#BeyondCOVID is the new mindset we have all had to adopt… how do we operate in this new changed state? I've gathered together some amazing Design Executives to share what they are doing now and in the coming months to survive and thrive in these difficult times.
Contributors
Chris Bosse - Director of Architecture at LAVA, Adjunct Professor at University of Technology, Sydney
Dylan Brady - Conductor (Owner) at Decibel Architecture
Richard Henderson - Founder & CEO at R-Co Brand
Ophenia Liang - Director & Co-founder at Digital Crew
Julia Monk FAIA FIIDA - Hospitality Thought Leader, Architect, Interior Designer, former SVP at HOK
Bob Neville - Global Creative Director and Head of Retail at New Balance
Betsy Sweat - Head of Asia Pacific at Restoration Hardware
Michael Tam - Global Associate Design Director at IBM iX
Quote Bank
A lot of our clients around the world are really using this pocket of time to drive innovation - Michael Tam
For those of us who live and die on the relationships that we've fostered, this period of time has set us back - Betsy Sweat
There's definitely this pent-up need for us as human beings to actually interact with each other - Bob Neville
I always love these conversations because I get a feeling of the excitement of a lot of businesses around the world - Richard Henderson
The Cocoon Strategy... We’re in a cocoon and we're moving out of that cocoon into darkness and uncertainty. We're looking for the light and we move forward to beyond - Richard Henderson
I think the brand is absolutely critical because culture is connected to the brand and the market set up - Richard Henderson
I'm fostering a lot of new relationships. One on one relationships with people. It's been amazing to really get to know people that have just been kind of very tangential to my world before all this happened - Julia Monk
One of the great things about creativity and design is its universal language, and when people get together to create something from anywhere around the world, it's that DNA that binds everyone together - Richard Henderson
The fundamental purpose of human beings is to create - Richard Henderson
And I'm quite prepared as a business owner to take that slightly more optimistic, slightly riskier take on it, to not go back to what we were, but find the opportunities to take the things we really like and move on from the things that we don't miss - Dylan Brady
From a cocoon you don't go back to being a bug. You don't go back to being a Caterpillar, right? You go forward - Dylan Brady
Transcript
Mark Bergin [00:00:00] Welcome to another DRIVENxDESIGN #BeyondCOVID Town Hall. It’s our second time in Asia and I've got a great panel of folks here who are going to be talking about the Three Phases. We've been through ReAct. We're now actually in ReBound and the next phase that everyone seems to be thinking about is Re-Imagining. Through the panel here we have architects, digital marketers, people in branding, graphic design, retail design, digital design. There's a really good mix here.
The first person I want to throw to is Dylan, you've actually got projects which you're seeing moving Asia at a pace that not used to. Has that acceleration continued on for you?
Dylan Brady [00:00:39] Yeah, it has. Because of not physically being able to travel, we've been able to accelerate the rate at which we have important meetings and reduce the amount of time that it takes us to get to and from them. One flight less, one hotel less, one taxi less, one flight less, getting home again, all for a 25 minute meeting. That's been extremely useful. Not in that it's a new channel of communication, but that it's elevated the importance of the channel of communication. So we're able to achieve a sign-off of a contract, or a variation, or deal digitally where we would previously have had to have had a dinner and a handshake, and as you say, a tea ceremony.
The accelerations has continued to a certain degree and the communication is still digital. The acceleration is often because of the lack of micro, medium, and major commutes – we're not trying to arrange our calendars to all get into the room, we're not trying to travel to two places to meet six people and we're accelerating definitely because we can put more people into meetings virtually, so we don't have to spend time writing minutes and recounting what happened in the meeting to the people who need to do the work. They're actually able to learn from and immediately spin off that. So it has progressed in that sense. It has meant that we've been able to navigate contracts much, much more swiftly in that we don't need to be posting things to one another. In fact, the delay that comes from posting the original contract or the original invoice is the longest delay, it's like waiting for the kettle to boil. So that four or five days of courier time turns out to be the longest delay we have now. Whereas I didn't even notice it before.
Mark Bergin [00:02:58] Yeah. And so I want to now throw across to Michael Tam at IBMiX. Michael IBM's doing really well. You've got lots of corporate clients. The pipeline would have been full. Has the nature of the work and the speed of the work, has that changed? We don’t need to know about particular clients, but how is the cadence of the projects going? Have you got to the point that people are now responding and they're working out how do we actually speed things up?
Michael Tam [00:03:18] I think a lot of our clients really recognise this is a time that they have to get things right. Get to a good foundation to be ready for the rebound, when the market picks up again. So, a lot of our clients around the world are really using this pocket of time to drive innovation. A lot of our projects are still going on very quickly. Working on the point that Dylan made, it seems like we cut short a lot of the the gaps in between, you know, signing a contract, getting things moving around in between different teams and all that.
That kind of pace in between people who are working remotely, people who are supporting from all around the world, from different studios, has really picked up. From that perspective I will have this period of time has just changed the way that we work completely. For example, I just move into a global role which means I'm extra supporting projects in the States right now. It has really filled up my calendar, I'm working around the clock to a certain extent. But also means my teammates from the states are adjusting to this new way of working as well - having people who are supporting from the other side of the world. It’s a really funny time, interesting time, but I think it really goes along with the theme that we talked about: ReBound. What are we going to do? What are our clients going to do? What are enterprises doing to be ready for when the market picks up again? It’s very interesting.
Mark Bergin [00:05:18] Ophenia I'd like to get across to you because you have clients in the digital marketing and digital brand space. When we did the first Asia Town Hall, you mentioned that some of the Western clients kind of dropped the ball when it came to actually keeping up their campaigns into China. Have you seen those respond back? Or is the West still dealing with its own problems in its backyard? Are people realising that China is basically back at speed?
Ophenia Liang [00:05:50] So something has changed in the past three weeks or so since our last discussion. Number one, China is almost completely back to normal in terms of Chinese people in mainland China and their day to day life. Students are back to school, people are back to work, all the transportation is open, domestic flights are open. I’m not saying that they're full, but travel is allowed, so there is no more restriction. And so we see more Chinese companies and Chinese brands that want to branch out because previously they would just get big contracts, export contracts from Western companies, but now they're not getting it in the usual way. They're not able to go out of China physically to do exhibitions etc. So Chinese brands are actually seeking digital means to do marketing and to attract and to build their brands in the outside world. We’re seeing a lot more attraction in that direction. And compared to our clients from, for example Australia or US, I think about a month ago we were still planning a lot of recovery – planning how do we do recovery and communication in terms of random marketing and the timeline we discussed was around June or July. But I think now a lot of Western, well, I would say outside of China, clients are starting to realise the recovery actually will take longer. So many plans have been postponed to September or October onwards.
Mark Bergin [00:07:30] Earlier this week, we went and recorded a new program that we're doing for the interiors market. Betsy, you were on that call – we're calling it Not Milano Interior Show, because as Ophenia mentioned, the trade shows are actually missing for people as part of their way to go and prime and correct new business opportunities. And then as well as those interactions, physical interactions that you have with people, what they're also missing is the opportunity to announce or release their product. I think fear for you, Betsy here, Milano was one of those huge opportunities for you to have deep, immersive relationship, building events with your clients. You've now had to work out how to restructure it and redo that, but is the pace of the deal flow actually performing for you, or have you found that there's still some gaps on people getting up to speed.
Betsy Sweat [00:08:29] Yeah. So, internally versus externally Mark, since we last recorded, there has been an acceleration for RH to actually open all three of the international galleries that we were planning to do over a period of two years now. So why the acceleration? Business, especially for the retail space, is up significantly with a number of people sitting in their homes who just can't stand looking at that piece of furniture or lighting any longer. So not a pickup of the online business, but also the galleries as they continue to slowly open in North America. We're seeing a lot of pent up purchasing going on. Also I think that frustration of not having that human connection. It’s an experience for RH when you walk into the gallery. Having a glass of wine on the rooftop has become now a full day experience for the retail organisation.
On the are the commercial side of our business it's been very, very interesting. We've had to learn to do things very differently. So the positives of that have been, as Dylan was talking, the efficiencies of doing things have grown. We can get 12 people around the world, as long as we can find a time slot that works - both clients as well as internal people, and we can bang out our supply agreement in 48 hours now. Whereas before, as you were saying, Dylan, it was taking forever. So what's the downside of that? I think you talked about the tea ceremony. That connection that you have to your clients isn't there. That connection where you have spent many long nights banging out those supplier agreements, that’s lifelong relationship building. And for those of us who live and die on the relationships that we've fostered, this period of time has set us back and the businesses has seen some implications as a result of that.
Mark Bergin [00:10:41] Betsy, I think you've hit the nail on the head there. The tea ceremony was both painful in that it delayed the cadence of the project, but it was also so useful because of the depth of getting to know each other and understanding each other. So I suppose when Michael was talking about the idea that he's got some people who are now being swung into projects and it's happening at a faster pace, you're losing some of that project culture that that is so important, because then you wind up with misunderstandings that might have multiplied down the tracks. I suppose on one hand, we've got a good thing that we've actually got cadence of the project. The other one is that we've got to make sure that we're still building in the team culture there. This is the difference of the shows that I've done for my ISO studio, the way that I do them now, we onboard with 10 minutes of discussion for everybody before we start recording, and then we hang around for 20 minutes or half an hour at the end because that's necessary for us to actually be people, not just performing on a zoom call, and that's going to be the same for all the projects that everyone's doing there as well.
Bob, you're down in isolation. You're kind of like the man from Mars aren't you? You're Hong Kong and mainland China based. That's where your operation base is, but you're down in New Zealand at the moment. You've been leveraging LinkedIn. You've been leveraging Facebook and other forms of contact with people who are from past eras in your commercial world. How is that helping them? The fact that you're able to say, well, I'm available, let's go and actually do some business there.
Bob Neville [00:12:28] I think what's interesting and to sort of pick up on some of the things Betsy was talking about, like the relationships and doing the business and having those meals and spending time with individuals in hotels and traveling together… something I'm finding is that I'm interacting with people now that I’ve known for 20 odd years and so there's a lot of business and activity happening now because of those relationships and there is an amazing amount of things that can happen quite quickly. But I think there's definitely this pent-up need for us as human beings to actually interact with each other. You know, I miss those times hanging out in a hotel bar with a client or a colleague and getting to know each other. But having said that, we're still looking, obviously to get back up into Hong Kong and China, but even then, you know, from down here we've got meetings on Friday, which is revolving around a physical rollout for an American brand, rolling out through China. So we're going to be manufacturing in China, rolling out through China. It’s a body of work that we actually executed in New Zealand, Hong Kong and China. So it's real. It's real network. It’s working from home. It’s working from wherever you're able to do that. Physical things are really ramping up, but we're also doing a lot of virtual work. From New Zealand, we've been able to tap into a lot of work in a lot of different countries.
Mark Bergin [00:14:09] So Richard Henderson, that brings me to you. You've been working with huge brands through your career. You’ve also got a specialty where you’re working with some of those midsize and smaller brands in the market at this point. How are you finding the cadence going on for them? Have those smaller organisations begun to respond yet, or are they still trying to work out which way is up and working out how the reaction part works? Have I got to the rebound, I suppose?
Richard Henderson [00:14:41] Thank-you Mark. I always love these conversations because I get a feeling of the excitement of a lot of businesses around the world. I suppose my business and my interest, I can't separate business from brand and design, so I’m a sort of creative but I’ve got my feet in business. I'm very interested in the psychology of change, and movements. And I'm working on that myself. I'm doing some charts myself. I'm developing some business initiative myself. I don't think I could really make a significant contribution to the conversation about exactly where the business in Melbourne, where I operate from, is at the moment. What I can say is that from a small business operator, that the only way forward for any business, including ourselves, is to move. And there's a lot of inertia here at the moment. There’s a lot of fear around that and I don’t think the press is really helping things at all from my point of view.
Unfortunately, I see everything in terms of brand. I see when I get up in the morning things about my own brand and what I'm going to be doing myself, etc. and my business. And I see ourselves basically in a cocoon. I call it the Cocoon Strategy. We’re in a cocoon and we're moving out of that cocoon into darkness and uncertainty. We're looking for the light and we move forward to beyond. And whilst it’s a cliché, the cocoon is a nurturing space of quietness, of reflection, and when you move out of the cocoon, you turn into a butterfly and the butterfly is about discovery. So I've got this theory that I'm working on. I'm sharing it with people and put something up on LinkedIn and I got a lot of responses on this idea that we were in the crisis to fearful mode. We moved to a hopeful mode. We then moved to a motivated mode. Now we’re in the motivated and we're moving out of the cocoon, coming to a recovery, and then we start adjusting. I don't think we could really say at the moment that everyone's adjusted. I think everyone's trying to figure out where they're going to be in their life and their business, particularly where people are concerned. In the city here, for example, the government has actually had an edict where government people are not returning to their offices until September. That’s a huge thing for a company to manage. So that's my space or interest. I think the brand is absolutely critical because culture is connected to the brand and the market set up.
So from my point of view, and if you ask me about my own business, I have a couple of very interesting projects on. Actually, the two most interesting projects of both stadiums. I’m not quite sure how they're going to fill those stadiums, given the current situation with the 1.5 meters distance between people. But they’re also at that culture, people, society, connection. Look I'm a smallish business niche. I had also opened up a partnership business in China, amd we had an office in Hong Kong, which is a registered office, but that's sort of basically like a tree that’s been locked and it’s just sitting there waiting for Hong Kong to come together. I've kind of connected up with Hong Kong tourism because I have an idea for Hong Kong that they could use as a destination branding for Hong Kong. Yet get some traction on that. But I've got a partnership with a designer in Shijiazhuang, which is about three hours from Beijing in the Herbei Province. And that's exactly what was mentioned before about China going to manufacturing. So I'm going to be trying to help Chinese manufacturers brand thier products in a Western way. My EA is Chinese and we’re multilingual here at R-Co and whilst it might not be politically correct right this moment, I’m a pretty big fan of China and its potential.
Mark Bergin [00:18:35] And so what's really good about that is that, you know, it's almost like a spring that you've described there where you're actually-
Richard Henderson [00:18:40] That is a great word Mark because I'm putting out a campaign tomorrow because the restaurants in Melbourne open on the 1st of June-- and I've got this campaign which is called ‘Melbourne’ and it's got a flower arrangement and I'm offering restaurants a competition to put the flower arrangement in front of their restaurant, and then send us a picture of the flower arrangement. We'll award the winner with a complete signboard outside their restaurant, promoting their restaurant, because we just want Melbourne to bloom again.
So that idea of seeing opportunities for designers and design firms to contribute back into the community like that, they’re all initiatives. And I think that's the contribution that good design and designers can make to society at this time.
Mark Bergin [00:19:27] Fantastic. Julie, isn't it amazing? Here we are. We’re standing with giants and like with what Richard just described, they're about that forward initiative. What's happening for you, because you're not only in Hong Kong, you've got connections in the New York, you also have some projects from HOK which are still finishing up in other parts of the world. How's the cadence? How's the pace going for your world? Well your gap year has been absolutely decimated, but what’s happening for you?
Julia Monk [00:20:00] I'm redefining gap year, or in process of doing that. Richard, I loved your metaphor about the butterfly because I think it's very apt to where I feel that I'm at right now. And in terms of relationships and building, Betsy, how you were talking about your relationships and how that's all going, I find that I've got lots of time to talk with my more traditional colleagues and relationships digitally, but I've also got more time to meet with people that I couldn't have found the time to meet with before, that are here in Hong Kong.
So I'm fostering a lot of new relationships. One on one relationships with people. It's been amazing to really get to know people that have just been kind of very tangential to my world before all this happened. In terms of the projects that are going on, they're still ongoing. We had a big project in Belgrade, Serbia that the client is anxious to get finished, but they're getting a little bit of cold feet right now in terms of whether people be able to travel. All of my designers come to the site and see what's going on. How much longer is this locked down going to happen? Is it going to impact the projects? That's been an ongoing discussion that we're having at the moment. But we're seeing our projects in China starting up again. Or just to get off that hold pattern that they were in. We've got a couple of design presentations coming up next week for a couple of hotel projects. Thank God for a couple of hotel projects.
Richard Henderson [00:21:27] Can I just interrupt and say on that, you know, one of the great things about creativity and design is its universal language, and when people get together to create something from anywhere around the world, it's that it's a DNA that binds everyone together. And whilst we all have to understand and work in politics, that's the nature of society, that sort of commonality of the nod that we all basically understand the fundamental purpose of human beings is to create. I think that's such a great thing in a conversation where you're talking about China. It's a really a wonderful attribute of the design community.
Julia Monk [00:22:05] Yeah.
Mark Bergin [00:22:08] So one of the things I want to go and have a have a quick chat about, and I think Chris, we're going to get to you in just a moment, but seeing you're in a shadow with your face, we'll come back to you and just quickly jump to Dylan here. We haven’t forgotten about you on the call, but Dylan, I'm fascinated with is around built space projects. One of the differences that a lot of people don't understand say between a project Michael Tam is doing and what you're doing is that often the sovereignty of those of those projects goes into a handover stage. So say if you're working on a digital brand for a major corporation, it's still their digital brand, it’s just the the project is delayed. But with these building projects and large scale at developments, it goes from the developer into the hands of the builder and there's an economic interest with people sometimes to delay projects because they might find, as Julia was talking about, the tourists aren't going to come. So navigating where if there's an interest to finish the project is a really important thing because if somebody doesn't think there's going to be an occupancy rate for the hotel you could imagine they're going to slow down the completion of the hotel and push that liability onto the builder. Do you see much exposure to that in the projects that you're doing or are the people in Asia that you're working with moving at such a pace that they don’t want to play those games?
Dylan Brady [00:23:31] The only projects that we've really had go on hold are those that can go on hold that are in a design phase or that, that aren't attracting any additional finance costs or opportunity costs on not being built. There's not a project that we're building anywhere on the planet that it's slowing down, because the cost of finance certainly hasn't shifted. For example, the new interior workplace we are doing with John Holland, well they are are already a couple of months late and they are working as fast as they possibly can with numbers of shifts. They're extremely happy that they can now have four people in the same room together, given that the work they've got to do in fitting out and commissioning and putting furniture in and getting deliveries of all the bric-à-brac and loose items that need to go into a new office when you're delivering it. They, when they take possession of their own building, in that instance, stop putting the lay claims to the client of the build, and they can become the tenant themselves and then they can navigate in their own return to work. China, well, nothing ever goes slow in China unless it is stopping. So if something starts going slow in China, you know that it's probably stopping and you find something else to do. We've been asked to do a 5,000 square meter office building as one of the world's most sustainable, and they want this thing finished in July 2021 and I'm like, but it took you five years to get to the point where you're hiring us and now you're giving us two months to design and build it. So I'm not seeing anything slow down like that. Nothing.
Mark Bergin [00:25:25] So that then is the perfect throw to Chris. Chris you've actually got a couple of projects at facade. You've got the German Pavilion at World Expo, which we'll talk a bit about that because World Expo 2020 is now the low or is it world expo 2021 or 2022? Then we're also going to talk about the central station project in Ho Chi Ming City. Is that project moving along with its cadence?
Chris Bosse [00:26:00] Oh, ‘as far as we can tell’ is probably disclaimer for any answer at this point of time. The expo is now officially delayed by one year. The Tokyo Olympics are delayed by one year. And the Beijing Biennale is delayed by one year, which will really throw out the whole concept of a Biennale and what happens to the next Biennale and then will the next be one year later. My biggest fear in that space is that the entire Biennale is going to be about post-pandemic architecture, cities in isolation and all that sort of stuff. And by then it may already be obsolete. Slightly different topic. But as far as our projects are concerned: so Dubai, they slowed down the construction because there's no point in finishing the pavilion a year ahead of schedule. The basic kind of structure is up, but no fit outs, no facade and no roof.
The project in Vietnam… Vietnam is a very interesting case. I've been in Vietnam for the last five years with our office that we've slowly built up and I've experienced firsthand Vietnam’s amazing response to the whole cultural situation pretty much since Christmas. People, I mean, people are always wearing masks and people are very hygienic and washing hands and so on. Since Christmas, maybe was a little bit later in January, there were signs up in elevators, there were signs up in offices, offices were being disinfected, and there was an overall kind of awareness of the situation unfolding in China and elsewhere. And somehow Vietnam has by these measures, managed to dodge the bullet. They have not had a single death. They have very low case numbers, 270 cases I think. Which for a very long time was 16 cases, until patient 17 came on a plane from fashion week in Milan. So they have individual names for each case. You know, it's not like we have 500,000 cases. We have 270 and we know them by name and all of that. Then they went into lockdown for about four weeks, and as of two weeks ago, they're all back in the office. And with the same kind of distancing and hand washing and disinfection and wearing masks and so on. But Vietnam is back in full swing, I would say. And they never really stopped. They worked from home for a little while, but everybody was just preparing for what's next. And the hospitality space I think is still very strong, although there may be question marks around how many hotels do you need in the future? Traveling restrictions obviously caused a major problem. I think there's currently internal flights, but depending from where to where there's isolation requirements and so on. There are no international flights yet.
But, coming to your actual question, the project for the Central Park at Ho Chi Minh City, it's kind of a public-private partnership project for a large public urban space, which is also the connection to the Metro line. And kind of the hub for future transportation technologies and innovation. That project is probably not the fastest moving project on the planet because it relies on public funding as well as private funding. So you need to marry up very good partners who run the commercial assets, the car parks, the shopping malls, etc. and who run the public assets. But the government is very keen on that project and very supportive. Our meetings have gone online and they're very keen to push ahead with that.
Mark Bergin [00:29:50] I think you've highlighted a very important point, that the central station project is a new money project. And last week when we were doing the USA Town Hall, we had Jay Valgora from Studio V in New York. The question I asked him was, have you had any projects where they've had to go back and ask for new money in the cycle or have you been out through? He hasn't had to go and talk about any new money in any project so they're all just moving along as already approved and as financed. And then if I go, think of projects in the UK. I was speaking with the team for Motivation and their non-for-profit work with wheelchairs as foreign aid in the UK. Because of Brexit, because of the changes there, the money cycle has slowed down. It’s not because of COVID that they're actually struggling, it's because they can't get new money approved and they can't get a new money conversation going on. I think for everybody that's a really important thing to look at. Are we dealing with projects which have been funded and the money is allocated and therefore the pace will go on? Otherwise, trying to get something that is yet to be funded and green-lit is very, very troublesome. And that's where Betsy, to hear that Restoration Hardware have gone and said those international showrooms are now being fast tracked, that they've been brought forward, that's a very interesting signal that shows RH is a very confident with where the market's up to.
For people who are a little bit slower in their money cycle, maybe there isn't as much confidence. What I hope that we are able to do with these calls is share knowledge of how projects are operating. You will know how to do the design, but it's about the strategy. It's actually the marketing insights where I think that the intelligence is there. So who's actually got something which you'd say would be like you're busting out of your skin, that there's something that you’ve seen that may not be exactly on topic. For me, I must say I've tried to be a little bit cautious here about the Hong Kong circumstance, but I see that it’s just accelerating but is yet to get stable. And it's going to take a while until we really understand what the implications are there. But that creates all sorts of dynamics. In Australia, we've got industrial relations, which is going through a dynamic change period as well, and it's going to take a while until to know which way is up. Who's seen something else, which might be a dynamic circumstance, which also has an opportunity attached?
Dylan Brady [00:32:27] I'll talk a little bit about a project that I only just realised was a project, which is the project of my business. We've been talking about the projects of our businesses, the work that we do with other clients, and as part of our return to work, part of experiencing how we work away from each other, and part of what the impacts of that digital kind of space for us? There has been massive streamlining within teams on the projects that they're working on because we’re essentially designers in computer spaces and we're operating now by sharing screens and being able to draw directly into each other's screens. There's been some efficiency there, but there's been a bit of a real lack of cross pollination, like Betsy was talking about. What is it that you get when you're in a human situation and you're overhearing something, or you find a book next to the book you’re actually looking for? The digitalisation has siloed us a little bit. And I think that you've got to spend a lot more energy trying to reconnect people. As part of returning to work and starting to plan for that when the government finally raises those barriers, there's two key drivers for us. One is the clinical rules around that, but the second is more interesting to me, to the degree that we're actually making it a project of the studio and imagining ourselves as the clients coming to ourselves and saying, “Hey, you're going to reimagine how you come back to work”, because some of our staff have to travel two hours a day to get to work and two hours back, and this 9-5:30 thing just breaks my heart when you think about how mad it's made the world, and it's just a hangover. So, the most exciting project we have in the studio at the moment is the studio. How do we want to work? What are some of the ways that we can dream about better ways to come together? Why are we gathering? how do we need to gather? And I'm quite prepared as a business owner to take that slightly more optimistic, slightly riskier, slightly more positive take on it to not go back to what we were, but find the opportunities to take the things we really like and, and perhaps move on from the things that we don't miss, take the things that we do miss and move forward. For us as a practice that's been really interesting because we love doing this, and essentially the things that we're thinking about are transferable ultimately to government. They're transferable to, how Hong Kong comes out of this, they're transferable to this kind of direction between going back and going forward.
From a cocoon you don't go back to being a bug. You don't go back to being a Caterpillar, right? You go forward. To something else and there is not a single Caterpillar on the planet that doesn't go, “Holy shit, I'm about to fly”. We’ve got to fly, and that's what I see the opportunity as. That's where I see the fundamental design thinking come to play that can affect all of us. It can raise all of our agendas to the sky rather than saying “how do we get back to being a Caterpillar?” Because that doesn't work.
Mark Bergin [00:35:36] Look, Dylan, I'm thinking I get a close this call on “how do we imagine ourselves as a Caterpillar of a butterfly?” Everybody, it's been fantastic to have you here. Viewers, we'll be back in a month with another ASIA Town Hall.
And, just begin to plan how to go and rebound and also reimagine? Thank-you for your time, everybody.
Hosted by: Mark Bergin
Podcast Production: Pat Daly
Notes: Lucy Grant