavior and actions. A city which has only suburbia.

Reza (29:59)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Chris (30:13)
and roads. mean, I remember when I arrived in Austin, you know, here is here I am a German, I opened the map, here I am, here's downtown, I'm going to walk there. And I just started walking. And I didn't realize that there's no pavement. So I was like walking on the road, you know, and the car is like, I'm trying to walk to downtown. And there was no bloody pavements at the time, you know. So you know, that city was not an actually one guy slowed down, one guy slowed down and said, What are you doing? I said, I'm trying to walk to downtown. He says,

You got feet there for pedals. For gas pedal, that's what his feet were for. I was like, okay. So anyways, you see, so a city can, you know, further movement, bicycling, fresh air, you know, contact of nature, social connection, cohesion. And like, I'm in the middle of the Cologne carnival. So, you know, carnival is going on now. And Cologne carnival is as crazy as Rio. Okay. There's 1.3 million people on the streets tomorrow.

Everyone is dressed up in costumes. Basically everyone is drunk, you know, and you know, it's, it's, it's a great cathartic social moment where everyone kind of gets together and sings. They're all singing that was in the train and they're all singing today. So anyway, so, you know, these are the things. So it's the, a city can both hard wire healthy behavior and opportunities of other behavior and culture can have healthy habits, how they.

express their culture, you know, how they eat, how they celebrate, how they connect, how they participate. And so I've, you know, I fully agree and I think that's actually a crucial level of where we can build resilience for societies.

Seyi (31:50)
goodness. I have to quickly jump in because I have a similar story to yours but it was in Birmingham in the UK and it was actually the a policeman who came up to me and he goes you're not supposed to be walking here and while Birmingham has some pockets of greenery and places where you can the parks where you can enjoy

Chris (32:18)
I know Birmingham well, yeah.

Seyi (32:20)
Exactly, as a city it's a lot of industry and it is no surprise to me using the framing you've just provided why Birmingham has seen such a massive decline compared to some of the more green communal minded towns around it because they've stripped away

the opportunity to engage, people do not see the world as being a place where they can thrive, even though it's just their city. The world now feels locked in and closed and consequently the response to the world is a very negative and stressful one, honestly. Thank you for that Freeman.

Chris (33:10)
Exactly.

Reza (33:14)
Yeah,

that was both really good examples and and and and it's so good that you know Chris you've described that cities can actually meaningfully hardwire the the these these things that Help us become healthier help us become more resilient whether it's these walking paths green areas and we talked about You know the laws that I talked about a public spaces where people can interact you want that social connection Green spaces where you can sort of interact with nature and regulate yourself

And then I also touched on participatory governance, giving everyone a chance to be part of the city thriving. And I do remember you telling me that story soon after we met about you trying to walk. You were so confounded with Austin when you first got here. You were just like, what is this place?

Seyi (33:58)
you

Chris (34:00)
You

Seyi (34:04)
Hahaha

Reza (34:09)
Fortunately, Austin has become slightly better there. do have greenery, we do have trails. The city has done a really good job with parks and libraries and things like that. But yes, for someone coming from a place in Europe where that is hardwired, you will be shocked by a city that doesn't have it and then you're searching for it. I love how we've come full circle from talking about

resilience at an individual level, what it does for you physiologically. touched on how it fits into organizations. We touched about communities, and then we went all the way to cities and why cities are an important factor in creating resilience. It feels like we've covered all the topics. Before we close and go to mailbag, Chris, I want to give you a chance.

Is there anything that you'd like to talk about that we haven't had a chance to touch on yet? And how can folks find you or help you? Because this has just been so much, this has been so good.

Seyi (35:12)
Radio message. Yeah.

Chris (35:16)
Yeah, I mean, think just again, because I'm a physicist at heart, you know, I've tried to be very realistic about the things. So it's also important to look at stress overload. Do you see? Because resilience is the ability to move under stress. But actually, you always have to look at stress overload. And sometimes you see that the stress overload is too high for people. And that's really what happens when you look at Birmingham, for example, poverty, essentially is a number of stress factors, which actually breaks down people's resilience behavior.

Reza (35:29)
Mm.

Chris (35:45)
And so this is the situation which we have in many societies, that people are just too stressed actually to engage in good behaviors. are two, because what happens when you get stressed is you kind of habituate, you get stuck on ways of behavior and ways of seeing the world. And I think that this is a very important point and we see this in companies that we can do analysis to predict actually what percentage of the population is able to still learn resilience skills and what percentage isn't because the stressor load is too high. And I think that that's...

And if they're not able to do themselves, then they need outside help. And outside help is either, of course, an intervention or it's also shared habits and rituals. And this is again, an important point about cities, you see, that because we have, know, in an organization, if you think about how organizations solve the safety problem, there's been a massive decline in safety incidents. They've done it because of shared rituals. You know, we have, you know, certain colored codes and we walk on certain lines and we do certain safety checks every day where we come together and

beware. And essentially, that's really shared habits that have shifted the topic of safety. And for the topic of resilience and organizations, and for the topic of cities, we'll need to have a lot more shared habits. Okay, so like, cologne is having a shared habit, which is a drunk orgy. But it is in some sense, healthy one, because after that, it's like a month of fasting. And there's just this kind of like, you know, very intense social time. Okay, so I think that this is something not to forget is

Reza (37:00)
Mm-hmm.

Chris (37:11)
What are shared habits? Because individuals sometimes have difficulty getting out of habituated behavior. And you see that societally, that people are very stressed, therefore they get stuck in kind of this. And I think that, you know, we're interested in fundamentally any realistic thinking about how structurally to anchor resilience and cultures. And that's what we work with organizations to actually design their culture. What are the shared habits that we want to anchor as a culture, as an organizational culture?

Do we have, if you look at the stressor load of us as a company, do we have a high emotional stress load? Do we have a high fragmentation stress load? Do we have a high time pressure stress load? So to understand the different stressors people have, and then to figure out what are the shared habits we can anchor to make that workable. So I think that that's kind of a very important part of the puzzle still, both for cities, how do we design shared habits and rituals as cities?

And you know, they do, mean, like a marathon is a shared habit. mean, a marathon in city is a shared habit, you know, or walking or whatever else it is, you know. And I think for us, just in terms of, you know, getting in contact with us over the website, you know, AWARIS, A-W-A-R-I-S dot com. We do, you know, we work large scale. I'm happy to also, I'm very curious. We work a lot in politics. I work with a number of parliaments. We've worked with the UK parliament, German parliament, European parliament.

Reza (38:12)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris (38:36)
And I think that that's an important thing at the political level to think too. What are society's shared habits and how do they contribute or don't contribute to resilience? So yeah, so we're really open for any such discussions and anything we can do to help, you know, think systematically about building shared resilience. We call it resilience, which sounds a bit nerdy, but we like it. We-zillions rather than resilience. Sounds like Germans who are not able to say it properly, but it's still we-zillions rather than resilience.

Reza (38:59)
Weezilians.

Seyi (39:03)
you

Reza (39:03)
Resilience.

Interesting. And you have a book, Chris, it's called The Resilient Culture. Where's that? Yep.

Chris (39:09)
Yes. That's right. So we

lay out this, both this whole, you know, one needs to rethink resilience. So we lay out this different view of resilience in there. We talk about the habits, we show which habits, it's very interesting. Different habits have different impact on different types of outcomes. And then how to anchor habits in teams and in organizations. And that's kind of very, yeah, I think a useful thing if anybody's interested in that to read that.

Reza (39:33)
That's fantastic. I'm so glad you brought up that last part about stress overload because that's critical factor and actually observing how do you get past that? Where is individual or community or society in that? And folks, if Chris can help your organization, please reach out to him. With that, let's transition to closing out the episode.

have a mailbag this week that I'd like to share. And the mailbag comes from one of our frequent listeners, my cousin Perinoz. This was in response to the future of shops and small businesses. She's still catching up on the episodes and so she really enjoyed that one. And her comment back, she said, it's interesting because you're talking about small shops. But when I was at Chanel, she worked at Chanel, they had the same belief

to have this relationship building mindset. We had a very limited online presence to preserve the in-shop experience of building relationships between the salesperson and the client. So bringing those people in, building that relationship and creating that different feeling of being in that place and yeah, belonging, belonging. So that was a really good observation. And then I had one other thing. This is not necessarily a mailbag from someone else, but this was

Seyi (40:52)
belonging.

Reza (41:03)
We did that episode on AI and data centers and there's been new research that's come out. We talked about the impact of GEN.AI on electric consumption, but there was a little snippet that came out that I wanted to read out. Again, we're not experts. Sometimes we don't say everything correctly and so we correct ourselves when we do. And this was...

In a recent study on AI energy consumption, chat GPT's latest model, GPT-4, has been found to use significantly less power than previously thought. Research by EPOC AI reveals that each query consumes approximately 0.3 watt hours, 10 times lower than earlier estimates. This efficiency improvement is attributed to advanced hardware implementation system optimization, more accurate calculation methods, though the cumulative

energy impact remains substantial given millions of daily queries. So we maybe got it a little wrong in the impact of these models on electricity usage, but it doesn't change the fact that there's going to be a lot of AI usage over time. And what we were talking about related to the impacts on infrastructure are still valid. But just wanted to bring up that correction for that. Anyway.

That, those are the two mail bags, Jay. Anything that you had?

Seyi (42:29)
No, no, no millbacks, but I'll push back on EPOC AI's assertions there because they're referencing one of the models, a new model, when they're about five or six and there's been increased use of the reasoning models.

Reza (42:44)
Mm. Yes.

that still exist.

Yes.

Yeah.

Seyi (42:57)
compared

to the pure LLMs that 4.0 is. So yes, there is less usage of an old model, but the new models which are getting more use have a lot more usage per query than...

Reza (43:13)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah, especially the

especially the new reasoning ones, especially the new reasoning.

Seyi (43:22)
The reasoning ones

have consumed a lot more energy. so, our assertion that this will have a negative impact on energy usage still applies. I like that they're putting that out there, but they should put the whole context. Yeah. Great. So thank you. Please, please do.

Reza (43:42)
whole story. Yeah. Well, cool. Please.

Chris (43:45)
Should I tell a small story from the Chanel, a nice little

shop, a customer relationship story from a shop, which I think is really mind boggling story. So this will be a nice little end here. if this really happens, so a friend of mine, know closely her uncle and aunt lived in Germany and they were over 80 and they always wanted to visit the Louis Vuitton store. Fantastic. Really has a fantastic experience in Paris. They had a dog, however, that was very old and incontinent, so they could never take the train.

Seyi (43:54)
We'd love to hear that, yes.

Chris (44:16)
So at one point, anyways, they finally got their energy together. They rented a car. They drove all the way to Paris. And of course they had to wait in the line. There was a line at the store and the dog had a moment of incontinence outside and the staff were extremely helpful and brought some, you know, stuff to clear. But then the dog just expired, died while they were waiting to get into the store. And again, the staff were super responsive. They brought this elderly couple over 80 up to the VIP room. They took care of them, everything.

Seyi (44:36)
Wow.

Reza (44:37)
my god.

Chris (44:45)
And then of course, you you can't just throw a dog away. So they wrapped the dog in beautiful paper and they gave them a one of these big Louis Vuitton shopping bags to take the dog home. So this couple leave the beautiful Louis Vuitton store in Paris on Champs-Élysées and a thief on a motorbike drives past and snatches the bag from them driving away with this carefully wrapped dead dog.

So this really happened. So they had a fantastic experience, thanks to Louis Vuitton, really customer service, but the outcome was of course.

Reza (45:26)
I, you know, invariably you have the best stories. You always, you know, I've always loved this about you, your humor and just like the odd humor that you'll always find. It started with like the, what was the Darwin Awards? You loved the Darwin Awards way back in the day where people just do stupid stuff in the world. But this sounds like one of those Darwin Award winners. Yeah, beautiful story. What a twist at the end. Love the humor.

Seyi (45:26)
What a... What a story.

Chris (45:40)
Yeah.

Yes,

Reza (45:55)
yeah. I don't know. I don't know how to top that. Yeah.

Seyi (45:56)
Wow, what a way to end the show. There's no topping that. There's no topping that. That

Chris (45:59)
you

Seyi (46:03)
being said, if any of our listeners have any stories that do top that, please reach out. Future Forward, info at futureforward.fm, hello at futureforward.fm. Let us know your thoughts. And as always, we appreciate the listenership and we're just.

excited that we can bring people like Chris on board. So thank you again, Chris, and thanks all our listeners. Till next time.

Reza (46:30)
Bye.

Chris (46:30)
Thank you, Shay. Thank you, Reza.