Chris Bauer: This interview’s subject primarily is the concept of leadership, where we’re looking at a question of how future generations of leaders will be transformed by the pandemic?

Chris Bauer: We’re quite interested in your experience of leadership through the crisis and what might be retained, what we might learn from that, and how we can use that moving forward to guide practices of leadership in organizations of any scale or size in the public or the private sector.

Chris Bauer: Can you please start with your own leadership journey today, how you understand the concept of leadership, and how have you experienced it so far in a summarized style?

Audrey Tang: OK. I have to first say that this meeting, the voice is being recorded, but we’re not publishing the voice record. We’re going to co edit the transcript for at least 10 days before publishing. When we publish it would be free of copyright on both sides. I believe my assistant have communicated this to you.

Chris Bauer: Yes, that’s perfectly fine on both ends. I’ll be using the transcript as an input to writing up what we’re terming as “Origin Story,” which is a way of describing a case study around the leadership experience. I’ll also supply the Origin Story back to you before that would reach into the public domain for your approval and edits, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Excellent. With your informed consent now comes my answer. Now, what I would like to think of leadership, when you said “Take me as far back as possible,” begins, I believe, when I dropped out of high school, back in ‘95.

Audrey Tang: I was 14 years old. I told the head of my school, principal Du (杜), that I found this new thing called the World Wide Web, and knowledge is being created there. I would like to devote 16 hours a day, not just 8 hours a day, to research, and you can really help by allowing me to drop out of school.

Audrey Tang: She thought for a minute and said “OK, tomorrow you don’t have to go to my school anymore, godspeed with your research.” I think that’s leadership. It’s risk taking, because it was against the law.

Audrey Tang: We didn’t have experimental school law at that time, so to home school is to practice in civil disobedience, and a head of school basically said she will absorb the risk for me.

Audrey Tang: I feel much safer, the second she said that. Also, it saved me a lot of time. At the time I was interested in the phenomenon of swift trust. How complete strangers over the Internet can trust each other so quickly.

Audrey Tang: Staying in school for eight hours a day, or five hours a day, doesn’t help with my research at all. It’s a massive time saver, that she said that. I think that’s leadership. It’s reducing risk for everyone involved. It’s also saving time for everyone involved.

Chris Bauer: From there, then as you experienced that first sort of exposure to the concept, how did you consider embedding constructs of leadership? Is leadership an important idea for you? Do you consciously practice leadership, or do you reflect upon your experiences of leadership?

Audrey Tang: When I said saving time and reducing risk, I mean doing so across the board. Saving time for everyone, not making trade off. Not reducing risk for that one, while making a trade off, increasing risk from somewhere else.

Audrey Tang: Taking all the sides, when you talk about leadership, is what springs to my mind. It’s been variously described as leadership based on empathy, or leadership based on the idea of servant leadership. Many people have defined in various different ways. I wouldn’t add any adjective to it. To me, leadership means taking all the science.

Chris Bauer: Have you observed leadership in others that helps you to evolve your own practice? Is it something that can be learned from exposure, and from experience?

Audrey Tang: When I began my journey on the Internet, becoming not a digital native, but a migrant, then I discovered this community, at the time called the Free Software community. The term open source have not been invented at the time.

Audrey Tang: One of the most prominent in that community is called the Perl community, led by Larry Wall. Larry Wall is a very interesting figure, he’s kind of my mentor for many years. Larry Wall often says things like, instead of thinking about singularity, let’s focus on plurality. That’s what I learned from him.

Audrey Tang: Also, in Perl, P-E-R-L, the E stands, according to Larry, for eclectic. Meaning that instead of seeing one side win and one side lose, we should always take any tension, any conflict, as an opportunity to provide an eclectic innovation, so that the shared value is taken care of.

Audrey Tang: He practiced that over the course of leading the Perl, and now Raku communities, so I would say, yeah, it could be taught and learned.

Chris Bauer: Being part of those communities that were making such powerful use of code, and the opportunities that technology can afford to open up, is that also a crucial component of leadership?

Chris Bauer: To be able to harness the powers of the tools around you, or to learn how to augment yourself with additional capabilities, to achieve your goals in life? Is that a requirement of leadership, to be open to that, and to also invest yourself in acquiring the knowledge necessary to harness the power of these extensions of self that allow you to engage more meaningfully with others?

Audrey Tang: I think of it in a reverse manner. Instead of thinking these spaces are my extensions of myself and my ambitions, and so on, I think that we as individuals are just passers by to a larger pyramid in building.

Audrey Tang: A larger project that has a life of it’s own, but we help shape part of it. We being good enough ancestors, not perfect ancestors, always expect that descendants, the people come after us, actually have a better grasp of how to use these technologies and spaces.

Audrey Tang: Instead of trying to be perfect and define, it’s perfectly so that we essentially foreclose possibilities of creation of people later on, instead of just called amusers, which is also used by some other addictive industry.

Audrey Tang: I prefer the idea of human experience, not user experience. Basically, I lead by example, by creating such spaces and practicing it a little bit, but always focusing on empowering people closest to the pain and younger than me, so that they can take these tool kits and make it even better.

Chris Bauer: Does that mean being able to pass on then, not just knowledge, but a code base or assets that reflect the progress that has been made?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, yes. The transcript that we’re producing now, we relinquish it to the public domain immediately, instead of having to wait until both of us log out after 75 or something years.

Audrey Tang: Basically this is empowering the descendants in action, because if we want to hold to the royalty of the estate or something, then it essentially means that we only allow the use of the pre-authorized while we’re still alive, derivative works.

Audrey Tang: The spirit of Free Software, and now open source, means that we’re free to experiment with each other’s creative work, even for uses that are not anticipated by the originator.

Chris Bauer: Taking this philosophy into different domains in the world, particularly I’m thinking the socio technical domains of government in which you operate, and the liaisons and touchpoints with the greater public, but also with industry and corporations and capitalism and all of these other movements.

Chris Bauer: Is it a fluid process seeking to adopt this interpretation that you’ve described of leadership and of the role and responsibilities that come along with that? Is it easy to operate in that way when you move into domains that maybe have different traditional paradigms or ways of operating historically and different ways of defining what it might take to demonstrate leadership?

Audrey Tang: As long as there is a metric of risk and a metric of work, then saving time and reducing risk always works in those domains. In domains where there is no concept of risk or there is no concept of chore, then, of course, this wouldn’t work.

Chris Bauer: Do you translate the language, or do you operate as a translator in those domains? Then to take these ideas of saving time and risk, and that translates into productivity or efficiency or opportunities for incremental growth in the ways in which outcomes or goals are typically articulated in those types of environments.

Chris Bauer: Maybe focus specifically on the pandemic crisis, for example, and then walk me through how you might apply this idea of the role responsibilities of leadership to operating in the midst of the pandemic crisis?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Sure. So far, I’ve worked with the systems of mass distribution and also with the SMS based check in system to enable contact tracing and very soon also vaccine appointment and reservation.

Audrey Tang: These are in any country three major systems of the pandemic prevention. Starting from the mass distribution of last end of January, we learned from public health experts that’s the R value. The basic reproduction number defines the percentage in any given space. The people’s social distance and masks need to reach 75 percent before we can avoid community spread.

Audrey Tang: If we get three quarters of people in any space wearing masks and washing hands, then any community of transmission will not become a community spread. That’s basic public health knowledge. But at the time, Taiwan only produces less than 2 million medical grade masks a day, but with 23 million people, that means masks has to be rationed.

Audrey Tang: This is a classical governance domain thing. Limited, scarce resources, fair distribution, equity of this enters play. Instead of saying we need to, for example, require people to buy the mask, we very quickly decided that we need to ration it.

Audrey Tang: Instead of saying people need to buy them online, we immediately said they can go to their nearby pharmacies to get with their national health cards two per week and then later on as the production increase three per week, nine per two weeks and nowadays, essentially limitless.

Audrey Tang: To manage this and communicate and display takes this idea of taking all the sides. We need to reduce the chore for pharmacists by making sure that they don’t answer the calls asking whether the masks has been replenished? Is there sufficient amount today? We need to communicate.

Audrey Tang: For people, we need to explain masks are there to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands, appealing to self interest instead of saying respecting your elders, which doesn’t reach three quarters of people, and [laughs] many others… a cute spokesdog, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we took all the sides, established the initial rules, and then people, of course, said, “OK. What if I work very long hours, so when I reach the pharmacy has closed and I don’t live with anyone so I don’t have anyone I trust with my national health card?”

Audrey Tang: There we work with the economic sector that’s the convenience store owner. Then this whole visibility of masks availability is prototype in the social sector by volunteer civic technologists in the open source community.

Audrey Tang: What I call this is a People-Public-Private Partnership. That is to say, the open source community prototype, the norm. The public sector amplify the norm, and then the economic sector implements the norm. I believe that is a concrete example where everyone’s risk is reduced and time saved.

Chris Bauer: Is that a model that can be applied across any of those interactions? Does it apply when you look to generate new ideas or to innovate solutions to problems?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. For example, for contact tracing enabling, instead of asking people to download an app, we simply say, “Scan it with your phones built-in camera and send that SMS and toll free.” Of course, specialized scanners that recognize only contact tracing QR codes very soon gets developed that gets into the contact tracing, Bluetooth, space tools and so on.

Audrey Tang: What used to take weeks or months in other countries took three days in Taiwan. First, because we have the hindsight of literally 2020, but also because the social sector and open source community already provided working prototypes and design. All we have to say is say, “OK. We’ll just standardize on this SMS code.”

Chris Bauer: Is this something that you think can be successful as a methodology effectively for creating solutions quickly for speed to impact?

Chris Bauer: Does this work outside of the public sphere? Do you think that this type of methodology could be applied for organizations working in any sector across any area? Are there limitations to how to create this relationship between these three entities to produce results that are meaningful for everyone?

Audrey Tang: This basic idea, instead of treating people in the social sector as users, treat them as co-creators. Instead of “for” the people, “with” the people, or even “after” the people.

Audrey Tang: This is not limited to public sector. Of course, the original branding of open source is essentially saying free software is ethically good, but open source make business sense. That was the original argument back in ‘97.

Audrey Tang: I would say anywhere that has a user community that could be turned into co-creator community through crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, or even distributed ledger technologies. Then this social configuration is ripe for this people public private partnerships.

Chris Bauer: This idea of increasing the speed, reducing the risk. We’ve observed from our research to date around this topic what we’re terming high velocity leadership requirements. It’s a state of change in the speed of leadership through particularly the initial advent of the crisis and then the need to respond and imperative to act.

Chris Bauer: A lot of isolation from your traditional networks needing to reconfigure and reform those connections in different ways, and essentially responsibility increasing quite significantly for leaders whose every decision then has cascading impacts on multitudes of others. Is that something that you’ve observed? Would you describe the crisis as a high velocity environment?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. My original research topic back when I was 15 years old was swift trust, so sure. [laughs] I mean, swift means high velocity, and trust is the currency that we operate in to give no trust is to get no trust, I would agree. Yes.

Chris Bauer: How is it then? Is there a different tool kit or a different way of thinking that’s required in it in the midst of that swiftness, in the midst of that high velocity? I’m thinking particularly about how to act with agility and confidence despite the need for speed and so on.

Chris Bauer: To simultaneously balance out these two things as you described them, moving quicker, but simultaneously reducing risk?

Audrey Tang: Making it safer. Safer while driving at high speed.

Chris Bauer: Saver while driving at high speed. How can we operate safer while driving at higher and higher speeds?

Audrey Tang: I lived in Germany for a year when I was 11. I was told on their highways, there’s no speed limit. It’s safer when you would drive at high speed. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Maybe that idea came from that lived experienced on the Autobahn. [laughs]

Chris Bauer: There, the drivers are quite notoriously technically adaptive and have learned in that environment. It’s a state of high speed transport across their roadway…into other environments where people accelerate to whatever speed they think suitable and so on.

Chris Bauer: Yet, they haven’t got the experience that often leads to unknown consequences. What do you think we have to provide to leaders that aren’t used to operating in high velocity, how can they adapt quickly to practicing in that environment once there’s this imperative to act?

Audrey Tang: Or they can’t.

Chris Bauer: What do we do with the leaders who are thrust into the pandemic or into the high velocity environment, who nonetheless had to take on responsibility?

Chris Bauer: What we’re finding is there was an increased willingness to accept failure, in a sense, that leaders were expected to act, but it was also expected that they were going to make mistakes along the way.

Chris Bauer: Despite the fact that there had been a history of “fail fast, fail often” and try to include some of these ideas into their world. It hadn’t vetted in strongly in a real sense. Since the pandemic, it maybe didn’t.

Audrey Tang: So, don’t. Don’t lead it. Follow the people. Find a community like g0v, g zero in Taiwan that are experts in open source rapid prototyping. There’s the code for all network a few years back. In Japan is the code for Japan network doing the same thing and so on.

Audrey Tang: In every country or jurisdiction with press freedom and communication freedom, there exists such communities of open innovation practitioners. Engage them and yield the prototyping power of moving fast safely to these people. The leader becomes a follower in the initial prototyping stage.

Chris Bauer: Essentially, looking at them as those drivers on those German roads, for all intents and purposes, they do have the experience operating in that type of environment. They also have the experience and the comfort with the prototyping process and the idea of experimentation and continuous learning in these faster techniques. Are you able to quickly adapt to harness the power of resources you have within your network and community?

Audrey Tang: We can call them scrum masters or coaches or co-pilots. It’s not a new idea.

Chris Bauer: Building on this idea of transforming a generation of leaders, do you have any thoughts about that? We’re quite interested in the legacy impact of this specific pandemic crisis on leadership. What did we learn? What’s going to be retained? What will we likely not look to retain in our practices or in our experiences?

Chris Bauer: Have you observed ways in which this generation of leaders who have had the responsibility of  leading organizations, countries, even every individual who’s participating within the movements to promote change? Have you observed any fundamental changes that we could look at in that generation?

Audrey Tang: Sure. It’s a generation of worldwide comma, urgency and therefore a worldwide community. We all become time zone travelers, if not time travelers. That means that the idea of who are close to you is not defined by physical distance, but by first Internet connection speed, and then also the pandemic urgency.

Audrey Tang: All the jurisdictions that are facing similar mask, vaccine, and contact tracing situations are kind of by definition our neighbors and will stay quite late to get a connected with them.

Audrey Tang: The point I’m making is that before the pandemic the leaders often have this idea of closeness like people in my in circle that are my constituents or stakeholders that I must respond to, at least to give an account to, and people who are frankly, speaking outside this range that I care only symbolically, but the pandemic changed all that.

Audrey Tang: Because for the first time, well, unless, of course, you belong to the immediate Climate Action Group before the pandemic. For the first time in human history, everybody feel the same urgency and that enabled a reconstitution of neighborhood and also the in group.

Chris Bauer: You think that’s something or aspects of that that are likely to be retained when we move on to this high velocity environment while we’re still pursuing opportunities for growth? What were some of those factors that were relatively unique to the pandemic lessons in environmental or contextual influence?

Chris Bauer: What were leadership approaches like? What are they likely to choose to retain in the kinds of models and philosophies that were adopted through the pandemic?

Audrey Tang: But first of all, I think this information crisis, cybersecurity threats, the climate change, of course, increasingly and many other issues have frankly speaking, the same configuration as a pandemic. In the case of computer virus is literally a pandemic. [laughs] What I’m trying to say is that there’s no shortage of problems that require this world neighborhood feeling to tackle.

Audrey Tang: Often, this is global enough so that the open source and innovation community already have readily baked configurations that can tackle 80 percent of the issue at hand but you need to move swiftly and with grace to complete the last mile, the last 20 percent to feed that to the local knowledge.

Audrey Tang: Domain knowledge is important, local knowledge doubly so, but in this particular case the domain is worldwide. I do believe most of these characteristics will be retained after the pandemic. SARS we’re at 2.1 beta and delta at this moment. When 2.2 or SARS 3.0 gets released and then there’s another wave that require the same urgency.

Chris Bauer: I’ve just got a couple of items to finish off. One is around the education, or the opportunities to pass on knowledge more widely around leadership experience. What do you think is the best way to teach leadership?

Chris Bauer: Or do you think it can be taught and what have you learnt from your experiences in those communities that can help us understand how we might better share our experiences or knowledge with our peers across other leaders so that collectively we can learn from each other while simultaneously developing our own ideas on how to move forward?

Audrey Tang: I literally blogged about it with the title “Lessons Learned From Open Source Communities” back in 2016. I believe many of these ideas are still relevant today. I’m just pasting it to the link.

Audrey Tang: The subtitles say, “Be bold to search and ask,” instead of saying, “Read F, the Fine manual.” We hold each other’s hand, and have a warm reception to newcomers and be very quick to clean out any cash.

Audrey Tang: That’s to say their preconceptions, because the new emergencies all require us to rethink fundamental pre concepts, and to hug the trolls, and to communicate taking all the sides, and finally, worst is better.

Chris Bauer: That’s a good playbook. If you already made one, you could ship over to us. Thank you. What comes next is my final question around where we go from here. We’re looking at — as you described — we’re not looking in an acute way of the pandemic, as if it’s in isolation.

Chris Bauer: This particular set of conditions, it won’t ever be, but rather trying to use it as a sign posting or a learning experience for other similar dynamics that humanity will encounter in our future horizon here.

Chris Bauer: As such, we can see some of those big challenges, particularly in decarbonization and sustainability, and harnessing digital transformation in the emergence of a world working heavily in concert with smart technologies. What are the opportunities?

Chris Bauer: How do you see the future in terms of what comes next in regards to having used this almost, as you say, 2.2. In your experience, does it just naturally unfold what comes next, or are there some things that we can expect or that you can foresee are likely to occur as a result of our experiences with this?

Audrey Tang: The future is already here, just not evenly distributed, and that also applies to the variants, right? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We just had our first local delta small community transmission. It seems to be contained, almost eradicated, but we don’t know. That, basically, I think, is very fresh on all of our minds, that these new challenges and opportunities naturally occur. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Some part of the world encounter the future and deal with that in an open manner, so that other people can learn from it before it spreads to other localities. I think pandemic is a generally useful metaphor, the threats of that, that you just described, for example, the decarbonization.

Audrey Tang: The urgency is different because every climate is different, and some jurisdictions may benefit even temporarily from the climate change and therefore not assigned the same urgency to this problem.

Audrey Tang: Nevertheless, they can and should learn from renewable energy and other decarbonization techniques, even though the climate is not technically speaking urgency to them. This is much like the pandemic situation. I think this is generally a reoccurring pattern.

Chris Bauer: Brilliant. Well, thank you so much. I agree that that was a fascinating conversation and I’m very pleased that you took the opportunity to participate in our research.

Chris Bauer: I look forward to inviting you to come and join my students in the fall if we could find another window of opportunity for that to share some of these thoughts and others that you maybe can with us.

Chris Bauer: Thank you again for your time.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Until then, live long and prosper.