Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:00:00 - 00:00:47]
My favorite modern philosopher is Albus Dumbledore. So at the end of the second Harry Potter book and it's Dumbledore who says this. It is our choices, Harry, that show people who we truly are far more than our abilities. But the use and abuse of AI, if it's not on your corporate risk register now, by the way, your risk appetite for use and abuse of AI is about 100% because you can't control it. The pace at which organizations information flows through organizations today we as a leadership team will only know we're in trouble when we get the numbers in 3, 4, 5, 6 months time and the trouble will be significant. Needless to say, I didn't accept my resignation. But I think there's a moment and you've got to be willing to put your own career on the line.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:00:52 - 00:01:34]
Chris Bones is the newly installed chair of the Chartered Institute for Professional Development, cipd, the leading professional body for those working in the human resource business. He brings with him a wealth of experience in business, both as an executive and as an advisor. More recently he served as head of the Henley Business School, an unusual appointment, a practitioner rather than an academic. He's written widely, most notably on leadership and now faces the challenge of the march of technology and its impact on the people business. Chris, do people still matter?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:01:35 - 00:03:27]
You'd expect me to say yes to that, so I'll start with a yes. I think they matter in the context of your intro technology in three ways. One, the technology. There's so much hype about AI, but fundamentally these are large language learning models. The system works because someone's programmed to work out the probability of word A appearing after word B in the context of a question or a number of question or prompts. First, people matter because they're shaping technology and I think put aside some of the dystopian and wild science fiction, fundamentally they're going to make AI better and in making our AI better they will help an awful lot of things be better in society. The second reason I think they matter is because they set the ethical and professional framework within which technologies per se, more generally, be they scientific, medical, it, sit and are developed and if they lose their moral compass in doing that, that then they can damage society so that they can matter from a good or bad impact in the longer term. And the third reason they matter is I think they're going to be shifting the roles in many organizations from potentially processing the data to evaluating the quality of the data processing. So do I see people being replaced? I'm sure in this Large amount of automation to come, jobs will go, but new jobs will need to be developed, otherwise you'll be facing a number of problems that we can talk about later about what happens when you do something unthinkingly as a result of asking a question of ChatGPT.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:03:27 - 00:03:54]
Well, indeed, I want to come back to talk about that. The change in culture, because introduction to technology tends to do more to change the people that than. Or what people do in their behaviors than anything else, plus occupational roles and all of that. But let's first talk a bit about you, your own background. How did you get to the people business?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:03:54 - 00:04:38]
By accident? I was going to be an actor and I spent a lot of my time at university and I wasn't doing student politics on the stage and I was really determined to be an actor right the way through till I looked at the size of my overdraft and the size of a potential job offer, should I get a job on the milk round, as it used to be then? And I decided actually probably impecunious acting was possibly not for me. So I did a rapid swerve and applied for a load of jobs in an area where I could work with people, which was personnel, industrial relations, I guess. So I started out as an industrial relations graduate in the oil industry.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:04:38 - 00:04:40]
Where. Where was that?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:04:40 - 00:04:54]
In Shell briefly in London and then most of my time in an oil refinery on Merseyside. I think I was a shock to them, they were a shock to me and boy, did it teach you a hell of a lot about people.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:04:55 - 00:05:33]
That's very interesting. I didn't know that. I in fact also almost went to Shell though, they said to me, and this, we have in common a background in student politics. They said to me, what would we possibly do with you? Which was as good as saying we're not having you. And actually my first proper job was in fact in oil refinery on Thames Estuary for mobile, which is now part of Exxon. That must have been quite. Was it a culture shock?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:05:34 - 00:07:08]
It was a huge culture shock. I mean, a going. I mean I'd spent five years in Aberdeen as a student, having been by birth and education in South Londoner and indeed met my wife up there. So, you know, I'd done a big transition, but in a. In a context that was still relatively sort of educational and esoteric, if you like, intellectual. So moving to Merseyside and spending, you know, most of my week sitting in a refinery going into plants, trying to fix problems, deal with the consequences of erratic management, sometimes bad management or erratic, you know, worker Reactions and trying to build relationships where people had confidence that you were saying things as they were and you were believable. And if you say it was going to be fixed, it got fixed. You really had to work hard to understand where people came from and understand the sort of context, how they saw things, as opposed to the management of a global multinational who saw things in terms of sort of productivity and outcomes and efficiency. Actually most of the people on our refinery saw things in terms of impact on their family life, ability to do this, do that, follow their interests and, you know, have a safe and secure job, which, you know, Merseyside in the early 80s was quite an important challenge.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:07:09 - 00:07:59]
I want to come back actually to terminology. It's very interesting. You started in industrial relations, now you preside over a body that concerns itself with human resources. And perhaps when we talk about the cipd, we should talk about is that significant? Does that tell us anything about what we think about people? But let's stick for a moment with your own experience now you've worked for several companies and in many different roles. When, before you went to Hendy, what would you say would be the most, if you like important teaching experience that you've had for yourself in dealing with people working in business?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:08:01 - 00:08:03]
I think the refinery, because it's.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:08:05 - 00:08:06]
It.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:08:06 - 00:09:39]
Puts you in a position where you were only successful if you got people who had a very different perspective than you, able to sit around a table and talk constructively and find a solution. So that was. Whilst it's on a small scale, it taught me a huge amount also about being clear, checking your detail. I have one terrible story which I will admit to. In the middle of a pay negotiation, I signed something off very quickly and we circulated it to the whole of Shell. And I got a phone call the next day and it was the head of personnel for Shell in the uk. So I sort of stood up and he said, ah, young Chris, so you know you're in trouble, don't you? He said, you've just circulated the Aston Sachs agreement or whatever it was. And I said, yes, this is, this thing was about 120 pages and in these days, if you remember, we had sort of substantive agreements, procedural agreements, sort of highly structured world. Anyway, he said, I've just been to the toilet and I'd like to claim my new allowance. Sorry, Jeff. He said, I've just been to the toilet and I'd like to claim my new allowance. I said, okay. No, Jeff, haven't quite got it. Silence. Turn to page 78 of the document you Circulated. So I turned to page 78 and there is this long list of allowances, mainly shift allowance. And at the bottom is this allowance called change of shift. And I had left the F shift.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:09:40 - 00:09:40]
Nice one.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:09:41 - 00:14:10]
So, you know, very early on in your career did you learn about. And we said this sort of, you know, actor is just giving the lines and I'll perform. No, it's got to be structured and detailed so early on that I think they're moving into postings where you operated. So I worked in Hong Kong for a while. I worked in the States for a while. I commuted in and out of Japan for a year working on a culture change program, you know, and you could cause havoc just by using the wrong word. And Japan was fascinating because you have this hierarchy of conversation and we. Whilst you're the gaijing, you're the foreigner in the room, there is a more senior Japanese manager in the room and there's an order in which people spoke. And you had to learn that no one actually told you. And as you can see, I speak with my hands. So I learned my training in Japan was I spent the whole of the time in a meeting like this with my hands under my legs, which is a way of reminding myself that you are not going to open your mouth first. There's an order of contribution. So building strategies for success in very different cultures and environments I think was a huge learning piece. And then which I guess we'll explore more of making decisions about people quickly and effectively and deciding who you're going to back, who you're going to change and then how are you going to do that in a fair and thoughtful way? Because high performance cultures are really important and when you get them, you know you've got them. But they can be rapidly undermined by one toxic individual. And being able to understand toxicity in teams and toxic teams within organizations and working out how they, how to deal with them so they don't infect across the organization and start to demotivate and demotivate, demoralize as something I built over the years as a skill. And I got a piece of advice very early on when I became sort of equivalent of Chief Executive Henley from the then chair who said make your decisions about people quickly. You know, my mistake was waiting too long and you sort of know, wisely I now say that to other people because I should have been quicker and sharper off the ball and made my decisions more quickly about, you know, where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. So I think being clear about what you're trying to do being clear about who's going to come with you and then not tolerating inappropriate behavior in organizations. You're really calling it out, calling it out early. And you have to be a bit brave to do that. It's quite uncomfortable when you do it the first time. To give you an example, as I got to be very senior in my last commercial job before I went into business education, I ended up accidentally as head of global corporate communications for a while. I think I was the last person out the door when someone said we need to give someone this job. And I had a bit of a roller coaster time. It's a time of great change and excitement. But I ended up having to put my job on the line over a proposed ad that was going out to support a particular brand and it came into the office very late and it had been challenged at every stage and no one had said we're not showing this ad. And had we shown it, we'd have seriously damaged our reputation. And ultimately, because no one else was going to do it, I pulled it, costing the business a lot of money to the objection of the market concern, the global head of marketing. I overruled them and said this is not going out. And I put it in the post with my resignation letter to the chairman and said if I've done the wrong thing, here's my resignation and went home. Needless to say, didn't accept my resignation. But I think there was a moment I had learned to that point that at some point if it's wrong, it's wrong and you've got to call it and you've got to be willing to put your, your own career on the line.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:14:10 - 00:14:12]
What gave you the confidence to take that risk?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:14:14 - 00:15:18]
I'm not sure I was very confident. I, I, I got, I think, I think the content of what was in the advert was objectionable. It was sexist, it was, I thought, racist. So it hit a set of values. So I was. One of the things I think is really important as you get more senior in organizations is you have to take your values with you. You can't compromise them along the way. And if you lose, if you do, you look really at sea and a bit rudderless and then you end up being overly pragmatic about stuff that's more important than day to day pragmatism in business or delivery of healthcare, whatever it is. So I was pretty sure it had hit every one of my value. I tested it out with groups of people in the office and said I'M going to show you this ad. What do you think? And most of them were left reeling. So I did some validation. So I guess I was confident the reaction wasn't just mine, but I lost a number of friends in the organization as a result.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:15:19 - 00:15:19]
Why?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:15:20 - 00:15:21]
Because they thought I shouldn't have done it.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:15:22 - 00:15:26]
When you say they thought you shouldn't have done, they thought you should have let it go.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:15:26 - 00:15:28]
Let it go. It wasn't my job to stop it.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:15:29 - 00:15:35]
Okay. Was that because they thought it wasn't your job or because they thought that the ad was okay?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:15:36 - 00:15:56]
That's a very interesting question. I think they thought the decision of whether an ad was okay should sit with the market concerned and should not ever be overridden. So the accountability should be down there. And my belief was, I'm afraid the global reputation of the business is more important than a market and therefore our values needed to be protected.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:15:57 - 00:16:51]
The reason I asked that, I think this is a very interesting example of the test of leadership. Because in the end, most leadership is really about choice and decision making. And when you're making a decision, you're making a choice, you have to weigh up what you might lose by making choice A, as opposed to choice B, as opposed to what you might gain. And I was interested in the way you explained this because you clearly had a sense of what the values of that organization would be. And from the way you explain it, you thought that was more important than any other advantage that might have been gained. Is that a reasonable way of putting it?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:16:51 - 00:18:15]
Yes. I mean, I have a. My favorite modern philosopher is Albus Dumbledore. So at the end of the second Harry Potter book, Harry discovers he has the same skills or abilities, if you like, as Voldemort, who's the villain of the piece. And it's Dumbledore who says this, says it is our choices, Harry, that show people who we truly are far more than our abilities. And I've. I think it's a brilliant line because it defines for me what really effective leadership is. It's understanding the thoughtful choices you make. You shouldn't ever make an unconscious choice. You should make. Be conscious in your choosing and you should have an understanding of why you've chosen. So I, you know, evidence led, data led is quite important for me. And, you know, the. That choice needs to be informed by a value set that I think is appropriate for the organization. You're not there to impose yourself on the organization, but the organization has a clear set of values and standards. And you want to make your choice in that context. So choice is the right word for me, Trevor. And quite often you see leaders in public life who make some lousy choices. I often think they don't really know they've made the choice until it bites them in the backside and then they realize they inadvertently chose to do something which was, you know, when they look at it they go, I really shouldn't have done that, should I Wendy?
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:18:15 - 00:18:20]
I can't remember who it was that said it, but not making a choice is also a choice.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:18:20 - 00:18:21]
Yes.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:18:21 - 00:18:33]
Yeah, in itself. The other element of what you said about decision making, which is very interesting, you say make it quickly. What if you quickly discover it wrong?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:18:35 - 00:18:38]
Own it. Own it and put it right.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:18:41 - 00:18:43]
Publicly, privately, both.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:18:44 - 00:19:19]
I've got a long list of bad decisions trail behind me. Yes. I think it's important that people see you're willing to reconsider if something happens that clearly is not intended by the decision you've taken and that you're willing to reconsider based on whatever the evidence is that's being presented to you. So I think as long as you're thoughtful in the way you do it, most of us would like our mistakes to disappear quickly, wouldn't we? But I think to the degree you need to go admit it, you have to go admit it.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:19:20 - 00:19:25]
You wrote a book, Cult of the Leader. What was the main message of that book?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:19:26 - 00:20:36]
I spent my last few years at Henley having come out of business, into business education, just observing the run up to and then the implications of the financial crash in 2008 and being quite interested in what other business schools were teaching or their academics were writing around leadership. And we got this whole conversation that started in, in the sort of late 90s and went into the noughties about the war for talent. And the war for talent I thought was an interesting idea because it was based on quite a lot of myths. Some interesting assertions, a bit of taking a model of talent management used by the Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain where its talent lasted days, not weeks, weeks or months. And then extending that somehow into thinking about top talent and bottom talent and churning talent. And I think it became one of those HR fads that people started applying this term, a fad.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:20:37 - 00:20:39]
There'll be a lot of people who will be very upset.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:20:40 - 00:23:13]
But it became a fad not because the thought wasn't, because it wasn't underpinned by an observation about, you know, to find the best people you need to go far and wide, you need to, you know, extend the reach, you need to make sure you're reaching into, you know, all possible places of talent, not just the normal pools and so on and so forth. So a lot of the, the core thinking in that debate was sensible, but, but somehow this idea that you know your top talent is your top talent and then you feed it, you tell it's the top talent, so you create egos, you then pay it big money and then this sort of top talent becomes a self sustaining plutocracy. So this is where I think sensible thinking of fad come in. And suddenly you've got plutocracies in organizations that are the sort of identified top talent. They're super paid, they're super confident, they become un listening, they don't think they need to develop because they're already they're on the list or they made it. And they then drove a set of behaviors which I crystal crystallized in the book. I described them as the l' oreal generation, which is, you know, because I'm worth it. And you watch those behaviors at the top of organizations, business, public sector politics. And the book really explores how that plutocracy blindly walked us into a financial crash because they were basically all in the same game. Talent in civil service, talent in the fca, talent in business. And we walked ourselves into an example of a lack of diversity, which wasn't demographic diversity, but it was sort of thinking diversity funded by cash. There's this idea, this concept. I was a global REM and bend director before I went to Henley for a FTSE top 10 company. And someone described this as the late woebegone method of rewarding as senior executives in late woebegone, where all the women are strong and all the children are above average. And this idea of everyone's above average. So of course every chief executive has to be above average. So everyone's pay is put in Q1 against comparative surveys and every year the survey changes, so the Q1 number goes up, so the chief executive's pay goes up. Because you don't want a Q2 chief executive, do you?
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:23:14 - 00:23:16]
And no board want their chief executive to look like a cheap.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:23:17 - 00:24:40]
Exactly. So you had all these mechanisms in global business and the sort of permissive regulatory environment which just created a set of the perfect storm. So the whole ship crashed in to this crunch around wholesale credit. And I asked myself the question, what was it about leadership across politics, public life and business that didn't to phrase the late queen's great question, understand why no one saw this coming and what was it? And so the cult really describes that and lays out Perhaps a manifesto for change that I think is still not really adopted in organizations to have genuine diversity of, genuine diversity of thought perspective, sensible regulation. I think the scale of chief executive reward over the average is unjustifiable, but it's driven by a whole load of, it's driven by the sort of myth behind the wall for talent. And are they the most talented people? Perhaps not, but they've got themselves in a position where they are the talent.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:24:41 - 00:25:38]
Why do you think diversity in the sense that you mean it, diversity of outlook and thought, rather than protected characteristic makes a difference? And indeed, how do you spot it? How do you know? Because of course one of the things that modern day leaders, well actually in history, all leaders are good at is persuasion, including persuading themselves that they know stuff that they don't know about. But what they're very good at is coming into room and explaining to you why they know better than anybody else. And you know, most of us will fall for it. So how do you, how do you create the teams, the organizations, the leadership which is truly diverse when people, you know, can sell amongst people who can sell snow to the Eskimos, as they say?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:25:40 - 00:28:43]
That's a great question. I, I started thinking about this a long time ago. I got a global lead on diversity in the sort of early days of what does this mean for us and how would we do it? So I'm not dismissing protected characteristic because I think actually some perspectives are different. But interestingly, even there, I think sometimes we muddle up. We have a qed, therefore diverse perspective. Where actually the bit of diversity in particularly I think in British business and organization life that is less considered and far more likely to bring diverse perspective is social mobility. So I've always seen this from a social mobility perspective. You can get people of all sorts of backgrounds round the table and if we've all had a broadly similar education and a similar experience, the chances are we'll have a relatively similar perspective. It's the not similar experience and not similar background and not similar educational outcome which bring, I think debate and exploration. And I spent seven years before doing the jobs I do now very proudly being the first non lawyer to lead the most socially diverse group of lawyers in the UK Chartered Institute of Legal Executives who are 76% women, 20% from non white ethnic minority backgrounds, 60% who don't go to university, all of whom learned and earned on the job and therefore look very different and sound very different from the profession. I now chair the regulator for the bar or from solicitors. And when you hear them when you listen to them and you listen to their stories and their backgrounds. What they're bringing is something radically different into legal services. And they were excluded from just about everything when I started out campaigning to have this voice better represented in judiciary and in other aspects. And what's interesting is I think there's quite a lot of research now that says if you really start to think about social exclusions and mobility, what you will bring with you in trying to be inclusive in that way is actually quite a lot of protected characteristic differentiation as well, and diversity. So I don't think they're mutually exclusive and I think there's an overlap there. So I more recently come to the view that testing the social mobility, the social inclusion of what we have in a room around the table, is more likely to provide a variety of view and a variety of perspective, and therefore more challenge at a board level than just thinking about this in the more traditional way.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:28:44 - 00:29:31]
I understand that and I think there's a lot in that. But we still find in our work, Green park, that there's still a bit of persuasion to do with decision makers that merit whatever shape it comes in. And even if you want to, for example, promote social exclusion, it's quite hard to spot unless it looks like what you see in the mirror. I don't just mean physically, but I mean mentally. You know, that the people who are good or merit somehow mysteriously lines up with my experience and my capabilities and what I am good at. How do you tackle that?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:29:32 - 00:29:58]
I think with mixed success, to be honest. I have a thing about people coming into interviews when people wore suits and interviews with white socks, you'd lost the job, really. I just couldn't get over the fact that you just. Your socks didn't match your suit. And at some point I thought to myself, that is just a really silly thing to do. So how do I got over?
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:29:58 - 00:30:06]
I don't know. I don't know. I've met lots of people who wear white socks and I'm trying to think of one about whom I was wrong.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:30:08 - 00:31:04]
So you sort of think I've got to get over the white socks because I. I really need to, to listen. So I think being aware of your own biases is a good place to start. And so I try and sort of check in with those from time to time and make sure if I'm going to have this conversation, what am I really looking for as opposed to what my instinct would look at if I. If I like to put it out. I said, what am I listening For I think the other way of, of doing it is to be more interested in the outcomes of what people are doing than in their inputs. So so many organizations reward people for activity, they don't actually reward them for outcome. You know, we get an activity is I've done all my objectives. Great. Well, so what have you achieved? And one of the things that I.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:31:04 - 00:31:06]
Phone calls. Doesn't matter if any of them turned into anything.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:31:06 - 00:31:47]
Exactly. So what I now start to do is, is think about, have I got people around the board table who can give you a list of outcomes where they've, where they've done something and it's measurable and it's, and it's, it's moved the needle and interesting. The more I've dug into that, the more I've been surprised by the variety of people that you can have in a, in a team or in a room or, you know, working on something. So that's the best advice I can give, I think from my experience is to focus on outcome. Loads of people will tell you what they did, fewer people tell you what they achieved.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:31:48 - 00:32:24]
My version of your first point, by the way, the White Sox point is ignore the tattoos, which is what advice I get from my daughter who rolls her eyes at my prejudice. You said on taking up your new role as chair of the trustees at CIPD that one of the things that concerns you that the CIPD has to address is the advent of digital technologies, the way they change the workplace and so on. Is this a threat or an opportunity?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:32:25 - 00:37:28]
So if you, professor, answer, it's both. Let me start with opportunity and then we'll turn to threat. So I think the opportunities, the very obvious opportunities in terms of the ability to process mass data points and therefore, for example, diagnose illness or condition far more quickly. Being able to identify the right pattern or pressure point. In my regulatory role as a regulator board, what you want to understand is where the risk is. So if technologies can help you understand the risk more quickly by sort of agglomerating huge amounts of data and give you something that's a pattern that you can respond to, I think that is helpful. So there's vast amount of opportunities and opportunities to get rid of basic grind processing that makes a lot of day to day jobs a bit frustrating. So plenty in there. I, I think the threat is twofold. It's in the how and, and, and the degree of control of the how. So the first threat is, is this blows up and we start failing in key institutions. You know, we're already, you know, I'm being told of cases of barristers using AI in court disastrously and in other words using it in the middle of a case and, and answering a judge's question and it's wrong well. So people are applying this inappropriately and they're doing that in a lot of places. What's different about this technology revolution? So Trevor, you and I have been through computerization, we've been through ERP systems and we've all got scars on our back from those endless scars. But everything we've brought in as technology, from you know, the beginning of spinning Jenny through to Steam Engine to enterprise wide computing, was controlled in that it was a top down decision, top down funding and top down implementation. AI isn't, AI is guerrilla warfare. It's already happening in your organization. It's in your organization even if you don't know it. People are using it today and they may well be using it well if they've learned to do prompts really well and they understand hallucination and slop and these other wonderful terms. But actually a lot of people are just asking ChatGPT and sticking it in there and many, increasingly we are more and more at risk in the delivery of our public services and the delivery in profit making activity. For people in organizations thinking ChatGPT has the answer and we had the Google chief exec yesterday or the day before flagging this as a serious issue. The threat is first and foremost that we don't get our act together as organizations quickly enough to put some rules of engagement around it. And it's often a way and it's undermining what we're paid to do, unknowingly undermining until it's way too late. The other threat I think is the slightly dystopian one which is the failure of any sort of ethical framework that draws a line between the appropriate use of large language models and the development of technologies that have the potential to harm society and ultimately humankind. And I am concerned, whilst I think it's out there for the future at the moment, technological advance is so quick that if we don't have a sense of what good looks like and serious and clear consequences of going over the line, we might find ourselves in the computing equivalent of where we were with bioengineering and cloning and so on 20 years ago. And clearly in this country we put a very clear control into that sort of experimentation and modeling which has stopped people doing things that are inappropriate. So I think you've got opportunity and threat and sitting in both the People. Technology is not going to solve either of those things. People are going to play a role. The problem for most people in leadership roles in organizations today is that they don't use ChatGPT or the equivalent, don't even know what a prompt is. They certainly wouldn't know. Well, they thought hallucination is probably something you and I took at university, but it's certainly nothing to do with the tech program. And I think there is a duty on leaders today to start using this stuff quickly because that will help them understand where the risks are to their business or their public service.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:37:29 - 00:38:02]
How serious do you think the damage to any organization or more widely to the community might be? And how will we know? Because actually, I think part of what you're saying is that we pick up this tool and we can use it and it serves protect some particular purpose, but actually because it's not completely autonomous yet, but there are unforeseen outcomes.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:38:03 - 00:39:36]
The danger is, over the last, I think, 10 or 15 years, the educational model we use hasn't changed to keep up with technological processes. So people are increasingly able to go on the Internet and find the answer. And institutions like the one I'm still attached to, Manchester, we have pieces of tech to see if you've plagiarized. But if you think about that sort of strategy, what that's doing is you're chasing an after the event activity. So you've got a generation coming into work who think the answer is online, who are going to use AI where the answer is potentially online, but it's a bit hit and miss. And then if you take it, and it's a bit like I used to say to people at Manchester when I taught on the MBA program, you know, if you, if you use Wikipedia as a reference, I'm just going to fail you because you've not gone and checked where the article come from, you've not gone to the source, you've not shown, you've read the source beyond the reference and you know, it's just sloppy thinking. So don't think, you know, you've got to show me you can critically think and not just parrot something at work. Of course, no one's. There is no requirement to do that. You know, steal with pride used to be something we all did on PowerPoint presentations 20 years ago. Academics are famous for repurposing what they do.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:39:37 - 00:39:39]
Thin line between citation and. And plagiarism.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:39:39 - 00:40:50]
Exactly. Now in a work environment, lots of people copy everybody else, so you can see the problem, can't you? Someone gets the answer from AI, it's not quite right. It's put in a SharePoint environment, a hundred other people copy it around the world. It becomes the truth, but it's not right. We then put our plans together on the truth. It's not right. We're not going to deliver. And the pace at which organizations information flows through organizations today, we as a leadership team will only know we're in trouble when we get the numbers in 3, 4, 5, 6 months time and the trouble will be significant. And I just don't see at the moment people aren't the risk. We've all got cybersecurity Jaguar Land Rover at the minute on our number one risk and we're all panicking about cybersecurity. But the use and abuse of AI, if it's not on your corporate risk register, not now, by the way, your risk appetite for use and abuse of AI is about 100% because you can't control it, because people are using it. And if they're not using it on your machines, they're using it on their mobiles. So don't tell them you can't use our machines, they're already there.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:40:50 - 00:40:58]
But you seem to be saying that the biggest risk actually is the people. Yeah, in principle. What do you do about that?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:40:59 - 00:41:56]
You make AI. I think what you do is you say we're setting a cultural standard in our organization which is if you have used AI to produce any of what you're presenting, you tell us and you provide a citation of AI. So I got it here, these are the prompts I used. This is the outcome I've got and I validated it in this way. So I don't think it's bad to use AI. It's hugely advantageous. You can speed your way through all sorts of stuff. So I'm not being a Luddite, but I think organizations need to make AI visible very quickly because as soon as you see the visibility, you'll know whether or not someone's basing their conclusions and their advice. To spend or act on something that is valid, that's interesting.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:41:56 - 00:42:27]
So use it, but be upfront about the use. Let's turn lastly to the CIPD itself. I was quite interested in the way that you talked about your first job as industrial relations. You now preside over this organization that talks about human resources. Is that just words or does it reflect something wider about the way we think about people in the workplace?
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:42:28 - 00:45:37]
I've never been a great fan of the word human resources. I have to say I think it's slightly dehumanizing. I understand why it became a thing and often these things come out of the states and they drive their way through the rest of the world. But it's interesting in, in organizations many of them now have chief people officers, they don't have chief human resources officers. And I think Chartered Institute of Personal and Development, whilst we might one day want to become the Chartered Institute of People in Development, I, I quite like it that we're talking about people because it reminds us who creates value and what creates value. So I think HR caught on. If I remember rightly, this sort of happened in, in sort of towards the end of my. Maybe the last five years when I was in HR. I haven't been in HR for 20 odd years. 25 years. So it's quite funny coming back in as a someone who kept their fellowship of the professional body up but hasn't, hasn't really done an HR job. I think people grabbed it because there was this whole thing about HR needs to be on the board, HR needs to be on the xco. And so if we persuaded people we were managing a hugely valuable resource and this was our, we were the burster of this resource and we were there to help organizations use it differently. I think somehow we saw that as a validation stamp we would be more like finance. I'm not sure becoming HR changed the reputation of the profession, good, bad or indifferent. I think the professional reputation didn't, the words didn't make a difference. Good people and organization teams do great jobs, are highly valued by their colleagues, sit on excos and are very, very influential, rightly so because they understand how to create target operating models. In other words, this is what our strategy is. So our organization needs to work like that. They understand process, they understand how roles feed into process, what capabilities those roles want and then how to go and recruit them and develop them. And they then understand how to manage the relationship between them either as a collective. So there is still industrial relations I guess in our collective structures or through employee relations in sort of more individual groups. That's what great people in organization teams do. And they are part of management. They are there to enhance management and to enhance value for shareholders and or value in public service delivery or in charitable impact. There are lots of those organizations around. They're not always recognized, they're not helped by some of the wider narrative about some of the things that happen in the name of HR that you know aren't particularly great and you wish they hadn't happened. But the job of the CIPD is to make sure that people understand that is the model. That's what the profession is at its best. And to make sure we build the skills in the profession.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:45:38 - 00:46:56]
I mean, it's always struck me that the point about human resources was meant to position people as an asset to the business rather than an army to be regimented and bossed around and so on. And it seemed that's, that's a perfectly positive way of looking at it. But in practice, let me put this to you. See, see what you think. Leaders seem to have concluded that the point of HR is cleanup merchant. If we've got a problem, give it to hr. If something has gone wrong, it's probably a thing that HR got to deal with. If there's some really difficult, tricky behaviors. HR for employees, seeing from a different point of view, HR police. Now there's those two views of the people business, neither of which is particularly pleasant or I would say not particularly accurate. But the people that you represent and that you support have to get past that somehow.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:46:56 - 00:49:36]
Yes. And both of those pictures I think, I recognize, I think there's some validity in both. You know, there are managers who abdicate the job of managing and put it in to other people to clear up the mess. I think that's an inappropriate poor leadership. There are HR functions that have allowed themselves somehow to get sucked into the job of telling people how to and how not to be. I don't think that's a smart role either in any organization, but I don't think they're the majority by any means. The interesting thing about being a professional body where the qualification is not a license to practice is you're having to try and persuade very senior people that by investing in their people and organization specialists to get this set of skills and this set of abilities, they're not going to have the outcomes you've described. So I think, I would say, I mean, there are, I don't know, 300,000 at the last count, HR jobs in the UK we have about 160,000 members, a chunk of whom are overseas. So we probably have a third of the people in the profession who are members of the professional body. So I think the way forward for the body and for the people and the teams who are doing a great job is to make sure that the qualification and the continuing professional development around it is associated with the best of the profession and therefore is the thing that people can say, well, you know, we're a CIPD team, so we, that's not us. We, we do it this way and we behave that way. That and I know that's shared by you know, the current leadership team, the cipd they would like to they articulate that. Peter G. The CEO spends a lot of time talking about it and you know I think there are opportunities to re. Reinforce that. Particularly if we partner with organizations around the technology issues, future the profession, future work. I think we can show the value of people who are really smart around people and organization motivations and deployment. I've never been super comfortable with the idea of people are an asset. I think the problem with that is you start looking at balance sheets and I think people are the heart because.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:49:36 - 00:49:38]
Some people turn out to be liabilities.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:49:38 - 00:50:13]
Exactly. I think people are the heart of all organizations and if they're engaged and there's loads of great research on this, if they're engaged I. E. They understand the commitment and they're motivated to perform, they deliver outstandingly. Interestingly, the single biggest demotivator around an engaged workforce is failing to confront poor performance in others. And it goes back to great leadership and great management. And I think lots of organizations put up with rather than confront poor performance because it's difficult.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:50:14 - 00:50:16]
That's quite a tough message, you know.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:50:16 - 00:50:38]
And, and we need to. If you want high performing cultures you've got to confront and in fact if you confront it early, most people don't leave. They, they work out what they have to do and do it well because you can train and. But you need to confront it early. If you confront it the stage of there's a problem over here in a nasty mess going sort it out. You're way beyond recovery, aren't you?
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:50:39 - 00:50:53]
Last question. Which is really more of a personal one. Coming back to where you started, looking back at your career and looking where you are, looking at where you are now would have been better off choosing acting.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:50:57 - 00:51:51]
I can hear my mum laughing at this. One final story. In terms of what was my career, how could you sum it up? When I got to 50 and I left Henley and went set up my and become an entrepreneur and set up a business. I also got offered a part time professorship at Manchester Business School last Manchester where I'm now an emeritus professor and you know it's world top 25 universities so what do you do when you get offered a chair at a world top 25 universities? You phone your mum. So I phoned my mum and said I've just been made a professor at the University of Manchester. Silence. Professor of what? So I looked at the letter and it said professor of Leadership and Creativity. So I read this out. Another silence, huh? Sounds like professor bullshit to me. So perhaps, Trevor, I'd have been better acted.
Sir Trevor Phillips:
[00:51:52 - 00:51:54]
Chris Bones, thank you very much.
Prof. Chris Bones:
[00:51:54 - 00:51:55]
Thank you.
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