Nurturing Change: Metrics Matter

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Summary:

We live in a complex emergent world. When you put energy into nurturing a larger space – one beyond your control and possibly even your influence, be wary of assuming causal connections. Look for probabilities and correlations.

When looking for metrics: use multiple perspectives to help develop measures that go beyond your assumed (and blinders on filters). Think through time. And Be sure to track data that allows you to have quick feedback on blue oceans and black swans.

Article:

In an uncertain world – one where emergence from complex adaptive interacting systems is the way most things operate (to a greater or lesser degree) there are things you can control… a broader range of things you can influence/guide, and an ever larger sphere that you can nurture or care for.

Using network theory, we suppose that the impact you can have through the things you can control is small… it operates in the world of Gaussian curves – what Taleb calls Mediocrastan of sorts. And the things we can nurture can possibly (or are more likely to) result in power law dynamics – what Taleb calls Extrimistan. Thus, the impact you can have through nurture has the potential to be much larger.

However your risk and your “authorship” influence this as well. In the world you nurture, it is much harder to attribute outcomes to your actions… there are probabilities and correlations rather than causal connections. I can trace the causal chain on donating $100 to feed the homeless. Did they get fed? How many? Is that where my dollars went? I can’t say that my advocacy of a ban on texting while driving saved lives. I can say there is a correlation of texting while driving and car accidents. And then I infer that reducing texting while driving may reduce car accidents.

And the risk of planting seeds in the nurture space is larger (you have less control and thus less assurance of having a particular outcome). I convince my neighborhood to have an annual potluck and I lead the committee to make it happen. Does this make my neighborhood safer? Reduce crime? Increase sense of meaning and connection?

Transformative philanthropy operates in this nurture space – having potentially larger impacts over time, but it is harder for any change agent working in planting transformative seeds to give direct impact measurable results to funders.

Similarly, if you work in social media (or advertising for that matter) this dynamic of probabilistic correlation but not causal connection makes it rather tricky to say your campaign led to x, y, and z results (through your specific efforts alone). What is that saying? Something like “We believe 50% of our advertising is effective. We just aren’t sure which half.” or something like that.

We can come up with metrics to see if we are achieving the goals we set for ourselves – from products sold to child mortality. However, it is an illusion to think that we can attribute success in these ways to activities we conduct in the nurture space. We campaigned on twitter. Did that increase sales? How can we be sure? In the short term or long term? Did more children survive? Was it because we built a well, gave soap, covered them with nets, increased access to health clinics? Are we sure it was our intervention that made the difference? Or is it the convergence of interventions that tipped impact?

Creating metrics that show your goals are being achieved is level one. Being sure those metrics help link our activity to the outcome is level 2. Being able to look over longer and longer spans of time is level 3 (our action might have delayed or long term impacts which don’t show up in the short term funding calendars). And level 4 is being able to look outside of our own perspective to create metrics that allow us to notice a blue ocean move or a black swan.

My friend Manar, in our conversation on this, gave the example of Nescafe. They were very rigorous in their metrics on grocery store sales of coffee. What they couldn’t see or expect was Starbucks, with an existing brand, moving their coffee into grocery stores and having intense escalating success. Nescafe was blindsided. If you ran a bookstore, how would you have been using metrics that would have helped you anticipate Amazon.com impacting your business?

*** This post is part of the series for the Breakthroughs book. Please see Contribute to Book for more. ***

Help Others Thrive

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Helping others to thrive sounds lovely and idealistic, right? Turns out to be hugely practical.

If you are developing social software and looking for investors, you can be sure they are going to ask how you are building community. Who has done this well? Those who created a space for others to thrive.

I was recently reading Power of Pull. They tell a wonderful story, and John Hagel tells this story when he speaks too, about the industry shift to container shipping. A guy running a trucking company built from the ground up realized there had to be a better way to ship things. He designed shipping containers, and he patented it. Only he opened the patent to everyone. Then he convinced all the players in the system of the benefits of using these containers to make shipping easier and more efficient. The net result is that he evolved the market, did well financially, and probably made the cheap transportation of goods that led to globalization possible. Industry shifting.

When we look at the well scaled social websites such as facebook and twitter, we see a similar creating of shared space with a small corner of that space being profit for the creator of the space. Facebook’s apps allowed other people to make a profit on top of their application. Twitter enables a whole market of vendors, applications, advisors, “experts” to make a living on top of their platform. Viola… other people come to play. Apple and Android with their apps markets do this as well.

Create a space for a collective. Select a small tangible and profitable corner of it that respects the free flow of the community while allowing you to collect a “tax” for high-end service in the collective.

A lot of open-source software also follows this model. Allow others to play and add and evolve the collective space while charging for a subset of activity in that community. Getting this right is of course harder than it may sound. It doesn’t work at small scales. Communities are highly sensitive about what is owned, controlled and profited from. Revenue may come in the form of voluntary contributions or pay for service forms. And it can be much more difficult to control the flow – you may have to support the community until it reaches significant scale to support you back. Whereas usual fee for service models allow you to restrict service if fees are not sufficient for support, these community spaces don’t have easy on-off switches. You have to trust.

And thus, for success, you see two things. One, that they start with small or focused collectives and then open up to larger and larger communities as investment allows for expansion. And two, with significant promise, they take in large amounts of funding with years of delay expected between investment and payout. They can be slow capital.

How can you create a play space that helps others to thrive? And how, by doing so, can it feed back to help you thrive over time?

*** This post is part of the series for the Breakthroughs book. Please see Contribute to Book for more. ***

Remixing Community: Interview with Jono Bacon

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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.

Jono Bacon is a changemaker in a seemingly paradoxical sort of way.  He’s a headbanger and a diplomat.  He plays rhythm guitar, swims in big ideas, and has an infectious “Let’s do it!” attitude.  He sometimes screams into the mic, but speaks and writes persuasively.  As the author of The Art of Community, he shared his experience working for Ubuntu, one of the largest open source online communities.  As a musician, Jono recently launched Severed Fifth, an “open band,” that was recently featured in O’Reilly Radar for its potential to reinvent the music business.   Jono sees a new music industry emerging, and he wants Severed Fifth to serve as an example.  The band is in the final stages of crowdfunding their studio album.  (You can help).  But it’s about more than the music.

Todd Hoskins:  Jono, you’ve worked in the open source software business, as well as the music business for a number of years.  What can the music industry learn from the growth of open source?

Jono Bacon:  Open Source has brought tremendous change to the IT industry. Fundamentally it has closed the gap between content provider and content consumer. In the older world, content consumers have little interaction or opportunity to influence the content provider, and this often caused the relationship to feel strained. Open Source changed that: no longer did a programmer rely on a publisher to get their work seen, and no longer was the consumer unable to express feedback to the programmer.

The same thing has affected the music industry: bands would produce content but the content was fed to listeners via the labels. The world I am advocating, via the example of Severed Fifth, is one in which bands are closer to fans, and fans feel they are an integral part of how the band works.

Todd:  You’ve said the uniqueness of Severed Fifth is your community, not that you openly give away your music for free (which others do also).  Why are people motivated to join your Street Team, be your advocates, and send donations for producing a studio album?  Why is the Severed Fifth model thriving?

Jono:  Community has taught us that when people feel empowered by a mission, by an ethos, and by a goal; they will feel an overwhelming sense of unity in contributing their skills and abilities to that mission, ethos, and goal.  We have seen countless examples of this — be it software freedom with Open Source, public availability of knowledge with Wikipedia, or political resistance with various forms of activism.  When a community feels empowered and has the tools and venue to contribute their efforts, great things happen.

Of course, the mission and ethos needs to be one that people genuinely care about. “Getting Jono weekly bagels”, while interesting to me, would not be interesting to most people. I believe that we have seen Severed Fifth gain momentum because this is a problem that many passionate free culture folks care about, but it is also easy for other people to understand and care about too. My goal is to get as many people as possible to understand the mission and ethos we are empowered by — a more open music industry — and to get people on board the Severed Fifth train to produce a great example of success in the new industry.

The challenge is that culture-changing goals such as these can often sound incredibly ethereal and difficult to understand.  My goal is to produce a concrete example of something everyone can point to that demonstrates that a band who harnesses their work with professionally produced music, free access to content, empowered community, and fair financial contributions decided by the fans, will be successful. This is what I want Severed Fifth to be – so other bands can point at it and say, “If they can do it, so can we.”

Todd:  There is this Creator’s Dilemma . . . people have creative power, but often limited ways to make an income without making sacrifices in integrity.  How do you see this becoming more resolved in the future, for artists as well as engineers?

Jono:  Music isn’t any different than software.  When Open Source first came into focus, people were asking the same questions about that too.  On one hand we are giving the music away for free, but free content lowers the bar for listeners to enjoy it – more people can download it, share it with their friends, put it on YouTube and elsewhere.  Therefore, the fanbase grows naturally as people like to share and recommend great experiences to others – it is what makes us human.  A bigger fanbase means more potential customers.  This is a big part of the experiment, and I have a series of ideas of methods for generating revenue that fit into the wider ethos of Severed Fifth.

Todd:  Even with Radiohead’s successful In Rainbows experiment in 2007, it seems bands are still waiting for labels to court them.  With Rock n’ Roll’s history of breaking rules, rebelling against cultural norms, and exerting independence, why has this taken so long to take shape?

Jono:  I believe part of the challenge is that bands traditionally have not had the tools or skills to get out there and build awareness on the back of the free availability of content.  It is hard enough trying to persuade a label to give the content away for free, but then you need to develop a set of skills to really raise awareness of this. Finally, you have the final complicating factor that record deals are so romantic – they hold so much promise for so many bands.  Unfortunately the reality in these economic times is often in conflict with the fantasy.

For years bands have pushed their music in their local areas, but it is only in the last few years that we have seen people developing skills in the area of global community growth and empowerment.  While I am not suggesting for a second that I am an expert, I have been working on this a lot over the last ten years in Open Source, and I think we are starting to see more and more focus being placed on communities and growth – this is another area in which Open Source has led the curve.

Part of the goal with Severed Fifth is expose many of these techniques and approaches and transition them from Open Source and technology to music. Down the line I want to write a book explaining how all of this worked in a format that other bands and artists can harness. focused on musicians and creative types. We have already seen the impact of digital sharing on the music industry, and I think we will next see the impact of sharing this knowledge about building your own fanbase, and this will contribute to the change.

Todd:  We see an aspect of thrivability as self-evolving and self-organizing, requiring an openness to experimentation.  How do the Severed Fifth experiments apply to businesses outside of the music industry?

Jono:  The key point is that software and music are links to other commercial opportunities.  Take Open Source for example – we have huge companies who have successfully built businesses around giving their primary products away for free.  They have instead generated revenue from other areas such as support, training, commercial sales, custom engineering, etc.  It’s happening everywhere, but you have to look for it.

Todd:  On your dream tour, who would be headlining?

Jono:  I would love the exposure of touring with a number of bands, but I’ll say Iron Maiden.  Up the irons!

Todd:  Thanks, Jono.   Good luck with the album and the mission.

Something Great Together Again

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Thrivability is participating in something great together again.

Thrivability asks us – what might we achieve together that is great? What might we do to flourish? It asks us to move beyond the contraction and fear that resides in “sustainability” framing and create something fun, engaging, lively, creative, agile, resilient, enduring, and evolving.

We teeter on the precipice of the now, look back at all human culture and evolution itself has generated. Do we level up? Or do we fall over? Do we have it in us, together and individually, to co-create something worthy of that legacy? Or are we shame-faced at the errors of our past and retreat from our own creation and the consequences thereof?

If we step forward together, what is it that we create? How do we use what we have to create something more than what is there now? And do so responsibly? Responsibly to our ancestors? Responsibly to our future? Responsibly to each other? So we can collectively gaze back in the mirror on some future day and say we are proud of what we have done?

  • Did I connect people in ways that enriched their sense of meaning and purpose in the world?
  • Did I give them the information they need to make the best choices for our collective outcome?
  • Did I make a meaningful contribution to society? Did I improve the human condition?
  • Was I and am I a part of the breakdown or the breakthrough?
  • Did I dance gracefully with my follow beings and bring laughter and delight to human existence?

I have many questions. The answers are given each day, by each of us, knowingly or unknowingly.

Incubating Entrepreneurs

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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

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