The Relationship Economy: Interview with Jerry Michalski

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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.

Jerry Michalski (ma -call-ski) is the founder of REX, the Relationship Economy eXpedition, a private, collaborative inquiry into the next economy. More broadly, he is a pattern finder, lateral thinker, Gladwellian connector, facilitator and explorer of the interactions between technology, society and business.

Jerry is a former technology analyst, and currently an advisor to a number of technology companies. He was fortunate to be on duty when the Internet showed up.  Jerry is also an advisor to Thrivable.


Todd:  What is the Relationship Economy?

Jerry:  The Relationship Economy is a theory about how business, government, and society are being restructured worldwide.  It starts with the belief that authentic trust is reemerging as a driving force, as opposed to the “trust me” of advertising or empty promises, and that we’ve tumbled into a world of abundance, not scarcity.

So, trust plus abundance.  Building from there, you can use the Relationship Economy lens to look at every sector of life and better understand how they are changing and where they might go.

Todd: So, you’re saying we’re moving into an era of greater trust?  Who is beginning to trust whom?

Jerry:  I’m not sure if it will measure out as greater trust overall.  Rather, the organizations that will succeed will succeed based on real trust, not on building businesses that are really traps.  Transparency is a big driver, as is the fact that customers and citizens can now organize on their own.

Todd:  You have written and spoken on the Commons extensively.  How are the Commons connected to the Relationship Economy?

Jerry:  One of the major relationships that matter in the Relationship Economy is the one between people, businesses, and the Commons.  Until recently, companies could stake out a piece of the Commons for themselves, plunder it (quoting Ray Anderson of Interface Flooring here) and not worry too much.

That’s changing.  Now companies are beginning to hit resource constraints, or realize what effects their actions have had on local communities, which are increasingly able to communicate their plights.  So, we’re seeing companies learn to live with the Commons, nurturing it and feeding from it, rather than merely depleting the Commons.

Todd:  What is earned by organizations that nurture the Commons?

Jerry:  They earn many things, which vary depending on which Commons we mean.  For example, IBM adopted Open Source software, which is part of the  information Commons.  It earned lower costs, a much bigger market, easier recruitment of many more talented people.  It also saved its many different hardware platforms, several of which were destined for the dustheap of history.

Other companies can earn long-term stability of their supplies (say water or cocoa pods), goodwill of the communities they touch, and free marketing, as word gets out of their Earth-friendly actions.

Todd:  You have also included “thrivability” as an aspect of the Relationship Economy, which according to you, includes profit, sustainability, and joy?  Why is joy important, and should it be discussed in the boardroom?

Jerry:  Thriving points up.  Up doesn’t mean only improvement in metrics like how much money you have or how few greenhouse gases you’re emitting.  It also means improvement in how you feel about your life, and greater happiness is central.  Also, joy is an important and often overlooked aspect of the best work you can do when you’re connected to your purpose and creating something fruitful, you’re building joy — and time melts away.  It’s that flow state that we want to be in while creating a thrivable world.

Todd:  Is collective joy the sum of the joy of individuals in a group?  Can it be measured?

Jerry:  I have a feeling joy isn’t merely additive, it’s somehow multiplicative or otherwise nonlinear, but I’m not sure how to measure it.  Researchers have measured the “mood” of groups by analyzing the content of their texts, tweets or blog posts that gives a thermometer-like map of some proxy for joy.  You could also run surveys, but I don’t know how you discover how many people are in flow states, or enraptured.  I do suspect that measuring it concretely, then aiming for it as the key outcome would probably break joy.

Todd:  What is it going to take for organizations and individuals to start thinking and acting in terms of thriving?

Jerry:  Many organizations are shifting slowly toward adding sustainability to their measures of performance.  It’s the perfect moment to help them move a step beyond, into positive space, where thriving is the opportunity, not just surviving.  The thrivability movement will need materials that dovetail with those efforts, that fit the corporate quest for rethinking measures.

Todd:  Your research and work has resulted in the recent launch of The REXpedition, a guided exploration through the Relationshp Economy.  What kind of business is “an exploration”?

Jerry:  In this context, it’s a collaborative inquiry into an idea.  Peers from diverse industries are joining this eXpedition in order to understand these shifts, then to take action and reinvent their products, businesses and maybe even industries for the new structures and dynamics.

Todd:  What types of participants are joining the inquiry?

Jerry:  They have many different titles — CMO, President, Collector of Cultural Insights, Director of the Innovation Exchange — and from many industries, from beverages and clothing to high tech and sustainability.

Mostly they have a passion for figuring out the big shift we’re in, an optimism that it’s about rebuilding relationships, and a desire to get their hands dirty by experimenting with these ideas in ways that might turn into new offers or practices.

Todd:  Thanks, Jerry.

Find Good Questions

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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

COSI10 in Chicago

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I am super excited to be organizing the Chicago event of COSI10. We will be gathering on November 6th and 7th to learn, share, and breakthrough together. We welcome social innovators from nonprofits, for profits, and blended hybrid efforts as well as those who champion social innovation. Together, we will discuss the field of social innovation, our networks in Chicago, our own efforts. Share your skills. Learn or develop your skills. Find collaborators and champions. Register today!

See our fresh flyer below!

Flash Collaboration Process

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or how Thrivability: A Collabortive Sketch happened.

People have asked: How did you get that done? So, I’ll tell you.

First and foremost, I lucked out. I worked with amazing, generous, patient, inspired, and brilliant people. 70 of them. I wish I could have included more, and yet, it is too much already.

Two of my advisors suggested the project to me in December of 2009. Mid-January, I had enough of a sense of it to put out a request to my advisors for contributions. As pieces came in, I became more bold. I joke that I am a compulsive recruiter. Really, I think it is an energy high of positive feedback loops. That drove me — even more — to want to honor what people contributed and nail our March 15 launch date at SXSW.

Here are my answers to some of the specific questions I have been asked.

What worked well with your book project?

  • Using social media to create buzz, encourage participation, and share thanks
  • Being a dictator about form, process, topics to cover, and who participates
  • Hand-holding those who get writer’s block

What challenges did you face?

  • Getting 70 people to all be on their precise task in a short time period
  • Getting people to meet their deadlines (even though it was all volunteer)
  • Scope creep – the book doubled in size from original intention for it – which I think made it too big to digest whole

How did you manage so many contributors? Deadlines/workflow/editing?

  • Used a modified personal kanban – each person/topic was a post-it note on a wall indicating (by wall placement) what they had done or needed to do
  • Put deadlines 2 weeks before I really needed them, so the slips would be okay (shhhh, keep that secret!)
  • Put everything into a google doc as it came in.
  • Didn’t let them edit each other’s pieces (although I did share samples of existing contributions to new contributors to give them a feel for what was there)
  • Note: I have been an editor for 15 years or so. I am used to the process of idea->draft->edit->revise->final->design->publish. I edited each as they came in. I brought in help for second/third pair of eyes. Only a few had major re-writes and a few went way over the 500 word limit.

How, if at all, did you incentivise contributions (and also people working to deadlines)?

  • Seeded it for momentum. The first contribution came in 2 hours after I asked the initial group (my ring of a dozen advisors). I tweeted my thanks.
    People were motivated, I think, by:

    • Social relationships (they all know me or someone else involved)
    • Uplifting concept (mission is bigger than me or you and aspirational)
    • Peer influence (who else had or was going to contribute)
    • It is possible people thought that being in the book would help with their visibility, but I think that wasn’t a real motivator (in hindsight).
    • People were asked to speak to something they know super well and feel “alive” about, so I suspect/hope they felt it was an “opportunity” to give voice to something vital in themselves.
  • Made it easy to be involved – just get me your 500 or less words. I will do the rest.
  • Made it clear what needed to happen and by when. There were no “ifs, ands, or buts” about it. No threats. No complaints. And an open door for anyone struggling with it.

What advice would you give to anyone thinking of crowdsourcing a book about sustainability?

  • If it is an ebook – keep it SHORT
  • Be firm in your structure and allow people to be creative and alive in the container you provide
  • Ask for small contributions that seem easy to achieve
  • Stick to a short window from request – draft – response – final – design – approval to publication
  • Don’t over-explain the process. What is the least they need to know about what is happening behind the scenes?
  • Consider how you want to manage copyright (we have a copyright on the collection – with each individual holding copyright on their specific piece)
  • Think of it as curation – you are creating a larger work by placing individual works in relation to each other, just as one would with an art exhibit of many artists. There is a grace to making that work well and be cohesive as a whole. (That would be a whole other conversation here)
  • Get multiple opinions on your draft and final draft so that you can find out if that piece that doesn’t strike your fancy is super compelling to someone else (and vice versa). Be careful not to let that feedback overly homogenize things – squeezing the voice and authenticity out of it
It is easy for a collectively written piece to:
    • Get diluted by having too many editors or an unclear vision/purpose
    • Seem like a random hodge podge (be sure to create cohesion through form/argument/story or something!)
    • Have an inconsistent standard or threshold of quality (especially when people volunteer, it is easy to simply be grateful for whatever they offer – but don’t. If they want to be involved, they want it to be good. So handhold folks if you have to – until it meets a high standard.)

How will you solve those challenges?

What questions do you still have? And what answers do you have for collaborations you have worked on?

Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch

View more presentations from Jean Russell.

Social Innovation in Practice at cosi10

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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

Goals, Values, and Trust

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Yesterday on a terrific yitan call where Jerry Michalski introduced his fabulous offering of the REXpedition (guide to the relationship economy), I developed a mind-crush on Nicole Lazzaro. I loved her contributions to the IRC channel, and I am now reading more about her work with play and gaming.

One question she posed on the IRC chat really tickled me. She asked, “Wonder whether having a common goals or values create trust or are required or catalyze it?”

Trust, being an elemental particle of collaboration, fascinates me. And sure there is something about sharing common goals or values can facilitate the development of trust. But I would not say it is required for trust. For example, some families are split between progressives and conservatives and speak to clearly different values and goals. However, because the family is enduring and blood can sometimes be thicker than politics, there can be a measure of trust present. Trust for what?

  • Well, I may trust that my very conservative aunt is going to vote for a conservative.
  • I don’t trust her to vote on my behalf.
  • I trust her to watch my kids for an afternoon.
  • I don’t trust her to raise them if something happens to me.
  • I trust her real estate savvy, but I don’t trust her cooking.
  • I trust her to act on her goals and values, as I have seen her do consistently for decades.
  • I don’t trust her to give me advice on my career.
  • And I don’t trust her as a working partner on a project.

Trust is very contextual.

When I know someone’s values and goals, it is easier to develop trust. I may not need as much consistency over time to make myself vulnerable to someone who shares my goals, values, or beliefs. Sometimes we make these intuitive judgments about how aligned we are with someone else at hyperspeed. I met AB through a friend, we share several interests that rely on a set of values, and I know his company shares stated goals with mine. We were talking like old friends after an hour. I don’t need years worth of consistency to have some measure of trust with him.

We tend to talk about trust as if it is an on/off switch. But it isn’t. It is something we have to a degree and within specific contexts. Sharing values or goals can facilitate the development of trust, but I am not convinced they are required.

Why the optimism?

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In the face of all the catastrophe thinking and story-telling, why the optimism of thrivability?

This optimism is not blind idealism or the search for some dreamy utopia. A thrivable world will exist (and has existed) in a strange balance and tension where there is more health and generativity than illness and destruction. That does not mean there is not destruction. Old orders must fall, become the compost of new life, and cycle through. Ideas get refined and transcended. A thrivable world is not static. It is not the end of suffering or the birth of a hedonistic paradise. Instead, think of a garden or better yet a meadow.

So, let’s be pragmatic. What is the basis for being optimistic about thriving given stories of catastrophe and crisis. I will merely mention these – you can find more easily by digging deeper on any of it. This is the big picture overview. Also, it is not comprehensive. I offer here only a half dozen examples of why optimism is warranted.

  • communication – never before has communication been so possible – over distances, between languages, across cultures, etc. Information can flow. There is talk of a global brain (although at times that brain may seem primitive and dumbly focused on sex, superficiality, or bad news). It still remains – never before have we had such access to each other. (nods to Deanna Zandt)
  • cognitive surplus – never before have so many had so much liesure time. Not saying we are effective with it, but the possibility of people contributing their time, wisdom, and resources has never been greater. (nods to Clay Shirky)

Yeah, you heard those before….but it is working? What about people who are dying!

  • hearts break as we read of children dying, but what is the trajectory? UNICEF says:
  1. “Research and experience show that six million of the almost 11 million children who die each year could be saved by low-tech, evidence-based, cost-effective measures such as vaccines, antibiotics, micronutrient supplementation, insecticide-treated bed nets and improved family care and breastfeeding practices.”
  2. “While global immunization rates have risen from less than 20 per cent in the 1970s to about 74 per cent in 2002, millions of children must still be reached.”
  3. “In its sixty years of existence, UNICEF has seen a fifty per cent reduction in under-five mortality between 1960 and 2002.”
  • Peace on the rise. I know it seems like the opposite. But let’s look at some charts to see what the numbers tell.
    via systemicpeace.org

    via systemicpeace.org

    We can see from figure 8 that the conflicts that do exist produce more refugees and exist in poorer states and thus require more humanitarian relief. However, note, “The end of the Cold War, marked by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, had an equally dramatic effect on the general level of armed conflict in the global system.” A couple key points:

  1. “Separate research indicates that the increasing level of societal war results from the protractedness of societal wars during this period and not from a substantial increase in the numbers of new wars.”
  2. “At the peak in 1992, nearly thirty percent of the countries in the world were experiencing some form of major political violence. This percentage of the world’s independent states (with total population greater than 500,000 in 2008) has dropped by nearly one-half since the peak, registering at slightly more than 15% with major episodes of political violence in 2008.”
  3. “There has been substantial improvement in general resilience in the global system since 1995.”
  4. “Global gains are observed for seven of the eight fragility indicators; only “economic legitimacy” shows no improvement, indicating that there has been no substantive shift away from primary commodities production toward manufactured goods in the world’s more fragile states.”

There are a few counter-trends to be wary of (see end of page)

Okay, so kids are more likely to live (but we can keep improving that) and there is a downward trend in warfare/armed conflict. We can communicate better and have more time to make the world better (or be entertained or both). But what about the environment?

Let’s try wikipedia this time:

In 1999, the United States EPA replaced the Pollution Standards Index (PSI) with the Air Quality Index (AQI) to incorporate new PM2.5 and Ozone standards.

The effects of these laws have been very positive. In the United States between 1970 and 2006, citizens enjoyed the following reductions in annual pollution emissions:[48]

  • carbon monoxide emissions fell from 197 million tons to 89 million tons
  • nitrogen oxide emissions fell from 27 million tons to 19 million tons
  • sulfur dioxide emissions fell from 31 million tons to 15 million tons
  • particulate emissions fell by 80%
  • lead emissions fell by more than 98%

Please don’t take this to mean that we are done. We are not. AND, when was the last time you heard that we had made progress?

So we have been making some progress, and actually there are some positive trends. Now let’s add in a few juicy additions:

  • Purposeful or meaningful life pursuits are on the rise, in fact there is a convergence. Millenials – in general – prefer purposeful work and play, GenX is interested too, and the Boomers who made money so they could have a meaningful life later – well, that later is arriving. What happens when you have multiple-generations with a growing interest in living on purpose, with intention, and therefore being conscious about doing more good in the world?
  • Social entrepreneurship (probably in part as a result of the previous) is on the rise – a very hot trend with many subsets and variations in making money by or for doing good. Let’s call corporate social responsibility one of those variations.
  • A paradigm shift in leadership and collaboration is underway. Beginning a few decades ago with the birth of servant leadership, and reinforced by books like “Outliers” (which shows the supporting factors that go into supposedly independent genius)… now we have open source, crowdsourcing, and so much more. How we think about working together is changing. And that change makes more successful collaboration possible.
  • Green technology. Some of us find it so incredibly sexy. And sometimes it really is. Sometimes it is wishful thinking or innovation many years from implementation. However, I can count 4 wind farms on my 120 mile journey to see my family. I sense some potential black swan like shifts if some clean green energy or technology comes to market… whether that algae that eats pollution or cars run on the biofuel made by your food waste… I have hope that something out of the bright green movement is going to come to fruition in a way that changes the world dramatically.
  • I’ll close my brief list with metrics… we have been improving our metrics (and our intelligence in how those metrics can be used to tell different stories). The better our metrics – and the better we are at realizing what to measure, the tighter and more useful our feedback loops become. From using social network analysis to map out which congresspeople are being lobbied by what organizations (and who is paying them)… to stats on child mortality, the environment, and energy consumption and creation – we know more about our world than ever before. And that empowers us to do more about it.

These are just a few of the things that make me optimistic in the face of catastrophe stories. What are yours?

On twitter–

@jhagel: More cause for optimism – we are having fewer children and living much longer – great visualization of global trends http://bit.ly/c93ven

Fiscal Futures

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This evening I attended (with a brand new twitter friend) the MacArthur Foundation and Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s America’s Fiscal Future: Making Difficult Choices event.

Oh, I have lots of thoughts to share, but sharing them usually only gets half done… so I am shifting modes and sharing with you just a light dose of the questions and notes that I jotted down in my notebook as I listened to the panel. Think of it as live blogging. Does it provoke anything interesting for you? I would love to hear if anything sparks for you.

This talk seems to be focused on the deficit…with a lot of concern about how in debt the government is. (Oh geez, what about all those families who are in debt? hmmm….)  Debt is actually quite difficult for families but at the governmental level, it is a floating issue (the being in debt isn’t so bad, it is the lack of confidence others have in the dollar that is troubling)…

Yikes, we have a debt-based currency, so please don’t tell me debt is bad. All our money is based on that!

I wonder what these panelist would say if we talked about the depression of 1873 and how that crisis in confidence was resolved through regulation (which lasted fairly well until computers made complex math easier and thus derivatives possible).

How much of this is fear-mongering. Really? They aren’t speaking to some current crisis (which we actually have on hand) but threaten some future crisis with terrible things like “triple digit” …was that inflation or interest rates or something?

I wonder, in a system of debt-based currency, as the economy grows, how does that work, really? Is that dependent on the growth of debt? Who holds that debt? Doesn’t something have to give?

I hear a lot of “uncertainty” but not yet a recognition of black swans and a system living in extremistan… How do these complex adaptive systems respond? How can you possibly predict them? I am so often frustrated by long term thinking that assumes some consistent or steady trajectory.

While there is acknowledgement of the Baby Boomer issue (how can we pay for all these people about to enter retirement age?) – do we understand that this is an issue in many other countries as well?

Fiscal responsibility is getting framed as if government manages a pocketbook like a family does. URgh… it is NOT like that at all. And framing it that way feels like a pretty nasty way to DUPE people.

Huh, fundemental tax reform. Suggesting two tiers 10% and 25% ... hmmm… by the way, in case you didn’t know your tax history, I looked it up again for you:

“By 1917 a taxpayer with only $40,000 faced a 16 percent rate and the individual with $1.5 million faced a tax rate of 67 percent.” then… “By 1936 the lowest tax rate had reached 4 percent and the top rate was up to 79 percent.” oooh, and if you think that was high, check out “By the end of the war the nature of the income tax had been fundamentally altered. Reductions in exemption levels meant that taxpayers with taxable incomes of only $500 faced a bottom tax rate of 23 percent, while taxpayers with incomes over $1 million faced a top rate of 94 percent. These tax changes increased federal receipts from $8.7 billion in 1941 to $45.2 billion in 1945.” And numbers of people paying count too, so “Beyond the rates and revenues, however, another aspect about the income tax that changed was the increase in the number of income taxpayers from 4 million in 1939 to 43 million in 1945.” http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml

And where oh where did this gigantic deficit come from…

“By 2001, the total tax take had produced a projected unified budget surplus of $281 billion, with a cumulative 10 year projected surplus of $5.6 trillion.” http://www.ustreas.gov/education/fact-sheets/taxes/ustax.shtml

Oh never, mind, those deficit deniers are crazy…

One option is to phase in a carbon tax. Hmmm, interesting… Another is focusing tax increase on consumption rather than income (and especially tie this to healthcare)

Healthcare costs keep going up! Oh my! Let’s really call this ILL-care, because the costs of keeping me heathy are not so bad, it is the cost of being ill and treating illness with hospital and medicines that is expensive.

Should there be an income cap on Social Security? Hmm, I don’t know. I guess I have grown up expecting that social security won’t be around when I get to retirement age. So I just shrug at this. There might be an age hike for full payout… great, add a few more years and decrease the number of people that can live to retirement. And let’s not even begin to discuss what that does to employment issues… (especially in an information age where many of these people don’t intuitively navigate computers)

How will State and Local governments be impacted by our deficit issues? Well, expect more unfunded mandates. (ouch) and if they raise taxes at the federal level it will be harder for States to raise their taxes. If we create federal consumption taxes, those hurt States too.

Sure our treasury is allowed to borrow at low rates- we are the best looking horse in a glue factory. No, really he said that.

If you look, he says (it doesn’t matter which him- the antiquated white guy at the front of the room pontificating) – if you look at the history of deficits in many countries over hundreds of years, you can see that it often looks like borrowing is fine… then everything collapses fast. There is so much uncertainty. (Which is about as close as they got to admitting these are complex dynamic systems that a panel of old school “experts” would not be able to predict or sufficiently analyze (in time).

Haven’t we been living on mortgage debt for a long time? Is that what grew money in our economy? The issuance of debt to families?

He admitted the system is broken! Yeah!!! Now we get somewhere!

Huh, it won’t compromise national security to cut some of the defense budget, but… ummm, it does impact jobs (which can be tracked to a specific district making those cuts politically very unpopular no matter how obsolete or irrelevant the defense product is).

A great question – one that was mentioned on my European tour this summer – Is immigration something that can help solve the deficit and social security? Antiquated white guy says – well in the short term maybe, but in the long term they pull out from the system too… and anyway we just want bright enterpreneurial innovators as immigrants – that helps the economy. Okay, maybe that wasn’t in one sentence… but the parts were all there! <insert invective of choice>

Another question is about the recent G20 meeting and their commitment to lower deficits by 50% by the year 2013. Aggressive! Answer: well, some of those countries are emerging economies growing very quickly, which makes it easy to reduce debt.

Huh, you didn’t mention that before – that emerging economies grow quickly and that makes it easy to reduce debt. Why don’t we do THAT?

Another wonderful question from the floor… uh, sir, so we have all these subsidies for corn… and corn products are what leads to obesity and diabetes… which are major healthcare costs… so um, would it be prudent to reduce subsidies? (answer: well subsidies blah blah blah…. umm, yes)

Someone else asks about unemployement issues, to which they say – we didn’t look at that. What? You didn’t look at how unemployment impacts the economy, taxes, and the deficit? What experts are these?

Enough, I am out of here…

Collaboration Mixing Board

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This morning I read a RT from @jhagel:

Open source trumps crowdsource – by @cdgramshttp://bit.ly/bIn1at

And an idea that has been bubbling in the back of my head came to the surface begging to be set free. Collaboration and Cooperation are complex processes. Setting up them as rivals diminishes the value each provide us. One is not better than another as much as one may be more or less appropriate for a particular issue. And there are a bunch of knobs and dials to adjust based on what we have to put into the system and what we would like to have as output.

My initial “Mixing Board” points to several of these knobs and dials and some of the measures we might watch. I hope you will consider these and contribute to a revised version that holds greater rigor and collective wisdom. 🙂 Collaborate with me!

CollaborationSThis is the basic mixer. We have 3 areas: the Dials – things that feel measurable and adjustable, the Knobs – things that feel like a spectrum, and the Lights – things that we can sense but probably not directly adjust.

The Dials:

  • # of contributors (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • # of beneficiaries (5 people, 25, 100, 1000, 10000, etc)
  • degree of facilitation/quality control (none, light-handed, moderated, tight, regulated)
    1. none – for example – the ability to co-create the internet approaches NO facilitation and NO quality control.
    2. light-handed – co-creating youtube is light-handed (as is most major social media space) with very simple rules.. and very little quality control
    3. moderated – wikipedia has a process for including content, a system for elevating reputation, and a fairly advanced peer produced quality control system and standards
    4. tight – most blogs (from harvard business blogs to Daily Kos) where several people have permission to add posts (the comment option might be handled lightly to not at all however) and the quality control is high (even if the quality is not high – the control of it is)
    5. regulated – let’s talk wall street stats or sports numbers collecting on websites – there is regulation about the information to control the quality and the facilitation is more in the realm of bureaucracy
  • feedback loops – do stakeholders/creators have ways of getting feedback on the collaborations? For example, couchsurfing ratings. I presume that collaborations in which people know they are successful via tight feedback loops encourage more collaboration. This is simply my assumption. 🙂

Then we have The Knobs or Spectrums:

  • cooperation – from collective to collaborative (to what degree are people creating/generating through interaction with each other? Is it the number who show up or the output of their engagement with each other? CarrotMobs are about the number (collective) and team sports are about the combined output and interaction (collaborative).
  • granularity – from single output to many outputs that can be added together. A single output could be a logo design or a designed t-shirt… where an additive output is something like Linux – composed of hundreds or even thousands of pieces where individual authorship of the granule still allows for collective production of a larger work.
  • governance – from benevolent dictator to consensus, who manages the collaboration? An individual, a leadership circle, a revolving/evolving group, or full consensus of all involved, etc.
  • field – from commons to market – what does the output create in total? Does it create a market for individuals to succeed (or fail) within or a commons for all to share?

Finally we have The Lights – given the settings of the Knobs and Dials, what can we sense?

  • emergent – does the collaboration create the conditions for emergence? To what degree?
  • creative – does the collaboration enable creative effort or stifle it?
  • quality – does the collaboration produce high quality results/outputs? (by whose definition?)
  • resourceful – does it optimally engage the resources of those collaborating?
  • beneficial – does it create benefits? (one could ask for who?)
  • speed – how long does the collaboration take?
  • adaptable – how able is the collaboration to make adjustments in response to the environtment
  • scalable – can the collaboration expand? to what degree? (not that scaling is always ideal! it isn’t!)

WonderWomanGang

by

Yesterday I was missing my friend @rachelannyes – so I looked at her twitter feed to see what she has been up to and get a sense of how she is doing. I found a lovely post:

@rachelannyes: What the world needs now is a Wonder Woman gang.

Absolutely.

So I hereby nominate for the Wonder Woman Gang the following amazing women. Please feel free to nominate those who inspire you and seem to have super powers in transforming our world.

@rachelannyes @randomdeanna@CDEgger @juneHolley @HildyGottlieb @amoration@amyrsward @VenessaMiemis @kanter @caseorganic@p2173 @kitode @ruby @silona@samsweetwater @wseltzer @rmchase @nilofer@deborah909 @sgleason @kristinwolff @staceymonk @joguldi @christinasworld@identitywoman @mariadeathstar @lizstrauss@ruthannharnisch @ladyniasan @beandlive @sheriherndon @nancywhite@alizasherman @CreatvEmergence @slboval

Then I asked for other nominations.

@kg posted: @NurtureGirl I nominate @sloane@beautifulthangs @ericaogrady@ShaunaCausey @willotoons@emgollie @khartline @Rapetzel#WonderWomanGang 🙂

plus: @kg posted: @NurtureGirl Are so many! @coachsizzle @nspilger @avivamo@realize_ink @snesbitt @susangordo@suzboop @penguinasana too 🙂#wonderwomangang

Who do you nominate? And when you think of wonderwomangang, what comes to mind? What super powers do you think these women have?