Manara

In September I had blogged about some of the stories told at BIF-6 and the random encounters of unusual suspects at the Collaborative Innovation Summit. In particular I wrote about Keith Yamashita’s story and how it impacted me.

Since then I have reminded myself and others when we are planning or considering action, that we should dare to be great, and have found often that this simple sentence often ignites imagination and inspires the conversation to steer towards more ambitious goals and more significant change. The power of collectively imagining a “greater” future never ceases to amaze me and I am grateful to Keith for planting this seed in my mind.

Now the video recording of Keith’s presentation at BIF-6 is available online. I highly recommend that you view it, and that you do so in a quite uninterrupted moment to enjoy the full power of his story.

Citizen initiatives are transforming the discourse, even the relationship between citizens and their governments. The most recent installment of evidence of this transformation came at this month’s Unfinished Business Lecture at OCAD’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) on October 20, 2010.

SeeClickFix Platform

The invited speaker of this lecture was Ben Berkowitz, CEO of SeeClickFix. I had the pleasure of attending Ben’s presentation about the story behind his organization at the Collaborative Innovation Summit (BIF6) in September of this year and was happy that he could tell this story to a Toronto audience. Kudos to Michael Dila and his team at Torch Innovation for taking the initiative of inviting Ben to speak at the Unfinished Business Lecture that they sponsor. The series has been exceptional in the selection of topics and the quality of speakers.

Ben told the story of SeeClickFix. It started as an initiative to fight unwanted graffiti in his neighborhood, morphed into a web application for reporting pot holes that needed repair, grew into a tool for alerting government officials to public works needed (pot holes and others), and blossomed into a global web 2.0 platform for citizen engagement and for citizen self-organized action.

Government Evolving

What I found interesting is that what started as an application to collect information locally about unwanted graffiti evolved rapidly not only as a platform for the distributed collection of needed public works, but also as a tool for governments to cut their cost (roaming inspectors to identify needed repairs). Even when governments were short of resources to address the needs, they found open communications with citizen to provide transparency about the allocation of resources and to help dispel perception of preferential treatment of particular neighborhoods. The tactics of subscribing government officials to receive alerts generated within their jurisdiction without first asking for their permission, have increased pressure on officials to engage their citizens. Those who resist and resent the service provided by SeeClickFix are quickly identified by their citizens as non-transparent bureaucrats who are providing inadequate service. In return, the site’s ability to display the status of reported issues (open, acknowledged, and closed) on a Google map is providing public works staff with a capability to publicly display their own work and performance.

Self-Organizing Citizens

Furthermore, citizen started using the platform not only for reporting issues but for peer-to-peer communications in order to organize their own actions addressing the issues reported. Examples ranged from a woman, who spray-painted the fading stripes of the pedestrian crossing on her street to Washington citizens posting what resources they can offer and organizing in small groups to help neighbors clear their driveways and sidewalks during the snow storms of the past winter. Some local governments are starting even to offer “civic points” for citizens reporting required works and organizing to help with addressing them.

Toronto’s 311 Service

In the Q&A following the lecture, Peter Rose, a graduate student in OCAD’s Strategic Foresight & Innovation program, asked Ben if Toronto, which has a 311 service, is using SeeClickFix. Ben mentioned having a phone conversation with someone in the Mayor’s office. That person (Ryan) turned out to be among the audience. Peter then put Ryan on the spot asking him to provide the audience with an update on Toronto’s government activities in that space. Ryan did not have detailed information (being away for 6 months and at the end of his term with the elections on October 25th), but he deferred to Dave Wallace, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the city, who was also attending.

Sure enough, Dave came forward and provided an interesting insight into Metro Hall’s plans and activities around open government and the open data movement. One of the new applications of open data is Toronto’s road closures information to help you plan your movement around the city.

What followed was a lively and informative conversation, typical of the Unfinished Business lectures. This and other open-data city activities will be the subject of another posting in the near future as I get more details, so stay tuned.

Last week I attended the Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI. Called BIF-6 in reference to it’s organizer, the Business Innovation Factory and it’s sixth occurrence, the two-day event exposes participants to thirty exceptional storytellers in a intimate theater setting. I had attended last year’s BIF-5 and found it inspiring and energizing, so I went for more.

An even greater value in attending BIF-6 is really in the networking that takes place before, after and between the stories. BIF founder Saul Kaplan calls it “random collisions of unusual suspects” because he and his team use diversity and diversification as a core principle to enrich these collisions. Storytellers as well as participants are from every walk of life imaginable: from serial entrepreneurs, to educators, technologists, business executives, high-school students to a twelve-year old girl that set up a domestic grease collection and reprocessing into bio fuel that helped heat the house of needy families in her town.

Daring to be Great

The last presentation of Day 2 of BIF-6 was by Keith Yamashita, titled originally “Change, to the Power of Ten”. Inspired and moved by previous storytellers and encounters with participants, he changed his title to “Is it worth daring to be great?” As he was reflecting on the role of trust between two people in the larger context of teams and organizations, he recounted an incident, when a business partner and mentor (Alan Webber) vested his full trust in him. For 10 seconds he became very emotional and a tear ran down his cheek. He quickly recovered and continued his presentation, but in those 10 seconds I learned about trust and its importance in personal relations and in social networks small and large more than any books or courses could teach.

Random Collision

Later the next day, in the coach taking us to Providence Airport I happened to sit next to another participant, Monika Hardy (@monk51295). With a long wait for our flights, we settled in one of the airport’s seating areas, opened our laptops, intended to get some work done. But the conversation started in the coach did not want to go away. I was still reflecting on my learning experience from Keith’s presentation, and found myself in an amazing deep-dive conversation with Monika, who turned out to be an innovator herself in the field of children education. I was fascinated and encouraged that in a public school system, a space has been allowed to experiment with new methods and ways. Monika described how children choose what they want to learn and are then guided by a different kind of teacher, a facilitator of learning that connects the dots of the child’s interests without imposing an unnatural regiment of learning. In fact, the children go through a “detox” to unlearn some of the old behaviors learned in school.

Emotional Learning

As I was listening to her passionately describe her work , it occurred to me that the “detox” approach might well be applicable to business. We need to unlearn behaviors drilled into us by the existing system, before we can innovate new ways and structures to do business. I am planning on following up on this conversation.

So, what else did I learn? We seem to be wired for absorbing a significantly higher volume of knowledge, when we are emotionally engaged. Traditional learning, however, focuses primarily on information supply, without much of an emotional component. The result is that we learn the information without the full context that gives the information so much richer meanings in multiple dimensions. We do the same in business. As Keith said: “The biggest fallacy of business is that it’s only rational. All business is personal and all business is human”. That’s why one random encounter with an unusual suspect can teach you more than volumes of HBR.

So as I am soaking up all the learning from these two random BIF-6 collisions, the question swirling in my head is: Could we design emotional components to our learning processes at every level? That’s a very intriguing idea particularly as we witness the emergence of a new system of learning based on modules of knowledge that learners can pick and choose from. Imagine if each of these modules was designed to enlist an emotional component of learning.

I’ll be trying to write about the many other encounters that sparked my brain at BIF-6, so stay tuned!

A few months back I had written a blog about the ups and downs of policy innovation. Since then may things have happened.

First, Change Camp 2010 has taken place and I was there as one of the on-line scribes that facilitated the 30 break-out groups of this remarkable event. It was an interesting experience that taught our team a lot about facilitating engagements at this scale (240 people).

Then I organized XCAMP, the unconference discussing the XCLINIC project. With the support of several peers from the Design with Dialog (DwD) practitioner group that meets monthly at OCAD’s Strategic Innovation Lab (sLab) this smaller event was a great crowd-sourced co-design experience pushing the project a big step forward.

The most important time investment over the past few months (the one that took me away from blogging all this time) was put into developing a brand new graduate course “Business Model & Policy Innovation” and teaching the course to the first class of the MDes program in Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) at OCAD. This has been an exhilarating and learning-rich experience, which we’re about to wrap up with project presentations and critiques over the next 2 weeks.

Emerging Trends

During the course I hosted a number of guest lecturers including Toronto City Councilor Gordon Perks and Change Camp co-founder Mark Kuznicki. From the lively discussions throughout the course and the guest lectures, I came out with a renewed sense of urgency for policy innovation. Everywhere we looked (enterprises, government, academic institutions, NGOs) the trend swelling from the grass roots up was towards more collaborative and participatory mode of working. And in most instances that trend was clashing with the vertical decision-making hierarchies and structures that characterize the 20th century.

Towards a Solution

I had highlighted the inherent risks of not addressing this gap in my previous blog about policy innovation. What has emerged through these various events is the beginning of a discourse about how to do so. In a conversation with Dr. David Wolf, Royal Bank Chair in Public and Economic Policy at the Munk Centre for International Studies, about how to address this gap, he envisaged governments shifting implementation efforts significantly towards grass-roots organizations and NGOs. Karl Schroeder, a Sci-Fi author, future scenarios writer, and graduate student at the SFI program suggested exploring a sequencing of these two different modes of organizing: horizontal networks and vertical hierarchies. Each of these modes excels at certain aspects and could be used at specific times in the process of policy making for example.

Mark Kuznicki provided real examples of how tremendous engagement and creativity by grass-roots initiatives in Toronto got stifled due to infighting between vertical hierarchies in Ontario. Everybody agreed with Mark, that how we address this fundamental issue is the conversation all who seek positive change must engage in. This could easily become a cornerstone of research in strategic foresight and innovation.