HOW WE OUTSOURCE OUR POWER

Host Stephen Barden asks: 

How do we make sure that we don’t shrink ourselves when we outsource to others – to technology or to other people? 

How do we keep a reasonable balance between making sure we maintain our own power of learning from experience – on the one hand- and being agile and quick off the mark on the other?

For more information about Stephen Barden and his work please visit:
www. stephenbarden.org
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Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Power of Balance. I’m stephen Barden.

Today I want to explore the question – how do we make sure that we don’t shrink ourselves when we outsource to others – to technology or to other people? How do we, in other words, keep a reasonable balance between making sure we maintain our own power of learning from experience – on the one hand- and being agile and quick off the mark on the other?

So, why did I say learning from experience rather than just learning?

The word experience comes from the Latin “Experientia”- to try:, to experiment, to learn by participating. 

And it is from that learning by participating that we gain our Expertise – our skill, our expertness, our proficiency at applying (and improving) what we have learned. 

So, if we don’t participate in the making of our learning, we don’t gain expertise. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones may have listened to hours of Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly but they would not have gained any expertise as musicians until they participated – until they played, adapted, experimented – and created their own music. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the power of balance. I’m stephen Barden.

Today I want to explore the question – how do we make sure that we don’t shrink ourselves when we outsource to others – to technology or to other people? How do we, in other words, keep a reasonable balance between making sure we maintain our own power of learning from experience – on the one hand- and being agile and quick off the mark on the other?

So, why did I say learning from experience rather than just learning?

The word experience comes from the Latin “Experientia”- to try:, to experiment, to learn by participating. 

And it is from that learning by participating that we gain our Expertise – our skill, our expertness, our proficiency at applying (and improving) what we have learned. 

So, if we don’t participate in the making of our learning, we don’t gain expertise. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones may have listened to hours of Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly but they would not have gained any expertise as musicians until they participated – until they played, adapted, experimented – and created their own music. 

So, we need to be very careful about outsourcing our experiences – in the interests of what we see as efficiency and faster success. It is not the result that enriches our learning- that builds our expertise - but the experience of getting there. We never gain expertise purely by technical skills. We need to know how to manage competitors, allies, systems and environments as well. We need, in other words to experience the building of our learning. Hand that to someone or something else – even partially – and you diminish your own capacity to understand and manage yourself in your world. You steadily shrink the space in which you can exercise your God given powers as a human being.

And that is exactly what too many of us are currently doing. AI is the most obvious example, and I’ll dig down into that, but  there are many others. Some seemingly, quite trivial. “likes”, “loves” and “supports” on social media (even though we all like getting them). Then there are those institutions – including governments - outsourcing to consultancies. And they’re outsourcing not just the solving of specific problems, by the expertise for which they were appointed in the first place: managing, strategizing and even executing.  

Some of outsourcing,  we’ve been doing for centuries; the hiring of mercenaries for example. Some are very recent. But the issue is we’re outsourcing more and more of ourselves, in exchange for information, entertainment, social influence and what we think of as success – particularly short-term success.

Alarm bells are ringing about AI – but not, I believe, about the real danger. 

The issue with AI is not that it will get so powerful that it’ll leap out of its box, take over our minds and then eat us alive for good measure. It isn’t even that we are handing our knowledge to it. It’s that we are shrivelling our experience: - that marvellous combination of emotions, intuition, thought, physical action and spatial mapping : our building blocks - by which we not only manage ourselves in the world  but learn how to do so better and better. 

By outsourcing to AI – and it’s not just AI of course – we may get a result but we bypass our experience of it – and, with it, the learning we have gained.   A recent MIT study, that you may have seen, pinpoints this exact issue. When we by-pass our experience, the neural activity and balance that is needed to manage  ourselves in our world, atrophies. Use it or lose it. The study found that the key brain waves in those people who used AI extensively were severely downgraded. Those waves are: Alpha, bridging the gap between the conscious and subconscious mind and  managing fantasy and imagination. Beta waves through which we manage alertness; conscious and logical thought.  Theta regulating light sleep, inventiveness, creativity; and deep emotions. And delta waves linked to the deepest levels of sleep, where we completely relax and – essentially - heal. 

All those – according to the MIT study – are reduced. And the problem doesn’t end there. They are all linked. That’s kind of obvious. If my ability to manage deep emotions is disrupted, then I’m going to find it pretty difficult to relax or even use my creative imagination. Disruption in one set of waves will destabilise the others – and, with it, our capacity to manage our behaviours, thoughts, emotions and well-being, overall. 

So, what we’re doing in turning increasingly to AI is not just outsourcing our experiential learning, but our neural abilities to learn.  It’s no wonder that the MIT study found that those with what they called AI Dependency tended to be more passive, less joined up in their thinking and had much weaker memory. 83% of the AI users couldn’t quote even one sentence from the essay they had written with AI. Whereas around 89% of those using search and their own brains could recite their own work - and pretty accurately.  And the kicker is that the damage is not short term: the neural activity did not return to the baseline even after the AI use was stopped. 

But even if we didn’t know anything about that, even if this study had never been published, all of us who have used AI and large Language models will have experienced the shutting down of our own thinking effort. The exercise of our own brainpower. When we ask it to to write this presentation  or that strategy paper we’re actually by-passing the logical, creative, physical and – of course– emotional effort to do those things ourselves. We are not exercising those muscles. We are robbing ourselves of experiencing the process. And it is in the experience that we learn; not, in the result. It’s a little like a tennis player hitting a great shot and not knowing how she did it. And therefore, not being able to do it again.

Ironically, AI may be forcing us to think deeply about an assumption that has driven most societies for at least a century: that success, the end, is everything. What the debate is hopefully exposing is that owning and building the ways and means to an outcome – the experience and learning - is more important. You may get the interview through your brilliant AI-written application but what are you going to do at the interview itself? And what happens if you actually get the job? Are you going to run to ChatGPT every time you have to solve a problem? So, while, we are worrying about whether AI will become more and more human, the real danger is that we are becoming less human.

And, while we’re at it: think about the ways and means of building AI itself. The result may be super-quick and smart solutions, but the cost to this planet in energy and water usage is enormous.

 So, am I saying, don’t use AI?  No. 

The key in maintaining your own powers of EXPERIENTIAL learning is in participating, experimenting, trying, testing. aking your own music. So, use AI as ONE of your tools, ONE of your sources -but not as your by-pass 

And by-pass reminds me of another outsourcing tool many of us have used for years without thinking about it – and without understanding that this too is, and will continue to be, a mode of Artificial Intelligence. The in-car navigation system. 

Now, I have a terrible sense of direction. Tell me to go north, and my instinctive response is to take a wild guess. So, I use my navigator whenever there is a danger of my getting lost. Which my wife tells me is all the time. 

But I can’t have been that bad before the invention of google or the navigstor. After all, I did find my way down some totally unmarked roads in Europe the US and Africa, including driving down a dry river bed for at least 50 miles in South Africa. 

So, what happened between then and now? Well, this is what I’ve noticed: over the years my ability to hold an overall visual map – of the space around me and where I am in that space - has dramatically diminished. Whereas before, I could say, “ok – this is where I am in the area around me; this where I’ve come from and this is where I’m going.  I could hold that map in my mind’s eye, much as if I were a drone hovering high above. . So, for example, I’m in the South of France at the moment, not very far from Nice, Grasse or Cannes. I know how to get to Grasse without the Navigator because I remember the road signs from here. But where I am – in relation to Grasse – I have no idea. And in case, you think I’m pathetically unique, I’ve heard too many similar stories to know that – unfortunately - I’m not. We have outsourced our power of spatial awareness - mapping and navigation - and in the process left the two brain lobes that perform those functions – the Occipital and Parietal lobes – unexercised and therefore, like unused muscle, limp and flabby.  

Power is not just about authority or power-over – as we keep on being told. It is about the ability to manage our actions in and with our world. It’s the level of ability we have to do. And that is always a matter of balance. Because what we call “our self” is actually the product of at least three key ingredients: our experience, the assumptions we form from that experience – and third, the learning we are able to gain – to do things more effectively.  So, in order to manage that self effectively within the changing world, we had better make sure we are clear about which experiences are going to be learning ones – and which not. Which tools are going to deplete our learning -and which are going to help it. 

By learning I don’t mean just effort-full worthy learning. I mean the result of curiosity, exploration, joy even. That which becomes part of your experience adds to who you are - and what you can do. 

By the way, clearly we sometimes make choices to outsource something - from which we don’t directly learn. Perhaps, because a result -not learning - is the priority at the time. In an emergency for example. Or because something else – other learning experiences – are far more important. How many of us know how to build a working light bulb or a combustion engine? My father and brother could do both. When they tried to teach me, the only thing I learned was how to fall asleep standing up, with my eyes open.

Of course, it’s not just individuals who outsource their power.  Companies, institutions and governments do it all the time – and spend billions while they’re at it.

At the top level they’ll use the so-called primary strategy consultants, MBB – McKinsey, BCG and Bain who pride themselves in hiring the best and the brightest. And I’m sure they do. This is where top managers will use MBB to help them to think big - or perhaps to think big for them.   

At operational level, they’ll bring in the big 4 – Deloitte, PWC, EY and KPMG. - originally specialising in accounting and auditing but now fully into the consulting space. So, what is happening in both these sectors is that, increasingly, consultants are working on both the big thinking and implementation. 

In the 1970’s, shareholders – and their agents, the top managers - fell in love with economist and statistician, Milton Friedman. Not surprising, because he insisted - in an essay in the New York Times of September 13th, 1970 - that (and I quote) “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits”. In fact, he made it absolutely clear that he thought executives who spent the company’s resources on socially responsible enterprises were misusing the shareholders’ money.

Now maximising profit, in the short term, with the least risk, meant examining efficiencies – cutting costs, reducing staff and resources to focus on direct money making. Commercial shareholders loved it and incentivised their company managers to love it too. And, because of the focus on efficiencies and cutting costs, governments and public institutions –under increased political pressure to cut back - loved it too. 

So, both the public and private sectors increasingly hired management consultants to tell them how to do it.  Why didn’t they do it themselves? Initially I suspect because it could be argued that the consultants were able to review an organization’s performance and structures without disrupting day to day business. The more they were used, particularly the big consulting firms of the time, the more they gave both the institutions and their managers, a stamp of authority and respectability. After all, they were hiring the best and the brightest. 

Globally, MBB together made around 36 billion dollars in 2024. Of the big 4, Deloitte, alone, made just over 67 billion dollars in the same year.

The authors of the book “When McKinsey Comes to Town” track the experience of Disneyland where  in 1997– and I quote – McKinsey “recommended cutting back on park maintenance, eliminating jobs, paying some people less and hiring outside contractors“ This was at a time when Disneyland had – and again I quote – “an exemplary safety record, earning a reputation in the industry for safety.” 

Despite warnings from Disney employees, this cutting back went ahead and those employees, not surprisingly, cited later accidents -some fatal. Causality has never been legally established – and there were probably other factors involved.

Since its establishment in 1948, the British National Health service has been reorganized many, many times. The first of these happened when Mc Kinsey (amongst other management consultants) were called in. They came up with a plan that was rolled out in 1974 to integrate the service along geographical lines and – as a number of sources say - it was not seen as a roaring success. I suspect, however, conflicting vested interests, including changes in government, can’t have helped. What is probably more important is that this marked the beginning of over 50 years of consultants being embedded in the NHS and Whitehall.  

In 2024, the British State Sector paid out 3.4 billion pounds to consultancies. Of that, one and a half billion pounds went to the large consultancies, according to the Financial Times, of the 27th of February 2025.The vast majority to the Big 4:  KPMG, Deloitte, PWC and EY.  In the US, the government is estimated to have spent around 24 billion dollars on management consultants.

Now, I’m not going to question the motives or aims of consulting firms to improve performance. I have little doubt they went in – focused on doing a good job. 

What I really would like to know is why any corporate or institutional leader would think that outside consultants know more about the intricacies of an organization than the people who are working within it? 

If you think that your employees won’t have a macro view – a holistic perspective- of the issues, then that can be easily overcome by setting up project teams from multiple levels of the organization to investigate, review, understand, recommend and even help enact changes. 

When people are asked to be part of the change, they own it; they help implement it; they influence others where there is resistance. But no, the instinct – that still prevails today – is to bring in the outside experts, meaning the non-experts of your particular organization. By outsourcing expertise, we again shrivel the power that we have on our doorstep; not just the skills we have in our institutions but the experience, the learning, the memory that has been built up over the years. 

In fact, in a very detailed article in the Medical History Journal, Philip Begley and Sally Sheard of the University of Liverpool point out that since that giant reorganization of 1974 in the NHS, (again I quote) “The fact that many of the ‘mistakes’ that were made have been repeated in the course of subsequent reforms, speaks to the poor institutional memory of Whitehall.” 

Of course there is no institutional memory. Much of it sits with the outside consultants.

We also kill the emotional pride and ownership that our people have when we repeatedly call in outsiders. We tell our people, “You’re not to be trusted, your experience is not worth much at all”. What makes it worse is that these commercial and public institutions are actually giving away their power – and then paying for it to be loaned back to them.  Because where do these outside consultants get their “knowledge”? From those very insiders whose experience is not trusted enough to do the job in the first place. And what historically happens when the consultants’ recommendations are implemented? Why, many of those experienced insiders are let go. Why? Because those with the most experience are usually the most expensive on the payroll.

So, should we never call in consultants? Of course not. Consultants can bring in broader perspectives, technical know- how and solutions to specific issues. But not as a by-pass – not if they diminish or replace the experiential learning of our institutions. Not if they risk the self-confidence and value of the people within them. 

Not if by bringing them in, the managers and leaders are by-passing the experience of doing the jobs they were appointed to do in the first place.

Another example of outsourcing is the use of mercenaries. It’s a practice that has been in existence  since 2050 BC, when King Shulgi of Ur (in present day Iraq) hired troops to bolster his fighting force. Alexander the Great used them extensively as did both Saul and David, the Hebrew kings. In fact, Israel uses private military contractors in Gaza to this day. There probably hasn’t been a time when mercenaries were not used in the world. It is a major global industry, worth, depending on who you believe, around 250 billion US Dollars – and projected to double by around 2035.  

The use of mercenaries is fundamentally outsourcing war. 

So, if it has been done successfully for thousands of years, what’s the problem? The problem is that we are not just outsourcing war, we are outsourcing the impact of war and the experience of the horrors of war – we’re outsourcing killing; we’re outsourcing dying; starvation, homelessness. When we outsource war, we literally outsource the experience and ownership of that war: it’s their war.

America’s war against Vietnam was not just a disaster for the people of Vietnam but it exposed for the first time, in the full glare of television, the horrors of what US conscripts were both perpetrating and suffering. For the American people the Vietnam war actually hit home in 1965 when the draft was dramatically escalated.  According to the Vietnam Veteran Project, 1.8 million were drafted from 1965 to 1973.  A growing number of whom didn’t want to go; they didn’t see it as a just war; frankly didn’t see the point of it. Nearly one in every ten young men of their generation went to war. And when sons, fathers, brothers, neighbours and friends and friends of friends were among the 211,000 casualties, the pressure to get out became inexorable – which they did in March 1973. That was the last time the USA, entered into a war that fully hit home. After that they increasingly used private contractors.

When casualties are people from another country, or they’re guns for hire, wars can go on for a long time, barely touching the sensibilities of domestic audiences or the hold on power of politicians. The invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation lasted 8 years but didn’t elicit the visceral resistance from US citizens – or even, I would argue, threaten the various administrations at the time. In Iraq, over 50% of the US forces were mercenaries, or private contractors. The occupation of Afghanistan lasted 20 years – with 70% private contractors. In neither of these wars were the mercenary losses counted in the official casualty statistics. And, in any event, they hardly touched the emotions of the domestic audiences: nobody’s conscripted son or daughter was killed in those wars.  It’s not much different now. The wars in Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine – despite being inflamed and extended by external funds, weaponry, mercenaries and intelligence – have not attracted anything near the visceral resistance of the Vietnam protests in the US, UK or Europe. Large crowds – yes. But, fundamentally, popular opposition to these wars has not changed a single election outcome. 

But what about the massive coverage we’re confronted with every day on all media? When we see cities turned into rubble; skeletal and starving human beings  and rape victims  of war, why do we react less strongly, less furiously, than those with a handful of TV channels did in the 1960’s and 70’s? Well, there’s some outsourcing going on there too. Streaming – literally flooding - images of hardships inure us to the suffering of others. It no longer becomes a disruption; it literally becomes part of the stream of ordinariness. What do we do, on social media? We either move on, or press like, love or support. That outsources some of the guilt. That also outsources the will, the outrage that might propel us to do something in the real world.  Let’s not forget, liking, loving or support is not a real-world gesture. What would you do if you found somebody in need outside your front door? Would you give them the thumbs up and close the door? 

We are particularly willing to outsource priorities and meaning to media, to governments, to experts - to anyone, in fact, who tells us that they are on our side. There’s nothing wrong with, for example, referring and listening to your doctor when you’re feeling ill. The problem comes when we don’t ask questions. When we don’t ask “why”? Why are you prescribing or recommending that? What are the alternatives? How do you know?” 

I particularly remember someone who was diagnosed with cancer while she was pregnant and was told that she should abort the child and start on chemo therapy immediately. Now, she told me, neither she nor her husband had moral or religious qualms about abortion, but what she did want to know, was whether there were alternatives. So, she researched for herself; she asked 2nd and 3rd expert opinions and discovered that the cancer was very slow moving. It would not metastasise during her pregnancy, and she could safely have treatment after giving birth. She remained curious. It was her body, her child and the least she could do was ensure that she protected them both by building her own experience in and with her world. She didn’t say “I know best.” She didn’t say, “you don’t know what you’re talking about”. She said, “I want to know more before I outsource my decision making to you or anybody else”.

In a funny sort of way, those who decide that the experts- in vaccines, politics, science whatever, don’t know what they’re talking about or are somehow in the pay of the pharma industry, deep state, capital, the Chinese and particularly the Russians, are also outsourcing themselves. They’re not asking questions to find out more. They have either listened to an anti-expert expert or they have made up their mind and stopped wanting to learn. 

Even if the evidence supported your decision one year ago, look again: objective evidence and personal assumptions may well have changed during that time. Once the curiosity goes, it’s a signal that we have outsourced ourselves a key part ourselves. If, on the other hand, we delegate to others and we are still curious, that signals that we are still, at least trying to learn; we haven’t given ourselves away.

So, to round off: we have been outsourcing our own powers - contained in our experience and learning - for millennia. After all, we couldn’t all be bakers, some of us had to be butchers or candlestick makers. The difference now is that we are increasingly outsourcing fundamental parts of our own humanity. Not just our experience of doing – but our experience of being. I use ChatGPT as a sparring partner. So, I will say to it, “this is what I’m thinking; What have I missed in my argument? What are the flaws:” At it will come back and say, “yes, that works but you may want to add these bits.” I don’t like it writing things for me, and I rarely – if ever- agree with everything it recommends. So, I can probably argue that I’m using AI as if it were a dialogue partner or an editor in the room. But… here’s what I’ve noticed: I found myself thinking “I’d better check with ChatGPT on whether I’ve missed something. I’d better check now before I write this article or script. And even, I’d better check whether that is a good subject to write about. 

It may not have blunted my curiosity but it blunted my self-confidence and my personal appetite for risk. I am in danger of outsourcing my self-confidence, my courage and my ownership of myself – all of which are vital ingredients of being, not doing. 

Similarly, when we, as decision makers, outsource the management or strategy of our organizations, institutions, and even vital government departments to consultants, we may be reducing the threat of “capture” by internal vested interests, and perhaps even gaining a more objective view of what should be done, but what are the vested interests of consultants? Have you thought about that? To extend their source of income or cut it off? To extend their stay or go? And do we really need an objective view of our organizations or a deeply informed one – drawn from experience, knowledge and ownership of both the organization and its place in society or the market? And – as I said before – we are not just outsourcing management and operations, we are giving away our knowledge, experience and self-confidence. We are hollowing out our institutions and our people. No wonder we see a sharp drop in trust among the under 35’s that their employers would do right by them– both in the public and private sectors. 

The chain of outsourcing – be it to AI, consultants, media, doctors and pharmacists – is long and extremely damaging. But it’s not to whom we outsource that is the issue, it is what of ourselves we are weakening or killing. Are we blocking our own curiosity, our own experience, our own self confidence and our own learning as a result of this surrendering? 

So, in that vein, of course we are going to carry on outsourcing. Of course we shouldn’t stop using AI, consultants or believing medical science. But if, by doing so we are dulling or blocking those 4 key ingredients, (curiosity, experience, self-confidence and learning) stop and think again. If we dull any of those, we’re in trouble. And in my experience if we dull Curiosity – we are in very big trouble. 

I’m Stephen Barden. This has been another episode of The Power of Balance.