Curating the Conditions for a More Thrivable World

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Slides and notes from a talk for the ISSS57 conference.

 

And my notes from that talk that go with the slides:

I am so excited about this conference. I am very English language sensitive, so getting just the right words is important to me. Words matter. They tell a story of possibility. And these words speak deeply to me. So let me explain…no, let me sum up…

In 1998, I curated an exhibition call Text and Territory: Navigating through Immigration and Dislocation. Curating art is all about caring for it, putting pieces together to tell a larger story, and caring for all the people connected to the exhibition.

In 2010, I curated a book- Thrivability: A Collaborative Sketch, gathering writing from over 65 people and pairing it with artwork to begin to explore what thrivability is. They didn’t all agree what it meant, and they didn’t need to. Curating the work was about pulling all the different voices together to make sense. To offer a first sketch of what thrivability might mean. Curating isn’t control. It isn’t about the author/creator/writer. With the Thrivability Sketch, the very first piece someone contributed surprised me, and I knew then that the collective work would be better than what I could do alone.

—

A good friend of mine, Steve, is a scientist and inventor. I would bet you have some tech you use that he was involved in creating. Something of a typical physicist, he wears one of those shirts that say “Over 1000 scientists named Steve agree…” We have spoken at length about creativity over the years. We keep coming back to ask, “what are the conditions that give rise to creativity?” While we can’t control creativity – or generativity – we can, like good gardeners, give all the ingredients to support creativity arising.

Curating the conditions is about creating the nutrient base for what you want to emerge. It is about nurturing the substrate for things to evolve from.

—

Last year at a brunch I hosted, we got in a debate about sustainability, resilience, and thrivability. So we made this chart to help people understand how we see the difference. Thrivability’s motto is “Game on!” It is about metastable states, live giving rise to more life, and anti-fragility. It is about striving for greatness. Play. Aliveness. Joy.

Thrivability doesn’t replace resilience or sustainability. It transcends them. Life strives to thrive, in whole or in part.

—

You could say I have had a passionate obsession with efficacy since I was a kid. It is a long story. Including a long tango with social change and philanthropy. And at the end of it what I found tied to efficacy were levers for transformation. What can I do to make a difference in curating the conditions for a more thrivable planet? My answer may differ than yours of course. My answer comes from Donella Meadows work on Places to Intervene in a System. I want to shift people to think about better goals, change the paradigm, and even give people more power to transcend paradigms. 1, 2, 3.

—

My strategy in curating the conditions for a thrivable world is planting the seeds of thrivability across the world. Planting the idea in people who are ripe for some story of greatness and possibility. People who are working hard to expand the possibility space. And to offer a story to people that includes joy, delight, and awe. Because awe and joy expand the mind and increase the possibility of creativity and connection.

—

Ouishare started as a small social media group focused on collaborative economy. They started to have local gatherings in Paris. They connected with like-minded groups in other cities.

Ouishare organized around values of open, sharing, and empathy.  They scaled in 2 short years from small group to global collective. They produced a list of shared values: Openness, Transparency, Independence, Impact, Meet People in Real Life,  Action, Permanent beta, Feedback, Inclusion, Play.  All values that help curate the conditions for thriving.

They came together to host an event: Ouisharefest. I heard about it and promoted it to my network. I got feedback that there weren’t enough women and minorities speaking from a friend who believe the collaborative economy is based in the emergence of the divine feminine. When I brought that back to the Ouisharefest team, they invited me to help with programming.

—

Part of the curation was about clear process. They used RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) for clear accountability and relationships. Ouisharefest came together with a scrappy startup vibe, using the very practices of the sharing economy that they promoted. They created a space for interaction to occur, and invited inspirational speakers to attract attendance. When someone like me offered feedback, they invited that person to take leadership on that activity. Pretty soon it wasn’t just a conference, they had an open space time slot, a hack day, and evening festivities, all organically grown from the invitation and shared values.

They used collaborative software to make it visible who was doing what, what decisions were being made, and even enabled voting up of ideas. They aimed at as much transparency as possible while being reasonable about what information people wanted access to.

—

Yes and culture – build on others, offer appreciation, look for assets and resources instead of deficits or needs.

Attractor Force – had the technology savvy and marketing gloss to pull in speakers, sponsors, and participants. Plus the connections and operational skills to deliver.

Success: The conference was a success.  Another conference came quickly in Spain a month later.

More energy made them more visible which attracted more people who felt they had something to offer aligned with that vibe and felt empowered to act on it grew more visibility and activity all self-managing.

Indicators: 

when an outcome from the event is listed as answers to the question “how can the government harness its potential to be a sharing platform?” you know that they were not playing blame games and instead were focused on what assets we have and how to build forward.

—

Curating conditions: values and process. The values attract the energy and the clear process gives the energy a path to follow.

They grew up from an emerging space – the Sharing Economy. They increased the network connectivity before and during the event. Ouisharefest increased the visibility of the sharing economy and bolstered those within the field.  Ouisharefest grew and strengthened the field of sharing economy, which in turns should increase the likelihood of their success in upcoming events.

—

Most of the projects that I see where people are striving to curate the conditions for thriving need to work on 3 improvements:

Clear process. What are the simple principles that form the paths for emergence to happen? Structurelessness is dangerous. Rules are too bureaucratic.

Playfulness. Thrivability emerges from play. Expand the possibility space. Find ways to reduce the pressure and seriousness in the system. Chunk it down to lighter parts where play can happen.

Layer up and down – create the conditions for those upstream and downstream of you to thrive.

—

Wishing you the best in curating the conditions for a more thrivable planet.

Thank you

Scale Makes Me Scream

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In both for profit and social enterprise, people talk about creating a business that scales. And it is said as if there were no other way worth doing it. It is said as if you don’t have a successful business if it doesn’t expand in size. And you don’t have a successful social business if your impact isn’t scaling.

It makes me want to scream. Or inside I am already screaming.

There are organizations that are best at scale. And laudable well scaled social enterprises exist too. I am not denying that. I am saying the glorification of any of those without pointing to small business or local enterprises diminishes the power and results of an organization that is not scaling ever upward in our collective awareness. Where are the HBR or SSIR articles on local social business and impact?

When uniqueness is part of the experience you pay for…

Think about your favorite local family owned restaurant. Should it scale? Doesn’t a little part of you die if you hear they are scaling? As if the personality of the place has been turned into a factory like process with measured perfection and efficiencies that stop being unique and by hand. What about your local farmer? The local farmer’s market? Should those scale?

Big scale, no fail, organizational obesity in a fragile market…

scale guy

Aren’t businesses that have scaled part of the problem in our current economy? Much like people have a dunbar number – the number of people you can know (and know who they know) which tends to be about 150, organiz

ations have a scale limit. When they exceed that limit, the costs of the necessary organizational bureaucracy to operate outstrip the efficiencies of being bigger. Think of an organization as a organism. You need food (income) to survive. And what is surviving without a purpose? Social organisms make sense. And we as a society want to see them fed, at least. But lots of organizations grow and grow until they bloat and become obese. And unhealthy. Additionally, at such massive scale, society becomes invested in the ongoing success of the obese organization, ruining the market mechanisms capitalism professes to use to make an organization healthy in the market. Too much concentrated power. Why are we glorifying movement in that direction without adequate critique and qualification? From the articles I read, it seems we do so without any question. And that makes me scream,”Wait, stop, think about this!”

whatabout manLayers of impact, axis of scale…

Is it more important for the social business to scale or for there to be impact that goes to scale? Which is more important to you: 1 business (with 5 staff and a group of investors) that gives 1 million people access to water or 1 business model is replicated a thousand times locally, producing a living income for 1000 local entrepreneurs? If they both produce the same impact: 1 million people with access to water, but the first benefits a handful of people in a single organization and lines the pockets of investors OR the second gives living income to 1000 local people. In our current market and media, the first model is celebrated.

When social entrepreneurship looks at scale, we want it to mean scale of impact. What it really means is that investors think that enough transactions at a low margin of profit to the bottom of the pyramid, a profit can still be made. Or they mean, enough wealthy people in search of meaning will pay premiums for the latest moral crisis to be off their conscious. I am not saying that either of these are bad in and of themselves. I think it is good that we explore how to give people at the bottom of the pyramid a greater experience of agency – if that means buying products and services or creating their own small businesses. (You don’t see Kiva donors asking to see if their entrepreneur is taking a business to scale.) And I think it is good that socially conscious people can make more informed decisions and advocate those decisions through social cause purchases. What those two paths miss are the other axis by which social change can happen. What if 10,000 of us all start a MakerSpace in our town? None of our businesses will probably scale (some may merge over time). But if Make Media puts out a blueprint, and thousands of us run with it, enabling lots of innovation and tinkering in our towns, is that a social entrepreneurial effort worth celebration? Should you look at the impact of a single town or could you say the overall movement has touched how many lives, led to how many inventions or customizations, or created how many small businesses…. Sometimes scale comes through tight models that can be replicated. Barcamps. Jellys.

What about the revolving loan or cascading good efforts? Let’s say I start a project where 10 of my friends get together and help 10 people improve their lives, and each person donates $10 to that effort. Each “receiver” is then required to give 10 hours to helping someone else’s life. $2 are used as an administration fee for tracking the cascade forward. The receiver then gives forward their ten hours and $10 to 10 more people and on down the line. Does that count as a social entrepreneurship? Even if the main organization never has to grow beyond 1 or 2 staff? What if loans are passed forward instead of back – so as you prepare to pay your loan, instead of giving the money back to the bank, you have to find someone to give it to who will follow the same condition and mentor them so they can pay it forward to. That might have a lot of social impact over time, but it won’t look sexy at SOCAP. Not glorious or big enough for investor interest, which is what drives media interest and behavior at SOCAP.

Speaking of time…

What “they” also mean when “they” unquestionably glorify scale is that the timeline for scale needs to be rather short term – say 3-7 years. We are talking about cashing out investor money here, and they need to know they can get it. And yet, deep transformative social change happens over decades. So we end up with lots of hot, sexy, quick fixes that scale fast instead of deep and thorough long term social transformation efforts. And with all the glamorization of for profit investment into the social change space, the growing trend for philanthropic dollars to be tied to business like outcomes increases. Why fund long term social transformation when you can get quick neat little measures of incremental improvements as a social impact investor? Slow Money is a small counter effort to this, of course.

Please

Can we please be sure to qualify statements about scale – as a subset of all ideal business development options. Please.  Can we stop glamorizing investment capital and start to celebrate slow evolution, iterative crowd-funded efforts that make a difference locally or have long term deep and transformative impact?

Strange Attractor Design

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We had a series of aha moments. Herman was explaining a recent design choice. We connected it with a prior design choice, and this took us to a transcending moment of seeing how these patterns are at work. This unleashed a raw flurry of cascading aha moments, which are roughly captured here.

Designing Networks

Consider a group of businesses and organizations that are all connecting to each other. Very quickly, the amount of information being tracked about all the others in the network overwhelms the nodes. (Herman drew the actual network math, I drew a dense network cluster.) The orgs have information that they need to exchange in order to unlock value that they benefit from. So, how do they reorganize the network to enable the optimal information flow patterns in a network that has limited trust between selfish nodes? So often when asked to design these things, people think in terms of idealistic utopian design conditions. It is about how much functionality can be given so that any information can flow in any direction. However, all the nodes find this scary. Instead of designing for optimal participant conditions, design for “willing to cooperate, yet anxious” instead.

As a network solution, you create an intermediary to reduce the network connection count. If I know the right network members, I have 2 degree access to everyone while not having to know most of them. So, see my “count of nodes” divided by “count of hubs” which is a rough way of saying, in back of the napkin kind of math, that each intermediary is reducing the number of nodes you need to directly connect with.

Trust

The next problem is why would we trust this intermediary? Again, lots of design decisions are made for central control of these hubs. What Valdis calls the “queen in between” kind of model. Most of us are skeptical about the power that aggregates in these hubs. So we need ways to ensure they are reliable. Solution: a) limit what information does flow through – only a certain type or amount. b) make all the nodes equal in some way and c) make the flow of that information extremely transparent.

When we don’t have much trust in the health of the network, the other nodes in the network, or in intermediaries, we have to manage high amounts of information about all of them. We act paranoid. When we have significant trust in the health of the network and the nodes within it and the intermediaries, we act generously. We can handle more “hops” between members, since the trust is in the network as much as it is in the nodes of that network.

One of the aha’s here for me was actually a reminder more than an aha. It is not the FORM of the network that determines the way it needs to be governed. It is the evolution of that network that determines the governance. How did it mature? If trusting in the past has led to positive outcomes, more trust will continue, and less governance is needed. However, if trust has been broken, more rules might be created to qualify when and how to trust, and thus bureaucracy begins to flourish. But I will get back to that later.

Where you see the figure 8 on the side, I am explaining to Herman about polarity management. We are not just greedy and selfish nor are we just open generous cooperators. We exist in the tension between these extremes. And even the skeptics are willing to navigate the risks of cooperation when the benefits might be higher.

Incentives

Herman mentioned how the use of financial incentives can often be misleading. The amount of the financial incentive is not what allows the node to participate in the network. Instead it is the ability of that node to maintain identity with their peer group. Can they save face and have pride while taking the risk of cooperation? Yes if there is some token amount of money involved. Or it can be another kind of token.

We have another case where credits were used between players to negotiate their placement in a queue. I might let you pass me in line, if you give me your credit. I can still save face to my peers for letting you cut, because I got some benefit for it. This design may require an arbiter to view the transaction, but the arbiter isn’t needing to make judgements about whether it can happen or not. Tokens can make visible an exchange that allows both sides to save face to others and enable actions in cooperator networks.

choice

Identity

We find the issue of identity to be a huge factor in the behavior of nodes in a network.

We talked about how a transaction between two people always seems to have at least a third party. I am not only negotiating with you for what the transaction is, I am also thinking about what my group or tribe will think of me for engaging in that transaction. In fact, I may have more anxiety about what they think than about whether you are making a good transaction with me or not. Most of us dedicate most of our time to identity formation, with everything we say and do designed, intentionally or not, to reinforce what we want to think of ourselves. We may not do a good job of it all the time, but that is a driving force.

Choices

I told Herman about a conversation I had with Benjamin Ellis about making choices. Benjamin was talking about a graphic designer that provided 3 choices. And we quickly riffed on why this works so well. We think that the selecting out of the bad option of the three builds the sense of confidence in decision making that enables the next choice between the remaining two to be faster and seem easier.

Rules, Rules, and more Rules

We also talked about how the centralized control design model has these negative side effects of generating bureaucracy because they tend to create rules to follow, and when those rules conflict, they create rules about the conflict, in an infinite cascade of rule making that ends up grinding cooperation to a halt. Thus we said they are limited in size by the ability to moderate the rules. This did help us transcend the 150 limit of community cooperation (limit to the ability to track the trustability of members of a network with each other). However, when you design for robustness (bookmark conversation on resilience, robustness, and anti-fragility)… when you design for robustness, you put the value and power at the edges of the network operating on principles instead of rules, and allow it to learn and grow from a simple structure, you get agility and adaptability in the network…and it can become scale-free? I think.

Optimize for what?

We moved to a meta-level discussion about how any group tends to design to optimize for one factor. When we succeed at that optimization, we also learn that there are negative side effects that may inhibit our achievement of another (possibly more important) goal. So we have to switch to design to optimize for something else. This can be long term human social evolution at work – when we exhaust the potential of something, we have to evolve to work around that. This often involves making distinctions between things that were previously hooked together in order to unlock value… but I digress. Will save that for another conversation…. back to the design at hand.

Rituals

In talking about Identity, we had taken a side track to talk about the power of ritual. I had shared a story about being uncomfortable – with a growing sense of dis-ease when I was in a group that had a series of actions that were meant to create bonding in the group culminating in a big ritual together. Rituals can help ease the anxiety of cooperation by bonding everyone into a peer group – we are all smart or stupid together, so I can work within that group easier. Everyone has crossed a threshold together. And you feel it in an embodied form. However, we need to take into account that humans have a spectrum of tolerance to peer influence. Some of us just don’t care what our peers think. And others can’t make a decision without being aligned with the group. It isn’t a stable known to design for.

There is that formula that Herman wrote. 🙂

Design to Evolve Cooperation

In pink at the bottom it says “It isn’t the form==> governance. It is TRUST==>governance.”

On the left in blue it says, “Design big” from the start and you get “bureaucracy, low trust, not agile, ultra specific and rule based.”

If you start small, simple, and mature through the growth of trust, you get evolving cooperation. What is the least that is needed? What is the smallest channel that enables a flow of information that benefits the network? Design for learning and self-evolution. Design to grow using minimal rituals for a foundation of trust to help mediate the anxiety of cooperation. When evolving cooperation against the will or inclination of players, manage their fear and sense of security. Sometimes tokens or credits can be used to mediate that trust.

I am very interested in how tokens are used to engender trust and enable flows. How does a token act as an object of trust transfer? Trust tends not to be transferable, whereas tokens can be. How do you route the trust into the token and the process, so that it can be transferred?

This is where we start really transcending that 150 limit.

 

Sorry this isn’t an essay yet. It is just notes from an extended conversation.

 

Co-Created Solution Design Workshop at Chicago Bioneers

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I hope you will join me November 2nd in Chicago for a workshop on Co-Created Solution Design at Chicago Bioneers.

This workshop is for you if:

  • you work with others that you don’t have total control over to come up with new ideas or actions
  • you want to tap into the wisdom of a group and go beyond what any could do alone
  • the same old problems are present and you know you need to approach them differently to get better answers

My goal for the workshop is two-fold:

  • give people ways to redirect conversations to be more co-creative
  • offer several different approaches to achieving co-created solution design

Why Co-Created Solution Design?

Since January 2011, a small group of facilitators working on social entrepreneurship and international development have come together to find ways to impact the system of social innovation globally. We call ourselves ci2iglobal, which is short for Collective Impact and Innovation Institute. With a collective 100 years experience in the area, we pooled our experiences together to figure out where we can be most useful. We believe a crucial part of the difference we can make is spreading the work of co-created solution design.

Collaboration might be the hot word of today, but we believe co-creation gets closer to our intent to help solutions arise from group creation. Too often gatherings come together and the path or outcome has been pre-determined. And it limits the engagement of all stakeholders, which is vital to successful social innovation. Co-created solution design provides a method – a process – to create solutions, but it does not presume answers. It opens questions to be answered by the group.

While much of what we do is about getting something done together, what actually gets done depends heavily on the relationships between the participants and their commitment to action.

I remember very vividly learning first hand the difference between advice and self-generated solutions. On the second day of my coach training, we were asked to provide advice to our partners on how to achieve one of their goals. We talked at them for 30 minutes. Then we were asked to listen as they thought through another challenge.  The difference startled me. I am a quick thinker and prided myself on my ability to offer useful advice. However, the solutions my partner came up with had deep understanding of all the forces at play. Most importantly, my partner hesitated in implementing my solution, whereas the partner eagerly looked forward to testing the self-generated solution. The difference in engagement and commitment was tangible for me.  I have tried to listen more and advise less ever since.

Co-created solution design is just like that, except it is working with groups and even groups of groups on larger systemic issues.

Strategies

I will be highlighting three different strategies for doing co-created solution design:

  • Engaging Exploration – Use when there is not much of a time limit and a need to see and act within a large landscape of possibilities.
  • Flash – Use when there is very little time and a strong base of existing knowledge and awareness.
  • Creative – Use when you need a very well fit and very novel solution.

So, how do we do it?

Come to the Co-Created Solution Design workshop to find out! After the workshop, I will share some of the materials from the workshop here for those of you who can’t make it.

 

 

Give it away now!

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I get asked a lot to do many things for free. All the time. And I find I sit in a tension between advocacy for the content of the work – give that away to promote the work – AND that my work is a service process that I earn a living from.

So people ask for me to help put together events, curate things, or advise on their projects. But I also make a living facilitating events, curating and managing projects, and consulting. So when do I say yes to the free services they ask me for and when do I say, “yes, and that costs money.”

I can sense by gut when the opportunity doesn’t seem to be reciprocal. But describing that sense of reciprocal benefit in terms that can become principles for consistent action…that seems more tricky. How do you manage it?

IMG_0905
Creative Commons License photo credit: askingdave

Is it worth it to do for free?

Events:

  • A major conference in one of my fields has historically given me a free pass to be an energizing presence in the space. They aren’t asking me to run the event. I get to do my thing. And they get the benefit of my more subtle forms of facilitating – network weaving, curiosity infusions, etc.
    That exchange seemed worth it to me. This year the benefits are not clear or pressing enough to them.
  • A conference in one of my fields – but directed more toward specialists – asks me to be on an organizing committee for 9 months. To even attend the event I will spend a thousand dollars on airfare – not to mention numerous hours of pre-event meetings. I might increase visibility of my work, but not to a broad audience. That didn’t seem worth it. They aren’t offering money and the visibility gained isn’t ideal. I might learn some, and I already have enough social contacts in that arena for my needs.
  • An innovation event raising money to do the event via crowdfunding asks me about curating some of the event. Hmmm, the right kind of audience. And, if this was not my content audience, I would be charging at least $3000 for design, coordination, and production. I will have to think about this. It would have to make my organization visible to the tune of a $4000 sponsorship in lieu of fees, I think. At least for my effort at this time and not living in the location of the event.

Consulting:

  • Someone designing a values-driven community asks to pick my brain for an hour. It actually takes about 3 hours between the email and follow up, the scanning of documents to offer useful feedback, and then the actual conversation. They are not likely to be paying for consulting later. Benefits: continue building reputation as someone who can think through the complexity of a social ecosystem and flow dynamics. Yes. Good. And costs: my time and energy aren’t being valued with anything but gratitude. I am not getting visibility, social contacts, nor learning. I have historically just done this sort of thing for the sector. Over and over. I am starting to feel like setting the limit at 1 hour is not enough. I should restrict these freebies to 30 minutes or just publish a guide of questions for a reasonable fee. Anything of my time over that needs to be an hourly rate through the Agency.
  •  Someone calls needing to make a decision on a potential partnership or collaboration. We talk for 45 minutes. I ask questions. We clarify. A decision is made. We could call this social capital building. And you might say that if the person had to pay they would simply skip the counseling. However, I am failing to use the social capital I built with them before it starts depleting (passage of time – these things don’t hold value indefinitely). I need to start making it clear that I charge for this. That will show up over at the Agency in the next month too.
  • I am on the board for a project and the collaborators on that project have a massive meltdown. I mediate over the course of two weeks to get them to a clear outcome, agreed process, and personal development for all sides toward positive feelings and “ownership” aka responsibility all around.  Of course this is free – I might not be on the board to serve that purpose expressly, but I am happy to give my time to them. However, I ought to also be more clear about providing this kind of mediation as a service. That is definitely invisible to the market. Again, that will be showing up in the Agency in the next month.

How do you decide what to give away? When is it worth it? How do you do your cross-capital forms accounting?

 

Facets and Heterogeneity

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Evangeline

Do we wear many masks? Or just one? Are they really masks? Or can we perceive them as facets of a multi-dimensional self?

Masks has a connotation of being false. Thus it is hard to pair a mask with authenticity. I have been using the words – facet or aspect. And I tie it to a metaphor of a gem – we are one crystal with many facets. Each facet faces a different tribe. A few people close to the edges of these facets may see a more than one of our facets and connections to more than one of our tribes. Some of us are pretty translucent gems, while others prefer to be – or need to be – opaque.

This is deeply tied into a model of a human we use when designing social software. When we presume that a human is an integrated whole who shows all people the same depth and dimensions of our being, we create too superficial of a tool. And we end up with several dilemmas.*

  1. Show the whole self and bombard people with TMI (and later get held accountable for your intimacy).
  2. Show only one dimension of the self (and get accused of not being authentic or of not being a part of one of your tribes)
  3. Create multiple identities (and then try to keep track of them and which facet you display in each… and later get pushed out by “real names” social software.)

quartz crystal

We are too often seen as a single facet (race, religion, work, location, affiliation, purpose, etc.) when we are many. Social Network Analysis, of which I am an avid fan and advocate, still usually only maps for one dimension of the self. Imagine the real social network map – the layers and layers of connections and the participation in the many tribes we belong to and participate in. This map may be so full of links and nodes as to be unread-able at anything but perhaps the most local scale. (and of course overwhelming if we move the static map into active motion of real-time interactions) (Let’s not even begin to talk about degree of association/depth of connection which adds another layer/filter to what we share and who we share it with.)

20110825-NodeXL-Twitter-ASA2011 Graph

Network maps have yet to really reveal this inter-lacing because they draw links, usually, on one facet or connection type. But, in practice, most tribes are deeply interlaced. (Cults try to diminish this interlacing – by reducing other tribal affiliation and thus increasing dependency on the cult.) For example, I may live in a blue state, but I have relatives that are red voters, which keeps me informed of other positions besides the blue I seem embedded in. This is the counter argument to homophily and the risk of sameness that some are recently arguing the internet encourages (you filter for that which you are already a part of and thus only reinforce your beliefs).

Our resilience rests in our heterogeneity which brings us the diversity of viewpoints we need for a better, more complete view of our world. We build relationships by focusing on a sameness, however that need not obscure how we may be different. For example, Alexis and Xavier connect because they both believe in building better local economies. Alexis has a background in marketing. Xavier has experience developing collaborative conversations. Together Alexis and Xavier create an event for local businesses and potential entrepreneurs to meet and discuss with local government figures how to support developing local economies. As Valdis Krebs says: “connect on your sameness and benefit from your differences.”

* To keep things light, I only mention the design of social software, however, we also limit people in our in person social interactions by presuming an integrated human as if they only have one persona in their minds. Voice dialogue offers a powerful process for letting us open to the multiplicity of voices we have within us and act with greater awareness of the dynamics between those inner facets of the self.

Integration

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This is a time of convergence and integration. Re-integration actually.

It is like that tip of a fractal pattern where it no longer pushes out and starts to turn a corner and draw back in. We have been specializing and specializing and valorizing the specializing for a long time. Some of this knowledge and new understanding pushes us further away from what is known and what is known in related fields. I saw this image a few months ago and had to laugh. I don’t remember where I saw it, so please forgive the replication from memory. Let’s say for example, that the core body is biology, the specific domain is Cellular Biology, and the graduate paper is on the some process of mitochondria.

knowledgeExpands

And while this is expanding our knowledge ever outward, it doesn’t pull us back into core knowledge to shift our basic understanding of the world. It is knowledge that resides in ever smaller numbers of people, applicable and valuable only to them. It is the 18th Century Literature scholar who becomes so deeply specialized in a particular poet or time period that their sphere of language centers further and further out from our common tongue until they become nearly unintelligible to someone in a different field of study. It is the Theoretical Physicist whose language of quarks and gluons seems like an alien or imaginary world to the Sociologist they sit with at the campus-wide faculty meeting.

And yet there is another way that knowledge expands when two related fields develop something near their intersection. And example here might be Biology –> Cellular Biology –> Process of RNA transcription which uses a lot of Chemistry. (These are elementary examples, because you and I do not share enough deep expertise for us to point to some recent edge being expanded here in enough detail!)

KnowledgeIntegrates

Here we begin to find the overlaps between fields, weaving them together into a larger cohesive picture of the world. And as the gates to the intersection open, it continues to expand out, often until the intersection of the knowledge space becomes a field itself. Neurobiology, computer science, sustainability are a few more recent developments that arose as intersections of one or more domains. However, this doesn’t draw us back toward fields that aren’t peripherally connected. It doesn’t take the revelations from statistical math and begin to apply them to organizational design. It doesn’t take a strand of physics and link it to spiritual traditions. These radical connections between fields of seemingly quite different areas is where some really interesting work emerges that can reshape what many of us see about the world and do within that world. These radical connections shift the intersections at the center of our knowledge and open up new axis of information.

And this…. this is where radical innovation happens. It is where most people think you are crazy until all the sudden it pops and knowledge feeds back into the core of our shared understanding shifting many of us.

InnovateKnowledge

And just for some background on the drivers behind this, some of my view here is coming from conversations about Adam Smith and divisions of Labor and Specialization… That we have reached points in the expansion of knowledge by which they hold value to so few people that they can’t attract more to specialize further into that space. And instead, when we pull back to reintegration of knowledge we expand the value of the development of that information so that it serves a broader audience… And thus knowledge expands and reintegrates like the breathing of a giant collective organism.

 

Freedom and Responsibility

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Before I dive into Freedom and how it relates to responsibility, I have to confess that George Michel’s Freedom! song runs through my head as I type. In it he sings “you got to give for what you take.” and while much of the song might only poorly relate to what I am about to play with, this line certainly does.

I typed into twitter yesterday, “Thinking about the connection of freedom and responsibility. To thrive are they correlated?”

A little background. For a long time, I have been irritated and judgmental (feelings I try to avoid). I have been irritated and judgmental about Ayn Rand and her whole Objectivist thing. A few weeks ago, I was reading about Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand. Yes yes, exactly, I was thinking. We love it when we find things that validate or resonate with what we already believe. However, I can also see that between the right and left – the libertarians and the liberals – are two seemingly polemic forces – one side all bloated with self-interest, cries “Freedom above all else!” and everyone who follows that belief can join that side… And the other side righteously declares, “Equality for all!” and everyone who believes in that gathers around. Both sides hold their chests high and have some sort of moral indignation with the other.

First, let’s acknowledge that Ayn Rand attracted a following because there is a tension between the collective and the individual. And there is something deeply satisfying about believing in individual agency. And America (and Australia too) has a love affair with the cowboy – the lone agent, the entrepreneur, the solitary genius, and the self-made man. And sure, if the collective just looks like someone else’s self-interest being served and not honoring the whole or even the other parts, then sure, pursuing your self-interest instead of theirs makes a good deal of sense.

However, it is also the case that except for the wild ones that have left society completely and live alone on the land (and these unusual creatures do exist even if only for short periods of time)… except for the wild ones, we are all intricately linked. So while Rand might have been right to disavow communism, the Objectivists are wrong to neglect our responsibility to the networks we depend on. Freedom and responsibility are intricately linked.

If I have little or no freedom – you have imprisoned me, let’s say; then we can’t really hold me responsible for much (except my thoughts and perhaps my words). However, if I am unshackled and given freedom, I can’t hope to maintain that freedom without supporting the conditions that allow for it. For me to be free, I have to care for the context I am in and the people I engage with. I am never purely autonomous – especially after globalization entered the picture. And for the agents of equality, let me add – if we encourage equality, it may be in our own self-interest – or our belief therein. It is that sense of “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” As well as the same kind of thinking that prevents lower to middle class people from voting to tax the rich, “that could be me, and I don’t want to be taxed when I get there.” And, when my freedom interferes with other people being free, I am responsible for navigating that tension (as are they and those around us). We call this process “Court” and the decisions are “justice” not just for us but for all in like positions. I am hoping there is a court jester in there to keep things lively and light-hearted.

Okay, okay, I get the overwhelm that ensues when we try to be responsible for our actions. Taken to the extreme this can mean accounting for where everything I use and enjoy has come from, who was impacted by the making of these things, what the making did to the environment, and what impact any of all of this can have on me and my descendants or legacy in the future. Just how responsible am I? And how can I feel free when these responsibilities begin to inhibit my actions?
Well, that is the dance we do. Don’t mistake feeling free for being free. We take responsibility where we can today and hope our choices, made to the best of our knowledge, will enable us to be free in the future. We ask not, “what all am I responsible for?” but instead, “where else can I take more responsibility today than I took yesterday?” And asking that, we take a step and action toward increasing our ability to be free tomorrow. Freedom after all is not just the ability to do whatever we want and damn the consequences, it is the ability to make a choice given the consequences we can perceive.

Freedom and Equality are not opposite ends of some spectrum but qualities acting in dynamic tension together.

Responses to my query on twitter:

greghartle Greg Hartle: @NurtureGirl In my opinion, with any freedom comes great responsibility.
ahesse Arno Hesse: Freedom implies living up to your responsibility. RT @NurtureGirl: Thinking about the connection of freedom and responsibility
elizlk Elizabeth Krueger: @NurtureGirl connected by moral sense so that freedom for me isn’t hurting someone else; w/o morals freedom isn’t shared
What do you think?

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. ***

Thrivable Leadership : Interview with Kevin A. Clark

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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.

Kevin A. Clark is an award-winning brand strategist, experience designer, author, and transformational catalyst.  He is President and Founder of Content Evolution LLC formed in 2002 to provide leadership in brand behavior and experience strategy.  In early 2009 Kevin retired from IBM with 30 years of service.  He is Program Director emeritus, Brand and Values Experience, IBM Corporate Marketing and Communications – responsible for discovering and creating new ways for people to experience IBM.  As a business metaphysicist, Kevin also is a member of the North American Thrivable Network.

Todd Hoskins:  In your experience how are the impacts, methods, or requirements of leadership changing?

Kevin A. Clark:   Yes, there’s definitely a shift.  John Perry Barlow says the role of the manager is changing from telling people what to do, to helping them make sense of things (so they can act on their own).  Leaders need to move from directing to enabling.  Governance at the board level needs to move to enablement too, and environmental scanning.  This is part of the resilience and adaptive function leaders need to embrace.

Business schools are creating technically capable professionals, yet they are not delivering two things you get promoted for:  leadership and judgment.  Leadership gets some air time mostly by case study, yet more focused on outcomes than the journey.  Judgment hardly at all.  We need to find better ways to provide learning environments to hone good judgment – both inside the enterprise (the federation in my case) and the classroom.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter at Harvard Business School said two decades ago the new deal with employers and employees is:  We can’t guarantee your employment, but we can guarantee your employ-ability.  I like that deal.  It means you take full advantage of being the best you can be as a lifelong learner and professional, and it places the burden on the organization to find ways to hold on to you.

Todd:  There is a collapse of disciplines/silos that we see happening, which also seems to point towards the more thrivable whole.  Business leaders are no longer just reading business books.  You are influenced by Don Beck, Ken Wilber, Dave Snowden, Carl Jung, Dan Ariely, among others.  What is happening here?

Kevin:  Business leaders are beginning to act as authentic selves in all contexts as opposed to acting situationally.  Situational management techniques lead to multiple personality disorder; and organizational schizophrenia.  If you treat all the people in your life with respect and don’t become another person when you go to work, you start to understand how to play non-zero – or more ways to play in an increasingly win-win world.

I believe we’re also inheriting a new generation of people who are broadly networked and think in bursts (texting-minds), combined with short attention spans and a width of broad knowledge.  I see imprinting and collective consciousness moving toward bite-size interaction with implications for short-burst projects and direction.

I work with companies in other parts of the world that have 100 year plans and accompanying scenarios – we have a shorter time horizon in our Western left-brain linear processor world.  We need to embrace the non-time-dependent, holistic side of our thinking to be fully ready for economic forces emerging that have a much longer term and more comprehensive outlook.  There is also a perceptual and cognitive readiness emerging that makes it possible to both collaborate and compete simultaneously.  It is the “I” and the “we” held in dynamic tension – not canceling out each other, but amplifying the strengths of both.

Todd:  Is business planning changing?

Kevin:  Business planning is changing from simply doing “well,” to doing well and doing “good” for a number of stakeholders.  We encourage an understanding of the full spectrum of resource acquisition and resource allocation, making provision for alternative futures and preparing for them.  We look at monitoring emergence, and understanding both the permissions to operate freely and unconstrained along with the behaviors that will trigger regulation and customer defection.  These are all needed by the contemporary business planner.  Spreadsheets will no longer be the primary planning tool.

Visual models accompanied with explanatory narrative and a financial business case will be needed to deliver competitive resilience in the future.  The planning cycle will also have to move from annual or quarterly cycles to continuous modes with selected deep dives.  This will provide new insights and help eliminate the unjustified assumptions which can deplete the energy of companies through unnecessary activities and operations.

Todd:  Content Evolution is a global “non-holding” company.  I know you’ve called it a “federation.”  How do the companies relate to one another?

Kevin:  Content Evolution functions as a global ecosystem of member companies – we work together to organize intention around marketplace behavior.  Much of this is done by exposing members to each others’ capabilities, participating in joint business development activities, and global teleconferences.

We have a business development commons that brings together the sales and development executives from the member companies and provides a safe environment for them to collaborate and quietly do horse-trading.  We also have an annual conference for our 40 companies worldwide – last year at Interbrand headquarters in Manhattan – and this coming year in the spring at Jack Morton Worldwide in Boston.

Todd:  How does this model represent a shift from the old “if you can’t beat them, join them” model of compete or acquire?

Kevin:  We collaborate.  I’m reinvesting the 30 years I spent in the corporate world and taking my professional relationships and federating them into something integral that hasn’t existed before.  It’s also better being a global mentor than being a traditional manager – just like it’s better to be a grandparent than being a parent!

Content Evolution as a member federation has no debt, since no one acquired anyone.  We have more capabilities than the largest of the marketing holding companies, spanning customer and market research, product and service ergonomics, business and thrivability strategy, brand strategy and management, and customer and constituency experience design and strategy.

Todd:  What have you learned in pioneering this federation?  What mistakes have you made?

Kevin:  I have made no mistakes (says the ego).  “Ha!” says the rest of my consciousness.  I like to move in several different directions at once.  Some of my experiments failed, such as working on a collaborative book (too much effort for too little collective reward).  We refocused our group energy around driving revenue rather than driving early visibility.  The recognition we’re here is growing – commensurate to our practical contributions to solving client problems and adding breakthrough value.

Our strategic selling method: listening, just like I’ve needed to direct less and listen more to the members.  Today we’re working together better than ever and thriving as a group.

Todd:  Anything else, Kevin, that can help us thrive in the New Year?

Kevin: Be intentional!

Todd:  Thanks, Kevin.