Category Archives: Personal Values

Intelligence Multipliers

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Great book Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.

Summary here.

 

  • Multipliers are Talent Magnets: They look beyond their own capabilities to see the deep capabilities —or genius—of others. And then they utilize people at their highest point of contribution.
  • Multipliers are Liberators: They eradicate stress and fear from their organization and instead create an intense environment that requires people’s best thinking and work. They keep the pressure on but make it safe to make mistakes. The result is a climate that is intense without being tense.
  • Multipliers are Challengers: Instead of telling people what to do, they show them what they can do. They seed opportunities and let people discover needs for themselves. Then, they lay down challenges that cause people to stretch beyond what they thought was possible.
  • Multipliers are Debate Makers: Instead of making isolated decisions that leave others in the dark, they engage people in debating high-stakes decisions up front. This leads to decisions that people understand and can execute efficiently.
  • Multipliers are Investors: Instead of getting things done by micromanaging, they give other people the ownership for results and invest in their capability and success.

Management Innovation: Extreme Management Makeover

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Stumbled upon this great blog post by Gary Hamel in the WSJ. Extremely relevant if your business is a service business run by first-level employees.

It’s based on the work of Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies (HCLT).

It’s now all documented in this great book Employees First Customer Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down

If you thought I was sometime being a bit extreme in challenging existing ways of doing things, have a look at following recommendations:

  • We must destroy the concept of the CEO
  • Employees First, Customers second
  • Exalt those with hierarchical power rather than those who created customer value
  • Turn sober-suited executives into rabid management heretics
  • “reverse accountability.” Managers should be accountable to those in the value zone
  • Give every employee a detailed set of financial metrics for their own team and other teams across the company
  • A non-censored censored “U&I” site, taking also the dirty questions
  • Install a web-based “Smart Service Desk” and SLA’s with powerful corporate departments, like HR and finance, who often seem more interested in enforcing blanket policies than in making life easier for employees.
  • Rate the performance of any manager whose decisions impact their work lives, and to do so anonymously
  • Crowdsourced review of divisional business plans
  • Employee First Councils: to help employees connect with team members who shared similar interests and passions

The last two concluding paragraphs are enlightening:

The world has become too complex for the CEO to play the role of “visionary-in-chief.” Instead, the CEO must become a “management architect”—someone who continually asks, “What are the principles and processes that can help us surface the best ideas and unleash the talents of everyone who works here?” Today, as never before, the world needs leaders who refuse to be seduced by the fatal allure of the familiar.

It really is possible to change the management DNA in a large, established company. When you dig into “Employees First” you’ll learn that it’s possible to reinvent management without blowing up the existing management system, without having a detailed master plan at the outset and without taking inordinate risks. If you’re a would-be management renegade—this means you’ve just run out of excuses.

We are as gods and might as well get good at it

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Check out Raw Dawson’s blog post of today with superb video

TURNING INTO GODS – ‘Concept Teaser’ from jason silva on Vimeo.

Indeed today it is entirely appropriate for us to be thinking in terms of human transformation, and the power we have at our disposal. The cycle has swung back, and once again there is the promise that we have what it takes to change who we are… for the better. Whether human nature will allow those changes to be fully positive we have yet to discover. But that promise is – once again – part of the zeitgeist.

Heretic Team Glue

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Last week we had a great team off-site.

We arrived late afternoon in the fantastic location of Chateau de la Poste, close to Namur, Belgium. Built in 1895, the Château de la Poste was the residence, for more than forty years, of Princess Clementine, daughter of King Léopold II. It later was sold to the postal services, who used it as a vacation resort for the children of the employees of the Belgian Post (times have changed). It recently was refurbished completely by a French wine maker, and it houses now a wonderful hotel, meeting centre and quality restaurant.

The amazing landscape, the silence and the soft welcome on the summer terrace set us all in the right mood. We all felt our physical and mental muscles relaxing, winding down.

Don’t know where I read it anymore, but I recently found a quote: “If you are not able anymore to take some time out for an off-site team gathering, you’re cooked”

For once, we did NOT have a packed agenda, and plenty of time for  real Quality Time Sessions.

We even made an acronym for it (QTS) to joke a bit with the “acronymitis” of the lean methodology.

More seriously, we invented QTS because we felt that the pure lean method was too much focused on a problem-mindset, and not enough on an opportunity-mindset, opportunities to develop some deeper quality thinking on subjects relevant to our business and team.

One of the items on the agenda was about “how to tell bad news”. In the subsequent discussion, one team member reflected on some sort of “fear” and “If I do this, then this and that may happen, and then…” thinking. Being in the acronym mode, we had a good discussion on

 

FEAR = Fantasy Experienced As Real

 

and how such behavior leads to blocking, status-quo situations.

Almost “emergent by design” our team culture principles unfolded, and we articulated them along the themes of “old” and “new” game.

 

  • Old game = fear, tricks, manipulation, raising stinky fish, machiavelism, creating and maintaining negative energy in general

  • New game = solution oriented, integrity and authenticity, fast correction (like Guy Kawasaki used to say”churn baby churn” a variation on the famous 1976 disco song “Disco Inferno” by the The Tramps), the holy fire, positive energy, who is the owner of the idea, who cares ? It’s about focusing on believers, and investing heavily in those VIP followers that will help us create a viral innovation infection/storm, like a raging holy fire that cannot be stopped anymore. Burn baby Burn…

 

We replaced “raising stinky fish” by regular update and feedback sessions, focusing on polishing rough idea diamonds, focusing on what works vs. what does not work, focusing solutions vs. problems.

 

If you think deeply about it, all this is about

the major cultural shift

from pushing towards pulling your ideas,

it’s about a strengths based society and team,

it’s about connecting ideas

and excel in making them real.

 

Another correction we made to lean was our understanding of a skills matrix.

We were very inspired by Venessa Miemis’ blog post “Framework for a Strengths Based Society” that included following diagram.

We decided to add these skills to our existing lean skills matrix that was too focused on identifying and solving problems and tools mastery. “We are not the tools, the builders are us” is another quote from one of Venessa’s presentations.

The subtle nuance is that we did NOT implement these skills as comparative/ competitive skills of different team members but

 

in terms of personal areas of

strength and potential

for each team member individually.

 

Our little team is SWIFT’s “Innovation Team”. Some time ago, we shared the details of the mission here and in summary it goes like this:

Build the Skills , Tools , Processes, Metrics , Values , Network , required to support collaborative innovation and transform SWIFT in an agile company, able to succeed in a changing environment.

I often make reflections on how real our innovation work really is. And although we are having lots of fun and some sizeable impact on how the company little by little opens up for innovative behavior, I always seem to be in search for that little extra in life and work.

Too many of our innovation experiments and proof-of-concepts remain just that: proof-of-concepts and prototypes. They never get into production. Worse, some outcome are just ‘filed vertically” or even never get the any executive attention.

I would like to hear from other innovators what is the secret sauce to get beyond the prototype stage. Because staying in prototype stage sometimes makes me wonder if I am in some sort of “busyness” therapy.

And I have come at an age where I cannot content myself with busyness.

I could sit here till my pension, having a good pay, and living honestly speaking in a quite luxurious working environment. But I am in search for more. I am in search for

 

meaning and significance

 

With the couple of years still to go, I still have the arrogant (?) ambition that I want to leave a legacy. On a personal level in my family. On a professional level that my passing in this company has substantially changed something. It’s about a deep sense of motivation, beyond pay and perks.

There is something heroic, even heretic about all this. That’s why the title of this post is Heretic Team Glue.

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Heretics are the ones that were expulsed from the Catholic Church because they did not follow the rules and challenged faith and established dogmas.

There are several dictionary definitions of “heretic”. The one I have in mind here is “anyone who does not conform to an established attitude,doctrine, or principle”.

I think we in our team are all some sort of heretics in the castle. It’s something very special in our team, that creates a very strong bonding.

At times it even has some masochistic flavor. Why on earth do we keep on trying again and again ? Even if the odds are against us. Why are we prepared to go time after time through the innovation pains over and over again ?

I truly believe it is because we do it for the right reason. Not for the pay. Not for the glory.

 

Because we believe there is a chance

we can succeed 

 

And believe we can create a tribe of followers in the same belief. It’s for some of us the only reason why we stay !

Are the above reflections caused by my age and my 3/4 life contemplations ?  Don’t think so. We invited some GEN-Y colleagues to join our off-site. And see: they too are driven by honesty, they too want promises to be kept, they too look for meaning and fulfillment in their lives.

But it was shocking to hear how some of them have been seduced to join a company based on huge expectations and promises that they would work soon for 3 years in the US, and have rapid accelerated career paths, and deep young graduate immersion programs. It’s unacceptable to make such promises if you know you can’t realize them.

And this is their first contact with corporate life !

How can we ever correct this ? How on earth can we regain the trust of these young people ? Our generation has planted the seeds of suspicion in these long lives. Big mistake.

Me too I have been mislead several times in my life, and I recognize the power-less emotion of trust that was betrayed. Lessons of life ? Normal life injuries ? The way it is ? Why do we need to accept that ? Why do we repeat the same errors over and over again ? Sooner or later, these young people will present us the invoice.

These folks actually think. Think deeply. Some GEN-Y people are for example  insulted when calling them “GEN-Y”. Because they see themselves as individual human beings, with their own identities and values systems, not prepared to be tagged as a category. And they have great ideas. We organized some sort of Innotribe Lab with them: more than 20 ideas on how to improve quality of work came out. I am honored that I can channel these ideas into the People & Culture “movement” team of the company.

Last but not least, we had a great discussion about “reverse mentorship”.

Instead of older experienced professionals mentoring new young people joining the company, why not letting young people mentor the already older – sometimes (mis)formatted – generation, and teach them how to use new technologies and apply 21st value systems ?

We had a fierce debate: how can one say that the young generation is the future, and five minutes later challenge reverse mentorship by not accepting that one can learn an awful lot from these fresh and well trained minds.

Maybe that’s where my future is ? In being mentored by a GEN-Y ? It will ask of course an attitude of

vulnerability

 

It’s also part of a give-ànd-take culture that includes transparency and openness. Especially give. Like a gift, where you don’t expect something in return.

 

When is the last time you made a Gift ?

 

How can we create an environment where we encourage learning from each other (in normal and reverse mentoring mode) ? An environment where we celebrate confidence building on your own rhythm, dare to be vulnerable, asking for feedback that is clarifying, supporting, challenging.

I am convinced I can learn something from every human being. Especially young people who have a renewed and fresh sense of civic responsibility, transparency, honesty, openness.

I have committed to take the challenge and invite one of our GEN-Y’s to monitor me during 6 months and give me feedback on my behavior and to keep me honest.

So that I walk the talk. Every manager should do this.

We are what we choose

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Yesterday – in one of those uncontrolled mixed moments of vacation, winding down, browsing, boredom – I did a health check on one of those “how-old-will-you-get-if-you- keep-this-lifestyle” sites.

 

The answer was 75

 

The test told me that I could extend this by probably a year or so, if I gave up all the negative stuff in my lifestyle. Only one year ?

75 ! It put me in some strange mood. I really never had a mid-life crisis (my wife will vigorously argument against that :-), but this hit me into a 3/4 life crisis/reflection.

It meant that I had a bit more that 20 years to make the right choices.

And then I discovered by pure luck this wonderful Jeff Bezos speech. Thanks to the tweets of digitalwaveride

Check out this fantastic 2010 Baccalaureate remarks by Jeff Bezos. The whole story is moving, but the last part should be a mantra for every human being that has the luxury to have choice.

Sine parole

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins.

How will you use your gifts?

What choices will you make?

Will inertia be your guide, or will you follow your passions?

Will you follow dogma, or will you be original?

Will you choose a life of ease, or a life of service and adventure?

Will you wilt under criticism, or will you follow your convictions?

Will you bluff it out when you’re wrong, or will you apologize?

Will you guard your heart against rejection, or will you act when you fall in love?

Will you play it safe, or will you be a little bit swashbuckling?

When it’s tough, will you give up, or will you be relentless?

Will you be a cynic,

or will you be a builder?

 

Will you be clever at the

expense of others,

or will you be kind?

 

I will hazard a prediction. When you are 80 years old, and in a quiet moment of reflection narrating for only yourself the most personal version of your life story, the telling that will be most compact and meaningful will be the series of choices you have made. In the end, we are our choices. Build yourself a great story. Thank you and good luck!

With that as a background, I reflect back on some great conversations I had recently with some GEN-Y people, who can spent their whole day in studying human behavior and values like strengths based society, collaborative innovation models, and other cool and exciting stuff.

How much would I like to go back to high school and study. Just study for the pleasure of the mind.

Or shall I finally start writing that book ?

Social Currency: My Personal Identity

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Recently came across this great site by Dan Robles.

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One of his latest posts Will Social Capitalism Replace Market Capitalism? (Parts 1&2) included great video material on how social currency can change industries.

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His forecasting example is the airline industry. And it’s even not so far fetched. What if you could “Time-Share” seats in private jets ?

It’s easy to think how this social currency model would apply to any other business and radically innovate by creative destruction.

It’s a very novel way to show how a number of trends come together:

  • The influence of gaming theories and practices in new business models
  • The value and tradability of my personal information
  • The power shift from Push to Pull that is so well described in John Hagel’s latest book “The Power of Pull” (I repeat it, in my opinion THE business book of 2010)

By the way, we recently had a face to face meeting with John exploring the possibility to have him with us at Innotribe at Sibos in Amsterdam, 25-29 October 2010.

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We have asked John to consider a talk in our Innotribe Opening Keynotes, and to be part of our special Innotribe Lab on The long now in Financial Services.

To come back to the subject of the power of identity, I’d like to spend a bit more time on the tradability of my personal information.

The essence of the story is that some parts of my personal data have value and can be traded under the user’s control to get a better service.

It opens questions to:

  • How tradable is my personal identity ?
  • How tradable is my digital footprint ?
  • How tradable are my on and off-line relationships ?

I have been immersed in “personal digital identity” the last couple of weeks. Recently i attended the EEMA’s The European e-Identity Management Conference in London.

The week after i was the “tour guide” for a "Digital Identity Tour” we organized with some colleagues on the West-Coast”. I am preparing a set of blog posts on these conferences and 1-1 conversations with thought leaders in e-Identity space.

In this blog i will just simplify my summary thoughts with the statement that e-identity is much, much more that a certificate on a smart-card, or for sake of the argument any other form factor.

We are witnessing a power-shift:

In stead of the government (or the bank, or any other service offering entity) creating digital identities to give more value to the citizen, we see the emergence of  identities created by the user to give greater value to the government (or the bank, or any other service offering entity)

We have to carefully think this through, as identity – and relations between and with persons – is really a complex animal.

Have a look at this fantastic 210+ slides presentation “The Real Life Social Network V2” by a Google analyst @Padday aka Paul Adams, working for the UX team at Google. The essence of his story is that there is nothing such as a generic “Friends”. You have all sorts of friends and different depths in relations. Whether those relations are between people-people or people-companies.

It’s a great story, and all slides are annotated. As a teaser, here are his 3 summarizing slides:

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It’s interesting how the words identity, privacy, care, relationships, collaboration, strong/week ties, Klout, etc are now all coming together. As a matter of fact, these are all attributes that make us truly human.

As a sherry on today’s cake, i’d like to link you once more to Venassa Miemis site “Emergent by Design” and the great recent blog post on Guidelines for Group Collaboration and Emergence, that is building on both her previous work on “Strenghts Based Society”, “”Skills for a 21st century connected world”, and her work on the open source collaborative tool “Junto”.

 

 

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As we are preparing Innotribe at Sibos, i had the pleasure to talk to Venassa during a Skype session. We are discussing her participation at several levels of our Innotribe Program.

It is great to see how these novel ideas become “totally” relevant when you start thinking about their value for a “community” like SWIFT and an innitiative like Innotribe where “Enabling Collaborative Innovation” is our “Leifmotto”.

From the conversation with Venassa, i can tell you she “totally” got it, and she is preparing some material and levels of interactivity for Sibos that you even never dreamed of.

We are now 16 weeks from Sibos. The idea is to begin hosting a junto every week, invite different thinkers to discuss the future of money, record all conversations and develop a presentation based on them, but also make the videos available for the attendees of the conference to be able to watch whenever they want to see what those conversations were like.

If we think about the Long Now, will there still be currency as we know it? Or will social currency become central to our trade? And what impact does that have on banks ? Should be have personal data stores where we deposit our digital footprint and open personal accounts and do payments for services from there?

Feel free to jump in.

Creative juices everywhere

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These days, when i kick-off an innovation workshop, i ask the participants “tell me about your hobbies/interests when you were 16-18 years old”.

The answers and the resulting effect are surprising.

  • First, it opens up people in a way they are not used to. The come out of their “i-am-at-work” comfort zone. Some people that you expect to be “emotional zombies”, suddenly have sparkles in their eyes and show leadership throughout the workshop. Having genuine interest in people unleashes nuclear creative energy.
  • Second, it is amazing how many creative juices you gave in your average workshop. People tell me about their dancing, painting, music instruments, fashion design, about crazy little (and big) things they did in life

I don’t know where it comes from, that attitude of “withholding” the best of yourself. Something that is for sure, is that once you tap into this creative well, the energy and engagement and idea generation increase by a factor 10.

Another example: a colleague from our German office came to see me on what our innovation team could mean for one of his customers. In stead of showing him a whitepaper or a slide show, i decided to show him some of our past productions. Again those sparkling eyes.

With hindsight, it is interesting to see how we almost unconsciously added some creative art/visual/audio layer to most of the things we do. You can call them “innovation productions”.

My German colleague was clearly surprised on the quality productions we do with relatively small means. “I have to let this sink” he said. “It’s all a bit overwhelming at this moment, but i am trying to grasp it all and how i can transfer the same excitement to my customer when going back to Frankfurt this evening”.

The point i am trying to make is that there are creative juices everywhere, and it only takes a little scratching or motivation to get the best out of people.

Here is an example of getting out the best in people. You remember by blog post on the Medici Effect ? Apparently it inspired my colleague Mela to some really video collage.

 

 

It’s beautiful. It touched me emotionally. Watch it. It’s only 5 min. You can use it as an inspiring start of your day as well. Or imagine starting a workshop after having played this video. The energy in the room is high. It’s a soft energy that makes you feel comfortable to share.

This video is used in our company to launch the next wave of internal innovation challenges.

Innovation Challenges are small competitions where we incentivize our creative people at all levels and locations in the organization to come up with ideas around a certain theme. The projects are presented to a judge panel that includes the CEO. The winner gets implemented. So the price is not money but personal fulfillment.

The Challenges of this wave are all run under the banner of “Create the Medici Effect”: bring together people of different expertise and with different creative and/or engineering skills, and let the power of intersections play.

It’s a powerful model.

You can expect this video at many of our events and workshops. Also at Innotribe @ Sibos this year in Amsterdam, where one of our labs will have a specific focus to amplifying the Medici Effect.

Nobody asked Mela to do this video. But she followed her own compass and did not wait to be called. Mela should not only start to blog. She should start her own “Mela Productions” company.

“Inspire other people to dream” seems to have worked. Creative juices are everywhere. Imagine if you could unleash this energy in a systemic way in your company and in your eco-system. Maybe we have to do a creative lab at Sibos where we ask teams to make a similar video on the topic Generation-Y and Banking and have it ready by the end of the conference for the closing plenary ? Any thoughts ?

I have to run now, but will polish up this post later in my usual way, but i wanted to get this off my chest and into the world as soon as possible.

Chose the situation… and defer judgment

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Guest post by Mariela.

Sometimes i get comments on this post that are too good to be hidden in the comments section. Here is one from Mariela on my previous post “Purpose Maximizers and Candies”

Some comments on Candy 2 (as the person who unearthed this particular post, I guess it is no wonder that I want to comment on it :-).

A very interesting point that the “Why your boss is programmed to be a dictator” implies, and which is something that I myself always wondered about, is why does it always seem that as soon as you become a boss you seem to fit this Dictatorship mold. Even people who to start with are democratic and liberal and open minded end up being dictators ( I must confess that my answer has always been that power somehow gets to their heads and makes them act like perfect bastards, but I always wondered would I have the moral stamina to be different… or would I also become a dictator like everyone else; I’ve been so much afraid to face the answer to this question, that I have very carefully and deliberately avoided being in  situations where I would have any hierarchical power what-so-ever).

Now, what this particular post talks about is two fold:

1), a lot of our behavior is determined by the situation (the example used is the simulated prison studies, where students acted the part of prison guards or prisoners, and were found to behave perfectly within the stereotypical roles, despite their initial character and personal convictions); so bosses behave as bosses, because our systems (organizations) force them to

2), the second thing is something known is psychology as Fundamental Attribution Error – which is the other side of the coin that Dhruve does not talk about, but you will find plenty on in the SWITCH book of Dan and Chip Heath (also referenced by Peter in previous blogs).  The fundamental attribution error is a bias that we all suffer from, which means that in any situation we are likely to attribute observed bad behavior as fundamental character flaw of the person, rather than attempt to check if the situation was not responsible; however when we ourselves exhibit the same behavior it is very clearly the fault of the situation (example – observing a driver passing a red light, causes us to usually call him names, while when we ourselves commit the same offense, it is… because we have a very good reason that excuses the behavior, of course).

Now what all that means to me, is that there is great hope for our bosses and organizations: all we have to do is change the situation and people will miraculously behave in a different way. Simple! 🙂

I know it sounds way too simplistic to be true, but I have been observing this change in people in my work, but never realized what caused it and how I could reproduce it predictably.

I have worked over the last few months with many colleagues with whom previously I had difficult relationships.

My current work usually involves situations when I offer to help them achieve a goal and facilitate collaborative meetings/ workshops for them. I have observed the most amazing changes happen to people in such workshops – they suddenly behave in very open, non-confrontational, collaborative, and creative ways. They get excited, they want to share, they value their colleagues and they appreciate their differences. And before I could have betted (if I was a betting person) that they could never ever behave like that, because they were not such type of people (attribution error again).

I’ve seen this magic happen over and over again in different situations with different people, and I could not explain it, so I just took it for granted. Until I came across the SWITCH book and the Fundamental Attribution Error. And then I realized that there was no magic.

People are people, they have good and bad sides, and they are mainly….well,  human. All you’ve got to do is chose the situation… and defer judgment:  Good situations bring out the best in people, bad situations…..

Mariela should start blogging herself. But maybe this is a situation where she feels some sort of hierarchy or being in a situation where she fears the answer on what would happen if she goes full public. There is only one way to find out.

Becoming Better Builders

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This is about an amazing idea of a 23-year young big thinker who created a fantastic community on-line and almost by accident stumbled upon a new platform for on-line communication that could change our world.

I stumbled upon this absolutely great video of a speech given by Vanessa Miemis in NYC during the Social Business Edge Conference on 19 April 2010.

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I am a big fan of Mrs. Miemis and fervent reader of her blog “Emergent by Design”.

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It’s the first time I see and hear her speak. It’s adds a different dimension. It’s a different type of engagement, and that different type of engagement is exactly what “Junto” is a about: a conversational platform between “real” people (see later on this blog).

She has roughly 4 supporting slides, and talks from the heart, with only a small sheet of paper with probably a couple of keywords and key statements. That’s how really super keynoters do their thing.

In this video she talks in an almost shy way about what drives her, and makes one after the other bold statement about the way this society does (not) work anymore.

The story is in essence about

the old game and the new game

 

As my friend, coach and mentor Andre Pelgrims used to say:

 

our (mental) software has evolved, but our hardware did not (our value systems, our hierarchies, our corporate models)

 

Vanessa’s speech in in 3 chapters:

  • We are shaped by our tools
  • We learn by modeling behavior
  • We align around a shared vision

I was mainly blown away by the section on Modeling behavior, some elements in the vision alignment, and definitely by her description of Junto.

 

Modeling behavior

 

Some real deep thinking here:

 

This is how children learn. It makes interactions transparent

Encourage a culture of collaboration, there is a certain type of behavior that we are modeling, and one that is based on a value system that is predominantly different than the one that exists in society and business today.

And its difficult to expect a paradigm shift when the current model rewards selfishness, and hording of information and exploitative behavior.

This virtual space is actually like some kind of training ground to build trust and to have a different behavior where the outcome is more than the zero-sum (in the existing model)

We align around a shared vision

 

There is this new way. For the greater good. A new global conversation and collaboration platform. that would sit on top of the web and that would accelerate the rate of taking an idea to action. And we are calling it JUNTO.

Enter Junto’s vision: a 3D space, where it’s live-streaming video, with video streams of us human beings.

 

It’s actually you,

who you really are

 

On top of that a profile system, automatically generated by the conversations you are having. It’s a different kind of transparency on who your really are. On top of this this reputation system that would be build into these trust networks, and virtual currencies, … and it goes on.

It’s like 5 people having a public conversation about a topic that interests them, and 500 people sitting in the back-channel. It’s all open source. They don’t want to monetize the tool.

 

They co-create value

by what they do with each other

 

It’s sounds a lot like our “enabling collaborative innovation” theme of Innotribe. It sounds a lot like the “advancing critical dialogue” tag-line of Sibos.

I truly believe that this tool could bee the basis from which a new global economy and a new global society can emerge from.

Wouldn’t it be cool to address this a a theme at Sibos. In front of 8,000 bankers ? Wouldn’t it be cool to experiment with Junto – yes, live i mean – during Innotribe at Sibos ? We plan other cool remote interactive stuff anyway this year. Just have to keep you curious here, as we have not yet fully worked out the concept, but if we pull it off, it will be really cool. Sort of first off.

Her final idea to consider:

Technology is the tool, but not the builder. We are the builders.

 

I challenge you and ask how we get better use to tools to connect and to inspire, so that collectively we can become better builders.

I need to discuss with the Sibos team, but I’d like to invite Vanessa to our Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam to be part of the keynotes on “the big tectonic shifts” and in our Gen-Y stream.

Let’s Prepare the Future !

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This article is a cross-post of an essay that i prepared for The Fifth Conference and that was published this week.

 

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The Fifth Conference is a forum for vision. Part publisher and part conference, The Fifth Conference tackles the ‘big issues’, the factors that drive our future. Think ten, twenty, even fifty years ahead and try to imagine how we will live and work. What will this world look like? How will we have solved the economic, social and environmental challenges that we confront today? To answer those questions we talk to entrepreneurs, policy makers and experts. We analyse the facts, the forecasts and the arguments. And most importantly, we collect vision.

As mentioned in my previous blog post “No more collateral damage”, this is so close to my idea of the Think Tank for Long Term Future that it was for me a no-brainer to passionately accept the invitation of Frank Boermeester (co-founder of The Fifth Conference) to draft an essay on Technology, with a focus on Technology Readiness in our region, and being conscientious aware of the “understream” that is driving all the changes and evolutions in Growth, Mobility, Green, Technology, Health. So here is the article:

 

Over the past 20 years we have witnessed a fantastic growth in and wealth of technologies. ICT technologies have started permeating our daily lives. Medical science and biotechnologies have increased longevity significantly. Other technologies (Nanotechnology, AI, Robotics, etc.) have kick-started.

However, in the last couple of years, we have witnessed the breakdown of a number of core systems:

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  • Our worldwide financial system is going through a “meltdown”. The old game of greed is being replaced by an all important requirement: trust.
  • Ecological, ethnological and demographical shocks (see also Geert Noels, author of Econoshock) are turning our systems upside-down: Green and Energy conservation thinking are now the mainstream.

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  • The East-West shock: economic power is shifting from the Western world to the new economies of APAC and BRIC+ countries.
  • New forms of communication via the internet (blogs, wikis, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Netlog, etc.) propose a new paradigm in respect to privacy.

All these fundamental changes give us feelings of discomfort, disorientation, confusion and loss of control. Although our “collective intelligence” indicates that our old models do not apply anymore, our “hardware” seems not to have caught on. We have not adapted the way we are organized hierarchically; how we look at governance. Our traditional ‘system thinking’ got stuck and did not follow our ‘collective intelligence’.

On the other hand a new set of systems and tools are emerging:

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  • Barack Obama describes it as the ‘audacity of hope’; innovators, planners, academics and authors are referring to ‘dreamtelligence’ as a new, vital, and visionary way to use play, fantasy, dream-thinking and innovation to kick-start ideas and stimulate community engagement.
  • A fantastic call for and revival of authenticity for ourselves and our leaders. Furthermore, having true leaders; with charisma, the power to attract, integrity and authenticity.
  • The Net-Generation (now young adults, 15-30 years old) have grown up as ‘digital natives’. They will be tomorrow’s leaders. What THEY think will co-form our future. The future will not be invented by today’s generation. This Net-Generation lives differently. They are “wired” differently. For them multitasking (multi-window chatting, gaming at the same time as listening to music, looking up information on the internet, being mobile, etc.) is very common. They also think differently (deeper and more authentically), and have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective and civic responsibility.

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Our technological revolution has just started. To illustrate:

  • Today our technologists are capable of crafting a human ear in their labs. We are now in a position to create and grow cells, tissues and even bodies.
  • Artificial Intelligence is back: by 2030 our computers will be able to think, be self-learning, self-healing – some will even be able to have a consciousness.
  • Self-learning robots will soon be mainstream technology. Mercedes and BMW already have cars in the pipeline for 2012 that can drive entirely automatically, better than a human counterpart.
  • The emergence of Google brings forth the concept of the “Global Brain”. The internet today is already a tremendous source of information. Today’s search experience will pale in comparison to the mechanisms we’ll have in 20 years. All knowledge will be available anywhere, anytime, wirelessly via brain-implants.
  • Social networking is already revolutionizing the way people and companies are communicating. It is interesting to note that these technologies let us evolve from a system-to-system communication paradigm towards a human-to-human one.
  • Today you can order your personal DNA genome sequence in the USA for only $399. The company doing this is a Google backed start-up. Think of DNA in the ‘cloud’, with DNA comparisons between ancestors, relationships, etc …
  • Brain-wave helmets and chip-implants will give humans better sensory perception. By 2030 we will see the emergence of “super-humans”. In such a dramatically changed context, what will make us “human”?

A lot of these future scenarios are described by Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” concept. This is the moment when man and machine truly blend. Kurzweil claims this will happen around the year 2030.

And the pace of all these technological innovations is just increasing exponentially. In the next 20 years we will witness technological breakthroughs tenfold those of the same previous span of time.

All this evolution calls for a re-thinking of our value-compass for the future: We must carefully re- think how all this will influence the way we will work and live. What sort of quality of life should we aim for? What will be the socio-economic impact of all this? How will we want education to be structured? What areas of society will we still want (and be able to) influence?

 

How are we going to ensure that the

Technical and Value ‘Readiness’

of our region

are competitive in this new era?

 

Will we lead the change, as opposed to being mediocre followers? I believe it is time for action.

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I believe The Fifth Conference and its organic network of inspiring leaders has deep within itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” addressing the long term future:

 

A movement and an energy

that prepares our Net-Generation

for the next 20 years,

with an emphasis on

our technical and value readiness

 

A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030, cross-pollinating each other’s disciplines. Indeed, “savants” from different contexts & worldviews can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live and work in 2030.

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How our education is best organized will also be addressed. We will investigate what our ideal value kit for that era should be, beyond traditional corporate culture. Moreover, with a culture of sharing and exploring – where we live committed to teams, groups, communities, regions and countries –a deep respect for the participating individual humanistic identities will nevertheless be maintained.

We don’t have to wait until our politicians have made up their minds as to whether or not they should invest more in innovation.

 

We can do this ourselves

 

I cannot accept that it would not be possible to raise private funding for such an organization/movement/tribe.

The resulting new models and scenarios will demand speed, creativity, dynamism, perseverance, courage, knowledge and working together in a multi-cultural context. This new society makes a plea for the respect for individuality, freedom, mobility and quality of life.

This paradigm is all about designing, exploring and organizing change, learning and fine-tuning as we go. Giving guidance to teams, organizations and leaders on how to surf these waves is part and parcel with this. Missing the first technology wave of speed and creativity will result in loss of economic relevance. Missing the wave of the new value kit will result in losing our Net-Generation; our brains for the future.

This is about preparing ourselves and our region for 2030.

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Who wants to join the tribe? Who is a believer? Let’s debate this idea on- and off-line for a couple of weeks. If there is enough interest, let’s meet and make this happen.