A Fateful Choice in the Seconds After You’re Accused

September 30, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When you’re threatened, everything that ends up mattering happens in seconds. You take a defensive, even defiant stance and can’t (or feel that you can’t) step back and retain any credibility. You pick up a gun and, as often as not, end up shooting your innocence and outrage in all directions.

Almost nothing is more threatening to people than to have “how they view themselves” called into question. When I believe I’m generous and am accused of acting selfishly, my self-esteem is challenged. And it’s not just how I see myself. It’s how I’ve presented myself to others too. When determining my response, it’s also about everyone else who’ll be disappointed if I don’t defend how I want them to see me.

That larger group always starts with the people who are closest to me: my spouse, children, parents and friends. If you’re ambitious and need others to vouch for your work, their number expands. Teachers, coaches and priests who can attest to your character for first jobs or college admissions; colleagues who can speak to your honesty; subordinates you’ve mentored and bosses you’ve impressed. If your rise is meteoric enough, your supporters might even include Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan and President George W. Bush.

So if you’re Brett Kavanaugh, you won’t just be defending yourself when you’re accused of wrongdoing, you’ll be defending what your legion of supporters think about you too. As a result, the frontline in need of defending is long and you’ll feel that it’s up to you to be “brave enough” to defend every inch of it.

And yet…

The fateful decision on how we’ll respond is often made in seconds, because that’s how the “fight or flight” response works when we’re threatened “to our very core.” At such times, it’s too easy to confuse our instincts for bravery.

You almost never stop to think about what you’ll do next because in that moment it’s incredibly hard to leave the reptilian parts of your brain for the more dispassionate parts, where it’s possible to admit that you’re not as perfect as you’ve convinced yourself and almost everybody else to believe that you are.

We also know that the most fateful decisions should never be made in a rush, particularly when you’ll be insisting that your white coat has never gotten dirty—not even once—in the ways alleged. But of course, that wisdom isn’t enough to overcome a knee-jerk urge to defend your honor. Part of what was so compelling about this week’s confirmation hearing was the defiance and combativeness that taking an irrational position always seems to require.

Some righteous outrage is warranted if you are wrongly accused. Some anger is certainly justified when accusations are distorted into parody. But unequivocal denials require more. Their nature almost demands that outrage at your challengers never waivers.

It can reveal more than we intend to those who are trying to keep an open mind and understand what really happened. What I saw were hours of defiance on Thursday, a reminder of Queen Gertrude’s comment in Hamlet that: “Thou dost protest too much, me thinks.” That is, too much reptile and too little rational judge if there really is nothing to your fall from grace.

In that initial “moment of truth,” when you first hear what you’re accused of, you don’t think of anything other than “protect myself,” “protect the queen,” protect everything that it’s taken me all these years to build. Unfortunately, I’ve had those moments and never thought once that I had an option other than to “go down swinging” if I have to, because everything I hold dear seemed to be at stake.

Somebody needed to tell me that I had an option, so maybe/hopefully I would remember the next time that while there are instincts hell-bent on defense inside of me, there is higher order biology inside me too.

It’s a pathway from instinct to emotion and onto thinking that I need to be reminded about. I can step back from the precipice and say: “I don’t have to start my denials right away, my ego is not so fragile that a searching moment or two is impossible.”

It’s a pause we almost never take, but could always take, if we thought about it beforehand, before someone confronts us again about a time when our pants were down.

Maybe I could respond not selfishly but with generosity towards myself (given the terrible costs of defending my perfection) and towards others (who say they’ve been damaged by far less flattering parts of me).

It’s hard to respond generously when you can’t see the option in the heat of the moment. You have to think about other ways forward long before your instincts take over, and too many of us never do.

This post was adapted from my September 30, 2018 newsletter.

Acting On Common Values Makes Change Possible

September 9, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

We don’t act on our values at work because we feel hopeless, that the odds are staked against us, that nothing we can do will matter. But are we right about that?

Resignation affects our paying jobs—how we retreat from our priorities in our workplaces—as well as the jobs we do in our communities (say, to support a local institution) or at home (as a caregiver). Since everyone else is only concerned about himself or herself, then maybe that’s all I should be worried about too. Am I right that my occasional impulses to be more open and generous are pipedreams that can never be realized?

A survey taken by the Common Cause organization in the UK in 2016 challenges both what we think about other peoples’ selfishness (as opposed to ther generosity) and the sense of resignation that quickly follows in us. The accompanying report also discusses how we decide on what we value more and value less. It’s not just the convictions that we’re born with. Our priorities are also influenced by what we think other people and the social institutions that we identify with value. It works in the other direction too, with our values and how we demonstrate them influencing these others too. Our values take form and get applied because of a complex back-and-forth.

Think of it as a three-way conversation. But you need to participate in that conversation to have an influence, and Common Cause discovered that your influence is probably far greater than you think it is.

Common Cause UK initiated the survey because, as an organization, it was concerned about the lack of public support for social and environmental changes it was seeking. Its leaders understood that values drive change and wanted a better understanding than it had already about citizen priorities. Those conducting the survey were surprised enough by the amount of common ground they discovered that they went on to propose ways that individuals and organizations (including businesses, non-profits and governments) can begin to overcome the current gridlock.

Here is a link to the survey report (“the Survey”), which I think you’ll find as interesting as I did.

This is the question I brought to it: Is where you “make a living,” try to make a difference in your community and create a better life at home primarily about your “selfish values” or is your work really driven by far more generous impulses? What the Survey shows–in a one-two punch–is how acting on the so-callled “compassionate values” that play a lead role for most of us is likely to be far more consequential than you know.

We Have More Common Ground Than We Think

The Survey defines “selfish values” as wealth, social recognition, social status, prestige, control over others, authority, conformity, preserving public image, popularity, influencing others and ambition. It defines “compassionate” values as broadmindedness, a world of beauty or at peace, equality, protecting the environment, social justice, helpfulness, forgiveness, honesty and responsibility.

The Survey found that nearly 75% of participants placed greater importance on compassionate values–with Survey protocols correcting for the bias that participants were seeking to cast themselves in a better light by downplaying the importance they attach to selfish values. Even more striking was the Survey’s finding that 77% of participants believed that other people were primarily driven by selfish values. The truth is that a large majority of people (three-quarters of the population) believe that their generous motivations are more important and drive them far more often than their selfish ones.

Because people always influence one another when it comes to values, and the priorities of social institutions are shaped in a similar conversation, the Survey’s authors make several recommendations to activate our generous commitments, including these.

Since people are discouraged from declaring their priorities when they believe that most other people disagree with them, accurate information—like that provided here—will not only counter pessimism but also fuel optimism. When it comes to your values, what other people value matter almost as much as what you value “in your heart of hearts”. But it goes beyond your optimism or pessimism. In the course of our work, we can probe other people’s motivations (instead of assuming them) to strengthen our social connections, while also finding enough courage in “the strength of our numbers” to act more generously.

The consequence for you and for others is similar to when you voice your dissent in a group, a back-and-forth exchange that was discussed here a couple of months ago. When you speak from your convictions and are clear about the changes you seek, it enables others to clarify their commitments, even when they’re different from yours, and for the group to move forward. Acting on your commitments also conveys your beliefs about how social institutions (from community groups to the federal government) should operate.

The entire time that our values are at stake, we’re watching and subtly influencing one another, so it’s important to read the social landscape around us correctly. The Survey’s writers ask:

How is a person’s perception of others’ values shaped? A person’s perceptions will be influenced by both what fellow citizens say is important to them and what he or she infers about fellow citizens from the way that they behave.

For this reason, it is very significant if people don’t always bear testimony to the values that they hold to be most important – either in what they say, or what they do…[P]eople often speak and act as though they attach particular importance to values that are actually relatively unimportant to them.

In other words, co-workers, neighbors and even family members may only seem to be acting selfishly. To discover their generous impulses, you may need to watch them more closely or simply ask what drives them in the work that they do.

Your actions and others’s actions speak louder than words to social institutions too. An institution like the US Supreme Court is always “noticing” how the American people are expressing themselves as decision-makers, voters and consumers. Because the men and women who guide these institutions are influenced by the public’s values, our acting generously impacts institutional commitments as well.

Our Commonality Goes Deeper Than Our Political Divides

In America today, it may seem like politics mirrors the debate between generous and selfish values, but it doesn’t.

While Common Cause’s objectives in conducting the Survey were to advance liberal-sounding social and environmental objectives, this Survey isn’t about the liberal versus conservative divide in either the UK or in America, even though one of the Survey’s compassionate values (“social justice”) may have political connotations here that it lacks in Britain. The polarity that the Survey identifies between compassionate and selfish values is different than the struggle between political left and political right.

The Survey’s results plumb something that goes deeper than the “political values” in those debates. That’s because “political values” both here and across the Atlantic are little more than buzzwords aimed at mobilizing one’s political base: red flags like “global warming,” “taxes,” “abortion” and “diversity” that have a high emotional charge but little if any ethical content on the political surface. When you plumb beneath the surface however, most conservatives as well as most liberals are committed to the health of the planet, to paying for our social institutions, to the quality of every person’s life, and to the inherent worth of people who are different from them. Three quarters of us!

Why not start with the values that unite us rather than the buzzwords that divide us?

Consistent with the Survey’s findings about compassionate and selfish values, most peoples’ convictions extend far deeper than will ever be apparent during bouts of political gamesmanship. Moreover, those on their “political sides” are often voting, marching and lobbying for the lesser of two evils (as in the last American election), which further obscures their true convictions. Even when the ethical imperatives that drive a block of voters are reasonably well-known, too little time and effort has gone into identifying the common ground that could unite them with those “on the other side” and break the current gridlock.

In this regard, the Survey provides a glimpse into the majority’s convictions when asked about two key values that are prime motivators for tackling our problems today. A broad-based preference for generous over selfish values provides at least some of the foundation for a collective way forward—and all of us would be seizing an opportunity by taking it. Given the Survey’s findings, the influence that your actions will have on others and on our institutions will likely be considerable and certainly more than you currently think if you’re as misguided as the Survey participants about the selfishness driving others.

Rebecca Solnit whose “Hope in the Dark” was a topic here last week provides a surprising postscript to this argument in her book. Above all, Solnit values grassroots solutions to problems over ideology-driven policies imposed from above. It’s a propensity that has made her flexible when it comes to finding common ground for her activism. In other words, she’s had to go deeper. As Solnit observes:

I’ve often wondered what alliances and affinities might arise without those badges of right and left. For example, the recent American militia movements were patriarchal, nostalgic, nationalistic, gun-happy and full of weird fantasies about the UN, but they had something in common with us: they prized the local and feared its erasure by the transnational. The guys drilling with guns might have been too weird to be our allies, but they were just the frothy foam on a big wave of alienation, suspicion and fear from people watching their livelihoods and their communities go down the tubes. What could have happened if we could have spoken directly to the people in that wave, if we could have found common ground, if we could have made our position neither right nor left but truly grassroots? What would have happened if we had given them an alternate version of how local power was being sapped, by whom, and what they might do about it? We need them, we need a broad base, we need a style that speaks to far more people than the left has lately been able to speak to and for.

The value that could have driven this unity was the protection of livelihoods and communities (a compassionate value) rather than sacrificing them on the altar of globalism and trade (an ultimately selfish one).

Solnit’s desire for environmentalists and ranchers in the American West to make common cause is similarly astute. Again, she attacks top-down ideological convictions that will never succeed because they always seem to miss the human costs at ground level.

Environmentalists had worked with a purist paradigm of untouched versus ravaged nature. Working with ranchers opened up a middle way [for her], one in which categories were porous, humans have a place in the landscape—in working landscapes and not just white-collar vacation landscapes—and activism isn’t necessarily oppositional.

This time, the common ground that Solnit saw was how environmentalists and ranchers both love and depend on the land, how each cherish different things about it, and how neither wants to harm it (another compassionate value) while the other side’s interest in the land is largely motivated by how much can be taken from it (a selfish one).

One day, the generous values we hold in common will help us to solve the problems that confront us. I’d argue that we should start acting on our generosity today.

Note: This post was adapted from my September 9, 2018 newsletter

Blockchain Goes To Work

August 26, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Technology can change the quality of your work for the better—but first you need to recognize it’s possibilities.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed that most people seem to glaze over when I start talking about blockchain, a web-based technology that’s already been demonstrating its potential. It’s not that people are gun-shy about technology. (15 years ago almost none of us were taking portable supercomputers everywhere that we went.) So maybe its because we haven’t needed to master blockchain’s learning curve—gentle though it might be. It’s like the CRISPR gene-splicing tool. We’ve heard that it’s groundbreaking, but have never had enough of a reason to understand why.

The case for understanding blockchain today is strong and getting stronger. It not only holds the potential to transform everything from the banking system (via digital currencies) to the pursuit of social justice (more below), but also the ways that we work everyday. In a future where more of our jobs will be automated or performed more cheaply elsewhere, spending 8 hours a day in an office, lab, classroom, clinic or factory will be the exception rather than the rule. Most of us won’t stop working, we’ll just work differently and, in all likelihood, blockchain technology will be one of the innovations that enable us to do so.

A blockchain is a web-based chain of connections, most often with no central monitor, regulator or editor. Its software applications enable every node in its web of connections to record data which can then be seen and reviewed by every other connection. It maintains its accuracy through this transparency. Everyone with access can see what every other connection has recorded in what amounts to a digital ledger.

Let’s assume that the blockchain involves the buying and selling of Mackintosh apples. Let’s also assume the apples are of equal freshness and quality and that transportation costs will be handled separately. If you’re interested in buying or selling Mackintosh apples, a blockchain digital ledger could allow you to see the prices and quantities in every other transaction on that ledger before you do your own buying or selling. Because this information is already available to you, there is no need for a “middleman” to access it, establish the trading rules or be entitled to a piece of the action. Once buyers or sellers have entered their transaction on the digital ledger, everyone can see it and no one else in the blockchain can change it.

Blockchain-based software can be launched by individuals, organizations or even governments. Software access can be limited to a closed network of participants or open to everyone. A blockchain is usually established to overcome the need for and cost of a “middleman” (like a bank) or some other impediment (like currency regulations, tariffs or burdensome bureaucracy). It promotes “the freer flow” of legal as well as illegal goods, services and information. Blockchain is already driving both modernization and globalization. Over the next several years, it will also have profound impacts on us as individuals.

A year ago, the MIT Technology Review published a two-minute video explanation of this technology called Blockchain Decoded. If you’re still puzzled, this short video can also help you to visualize it.

What Is Blockchain’s Transformative Power?

Before turning to its likely impacts on our work, it helps to understand why blockchain technology has moved to the forefront of many of our on-line interactions today. Christopher Mims, who writes on technology for the Wall Street Journal, gave three reasons for why blockchain is already transforming business models in a column that he wrote a few months back.

First, it’s genuinely well-suited to transactions that require trust and a permanent record [such as business contracts]. Second, blockchain typically requires the cooperation of many different parties [making it suitable to complex customer and supplier networks]. The third reason is [the] hype [that bitcoin has received.] The excitement around cryptocurrency gives blockchain the visibility to attract developers and encourage adaptation.

In other words, because of the fanfare around digital currencies like bitcoin, blockchain technology is rapidly developing its own “ecosystem” of applications in the marketplace.

Some of the lowest hanging fruit has been in the area of supply chain logistics. Mims reports that companies like retailer Walmart and shipping company Maersk are already using blockchain technology to track grocery items and the movement of shipping containers over transportation networks. Companies like Kroger, Nestle, Tyson Foods and Unilever are also using it to monitor the flow of consumer products. Every point in the supply chain logs into a dedicated blockchain “node” to provide source, condition and location information that makes it easier to estimate times of arrival or to identify where goods were damaged.

Mim’s also speaks to blockchain’s longer-term significance, noting “that the most seemingly mundane applications of blockchain could lead to the biggest and most concrete changes in all of our lives.” He continues:

It’s too early to say whether blockchain, as both a technology and a movement, has the power to overcome issues that thwarted generations of software engineers. The most justifiable skepticism is that blockchain is incremental rather than revolutionary. In some cases, it isn’t much more than a marketing term imposed on systems that hardly differ from existing databases….

But if it works, it has the potential to be a fundamental enabling technology, the way new standards for transmitting data across networks led to the internet. More concretely, it could someday underlie everything from how we vote, to who we connect with on line, to what we buy. (emphasis added)

Some Of The Spotlight on Blockchain Comes From Bitcoin

I watched an entertaining and informative documentary this week called The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a blockchain-based digital currency that can be used outside of the formal banking system. Here is a link to the documentary’s trailer and what an L.A Times reviewer said about it after its release in 2014:

Tracing the bitcoin to 2009, when a shadowy figure with the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto first floated the open source, peer-to-peer concept of “global decentralized money,” the documentary follows a community of tech geeks who were among the early adopters.They were soon joined by a parade of high-rolling speculators, libertarians and black market dealers who were all attracted to the notion of a currency that wasn’t tied to the institutional banking system or personal identity.

Inevitably the federal regulators caught up (one of the film’s subjects notes that historically, regulation evolves slower than innovation) and crackdowns and subpoenas followed. As a result, several of those featured bitcoin millionaires are later shown filing for bankruptcy or, in the case of Charlie Shrem, former chief executive of the early bitcoin exchange BitInstant, being arrested. (Last month he pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting the operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business.)

Despite subsequent damage inflicted by hackers and scammers, the bitcoin (currently hovering around $380 to $385) endures.

It’s worth noting that while a single bitcoin had no value in the marketplace a decade ago, the price for one last Friday (8/24/18) was $6,510–so bitcoin both endures and continues to prosper.

I recommend The Rise and Rise of Bitcoin because it’s a rollercoaster of a story and the sensation around the currency itself has driven interest in the blockchain that enables it. Bitcoin’s evolution is also about familiar themes on this page: entrepreneurship, navigating a “whitewater world” of rapid and confounding change in the workplace, and the risk/reward of leaving the security of what you know for the uncertain rewards that might lie over the next hill. This documentary throbs with that kind of adventure.

Blockchain Supports The Pursuit of Social Justice

Last fall, I talked here about the use of blockchain technology to simplify the recording of land titles. Enabling an activity that many of us take for granted is particularly important in developing countries where there can be significant bureaucratic and logistical hurdles to recording property deeds and transfers, particularly for people living outside of the largest cities. Without the ability to establish their ownership of land and of the improvements they have made to their land, poor people often find it impossible to escape from poverty by using “clear title” in their property to secure credit. A blockchain application established by Hernando de Soto and the Institute for Liberty and Democracy is dedicated to streamlining that process for whoever has online access in places like rural South America.

Other blockchain-based applications have recently been developed to store data from multiple, individual sources about atrocities that are being perpetrated in Syria by the Assad regime. For years, activists as well as average citizens have been attempting to document violence by taking photographs and videos as it’s happening with their cell-phones. Failing to record such violence in an accurate manner has consequences. For example, if the brutal chemical attacks against civilians in 2013 and 2017 can’t be documented reliably, it becomes easier for the regime to deny that they happened and for those running Assad’s war machine to escape accountablity. An executive at Truepic, a leading image authentication platform, wrote an article about local civic groups and international organizations like the Syrian American Medical Society that are using blockchain-based software programs to create a visual record of these atrocities that can easily be accessed and can’t be tampered with by anyone after the record has been uploaded.

Technological advances now make it possible to disseminate images and videos around the world in seconds. Journalists and observers can send authenticated, encrypted digital media over local cellular networks or high-speed internet connections. Device sensor data can verify precisely where a photo or video was taken, and the blockchain can ensure its integrity in perpetuity.

For readers whose non-profit work is dedicated to improving access and quality in education, health care, the environment, civic engagement—in fact, nearly anywhere involving diverse client connections—blockchain technology may open up new ways of tackling the problems you’re facing and improving the communities that you serve.

Blockchain Can Pay You For New Increments Of Your Work

All of the jobs that we do include providing products and services that are valuable to others but are difficult to put a price on and impossible to get paid for. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get paid for time and talent that we’re currently giving away for free?

For example I’m reminded of Steemit, a social network profiled here last October.

One of my regular complaints is that most of us are providing social media platforms with our time (the hours we spend liking, commenting, reading, and re-tweeting), our content (photos, videos, tweets, posts, articles and newsletters like this one) and our personal information (about what we watch and buy, about our friends, where we are, what we look like)—FREE OF CHARGE for the privilege of using Facebook or Twitter. We’re providing similar reams of free information about our interests and buying habits by using Google and Amazon.

There’s no question that the information we’re providing has value to these companies and that they’re making billions of dollars by selling our data to advertisers and others who are tracking our behavior. There is also no available way for us to get paid for providing these companies with our time and information.

Steemit’s social network is based on a different business model. It uses its own blockchain-based exchange to pay its users with a digital currency called Steem that can be redeemed in hard currency for your time, content and influence. In other words, you are compensated for small as well as large amounts of engagement and output. For its part, Steemit doesn’t monetize its platform with advertisements. Instead, its revenues come from users investing to promote their content and “earn more” from it. Over time, the digital currency that’s owned by the company also appreciates in value.

I learned about Steemit from a Wired article written by Andrew McMillan and wrote the following at the time:

Those who are active on the [Steemit] network are funding jobs like taking pictures for travel blogs as they wander around the world and their gigs as free-lance writers…

“The more people who like your post, the more you like other people’s posts, the quicker you spot a post that later becomes popular, that is, the more that you contribute to “the human hivemind” on Steemit, the more “money” you can make. McMillen estimates that at least one early-and-often user has accumulated more than a million dollars worth of Steem. In other words, people already have paying jobs on Steemit’s social network. And ‘Steem is the first cryptocurrency that attempts to accurately and transparently reward…[the] individuals who make subjective contributions to its community.’

As Steemit demonstrates, blockchain-based exchanges have already been built that pay individuals for their formerly uncompensated time and effort.

You might recall another October newsletter profiling Balaji Srinivasan, who predicted that blockchain-based digital currency exchanges will change how everyone does business while facilitating payment for every kind of product/service that has value to somebody else and is in limited supply. For him, blockchain is:

a programmable way to value every scarce resource (including, say, your availability to take a 5 minute survey that is sent to you by a marketer), and pay you for that scarce resource (namely, the 5 minutes that you would never have made available if you weren’t being paid for it). Time. Talent. 5-minute tasks. Listening to a lonely stranger [who’s willing to pay for your company]….

Think of it. Everything of value that is in limited supply today can become a commodity for sale in countless jobs–both small and large–because programmers have created an on-line exchange …that can handle each sale and get you paid for it in digital currency without the need for either banks or money as we know it. Compensation simply goes into your digital account.

Moreover, the marketplace could be global. Everyone in the world who has access to the digital ledger in a particular blockchain application would be able to buy and sell their work product. Such a marketplace would be bigger than Amazon’s without the need (or costs) of a company middle-man.

This work-to-benefit exchange, as I’ll call it, hasn’t been built yet, let alone populated by enough “buyers” and “sellers of work” to make the exchange itself and its valuation mechanisms viable, but rest assured, explorers like Balaji Srinivasan are already working through the details.

As 9-5 jobs increasingly disappear, there will be new ways to work and get paid for it. You will still need your talent, skill and vision, marketing, stamina and hustle, but in our lifetimes it will likely be possible “to make a living” in a marketplace where you (along with billions of others) each have a node in a global blockchain. Some people will still work in small and large groups and companies won’t disappear, but some of the void that has been left when traditional workplaces disappear will almost certainly be filled by these kinds of on-line, work-to-benefit exchanges.

Parting Thoughts

Blockchain is a story that won’t be going away, and I’ll continue to cover it as the technology evolves to support the good work that we’re trying to do.

Over the past several months there has been an animated discussion about artificial intelliigence (AI) technologies (that will replace us in the workplace) and intelligence augmentation (IA) technologies (that will make us more productive). Blockchain is an IA technology. It is expanding rather than limiting the ways that we can make a living.

And that’s a cause for hope.

Note: This post was adapted from my August 26, 2018 newsletter.

Ready To Leverage Rapid Social Change

August 12, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Because of innovations in technology, the near-instant availability of vast stores of knowledge and a random web of expanding connections, we’re in a period of rapid social change today.

With rapid change comes an opportunity to re-think, well, almost everything we believe has been etched in stone. It’s a chance to return to fundamentals, to the underlying value-propositions that drive our most basic decision making.

– Does society have to be organized this way?

– Does every channel of government have to aim at maximizing some peoples’ wealth?

– Is our society’s aim of producing more stuff at cheaper prices (and the instant gratification that it brings to us as consumers) more valuable than having better jobs and additional leisure time?

– Should the price of human consumption today be the destruction of the natural world?

We might be able to allocate our social resources differently if we got back to basics. We might make different trade-offs. Periods (like this) of rapid change come with the realization that “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

At times like this, there are opportunities to harness key drivers of change so that when you come out the other end, the world is better off. For this, it helps to have a vision of the future that you want to live in. In prior newsletters, John Seely Brown and Jed Purdy were “thinking out loud” about their visions for that better future and, as a practical matter, how we can get there. Deeply humane ideas like theirs can help us to maximize the advantages of change in the “good work” that we’re trying to do, both in our paying jobs and outside of them.

This week the news story is about how to learn productive lessons from times of rapid social change in the past. Over the last few years, some forward thinkers in the UK have been creating educational materials for anyone who is interested in seizing the opportunities of a world in flux to produce a better tomorrow. Theirs are ideas for the classroom, the workplace, the community—wherever imagination has real problems to solve in a “white water world.”

History Gives Us Hope

One reason to believe that tangible, positive change is possible today is because it’s been possible during similar times in the past.

A group of scholars who are clustered around the University of Sussex have been presenting some of those history lessons along with their arguments for “seizing the days” that we’re in. The image that they use in their educational materials is the butterfly because it represents a point in the arc of change between chrysalis and taking flight. As teachers, they’re saying something about the potential of these times, but they’re also referring to us as individuals and the opportunities we have to “take wing” instead of drifting in complacency or thinking that whatever we do won’t matter.

The Sussex scholars know that their first task as teachers is to get their students to engage. As such they remind us that during other times of rapid social change, people just like us achieved real progress. Because history shows that humanity can learn to do things differently, adapting on the fly, we can do the same while bringing others along.

The Sussex scholars also have the real (as opposed to theoretical) world clearly in view. Their aim is to engage us in what they call “living exercises” to tackle The Problem as they see it today.

We are currently locked in to a high-carbon global economy by multiple factors. They include energy-intensive infrastructure, high-consumption culture, unequal distribution of political power within and between states, and an economic system dominated by finance that fails the poorest, takes infinite growth for granted, and resists reform, however broken it becomes.

This is the challenge they designed their teaching for, but the approach they take would likely succeed if you defined The Problem that we face today differently. That’s because:

‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change to the current economic system.’ And yet, as it also says in Proverbs (29:18) ‘Where there is no vision, the people perish.’ Visualising what can be done, inclusively and progressively, to bring about a sustainable society is therefore our challenge …Only in this way might we overcome the ironic maxim of medieval historian Vasily Klyuchevsky, that: “History teaches us nothing but just punishes us for not learning its lessons.’

History Provides Working Models

Promotional image for the booklet “How Did We Do That?”

The following historical examples are cited in a booklet the Sussex scholars compiled in 2016 and you can download here.

The examples that they discuss all involve (1) responses to a radical change in circumstances that would/could not have been possible in a less disruptive time, (2) rapid adaptation by the public, and (3) longer-term improvements thereafter, some expected and some surprising. Despite the length of the following quotes, I thought these authors needed to teach their history lessons in their own words.

IN THE WAKE OF RECENT ECONOMIC RECESSIONS, WORK WEEK & OTHER JOB-RELATED CHANGES

“Responding to a recession in the early 1990s, the public sector in the Netherlands began offering a four-day week to staff to save money. Since then it has spread and become common employment practice, with the option offered to workers in all sectors of the economy. As a result, job-sharing has become the norm in the health and education sectors. It is common to have part-time surgeons, engineers and bankers making the much hyped work-life balance in modern industrial economies a practical reality. One in three men either work part time or compress their hours, working five days in four to enjoy a three- day weekend. Three quarters of women work part time. The popularity of the different pattern is such that 96 percent of part time workers do not want to work longer hours.

“It’s not just liberal Northern Europe that’s seen the benefits of shorter working weeks. In the United States, in the midst of the financial crisis in 2008 – faced with recession, rapidly rising energy prices, growing lines at food banks, rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures – instead of simply bringing a knife to public spending and pushing austerity measures, Jon Hunstman, Utah’s Republican Governor, surprised people with an experiment to save money. At only a month’s notice, 18,000 of the state’s 25,000 workforce were put on a four-day week and around 900 public buildings closed on Fridays. The impact of the scheme was studied. Eight out of ten employees liked it and wanted it to continue. Nearly two thirds said it made them more productive, and many said it reduced conflict both at home and at work. Workplaces across the state reported higher staff morale and lower absenteeism. There were other surprises. One in three among the public thought the new arrangements actually improved access to services. It wasn’t the main objective, but at a stroke the four-day week also reduced carbon emissions by 14 percent, a huge annual, climate-friendly saving.”

INSTEAD OF PRESERVING ITS BANKS, A COUNTRY RE-INVENTS ITSELF

“Iceland was at the heart of financial crisis in late 2008 and nearly destroyed by it. It built its economy around speculative finance but, after the meltdown, a ‘pots and pans’ revolution led to a process to draft a new citizen-drafted constitution, engaging half the electorate. Rather than making the public pay for the crisis, as the Nobel economist Paul Krugman points out, the country, ‘let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net’ and instead of placating financial markets, ‘imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to manoeuvre.’The constitutional exercise proposed a new approach to the ownership of natural resources for public good. Iceland now gets all its electricity and heat from renewable sources.

“The crowd-sourced constitution ultimately fell foul of legal technicalities and the Supreme Court, but that didn’t stop the new mood creating lasting conditions for change and the desire for new economic approaches. Where other countries largely let banks off the hook, in 2015 Iceland’s Supreme Court upheld convictions against bankers at the heart of the crisis. Finance is now so sensitive that when the Prime Minister was caught up in revelations from the release of the so-called Panama Papers, he was forced from office.”

WE COULD ALSO HAVE INVESTED IN A DIFFERENT FUTURE DURING THE GREAT RECESSION

“The notion that you can’t ‘buck the markets’ was turned on its head by the 2007–2008 crisis when financial markets realised they couldn’t survive without a massive public bailout and long-term support…The novelist and observer of modern banking, John Lanchester, made this observation in his book about the financial crisis, Whoops!: ‘The amount of state intervention (in the banking system) in the US and UK at this moment is at a level comparable to that of wartime. We have in effect had to declare war to get us out of the hole created by our economic system.’

“Lanchester was referring to the amount of money created by central banks and pumped into the financial system. It was used to recapitalise the banks after the financial crisis had destroyed money and the banks’ balance sheets. The method was given the technical term ‘quantitative easing’, but it was in effect printing money. In the UK the sum reached £375 billion…To put that figure into context, it is about double the UK’s combined health and education budget in 2017. In the United States between 2008 and 2015 a breathtaking sum of $3.7 trillion was mobilised. Meanwhile, across the European Union, the European Central Bank has been injecting €80 billion per month to stimulate the economy, a figure which only fell in 2017 to €60 billion….

“There was…a missed opportunity [here]… The alternative was highlighted by a report called the Green New Deal, published in 2008, which estimated that the annual spending needed in the UK to set the country on a path to low carbon transition was around £50 billion.That was not simply a ‘cost’ as it would have an economic multiplier effect, generate economic activity, creating jobs and tax revenues. It’s a sum coincidentally similar, in proportion to national income, to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programme in the United States.”

In other words, the £50 billion investment in “a low carbon transition” should be contrasted with £375 billion invested in the U.K.’s banking industry. Moreover, given the “wartime level” of social investment by the UK, the US and Europe a few years ago, stabilizing the financial system and a low carbon transition did not have to be mutually exclusive.

What else could America have invested in with portions of the $3.7 trillion that was mobilized to bail out this country’s banks? A 4-day workweek for every working age American? Universal health care? Whatever the trade-offs, when they are “thought through” beforehand, they can be considered and even implemented during times of rapid change when their advocates (and supporters) insist upon having that debate. In other words, we can leverage the lessons of history if we’ve learned them beforehand and strike while the iron is hot.

The radical circumstances that leaders and countries responded to above were all deep and unexpected economic events. It’s only fair to ask: how can we leverage continuous change (involving technology, the unprecedented availability of knowledge, and a world of random interconnection) to implement our visions for a better future? In this booklet at least, the Sussex scholars don’t say. But it would surely include leveraging the changing states of mind of citizens in democratic societies. They might include:

–alarm over the privacy of information—with the possible result that personal information is recognized as “personal property,” including the protections and value that come with private ownership;

–fear of massive forrest fires burning homes and communities—with its consequences for changes to climate-related policy; and

–revulsion over another mass shooting—with new priorities impacting the availability of guns and their ownership. In this regard, here is a video that effectively uses humor to describe Australia’s movement towards greater gun control after public revulsion following a mass-shooting incident.

A shift in the popular mood can combine with similarly disruptive social forces to precipitate change when enough people are envisioning and debating the better future that they want after the change.

Teachers Showing the Way

The Sussex scholars are motivated by values (like fairness and the pursuit of intangible “goods”), preferences (like collaboration) and insights (like seeing opportunity in new limitations and during times of crisis). They end their booklet with 12 “observations” that function like recommendations. Here are four of them, explained in light of The Problem as they see it:

– Fairness matters: Demonstrable equity matters for the public acceptability of rapid change. This is especially true if and where there is any perceived sacrifice to be made for the greater good.

– Working together works and creates new possibilities: The experience of acting collectively to solve common challenges itself creates self-reinforcing possibilities for further transformative action, often unanticipated.

– Accepting boundaries triggers innovation: Setting new parameters around consumption – such as introducing safe limits on the burning of fossil fuels – can unleash innovation and reveal great, nascent adaptive capacity. Businesses, societies and whole economies adapt to new ‘rules of the game’ remarkably quickly.

– Value experiences, not ‘stuff’: Material consumption of ‘stuff’ in rich industrialised countries can be substituted by spending on experiential activities that benefit well-being.

Even if you define The Problem that needs solving differently than they do, these 4 basic “observations” can serve anyone who wants to be an agent of change.

The people who are behind the booklet are principals at the STEPS Centre and the New Weather Institute. STEPS stands for “Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability.” The Centre describes itself as “an interdisciplinary global research and policy engagement hub” at the University of Sussex. The New Weather Initiative describes itself as “a co-op and think tank” that was formed:

to accelerate the rapid transition to a fair economy that thrives within planetary boundaries. We find, design and advocate ways of working and living that are more humane, reasonable and effective.

Our associates work through projects involving debate, thinking, trend-spotting, community, arts and culture. This means they are:

– organizing debates and seminars on how to think and do things differently to make rapid transition possible;

– publishing books and pamphlets about a future that works to make it more imaginable and achievable;

– talking to local government about using scarce resources more democratically and creatively for fair and planet-friendly economic transition;

– learning the lessons of history and applying them for successful, contemporary rapid economic and cultural change;

– bringing attention to what works, and how and where in the world a more fair and ecological economy is already growing;

– working with communities to discover what creates resilience, and about ‘the sort of environment, colours and patterns that give them identity’

– talking to businesses and services about re-imagining the human efficiency of involving employees and users;

– bringing together organizations and people with experience of doing things more effectively; and

– helping organizations re-discover the lost arts of using the judgment, honesty and loyalty of staff and customers.

While these organizations might inspire you, they might also be a resource in your own work given their desire to:

enlarge the conversation about rapid transition, and ensure that its best insights are brought directly to bear on how we live and make decisions – from the home, to local life, the workplace, to governments and international institutions.

If readers are aware of organizations that define The Problem differently than the Sussex scholars do here (or Purdy did last week)—namely, from an ecological perspective—while also providing a competing vision of the better future that they want to inhabit, I hope that you’ll drop me a line so that I can consider their work for an upcoming newsletter.

A Living Exercise

A couple of final observations.

The men and women I’ve called the Sussex scholars are noteworthy because, as they describe it, they are offering “a living exercise” in their rapid-change booklet and elsewhere. In other words, they want an engaged public to “live” their lessons with them as they struggle to leave a positive imprint on the future. I hope you’ll follow their work, as I do.

Unfortunately the teaching of history (like the rest of the humanities) is in decline. But it’s still possible to imagine a history course on incidents in the past where “change provided opportunity,” including examples like those above, others included in their booklet, and many other social transitions. A course like this would connect stories from history with the stories that kids (as well as the rest of us) want to write into our futures. How exciting would that be!

Because the best learning always gives us the chance to take the boldest flights we can imagine.

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This post derives from my newsletter this week. If you enjoyed it, I hope you’ll subscribe along with recommending it to friends. To receive these posts weekly, you can follow the link to your right.

See you next week.

Good Work Uses Innovation to Drive Change

July 29, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Welcome to the “white-water world”—a world that is rapidly changing, hyper-connected and radically contingent on forces beyond our control.

The social environment where we live and work today:

– makes a fool out of the concept of mastery in all areas except our ability–or inability–to navigate these turbulent waters successfully (the so-called “caring” professions may be the only exception);

– requires that we work in more playful and less pre-determined ways in an effort to to keep up with the pace of change and harness it for a good purpose;

– demands workplaces where the process of learning allows the tinkerer in all of us “to feel safe” from getting it wrong until we begin to get it right;

– calls on us to treat technology as a toolbox for serving human needs as opposed to the needs of states and corporations alone; and finally,

– this world requires us to set aside time for reflection “outside of the flux” so that we can consider the right and wrong of where we’re headed, commit to what we value, and return to declare those values in the rough and tumble of our work tomorrow.

You’ve heard each of these arguments here before. Today, they get updated and expanded in a commencement address that was given last month by John Seely Brown. He was speaking to graduate students receiving degrees that they hope will enable them to drive public policy through innovation. But his comments apply with equal force to every kind of change–small changes as well as big ones–that we’re pursuing in our work today.

When you reach the end, I hope you’ll let me know how Brown’s approach to work relates to the many jobs that are still ahead of you.

Good Work Uses Innovation to Drive Change

John Seely Brown is 78 now. It seems that he’s never stopped trying to make sense out of the impacts that technology has on our world or how we can use these extraordinary tools to make the kind of difference we want to make.

Brown is currently independent co-chairman of the Center for the Edge, an incubator of ideas that’s associated with the global consulting firm Deloitte. In a previous life, he was the chief scientist at Xerox and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (or PARC). Brown speaks, writes and teaches to provoke people to ask the right questions. He stimulates our curiosity by defining the world in simple, practical terms that are easy to understand but more difficult to confront. As a result, he also wants to share his excitement and optimism so that our own questioning yields solutions that make the most out of these challenges and opportunities.

He begins his commencement address with quotes from two books that frame the challenge as he sees it.

KNOWLEDGE IS TOO BIG TO KNOW

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We’d nail down the facts and move on. We even had canons . . . But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There’s more knowledge than ever, but it’s different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything. (from “Too Big To Know” by David Weinberger)

A WEB OF CONNECTIONS CHANGES EVERYTHING

The seventh sense is the ability to look at any object and see (or imagine) the way in which it is changed by connection–whether you are commanding an army, running a Fortune 500 company, planning a great work of art, or thinking about your child’s education. (from “The Seventh Sense” by Joshua Cooper Remo)

These realities about knowledge and connection impact not only how we think (research, practice, and create) but also how we feel (love, hate, trust and fear). Brown analogizes the challenge to navigating “a white water world” that requires particular kinds of virtuosity. That virtuosity includes:

– reading the currents and disturbances around you;

– interpreting the flows for what they reveal about what lies beneath the surface; and

– leveraging the currents, disturbances and flows for amplified action.

In short, you need to gain the experience, reflexes and opportunism of a white-water rafter to make the most out of your work today.

Becoming Entrepreneurial Learners

To confront the world like a white-water rafter, Brown argues—in a kind of call to arms—that each graduate (and by implication, each one of us too) needs to be a person whose work:

Is always questing, connecting, probing.

Is deeply curious and listening to others.

Is always learning with and from others.

Is reading context as much as reading content.

Is continuously learning from interacting with the world, almost as if in conversation with the world.

And finally, is willing to reflect on performance, alone and with the help of others.

No one is on this journey alone or only accompanied by the limited number of co-workers she sees everyday.

Years before giving this commencement address, Brown used the “one room schoolhouse” in early American education as the springboard for a talk he gave about the type of learning environment we need to meet this “call to arms.” In what he dubbed the One Room Global Schoolhouse, he applied ideas about education from John Dewey and Maria Montessori to the network age. This kind of learning has new characteristics along with some traditional ones.

Learning’s aim both then and now “is making things as well as contexts,” because important information comes from both of them. It is not simply the result (the gadget, service or competence with spelling) that you end up with but also how you got there. He cites blogging as an example, where the blog post is the product but its dissemination creates the context for a conversation with readers. Similarly, in a one-room schoolhouse, a student may achieve his goal but only does so because everyone else who’s with him in the room has helped him. (I’ve been taking this to heart by adapting each week’s newsletter into a blog post so that you can share your comments each week with one another instead of just with me if you want to.)

On the other hand, learning in a localized space that’s open to global connections and boundless knowledge means that it’s better to “play with something until it just falls into place.” It’s not merely the problem you’re trying to solve or the change you’re trying to make but also creating an environment where discovery becomes possible given the volume of inputs and information. This kind of work isn’t arm’s length, but immersive. (I think of finger-painting instead of using a brush.) It allows you to put seemingly unrelated ideas, components or strategies together because it’s fun to do so and–almost incidentally–gives rise to possibilities that you simply didn’t see before. In Global Schoolhouses, “tinkering is catalytic.”

Because “time is money” in the working world, one of the challenges is for leaders, managers, coordinators, and teachers to provide “a space of safety and permission” where you can make playful mistakes until you get it right. Because knowledge is so vast and our connections to others so extensive, linear and circumscribed forms of learning simply can’t harness the tools at our disposal to make the world a better place.

Some of the learning we need must be (for lack of a better word) intergenerational too. Brown is inspired by the one room schoolhouse where the younger kids and the older kids teach one another and where the teacher acts as coach, coordinator and mentor once she’s set the table. In today’s workplace, Brown’s vision gets us imagining less hierarchical orgnizations, workers plotting the directions they’ll follow instead of following a manager’s directions, and constantly seeking input from all of the work’s stakeholders, including owners, suppliers, customers and members of the community where the work is being done. The conversation needs to be between the youngest and the oldest too. For the magic to happen in the learning space where you work, that space should be as open as possible to the knowledge and connections that are outside of it.

In his commencement address, Brown refers to Sherlock Holmes when describing the kind of reasoning that can be developed in learning collaborations like this.

[W]here Holmes breaks new ground is insisting that the facts are never really all there and so, one must engage in abductive reasoning as well. One must ask not only what do I see but what am I not seeing and why? Abduction requires imagination! Not the ‘creative arts’ kind but the kind associated with empathy. What questions would one ask if they imagined themselves in the shoes, or situation of another.

Here’s a video from Brown’s talk on the “Global One Room Schoolhouse.” It is a graphic presentation that covers many of the points above. While I found the word streams snaking across the screen more distracting than illuminating, it is well worth the 10 minutes it will take for you to listen to it.

There’s Cause for White-Water Optimism

We’re worrying about our work for lots of reasons today. Recent news reports have included these troubling stories:

– the gains in gross national product (or wealth) that were reported this week are not being shared with most American workers, which means the costs and benefits of work are increasingly skewed in favor of the few over the many;

– entire categories of work—particularly in mid-level and lower paying jobs—will be eliminated by technologies like advanced robotics and artificial intelligence over the next decade; and

– the many ways that we’re failing to consider the human impacts of technologies because of the blinding pace of innovation and the rush to monetize new products before we understand the consequences around their use—stories about cell phone and social media addictions, for example.

Brown’s attempt to produce more white-water rafters who can address these kinds of challenges is part of the solution he proposes. Another part is to balance our legitimate concerns about the changes we’re experiencing with optimism and excitement about the possibilities as he sees them.

Brown closes his commencement address with a story about the exciting possibiities of new technology tools. It’s about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can become Intelligence Augmentation (or IA). “[I]f we can get this right, he says, ” this could lead to a kind of man/machine virtuosity that actually enhances our humanness rather than the more dystopian view of robots replacing most of us.”

Brown witnessed this shift to “virtuosity” during the now legendary contest that pitted the greatest Go player in the world against AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program. (Maybe the world’s most complex game, Go has been played in East Asia for more than 2500 years.)

There is a documentary about AlphaGo (trailer here) that I watched last night and that I agree with Brown is “stunning.” It follows at close range the team that developed the AIphaGo program, the first games the program played and lost, and the final match where AlphaGo beat the world champion in 4 out of 5 games. What Brown found most compelling (and shared with his graduates) were the testimonials and comments at the end.

Those who play the game regularly, like Brown apparently does, found the gameplay they witnessed to be “intuitive and surprising,” even “creative.” Passionate players who watched the human/machine interaction throughout felt it expanded the possibilities and parameters of the game, “a different sense of the internal beauty of the game.” For the world champion himself, it was striking how much it improved his Go play after the epic match. Brown was so excited by these reports that he felt the 21^stCentury actually began in 2016 when the championship matches took place. In his mind, it marked the date when humans and machines began to “learn with and from each other.”

Of course, Brown’s AlphaGo story is also about the entrepreneurial learning that produced not only an awe-inspiring product but also a context where literally millions had input in the lessons that were being learned along the way.

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The past year’s worth of newsletter stories have considered many of the observations that Brown makes above. If you’re interested, there are links to all published newsletters on the Subscribe Page. Here’s a partial list of topics that relate to today’s discussion:

– how technology influences the future of our work (9/13/17-why “small” inventions like barbed wire, modern paper and the sensors in our phones can be more influential than “big” ones like the smart phone itself; 10/1/17-how blockchain could monetize every job, big and small, where you have something of value that others want);

– how openness to “the new and unexplored” is key to survival in work and in life (8/20/17–working groups outside your discipline are better at “scaling up” learning in rapidly changing industries; 6/24/18–a genetic marker for extreme explorers has been found among the first settlers of the Western Hemisphere); and

– the value of playful tinkering (7/2/17 -if you really want to learn, focusing less may allow you to see more); 8/27/17–how curiosity without formal preparation can win you a Nobel Prize in physics; and 10/17/17–the one skill you’ll need in the future according to the World Economic Forum is the ability to play creatively).

What John Seely Brown does in his June commencement address is to link these ideas (and others) into a narrative that’s filled with his own excitement and optimism. In my experience, the commencement address season is a particularly good time to find his kind of inspiration.

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