Category: Innotribe

No innovation without the connection with the world of art

storyclub petervan

 

In June of this year, Raf Stevens (RS) invited me for an interview as part of his StoryClub Podcast series. The interview was in Dutch but i made this English transcript out if it. For those interested, it’s a good summary of my thinking and mood halfway my sabbatical. The different rhythm of the sabbatical has also softened my voice. And I like how Raf kept the silences in the interview. Emptiness is sometimes the platform for resonating content… Enjoy or start crying ;-).

Part of these reflections will be integrated in my mid-Sep keynote/performance at the Finnovate FinnoSummit in Mexico City.

PV: If there is any form of consistency in my story, that would be in the word “rhythm”.

RS: I spoke with Peter Vander Auwera (PV)

PV: I have to be very careful that I am not creating a story – which also would be ok – but I just want to indicate that I have the sensitivity not to invent a story just to make the whole thing make sense. In English there is a term for this: confabulating a story. To make – with hindsight – sense of and for myself and others.

RS: Peter Vander Auwera is a thinker. He has been thinking a lot about innovation and change. But he is also a creative doer. He makes paintings and writes poems. At first sight a strange combination. But then you don’t know Peter.

PV: I am in a sabbatical right now. Before this, I was enjoying lots, lots of freedom to create – together with others – a community. We called it a “tribe”. An “Innotribe”. A tribe of innovators in the financial industry. And throughout that journey my focus has become more and more on the creation of a sort of events where people come together in a coherent setting around some content themes. In fact, that has become my main expertise. I rolled into it, and it has become the place where I was meant to be.

RS: Peter works with SWIFT. An international financial services organisation. Within this company, Peter co-founded a very inspiring initiative: Innotribe. A community where financial leaders and big thinkers of today gather to explore how they can create a better world. With Innotribe, Peter brought together these people in what he calls “high quality meeting platforms”. To learn from each other, to start conversations, to dare dreaming again.

(Music)

RS: Peter lives and works on the intersection of business transformation and art. Since begin 2017, he is on sabbatical, a period to disconnect, and to take distance from his day-job at Swift and Innotribe.

RS: Welcome at the Story Club Podcast, with Peter Vander Auwera.

PV: Sometimes I think I pushed the bar quite a lot with the work I am doing so far, but in reality I just scratched the surface. I got a lot of freedom, I mean a LOT of freedom at SWIFT. I can say for sure that I got 95% freedom to do what I thought should be done, what content to bring, how the production should feel like etc, etc… But still, I felt I was hitting some cultural ceiling within the organisation. That is not a criticism, it is what it is.

I want a much bigger contribution of artists, of art in the creation of this sort of rhythms, this sort of experiences. What I want, I want to resonate with the audience and the guests at a level “beyond the cognitive”. Not only leave a message between the ears, but also touch the heart, the soul, and the human. I want that what we make that it enter your unconscious. I want to create magic and put a spell on you.

In the events, especially the bigger ones, I use artists in support of the content, so not as entertainment, but as underpinning for the content. In the smaller events, these feel more like a retreat and therefore only target small highly curated groups of twelve people, I use artists not so much in support of the content, but to let them inspire the guests by sharing the intensity of their work.

(Music)

I was trained as an architect. At Saint-Lucas in Brussels and Ghent. So not the engineering architecture, but more the artistic side of it. I usually say with a prank: “We were permissioned to draw buildings that never needed to be built”. And that is an enormous freedom of expression. That started itching again. Three years ago, I went back to art academy. The first year was drawing, especially drawing of life models… with my architecture background of straight lines – in that era – it was a real stretch for me to deal with the organic shapes of the human body. I even felt that in my hands: they never had internalised the drawing of a curved line, it was not natural for me.

But I also learned to observe. So not drawing what you think but drawing what you see. Same for painting: painting the colour you see not the colours you think you see.

After the first year of drawing, I did two years of painting. And now and then I post some work on my Facebook page, and to my surprise there are a number of people asking me if I sell my work. Selling my work? Hmmm… never thought about that.

(Music)

And just like you, I got the chance and opportunity to talk in front of audiences. I do my best to illustrate my “talks” or “stories” with good visual material, and I also already use some soundscapes and even silence….

RS: Yes, I saw your nice TED talk of 2-3 years ago.

PV: Yes, Thank you… I now start playing with the idea to evolve those talks in some sort of “performance”, almost “conférencier” style of keynote.

RS: An “experience” ?

PV: Yes, an experience indeed. I want to tell a narrative – at another occasion we can discuss the difference between a story and a narrative – a narrative about maturity levels of change agents in organisations. I defined 3 phases, and each phase is documented by four archetypes of change agents. And for each archetype there is a narrative, a visual, a soundscape, a scene setting, a prop on stage. I have not decided yet whether I will deliver this as one big performance of 12 archetypes, of maybe an episode per phase, or maybe an episode per archetype.

I believe there are a couple of interesting findings in there. Phase 1 for example is about “The Forbidden”, that what was suppressed, the forbidden fruit. And Phase 2 is about protest and rebellion. And Phase 3 about daring to stand fully in your own creativity. And I illustrate all that exclusively with my own artwork, my self-composed soundscapes, my self-written poetry and “bring it live” on stage. And only once.

RS: Heh… only once?

PV: Only once.

RS: Why only once?

PV: Because I am attracted by ephemeral experiences. A good metaphor is drawing or writing on a sandy beach. The waves come and it’s all gone. You were there to witness it, or not. One can of course make a video testimonial of that, but that’s not the same experience as when you were there live. The idea emerged – maybe a strange connection here – when I looked and watched over and over again the reunion concert of Led Zeppelin in the London O2 arena a couple of years ago. That concert only happened once. You can’t repeat that sort of concert ten times in a row. Not possible.

(Music)

Then you encounter yourself. In your own emptiness, your own… the aspects of yourself that you don’t want others to know about. The so-called shadow side. A good way to pinpoint your shadow is to ask yourself what you absolutely would HATE that people say about yourself. What would hurt you badly? That could for example be: you are stupid, or you are a liar, or you are a manipulator, or you are a psychopath.

RS: An interesting word in that list is “manipulator”

PV: Yes. I got in contact with Leading By Being via Andre, Andre Pelgrims who was in one of your previous StoryClub stories. I know Andre already from my Microsoft period (2001-2005): Andre was offering a couple of workshops about people coaching. To make a long story short, one of the workshops was a role-play, and in the play Andre was my counterparty, the guy that needed to be coached by me. After the game, when Andre was back in his role of facilitator, he told me: “My feedback to you Peter is that I never would want to work for you. You are the biggest manipulator I ever met!” BANG! That is something Andre is really good at: he only needs 5 minutes to scan you, laser-sharp, make the diagnose, you are dissected…

RS: Do you think that was part of the game?

PV: I don’t believe Andre is a manipulator at all. That this is part of his game. On the contrary. I really think he is laser-sharp, in the sense of a scalpel, tjack – and be ultra precise in “this is your problem, man. “

I have tried to take that feedback with me very consciously in the rest of my career: make sure that I am not manipulating when I do something. And that is also part of the design and the delivery of the sort of events I am trying to create. You told me before this interview that you were planning to follow a workshop on “the art of facilitating”? I will send you a link – and please remind me when I forget – of a book by Dan Newman “From the front of the room” (Amazon Link), a sort of the Art of Facilitating for advanced etc etc … Dan is founder/director I believe of an organisation called The Value Web http://thevalueweb.org/ and amongst many other engagements they do the facilitation for the WEF in Davos. With big whiteboards, and live scribing, and – it is much more than scribing, it is based on the MG Taylor methodology – with a lot of preparation, a lot of solid framing, very very professional.

But when I was reading Dan’s book, at some moments I felt the facilitator became a manipulator. Using tricks that I would not feel good with and who make me think of what you read and hear about Trump. It was in that election debate with Hillary: at a certain moment Trump stands right behind Hillary, where he basically manipulates with his body energy how she feels. Not that I am worried that Hillary has not yet developed a thick skin against these tricks but anyway… In his book, Dan describes a couple of other subtle and not so subtle ways to facilitate groups and use your physical presence/position to deal with for example saboteurs in the group, by standing very close to them, or by ignoring them, or… The art of facilitating is a fine art. At what moment does it become manipulation and when is it authentic?

Another example: when we – I always say “we” because I never could make these events happen without other professionals, you need a production team for this – when we you work all the time in co-creation mode, I am basically the composer, the architect, like you ask your architect “I need a home”, I try as an architect to get a clue – or rather a pretty sharp understanding – of what you really want of a home.

RS: Also the storyline of an event

PV: And thus, what we do with our facilitators: we cut the content of the “speaker” in chunks, and after each chunk we give an exercise to internalise the content just given. Starters, main course, dessert. Whatever the number of servings you need… And the invitation process to move the audience into active assignment mode can be quite diverse. I will make a caricature of it now, but one way would be by announcing “Guys, we now have some work for you!” I can guarantee that 25% of your audience chickens out, especially an audience of people from the financial industry feeling already uncomfortable as they come into an experience space that does not exactly mimic their bank branch. Another way of moving your guests in action mode is to day “We have a present for you” and the assignment is wrapped in an envelope of a present box, or something they discover themselves, but there the line is very thin…

RS: Yes, is it manipulation or facilitation?

PV: Exactly. To come back to the beginning of this interview, I am very sensitive to this; it has to be “right”.

(Music)

RS: When I hear you talking, Peter, you know what I am thinking about? Maybe it is linked to your sabbatical, but maybe you went deeper then ever, not only in theory but also in art, in poetry – thinking about deep change some moments ago – but has all this created a deep change in yourself, that will maybe enrich you if you ever go back to a corporate world? Or will it rather be an obstruction; because of lot of what you do is a mile away of what happens in most companies? Will it be enrichment or rather a frustration?

PV: Yes, but it also has to do – and I come back to the aspect of maturity, the maturity of a change agent – with moments of powerlessness. The realisation that I have reached an age where I will never be capable anymore to become fully what I could become, and will not be able to realise my dreams to the fullest.

RS: Not anymore? That is quite fatalistic…

PV: Not anymore, or for sure not anymore in a corporate environment because I believe it is – and that is not a matter of laziness of fatalism – I believe it is a big stretch for a corporation to get inspired by these sort of ideas, let alone to do something with them. And it is very easy for me to shout something about architectural metaphors and blah blah blah, but in all these models – and they are just models – what is always missing is the noise inherent to the system. The noise of the human being. The noise of the human as manipulator, the noise of trying to take space from the other, the noise of not willing to make the other win, the career noise of wanting to be the next CEO, etc… all this is noise in the system that makes you live in a big illusion that you have a new skeleton, a new perspective, etc – in that sense most change programs are bullshit. As long as you don’t bring together people together in high quality connections, you have to get on with the old crocodiles that are polluted anyway.

(Music)

RS: May I ask you two things to end? One is a citation, from the editor of WIRED Magazine Kevin Kelly, also found on your blog. And the second thing… that is still a secret, won’t tell you now…. The citation goes: “Your job in life is to discover your job, and it usually takes you a whole life to figure this out”. How far are you with that?

PV: If zero is nowhere and 10 is everything…. I feel I am somewhere around 3

RS: Ouch! That’s sharp!

PV: Yes, but on the other hand, what you get from Leading by Being, at least in my case – it’s different per person – in my case – and I still don’t succeed in doing that – it is to build in mildness for yourself.

RS: So it is ok it is a 3?

PV: You say, “That is sharp”… What I realise more and more the last months – not sure you call this mid-life or late-life or whatever-life – a year or so ago I started realising that if I would like to stay active professionally till the age of 70, I only have 10 years left to do what I want to do. So the clock is ticking. And that is also the main reason for my sabbatical. If I don’t do it now, I will never.

(Music)

RS: Do you need appreciation? – everybody needs appreciation, let’s put that down as a certainty. With your blog posts and a quite different rhythm of life and the things you share with the world, it must be pleasing to get reactions/feedback, or does that not keep you awake?

PV: In honesty, yes, it is very pleasant to get these reactions, but it does not keep me awake.

RS: And not only reactions to your paintings and poetry, but also on your vision of the world?

PV: The really good question is – all your questions are ok – the really critical question is “what’s your intention in doing that?”. Is the intention to get reaction and attention, or is the intention “I have a reflection I want to share, I really want to know how you think about this”. I want reaction. To complement that idea, to challenge it, etc.?

RS: Is that something you question? Do you know the answer?

PV: Well, no. I don’t know the answer yet. But I hope that with my current writings about “being normal, being special” I will find some answers to that, I am asking myself… Sometimes I would like to disappear in anonymity, almost like a monk, without all this twittering, facebooking, blogging: phew … gone. And being normal again.

RS: Is there not some pressure like “I can’t do that because I have to earn a living for the next 10 years”?

PV: No, I don’t feel that pressure

RS: I have to throw my vision into the world, I must share it, I must continue building reputation so I can get back in corporate life late this year?

PV: No. Reputation is not something I worry about. I am in fact sharing and publishing less than before. I only want to publish if I really have to say something. And not when I am looking for attention. When I have a new insight – and that is not that often, but maybe… something of a higher quality? QWAN (the quality without a name)?

RS: But my spouse would say: “But how are you then going to make a living, Raf?”

PV: I am not worried about that. Because I really believe that there is a need for this sort of high quality meeting platforms, and if I keep focussing on what I am focussing on right now, some day something will emerge. I do have confidence in that. I have now somebody from the FinTech network asking me whether I would be willing to do the opening keynote at an event in September in Mexico City… Yes, by all means, but only in the way, in the direction I have set out for myself right now.

RS: One more. What are “Strillingen” ?

PV: Hah! I wrote a poem about that, a play of words…

RS: Can I read it out?

PV: Yeah, of course

RS: Or do you want to read it out? I will let you do that. I found it very beautiful.

 

PV: Thank you.

PV: Strillingen https://petervan.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/strillingen-poem/ (poorly translated by myself into English as “Hidrations”

Hidrations

Still vibrations

Cold and chilling

Perditions

Explorations of dangerous awareness, beyond the shame

A dog inspects her dung, rattle, and drivel

Nothing is worth what it seems

The silencing humming of tires on asphalt

Only the heat of tarmac is left

Air vibrations and fata morganas

Warm shivers of pleasance

A hideaway too far

Buried masks and hidden cuddles

Hidrations

RS: What does this mean for you?

PV: All sorts of things of course. This sort of poems emerge – I will give you an answer on what it means – this sort of things emerge, suddenly there is a piece of inspiration, and I start writing, just writing what comes, without thinking what the next sentence is going to be, an then scratching a bit here and there, just a little bit… It means, it stands for… euh… observation? In the following sense: I wrote this very early in the morning, at sunrise, when the house is still silent, and when you hear – just like now – when you hear far away cars on the highway, and you consciously hear it. Like right now, I hear the wind, I also feel the wind, and am willing to pause for a fraction of a second and realise that.

On the other hand this is of course also a reflection of the eternal fight, the eternal search for who I am, and what and when I am hiding and when I dare to stand fully in the fire, and when I will start doing, instead of telling stories of what I am doing or what I am planning to do. All that is buried in “perditions”, and in “buried masks and hidden cuddles”. Hidrations is about by soft side, my suppressed side, and the side I was not allowed to show. There is a post somewhere in the queue – more a poem than a post – that I have titled “The Touch”. Maybe I publish it some day, if I have the courage. So if I would go back to a corporate environment with this state of mind, mind-set, mind-state, I don’t believe I will survive. Of course I will survive physically, but not mentally. I am at a point that when I get into a corporate building, I almost feel a visceral disgust of “what a fake world!”

PV: Not so long ago – I am now 9 months into my sabbatical – in June that was, I travelled for the first time since 8 months. At Swift I was traveling almost every week, or at least once every month. So it was 8 months since I saw a plane from the inside. I can assure you they still look the same… A very big company invited me – I can’t say whom, as I had to sign an NDA – a very big company with a formidable brand new research site in the middle of nature. OMG, what a possibilities they have! My host was global responsible for their research for that organisation, and they have something like 1,500 researchers on that site. Stunning! Everything you can dream of. But the exciting part was that she – because my host was a woman – she had created a very intense collaboration with an art academy and they brought in artists into their research projects. That also where we connected. Where we resonated. They are convinced that artists can offer a different perspective to their researchers who have a more engineering training. In the sense like philosophy and art can offer a different perspective, ask different questions. So they don’t use artists in an “artists in residence” program to let artist do their artwork. No, the artists are integral part of their research projects as “interrupt-stations”, as” other-insight-stations”. And all this is executed at scale and very professionally by an international jury of art curators etc. PS: in the meantime I did a post on this: https://petervan.wordpress.com/2017/09/02/research-is-not-about-search-but-about-finding/

RS: If you could choose, would you prefer to be the artist that gets invited, or would you like to be the organiser?

PV: The organiser. Although I appreciate very much when people like my artwork, I fully realise I am just an enthusiastic amateur.

(Music)

RS: You listened to the StoryClub podcast with Peter Vander Auwera.

petervan-signature_transparent_black_version2

I am in the business of cultivating high quality connections and flows to create immersive learning experiences and structural change. Check out: https://petervanproductions.com/

Petervan Productions: when my edge becomes the core

Hello Tribe,

This is a post to share that I’m taking an extended sabbatical from Innotribe and Swift after some of the most amazing years of my career so far. It has been such an exciting journey working with many of you creating and enabling Innotribe to grow. Thank you for letting me being part of that journey.

jump

Quote by Abel Morales (Oscar Isaac) in “A most violent year”. 

Poster copyright: Lessons Learned in Life

 

Now the time has come for my next phase as an independent thinker, creator and sense-maker, as from 1 November 2016.

I will concentrate my – limited – professional activities under “Petervan Productions”. In the first instance I will create art, performances, and invitation-only retreat expeditions.

pvp-web-banner

I believe there is room for a new kind of experiences that resonate with your and my guests at another level than the pure cognitive. Holding a space to connect thought leaders, experts, and artists of all kinds, and to bring out the very best in you and them. The art of creating high quality feedback loops to enable immersive learning experiences and deep authentic change.

Mastery and excellence will be my guidance, but mystery is what I aim for.

Focus means deep work without distractions. Focus also means saying “no”. For the next couple of weeks/months, I will live under a rock. I will dramatically reduce my social media presence and activity. But will keep blogging and writing occasionally.

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“Creative work needs solitude.

It needs concentration, without interruptions.

It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching

until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to,

but does not necessarily have at once.

Privacy, then. A place apart

to pace, to chew pencils,

to scribble and erase and scribble again.”

 

Mary Oliver in “On Power and Time”

+++

It’s a jump into the unknown. It is a fork from the responsive/reactive orientation to solve problems to the creative orientation to architect, design, and produce what I really want. It is tapping into what Nilofer Merchant calls my “onlyness”, when my edge becomes the core.

I’d love to keep in touch with you all, so if you would like to connect please do so via my personal email or the usual social channels. You can also subscribe to the Petervan Productions Newsletter here.

See you on the other side. Onwards.

Rebelliously yours,

petervan-signature

Blogging and writing:

Mantra: “Imagine the kindest, most positive response to whatever comes your way” – Chade-Meng Tan

 

 

The Illusion of Agency

At this year’s Innotribe Sibos, we have a session about digital ethics. Part of a full day on man-machine convergence.

Some of that conversation will be about the use and control of data. With this post, I would like to add my perspective to that conversation, based on some recent thinking on human agency.

At a recent MyData2016 event in Helsinki, i was surprised how little the thinking about personal data stores has evolved since 2012, when i was myself deeply in the trenches of the topic of distributed data sharing.

It was a really great conference, well organized, cool audience etc, but like many conferences, it was the tribe talking to tribe, believers talking to believers, all thinking that their lens to look at things was the right one, with little or no contrarian view.

I wanted to be that contrarian, and challenge a bit the assumptions.

At the event there was a lot of talk about “PIMS”: Personal Information Management Systems, or personal data stores, or personal data “clouds”. I don’t want to have a discussion about the subtle semantics here.

At one moment, Jamie Smith from Ctrl-Shift – who i respect a lot – said something along the lines of “PIMS are all about giving people agency”.

I think that is a big illusion, and that was what my talk was about. The illusion that the problem is about taking back ownership and control of your data. And that a PIMS is the solution. I believe we are discussing the wrong problem and the wrong solution when talking about managing our own personal data at our terms and conditions.

Owning your own agency is more important than owning your data. That in essence is what my talk was about.

My presentation at #MyData2016 conference

UPDATE: here the link to the Prezi of this presentation. Because there is so much video in this Prezi it takes 2-3 min to load. Be patient 😉

The talk is part of a longer story of more than one hour, wandering through a whole bunch of philosophical, ethical and artistic considerations. At this event, i got only 20 minutes, and i told the moderator he could cut me off, which he did most elegantly (no pun intended) at the end of my presentation.

My agency vs. my data is a pretty big deal.

  • It is not about buying but creating
  • It is not about my data but my agency
  • It is not about privacy but about shelter
  • It is not about power asymmetries but relationship symmetries
  • It is not about MyData but about OurData

In that sense the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is shooting at the wrong problem. In that sense our politicians and leaders in general are again outperforming in solving the problems of the past.

I got some good reactions after this talk, from Doc Searls saying “you gave the talk that i always wanted to give”, to somebody else sending me a tweet and a mail saying “your presentation has changed my life, i decided to leave Facebook after more than 10 years”.

There is such a strong tension between our actual reality and the desired reality that we are currently moving in some form of virtual or surreality. But as Magritte said:

“Surrealism is the immediate knowledge of reality”

And we feel lost. We escape and try to reconnect nostalgically to what was, and are afraid of what going to be. People focus on the surreality of their phones instead of real life.

People believe what is on their phones and PIMS is the reality, and are able to represent us as human beings. But as Markus Sabadello said at this event: “Technology will not be able to represent the full complexity of human beings”

Our devices and apps make us believe we are in control, because we now can “manage” our data and lives. But we are focused on managing life, rather than living it. That is our big illusion.

To summarise, I believe our plan and ambition towards our desired reality must at least have following components:

  • This space needs to be regulated. Regulation means setting ethical and moral norms, AND policing them
  • These norms must be ethical and moral
  • We must decide who sets these norms, who polices them, and who penalises/rewards good behaviour.

For that we must bring “Society-in-the-loop”, and not let this be decided by governments, corporations, or god forbid, algorithms

 

society-in-the-loop-iyad-rahwan

Society-in-the-loop by Iyad Rahwan

We must expand ourselves from a problem (efficiency) orientation to a creative (value creating) orientation, because the future is not about solving the past but knowing what you want and use mastery to make that happen.

Last but not least, we must be very much aware of the shallowness of the actual reality, and strive for high quality work with high quality attention and presence and meaning also called “Deep Work”

Maybe next year, they should call the conference #MyAgency2016;

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day4 – Platform Cooperation

platform

Four weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I have revealed more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 . Today – 15 days before D-day – this post is the last in that series, and I will be looking into day-4.

We are now in the phase where all the artwork, design, session facilitation props, staging, lightning and special effects are coming together. We are now in nonstop back-to-back joint speaker calls to make sure our session cast, our speakers, our instigators, our producers, designers, and facilitators are full aligned. Some of the material we are producing for the big LED screen is of a beauty we have rarely seen in other event environments.

Yes, we try very hard to beat last year’s edition 😉

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC.

For the opening session of day-4, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and will zoom in into our Innotribe Industry Challenge on Compliance/KYC.

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Given that our day-4 is about the platform cooperation, our day anchor is Leda Glyptis, Director, Sapient Global Markets. She will stir the pot where needed during the day and she will come back at the end to wrap up the learnings of the day.

In between opening and closing, we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debate so you have the time to enjoy that session as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-4 is “Platform Cooperation”. In addition of the Opening and Closing sessions, we have four sessions:

  • Forward compatibility
  • FinTech Hubs session – APAC
  • DLT and cybersecurity: Sibos week wrap-up
  • Innotribe closing keynote: Platform Cooperation

This is a consolidation day – where it all comes together – and we will use a lot of metaphors and medieval painting examples to contextualise these rich topics, and to guide you through the disruptive complexity of our times

breughel

Pieter Breughel the Elder - The Blind Lead The Blind

Forward compatibility

I wrote a blog post about “forward compatibility” in March 2016, about how to avoid simplistic conversations on disruption.

That post was inspired by two conversations.

  • One conversation was in January 2016, with Angus Scott from Euroclear, and his key insight was that no disruption will happen without fundamental re-invention of the end-to-end business processes, and that requires what I now call “forward compatibility”, looking into big large scale experiments with real customers, real regulators, and real ecosystem stakeholders, aka not just in a Lab. Angus also injected the concept of broad macro-forces that drive change.
  • The other conversation was in March 2016 with Valerio Roncone and Tomas Kindler from SIX. They explained me how they were looking far ahead. Asking questions such a “what happens after T2S?”, or “what happens if DLT would fulfil its promise, and disinter-mediate existing players in the industry?”. How does the new landscape look like? Can we create “situational awareness” that can inform our strategy? They called this “impact oriented thinking” and “innovation through evolution”

The seeds were planted, and that was the embryo for this session.

red-line

 

I started playing around with this, and came up with the concept of “above and below the red-line”:

  • Below the red-line is what needs be be solved as a collective, as a community, as a platform. It’s stuff that no single company can really solve on it’s own. It’s things like DLT, Cybersecurity, Digital identity, etc
  • Above the red-line is where you partner with others, FinTech startups, established vendors, etc through JV’s, Partnerships, API’s, etc. It’s where you “complement” the platform under the red line

Throughout the week, we will have done some exercises, where we internalise the content from the speakers by mapping them above and below the red line, and see how they are relevant for banking, securities, and compliance.

This session is NOT a technical session for geeks. This session is a session for business strategists that are interested having a conversation on how we can move the collective forward from here to “there”, wherever and however the “there”emerges.

 

We have a BIG cast for this session, complemented by instigators, DLT/Cyber anchors and rapporteurs. This is the only session where I will be on stage as your moderator. The speakers and instigators for this session:

  • Angus Scott, Euroclear
  • Valerio Roncone, SIX
  • Tomas Kindler, SIX
  • Patrick Havander, Nordea
  • Paul McKeown, Nasdaq Financial Framework
  • Saket Sharma, BNY Mellon
  • Brian Behlendorf, Hyperledger Linux Foundation

 

FinTech Hubs session – APAC – over lunch time

Building upon the success of last year’s session “Why banks need FinTech hubs?”, we wanted to go create more air-time for FinTech Hubs from different regions of the world.

We’ll have 6 speakers in one hour. That’s 10 minutes each to share their ambitions and plans. With our designers we are looking how we can make this an engaging experience and avoid having a series of 6 commercials. Like for all FinTech Hub sessions this session is full house.

The “6 from APAC” are (in order of appearance):

  • James Lloyd, Asia-Pacific FinTech Leader, E&Y
  • Markus Gnirck, Tryb
  • Sopnendu Mohanty, MAS
  • Zennon Kapron, FinTech China
  • Janos Barberis, FinTech HK
  • Asad Naqvi, Apis Partners

Almost all of the hubs presenting at Innotribe Sibos during these hub sessions are now part of the Global FinTech Hub Federation (GFHF) announced three weeks ago. See press-release here.

TheGFHF-Branding-Logo-Non-HD

The GFHF will premier their latest FinTech Hub Index (A benchmark of 20+ FinTech Hubs) at Innotribe Sibos 2016. I have seen the design and infographics for this Index, and they just look awesome. We will use some of them as backdrop for this session.

Sandwiches and soft drinks will be served in the Innotribe space.

DLT and cybersecurity: Sibos week wrap-up

johan_zoffany_-_tribuna_of_the_uffizi_-_google_art_project

The Tribuna of the Uffizi, by Johan Zoffany, 1772-8
A collection of paintings
Royal Collection, Windsor

As you for sure have noticed, we don’t have any DLT/Blockchain sessions in this year’s Innotribe Sibos programme. We did this on purpose for two reasons:

  • There are already a lot of DLT/Blockchain sessions in the main conference sessions of Sibos
  • We sense a certain fatigue on the topic

We set ourselves the challenge to create ONE session where you get an overview, a collection of insights from ALL the sessions related to DLT during the whole of Sibos.

So if you don’t have time to go to all of them, or you prefer to stay in the Innotribe space for the week, we’ll make sure you get the key learnings in this single wrap-up session.

And as we were at it, why not do the same with Cybersecurity? OK, let’s do that too.

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

In the general overview of Innotribe sessions above, you will see some sessions marked with the “B” sign (Blockchain) and some others marked with the “lock” sign (Cybersecurity). It means these sessions have some DLT/Cyber flavour to them.

To create a coherent summary during this Thursday wrap-up, we have appointed “Transversal DLT/Cyber anchors”. They stay in the Innotribe space for the whole week, and will report back their findings:

  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney
  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven

To cover DLT and Cyber from the other non-Innotribe sessions (aka the main Sibos sessions, Swift Lab, workshops etc, we are sending out our “rapporteurs”. Our Rapporteurs are:

  • Our DLT rapporteur is Oliver Bussmann, ex-CIO UBS
  • Our Cyber rapporteur is Assaf Egozi, CEO Kidronim, Israel

Our DLT/Cyber anchors and rapporteurs will have a special lanyards so you can recognise them easily.

 

Innotribe closing keynote: Platform Cooperation

After a short wrap up of the Innotribe week presenting the key findings of our programme, our closing keynote speaker Dr. Douglas Rushkoff will provoke and challenge all your assumptions.

Douglas

Rushkoff is a renown lecturer on media, technology, culture and economics around the world. His new book “Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity” (Amazon Affiliates link) argues that we have failed to build the distributed economy that digital networks are capable of fostering, and instead doubled down on the industrial age mandate of growth above all.

rushkoff-book-cover

“Every great advance begins when someone sees that what everyone else takes for granted may not actually be true. Douglas Rushkoff questions the deepest assumptions of the modern economy, and blazes a path towards a more human centred world.”–Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media about Rushkoff’s latest book.

Marketplaces in medieval times were far more human centred, fairer environments that the so called P2P sharing economy of Uber and AirBnB, which all have little to with sharing but much more with an extraction value economy where only a few (monopolies) take it all.

breugel-mideval-markets

A Medieval marketplace scene from Pieter Breughel the Elder.

 

After his talk, Doug will stay on our stand and take some time to do some book signings. He’ll have a couple of free books with him.

Rushkoff is one of those rare thinkers and speakers that challenge all your assumptions. We did something similar last year with Andrew Keen with his talk “The Internet is NOT the answer”. Many of you loved his energy as the Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley.

Think of Rushkoff as Andrew Keen on steroids. Not to be missed if you like to be inspired, if you like to be provoked.

 

teamhuman_redlogoname

Since publishing Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Rushkoff has answered more than 20,000 emails from his readers, one by one, individually. People, companies, mayors, cooperatives, towns and big corporations, all looking for ways to distribute prosperity more widely, start local currencies, build platform cooperatives, convert to employee ownership, offer dividends instead of capital gains, or crowdfund a bookstore.

Rushkoff realised it was not about him but about you and last week he launched Team Human, a weekly postcast on radio. “An intervention by people, on behalf of people”. All in delightful audio – perhaps the most intimate, enveloping medium yet developed.

Douglas Rushkoff looks deep into the question of reprogramming society to better serve humans. Rushkoff grapples with complex issues of agency, social justice, and all those quirky non-binary corners of life.

We are also  bit quirky, non-binary. That’s why we designed the Innotribe stand with a very industrial look on the outside but as a very human and welcoming space on the inside. We believe on the synergising effect of emotional and physical space.

  • That’s why the overarching theme of this year’s Innotribe Sibos is about the tension between technology and humanism in this fast changing and disruptive environment.
  • That’s why we use a lot of art, as art can help making sense beyond the tactics and the cognitive.
  • That’s why we have throughout our four days the concept of “above and below the red line”, as below the red line is what we need to solve as a collective, as a community, as an ecosystem.

It’s going back to the original intention of the not-for-profit cooperative structure, but mixed with some healthy activism. Ruskhoff calls this “Platform Cooperativism”

Hope the architecture of our Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme all starts making sense now?

img_5481-1-1

I will leave you with this painting/collage by Yasumasa Morimura “Blinded by the Light” from 1991. It’s a picture from a reproduction, discovered in the lobby of Le Meridien Hotel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US, during my presence at the SparkCamp conference in 2015.

It is a modern interpretation of Breughel’s “The Blind lead the Blind” from 1568. See start of this post.

The landscape of both paintings is from a really nice area west of Brussels – an area named “Pajottenland” – and the chapel in the back of the paintings exists in a little village called “Sint-Anna-Pede“.

sint-anna-pede

It happens to be the place where I grew up the first 20 years of my life. I was living literately 200 metres from this chapel. So the Innotribe journey sort of brought be back to my roots. More about that after Sibos.

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe,@Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day3 – Man/Machine Convergence

man machine theme

Four weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I will reveal more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 (21 days left at the time of this writing).

Our preparations are in full swing. The first visual materials are coming in, and our designers have produced some very cool animations for the big LED screen. And we put a lot of effort to keep the architectural integrity  of the programme and the focus on intense learning experiences.

General structure:

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

 

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC.

For the opening session, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and for the Wednesday opening, we will zoom in into some of the startups from our  Innotribe Startup Challenge Latam.

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Given that our day-3 is about the man-machine convergence, our day anchor is Anju Patwardhan, Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, and ex-Chief Innovation Office of Standard Chartered Bank, where she was looking into AI and other FinTech innovations.She will come back in the day closing to wrap up the learning of the day.

In between opening and closing, we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debates so you have the time to enjoy those as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-3 is “Man-Machine Convergence”. This is going to be a super packed day. In addition of the Opening and Closing sessions, we have six sessions:

  • The Future Show Live
  • Digital Ethics
  • FinTech Hubs session – AMERICAS
  • AI for Financial Services
  • Innovation in cyber-security: Innovative defences to innovative attacks
  • Thingclash

The Future Show Live

Experience the future like never before with this innovative event concept designed for challenging decision makers.

Technology is changing our world exponentially and humanity will change more in the next 20 years than in the previous 300 years. Topics such as cloud/data security and privacy, automation and a potentially exponential technological unemployment, (very) big data, artificial intelligence and cognitive computing, robotics, self-driving cars, drones and the Internet of Things are popping up everywhere, and the public interest (consumers as well as businesses) in ‘the future’ has never been higher. This session will show how exponential technological advancements will radically alter and re-boot the way we experience the world and interact with each other. Both consumers and businesses, organisations and governments will be strongly interested in this.

The Future Show Live is a live, multimedia and interactive format that presents ‘the future’ key challenges and opportunities. Designed and delivered by Europe’s leading futurist and author Gerd Leonhard, and produced by art director and film-maker Jean-Francois Cardella. This session will flow seamlessly into the session/conversation on digital ethics. To find more about Gerd, his work and his latest provocative book  “Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine” (Amazon Affiliated link), check out my blog post of a couple of weeks ago.

This will be very special. To put it in Gerd’s own words in his weekly newsletter:

Second, just in case you are close-by, the world premier of my new interactive live program (finally, sans clicker and the conventional slide-deck marathon) called The Future Show Live will happen at SIBOS / Innotribe 2016 in Geneva, on September 28 – watch out for the video recording soon afterwards. With TFSLive we will attempt nothing less than to redefine the very meaning of ‘keynote presentation’.

The Future Show Live will have its world premier at Innotribe Sibos! The show starts at 09:30am sharp and flows directly without break into Digital Ethics. Be sure to reserve your seat. No hotel bath-towels allowed.

Digital Ethics

Whereas Gerd’s session will picture in broad brush stroked the tension between technology and humanity, in this session we will do a deep dive into the digital ethics that should underpin this man-machine convergence.

We believe these digital ethics are very relevant for financial services, and have fields of application in analytics, robo-advisors, financial apps, Ethereum DOA fork, chatbots, upto the respect for human attention in the design of non-intrusive applications.

The speakers for this session:

  • John Havens, Executive Director, The Global Initiative for Ethical Considerations in the Design of Autonomous Systems
  • Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist, and Fellow at Harvard Berkman Klein Center
  • Aurélie Pols, Data Governance & Privacy Advocate, and advisor to the Ethics Data Group EDPS (European Data Protection Supervisor)

The three  speakers will each take a different angle at the topic. From “value sensitive design”, to the respect of our human attention, into data governance, who sets the norms, how polices them, and how will good ethical behaviour be rewarded, or harmful applications be penalised. This may be a next area for regulation, not only in financial industry.

Coexisting safely and ethically with intelligent machines is one of the central challenges of the 21st Century. It demonstrates and strengthen the need to establish ethical standards for Artificial Intelligence to help us preserve the values we cherish the most.

To get yourself prepared for this session, you can start experimenting with The Moral Machine of MIT.

 

 

The session will be immediately followed by book signings by Gerd Leonhard, John Havens and Amber Case

Book gerdAmber bookHavens book

FinTech Hubs session – EMEA – over lunch time

Building upon the success of last year’s session “Why banks need FinTech hubs?”, we wanted to go create more air-time for FinTech Hubs from different regions of the world.

Each hub will get 10 min to share their ambitions and plans. With our designers we are looking how we can make this an engaging experience and avoid having a series of 6 commercials. Like for all FinTech Hub sessions this session is full house.

The “6 from the AMERICAS” are (alphabetical order):

  • 500 Startups
  • Digital Finance Institute and FinTech Association of Canada
  • FinTech Mexico
  • FinTech Forum Germany*
  • MaRS Discovery District
  • Partnership Fund for New York City

We have a waiting list for all FinTech Hubs sessions from most regions. That’s why we added *Germany to this group. They took the last remaining slot;-)

It is interesting to see how some of our sessions (like last year’s FinTech Hub session) or some of our research papers (like last year’s Powerwomen in FinTech) are growing into movements like www.femtechleaders.com or to new initiatives like the Global FinTech Hub Federation (GFHF) announced two weeks ago. See press-release here.

TheGFHF-Branding-Logo-Non-HD

We are happy to announce the GFHF will premier their latest FinTech Hub Index (A benchmark of 20+ FinTech Hubs) at Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Sandwiches and soft drinks will be served in the Innotribe space.

AI for Financial Services

AI for financial services is usually associated with robo-advisors. But AI for financial services also includes pattern recognition software and algorithms to detect fraud patterns and other financial anomalies.

This demo-packed session will showcase examples in fraud detection, cyber security,  compliance, natural language processing for AIFMD reporting (The Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive), and machine learning from customer behaviour for robo-advisory.

The cast of this session:

  • Eric Rosenblum, Executive, Palantir

  • Edouard D’Archimbaud, Head of AI Lab CIB, BNP Paribas Securities Services

  • Lisa Huang, Head of Quantitative Analysis Research, Betterment

This session will be moderated by Nicolas Mackel, CEO of Luxembourg for Finance.

Innovation in cyber-security: Innovative defences to innovative attacks

This session will highlight some of the latest innovative cyber-security attacks, and investigate how to address them with the most innovative defence strategies that mitigate the risks going forward.

We have an absolute rock-star for this session, nobody else than Bruce Schneier!

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a “security guru” by the Economist. He is best known as a refreshingly candid and lucid security critic and commentator. When people want to know how security really works, they turn to Schneier.

In his usual high-energy style, Bruce will start with a TED-like talk, and the quickly open for an intense audience Q&A.

His latest book “Data and Goliath” (Amazon Affiliate link), is an absolute bestseller.

data and goliath

Clay Shirky said about the book: “Bruce Schneier’s amazing book is the best overview of privacy and security ever written.”

After this session, you’ll never look at cyber-security in the same way again. It is very rare to have the occasion to be face to face with this caliber of security expert, so be there in time!

 

Thingclash

Thingclash is a framework for considering cross-impacts and implications of colliding technologies, systems, cultures and values around the Internet of Things.

We’ll be specifically looking at frictions that emerge in both existing IoT categories with transactional capabilities (such as chip cards and smart watches) and emerging ones (like drones, self-driving cars, and multi-purpose connected buttons). With new IoT interfaces proliferating in banking and financial services, there hasn’t been a better time to examine how we design for transactions in a way that protects usability, privacy, and security.

The session is designed as an interactive card-game, combining things, personas and contexts.

things 2

This workshop will be delivered by

  • Scott Smith, Founder and Principal, Changeist
  • Susan Cox-Smith, Partner & Creative Strategist, Changeist

Changeist is a post-national research, consulting and creative group that helps organisations navigate complex futures.

 

Networking Event

Last year we experimented with an informal networking event for anybody who feels connected to the FinTech ecosystem, and you seemed to have liked it. The Innotribe Networking event is back this year on Wednesday 28 Sep 2016, starting at 7pm in the Salle Communale des Délices – 20 Route de Colovrex, 1218 Le Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland –View Map. This is only a 10 min walk from the Sibos PalExpo conference center.

Agenda

19:00          Event Opens

19:00          Welcome speech by Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director the Linux Foundations Hyperledger Project

19:10          Bar & Buffet Opens, music provided by Beatie Wolfe and her band

IMG_0163

Sponsor

We are delighted that the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project is sponsoring the 2016 Innotribe Networking event

Linux Foundation Hyperledger Project

Partners

2016sponsors

This is an free networking event. Anybody who smells FinTech is welcome, but to help us plan for the catering and drinks, we’d like you to register on our registration site.

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion.

For the sessions where it makes sense, we also have a transversal anchor for Cyber-security and one for DLT. They stay in the Innotribe space for the week, and will report back at the end of the week:

  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven
  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney

Next week, we will cover the themes and sessions of day-3 of Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe,@Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day2 – Modern Organisation

Modern organisation

Three weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I will reveal more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 (29 days left at the time of this writing).

Our preparations are in full swing. We are in the midst of a series of intense prep calls with all speakers, together with our production teams and our facilitators and designers. All engines are on!

It has always been our intention to build a program with architectural integrity and a week of intense learning experiences. This year is no different.

General structure:

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

 

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC.

For the opening session, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and for the Tuesday opening, we will zoom in into some highlights of our Innotribe Startup Africa.

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Given that our day-2 is about the modern organisation, our day anchor is Louise Coster, Head of Human Resources at SWIFT. She will come back in the day closing to wrap up the learning of the day.

In between we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debates so you have the time to enjoy those as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-2 is “The Modern Organization”. In addition of the Opening and Closing sessions, we have three sessions:

  • Organise for complexity
  • FinTech Hubs session – EMEA
  • Situational awareness maps

Organise for complexity

This session is about leadership principles for a high performing modern organisation operating in a highly complex environment and how to deal with both in a productive way.

After a condensed introduction on the theory and practice of organisational high performance, we will move into an interactive discussion on contemporary leadership and profound transformation in organisations of all kinds.

Our speaker will dissect classic management theory and in a well-humored manner, and offer coherent alternatives that are a welcome addition to management thinking and align with the principles of wirearchy and connected leadership.

Pflaeging

 

Some of the session’s learning objectives are:

  • Complicated and complex are different, both exist in work – Complexity means: surprise
  • Every org has three structures, not one; they can be in conflict
  • Orgs are not pyramids, but peaches; Decentralization is a must, not an option in complexity
  • Orgs can move through different phases. Most have transformed at least once! Differentiation is toxic now, due to complexity
  • In order to transform an org, you must fix Human Nature assumptions and rid orgs of outdated practices and method
  • Change is easy if you work the system, not the people! People will adapt
  • We already have the right people, we just force them into the wrong kind of organisational model.

Our  rock-star for this session:

  • Niels Pflaeging, Co-founder and associate of the BetaCode Network

 

I was following Niels’ blog and tweets for quite a while, and when i discovered almost by accident his talk for the Deutsche Telekom leadership in Bonn, 2015, I knew Niels had to become a speaker at Innotribe Sibos.

 

This is a highly interactive session, with assignments for the audience, to help you internalise the knowledge you picked up from our speakers. At the end of the session, there will be a “gift” to take with you.

Niels book

After the session we will have a book signing by Niels of his latest book “Organize for Complexity: How to Get Life Back Into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization” (Amazon Affiliates link)

FinTech Hubs session – EMEA – over lunch time

Building upon the success of last year’s session “Why banks need FinTech hubs?”, we wanted to go create more air-time for FinTech Hubs from different regions of the world.

Each hub will get 10 min to share their ambitions and plans. With our designers we are looking how we can make this an engaging experience and avoid having a series of 6 commercials. Like for all FinTech Hub sessions this session is full house.

The “6 from EMEA” are (alphabetical order):

  • EggSplore
  • Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)
  • Holland FinTech
  • ING FinTech Village
  • Innovate Finance
  • Luxembourg for Finance

We have a waiting list for all FinTech Hubs sessions from all regions.

It is interesting so see how some of our sessions (like last year’s FinTech Hub session) or some of our research papers (like last year’s Powerwomen in FinTech) are growing into movements like www.femtechleaders.com or to new initiatives like the Global FinTech Hub Federation (GFHF) announced earlier this week. See press-release here.

TheGFHF-Branding-Logo-Non-HD

 

Sandwiches and soft drinks will be served in the Innotribe space.

Situational awareness maps

In this session you will learn how to avoid creating a “me too” strategy. “me too” strategies sound like “let’s Uberise everything”, “let’s Platform everything”, etc. Most of these strategies are copy-cats of successful models for one company, but rarely apply in other contexts.

It is like playing chess on a linux command line without seeing the chessboard.

What is missing is situational awareness of the battlefield. Both positional and movement awareness of the enemy and the different technologies that each move at their own pace through their maturity cycle.

fig43

This highly interactive exercise will immerse you in the principles of situational awareness mapping, and will help you understand where the different methods like R&D, Agile, Scrum, Lean, and SixSigma each have their role to play.

The man:

  • Simon Wardley, Industry and technology mapper, destroyer of undeserved value, CSC Leading Edge Forum

This session is absolute brainfood with British humor guaranteed. Check him out at his 2015 Oscon talk or spend some quality time on his awesome blog:  http://blog.gardeviance.org/

We have designed also this session as an immersive learning experience, seats and limited, be sure to be there in time and don’t put your beach towel on your chair two hours before the session 😉

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion. The “instigators” of day-2 are:

  • Patrik Havander, Nordea
  • Anthony Brady, BNYM
  • Saket Sharma, BNYM

For the sessions where it makes sense, we also have a transversal anchor for Cyber-security and one for DLT. They stay in the Innotribe space for the week, and will report back at the end of the week:

  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven
  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney

Next week, we will cover the themes and sessions of day-3 of Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe,@Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Team Human

Web

Artificial intelligence. Cognitive computing. The Singularity. Digital obesity. Printed food. The Internet of Things. The death of privacy. The end of work-as-we-know-it, and radical longevity: The imminent clash between technology and humanity is already rushing towards us. What moral values are you prepared to stand up for—before being human alters its meaning forever?

This is not me saying this. This is Gerd Leonhard a new kind of futurist schooled in the humanities as much as in technology. A musician by origin, Gerd connects left and right brains for a 360-degree coverage of the multiple futures that present themselves at any one time. In 2015, Wired Magazine listed Gerd as one of the top 100 most influential people in Europe.

In his most provocative book to date “Technology vs. Humanity: The coming clash between man and machine” (Amazon Affiliated link), he explores the exponential changes swamping our societies, providing rich insights and deep wisdom for business leaders, professionals and anyone with decisions to make in this new era.

If you take being human for granted, check-out this trailer for a movie he made with Jean-François Cardella, his film producer.

 

 

Gerd has a new book out and it is and i recommend it strongly, and i am not alone.

 

“Gerd Leonhard is most definitely a member of Team Human. Here’s his convincing and heartfelt call for the reinstatement of people and purpose into the technology program.” – Douglas Rushkoff, Author of ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus’, host of the ‘TeamHuman’ podcast

“Gerd Leonhard provides a fascinating look at the impact of exponential technologies and the dilemmas we will face in adapting to—or being adapted by—these. His book really makes you worry—and think.” – Vivek Wadhwa, Academic, Researcher, Writer, and Entrepreneur.

 

A good overview of the book can be found in Forbes’ recent interview with Gerd Leonhard and his reflections on digital ethics:

“Like sustainability, ethics is often thought of as a nice to have, a thing to consider when you have time, a luxury, non-monetizable. But now it is becoming clear that those distinctly human things that are not measurable (I call them the “androrithms” – as opposed to algorithms) such as emotions, intuition, beliefs and ethics are what sets us apart from machines.”

Gerd’s thinking is of great relevance to financial services. Because the whole value proposition of the financial services industry is about to change, it needs to reinvent itself in order to discover and grow new values and revenue streams.

 

Gerd_illustrations_27_5_16_v3

 

“In general you can say the financial industry has been asleep at the wheel for the past ten years, but it has woken up with a start,” says Leonhard, and

“The Darwinian megashifts of exponential technologies eventually challenge most of our assumptions, meaning somebody is going to reinvent the way we think about stock markets and what a stock-market actually is. After we get the blockchain and a global digital currency, the next step is to revamp the entire logic of the stock market. And that is imminent.”

In addition of the book and the film, Gerd has created a unique experience called The Future Show Live. The Future Show Live will demonstrate what exponential technologies are doing to our world of business and society and will create a context around financial services, pointing people towards how they can innovate from inside an organisation and not rest on outmoded systems.

We will need to embrace technology – but not become it. We will need to find ways that technology will actually serve humanity (i.e. support human flourishing and contentment) not vice versa.

Gerd Leonhard will be hosting The Future Show Live at Sibos at the Innotribe stand next to the main Sibos stand on Wednesday, 28th September from 9:30-10:15am.

55x19copy  All illustrations are by Gerd Leonhard and are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

 

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – Day1 – Disruption Redefined

Disruption

Two weeks ago, I shared with you a high level preview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme.

As promised, I will reveal more details for each day in some subsequent blog posts leading up to Sibos week 26-29 Sep 2016 (37 days left at the time of this writing).

Our preparations are in full swing. We are in the midst of a series of intense prep calls with all speakers, together with our production teams and our facilitators and designers. All engines are on!

It has always been our intention to build a program with architectural integrity and a week of intense learning experiences. This year is no different.

General structure:

agenda-4-days

General overview of the Innotribe Sibos 2016 programme

 

The structure of the week program is fairly straightforward:

  • We start every day with an opening of the day
  • We close every day with a closing of the day
  • Over lunch time, we have spotlight sessions by several FinTech hubs: one day for Switzerland, one for EMEA, one for the AMERICA, one of APAC

For the opening session, the Innotribe team will welcome you, and for the Monday opening, we will zoom in into some highlights of our Innotribe Industry Challenge on Securities (about issuing a bond on the blockchain).

Our day anchor will then walk you through the plan of the day. Our day-1 anchor is Michell Zappa from Envisioning Tech, Brazil. He will come back in the day closing to wrap up the learning of the day.

In between we have several Innotribe sessions. We don’t do anything during the plenary big issue debates so you have the time to enjoy those as well.

The main theme of Innotribe day-1 is “disruption re-defined”. We have three sessions:

  • Patterns of disruption in wholesale banking
  • The Future of Money
  • Emerging technologies for financial services

Patterns of disruption in wholesale banking

Learn to anticipate and react to disruptions in Securities, Trade Finance and FX.

Begin 2016, the Deloitte Center for the Edge published a deep research on nine patterns of disruption cross-industry. Upon our request, Deloitte created a special version for Innotribe Sibos on the relevance of these disruption patterns for financial services, and how incumbents can/should react to them.

Patterns of disruption Innotribe slide 042616

Key take-aways of this session will be:

  • Reframe the notion of disruption
  • Understand there are patterns of disruption
  • There is a way to be more rigorous in understanding and anticipating disruption
  • There are some effective ways to respond to disruption in a purposeful way
  • Apply these insights to our world of wholesale banking and think of specific action steps that can be taken by our organisations

The rock-star line-up for this session:

  • John Hagel, Co-Chair, Deloitte Center for the Edge
  • Val Srinivas, Research Leader, Banking & Capital Markets, Center for Financial Services, Deloitte

This is a highly interactive session, with assignments for the audience, to help you internalise the knowledge you picked up from our speakers. At the end of the session, there will be a “gift” to take with you.

The Future of Money

For the first time, this ever-popular Innotribe session has been promoted as a full-blown “Big Issue Debate” in the main plenary room of Sibos.

future of money

The idea behind Future of Money is to essentially act as a crystal ball, examining the large shaping trends that are going to affect financial services in typically two to three year’s time.

Moderated by Udayan Goyal, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Apis Partners and Co-Founder and non-executive director of Anthemis Group, this year’s Future of Money is set to discuss the Internet of Things (IoT) and how the collection of data in our highly networked world through sensor-based technology is set to change how we think of financial services.

Other topics include the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), with decisions regarding investments and creditworthiness becoming the purview of automated systems based entirely on inputs of personalised data.

The line-up:

  • Jon Stein, CEO Betterment
  • Carlos Menendez, President, Enterprise Partnerships, International Markets, Mastercard
  • Amber Case, Cyborg Anthropologist and Fellow at Harvard Berkman Klein Center

We also tried to re-invent a bit the flow of a big issue debate and “sweat the technical asset” we have at our disposal. Expect more from Innotribe 😉

Emerging technologies for financial services

In this session, we will share the results of a research commissioned by Innotribe to Envisioning Tech from Brazil. Again, original research and a word premiere of a fantastic visualisation tool.

The different technologies will be mapped on different time horizons, and we will highlight the inter-connections between them.

Every technology will come with a navigation card detailing its relevance to the financial services industry around 10 different impact vectors – with a focus on cyber-security and distributed ledger technologies.

visualization fintech

Screenshot of beta-version of visualisation tool

The session is animated with a spectacular screen-wide interactive visualisation.

The session is an interactive workshop with a card-game interaction with the participants. Seats will be limited.

General

All sessions are designed to maximise the immersive learning experiences of our guests. We use professional facilitators and designers to enable great group interactions. And we have an amazing audio/visual kit and production team to make the content come alive.

The pepper and salt comes from our “instigators” who have a designed role to provoke the critical discussion. The “instigators” of day-1 are:

  • Patrik Havander, Nordea
  • Anthony Brady, BNYM
  • Matthew Grabois, BNP Paribas Securities Services

For the sessions where it makes sense, we also have a transversal anchor for Cyber-security and one for DLT. They stay in the Innotribe space for the week, and will report back at the end of the week:

  • Our Cyber transversal anchor is Bart Preneel, University of Leuven
  • Our DLT transversal anchor is Andrew Davis, advisor from Sydney

Next week, we will cover the themes and sessions of day-2 of Innotribe Sibos 2016.

Resources:

Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe, @Sibos, #Sibos

We are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

Innotribe Logo

Innotribe Sibos 2016 – A preview

Innotribe Logo

For the eighth consecutive year, Innotribe@Sibos will introduce the latest innovation trends, whilst delivering thought-provoking content designed to challenge your assumptions.

The tagline for the 2016 edition is:

 

Be inspired. Be provoked.

The future is happening now

 

The tagline itself is inspired by a quote of Brian Eno in an interview in December 2015 with Steven Johnson about art, music, punch lines, and culture in general: “I don’t want to be entertained, I want to be provoked.”

 

Main programme directions:

Like every year, we aim to re-invent ourselves again, so we can offer a compelling program surpassing the excitement of our 2015 edition. The main themes for this year are:

Like last year, Innotribe puts innovation center stage at Sibos, and will provide a forum for critical dialogue where all Sibos delegates will get the opportunity to:

  • Attend the “Future of Money” session, positioned as a Big Issue Debate in the Plenary room for the first time this year
  • Meet some of the most forward thinking leaders in distributed ledger technology and cyber-security
  • Explore what it means to be
a modern organisation and understand how man and machine can work together
  • Understand the different patterns of disruption and how incumbents can react to them
  • Help define the principles for platform cooperation in more distributed ecosystems
  • Explore collaboration with a wide range of FinTech hubs from different continents, with a specific focus on the Swiss ecosystem
Gain insights on the new technologies developed by the startup community in Africa and Latin America through sessions dedicated to the winners of the 2016 Innotribe Startup Challenge

 

agenda-4-days

“We are not in the events business, we are in the business of creating high quality feedback loops, to create immersive learning experiences”

 

You will also notice that for many sessions we chose for the long format. Where the rest of the conference scene is going for short – almost tweet-style one-liner formats, we believe there is a need for longer explorations of topics and a sense and desire for more than superficial sound-bite like conversations. Immersiveness requires time, and it is – just like our attention – one of the more precious but also more scarce resources of our era.

Like in previous years, this immersive experience is enabled by the awesome production team under the leadership of Ben Hawkins, Executive Producer GPJ, and by the super sharp facilitators and designers of Collective Next, lead by Principal Hamilton Ray.

Transversal themes: Instigators, day anchors, transversal week anchors, DLT and Cyber Rapporteurs:

Like last year, we will have day-anchor persons, to guide you through the programme and to make a wrap up of the learning at the end of each day.

You may have noticed that at Innotribe we don’t have any DLT/blockchain sessions this year: indeed, we covered this subject extensively at previous editions, and many of our colleagues from banking, securities, standards, market infrastructures and SWIFT Lab have now sessions on DLT/blockchain in their main conference sessions.

This is exactly how we saw Innotribe at Sibos from the beginning: a space where we create awareness of what is cooking at the edges of our ecosystem, topics and trends that will enter mainstream in a couple of years.

So, this year, we will have DLT/blockhain as a transversal theme:

  • We will have a transversal week anchor person in Innotribe for all our sessions where DLT may be one of the many technologies covered
  • We will also have a DLT Rapporteur, who will follow all non-Innotribe DLT sessions at Sibos and report back in our Innotribe “DLT and Cyber wrap-up of the week” session at the end of the week.

Same for the other transversal theme at Sibos: cyber-security. In addition to a number of cyber specific sessions at Innotribe,

  • We will have a transversal week anchor person in Innotribe for all our sessions where Cyber-security may be relevant.
  • We will also have a Cyber Rapporteur, who will follow all non-Innotribe Cyber sessions at Sibos and report back in our Innotribe “DLT and Cyber wrap-up of the week” session at the end of the week.

Like in previous years, we will add some salt and pepper to the conversations by integrating “instigator”: business or technical experts that will act as soundboard and provocateurs for our key speakers.

We will also experiment with some new formats, combining visual immersive experiences, facilitation, design, and video blends to resonate with our audience beyond the pure cognitive experience.

Different locations

We will be at different locations this year:

floorplan

Main location: Innotribe stand (G16 next to main SWIFT Stand)

We will be located right next to the main Swift stand on the exhibition floor, and have increased our capacity with at least 50%. The design of our stand will be a combination of industrial on the outside but human on the inside, to reflect the tension between technological disruption and the need for higher qualities of human attention. All our sessions, except of Future of Money will take place here. Future of Money will be in the main Plenary Room.

stand1
Our Innotribe stand last year in Singapore

stand2
Inside our stand last year in Singapore

The big LED screen will be back, it just will be bigger, better, and even with a 4x better resolution than last year;-)

And of course, we’ll have our connoisseur coffee corner back, last year rated as the place to be to savour the best coffee of the whole event. Really.

As several of our speakers have published recent books about their insights, there also will be numerous book-signing opportunities throughout the week.

Can’t show the design of the 2016 Innotribe stand, yet. We want to keep it as a surprise for Sibos delegates, but if we can give you a hint: last year’s nick-name for our stand/space was “the blender”, this year people who have seen it describe the space as “the coliseum”.

coliseum

Just make sure you make it in time for the different Innotribe sessions, as last year all Innotribe sessions were overflow, and about 50% of all Sibos delegates attended one or more of our sessions. This year we have catered for overflow capacity in the mezzanine overseeing the Innotribe stand.

Location #2: The Fintech Hub (Stand B80)

We have tried to group together a number of FinTech Hubs who have rented a booth in this area. We have create a mini-stage and meeting area so you can meet the winners of the 2016 Innotribe Startup Challenge in Africa and Latin America: Bitso, Destacame, Hello Paisa, Quotanda, The Sun Exchange, and WeCashUp.

Location #3: The Sibos Plenary Room

The Future of Money’s premiere was at Innotribe Sibos 2011 in Toronto. Since then the session has become a brand on its own, and we are proud that for its fifth edition, this session is now promoted as a full-blown Sibos Big Issue Debate in the main Plenary room of Sibos. Monday 26 Sep 2016, at 2pm that is.

Location #4: Salle communale des Délices

Last year we experimented with an informal networking event for anybody who feels connected to the FinTech ecosystem, and you seemed to have liked it.

The Innotribe Networking event is back this year on Wednesday 28 Sep 2016, starting at 7pm in a location that is only 10 min walk away from the Sibos PalExpo conference center. We’ll have:

  • A short welcome by the network event sponsors
  • In the theme of the day, a Woman-Machine convergence with Beatie Wolfe and Live Band
  • Excellent food and drinks (informal standing dinner)
  • Lots of informal networking

This is an free networking event, but please RSVP via this registration site. For Sibos delegates, we’ll have postcard-style invitations available at the conference center.

Who should attend?

Innotribe is open to all Sibos delegates. Throughout the Sibos week, Innotribe will be the centre of expertise on innovation for the benefit of all relevant stakeholders, including business analysts, strategists, product managers, innovation managers, transaction bankers, securities managers, corporates, standards experts, payment professionals, regulators, and policy makers.

Resources:

In the coming weeks, we will pump-up our communications volume, and prepare a preview blog post per Innotribe day, revealing and contextualizing our amazing speaker and instigator line-up for this year. Follow us on Twitter: for the latest announcements: @Innotribe, #Innotribe, @Sibos, #Sibos

As you can see, all engines are on, and we are looking forward to meeting you all again at this year’s Innotribe Sibos 2016 from 26-29 Sep 2016 in PalExpo, Geneva.

It should be obvious that Innotribe Sibos is only possible through the great collaboration with the Sibos team, deep involvement of the Innotribe team, and a number of world-class contractors for the professional execution of all this.

Deeply grateful,

Your architect and content curator for Innotribe@Sibos, @petervan

 

Innovation: from tactics to strategy

I was invited at the 7th Banking Innovation Forum in Vienna to speak on Innovation. The title of my talk was “Innovation: from tactics to strategy”

I have posted the deck on Slideshare

It was an interesting audience, with most people coming from Central and Eastern Europe, with some interesting case studies from Paolo Barbesino from UniCredit in Italy, Carlos Gomez from Activo bank in Portugal, Marcel Gajdos from Visa Europe Czech Republic/Slovakia, Efigence in Poland, and Wojciech Bolanowski from PKO Bank Polski. I made quite some notes, and if i find the time to make a post on it, i will.

Luckily, my fans are out there to help me. I planned write something about my talk as well, but Wojciech Bolanowski already did that in his great LinkedIn Post here. I have cut and pasted his post in its entirety, as it captures well what i was trying to convey in that presentation. Thank you so much, Wojciech, much appreciated 😉

+++ Start post Wojciech

Inspire other people, think differently, create spaces where people come alive, ship to customers; as well as bravery, prototyping, events, capabilities and clarity – these are ingredients for successful innovation within big organization; at least according to excellent speaker and Innotribe Co-founder Peter Vander Auwera.

How to innovate in the shadow of behemoth?

marriott

Peter spoke on the first day of 7th Annual Banking Innovation Forum by Uniglobal in Vienna Marriott Hotel (as pictured above). He was keeping the audience extremely focused and interested. The subject was complex and of great importance: how to make really BIG organization innovative. As Peter put it in an outstanding rethoric figure: “how to make babies”. I would like to add: how to make the babies when you are well-known, established, serious and successful one with huge legacy and obliging history.

The questions are (usually) much more important than particular answers, so there is not my goal to report Peters’s solution in details. What I would like to point out is the question itself. Today, in the fast-running world of fin-tech start-ups and quasi-banking innovators almost every bank is big enough to raise this question to itself. Is it enough to inspire other people with your disrutptive ideas? Is such inspiring even possible in organization too big to change itself spontaneously? What could possibly happen if you think differently from dominant thinking styles?

Obviously, being innovative within mammoth-size organization is a big challenge and requires specific attitude and social skills. As I understood one of the Peter’s suggestion is to create appropriate team which become the centre and engine of the process. The brave, capable team with clearly set culture of “rather be failing frequently than never trying new things” to quote Peter’s presentation. Some important tools to do so are special workspaces, integrating events and ways of building true alignment.

Bravery – the slide of the presentation. Source: Uniglobal

How to gain executives’ support?

The presentation was full of insider stories with some of them concerning interactions between innovators and the board members. Those were a great lesson of struggle which, I think, at least to some extend, any innovator should expect and be prepared for. The very useful take-out was about prototyping and commercial launching of innovative products. The prototype should be, according to Peter’s best practice, as vivid and identical with the final product as possible. No more “Power Point Prototypes” unless you would like to fail. What’s even more – prototyping is just a step to the real strategic goal – to deliver real, commercial product and give it to customers. “Go out of the sandbox” is another great statement I heard from the speaker. Indeed, today environment of fast growing and alternating product propositions demand being “on market”. The Grand Jury of customers has no time to screen through pilots or prototypes; every company should be ready to risk and show its innovation as soon as it is delivered. In my opinion this is extremely important to realize. Shipment to customers what is already prototyped is the crucial part of execution process in innovation. I feel it is striking and true, therefore I tweeted this immediately with hashtag #BAIF2015!

What about the reluctant middle-level-managers?

The next splendid remark is about mid-level managers’ attitude toward change. For them the main goal is “too keep any changes far away of the plan”. It is understandable and rational. For manager’s KPIs are target-related, they try to keep organization on the course to achieve them. However, any innovation process within organization creates the risk of change, which, possibly, could alternate plans and goals. This is the real challenge – to execute innovation in organization which mainly consists of medium-level managers. And execution itself is much more difficult and lasts much longer than whole creative process of gathering ideas, evangelization, internal promotion etc. What Peter stressed, and I agree fully, is thatin context of big organizations idea management process is easier and shorter than its incubation and implementation. In start-ups world there is exactly the opposite relation.

Start-ups as indicators

Start-ups in financial sector (dubbed fintech recently) occupied a lot of Peter’s presentation as he is involved in the well-known Innotribe@Sibos program. The event has attracted more than 340 participants this year. It is quite nice sample to show what’s going on in innovation. With four continental semi-finals (NYC, London, Cape Town and Singapore) it gives global overview and prime selection of activities. This could be a useful indicator for big companies to track the start-up trends and pick up something valuable from. For example in 2014 the leading areas of start-up activity were (despite a broad category of corporates/business services) investment management, lending, big data and personal financial management. It is a clear message to banks: there is innovation coming to your core businesses and it is technology-driven.

This post is inspired by presentation shown on of 7th Annual Banking Innovation Forum ; there is another one of this category, in case you are interested:

Collateral damage of 2008 – card revenues in CEE

Peter Vander Auwera on stage in Vienna. Source: Uniglobal

Linguistic disclaimer

I have written this text in English and I know my limitations. It is possible you find this post illogical, offending, unclear or too simplistic. It does not mean to be that way, so please blame it to my imperfect English skills. I am neither native nor perfect English speaking person . If you want to be helpful, do share your grammar, spelling, style and any other remarks with me. I would appreciate any contributing comment, especially if it came from native speakers.

+++ End post Wojciech