Katz Kiely, Entrepreneur, Thought-Leader & Award-winning Digital Expert
CEO & Founder of beep (Behavioural Enterprise Empowerment Platform) | Chair of Trustees Frontline.live & Keynote Speaker
Welcome to The Global Interview, can you share some information about your background with our audience?
I am the Founder and CEO of a company called beep which stands for the Behavioural Enterprise Empowerment Platform. Our mission is to completely redefine what work means for people who work in large companies, so that's one of my jobs!
During the lockdown, I set up a charity. An organisation which is the very first-ever national digital map of real-time needs from frontline healthcare workers.
Our mission is to make sure that everybody working on the frontline feels safe and has the equipment that they need to keep them safe in this anxious-making time.
“Then I got headhunted by the UN, which was a really interesting time because I had only ever run my own companies and suddenly I'm senior inside the most bureaucratic, hierarchical, strange organisation you would ever want to work in.”
Katz Kiely
Katz Kiely, LinkedIn, beep & Frontline.live
That's wonderful! What attracted you to do this?
I fell in love with digital back in the day! I'm not a coder, but I understand what digital is capable of delivering. My interest is, how can we connect people so that they can be more than the sum of the parts? Everything I've done is, in some ways, common sense. I built the very first-ever open innovation competition platform in 2004 for Hewlett Packard, connecting big, monolithic change-resistant companies with start-ups, because big companies have money, and need to be more innovative. And small companies have all the ideas but need a pipeline.
I thought if we can link big with small in a meaningful way that will be good for both sides of the coin. We worked with corporates to help them really focus on the opportunity for improvement and shared the finely tuned challenges with our start-up/innovator community. They would then tell us what they would do to solve that particular problem. We would choose the best of the proposed solutions, and using social before social was a thing! The company would be excited. Start-ups would be enthusiastic, and then six months or a year later, they get chewed up and spat out!
This was neither helping big companies or small companies. As a start-up ourselves, we realised we had to pivot. We needed to think about what we're doing properly. We realised that the operating model within large corporations was profoundly hierarchical, bureaucratic and siloed, and nobody was talking to each other at all. We thought if we can take our experience of connecting big with small, and focus it to help the big companies become more resilient, more connected.
We got very good at helping big companies be more agile. All of the things that would now be called digital transformation, but there was no such moniker to hang it on then.
How did the UN opportunity present itself?
I got headhunted by the UN, which was a really interesting time because I had only ever run my own companies and suddenly I'm a senior person inside the most bureaucratic, hierarchical, strange organisation you would ever want to work in!
What was the main focus of the UN assignment?
My job was to take one of the UN agencies through digital transformation around one specific program. What I found was all of these experiments that I've done with different companies over the previous years using digital to help people be more than the sum of the parts.
If you tack those together; if you figure out who the change agents are across the organisation; if you bring those together; if you then let them co-design the strategy rather than telling them what to do, funnily enough, the change sticks! I was there for 18 months, and it was a very successful program. It nearly killed me!
How did you get into Behavioral Science?
When I left the UN, being the geek I am; I needed to understand why my approach works when so many approaches fail. That's when I got into behavioural science, and I always say if anybody hasn't read Dan Ariely's research, they totally should because it changed my life.
Suddenly you go, "Oh, that's how people make decisions. That's why people are so change-resistant." You know how dentists say "Only floss between the teeth you want to keep." - I say "Only people who have to deal with people need to understand behavioural science.".
So I figured I can build that into a system whereby we can send a software platform, plus the approach, and help large companies be less sh*t at scale. That's beep! That's my primary business.
Can you share the work you are doing at Frontline.live?
When the lockdown happened, everybody went into the rabbit-and-headlights mode, and I'm talking to a friend of mine who's a nurse, and I'm saying "I can't get a shopping delivery. I'm going to have to go to the supermarket." She says, "I'm going to have to go into a hospital tomorrow, and people have probably got Covid, and there are no masks." I'm like, "What?" – and then, of course, I see the lack of PPE everywhere!
Doctors and nurses all over the country saying: "We don't have PPE" on social media, and at the same time, the Burberry's, the BrewDogs are making PPE try to bridge that gap because they can also see someone has to do something! There's a need, and there's supply, but they've got no way of seeing each other.
If you have a brain like and you can see a problem, and you know you can solve it, you have to do something. I got a bunch of companies together, and lots of outstanding experts jumped out of the sidelines, and six weeks later, we launched frontline.live.
Is it a particularly traumatic time for frontline workers in particular?
We have had six months to sort it out since the first spike. Everyone knew we were going to get a second spike. But even now in France - this morning, Public Health France said: "we don't have enough masks.".
Frontline.live has been built and is operated by an incredible team of excellent entrepreneurial geeky, techies and communicators, we've got a platform, and it's open-source. We've built a target operating model, and we've got a digital playbook. So that means that anyone in any other country can pick it up and use it for PPE or any other shortage that might happen in any crisis - when people on the frontline need something to keep them safe and healthy, and the government is not able to deal with the challenge quickly enough. And it's free, and it's our gift, and that's exciting.
What about beep and what you do there?
I've got a funny brain. Unless I can understand what the 'why' of doing something is, I can't do it. I see connections between things. We've got a bit of a challenge, and the challenge goes a bit like this.
Thirty years ago, big companies started deciding that they desperately needed to be more productive and more efficient, and technology could help them do that. They start buying more technology to make sure that we're more productive and more efficient and all of those good things. Around 30 to 50 percent of the P&L was people costs. Zoom forward to now; I reckon that companies are wasting about $11 trillion every year on failed transformation!
In BCG's latest report, they comment that the reason 87 percent of digital transformation programs fail is that they forget to take into account the culture and the people! Another interesting stat, according to Gallup, 87 percent of the worldwide workforce is disengaged. 43 percent of every salary of a person who's disengaged is wasted. People are getting more disengaged while companies spend more and more on enterprise technology; disengaged workers are far less productive. The efficiency is lower! Companies are still spending 30 to 50 percent of their P&L on people costs, but people are switching off.
Why are people switching off?
There's a fantastic book called 'Bullsh*t Jobs', which is worth reading, which is about the fact that as companies have gotten bigger and more global, people have felt less and less connected.
They don't really understand what their job actually does within the context of what the company as a whole does, according to behavioural science, the purpose is absolutely essential for human beings as far as well-being goes.
People are going into work every day not quite knowing how their job fits into the big picture and therefore are just checking in and checking out. That's devastatingly bad for people, and it's terrible for business because If you stand back and zoom out and look at the reality of the situation, it makes no sense whatsoever.
Do you think the way we work has fundamentally changed?
Yes. And I think that Covid-19 has accelerated that change. Change that would have taken 6 years to happen has happened in 6 months, so do I think it will ever go back to the way it was? No. I don't think it will and to be honest.
There were huge swathes of people who were starting to work from home anyway. The statistics had already started going that way. Why pay for an office when people can work from home? It's a lot cheaper, right?
How important is culture?
The challenge and what's playing into our hands with beep is that if you don't have your culture rock-solid; if your leaders aren't the right kind of leaders - people working from home, things don't work very well.
If however your culture is rock-solid, and your leaders are what I call imaginal leaders - if you empower your teams; and if teams are working together in cultures of trust and transparency, if they are rewarded and recognised, they understand what success looks like, and they're trusted to work autonomously.
Those companies were, by the way, doing better than other companies before. They will rock it, whereas most of the traditional "We need people to be in the office between 9 am to 5 pm.", those kinds of companies, forget it!
Interestingly, companies I was talking to before, they're coming back and asking "Oh, you know, all that stuff you were talking about, about distributed workforces and how difficult it is to keep up motivation and how important connection is, suddenly we 100 percent get it?"
How do we make this work?
If you're talking about fundamentally changing the way we work, you can't stick with those traditional operating models. That kind of ludicrous, mechanical hierarchy and bureaucracy and people not talking to each other. You can't operate like that.
I talk about companies as talent magnets or dinosaurs. Talent magnets will keep thriving! There is a fascinating piece of research done by McKinsey, which looks at the relationship between what they called 'design-led cultures' and the other sort of companies. People have been saying for years that companies with more agile, more connected, more creative cultures are more successful, but McKinsey said: "Well, we need to prove it." We need to prove that culture is linked to commercial success.
They spent five years working with different companies, looking at the way they work and looking at the commercial benefit. They found that companies that they call 'design-led', and we call 'Future Ways Of Working' or 'Future WOW' are 4 to 26 times more successful than traditional companies (or as I call them, dinosaurs). COVID has happened, and suddenly those dinosaurs are going "Holy sh*t!" The ones set up for distribution, for agile, for flexibility, for autonomous, for trust, for transparency, for collaboration, all those things, they're flying!
Are people working from home benefiting from flexibility?
I walk into the countryside every day. I do a meeting on my way out and often a meeting on my way back.
The people I'm talking to have no idea where I am! when you're walking, there's something that happens neurologically to your brain, you are far more creative, it gets your juices flowing.
I never want to work in an office full-time again. I do miss being with people, and I miss collaborating, but you don't need to be in an office 9-5 and in fact, it's ridiculous. It's a waste of money.
What are you most proud of in your life so far?
When I was at the UN, it was a painful time. I can talk about my year and a half in the UN as if it was perfectly planned. It was not! It was painful, and it was tiring, and it felt like you were always pushing against the flow. It was a massive multi-strand strategy, which was all about how we operate internally between the different sections of the organisation. Also, how do we communicate in other ways with our stakeholders? One of the big things we did was a global event with engaged 6,500 world leaders from policy and telecommunications, in Geneva.
We also brought in 60 young innovators from across the world through open innovation competitions. The idea was if you're good enough, we will bring you to Geneva, we will take you through some training, show you how to pitch and you will get to pitch your ideas to the wealthiest, most influential people in the world.
The night that we greeted these young people, I had the arrogance of assuming they were going to be my kind of European entrepreneurs - my Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The sort of people I hang out with, but of course, they came from all over the world. We held a "meet and greet", where I got to know each of the CEOs and the innovators. Some of them had never even left their cities before. They had no clue, and so suddenly they're in Geneva! At the UN.
They were overwhelmed, and the brilliance of their ideas humbled me. We were also streaming from the various stages, and we had 10,000 children in schools across the world, who were watching the stream. They were having a conversation amongst themselves and tweeting questions to the senior leader on the panels. It was extraordinary, and the impact that it had on the leaders of the organisations to realise how much the world was changing and how you can start to drive real conversations using digital was incredible.
Are there any people that you follow, listen to or read that stands out for you?
I am so lucky that I'm in so many networks of the most incredible people. I'm part of a network called Kinnernet which is a global group set up by Yossi Vardi. The people who are invited into that network are all brilliant creatives and innovators. All keynote standards, I feel very lucky to be part of it and miss those gatherings a lot.
There is another network called Innovation for Jobs with people set up by Vint Cerf and David Nordfors, which is a group of people thinking about what could happen when technology starts to make people redundant.
I'm lucky in that I don't look outside so much for inspiration - I'm surrounded by some of the most incredible thought leaders, and I feel honoured and grateful for that every day I couldn't do what I'm doing without my network. It's exhausting and sometimes terrifying being an entrepreneur.
I'm a woman, and I'm building a tech company, and it's a tech company which is essentially trying to transform the way that big companies work. It's not easy because people resist change. If I didn't have my people to bounce off and learn from, I couldn't do what I'm doing.
Is there any organisation or brand that stands out to you?
There are. I mean there's the obvious like Zappos. I'm sure you know the Zappos story. If you look after your employees, your customers will just love you. Richard Branson is pretty impressive because he's always talked about "doing good is good business".
The companies that I respect are companies like Patagonia who don't just talk about doing good; they have 'doing', built into their DNA. With our company every time we sell a software license to a large company to help them look after their people better, we'll give one to a not for profit working towards the SDGs. That to me, is the future of business.
A few weeks ago, Apple announced that it's worth $2Trillion. On the same day, our government announced that we owe £2 Trillion. It is ridiculous! Amazon, Bezos, is stripping out the middle of the economy. That cannot be allowed to go on.
But just imagine if every pound or dollar that Apple made, the same amount of value was put back into the economy. Wouldn't that be amazing? I am on a personal mission, and there are a few of us around. There have to be policies that say you can't register a company unless you can prove that you will give back as well as take.
Social good and assisting communities, it's a big topic?
I think it's difficult because if you are set up as a pure profit company, your responsibility as a CEO is to make sure that the company makes profits at any cost.
I think it's challenging for a company to transform because it's not in their DNA to do so, but that doesn't mean that we can't start nurturing a whole new generation of companies who are giving value not just profit. Making profits is excellent. I'm a businesswoman; I just don't see any reason why you can't give back at the same time.
Is there a piece of advice that you would like to share?
That's an excellent question. I've got a funny brain, and I don't know where it comes from, but I'm one of those people that if I can see a problem, I have to try and do something about it because otherwise, I can't rest.
I've taken pretty crazy risks and never taken the easy path. I've always followed my heart and what I know to be right, which is not the easiest path, but it's the most fulfilling. A piece of advice that I would give to somebody would be, "Pick your battles wisely and only change things you can change.".
What about your motivations?
In every decision I make in life, I ask myself, is this going to make the world a better place? I think that if I'm not making things better for people and the planet, why am I here? As far as what drives me, seeing what happens when you see people who are pretty much zombies at work wake up and suddenly realise that when they are rewarded, and when they feel safe to be themselves when they unleash their inner problem solver. That's a fantastic feeling!
It's so strange in most big companies so busy being busy, keeping doing the same thing because it's normal. Then you get them to lift their head above water, and they go, "Wow! Gosh! This way of working doesn't make any sense, does it?" Watching that transformation in individuals and companies is fantastic.
Is there anything that hasn't come easy to you?
Yes, finding out about behavioural sciences has explained a lot of that to me. I realise now that listening is crucial - 'you've got two ears and one mouth'. I can understand things very quickly. I always want to get in there and tell them the answer. It's the worst thing you can do. You have to make sure that people arrive at a realisation in their own time. Learning to listen, feedback, and the power of empathy - has become a skill that I've honed over the years.
It's tough because we are hardwired to believe that our ideas are the best. And it's one of those things I had to confront in myself, but it's hard to find your own route to realise something, whatever that thing is, is necessary and fundamentally tricky.
beep's entire thing is about how to empower people. It provides an always on-system that rewards and recognises people at all levels for being a problem solver, not for being scared. It's about ensuring people feel psychologically safe. When you're smart and entrepreneurial and driven, it's hard sometimes to think I've got to put myself in their shoes and try to understand where they're coming from and make sure that they are with me.
Social media is playing a part in the way humans interact with each other right now. What are your thoughts on it?
I have been a prominent advocate for social media. I believe that we're in the most crucial moment in history and are more connected than we've ever been before in a peer-to-peer way. We have an extraordinary amount of affordable data so we can understand human behaviour both as individuals and as social animals in a way we never have before. All of that means that we can start to put into place democratised systems and frameworks.
Social media, as an idea, is fundamentally important to me, and beep is 100% social. I think that the way that organisations like Facebook et cetera have been set up, which means that it's in their responsibility to make a profit at any cost, which means using your data for getting as many eyeballs in front of adverts as often as humanly possible. Therefore, all of their time and energy and expertise has been put into that. How can we make these people addicted?
I don't think you can necessarily blame the beast. You have to blame the system in which the beast has been built. However, I believe that we've learned a lot, that these algorithms that drive such high levels of addiction means. We know how to nudge people into doing things we have never known before.
All of that learning can be harnessed good. We're in a place and time where we can start to use nudge technologies to help people to be the best they can be. I'm not quite sure how we take that power away from them. I do not want social media to be taken away from us. I think that there's a lot of vested interest that social media has questioned the status quo in a way that's never happened before. There are a lot of big players that would rather have social media just closed down.
I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. I believe that we have an absolute responsibility to educate people of all ages into really understanding how social media works so that they can make decisions about how their data is used. We don't, and that's not OK.
The internet is the most significant prototype that's ever been unleashed on people. Nobody quite knew what they were doing. I mean none of us knew what we're doing. But the worst thing we could do is, to brush our learnings under the carpet. We should make sure that we learn from the mistakes that we've made and build on them as opposed to demonising the people who run the platforms.
They're not demons. They're just doing what they were created to do. That beast is being that beast, and it's growing, and it's thriving. Unfortunately, it's doing all sorts of damage. That's why we need to step back and encourage leaders to be able to have honest conversations, and I'd say the same about politicians. People need to feel safe to say I've made a mistake.
Is there anything that you would like to share with the audience?
I should probably mention what beep does as a platform that rewards and recognises employees at all levels to report, refine and collaboratively find solutions to those myriad little problems that plague every large corporation.
People have to develop workarounds continuously, and they're frustrated. What beep does is incentivise them to report those little challenges. If there are enough people across the organisation who are reporting similar things, they can together refine those challenges. If enough people across the whole organisation are clustering around the same challenge, beep gives them the tools by which they can call and run their own design thinking workshop!
It is a decentralised continuous improvement engine which empowers employees to see a problem and find other people who care about that problem. And most importantly to be able to actually do something about them: to co-create workable solutions. Good for business and good for people!