Thanks for the heads up on Dans ted Talk

Just checking you have seen Dan's TED talk what really motivates us at work 

Here's as TED overview if you haven't  got time:  http://ideas.ted.com/what-motivates-us-at-work-7-fascinating-studies-that-give-insights/

Social Media disrupting the Established Economy

David Nordfors sites an example of radical innovation disrupting the economy:-

The media - mainstream- is becoming irrelevant in the social media communication Eco system. More people listen to the small movements than we might be aware of. People are looking for and finding new ways to relate to their environment through all the new channels available .

This blogging/ messaging/ visualizing ,new Eco system will not change legacy institutions,but will help build other options. If you examine education and the

New available materials in many formats,you have an opening for creative self actualization and enhancement. Innovative self education is already happening for millions. Mooc and Khan are just the beginning.
David

Innovation and economics - radical innovation needs radical change

A question by Curt Carlson 

 I can’t imagine that a society where 85% of the people don’t work would be a good thing.  Work is at the heart of being human — ones identity and self worth depend on it.   It seems unstable and likely to collapse from terrible policies that the 85% would impose on the 15%.  How do you think about that?

Response by Jordan Greenhall 

The key to creating an effective innovative economy is to get legacy systems and legacy habits out of the way while making people feel secure that their needs will still be met!

This can be done only with effective communication, connecting and collaboration! 

Changing the mindset and creating an innovative economy starts with education - and changing the way our education system links in with our economic institutions. 

These linkages make it nearly impossible to radically innovate in jobs without also radically innovating in education.   

Human beings don't need work.   They need more fundamental things like agency,  creativity,  community,  a sense of material safety,  etc.   Mileage will vary,  but my go to here is Max Neef on human needs.   

As it turns out, our civilization model has pushed a great number of these needs into "work".   Increasingly so over the past four centuries.   Indeed,  a big cause of the modern ennui is the fact that work is a poor satisfier for many of the needs that are being piled upon it.   Even really creative work,  but particularly the kind of stuff that usually goes under the heading "work". 

Now,  clearly,  we can not simply delete work.   85% of the population "just sitting around"  is a disaster.   What we must do is innovate entirely new satisfiers.   Optimally satisfiers that meet human needs much more effectively than our legacy approaches and do so much more efficiently.   Neef calls the best of these "synergistic satisfiers".   

Obviously a challenge for the ages,  but my sense is that we are very well positioned to meet it.   To me,  the hard part is doing it in the face of and in the midst of the broad institutional dysfunction that is characteristic of the current environment.   

For example,  take education.   When nearly every child,  teacher and parent is fully tapped day in and day out by the legacy system,  there isn't a lot of room for innovation.   Let alone radical innovation.   

But, if by some circumstance,  the entire educational system shut down all at once and,  as a consequence,  got out of the way; we would develop a dozen new models that are at least as effective in months.   And in a year we'd be well on our way to a set of satisfiers that are 10x more effective.   

In general,  a move like this is unwise.   New is usually a dangerous choice.   But as i believe that a decomposition of the legacy system is coming one way or another..... To create a radicL innovative economy one needs radical innovative ideas and action! 

Response by David Michaelis

We need to redefine WORK and its meaning. The writing of Hanna Arendt in the Human Condition might be relevant to this challenge. 

Arendt theorizes that the "human condition" is tri-partite, that is, composed of three dimensions: labor, work, and action.  To reduce the human condition to labor (as Marx did) and/or to work (as capitalism does), she argues, is to deny the fundamentally significant work that human beings can engage in, namely, action.  Understanding this, she believes, makes it possible to understand better how this allows political and economic systems to enslave human beings. 

 best

david

Innovaton and Economics

Kiely Katz talks about the need to shift to a people based economy in order to maintain and sustain jobs in an innovation driven economy. A radical mindset change is needed 

A successful shift to a more sustainable employment model needs to involve significant changes in traditional mindsets, attitudes and behaviours. Embedding behaviour change is notoriously difficult. The more deeply embedded the behaviour, the more difficult to shift.

We have worked within the similar operating norm for a very long time. Work is not “life” but the thing people do to “make a living”. For 9 hours every day. Those lucky enough to be employed spend more time with their work colleagues that with their loved ones. Employers expect employees to wear a cloak of the “professional persona” during working hours. Most expect employees to stick rigidly within the confines of their role. Stepping outside these rigid “job” walls, even to share knowledge to help colleagues, is often regarded as disruptive behaviour: and thus a massive chunk of skills, knowledge and experience are kept locked firmly away to avoid upsetting the status quo. Frustrating and bad for productivity - but “that just the way things are.

A shift to a ‘people centred economy” has to start by understanding what makes people tick.

Lets look at this norm through the lens of the the way the brain is wired.

People are most receptive to change (and most productive) when they are in “reward” mode. In this mode, we do our best, most creative thinking, we are open to collaboration and feel secure enough to try new things. 

There are six key triggers to this reward state:

Respect: People feel that their opinions are valid. They feel part of decision making processes and that their voices are heard.

Certainty: When there are no unexpected surprises. As an example, Zappos make all of their live data open to everyone across the whole organisation all the time. Nothing is hidden. Everyone knows what is happening. There are no board room secrets.

Autonomy: They don’t want to be watched and micromanaged. People are most productive and most collaborative when they are trusted to do the right thing - especially as part of a community working toward a shared vision.

Connectedness: We are social creatures. We are at our best when we part of connected communities - where we feel safe to share, to give, to be involved. We are most empowered when we are connected by a shared vision or collective mission.

Fairness: People like to know how and why decisions are made. 

Empathy: Even a message saying that leadership understands that change is not easy for anyone makes an enormous difference to how change is adopted.

Check back to standard current organisational operating systems. 

Employees are expected to keep their opinions to themselves and to tow the line. Leaders see knowledge as power and keep it locked away from prying eyes. Most leaders find the idea of employee autonomy uncomfortable and most workers are accustomed to doing as they are told without question. Sharing and cross silo collaboration is not incentivised, if tolerated. Decisions are made behind closed doors and delivered with not even a nod to the people most affected by them.

The gap between organisational norms and more engaged, and therefore more sustainable, operating systems is enormous. Travelling between one and the other will involve significant change.

Therein lies the rub. 

When presented with any kind of significant change, or anything that feels different to the norm, the brain triggers a threat “fight or flight” response.  We become distracted as we try to figure out how that threat will affect us.

Faced with change, people start to see threats even where there are no threats. People are less able to focus or think clearly. Memory and decision making is impaired, the field of focus narrows. They become more emotional and stressed, which further impacts ability to perform.

Unfortunately, the threat response is contagious. When one person starts to behave in a defensive way, the people around them react to the change in their behaviour.

While we considering how to innovate employment through the use of technology, we should not underestimate the challenge of introducing and embedding organisational and systemic change. Throughout the brainstorming process we should imagine what kind of frameworks could support organisations and cities (leaders and employees) through the pain on change into a new more sustainable norm.

Access to affordable and pervasive data, neuroscience, social physics and behavioural psychology provide us with an unprecedented understanding of how humans make decisions, what drives action and how behaviour change can be “nudged.” This research should be kept front of mind as we are plotting

Can innovation disrupt unemployment?

Today, most innovation is about helping people to spend money in meaningful ways. But in an ideal, sustainable economy, people need meaningful ways to earn money, as well—especially as the job landscape continues to change rapidly and dramatically, and certain forms of employment are either reduced or retired completely.

Luckily, innovation is the single greatest driver of job creation, and is propelling entrepreneurial companies to expand, even in a static economic climate. The Internet’s ability to match needles between haystacks enables a new labor market. Jobs may be tailored to fit each individual’s strengths and passions to the right opportunity.

Today, every second person is in the work force. Every fifth cares about their job. Human capacity is our largest underutilized resource.

Agenda
6:00pm:  Registration and Refreshments
6:30pm:  Opening Remarks with Adiba Barney SVForum CEO and David Nordfors, I4J CEO
6:45pm:  Keynote Speaker: John Hagel, Center for the Edge @ Deloitte
7:00pm:  Panel Discussion, moderated by Robin Farmanfarmain, President, I4JEco Summit
7:50pm: Q&A
8:00pm:  Networking
8:30pm:  Program Concludes

Last night we had the interactive discussion outlined below.  It was rather amazing.  Robin, Dave, and John gave opening comments to set the stage.  John made excellent comments about how our mindset and institutions must innovate as well as our technology.  Robin, as always, was the most charming, supportive host.  David's comments were along the lines of underutilized human potential and how new companies are needed to utilize it.  

Vivek ripped off a long list of transformational innovations that will be increasingly disruptive and that will come at a rate society will be unable to adapt to.  

The poster child for this is driverless cars, which can eliminate between 6-10 million middle class jobs.  Uber, for example, is first creating independent agents out of the taxi business but obviously their goal is to run a fleet of driverless cars.  They will be smaller, cheeper, cleaner, and run non-stop (in-between quick charges).  The jobs go away but the value to society goes up enormously.  Curiously the car industry revenue per capita goes down for the same reason — smaller cars shared across society.  

That has been one of the themes of this group:  societal value goes up enormously and corporate value goes down.  GDP doesn’t capture this value.  

Vivek keep up this theme to remind us of the magnitude of what we are facing.  That is critically important.  Some in the audience found this highly disturbing, as they should.  

Chris was more positive about our ability to adapt and argued that these changes will take longer than suggested.  

I stuck to my normal themes:  we can do much better at innovation, US global competitiveness must improve, and educational performance is our biggest weakness.  All three of these areas are under our control and we now have examples about how major advances can be made in all three areas.  Viveck pointed out that I was just making things worse by speeding up the innovation cycle even more!  It was fun.  

David then ran a session with the audience to see how many were engaged in new companies to help people develop new skills, form new initiatives, match people up with new opportunities, etc.  It was a revelation to me that there were so many teams involved in these kinds of activities.  

radical innovation cannot be measured by economics

great thought by David Nordfors 

I believe radical innovative entrepreneurship must be difficult in economics, almost per definition.

Economics does quantitive measurement of parts of a grander narrative, for example ‘number of active job seekers’ and ’the US labor market'. It has a model of the grander narrative where it puts in the measured numbers. Then it says how the grander narrative is doing.

But radical innovation entrepreneurship isn’t about changing the numbers. It’s about changing the narrative. Radical innovation is a new way of relating, rather than just relating more to something (or less). And the narrative is a scheme of how things relate. 

In order to be able to do that, economics must work with scenarios. Projections of how the existing narrative of how things relate will perform is not relevant if some entrepreneur came along and replaced it with another narrative. When Apple presented the iPhone and the app store, that changed the narrative. If you measure old indicators applying it to the old narrative you won’t get it right. You’d for example get the impression that people stopped listening to music, because the sales of music players has dropped drastically. You’d get the impression that people find it much more important to talk on the phone, because the sales of mobile phones went up. But what actually happened is that the old narrative of the “phone” was disrupted, and there came a new one. 

Aggregates don’t explain (radical) innovation. 

The introduction of new narrative is highly non-linear. Perhaps if one can construct lots of scenarios and do a Monte Carlo or something, I don’t know. 

Should remind a bit of tracing infectious diseases but much much wilder. 

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