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Friction is Your Friend: Why Sharing Values isn’t always Valuable

I hear about it all the time… Collaborate with people who share your values. Really? You know why they say this? Because it is pleasant and easy. When you are around people who share your values you can agree all the time, because you are using the same basis for your judgements. There isn’t much friction. Maybe people who like writing about collaboration find it easier to achieve flow states when they are not experiencing friction. Maybe.

FrictionFireFriction Friend

But friction can be your friend. And not just when you are applying the brakes. You want to make a spark or start a fire? Friction. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to be creative. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to start a business. Friction can be your friend when you are trying to spark dialogue with your community.

Let’s take business for example. I have seen startups where two partners may as well have shared one head they were of such like mind. And neither of those minds had much business sense. Both were visionary. They valued the exploration of ideas. They seemed to struggle to come up with a way to generate revenue to keep going and reach some lift. Neither had much talent or interest in operations. On the other hand, you can take a very profit-centric person and team them with someone who values customer and community and away they go. That is not to say they don’t experience conflict or even strong conflict. They do. But they learn how to balance it. They don’t confuse sharing values with being valuable.

Share

Sharing is great. Share something with your collaborators. Values is just one axis. You might share a goal: keeping your neighborhood clean. But you might have different values driving the goal. One neighbor, Samuel might value the number otherwise known as property value which they believe is impacted by how clean the neighborhood is. Another, Joan, believes that “broken windows” talk from Tipping Point and feels that a cleaner neighborhood breeds less crime. Joan values being safe. And a third, Sandeep, simply values tidyness. Fine. They all want it clean. Share the goal. From different values.

A friend of mine, Steve Crandall, worked at Bell Labs. In one of his delicious storytelling sessions Steve mentioned working with someone – for years – who had a polar opposite political perspective. And yet, in the creative innovation space, the two of created well together. They didn’t need to share values to be innovative together and enjoy the pleasure of that work together. They shared a practice of innovating.

Value Time

There are certainly times when you should connect on your values. It can help reinforce your identity and give you support that you need. But if you want innovation or you want to connect a neighborhood or you want to create dialogue across political boundaries, work with the friction of different values and connect on some other dimension.

As I learned from Valdis Krebs, “connect on sameness and profit from your differences.” Please be intentional about which dimensions of difference and which dimensions of sameness.

People-Powered Innovation: Interview with Robin Chase

Each Wednesday, we post an interview with someone who is living, exploring, or championing aspects of thrivability – people at the forefront of cultural, organizational, or individual change.

Robin Chase is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community.  She also founded and leads Meadow Networks, a consulting firm that advises city, state, and federal government agencies about wireless applications in the transportation sector, and impacts on innovation and economic development.  Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world.  In 2009, she was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People.  Robin lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment.

Todd Hoskins:  Robin, you’ve been looking at the possibilities of using excess capacity for quite a number of years now.  What is compelling about excess capacity?

Robin Chase:  Excess capacity lets us tap quickly and cheaply into resources that already exist.  We don’t have to pay for the asset, place it, maintain it.  I think about excess capacity very broadly: assets, physical space, temporal space, experiences, expertise, and networks.

Some obvious examples of making use of excess capacity are Wikipedia (excess mental capacity and expertise), eBay (excess junk), Flickr (other people could use your photos), LinkedIn (ditto for networks), CouchSurfing (beds).

Less common examples are Cyclovia in Bogota, Columbia, where excess road space on Sunday mornings led them to shut down 121 km of roads to car traffic and open it up for pedestrians and bikes.  From 7am to 2pm 1.3 million residents go out and play, dance, exercise, and meetup.  It has been an enormous success.  All for very little money and implemented very quickly.

Todd:  Are we cooperatively enabled to apply this excess capacity?

Robin:  Ah, technology!  I love it.  We may or may not be cooperatively programmed, but that is beside the point.  All of the examples I listed don’t require cooperation in the way we usually think of it.

With Zipcar, for example, 450,000 people are using 7,000 cars.  But it is painless.  No one is waiting for someone else or waiting their turn. Through the miracle of technology the sharing is easy and frictionless.  Of course, there are lots of examples that do require some cooperation.  My point just is that this is not required.

Todd:  You are serving on the National Advisory Committee on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and advising on policy issues.  How can our governments possibly become more adaptive and less rigid?

Robin:  Innovation is a country’s lifeblood.  Imagine if our lives stayed exactly the same.  The 1980s forever! (or choose your decade).  On the other hand, people hate change because they can’t quite see the future so it is unnerving.

Big companies and governments (who occasionally respond to their constituents who like the status quo) are not that easy to change.

By enabling innovation — 1) creating a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship; 2) reducing barriers and costs to experimentation; and 3) reducing the costs of the innovation inputs — government can make it possible for people to do the changing themselves.

This committee is specifically looking at ways to improve K-12 and university education to change the culture and provide more opportunities to innovate, making sure that government-funded research that has the potential for commercialization is easier to get at.  We are looking at reducing the effort and time to participate in the US government small business programs and procurement programs, and changing capital incentives for investing in startups.  Lastly, we are looking at ways of celebrating innovation and entrepreneurship.

I am particularly interested in getting more value out of government technology policy and procurements so that we maximize its potential for repurposing by innovators and businesses.  The government is about to make huge investments in smart transportation, smart health, smart grids, smart education.  We can unlock the excess capacity found in government purchases by making them more open.  Open as the default.  Closed proprietary single-purpose purchases need to be argued for.  Open data, open devices, open spectrum, open radio, open networks should be the norm.

Todd:  If we cannot rely on government or big business to facilitate change quickly enough, who can we turn to?

Robin:  People! I think of it as people-powered innovation: collaboration production, collaborative consumption, collaborative infrastructure, collaborative financing.  The excess capacity of individuals (their expertise, networks, assets, time) beautifully leveraged and joined together on the internet will be the most powerful force for change in the next 20 years.

Together, we get incredible speed and scale, at a fraction of the cost, and using resources of all kinds efficiently.  Beginning examples of this — we are in our infancy of this idea right now — include Airbnb and Etsy.  Smart phone apps are an example too. Based on the excess capacity made available in these devices over the last 2.5 years, we have seen 500,000 applications built — primarily by individuals.  Yes, Apple has made out like a bandit, but Android is surging ahead with its reduced tolls.  And hopefully, some of those innovating engineers are making a living and starting some interesting new companies.

Todd:  You’re currently living in Europe.  What are you seeing and experiencing that you would like to bring home to the US?

Robin:  It is totally intriguing to experience firsthand the differences that result from very different government spending priorities. Both systems are imperfect.  France has really terrific transportation, road, rail, and airport infrastructure compared to the US. My ability to move around this city without a car and having so much choice (walk, bike, metro, bus, high speed train, etc) is a great pleasure.

On the other hand, the amount of duplicate forms to be filled out and mailed places — back and forth — is pretty amazing. The value of some of the bureaucracy around opening a bank account, getting an apartment, signing up for a transit pass eludes me. This frustrates me to no end since I’ve experienced the same transactions so easily and quickly in the US.

Todd:  Robin, thanks for making the world a more thrivable place!

Incubating Entrepreneurs

I am picturing some very driven inspired individuals under a warming light. But we know it takes a lot more than that.

Co-creating the world we want and doing so in new ways takes a network of people and some great mentorship, resource sharing, and support. This weekend we will be incubating some social innovation through COSI10Chicago. We will tell you all about our intense weekend with the warming light of collaborators soon.

If you are in or can make it to California, you can help entrepreneurs succeed (and pay forward how you have been helped) by attending Incubate 2.0, November 17-18, 2010 at the HP Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino. And Thrivable offers you a discount for Incubate 2.0!

What is the purpose? Answering the critical question: “How do I help my entrepreneurs succeed?”

Who should go?

  • a local incubator
  • an angel network
  • an economic development agency

How Incubate 2.0 tells the story:

Over the last decade, entrepreneurs have not only created successful businesses but applied their understanding of technology, their vision of the future, and their passion for growth to help fellow entrepreneurs. The innovations that entrepreneurs have created for each other include global mentoring programs, angel funds, massive networking events and virtual incubators, etc…

Incubate 2.0 will showcase the most cutting-edge programs that help business founders start and grow startups. Join us on November 17-18, 2010 at the HP Executive Briefing Center in Cupertino to gain insight into what works and what does not, meet the founders of these programs, and meet business leaders that have turned them into a global successes.

More at www.incubate2.com

Find Good Questions

Today I dropped a whole series of tweets that are part of an understanding I am working on. Each nuggets lives alone, but the whole, I hope, is greater than the parts, and thus I post it in whole here.

Hybridity. Transcend and include. Hard to see, wearing attributes of past paradigms when useful, past ideological fashion made functional.

The moonSometimes when you are inside of a thing, it is mighty tricky to pull your eyeballs out far enough to see what you are in.

Zoooooooooom way way out. Look as if an alien anthropologist at 10 years, 20, 50, 100 and see patterns, movement, fractals, direction.

Creative Commons License photo credit: thskyt

The very idea of paradigm shifts (Kuhn) begets an age where no concept is presumed static. Flow, shift, evolve. The process of becoming.

Everything as prototype (nods to @ladyniasan) Government, business, product, like software releases, always todays version open to iterate

Nature knows prototyping, she is always modifying. She doesn’t want yesterday’s world, she is making tomorrow’s by leveling up complexity.

It isn’t about truth, ideals, pure states, pure extremes. It is iteration toward what is useful. Let go of answers. Stick with Questions!

I don’t mean questions like: can this scale? or did we price this right?

I mean questions like:

  • in 5, 10, 25, 50 years, can we still operate under this purpose?
  • do my actions and choices contribute to the ecosystems that support me/us? do I or we fit in the ecosystems we are entering? And if not yet, how do we expand them to include us while encouraging the life of the whole interdependent systems to evolve?
  • how have we made room for ourselves to evolve? For what we do to evolve?
  • What Women Wanthow am I being a contribution here? how am I allowing others to be a contribution?
  • what about this creates meaning for me, for those it touches, and for future society?
  • are we having fun yet? How can we encourage play, whimsy, emotion, serendipity, and synchronicity to join us?

These are the questions. The answers are not static. The system isn’t static. The interlocking systems of systems are not static. The answers change. Find good questions and stick with them.
Creative Commons License photo credit: jronaldlee

Social Innovation in Practice at cosi10

Note, I am a cosi10 event host in Chicago. I offer my perspective on the cosi10 global event developments.

I am fascinated by fractals. The consistency from layer to layer. The persistence of an inner integrity. There is something about the perfection of it that creates tranquility and trust even in complex environments.

COSI10 feels fractal to me. We are doing social innovation to help social innovators. Innovation, to me, means prototyping and iterating with what works, refining and improving. And social doesn’t, to me, simply mean it involves people. To me, it means people are participating.

There is one more quality central to COSI10, and that is transparency. There is a value to push power and choice to the edges. To enable the edges to do so, they require information. So there is an effort to make visible the inner workings of the process. Which I hope to contribute to here in this post.

Earlier this week, several of us on the organizing team including Pallavi from India, Matt from Denver, Jean from Chicago, Antoine from Brussels, and Christina Jordan our global events coordinator, chatted over skype. We changed the dates for some of the events in the COSI10 series. We had been working with a serial view of events happening over several months. We hear that one of the benefits of COSI10 is connecting globally with other COSI10 events (as well as connecting locally with social innovators). So we moved the dates to be much closer to happening at once. We hope to see you November 5-8 at an event near you!

We came to this decision as a group, reviewing where we are and what we feel will most make our regional events and the whole of COSI10 successful for participants. We had been at one of those stuck spots. We were not where we wanted to be. What would get us there? So we said, “Let’s together discuss honestly where we are and do something else (possibly anything else). What would serve our purpose and deliver on our commitment?”

Voila! Amazing to feel the energy shift in the group, generating energy and enthusiasm. This has cascaded into a whole series of transformations:

  • Project management of multiple events at different times was complex and we didn’t have clear accountability or expectations set. Now timelines are universal and expectations stated clearly.
  • Responsibility for collective success seemed to have been pressed harder onto earlier events, and now responsibility for our success is shared by all more equally.
  • Giving space to name what was not working (without blame) gave us a chance to get the feedback we needed to make significant changes (instead of incremental ones). Now our communication efforts are crucially clearer and more useful.

I hope we are doing what the COSI10 events will do for participants – connecting, getting around and over hurdles, iterating to be better and better. I hope we catalyze greater agility and resilience for social innovators.

Clarity works magic on enthusiasm. And this adjustment and the clarity it brings brought a whole new level to our excitement around COSI10. We hope you will join us. Together we can build alliances, engage in structured collaboration, and evolve our social innovation sector. Check out our revised description and register before the early bird discount ends October 1!

Jean Russell
founder of Thrivable
cross posted at COSI10

Designing Thrivable Creation Spaces

Thrivability, at its core, is all about creating environments that are generative of adaptive diverse abundance, both in the sense of nature, and in the sense of the potential for innovation present in an organization. If people come together with a sense of purposive play, then innovation emerges from the dynamic richness of the interactions.

It is all about fostering an environment in which upward spirals are most likely to emerge.

So it is great to see folks over at HBR talking about factors to take into account when intentionally designing creation spaces, such as the Hub coworking space for social entrepreneurs that will soon be opening in San Francisco.

Emergent behavior from participants is, of course, essential. But it rarely takes hold unless it’s organized and supported within carefully designed (and tended) “creation spaces.

As with gardens, it’s best to design creation spaces minimally at the outset and then let them create a life of their own, layering in additional design elements over time.