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The SWISSUES Podcast is an edited recording of the fortnightly Forvm discussion with full notes summarizing all the discussions. www.swissues.com

3h ago

Cognitive Commons

What it isThe group approached the Cognitive Commons from several useful angles. It was likened to a market, which no one can point to the edges of but which shapes prices, competition and success, and to a public park, a shared mental space where assumptions are questioned and ideas exchanged. Others compared it to a brain, in which each person acts as a node and new things emerge from the connections between them. Taken together, these pictures describe something fluid that is made and remade by the people in it, which is close to the heart of the idea. Several participants also noted that the music we think of as original is often assembled from what its makers have absorbed, which is the Commons at work. Healthy and unhealthy commonsParticipants were quick to separate a Commons that welcomes challenge and lets contradiction surface from one that rewards conformity and mistakes agreement for truth. The point was made that the dividing line is whether disagreement survives. The experiments in which people follow the crowd through the wrong door showed how easily we stop questioning when the environment leads us on. Diversity and alignmentThe group handled a real tension with care. Organisations need divergent thinking to explore and challenge, and then shared direction to act. Whether both can live in one organisation was left as an open question. Language was discussed at two levels: the national languages that include or exclude people, and the professional languages of diplomacy, science and business that let specialists understand each other and sometimes talk past one another. The gap between academic and commercial habits of argument was a good illustration. Companies and their leadersSeveral people observed that organisations say they want diversity while their hiring and development narrow it. There was also a thoughtful suggestion that leaders who overestimate what they know may be living in a thin, flattened Commons, where little challenges them. Artificial intelligenceThis drew the most energy. The concern was that if leaders and organisations draw on the same tools, which tend toward the median, variety of thought could shrink. Others countered that human unpredictability, judgment, interpretation and accountability remain our contribution, and that the real risk is people disengaging from thinking rather than machines out-thinking them. One participant’s frustration with tools that simply reinforce what they are told suggests the appeal of that behaviour may wear thin. Improving the connectionsThe closing question was practical: how do we strengthen the connectors, in business as in a neural network? The answers were open forums, psychological safety, a shared goal, curiosity, and using AI as an aid rather than a guide. The hour demonstrated the point. Few arrived with settled views on the topic, yet experience from procurement, pharmaceuticals, diplomacy, climate work, academia and elsewhere combined into something larger than any one contribution. About This summary is generated from the Forvm podcast discussion by an amazing panel comprising Fiona Revell, Aimilia Vasilakou, Edoardo Gatti, Pramod Prasanth, Isabella Ferrari and Ibrahim Yunus. The full discussion is in the podcast. Join us in SWISSUES.com and contribute to future podcasts and articles. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Oct 16

Strategy

What happened to strategy In the 1980s most large corporations kept strategy groups of fifty or more talented people who reported close to the CEO. By the early 1990s they had mostly gone. They were expensive, mergers and cost-cutting made them an easy saving, and some of their forecasts were unwelcome. Climate change was one example. Management consultancies then offered ready-made frameworks and took over the work. Senior managers lost the habit of doing strategy themselves, and the shocks since then (2001, 2008, 2015, the pandemic) have found many companies unprepared. Strategy is not planning Planning asks what we will do, with what resources, to hit which target. Strategy asks what we are assuming, what happens if we are wrong, and whether we are still solving the right problem. Planning looks for certainty and strategy looks for understanding. A company can execute very well and still be heading the wrong way. Systems thinkers add that strategy starts outside the organization: what environment are we in, how is it moving, and only then, where do we sit in it? Vision comes first Without a long-term aim there is nothing for a strategy to serve. A good vision is short and clear enough to remember. The strategy beneath it should change as conditions and results change, while the vision stays put. Many organizations have strategies but no clear mission, and that is a large part of why their strategies drift. Silos and thin teams Functions often write their own strategies, and nobody checks whether they fit together or fit the vision. A city can plan car parks on its edge for commuters and forget that most of them now drive electric cars that need charging points. Corporate strategy teams can be three people working from a narrow view and never consulting engineering about cost. Military planning, by contrast, puts logistics, communications, artillery and the other services in the same room. People in procurement and supply chain see the outside world earlier than most and are rarely invited. Short-term pressure and borrowed accountability Leadership attention has narrowed to today, which makes longer-range thinking hard to justify inside a function. Hiring consultants and lawyers to set strategy also protects the people who commission it, since responsibility moves elsewhere. In the army a failed strategy costs lives. In a company, nobody pays much when it fails. Scenarios and contingencies Scenario planning is about 50 years old and little used. A pharmaceutical company that expected generics to arrive slowly watched a billion-dollar product collapse within months. A dialysis manufacturer never asked what would happen if dialysis became unnecessary. Armed forces keep contingency plans for likely trouble spots and review them every few months against current capability. One scenario method builds a matrix from two independent uncertainties, which produces four different futures. These are written as vivid pictures that anyone can follow, not as probabilities or return-on-investment tables. The strategy is then tested against each one and should at least survive in all of them. Done properly it takes three or four days. Signals and curiosity Strategy depends on noticing weak signals that the world is changing, and on being willing to question accepted wisdom. That needs curiosity, which organisations ask for but seldom protect, because curiosity takes time and produces awkward questions. Conversation and execution One strategy program at a large company worked because the CEO sponsored open conversation, ran it without laptops, and sent the team round the world to talk to customers and engineers. Its output was still in use twenty years later. It faded when the CEO changed, and the execution phase passed to people who had not been in the discussions, who watered down the disruptive parts. Strategy has to be explained in plain words, with the reasons given, and tied to each person’s goals and reviews. Leaders cannot hand it to consultants and expect it to arrive on its own. The main point Management, process and execution matter, but they are not strategy. Strategy is the organization’s capacity to understand change, test its assumptions and decide whether it is still fit for purpose. It is a continuing conversation with reality and cannot be done once and filed. These notes are created by Anthropic from the podcast transcript. Contributing so excellently to this discussion were Nadia Stoykov, Fiona Revell, Stephen Fulton, José-Carlos de Sousa, Darlyne Freedman, Michael Firlie and Bill Young. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Oct 5

Life-Cycles in Business

This article was created from a Forvm event, Life-Cycles, on 30th September, 2026, and featured in the embedded podcast. What counts as a life cycle The term is applied loosely. Many consultancy diagrams show a process that loops back to the start once the work is done, which is a repeating process rather than a life cycle. A true life cycle has a distinct end, even if something else takes over afterwards: a product replaced, a company absorbed or closed. Whether the cycle is visible also depends on the viewpoint. From inside, a life looks like a straight line from birth to death; from far enough above, the parts are reused and the pattern repeats. A life cycle is also never isolated, because it sits within systems that interact with it. Companies: act your age, or look ahead? One view is that a company should act its age: once mature, it should return cash to shareholders and let its assets and people be used elsewhere. Philips is the usual example, and it can be read two ways. One reading is that it was a mistake. Its engineers developed lithography technology that the company judged to be outside its interests, and that technology became ASML, now worth far more than Philips itself. The other is that letting go was the right course: the assets went to work elsewhere, and shareholders were spared a management looking for new ventures to justify its own survival. The record is more mixed than either reading. Philips did not simply drop these ventures. ASML began in 1984 as a joint venture with ASM International, and Philips was the largest founding investor in TSMC, supplying capital, technology licences and its first chief executive. Both were set up at arm’s length, with partners and a minority stake, which may be the way to encourage a new business without smothering it. Philips later sold both holdings. That bears on a common failing: large firms tend to be poor at nurturing small ones, because they run them by the rules suited to large, capital-heavy operations. The same question applied to a chemical company that set out to break its boom-and-bust cycle, came close to bankruptcy through an execution error, and then recovered. The strategy may have been sound, but the recovery looked better for management than for shareholders, who could have moved their money elsewhere. Whether shareholder value should be the yardstick at all was also questioned. A more practical suggestion was that large organisations hold several life cycles at once and need different people for each. The people who run mature plants are not necessarily the ones who should start new ventures. Decisions to exit a market are better made case by case than by doctrine. Products and technologies Pharmaceutical products follow a fixed path from discovery through development and patent protection to generic competition, so the company must keep finding something new that others cannot copy. Technologies also shift underneath, from small molecules to proteins to genetic engineering, and firms like Nokia show the cost of missing the next one. Decline is not always accepted. One agrochemical product is still sold fifty years after patenting, and an old beer brand regained value by being made scarce and more expensive. Others drop a product on a rational view of the market. Stage also changes the skills needed: launch and growth call for different people than maturity, where cost and defending against decline dominate. A parable about the wheel illustrates this. Once a technology simply works, buyers care about range and colour, which is why new phones seem to be announced mainly through new colours. Imposed life cycles Some cycles come from outside the market. Patent expiry is a deliberate regulatory cycle, intended to keep medicines affordable while rewarding innovation. The planned end of combustion-engine sales spurred investment in electric cars, and the phase-out of CFCs produced replacement chemicals and, apparently, a recovering ozone layer. Management fashion produces a third kind: periods favouring divestment, then vertical integration, with little rationale beyond the trend. Misaligned cycles and inertia For procurement, the problem is rarely one cycle but the mismatch between several. A mature buyer, a young supplier and an experimental technology may all sit under a contract of five to ten years. Procurement also sees technologies moving faster in the market than inside its own organisation, which makes its warnings unwelcome but valuable. Finally, there was the suggestion that human laziness and attachment to comfort drive much of this. Organisations and sourcing relationships settle into habit. Deliberately ending something can shake that loose, though such experiments sometimes fail. Participants in the SWISSUES Forvm event on which this article is based were Armin Scharlach, Pramod Prasanth, Stephen Fulton, Ercan Solmaz, Halyna Yokovleva and Bill Young. The article is edited with assistance from Anthropic’s Claude LLM. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Sep 12

Managerialism

The session opened with a working definition of managerialism as habit rather than judgement: organisations doing things because the tools and routines are there, not because the situation calls for them — the beaver building a dam at the sound of running water. Several other framings were offered alongside it: prioritising the institution’s survival and status over its purpose; an early resort to tools, techniques, and efficiency; prioritising inputs over outputs. The group was invited to argue for, against, or around all of these. Managerialism vs leadership Much of the hour circled a single distinction, approached from several angles: Skills vs title. Being called a manager is increasingly a function of pay grade and tenure rather than of possessing the underlying skill set — the EQ, structure, and judgement that the job actually requires. Professions built on seniority ladders (law was cited directly) were said to produce senior figures who are excellent practitioners but poorly equipped, or unwilling, to manage people. Hard skills vs soft skills. One view split management (process, procedure, “hard skills”) from leadership (motivation, trust, relationship-building, “soft skills”) — with leadership pitched as the durable skill set precisely because process-following is what AI will increasingly be able to do. Process vs strategy. Managerialism was repeatedly described as technique in service of order, predictability, and coordination; leadership as direction, vision, and the willingness to evaluate the external environment and choose a path. Taken too far, managerialism was said to trade judgement, speed, and ownership for process compliance. Timescale. A recurring axis: management as short-to-mid-term operational delivery, leadership as the multi-year “North star.” One participant’s live example was AI strategy at board level — leaders talk about AI constantly but mostly at the level of tool adoption (e.g. Copilot), rarely as a multi-year business transformation; in that domain, in practice, almost everyone present is behaving as a manager, not a leader. Decisions and blame. Managerialism was framed as a way of avoiding accountability — “I followed the process, so I can’t be blamed for the outcome” — versus leadership as owning a decision, including the risk of being wrong, especially under time pressure (the example given was reacting to a supplier’s sudden bankruptcy, where waiting to complete a full process would be fatal). Where managerialism helps, and where it hinders Managerialism is not inherently good or bad. It helps in high-risk, repeatable environments needing coordination across many functions, where interchangeability matters more than creativity. It hinders where problems are complex and need contextual judgement, where innovation depends on curiosity and dissent, and where speed matters more than structure. Incentives and reward systems A significant thread connected managerialism to how people are paid and evaluated. Reward systems built around clear, narrow KPIs (”carrot and stick”) work well when the task is well defined and the goal is simply to do more, faster. They work far less well against today’s less-defined, more peripheral problems, which require creativity and departure from established process — precisely what bonus-driven KPI compliance discourages. This was offered as one explanation for why leaders default to process-following and keeping metrics green. Boards, capability, and time horizon A live debate: has excessive pressure and pace actually pushed leadership toward more managerialism, not less? One perspective, drawn from direct experience rather than theory, was that in difficult, fast-moving periods, leaders often revert to directive, managerial behaviour rather than rising to strategic leadership, because the same pressure lands on them too. This was contrasted with the view that true leaders (as distinct from people merely occupying leadership roles) hold the wider vision precisely when times are hard — and that team composition and experience level also shape how much direction versus autonomy is appropriate. Separately, direct board-level experience was shared describing boards that lacked operational grounding in the company’s core function — a pharmaceutical board with no supply chain expertise ahead of the industry’s later pandemic-era supply shocks; a food manufacturer’s board and executive committee that had to be trained from scratch on commodity hedging despite hedging being central to protecting margins. The point made was not that boards should be pulled into day-to-day operations, but that some baseline fluency in the company’s core operational risks (supply chain, hedging, labour) is a precondition for credible oversight — a version of “diversity of thought” distinct from demographic diversity. This was linked to a broader pattern of boards and leadership optimising for the next reporting cycle (annual for public companies, roughly 2–3 years at most) rather than a 5–10 year horizon, with private and family-owned companies tending to default to even shorter, year-to-year thinking. Organisational life cycle Drawing on Aswath Damodaran’s framework for company life stages, a case was made that the appropriate style of leadership is not constant: early stages call for craft- and builder-driven leadership with high ownership, while later, mature stages become about keeping output steady (”widgets off the line”). Knowing where an organisation sits in its life cycle — and adjusting behaviour accordingly — was proposed as a precondition for knowing when managerialism is the right tool and when it isn’t. Google and Boeing were cited as examples of organisations that shifted from engineering- or founder-led cultures to manager-led ones, arguably at a cost to sustained innovation; Philips’ deliberate contraction (which enabled the rise of ASML) was cited as a case of managing decline well. Outsourced accountability A further thread: heavy reliance on external consultants (McKinsey, Bain, BCG were named as a category) can let both management and the consultants disclaim responsibility for outcomes — “it was their recommendation” / “we only advised, management decided” — leaving no one accountable. This was linked to a broader concern that excessive managerialism can tip into organisations serving the interests of an internal group (an “oligarchy”) rather than their stated purpose, and into people occupying roles designed to satisfy process rather than create value. Closing synthesis The discussion converged on a shared framing offered near the end: managerialism is not good or bad in itself — it is powerful. It brings order to complex systems but can pull attention away from outcomes and into process. It tends to grow, unnoticed, in the gaps where judgement should be exercised. The practical challenge for any organisation is recognising where structure creates clarity and should be kept, and where it creates noise and should be removed — so that the system serves the people running it, rather than the reverse. Possible future topics raised Whack-a-mole management — whether organisations are structured to react instantly to whatever happened yesterday, at the expense of strategy and planning. Locus of control(internal vs external) — drawing on a recent *Economist* piece — the difference between believing you can shape outcomes through your own agency versus navigating primarily in response to your environment. Organisational and product life cycles— understanding which life-cycle stage a business, product, or capability is in, and how that should change strategy and behaviour; noted that a single company may contain multiple products or capabilities at different life-cycle stages simultaneously, competing for the same resources. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Aug 31

Curiosity

Curiosity as the Foundation of Human Progress Curiosity was framed as the basis of humanity itself — the driver behind communication, technology, and social development. Without it, nothing advances; society doesn’t collapse but plateaus. Historical examples (postwar jet-engine development, Concorde) were used to argue that major leaps happen when curiosity moves from individual tinkering into mainstream, collective effort. A counterpoint was raised: intense focus on a single target (e.g., building Concorde) is itself a form of narrowed curiosity, and undirected curiosity can be seen as a distraction or wasteful — though most felt curiosity doesn’t need a defined target to be valuable, since exploration without an immediate payoff often pays off later. What Triggers Curiosity: Dissatisfaction vs. Inspiration A central debate emerged over the source of curiosity. One position held that curiosity is rooted in dissatisfaction — a felt gap or lack that pushes people to seek something better (from vinyl to CDs to streaming was offered as an example). The opposing view held that curiosity can arise from positive inspiration or openness to new experience, with no dissatisfaction required — simply noticing something and wanting to know more. A middle position suggested every act of curiosity needs some kind of trigger, whether cognitive/rational (dissatisfaction) or emotional (inspiration), and that “lacking something” is present even when it isn’t experienced negatively. Boredom was also proposed as a trigger distinct from dissatisfaction — many breakthrough ideas were said to emerge from low-energy, bored downtime rather than acute need. Curiosity Inside Organizations: Safety, Boundaries, and Disruption Companies often claim to want curious employees (one example: an employer listing curiosity as a formal guiding principle), but in practice they may resist the disruption curiosity produces, especially where established or political processes are challenged. Curiosity was said to require a “safe space” or at least a degree of trust and psychological safety to be expressed without personal risk. Leadership was described as needing to set boundaries or “guardrails” — enough freedom to explore, but within limits relevant to the work — otherwise curiosity risks becoming unfocused or wasteful. It was also suggested that what looks like disruptive curiosity from an employee may actually be a symptom of that person not having been involved in designing a process in the first place, rather than genuine curiosity. Systems Thinking: Boundaries, Boxes, and Unintended Consequences Curiosity exercised only “inside the box” of one’s own function or role produces limited results; real impact requires thinking about how actions ripple across organizational boundaries (an example given: HR self-service portals that reduce HR headcount but shift the burden — and time cost — onto employees elsewhere in the business). The point was made that most organizational functions are artificially bounded, and genuine improvement often requires questioning those boundaries rather than optimizing within them. Curiosity aimed too low, or curiosity that stays inside a box, was described as generating a lot of activity without meaningful return — curiosity needs to be “aimed high” and tied to a large enough outcome to be worth channeling. Developing Curiosity: Challenges, Education, and Culture Educational and developmental approaches were discussed as ways to build curiosity deliberately: shifting from teacher-centered/top-down instruction to student- or employee-centered approaches where people are given open, sometimes unsolved or paradox-laden challenges to work through themselves, rather than being told what to do. One academic case study found that a creativity course measurably increased analytical students’ strategic/out-of-the-box thinking, but had a much smaller effect on business students who may have started from a higher creative baseline — suggesting different starting points require different developmental approaches. Company culture — how open an organization is to new ideas — was also raised as a major determinant of whether curiosity gets expressed at all. AI and Curiosity: Amplifier or Substitute? Views diverged on whether AI increases or diminishes curiosity. On one hand, AI was seen as dramatically speeding up the process of getting answers and partial answers, freeing people to explore and build further (particularly valued in consulting/research contexts). On the other, there was concern that AI can be used to simply retrieve a ready-made, well-written answer without any curiosity being exercised at all — and that relying on a single AI model risks producing “gray average” recycled thinking rather than original insight. Suggested mitigations included querying multiple AI models against the same question, and treating AI as a “probe” that challenges one’s thinking (asking what’s missing, what other patterns exist) rather than a replacement for it. A related distinction was drawn between learning what an AI’s answer is versus understanding the methodology behind it — without the latter, users gain outcomes but not developed judgment. It was also noted that skill in prompting AI effectively is highly context-dependent: simple lookup use requires little skill, but specialized applications (marketing campaigns, coding) demand real prompting expertise. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Aug 17

Humour

The discussion opened with humour’s cultural fault lines — what lands as connection in one setting reads as cruelty or evasion in another. Underneath the specific stories, though, three sharper threads ran through the hour, along with a recurring question that connects all three: can humour be trained, or is it something closer to instinct? Humour as an intelligence marker. Several participants linked wit to intelligence, though the group split on which kind. One framed the ability to deploy humour well and appropriately as a longstanding sign of high general intelligence — the capacity, as it was put, to see the funny side of any situation, even if you don’t always say what you see. Others pushed back, arguing the real driver is emotional intelligence (EQ) rather than raw IQ: the skill lies less in the joke itself than in reading the room, sensing when levity will land and when it won’t, and knowing when to hold back. This distinction mattered because it fed directly into the teachability question — if humour is fundamentally a technical craft (timing, structure, repetition), it can be taught like storytelling; if it’s fundamentally a form of social perception, training has much less to offer, since perception of a room is not easily drilled. A later observation complicated the picture further, rather than settling it: the kind of humour that lands with a room of PhD students is different from what works in mainstream entertainment, suggesting the relationship between intelligence and humour isn’t a straight line at all. Cleverness may shape the *style* of humour a group favours without making that group better, individually, at using humour well. The two claims — humour signals intelligence, and intelligence doesn’t reliably predict good humour — were never quite reconciled, which is part of why the group felt this was worth returning to. Humour in team-bonding Shared humour was described as constitutive of team identity: its own in-jokes, its own register, a shorthand that signals who belongs. Several participants recognised this from experience — the sense that a team’s humour is inseparable from how it operates and how it sees itself. But the same dynamic has a clear shadow side. What feels like harmless shared banter to those inside it can quietly exclude anyone outside the joke, and the people doing the excluding are often the last to notice — it typically takes someone stepping outside the dynamic to name what’s happening. One useful frame raised here was a simple team archetype — hero, victim, joker — as a way of noticing when humour has become a fixed role in a group rather than a spontaneous response to a moment, and when the “joker” role is being used to avoid rather than defuse tension. Humour as message clarification — and its opposite. In a business setting, humour was seen as something that can open a room and make an idea easier to absorb, provided it stays subordinate to the point being made rather than competing with it. Several concrete uses came up: humour as a way of lowering hierarchy, so a senior figure’s joke gives more junior people permission to speak; and humour as an icebreaker, making a difficult topic easier to start discussing. But the group was equally clear about the failure mode. Handled badly, humour doesn’t just blur the message — it can tip into laughing *at* rather than *with* someone, particularly across language or cultural lines, where intent and effect can diverge sharply. And it can become a way of avoiding a hard conversation altogether rather than opening one — deflection dressed as levity. Teachability Running beneath all three threads was that open question of teachability. There was real disagreement: one view held that certain technical elements — structure, timing, restraint in repetition — genuinely can be learned, much as storytelling can; another held that the deeper skill, reading a room and calibrating in real time, resists formal training almost by definition. Nobody claimed the matter was settled, and the group agreed these threads deserved more time than a single session allowed. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Jul 27

Diversity

Cognitive diversity: framing the topic The discussion opened with an attempt to define cognitive diversity — not the DEI kind, but differences in how people think, process information, and see problems. An early framing proposed it as the resolution of an organizational paradox: businesses need both standardization and innovation, and cognitive diversity — including the “uncomfortable advantage” of neuro-divergent perspectives that notice anomalies others miss — is how a system stays both stable and adaptive. A challenge was raised: is cognitive diversity a property of teams, of individuals, or of a homogeneous team that simply tolerates dissent? Beyond the cognitive: personality and lived experience The conversation broadened to include personality typing (Myers-Briggs was discussed at length), emotional disposition, and depth vs. breadth of experience (generalists vs. deep specialists) as additional dimensions of diversity. One participant uses Myers-Briggs actively in team composition and recruitment, deliberately balancing extroverts against quieter, structurally-minded types. A caution was raised that personality tests are unreliable over time (one participant reported getting three different results across five years) and shouldn’t substitute for developing genuine skill in reading and understanding people. Cultural, national, and religious background was proposed as another driver of cognitive/behavioural diversity — affecting how people interact, whether they’re reactive or proactive, and how they’re perceived Diversity, conflict, and conformity — the central thread This became the spine of the discussion. One position: diversity is only functional if it’s allowed to produce open conflict — teams that are too “cozy” (e.g., built from homogeneous personality types) avoid friction and become conflict-avoiding, which is a liability. A more provocative extension: real organizational value comes from allowing outright, wasteful-looking internal conflict — competing factions pursuing incompatible approaches — because what survives the conflict has proven itself. This connected to a related idea: conflict avoidance and conformity are two sides of the same coin, and conformity is often what happens when diversity is not actually tolerated. Recruitment practices (standardized, homogenized job descriptions) were cited as a structural driver of this conformity, with “diversity” language in hiring often reducing to demographic categories rather than genuine cognitive difference. Making conflict productive: culture and guardrails Several participants described how they operationalize this in practice: fostering “creative friction” or “respectful conflict” — encouraging team members to challenge each other and their manager, while maintaining an underlying culture of mutual support and psychological safety. The distinction drawn was between disrespectful conflict (which needs correcting) and productive disagreement, which prepares people for the harder conflicts they’ll face with external stakeholders. A caution followed: even genuinely diverse teams tend to converge/meld over time (the “flat-share” phenomenon), and there’s a risk that people unconsciously recruit others who think like themselves while believing they’re selecting for diversity — plus a risk that visibly diverse-looking teams (self-selected for adventurous team-building activities, for example) may in fact be homogeneous in temperament, masking a lack of real cognitive diversity. A related boundary question was raised: how far should managers push people out of their comfort zone (e.g. through adventurous team-building) before it becomes personally intrusive rather than professionally developmental — with consensus that any single objection should be respected and the activity dropped rather than risk excluding or stigmatizing that person. Conformity as a broader social/political phenomenon The discussion extended the conformity theme beyond organizations into politics and history — using examples of political appointees adopting positions they’d previously opposed in order to advance their careers, and drawing a historical parallel to conformity under authoritarian regimes (including a direct comparison to 1930s Germany) as an illustration of how self-interested conformity can operate at scale, often without participants perceiving themselves as compromised. This led to a broader question of whether “culture” — even ostensibly healthy organizational culture — is inherently a soft form of enforced conformity, and whether that is inevitable or manageable. The Pareto angle A closing observation applied the Pareto principle (variously 70/30 or 90/10) to human behaviour generally: a small minority of people genuinely think independently and drive divergence, while the majority default to conformity — reinforcing the episode’s through-line that healthy diversity requires deliberately protecting and channeling the contributions of that minority, rather than assuming diversity emerges naturally from demographic mix. Closing framing device The episode closed with a live analogy — using the World Cup final and the idea of national team vs. club team loyalty — to probe what “the system” or relevant boundary of a team’s culture actually is (the team itself? the league? the sport? the country?), left deliberately open as a question for reflection rather than resolved. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com
Jul 6

Hivemind

This episode features Lily Kozlowsky, Pramod Prasanth, Fiona Revell, Nadia Stoykov, Armin Scharlach and Bill Young. The session explored how decisions can actually form in organizations, using the “hive mind” instead of formal processes. Discussion opened by questioning whether human organizations can truly mirror bee colonies, given people’s needs for recognition and status. One view held that executive decisions are largely theatre — ratifying choices the organization has already made — while another separated “diagnosis” (idea generation, often distributed among invisible influencers) from “binding decision-making” (concentrated in accountable leaders who bear liability). A recurring tension was whether hive-style collective decisions dilute accountability and get silently sabotaged if the “collective consciousness” disagrees. The group distinguished leaders (who take responsibility) from influencers (who build buy-in), debating what motivates influencers — money, intrinsic belief, or organizational culture — and whether “leadership” is now corporate code for wanting influencers rather than executors, partly driven by AI replacing execution roles. The conversation closed on cognitive diversity and neurodiversity as strengtheners of collective intelligence, with debate over whether organizational tolerance and structured push-back are prerequisites for diverse ideas to thrive. SWISSUES Forvm events are open to all, have no agenda and no formal presentations. Subscribe to SWISSUES.com to keep in touch. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.swissues.com

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The SWISSUES Podcast is an edited recording of the fortnightly Forvm discussion with full notes summarizing all the discussions. www.swissues.com

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SWISSUES
Years Active

2026
Episodes

46
Rating

Clean
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Cognitive Commons

Strategy

Life-Cycles in Business

Managerialism

Curiosity

Humour

Diversity

Hivemind

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