Pascal: Hey everybody, Pascal here we are back with another episode of Disrupt Disruption. Today we have a very special guest, , Rafael Gillin. Rafael and I met at Singularity University eon ago, , at least what feels like eons ago, and he’s got an incredible job which he has been in for quite a while.
He’s with a Swiss design company called Vira. He’s there as their trend scout on the future of work life and learn. And this is what brought him to Singularity University originally. And since then, we have stayed in touch and have updated each other for quite a while.
I’m really excited about this this conversation. Raphael, it’s so good to have you.
Raphael: Yeah. Now from Boulder, Colorado to Uber Files Bavaria. How great.
Pascal: Exactly. So first of all, tell us a little bit about what you actually do at Vira, and maybe for those of our listeners who are not familiar with Vira, say a few words about Vira
Raphael: Okay, first, so Vitra, we are a family owned design company, so we believe. And the power of, of design and beauty. Special spaces. So we produce furniture. If you are sitting maybe in Singapore at the airport, you’re sitting on furniture from Vira. Maybe if you are sit in a McDonald, you’re sit on a PVI chair from Vira maybe, or in an office all over the world.
I would say the most beautiful ones use our furniture or maybe on a sofa or on a. So for, for me, what I do is I try to zoom out every day and try to understand how do we work in five or 10 years from now, not how do we work tomorrow, how knowledge work is changing in general. And so this is my job and to provide to find a lot of insights and already insights.
I try to build a kind of a weather map to give us guidance and orient.
Our home is the Vira campus close to the Swiss German border, and we get a lot around 360, 300 90,000 visitors every year. And I think this is special because on the vitro campus is architecture from the leading architectural world.
Pascal: And I’ve been one of those 390,000 peoples a couple of years ago where I got a very special tour from you, which was absolutely incredible. So highly recommended. If you ever find yourself at the border between Germany and Switzerland, do go and visit the the Vitro museum. That being said, let’s talk a little bit about the future of work and this notion around disruption, because clearly that space has been disrupted, left, right, center, up and down.
I remember the good old days where we talked about open offices is the, is just the jam, and then just before the pandemic, that seemed to have shifted towards research indicating that it’s actually not that great for productivity. Then we had the pandemic where everybody worked from home, where basically everybody said like, oh, offices are debt for good and how we see, you know, Elon Musk saying like, you have to be in the office or you get fired.
I’m curious. High level like that has been a rollercoaster for.
Raphael: Yeah, honestly. So the, the story of knowledge work regarding the relationship to office space is not so old. It starts in the 2010 years when the cowboys for the Silicon Valley. Called the leading architects to get the new super office like Twitter, Facebook, Google, all of them. They, order a kind of supercomputer for physical interactions 12 years ago, and then out of a sudden overnight we transform in March 20, 20, 80, 80 5% of any our physical interactions into the virtual world in these extended realities thing about. And what happens now is that corporate real estate in general is coming under pressure. I would say not in Asia, but in Europe or in the states. Like in the old world, there are a lot of changes because now the workforce, they are aware about their opportunities out of remote first imperative, but second.
They think the most of the office buildings are built to make money and not to host people. And I think this is the, the biggest shift and the zoom out. We should come to that later. I think that is quite interesting.
Pascal: So curious to hear your experience on when the big disruption of Covid 19 hit and, nobody went to an office. I do remember literally reading articles which said offices are dead. People will never return to office. Now we seem to find somewhat equilibrium with people kind of splitting their time between office and home.
First question I had for you is, do you think from your perspective, was this something you actually saw pre pandemic and just the pandemic accelerated this trend?
Raphael: No, honestly, I never thought that remote work could be so strong, so fast. That was, that was not in my mind and that was not in the mind of the, most of the ris. I know that was not in mind of the real estate, and even of the leading architects, never, they still believe in these days. In the power of the, the headquarter, this kind of center of gravity where everything happens.
Pascal: And then where do you see this going? .
Raphael: so in in a shorter term, we have to accept, they are kind in the question, where do we work? There are two areas. One are the physical realities and one are the extended real. The extended realities is everything. What happens in the virtual world if it is Zoom or teams or WebEx or meter worth knocking at the door.
And if you are observing the extended the com soft and hardware companies serving the extended realities you see in these two or three years now, giant improvements in hardware and in. So the brother or sister of these extended realities are the new physical realities. And what you could see in the physical realities is if you think about a city, for example, like New York or maybe Boston or maybe Denver in the future, the city is the office and not the office is the office because there are things you could do quite best from home.
There are things maybe where you need a little bit, a vibrant atmosphere. Maybe you go to a coffee or to an entrance hall of a museum, and for sure if you have a leg, if you need the sense of belonging, if you want to go to step in rituals with your coworkers, you would go to your office. Yeah. And now these two places are beating against each other.
Because there is one limitation, and that is time. And it is up to us where we spend our time. And the biggest loser is our average spaces so bad design, extended realities and bad design, physical realities. These spaces will be the losers. There’s no space anymore. No, there is, there’s no space anymore for bad or average.
Pascal: Rael. I’m curious. One thing I heard. Kind of towards the end of the pandemic was both from our clients as well as from academic partners, we had that they talked about work at home, increased productivity, which kind of makes sense, right? Like you can make the arguments like probably less water cooler chat, like you spend less time drinking coffee with your colleagues, et cetera, et cetera.
So if you have work, which just needs to be done, work from home might be a good place. The counter is that they all talked about both clients as well as academia, that creativity is down. So in productivity up, creativity down. Right? Because you did, which also makes intuitive sense because you don’t see your colleagues, you don’t have , the random brainstorm.
Do you see the same thing or did you see the same thing from your perspective, but also how do we solve for this?
Raphael: Okay, so first to understanding the big picture, there are a few facts. First is we have a global labor shortage
Pascal: mm-hmm.
Raphael: wherever you are, all over the planet, they’re the lack of labor of workforce in general. So this means. A company by themself, they have to understand the opportunity of a remote first organization and architecture.
That does not mean , that you don’t need an office anymore, but to have this kind of ability to adapt or this resilience in these years ahead of us, you have to move like mobile first, cloud first into remote first. So this gives you the freedom. To operate as its best, and then the time zone is the working zone, and maybe not the city or the country where you live in.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: you understand this perspective, then you come to the point, okay, what is the best space, if it is virtual or physical, to do the best work? If you talk about physical realities, space for rituals, like rituals, like give us intimacy and trust the coffee, the chat. Having lunch together, celebrating success, you can’t do that at home.
Second, innovation in an early stage coming up, framing the problem together it’s much more better in a space, in a kind of an exercise hall of a brain instead on my robot and for the old world I I, maybe I take the US out. Maybe I take. The transformation of industries from the heavy asset industry area into the new one.
For this giant transformation, it’s not enough to do an e-learning. You have to bring the people together in a space where this transformation happens. So that means for that also, you need these physical realities. But if you go to the surveys, To the papers of the leading companies, if it is Deloitte McKinzie ever, they describe you could do today 70% of knowledge work remote in average.
Yeah.
Pascal: Mm-hmm. . What is your advice if I’m the CEO of a company and I’m trying to figure out this world? You mentioned remote first , as an imperative. From your experience, how do you go practically about this? , what do you do?
Raphael: so what we do at Vira and we have for sure global clients. I was recently in Korea and Japan, and sure you understand there are leading companies like the, I visit six of the top 10 in most innovative companies in the world. So, so what we do, We offer our customers zoom out perspective, or it’s called designing futures. So first we believe that to design the future, you have to design the future from the future and not for today. And what I do that helps customer a little bit to design the future from the future. So to make a jump in five or 10 years from now and with this, because we know a lot what could happen. 2027 or 2032 now.
Yeah, there are a lot of papers outside and with this kind of information, they challenge for sure. They zoom in and that gives them a kind of direction and advices and I honestly believe they make other decisions. Just to give you an idea you are in the states, you’re super familiar with technologies, you know how they work and you know, What the benefit or value is using these technologies, whatever you do, if you’re endurance company, a producer or tech company in Europe, it’s different.
Yeah. In Europe, we address the responsibility for technology to the IT departments, and if these guys believe you don’t have to see it, you will never see it and you never learn it. You have a blind spot, so even you don’t know how it works. And second, You have no idea what the value is. So first, I believe the key resource of the world, of Tomorrow is using this technologies and combine them who advanced like the Japanese or the Korean companies.
They’re really advanced using them. And by giving our customer these kind of information, we bring them like with a jumpstart into the future and believe. They really rethink the way how they work on what with who, with whom, and with which kind of tools.
Pascal: Hmm. How do you get them? I’m very curious to understand like your particular approach to this. How do you get them to see the future? Because what we find is you’re so often so stuck in the here and now and or you have this very far out kind of like weird vision of the future. Like, oh, self-driving cars will be everywhere, you know?
But the reality is it’s much messier,
Raphael: I, I love this question. So I was not trained to be a trans scout and I have no academic background, and maybe that helps me a little bit to plicate my own experience story. So what I do is I provoke a little bit my audience with things I’ve seen and all the things I’ve seen.
All the things I show their existings, it’s not fake or like her, that will never happens. And I give them with these advanced things for sure. And experiences and new reference point. So when I tell the story about the Toyota V City built now since one CEO closes to Mount Fuji, and what is the idea beyond building an entire city as a one to one lap? If you see that, you say, oh my God, they’re doing that now. I would never believe them. Or if I share the mo the, the movie, the Making of Mandalorian, about this idea of a film set and how, what could we learn to mix up the extended and physical realities in a space? What are the opportunities they’ll learn about it?
Or if I show a video done at Neighbor in Korea, Where inside the company, the office building on 10, on 10 employees, their shares one robot. So there are more than 150 robots inside the building. They’re getting new reference points and by getting these reference points, they’re a little bit lost in this first minutes.
But then they try, they understand, okay, first we have to rethink the state of school second. We are not ambitious enough, so we have to fine for ourself our level of ambitious, but critically thinking how mature the company is by themself. And then the rest is energy. And energy means your own energy and money.
Yeah, but I work with reference points. I collect all the things I found in my Flipboard and and for sure I have a report, a giant report library, and I prepare myself in any kind of lecture workshop providing my audience the best reference point that they, that they get as much as guidance orientation, like a weather map that.
Pascal: That is fantastic. Can I. Ask, can we get into the head of Raphael for a second? And I’m just curious what are the, what are some of the reference points you are particularly interested in? Which get you really excited
Raphael: I would say my next research wave is understanding the power of optimization of knowledge work.
Pascal: hmm.
Raphael: Means how software like this German startup soloists, one of these most fast growing startups even in the world, they are minors of information and other smaller ones and hidden ones, how they have an impact on automatization of knowledge work.
Means combining with other technologies like hyperscale clouds and AI systems. So this is currently on my mind and also robotics. I’m in Boston. In in December I got the opportunity to go, to two of this leading robotic companies. And this is my approach now to, to go deeper in these topics. with these insights, designing the impact, I believe. And that would be, I would say my 2023 story.
Pascal: How does the design work you’re doing at, at vitro, so there’s a component towards you’re helping your clients to understand this and then bigger scale. Clearly, they hopefully make them their, like purchase decision, you know, so that it
Raphael: Oh. And getting and, and come much more closer to us because what is critical is is also related to the. Investment security. So as the value is not only given by the furniture, the value is also by the concept and context you provide to the customers. Yeah, and I would say we are much more closer after in this phase, making the phase zero together with the customer.
Pascal: , that’s fantastic. How does, your insight in The automation and the mining of knowledge, for example, how does this affect some, something as, pardon the language here, like something as mundane as a desk and a chair.
Raphael: That’s a good point. There was, there was an article for Nick Foster, the Future’s Mundane. It goes a little bit along that, so okay. We have to understand Vitra. 40 years ago, Vira starts with a paper called Work Spirit or like with the idea of the working spirit. And what they have done is like what I do today.
They try to understand 40 years ago what happens outside A little bit like the whole Whole Earth Catalog and what that means for vitro for our customers. So, and then every second year it was published. So I do it little bit the same, and the idea is, To give guidance and orientation to the designers.
How we work together with the designer is the designer. At the author. He’s, he comes up with an amazing idea and hopefully the family lost this idea and think we should go with that idea and make it happen, and then we make it happen. And then lo, hopefully the customer also love the. by the share the sofa, the table, and all the things.
So what I do is scaling from the edges, but I’m far away off the core of the company. I’m not, I’ve no impact on design and we, and we, and there is a firewall or like this Chinese wall in between that. And it’s important to do that because on one side I get the freedom. To go out and to zoom out. However, I want to zoom out, and in the opposite case, the designers are also free in any kind of decision in our r and d team, what they, what they believe in, and the e, I name it the E or like the resonance.
You get it three or four years later. Always. Yeah. Sometimes they surprise me. I never thought about. sometimes we wrote a paper, we wrote the first paper about the garage spirit in 2014, and now agile work is happens all over the world. Yeah.
Pascal: So interesting. You mentioned early in our conversation already this notion. And correct me if I get the language wrong, but you talked about space as something which is a physical manifestation and then this, digital extension of it. And you mentioned, this can be anything as mundane like today, mundane as Zoom, which still, if you think about 10 years ago, , oh my God, we get free, amazing video calls.
That’s just. Bonkers. . Clearly one of the topics a lot of people talk about is the whole metaverse. Whatever that means. How do you see this, as someone who’s working in truly in the field of the future of work and also representing a company which makes, you know, physical objects in this space.
What are your thoughts on, on virtual reality, augmented reality, metaphors, whatever term you want to.
Raphael: , I give you now an interesting share interesting story with you. One of the leading and most successful German companies, z e. They are now 175 years old. Since October, there was a giant party celebration and our councilor, Mr. Schultz, got his first NFT from Siemens by the way. So Siemens in summer, Holand Bush, the CEO met, invited the CEO for Nvidia and they announced during an analyzed analyst conference I wouldn’t say their wedding, but their collaboration.
So Siemens are the leading companies, is, I would say they’re one of three superheroes in production steering on processing with their machine called zma. And, and they extend now the superpower of their physical production with the omniverse on n.
Pascal: Hmm.
Raphael: When you listen to these guys and read the articles and you read the paper and you see the videos, you see, oh my God, these are untaught opportunities.
Pascal: Hmm.
Raphael: If I think about the metaverses and think like the, the mankind challenges we would have in future opportunities to surround ourself with really mankind challenges. Get a much more better framing than today. We frame today by papers, by Excel, by balance sheets, by an email, by pictures, but that is not enough to understand complexity and understanding complexity.
It is not helpful to reduce complexity. You have to surround yourself with this complexity and for that reason out of a business perspective, I believe on the power of the new web on all the other things like gaming. Or interacting. Okay. That was like the internet 30 years ago. A few of people don’t believe in that and, and, and I’m really looking forward getting with new kind of glasses and lenses, the opportunity to really dive into topics I would never believe to understand them.
Pascal: Rafa in this context. Do you think that the future, that particular future will arrive first on the consumer or first on the business side?
Raphael: Like always first as a consumer?
Pascal: Gotcha.
Raphael: good question. I’m at the CS this year again and I really looking forward to that,
Pascal: I.
Raphael: I’m aware that the movement comes from the consumer side. And by the way, we can really learn, even from the work perspective, a lot from the consumer side.
We could, I think we could adapt 35, 40% on the way like gamers are connected to each other. Collaborating, get credibility taking jobs over, organize them. You could take it over one to one. And you have a fantastic new organization model.
Pascal: Yeah, you teased us in the beginning and said there’s a whole discussion around the zoomed out perspective. , I want to come back to that. So take us to the zoomed out world. You’re seeing the, the further distant future, the world you are, you are perceiving as as it relates to us.
Raphael: Yeah, by the way, they zoom out. I was inspired by the Zoom out by a friend from both of us, from John Hale. His team from the Center for the Year, from Deloitte, they produced this paper, zooming in, zooming out, I think in 2018 or 2017. Yeah. And I would say I changed it. I adapted a little bit on my own.
But I was for sure inspired by this matter. Okay, so zooming out ho this, , this could be a dystopian and utopian world. Okay. First, I’m an optimist and I always believe in a preferred future. So if I zoom out, I believe energy is free in around nine or 10 years from. And I highly believe that the future markets, which have the power to be, to get visibility, like these, on the capital market.
Yeah. Like on the stock exchange, there are driven by secularity, they are driven by renewable. They are driven by the entire health and wellbeing agenda on one side, but on the other side, climate change will hit us massively by losing 25 or 30% of land. What we could use today, not only by flooding, but also that you couldn’t harvest anymore on these areas, just to give you an.
In Germany, in the eastern part of Germany we will, we are not able anymore to harvest us there. The food, what we harvest today, so we have to change the plans we seed out. And you need in general, 10 years for this kind of, This is another challenge. So on the other side, if it sounds bright that secularity is clear, renewables are near, and all these things.
So on the opposite side, we are really faced with the impact of climate change. , if you look back in the memory of man, There’s a Swiss called Buno and his book’s called Nothing But the World. And in his book Nothing but the World, he described out of two thou, 2,500 years of mankind stories.
Aha. Events like Covid, more than 200, 250 ones. And if you read. You always see that mankind take their, always have their own challenges and they make it happen in a way.
Pascal: Hm.
Raphael: that gives me for sure the optimism. And now I’m part of this story so myself, now I’m inside this kind of story. And, and for sure this book helps me also during the pandemic to be optimistic and find my own place.
Yeah.
Pascal: Zooming out one more time, . You have clearly someone who has done, who have done a lot of research, a lot of reading, a lot of sourcing of material. For anyone who’s interested, you know, for our listeners here who’s interested into like getting into your head, but also just like broadening their horizons what are a couple resources you recommend?
Maybe your own resources or stuff you know, you would point.
Raphael: And zooming out means you have to leave your field of expertise. Where you are trained in. So if you’re an architect or if you’re an engineer, leave the field of the architect and engineer and try to get as much conversation with people outside of your bubble first. Second is you have to make jumps. Jumps means, if you think about robotics, don’t buy a book about robotics. Go on Google, type in robotics and type. Find all the latest articles about robotics, and then believe me, after two or three articles, you will guided it to a conference. Then you go to the conference, you watch the speakers, and then you find the most advanced people, the protagonist of a new world. So first, second, you have to go to understand the future. You have to go to the people who design and shape the.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: Zoom, not by calling them. You have to go there to give you an idea. LG and COR Soul, they have an r and d lab with 1 million square meters. This is a giant building.
If you understand, a company runs an r and d site in this scale. You know which kind of superpower they.
Pascal: Hmm.
Raphael: getting these kind of real life examples or seeing the robots of neighbor in Korea also, that shocks you a little bit and provokes you a little bit in the first second, but that sees you how far maybe your mindset is a way of these things Then sources.
I, I’m running now my Flipboard since eight years, and inside there are now 3000. 500 articles inside. But what is much more interesting, 95,000 times people flip into my Flipboard. So it’s open to anyone. You, you only type at Google, Rafa else. Flipboard and I collect there ares about technology, society, economy, architecture.
And a few for sure. Sustainability and a few articles about art and culture. So, and this white, I think this white screen is a good training to understand how the things are related to each other and to understand the wider context. And yeah what is the quick win? Always, or like I would say a sweet spot.
Companies like Design It ideal.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: fr of your always. And from the research companies, the leading think tanks and the boutiques. Like if it is a McKinsey, a World Economic Forum Brookfield, the papers from the university’s leading ones. Yeah.
Pascal: Let me ask the last question. This is an incredible list of, of resources and we’ll definitely make sure that we link to some of them specifically, of course, your Flipboard in the show notes. When you talk to organizations, what is your personal advice to them in terms of how do you balance the future and the here and now?
Because clearly,
Right, like you need to make money in the here and now.
Is your advice there?
Raphael: I always describe the here and now as a garden.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: If you have a garden, you have to take care about the garden every day. So, and then they know, okay, it’s still important and I have to take a focus on my garden. And if, when I tell about the future, I always tell them, if you want to have shadow, if you want to enjoy the shadow, you have to plant trees.
Pascal: Hm
Raphael: is a long term perspective. So I always try to find examples which are close to them and what you immediately understand, even if you’re five or six years young. Yeah. So nothing I would say nothing highly sophisticated. Yeah.
Pascal: From your perspective. I love the analogy by the way, like the garden and the trees. It’s incredible. How much, like roughly how much time would you suggest to an executive listening to this saying like, I get really excited about this. How much time do I spend in the future?
Raphael: Good point. I would say if you, if you are good after, after a while, if you’re trained. 15%, 10% is enough, and then you are good for tourist. But my first mission, my first message is you can’t address the future to someone else.
Pascal: Hmm
Raphael: It’s not like your tax office or it’s not like your, how to say your doctor. The future is your own agenda. You would never address the future of your kids to someone else and why you should address the future of. Yourself or your company to someone else and, and deep in our, there is one muscle still sleeping and this is the muscle of the futurists and we all are futurists,
Pascal: Raha on those wise words. And this, I love the statement that we are all futurists. You’re absolutely correct. I’d like absolutely agree with that. This was a really fascinating conversation. I loved how we went from the future of work to talk about. These crazy, weak signals, which we are, we are seeing.
And then, you know, get back to very practical terms of like, how do you actually do this for everybody listening to this we’ll make sure that in the show notes you have links to Rafael’s work. Also at Vira you publish quite a bit of truly Insightful and, and remarkably detailed papers on the future of work, et cetera.
So make sure that we link to those as well. And if you want to have a beautiful design desk and chair and other design objects, you definitely wanna check out Viras a pretty wide array of, of furniture and other design objects. So with that being said Rafael, thank you so much. This was incredible.
Loved the conversation.
Raphael: Welcome and great to see you on the way on video next time in Boulder.
Pascal: That is exactly what’s gonna happen. So thank you so much and everybody listening. See you. And hear you soon.
He’s with a Swiss design company called Vira. He’s there as their trend scout on the future of work life and learn. And this is what brought him to Singularity University originally. And since then, we have stayed in touch and have updated each other for quite a while.
I’m really excited about this this conversation. Raphael, it’s so good to have you.
Raphael: Yeah. Now from Boulder, Colorado to Uber Files Bavaria. How great.
Pascal: Exactly. So first of all, tell us a little bit about what you actually do at Vira, and maybe for those of our listeners who are not familiar with Vira, say a few words about Vira
Raphael: Okay, first, so Vitra, we are a family owned design company, so we believe. And the power of, of design and beauty. Special spaces. So we produce furniture. If you are sitting maybe in Singapore at the airport, you’re sitting on furniture from Vira. Maybe if you are sit in a McDonald, you’re sit on a PVI chair from Vira maybe, or in an office all over the world.
I would say the most beautiful ones use our furniture or maybe on a sofa or on a. So for, for me, what I do is I try to zoom out every day and try to understand how do we work in five or 10 years from now, not how do we work tomorrow, how knowledge work is changing in general. And so this is my job and to provide to find a lot of insights and already insights.
I try to build a kind of a weather map to give us guidance and orient.
Our home is the Vira campus close to the Swiss German border, and we get a lot around 360, 300 90,000 visitors every year. And I think this is special because on the vitro campus is architecture from the leading architectural world.
Pascal: And I’ve been one of those 390,000 peoples a couple of years ago where I got a very special tour from you, which was absolutely incredible. So highly recommended. If you ever find yourself at the border between Germany and Switzerland, do go and visit the the Vitro museum. That being said, let’s talk a little bit about the future of work and this notion around disruption, because clearly that space has been disrupted, left, right, center, up and down.
I remember the good old days where we talked about open offices is the, is just the jam, and then just before the pandemic, that seemed to have shifted towards research indicating that it’s actually not that great for productivity. Then we had the pandemic where everybody worked from home, where basically everybody said like, oh, offices are debt for good and how we see, you know, Elon Musk saying like, you have to be in the office or you get fired.
I’m curious. High level like that has been a rollercoaster for.
Raphael: Yeah, honestly. So the, the story of knowledge work regarding the relationship to office space is not so old. It starts in the 2010 years when the cowboys for the Silicon Valley. Called the leading architects to get the new super office like Twitter, Facebook, Google, all of them. They, order a kind of supercomputer for physical interactions 12 years ago, and then out of a sudden overnight we transform in March 20, 20, 80, 80 5% of any our physical interactions into the virtual world in these extended realities thing about. And what happens now is that corporate real estate in general is coming under pressure. I would say not in Asia, but in Europe or in the states. Like in the old world, there are a lot of changes because now the workforce, they are aware about their opportunities out of remote first imperative, but second.
They think the most of the office buildings are built to make money and not to host people. And I think this is the, the biggest shift and the zoom out. We should come to that later. I think that is quite interesting.
Pascal: So curious to hear your experience on when the big disruption of Covid 19 hit and, nobody went to an office. I do remember literally reading articles which said offices are dead. People will never return to office. Now we seem to find somewhat equilibrium with people kind of splitting their time between office and home.
First question I had for you is, do you think from your perspective, was this something you actually saw pre pandemic and just the pandemic accelerated this trend?
Raphael: No, honestly, I never thought that remote work could be so strong, so fast. That was, that was not in my mind and that was not in the mind of the, most of the ris. I know that was not in mind of the real estate, and even of the leading architects, never, they still believe in these days. In the power of the, the headquarter, this kind of center of gravity where everything happens.
Pascal: And then where do you see this going? .
Raphael: so in in a shorter term, we have to accept, they are kind in the question, where do we work? There are two areas. One are the physical realities and one are the extended real. The extended realities is everything. What happens in the virtual world if it is Zoom or teams or WebEx or meter worth knocking at the door.
And if you are observing the extended the com soft and hardware companies serving the extended realities you see in these two or three years now, giant improvements in hardware and in. So the brother or sister of these extended realities are the new physical realities. And what you could see in the physical realities is if you think about a city, for example, like New York or maybe Boston or maybe Denver in the future, the city is the office and not the office is the office because there are things you could do quite best from home.
There are things maybe where you need a little bit, a vibrant atmosphere. Maybe you go to a coffee or to an entrance hall of a museum, and for sure if you have a leg, if you need the sense of belonging, if you want to go to step in rituals with your coworkers, you would go to your office. Yeah. And now these two places are beating against each other.
Because there is one limitation, and that is time. And it is up to us where we spend our time. And the biggest loser is our average spaces so bad design, extended realities and bad design, physical realities. These spaces will be the losers. There’s no space anymore. No, there is, there’s no space anymore for bad or average.
Pascal: Rael. I’m curious. One thing I heard. Kind of towards the end of the pandemic was both from our clients as well as from academic partners, we had that they talked about work at home, increased productivity, which kind of makes sense, right? Like you can make the arguments like probably less water cooler chat, like you spend less time drinking coffee with your colleagues, et cetera, et cetera.
So if you have work, which just needs to be done, work from home might be a good place. The counter is that they all talked about both clients as well as academia, that creativity is down. So in productivity up, creativity down. Right? Because you did, which also makes intuitive sense because you don’t see your colleagues, you don’t have , the random brainstorm.
Do you see the same thing or did you see the same thing from your perspective, but also how do we solve for this?
Raphael: Okay, so first to understanding the big picture, there are a few facts. First is we have a global labor shortage
Pascal: mm-hmm.
Raphael: wherever you are, all over the planet, they’re the lack of labor of workforce in general. So this means. A company by themself, they have to understand the opportunity of a remote first organization and architecture.
That does not mean , that you don’t need an office anymore, but to have this kind of ability to adapt or this resilience in these years ahead of us, you have to move like mobile first, cloud first into remote first. So this gives you the freedom. To operate as its best, and then the time zone is the working zone, and maybe not the city or the country where you live in.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: you understand this perspective, then you come to the point, okay, what is the best space, if it is virtual or physical, to do the best work? If you talk about physical realities, space for rituals, like rituals, like give us intimacy and trust the coffee, the chat. Having lunch together, celebrating success, you can’t do that at home.
Second, innovation in an early stage coming up, framing the problem together it’s much more better in a space, in a kind of an exercise hall of a brain instead on my robot and for the old world I I, maybe I take the US out. Maybe I take. The transformation of industries from the heavy asset industry area into the new one.
For this giant transformation, it’s not enough to do an e-learning. You have to bring the people together in a space where this transformation happens. So that means for that also, you need these physical realities. But if you go to the surveys, To the papers of the leading companies, if it is Deloitte McKinzie ever, they describe you could do today 70% of knowledge work remote in average.
Yeah.
Pascal: Mm-hmm. . What is your advice if I’m the CEO of a company and I’m trying to figure out this world? You mentioned remote first , as an imperative. From your experience, how do you go practically about this? , what do you do?
Raphael: so what we do at Vira and we have for sure global clients. I was recently in Korea and Japan, and sure you understand there are leading companies like the, I visit six of the top 10 in most innovative companies in the world. So, so what we do, We offer our customers zoom out perspective, or it’s called designing futures. So first we believe that to design the future, you have to design the future from the future and not for today. And what I do that helps customer a little bit to design the future from the future. So to make a jump in five or 10 years from now and with this, because we know a lot what could happen. 2027 or 2032 now.
Yeah, there are a lot of papers outside and with this kind of information, they challenge for sure. They zoom in and that gives them a kind of direction and advices and I honestly believe they make other decisions. Just to give you an idea you are in the states, you’re super familiar with technologies, you know how they work and you know, What the benefit or value is using these technologies, whatever you do, if you’re endurance company, a producer or tech company in Europe, it’s different.
Yeah. In Europe, we address the responsibility for technology to the IT departments, and if these guys believe you don’t have to see it, you will never see it and you never learn it. You have a blind spot, so even you don’t know how it works. And second, You have no idea what the value is. So first, I believe the key resource of the world, of Tomorrow is using this technologies and combine them who advanced like the Japanese or the Korean companies.
They’re really advanced using them. And by giving our customer these kind of information, we bring them like with a jumpstart into the future and believe. They really rethink the way how they work on what with who, with whom, and with which kind of tools.
Pascal: Hmm. How do you get them? I’m very curious to understand like your particular approach to this. How do you get them to see the future? Because what we find is you’re so often so stuck in the here and now and or you have this very far out kind of like weird vision of the future. Like, oh, self-driving cars will be everywhere, you know?
But the reality is it’s much messier,
Raphael: I, I love this question. So I was not trained to be a trans scout and I have no academic background, and maybe that helps me a little bit to plicate my own experience story. So what I do is I provoke a little bit my audience with things I’ve seen and all the things I’ve seen.
All the things I show their existings, it’s not fake or like her, that will never happens. And I give them with these advanced things for sure. And experiences and new reference point. So when I tell the story about the Toyota V City built now since one CEO closes to Mount Fuji, and what is the idea beyond building an entire city as a one to one lap? If you see that, you say, oh my God, they’re doing that now. I would never believe them. Or if I share the mo the, the movie, the Making of Mandalorian, about this idea of a film set and how, what could we learn to mix up the extended and physical realities in a space? What are the opportunities they’ll learn about it?
Or if I show a video done at Neighbor in Korea, Where inside the company, the office building on 10, on 10 employees, their shares one robot. So there are more than 150 robots inside the building. They’re getting new reference points and by getting these reference points, they’re a little bit lost in this first minutes.
But then they try, they understand, okay, first we have to rethink the state of school second. We are not ambitious enough, so we have to fine for ourself our level of ambitious, but critically thinking how mature the company is by themself. And then the rest is energy. And energy means your own energy and money.
Yeah, but I work with reference points. I collect all the things I found in my Flipboard and and for sure I have a report, a giant report library, and I prepare myself in any kind of lecture workshop providing my audience the best reference point that they, that they get as much as guidance orientation, like a weather map that.
Pascal: That is fantastic. Can I. Ask, can we get into the head of Raphael for a second? And I’m just curious what are the, what are some of the reference points you are particularly interested in? Which get you really excited
Raphael: I would say my next research wave is understanding the power of optimization of knowledge work.
Pascal: hmm.
Raphael: Means how software like this German startup soloists, one of these most fast growing startups even in the world, they are minors of information and other smaller ones and hidden ones, how they have an impact on automatization of knowledge work.
Means combining with other technologies like hyperscale clouds and AI systems. So this is currently on my mind and also robotics. I’m in Boston. In in December I got the opportunity to go, to two of this leading robotic companies. And this is my approach now to, to go deeper in these topics. with these insights, designing the impact, I believe. And that would be, I would say my 2023 story.
Pascal: How does the design work you’re doing at, at vitro, so there’s a component towards you’re helping your clients to understand this and then bigger scale. Clearly, they hopefully make them their, like purchase decision, you know, so that it
Raphael: Oh. And getting and, and come much more closer to us because what is critical is is also related to the. Investment security. So as the value is not only given by the furniture, the value is also by the concept and context you provide to the customers. Yeah, and I would say we are much more closer after in this phase, making the phase zero together with the customer.
Pascal: , that’s fantastic. How does, your insight in The automation and the mining of knowledge, for example, how does this affect some, something as, pardon the language here, like something as mundane as a desk and a chair.
Raphael: That’s a good point. There was, there was an article for Nick Foster, the Future’s Mundane. It goes a little bit along that, so okay. We have to understand Vitra. 40 years ago, Vira starts with a paper called Work Spirit or like with the idea of the working spirit. And what they have done is like what I do today.
They try to understand 40 years ago what happens outside A little bit like the whole Whole Earth Catalog and what that means for vitro for our customers. So, and then every second year it was published. So I do it little bit the same, and the idea is, To give guidance and orientation to the designers.
How we work together with the designer is the designer. At the author. He’s, he comes up with an amazing idea and hopefully the family lost this idea and think we should go with that idea and make it happen, and then we make it happen. And then lo, hopefully the customer also love the. by the share the sofa, the table, and all the things.
So what I do is scaling from the edges, but I’m far away off the core of the company. I’m not, I’ve no impact on design and we, and we, and there is a firewall or like this Chinese wall in between that. And it’s important to do that because on one side I get the freedom. To go out and to zoom out. However, I want to zoom out, and in the opposite case, the designers are also free in any kind of decision in our r and d team, what they, what they believe in, and the e, I name it the E or like the resonance.
You get it three or four years later. Always. Yeah. Sometimes they surprise me. I never thought about. sometimes we wrote a paper, we wrote the first paper about the garage spirit in 2014, and now agile work is happens all over the world. Yeah.
Pascal: So interesting. You mentioned early in our conversation already this notion. And correct me if I get the language wrong, but you talked about space as something which is a physical manifestation and then this, digital extension of it. And you mentioned, this can be anything as mundane like today, mundane as Zoom, which still, if you think about 10 years ago, , oh my God, we get free, amazing video calls.
That’s just. Bonkers. . Clearly one of the topics a lot of people talk about is the whole metaverse. Whatever that means. How do you see this, as someone who’s working in truly in the field of the future of work and also representing a company which makes, you know, physical objects in this space.
What are your thoughts on, on virtual reality, augmented reality, metaphors, whatever term you want to.
Raphael: , I give you now an interesting share interesting story with you. One of the leading and most successful German companies, z e. They are now 175 years old. Since October, there was a giant party celebration and our councilor, Mr. Schultz, got his first NFT from Siemens by the way. So Siemens in summer, Holand Bush, the CEO met, invited the CEO for Nvidia and they announced during an analyzed analyst conference I wouldn’t say their wedding, but their collaboration.
So Siemens are the leading companies, is, I would say they’re one of three superheroes in production steering on processing with their machine called zma. And, and they extend now the superpower of their physical production with the omniverse on n.
Pascal: Hmm.
Raphael: When you listen to these guys and read the articles and you read the paper and you see the videos, you see, oh my God, these are untaught opportunities.
Pascal: Hmm.
Raphael: If I think about the metaverses and think like the, the mankind challenges we would have in future opportunities to surround ourself with really mankind challenges. Get a much more better framing than today. We frame today by papers, by Excel, by balance sheets, by an email, by pictures, but that is not enough to understand complexity and understanding complexity.
It is not helpful to reduce complexity. You have to surround yourself with this complexity and for that reason out of a business perspective, I believe on the power of the new web on all the other things like gaming. Or interacting. Okay. That was like the internet 30 years ago. A few of people don’t believe in that and, and, and I’m really looking forward getting with new kind of glasses and lenses, the opportunity to really dive into topics I would never believe to understand them.
Pascal: Rafa in this context. Do you think that the future, that particular future will arrive first on the consumer or first on the business side?
Raphael: Like always first as a consumer?
Pascal: Gotcha.
Raphael: good question. I’m at the CS this year again and I really looking forward to that,
Pascal: I.
Raphael: I’m aware that the movement comes from the consumer side. And by the way, we can really learn, even from the work perspective, a lot from the consumer side.
We could, I think we could adapt 35, 40% on the way like gamers are connected to each other. Collaborating, get credibility taking jobs over, organize them. You could take it over one to one. And you have a fantastic new organization model.
Pascal: Yeah, you teased us in the beginning and said there’s a whole discussion around the zoomed out perspective. , I want to come back to that. So take us to the zoomed out world. You’re seeing the, the further distant future, the world you are, you are perceiving as as it relates to us.
Raphael: Yeah, by the way, they zoom out. I was inspired by the Zoom out by a friend from both of us, from John Hale. His team from the Center for the Year, from Deloitte, they produced this paper, zooming in, zooming out, I think in 2018 or 2017. Yeah. And I would say I changed it. I adapted a little bit on my own.
But I was for sure inspired by this matter. Okay, so zooming out ho this, , this could be a dystopian and utopian world. Okay. First, I’m an optimist and I always believe in a preferred future. So if I zoom out, I believe energy is free in around nine or 10 years from. And I highly believe that the future markets, which have the power to be, to get visibility, like these, on the capital market.
Yeah. Like on the stock exchange, there are driven by secularity, they are driven by renewable. They are driven by the entire health and wellbeing agenda on one side, but on the other side, climate change will hit us massively by losing 25 or 30% of land. What we could use today, not only by flooding, but also that you couldn’t harvest anymore on these areas, just to give you an.
In Germany, in the eastern part of Germany we will, we are not able anymore to harvest us there. The food, what we harvest today, so we have to change the plans we seed out. And you need in general, 10 years for this kind of, This is another challenge. So on the other side, if it sounds bright that secularity is clear, renewables are near, and all these things.
So on the opposite side, we are really faced with the impact of climate change. , if you look back in the memory of man, There’s a Swiss called Buno and his book’s called Nothing But the World. And in his book Nothing but the World, he described out of two thou, 2,500 years of mankind stories.
Aha. Events like Covid, more than 200, 250 ones. And if you read. You always see that mankind take their, always have their own challenges and they make it happen in a way.
Pascal: Hm.
Raphael: that gives me for sure the optimism. And now I’m part of this story so myself, now I’m inside this kind of story. And, and for sure this book helps me also during the pandemic to be optimistic and find my own place.
Yeah.
Pascal: Zooming out one more time, . You have clearly someone who has done, who have done a lot of research, a lot of reading, a lot of sourcing of material. For anyone who’s interested, you know, for our listeners here who’s interested into like getting into your head, but also just like broadening their horizons what are a couple resources you recommend?
Maybe your own resources or stuff you know, you would point.
Raphael: And zooming out means you have to leave your field of expertise. Where you are trained in. So if you’re an architect or if you’re an engineer, leave the field of the architect and engineer and try to get as much conversation with people outside of your bubble first. Second is you have to make jumps. Jumps means, if you think about robotics, don’t buy a book about robotics. Go on Google, type in robotics and type. Find all the latest articles about robotics, and then believe me, after two or three articles, you will guided it to a conference. Then you go to the conference, you watch the speakers, and then you find the most advanced people, the protagonist of a new world. So first, second, you have to go to understand the future. You have to go to the people who design and shape the.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: Zoom, not by calling them. You have to go there to give you an idea. LG and COR Soul, they have an r and d lab with 1 million square meters. This is a giant building.
If you understand, a company runs an r and d site in this scale. You know which kind of superpower they.
Pascal: Hmm.
Raphael: getting these kind of real life examples or seeing the robots of neighbor in Korea also, that shocks you a little bit and provokes you a little bit in the first second, but that sees you how far maybe your mindset is a way of these things Then sources.
I, I’m running now my Flipboard since eight years, and inside there are now 3000. 500 articles inside. But what is much more interesting, 95,000 times people flip into my Flipboard. So it’s open to anyone. You, you only type at Google, Rafa else. Flipboard and I collect there ares about technology, society, economy, architecture.
And a few for sure. Sustainability and a few articles about art and culture. So, and this white, I think this white screen is a good training to understand how the things are related to each other and to understand the wider context. And yeah what is the quick win? Always, or like I would say a sweet spot.
Companies like Design It ideal.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: fr of your always. And from the research companies, the leading think tanks and the boutiques. Like if it is a McKinsey, a World Economic Forum Brookfield, the papers from the university’s leading ones. Yeah.
Pascal: Let me ask the last question. This is an incredible list of, of resources and we’ll definitely make sure that we link to some of them specifically, of course, your Flipboard in the show notes. When you talk to organizations, what is your personal advice to them in terms of how do you balance the future and the here and now?
Because clearly,
Right, like you need to make money in the here and now.
Is your advice there?
Raphael: I always describe the here and now as a garden.
Pascal: Mm-hmm.
Raphael: If you have a garden, you have to take care about the garden every day. So, and then they know, okay, it’s still important and I have to take a focus on my garden. And if, when I tell about the future, I always tell them, if you want to have shadow, if you want to enjoy the shadow, you have to plant trees.
Pascal: Hm
Raphael: is a long term perspective. So I always try to find examples which are close to them and what you immediately understand, even if you’re five or six years young. Yeah. So nothing I would say nothing highly sophisticated. Yeah.
Pascal: From your perspective. I love the analogy by the way, like the garden and the trees. It’s incredible. How much, like roughly how much time would you suggest to an executive listening to this saying like, I get really excited about this. How much time do I spend in the future?
Raphael: Good point. I would say if you, if you are good after, after a while, if you’re trained. 15%, 10% is enough, and then you are good for tourist. But my first mission, my first message is you can’t address the future to someone else.
Pascal: Hmm
Raphael: It’s not like your tax office or it’s not like your, how to say your doctor. The future is your own agenda. You would never address the future of your kids to someone else and why you should address the future of. Yourself or your company to someone else and, and deep in our, there is one muscle still sleeping and this is the muscle of the futurists and we all are futurists,
Pascal: Raha on those wise words. And this, I love the statement that we are all futurists. You’re absolutely correct. I’d like absolutely agree with that. This was a really fascinating conversation. I loved how we went from the future of work to talk about. These crazy, weak signals, which we are, we are seeing.
And then, you know, get back to very practical terms of like, how do you actually do this for everybody listening to this we’ll make sure that in the show notes you have links to Rafael’s work. Also at Vira you publish quite a bit of truly Insightful and, and remarkably detailed papers on the future of work, et cetera.
So make sure that we link to those as well. And if you want to have a beautiful design desk and chair and other design objects, you definitely wanna check out Viras a pretty wide array of, of furniture and other design objects. So with that being said Rafael, thank you so much. This was incredible.
Loved the conversation.
Raphael: Welcome and great to see you on the way on video next time in Boulder.
Pascal: That is exactly what’s gonna happen. So thank you so much and everybody listening. See you. And hear you soon.
