7. Exploring Community Building and Tackling Loneliness in Organizations with Dr Robin Dunbar - Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Ceridwen

Part 2 of our Podcast with evolutionary psychologist Dr Robin Dunbar, focuses on community building in the modern workplace.

Robin sheds light on adopting a Victorian approach, looking at organizations as intimate villages to foster social interaction and alleviate feelings of isolation. We dive into history and explore the strategies employed by 19th and early 20th-century industrialists, who built communities for their employees by offering attractive accommodation, recreational activities, and alluring social amenities.

The profound impact of remote work on team dynamics.
Could the freedom of working remotely also be a catalyst for creating a two-tier society? We discuss the challenges that come with maintaining team cohesion in a remote work environment and the potential pitfalls. We share strategies to keep the team dynamics alive even when you're not sharing the same physical space, with an emphasis on non-work related social gatherings to keep the team's morale high.

We question, should creating a sense of belonging be a primary focus for HR people?

Scale and Rhythm
We delve into the organizational structures, featuring the insightful approach of Bill Gore, the founder of Gore-Tex. How did he manage to sidestep the common pitfalls of multinational companies? He limited their factory units to a maximum of 200 people and implemented a flat management structure. 

Robin shares his research on scalable and accessible solutions to loneliness, underlining the importance of maintaining a sense of scale and rhythm in an organization. 

---
I hope our conversation inspires you to rediscover connection in your own life!

Subscribe now and let the magic unfold.

Love,
Shelley x

About Your Host

Hi, I'm Shelley Doyle, a Social Wealth Strategist and Connection Coach, helping remote and hybrid leaders who are struggling to retain their high performers, with tools and strategies to reconnect their distributed teams.

I also help people who move or work remotely, to elevate and sustain their social wealth, online/offline - everywhere! Discover More

I am currently working on my MA thesis, combining cutting edge research on social wellbeing and digital health, with two decades in corporate communications, to deliver mind-shifting talks, workshops, and programs around the world.

Find me at TheCommuniverse.com and on LinkedIn.

Global Workshop Tour "Beyond Screens" launches September 2024.

To hear when new episodes drop, subscribe to my weekly newsletter, or check out recent episodes.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Hello, I am Shelly Keridwen and this is Rediscovering Connection and I am very excited today to have Mr Robin Dunbar here with me. Good morning, good afternoon, Robin. How are you today?

Speaker 2: 0:20

Good afternoon, at least here, and I'm very well, thank you.

Speaker 1: 0:26

Excellent. Well, I've got up bright and early here on Vancouver Island to speak with you and I'm tremendously excited because when I found your work it really was the missing piece in a puzzle that I've been putting together for the last two years of my own research and kind of drawing on other people's research. But Dunbar's number, which I think you're famous for, was really that tangible piece that I'm like, wow, all of this work that I've been looking at in terms of kind of frequency that we're spending time with close and kind of our wider spheres of social connections the numbers in there really makes it clear to me how, how possible it is, how accessible it is, to kind of uplift our lives through close friends and we don't actually need that many of them. Yeah, and I've been following a guy named Frederick Lalu for a couple of years. He wrote a book called Reinventing Organisations and one of the pillars of his work is about self-managing teams and he had come to it's between 12 and 15, that's the maximum you can have for a self-managing team.

Speaker 2: 1:50

Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. There is a real crisis point somewhere around about 40 where you organisations or groups work groups. They have to shift from being democratic to having a managing committee.

Speaker 1: 2:13

At 14?. Do you say 14?

Speaker 2: 2:15

40,. Okay, yes, it's between the 15 layer and the 50 layer that this happens and it seems to be critical.

Speaker 1: 2:21

You need more structure. You need more structure to it.

Speaker 2: 2:24

You need a management structure, basically if it's smaller than that. So you know, sort of, in terms of these layers, the five and 15 circles beliefs themselves.

Speaker 1: 2:35

So, in your opinion and loneliness, like the trajectory that it's been going on in recent history, can we turn this around?

Speaker 2: 2:50

The answer is yes, but my worry is that our communities are just too big, which means they won't happen easily, naturally. So we have to go out of our way to make it work, and this is really the burden of the latest book I've written, which is a collaboration with a couple of business consultants. We pitched at the implications of these ideas to business organisation, which is we really have to get back to, ironically, the old Victorian idea of an organisation as a village, as a community, and you have to provide the possibility for people to create a social world at work, because if they don't have a social world at work, it's going to be very difficult for them to parachute in quickly and simply and you're going to end up with a lot of loneliness and that means they're going to take more time off work because they're going to get depressed and they're going to get physically honest as a result, and you're putting a lot of pressure on the people they work with to fill in for them while they're off sick. It's not good for anybody. It's an easy problem to solve with a bit of careful forethought. The problem lies in the careful forethought.

Speaker 2: 4:27

It's very interesting if you look at what these big empire builders among the industrialists in the end of the 19th century, early 20th century did. A lot of them were Quakers anyway, which was a good start because they had this sense of communities. But even the ones that weren't Quakers so the Cadverys were Quakers, for example. But even people like Lord Leverhume, the founder of Unilever as it is now, were very clear that if you didn't create a community out of your workforce, you paid a very heavy price for it. And so they went to great lengths to build, sometimes extraordinarily beautiful accommodation for them. These were not kind of Manchester, back to backs of the early 19th century mill towns. These are houses which now sell for small fortunes because they're in private hands now on these estates that were built. But all of them in every house look different. None of these rows and rows of identifiers. Every house looked different. There was a central kind of village hall where, you know, the lunches could be put on for old people or philosophical meetings could be held to engage people and games could be played and there would be libraries and churches and pubs and things. So they thought very carefully about how to create this sense of a community so that everybody understood that.

Speaker 2: 6:24

You know you work for cadres, you work for uni. Leave, leave your homes. It was them. You were a member of that community and you were committed to it and they worked hard. That's why they ended up being so successful, for sure. So you know the tendency. You know, in the post-war, you know from the 1950s, we kind of got carried away with, dare I say it, mostly American sociologists telling us that all people were interested in working for money. You know. So you work them hard and you get rid of all these facilities.

Speaker 2: 7:01

You know, so all these places had tennis clubs and stuff like that. You're talking about the 1930s, you know, when tennis was very fashionable at all levels of society and they had. You know there were posh tennis clubs in the suburbs. But there would be tennis clubs, you know, for the workforce, the working families, because it was culturally a popular thing to do, at least in Britain, probably America too, and Mars, I'm sure they're saying there's another big family institution which is still a family institution, still run by the family. It has that same sense of creating a community. But there was a strong move away from that. The accountants, you know, mostly to blame. You know we can't measure what the consequence is. We can't measure the input and the output in terms of dollars, so it can't be very interesting. And you know money is going in but you know that's money wasted, could be spent on expensive business trips for the management instead.

Speaker 2: 8:06

And I think that was, that was, or we think that was a big mistake really. And if they want to have more successful businesses and organisations that survive, because the lifespan of businesses is very short now we're talking about 10 years as the average length of a footsie 200 company or a Dow Jones company now, whereas you know, some of those other successful organisations have been around, you know, for well over 150 years. If they, you know, if longevity is important which we think it is and it should be then they've got to rethink the investment patterns so that it's not so short term and rethink how they effectively, how they treat the workforce.

Speaker 2: 9:06

They have to view the workforce as part and parcel of the business, not as transient folk that you can kind of throw out tomorrow if you don't need them.

Speaker 1: 9:18

And just going back to the self managing part of that, like in my previous corporate organisation there wasn't a well being initiative, so I collaborated with one colleague initially to kind of get it going, and then we found other colleagues that were passionate about employee well being as well and we we managed to get a bit of budget from HR to do this and essentially we we drove it. And I think, thinking about those numbers that can be small, like empowering colleagues to start their own employee resource groups in whatever little niche they want and then letting them know that you know you don't even need that many people, Like even if you get two or three people signing up to this little group, that you come together every week or every two weeks, like that might be all you need for your work social.

Speaker 2: 10:11

Yes, yeah, I mean clearly. You know you have to be very sensitive in identifying what it is that will work as a social environment. You know tennis doesn't do it anymore. You know we have too much cheaper.

Speaker 1: 10:26

Badminton is pretty good, though we had a badminton group.

Speaker 2: 10:29

Yeah, Well, you know you've got to. You've got to see what the local culture is, and what the?

Speaker 2: 10:34

time, as it were. You know, because you're competing against more self contained family life now, as you were 50 hundred years ago. You're competing against television and you're competing against cheap supermarket alcohol, Right. So you've got to think in terms of what would actually work, what do people want, what would they stay on after work for? And places have done it.

Speaker 2: 11:00

So one of the examples we quote in our book is a SAB Miller who now part of in Bev, the big brewing giant. So I say be Miller is South African breweries. That's the SAB bit. And they're malchimated with or bought out Miller light, the American brewer.

Speaker 2: 11:20

And when they were set up as a SAB Miller from South Africa, right from the start, in all their factories and admin blocks, as it were, campuses, they had a bar. I mean they produced beer. So they put in a bar in the entrance for you every, effectively every building and you could just go along. You know, if they were open essentially, you know five to six every day stay open all night or anything they could go along. People went along, dropped in on the way home, had a beer chat to people. You met different people from different parts of the organization you wouldn't otherwise have met, and one of my co-authors, who worked for SAB Miller in those days, said 20 years later, the Facebook groups that were set up out of those bar meetings still going, even though none of these people work for the company anymore. They're scattered all over the universe.

Speaker 1: 12:22

The ties that were formed on that regularity of knowing that it's accessible, not that they even had to go there every day, but that they could.

Speaker 2: 12:30

If you turned up, you could guarantee there'd be somebody to talk to.

Speaker 1: 12:34

who'd be interested?

Speaker 2: 12:36

And if they'd never met them before, it would be an interesting hour that you could spend there. So there are things you can do that work. Singing is another very good one. Choirs really work extremely well. We refer to them as the icebreaker effect because they're so effective, but it's really about kind of thinking through and my pitch on it. I mean I've never quite said this in the book because I think my co-authors, who actually do run a very high level consultancy, were a bit nervous about offending too many people.

Speaker 1: 13:17

We'll have the exclusive Robin, thank you.

Speaker 2: 13:20

My pitch is that's what HR's job is. It's not regulating interviews and regulating diversity, tick boxes and all this kind of stuff which they got trapped into, and regulating the legal aspects of employer-employee things. What they should be doing is devising ways of creating this sense of belonging, and they do a lot better. They do a much better job and be more appreciative. They wouldn't have so much of the other work to do because people couldn't be constantly bickering and suing.

Speaker 1: 14:07

You mentioned before about you need the right activities to encourage people to stay on after work. But if you think of the effects, the positive effects of whatever this is in terms of people's retention and then sickness. Actually, there's no reason that some of these activities shouldn't take place in work time.

Speaker 2: 14:29

That's exactly so. And retention is a big one because that's very costly in the current circumstances to most of the big businesses. Because you train up, most jobs are now quite technical. They require a lot of knowledge of some kind, and you spend all this time training up somebody for the appropriate level, whether it's how the filing system works or whether it's what the technicalities of our production system are, or whatever it is. As soon as they're functioning well, they're off and you've wasted that money.

Speaker 1: 15:08

I hear it in Canada. Friends said recently she's coming up to three years, which means she has to look around because our current company would never give her the kind of pay rise that she can get if she jumps ship she can get a 10 grand pay rise and wouldn't they match her? And she's like no, that's a fault in the system, surely?

Speaker 2: 15:28

Yes, no, it is yes. Yeah, that's something which needs to be done at the same time or needs to be thought about at the same time. I mean there is a sense in which money is not the only thing people work for. But on the other hand, you don't want to treat them as slave labor, right, they'll give them a piton and they'll stay. But there is a sense in which people would rather have less money and work in a enjoyable, congenial environment, right, any time. And that's certainly I know when my co-authors have done surveys, and I think also that's come out of some of the big surveys that the various international consultancies have done. Again, people would much rather have 10,000 less and work in a congenial environment. It's a pleasure to be at that. You wake up in the morning and can't get to work fast enough because you enjoy it so much.

Speaker 2: 16:36

And again, there is a sense I mean that used to be true. Things like the BBC. The BBC notoriously paid considerably less than ITV to its staff. I mean we were talking about 10 grand less because they knew people just liked working for the BBC. I mean that was another aspect of this in the sense that it's the reputational side of the I work for the BBC the BBC will round the world, and that's part of that story. It's a congenial environment. So there's that reputational side, which is important. But equally there's the kind of village community. So there's a word I'm trying to think of here, meaning clubbishness but comradely or something like that that is often used in these contexts. And it's true. You know, if you get on with the people you work with, you work much more efficiently, not least because they don't have to explain everything to you. You just know it.

Speaker 1: 17:50

You've got that kind of hive mind.

Speaker 2: 17:55

It comes magically from one brain to another without actually having to have it explained, because you think the way, the same way.

Speaker 1: 18:02

Yes, and that can only come, I guess, once you've been working together in that team for a certain number of years.

Speaker 2: 18:07

Yes, yes, indeed. So yeah, it's like a football team. You know, it's all very well being an absolute genius, but that doesn't win the match.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Yeah, you've got to be working as a team.

Speaker 2: 18:19

You've got to be working as a team.

Speaker 1: 18:22

Do you have any thoughts on the shift to remote working and the necessity to still have some physical touch points with team members?

Speaker 2: 18:34

I do. The issue here to me is twofold. I'm not against remote working, because I work in a context where remote working is extremely common, let's say academia. So most academics will go into the lab or they're going to give their lectures to the department or seminars, but often they'll work at home if they want to actually get something done. So the academics are used to this.

Speaker 2: 19:08

But I'm very conscious of the fact that and this seems to be forgotten by everybody in the current enthusiasm for home working hybrid working is it's only possible for certain people, and those people tend to be paid more. And there's a whole bunch of people who simply cannot do it. Their job does not allow it, and they're people like the doorkeeper, the person on reception, the person who makes the sandwiches and the canteen or sweeps the floors or pulls the lever on the machines, or nurses or teachers face-to-face people and they tend to be paid less. So the risk is, if you don't think through this very carefully, you end up with a too class society and considerable envy and dissatisfaction coming from below. Secondarily, it's very clear that, however, it's clear why people want to work from home now that they have the experience of doing so during lockdown and are being allowed to do that is that it relieves you from the awful commute that you used to have. That's the real thing that people want to get away from, and clearly it's very advantageous.

Speaker 2: 20:47

However, there are two interesting observations I'd make here. One is this is not the first time we've tried this. We tried this in the late 90s In big cities. Big cities became very expensive to rent big tower blocks in, so a lot of companies decided that the way to do this was to give everybody a laptop, because laptops would just come in, send them off to their cottages and they could work from home and come in to the office when they needed to. And there was a whole lot of people who set up in consultancies to facilitate this, and the message that they were giving you know, men, women and child because I was sort of on the periphery of this at the time was do not think you can put all the money you save on your rental footprint in the bank, because if you do, your company will fall apart.

Speaker 2: 21:55

And it will fall apart because people working from home face two problems. One is either they will overwork because there's no time to go home at five o'clock, they will work through and they'll burn out or they will just lose focus and engagement with the organization because they won't be seeing anybody. And I remember one meeting one chap saying look, what you have to do is you have to use quite a lot of that money to set up systems that allow you to manage that. Part of that is having not a supervisory system but a kind of keeping an eye on people. And he said I'm not going to beat about the bush there is only one group of people who can do this and that's women. It has to be women because they're the ones men won't pick up on the queues. So this is your job is simply to sort of ring around everybody now and again and sort of how are you doing?

Speaker 2: 23:14

You know going all right there's women will pick up mysteriously because he was a bloke too Mysteriously. Somehow women know when somebody isn't quite right. They're not phoning in as often as they used to. When you phone them you're not getting the same vibes back and you've got to be able to pick that up so you can do something about it, because once they're into that mode, it's downhill very quickly and they'll fall apart and you'll lose them. And the other thing is you have to create regular social get-togethers and the last thing you must ever do at those, in other words, you must go and hire a castle in Scotland and take everybody up there and you must not mention work. Right, you've just got to create things, you know, that engage people dancing and singing and partying, party partying, but in a big feast, and things like that, cultural activities to create this sense of belonging and knowing each other, because otherwise and within less than a decade, everybody was back in work. They didn't work. And so the other nice example I had another meeting and some people from Unilever were explaining the process they'd gone through, trying to so they'd Unilever's headquarters.

Speaker 2: 24:46

They had three headquarters, campuses 30 miles apart on a triangle, and I thought this is stupid. This is a big footprint, so we will merge these three onto a new site and then sell off the land. So they built this purpose-built site. They thought about it very, very carefully. They taught people through it for a year before they actually got there. And again, here's the laptop go and work at home pop-desking when you get in. Only come in when you need to for a meeting. No managers offices, all open plan. When you come in, we're going to make the environment very congenial for you. There's going to be a you know, michelin-star restaurant there. There's going to be boutique shops and a gym and all these kind of things to make your life pleasant.

Speaker 2: 25:34

And I thought the people. We're going to have real trouble with the old people, more senior people, because they're going to say what about my six-inch pile of carpet and my 15 secretaries at my Beckencourt, my drinks cabinet in the corner? And the ones who had jumped? It would be the youngsters, the 20-something graduates, and it was completely. They were absolutely astounded and completely side-swiped because it was the other way around. All the old folk went whoopee. I can have a game of golf at lunchtime, I can take the kids to school, all these kind of things. But of course they got embedded home social networks by them.

Speaker 1: 26:12

That's it, and the young people are going there to find it.

Speaker 2: 26:15

That was exactly the response of the young people. They said what do you mean? Not come into work? We come into work to see our friends. That is our social world, and so you know my worry about this is the younger gen. Younger cohorts are the ones that are actually going to look at this, thinking it's a good idea, and then suffer badly and that needs to be thought about. But my suspicion is it's not going to stay the course of time, because people find it important to talk to each other face-to-face when they're trying to work problems out, whatever that problem might be, whether it's a design thing or an administrative thing or what have you. They do it much better in face-to-face and this came out very nicely. We published one paper on it. Microsoft published another paper on it.

Speaker 2: 27:16

These essentially show different data sets.

Speaker 2: 27:18

Microsoft's paper was looking at their entire workforce In the US.

Speaker 2: 27:25

There's 60,000 people, some silly number and they looked at the email traffic before ensuring lockdown and what happened with the email traffic was the email traffic to the work group, and we shared the same with data from MIT in Cambridge Mass and the University, again looking at the entire academic email trails, your email frequencies with the people, your work group or research group in that other case remain constant, and what dropped off dramatically was emails to other people spontaneous, casual, serendipitous contacts, which were created by largely out of face-to-face meetings. And so so you were not talking to new people, you're only talking to old people, so that's reducing the opportunity for new ideas to come into work groups. Secondarily, people were spending much more time online than they had ever spent in face-to-face committees Because they were worried about not being there. So the short answer or short lesson on this is you can end up wasting a lot more time and getting much less done and getting much less Flow of ideas around the system, which are the things that trigger new discoveries those Realizations, the ha ha's Melting pots of ideas.

Speaker 1: 29:09

Yeah and I'd love to you mentioned before about and people Calling up and like checking in how are you and is there? Is that kind of a reframing that's needed, like, rather than managers, do we need coaches, so the managers rather than like looking over, checking what you've been doing, the coaches like looking to kind of build and see what's, see what tools and resources you need to be able to do your work in a better way.

Speaker 2: 29:40

That's an interesting idea. The answer may well be yes, in some sense. That Because part of the problem is we're not, on the whole, most of us, very good at managing anyway, and people get put into management positions Because they've been good at something else.

Speaker 1: 30:00

Mm-hmm right, who likes managing people? I had a PR agency for a few years. I didn't really enjoy man.

Speaker 2: 30:06

I much prefer working side by side with people exactly so and the yeah, the, the, the object lesson here we keep coming back to in the book, which is simply called the social brain, the psychology of successful organizations, or something like that, is Gore-tex. Wl go the company, wl go that make Gore-tex. Because right from the start, when they've set up Bill Gore, having worked for DuPont's, the big American chemical giant, and comes to conclusion these big multinationals are dysfunctional, is what happens is rival reefs grow up Between different silos within the organization. They don't collaborate, information doesn't get passed on, all sorts things like that. He decided the problem was their size and there was an optimal size for all managing Relationships and he came to the, down to the figure of 150. So all to this day, all their factory units only have 150 people. They've up to the bit that the limit is now 200 and no more.

Speaker 2: 31:25

Absolutely, it's very straight. Buildings are never more than two stories, ground floor and first floor, in order to facilitate Personal relationships and ease of access. You don't have to climb up lots of steps to go and see somebody. The result of that is so it's a hugely successful medium, medium-sized company. Huge is successful. We're all wearing Gore-tex somewhere.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Even the astronauts had Gore-tex in there On the moon, you know had a Gore-tex in their spaces when they, as they expanded I mean, he literally started in his backyard Set this company up when he invented the product and then, as they've expanded, they, they, rather than build a bigger factory, which is what everybody asked us, they would build a new factory, often literally on the parking lot next door, each factories completely self-contained. Of course, the board Gives them their targets, but then after that everything's up to individual factories to do this. So it's what they call their flat lattice management structure, rather than a hierarchical one, because they keep the numbers small. Everybody knows who everybody is, and so nobody has actual labels, right? So the only thing you have on your jacket Is the name badge, just as Gore-tex associate.

Speaker 2: 32:53

Brilliant because everybody knows who the factory manager is, everybody knows who the accountant is, everybody knows who's the sales Team, everybody knows who suites the floor, everybody knows who pulls the levers to produce the stuff, everybody knows who makes sandwiches Personally. And therefore they work much, much more effectively together and so long as the board is kind of directing and say, okay, you know you need to target this market, or we need to target this market, you need to produce for that, then because they work together and collaborate together, they hit their targets. Don't need to do anything else, they don't need to give, incentivize them. They just enjoy being a little community.

Speaker 1: 33:37

So it sounds like they went completely the opposite way to what you knew Unilever did, trying to then bring them all into one hundred. One hub. No, no, no, you've already got it right.

Speaker 2: 33:46

Yes, in one sense, but I think their hubs are already very big. That was the problem. Because it's I mean Unilever is a, you know, huge Organization. I mean it's an interesting company because it's it's a dual national company. It's jointly owned by the UK and the Dutch. That's why the uni bit came, came in. The lever bit is the original founder, william Lever, who invented margarine basically. But somehow they teamed up with the Dutch over margarine and Amalgamated these two companies, who are the big Dutch margarine company. God, we used to eat it in Africa, big tins. Well, I can think it's flora, long before flora.

Speaker 2: 34:43

But they because they started with also margarine and so that that was the two things. They made their money on them. When they amalgamated with the Dutch Margarine makers they became effectively due course Unilever, to reflect that, but it's jointly owned the headquarters here. They were going to move it to Amsterdam, but two or two years ago and there was such a problem they can have their headquarters in either country really just by my tradition.

Speaker 2: 35:14

It's always been here and they thought they'd move it to Amsterdam, but probably for the benefits of the European market. But they didn't really need to actually, because they already off. The company is already in the use still, so wasn't really an issue, I suspect. Actually it was much more likely to be in an attempt to Prevent the company being taken over by predators, because the Dutch have very strict laws on foreign companies buying Dutch companies.

Speaker 1: 35:57

All right.

Speaker 2: 35:58

Yeah, very strict and it can't be done. So it might well have been an attempt to protect their existence, but somebody should think of that here.

Speaker 1: 36:12

And in Canada, I think. Here it just as soon as your tech business in particular takes off, you're just waiting for an American company to buy you.

Speaker 2: 36:20

Yes, exactly, yeah, exactly so, yeah, I mean, this is it's free trade. We invented free trade, I'm afraid. So you know. The question is has free trade outlived its use in that sense? In that sense because it, you know, it's all very well and it does in some sense often lead to greater efficiencies, but also leads to the destruction of all industries. Right, very, very quickly. And this was the problem with Hershey's buying cadbures. They had to promise not to break cadbures up as a major competitor to keep it going. It's not entirely clear that they stuck to their word.

Speaker 1: 37:13

My grandfather was a Cadbury's man.

Speaker 2: 37:17

Yeah, well, you know, people who worked for Cadbury's were what the Japanese would call company people, a company man. You're a part of the family. They were Quakers. They built, you know, the cellioc estate for their workers.

Speaker 1: 37:38

But the last thing I just want to mention is so my last interview was with Richard Bartlett, so he was talking about he's been working with your Dumbars number for many years in terms of teams and he talks about scale, scale and rhythm. So I think we've spoken quite a lot about this and I find it very intriguing to think about organizations operating in this way and being very strategic about scale and then rhythm. I guess, that's coming into the new way of working in terms of remote working and having rhythm.

Speaker 2: 38:14

It's all about the bonding process, really that's where the rhythm comes in, it's creating that sense of because it doesn't come for free, just by getting the right numbers. It doesn't mean to say it the rhythm an intentional rhythm, yeah yeah.

Speaker 2: 38:30

So it says it's back to how you're working. It's back to how small children see friends. They think if they say Jimmy's my friend, that makes Jimmy my friend. But if you ask Jimmy, are you friends with so and so no, so it's the same in numbers. I mean that you get the numbers right is really crucial, but you have to do something to make the people in those numbers gel with each other. It doesn't happen automatically.

Speaker 1: 39:00

And no, like you don't necessarily need to say it out loud, but through your behaviors and activities let them see that they are on your page, they're on your paper.

Speaker 2: 39:12

Yes, exactly, exactly so. So it's about seeing the community as a community and about the longing. And to create that sense of belonging requires, essentially it requires rhythm, literally in many cases, because it requires a sense of doing things like singing and dancing together.

Speaker 1: 39:38

Yes, moving together.

Speaker 2: 39:40

Yeah, moving together.

Speaker 1: 39:42

And you mentioned your book the Social Brain.

Speaker 2: 39:45

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 39:46

Is there any other resources that you would like to recommend, given the topics we've spoken about, that you would like to direct people to?

Speaker 2: 39:54

So the other book is my friend's book, which was the one actually it was two before because that has, if you like, the friend's book summarizes the theory, but in a readable way, and the Social Brain business book applies the theory.

Speaker 1: 40:16

Into the corporate world.

Speaker 2: 40:17

Into the corporate world.

Speaker 1: 40:19

Yes, amazing. Thank you so much for the gift of your time today, robin. I really, really appreciate you jumping on. You're welcome, thank you, thank you. And I hope this won't be the last time that I get to speak to you. I hope that this will be something that I come back to and kind of share where I get to in my research and hopefully, on my mission to find scalable, accessible solutions to loneliness.

Speaker 2: 40:44

Well, we should be interested to hear about them. If you, this is the nearer of honor that we're all trying to achieve.