Positive-Sum Leadership

by Kent Aitken

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I love this:

That's the concept art for a hypothetical public transit system described in a blog post by Elon Musk, Chairman of Tesla Motors.

From http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/hyperloop:

The Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart. Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper. With a high enough altitude and the right geometry, the sonic boom noise on the ground would be no louder than current airliners, so that isn’t a showstopper. Also, a quiet supersonic plane immediately solves every long distance city pair without the need for a vast new worldwide infrastructure.

Musk, described in one Wikipedia article as a "Serial Entrepreneur", essentially invented a mode of transport in his head, explored the technological assumptions, and explained how to do it. Then, he dropped the mic and left it for someone else, saying that he was too busy.

The idea of a Hyperloop is awesome on its own. But it's far more interesting for the philosophy behind the fact that he wrote about it, but didn't do it:

• Even if you're good at what you do, don't run with every good idea. There may be others better positioned to do it, or there may be more important goals for you to pursue.

• It's worth sharing your ideas. Take the time because it's low-risk and high-reward, even if that reward doesn't necessarily accrue to you. Do it just in case something amazing happens.

• In a market economy world that many see as a zero-sum game - in which people win only when others lose - you can be the one that takes the first step, the leader that makes a small sacrifice to try to redefine the world as win-win. As a positive-sum game, in which we can make something greater than the sum of our parts.

Be deliberate about your goals, err on oversharing, and look for the win-win. And you’ll lose nothing in the long run.

Inverting Thoughts on Thinking

by Nick Charney

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Last week I quickly threw down a video from Geoff Mulgan at Nesta in the hopes that you'd watch it (See: Thoughts on Thinking).  At the time I had a bunch of notes sketched out on a pad of paper (yes I still use those!) but didn't have time to pull them together into something coherent.

This week I wanted to share what I took away from the video because, as I indicated previously, there are some great nuggets of information in there. Mulgan divides up policy process into three parts:

1) Creating Mutation

Mulgan starts his presentation by arguing that novelty is the purview of iconoclasts and radicals; it's an explanation that conjures up support for the innovator as trickster hypothesis (See: Book Review: Trickster Makes This World, Innovation is Tricky, Literally and Finding Innovation) given that, tricksters seem well positioned to:

• Reassert old ideas and infuse them with new ones 
• Apply a different lens altogether (e.g. carbon)
• Ask new types of questions (e.g. can it be a market?)

Whereas, as Mulgan argues, conformist institutions aren't a good source of creative mutation given that new ideas, by their very nature, have no evidence to support them.


2) Selection Principles

Mulgan goes on to outline a number of selection principles that determine which ideas tend to make the cut and which ones don't. It's likely not a coincidence that he starts his exploration by naming political convenience and ends it with evidence and reasoning. While I'm not trying to situate the two on a dichotomous spectrum I did get the sense that his ordering is purposeful and informed by his experience.

In an ideal world there is obviously at least some synergy between these and the other factors — coherence, 'appealingness', and the failure of alternatives — that Mulgan names. He goes on to explain that one of the core challenges of the selection phase is the tendency to promote a particular narrative structure (that which fits the mould, sustaining, do more with less innovation) rather than on what evidence supports (that which breaks the mould, disruptive, do different with different innovation).


3) Replication  and Spread

According to Mulgan, policy ideas that make it through the selection process require translation by intermediary bodies to enter into the policy bloodstream and that alternative approaches more easily replicate in the wake of failure created by an excess of orthodoxy. In other words, a history of failure creates a climate more ripe for disruptive innovation rather than one that has even a modest history of successful incremental innovation.

What if we reversed their order?

While Mulgan presents the above as sequential stages (e.g. moving from creative mutation, to selection principals, to replication), I wonder what would happen if we simply reversed their order? If we stand Mulgan's explanation on its head, the path to policy innovation seems to be:

1. Look for a policy area with a deep history of failure (because the ground is fertile) 
2. Identify intermediaries with a vested interest in the solution (because they will help you)
3. Identify solutions that meet selection principals (because decision makers will support it)
4. Apply a new lens that creates the mutation (because it leads to innovation)

Flipping the process — putting support first and ideation last — looks like a faster track for policy ideas and I'm interested in hearing if anyone has any tangible examples that I can learn from that have put this type of approach into practice.



Note: I've decided to re-embed the video below in case you missed it.

Trust in the Age of Information

by Kent Aitken

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Last week Bill Eggers from Deloitte was in Ottawa, explaining his view of The Solution Revolution: the idea that for-profit businesses and social enterprises will solve societal needs before government can, in creative, interesting ways. The question post-presentation was "How can government help this ecosystem of solutions?" One of the themes we hit on in response was that supporting such counter-intuitive approaches is a hard road. The Triple Bottom Line There's a common case study in business literature - whether it's about innovation or marketing - about Gilette's "safety razor." This is the standard now: you buy a handle once, and expensive disposable blades frequently. But when introduced, it was a disruptive innovation, undermining barbershops' monopoly on shaving. From the marketing standpoint, it's a example of knowing what your customers want. As it turned out, they didn't want a steady hand with a straight-razor in a nice barbershop, they actually just wanted a clean-shaven face. Or as Harvard's Ted Levitt put it: "No one ever buys a shovel. What they're buying is a hole." But for governments, this level of disruption and slight counter-intuition doesn't go far enough. Government isn't looking for a shovel or a hole. It's more like government wants a vibrant environment in which kids can grow up. The hole is just for a post, which supports a volleyball net, which isn't even really for volleyball at all - in the long run, it's actually just an interaction device for the neighbouring kids, to build friendships and community. So the savvy marketer, when approached by someone looking to buy a shovel, might then say "Are you sure you don't want a soccer league, instead?" With so many stakeholders, this actually is the level of complexity governments are experiencing in their outcomes, whether or not they actively pursue it. Or even know it. It's the idea of the Triple Bottom Line, taken to extremes. Former Clerk of the Privy Council Jocelyn Bourgon provides case studies from this future: what she describes as a New Synthesis of Public Administration. There is a fascinating common thread running through each case study. Not only do the programs she describes solve the short-term problem at hand, they actually work to obsoletize the government's involvement in that solution in the long run by building communities around the problem. That would be part of my True Bottom Line for Government. (Another would be organizational learning being a core component of any approach to solving problems. For another day.) The Sound Bite World The problem is that this level of nuance is really - and understandably - hard to explain to taxpayers. An example: a few months ago a House Committee in the US released a report detailing $50M in spending on conferences for the IRS between 2010 and 2012. Outrage, predictably, ensued. It seems extravagant until you take the step of dividing that figure by the three-year horizon and by the organization's 106,000 employees. All of a sudden they're spending about $157 per person per year on conferences. Which seems borderline paltry, especially if you compare that to what they spend on each of those employees. To boot, the longer and more accurate story about conferences is that their key benefit is the interaction and relationship building between colleagues and industry partners, far in excess of the value of simply having ideas changing hands and minds. Or for an analogous example, as Clay Shirky put it yesterday at the Code for America Summit: "The product of a hackathon isn't running code. It's the social capital people created among the people in the room." Or what about building civic awareness by gamifying recycling with rewards, which Eggers explained has raised recycling rates from 30% to 90% in some U.S. neighbourhoods? These are harder ideas to sell. Why hasn't the information age changed this? Trust in the Age of Information Even fifty years ago, the machinery of government would have been largely opaque to many Canadians. But as the availability of information has increased, Canadians' trust in government has not. Today, I would posit, we're at an awkward point in this evolution where we have information without understanding; availability without transparency; content without context*. But this situation may be a side-effect of The Connected World: that of radio, television, photojournalism, and globalization, which is giving way to a new one. Which dotted line path will it be, as even more information becomes available? What happens to the trend in public trust in The Hyperconnected World? As the age of Open Government unfolds? Are we going to see an acceleration, or a slowing and reversing? I don't know, and I think much hinges on it. But if government lacks the relationships, willpower, and evidence to pursue messy, complex outcomes - to return to my original analogy, communities, rather than holes - The Hyperconnected World will be characterized by a lot of getting the wrong things done, with stellar efficiency. * Another link to come out of the Code for America Summit yesterday: Transparency is Not Enough, by Danah Boyd. Suddenly I feel bad for having partially rehashed a three-year old argument (I wrote this over the weekend (and to be fair, this is actually somewhat of a synthesis of a handful of themes I've already gotten in to)), but considering that we still haven't moved past weak transparency yet, I'm okay with it.

Thoughts on Thinking

by Nick Charney

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It's been a busy week and I've got a lot of different thoughts in the blender but since none of those thoughts are ready for prime time right now I figured I'd share this video from Nesta entitled "How Think Tanks Think".

It's 45 minutes of your day well spent. Geoff Mulgan goes over the process and conditions of ideas generation (novelty and mutation), outlines selection principals and addresses how these ideas replicate and spread; and he does so with a respectable bias towards action and a rich history of experience. I found his closing remarks about the wake of excess orthodoxy creating room for innovation particularly poignant yet deeply troubling.

Take Everyone's Phone Away for a Day and See What Happens

by Nick Charney

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Sometimes I realize that I've let technology creep far too deeply into my life. Somewhere along the way my smartphone became intrusive; I fell prey to the moral hazard of the early adopters.

A tiny little screen took over my life.

But when I realized that I was serving it instead of it serving me, I knew something had to change.

The small changes are easy.

My phone is now completely silent from 10PM at night until 8AM in the morning; giving me 10 hours of uninterrupted time to use as I see fit.

The result? My phone is no longer the last thing I touch at night before bed, nor is it the first thing I touch in the morning.

I don't keep it on me over the weekends; rather it tends to sit on a shelf, or on top of the fridge. It's less of a distraction when I'm playing with my kids or speaking with my wife.

I'm consciously limiting its use in social settings, because over time I've come to understand that nothing is more important at any given moment than the person in front of you.

It's a lesson that applies equally well in the workplace, as it does at home.

Maybe we should take everyone's phone away for a day and see what happens.