And right now, we need that technology to do its thing, and get ourselves out of the hole(s) we’ve dug for ourselves. We need scientist to work fast and openly to combat COVID-19 (and, hey, look, they’re using digital technology to allow that to happen). But we also need technology to address the climate crisis.

Martin brutally addressed the economic illiteracy involved in the “retreat” position. Degrowth will not work to deliver the changes we need. Instead, we have to go forwards and that means innovation. And we also need the stories that drive innovation.

Storytelling decarbonised energy

One of the few people doing this well right now is Elon Musk.  He’s the most prominent entrepreneur who is building a set of businesses about ways of decarbonising the economy. All the focus is on the cars, but energy-related parts of the business are just as vital. The solar panels and battery storage divisions demand at least as much of your attention.

He is starting to tell the story of a better future, product by product, that is inspiring — and forcing — other businesses to come along with him. But we need to do more than that. He’s not enough; we need more than one green energy storyteller.

We need climate carrots as well as climate sticks. The doom and gloom stories of what happens if we don’t act, can be countered with the potential lifestyle gains if we do.

Better visions of a green energy future

I have a local acquaintance who is doing a fantastic job of reshaping his family home — and life — around decarbonisation principles. He’s gained some press coverage along the way, from sources as diverse as the BBC and a motoring magazine. He’s doing it bottom-up to Musk’s top-down. But we need this to happen at every level.

In this context, it’s great to see Fast Company publish something like this:

Luckily for the 75% of the population who live in cities, new electric railways crisscross interior landscapes. In the United States, high-speed rail networks on the East and West coasts have replaced the vast majority of domestic flights, with East coast connectors to Atlanta and Chicago. Because flight speeds have slowed down to gain fuel efficiency, passenger bullet trains make some journeys even faster and with no emissions whatsoever.

This is actually an extract from a book, The Future We Choose, which tells two stories: one of the world if we do nothing, and one if we take the measures we need. And it’s the latter that interests me. It’s a compelling vision of deploying technology to create the infrastructure and energy we need for a decarbonised future. It reminds me of my father’s old adage: “It’s better to run to something, than away from something”.

Imagining a new social and technology landscape

The authors paint a picture of the lifestyle, technology and economy we’ll need to run towards:

The U.S. Train Initiative was a monumental public project that sparked the economy for a decade. Replacing miles and miles of interstate highways with a new transportation system created millions of jobs—for train technology experts, engineers, and construction workers who designed and built raised rail tracks to circumvent floodplains. This massive effort helped to reeducate and retrain many of those displaced by the dying fossil fuel economy. It also introduced a new generation of workers to the excitement and innovation of the new climate economy.

It seems strange to be talking about positive storytelling at a time when surely we should be talking about politics and innovation? But then, what drives those two but stories of a better world?

We tell ourselves stories of the world we want to live in. The politicians find the money, and the frameworks to make it happen. And the bold, stupid, inspired innovators build the tech that will make it a reality.

I am convinced that if we are to survive and thrive as a species over the next few decades, we need to learn to balance our scepticism with our idealism. It’s better than ricocheting between the two as we have with digital.

Let’s start halting the relentless negativity, and start telling positive stories of the life we could create. And then let’s get to work building the tools, the products and the politics that can make it happen. Stories are what make innovation catch fire.

Photo by Andrew Sellick on Unsplash

The post The road to decarbonised energy is paved with… stories? appeared first on NEXT Conference.

It’s very hard to see yourself as a soldier when you feel like you are just hanging out with like-minded friends. And that’s what the internet has always been good at; at eliminating geography, and allowing connection by idea rather than by proximity. But that’s where we are, and it’s worth thinking about how we got there, and how we might move forwards.

For many of us who came online in the 1990s, one of the sheer delights of cyberspace was your ability to find people into the same things you were into. It didn’t mind how obscure your passion or hobby (or, lest we forget, fetish…) was, somewhere there would be a web page, chat room or mailing list supporting it.

All of a sudden, anyone with access to a dial-up modem could do something only available to people in the largest cities previous: associate based on ideas. As a teenager growing up in rural Scotland as a huge fan of Doctor Who, I looked longingly at the conventions and meet-ups happening in the big cities, but which were unavailable to me.

A decade later I was chatting with fans — and authors — of obscure tabletop games in a way that was inconceivable to my teenage self.

These little bubbles of extra-mainstream culture formed into parallel worlds of culture, without the mainstream world noticing.

The Gaming Petri Dish

Gaming is one of the best examples of parallel worlds of culture that are huge in scale and impact, but which mainstream culture under-estimates. If you follow much of the mainstream media, you would barely know that it — and eSports in particular — were such huge business. The fact that it has developed its own media, its own broadcast channels (through streaming) was highlighted at NEXT by TL Taylor’s compelling talk.

But that very closed-off nature has been the problem. Rewind half a decade, and gaming was the incubation chamber for many of the disinformation and political tactics later used in the rise of the extreme right across the West. A movement that was known as Gamergate, shared many key figures with the later alt-right movement. And similar techniques have since been exported by people on all ends of the politics spectrum.

A community is not inherently a good or a bad thing. It depends on how porous its borders are. The tighter they become, the more likely it is to be heading to a dark place. At its most toxic that grows into things like incel culture, where young, sexually-frustrated men gather, support each other — and develop a psychologically damaging view of women and sexual interaction. The results can be tragic.

We now know that the internet is the battleground for an information war. It’s become too easy for these culturally isolated communities to become radicalised. I can barely open Twitter at the moment, because it’s become a battleground for organised brigades of political loyalists to insult each other, rather than a space for discussion.

New recruits in the culture war

An acquaintance noted that the official BBC account for my teenage favourite Doctor Who is besieged by people decrying “political correctness” every time they post, simply because the lead character has become a women. But when he tracked those accounts back to source, he found profiles of people who are very keen on Donald Trump and making America great again, rather than British sci-fi shows. In fact, to judge from their profiles, they have no interest in show at all, only the culture war they have been recruited into.

Geographical isolationism and the othering of non-proximate people that comes with it has been the source of probably the majority of human conflict — until now. It turns out that ideological connection may be even more powerful in doing this. We’ve seen evidence of that, too, throughout history. There is very little in life quite as dangerous as a group of people who are convinced they are right, and who refuse to listen to opposing views.

Once they are mobilised as a unified force, bonded through connections forged as friendships, they can be powerful, focused and ruthless.

And we’ve built a tool that amplifies this effect. It’s rather bowel-loosening, when you think about it, isn’t it?

So, perhaps after 25 years of delighting in the internet’s ability to make connections based on ideas, we need to find ways of connecting on other axes, too. The beauty of geographic connection was that it did force you into contact with people who you disagreed with politically – and created social consequence for taking those disagreements to extremes.

If we, as a set of societies, are to move forward from this rather dangerous time in our development, we need to find ways of enjoying the great potential that digital connection offers, without letting those around us be consumed and radicalised by it.

Enjoy the parallel worlds of culture – but make sure that you, and those you love, are not trapped in them.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

The post Divide and rule: the dark side of parallel digital cultures appeared first on NEXT Conference.

I will admit – this surprised me. Perhaps, as a fairly long-term self-employed individual, I’ve become too sceptical of corporate life. But perhaps, as a Gen Xer, I’m also of the wrong generation to take this as seriously as it deserves. Because, as the planet that sustains us faces a crisis, it’s clear to many that business can’t be business as usual. And the idea of working for businesses with purposes has a deep appeal for many people, that more fundamentally integrates the need to improve the world than the old-fashioned approach of make your money at work, then donate some of it to charity.

However, in my own defence, there are good grounds for scepticism. The corporate world does not have a stellar history here. And I’ve seen some of that first hand.

Let’s take a brief wander down memory lane here:

Corporate Social Responsibility

About 20 years ago, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) came into vogue. Although the concept dates back to at least the 1960s, in the mid-to-late 90s corporations developed a new enthusiasm for it. This may be because times were generally good, people were optimistic about the future, and many corporations had the bandwidth to start giving back into society. But were they doing it through genuine commitment, or as a marketing-driven public relations exercise?

I wrote about it extensively in the context of corporate real estate companies around the turn of the millennium. Some of the initiatives were genuinely exciting. I remember talking to a supermarket chain about their new, greener store designs in the run up to the millennium. A couple of years ago, I heard that the flagship store – designed to last decades – was being knocked down. The high principles did not survive the tough financial times that hit.

By the last 2000s, for the company I was working for, CSR had pretty much eroded down to a single person arranging some staff to volunteer for charity. For example, I once spent a day helping clear scrub on a historic site not terribly far from where I worked:

This history – of big promises decaying when economic times become rougher – leads to so many people being sceptical of the promises of purpose-led business. And CSR isn’t even the worst of it.

Greenwashing

Equally long-lived is the idea of the environmentally responsible corporate — and with decades of experience under its belt, the corporate world has been able to hone the practice of “greenwashing” down to a fine art:

The term greenwashing was coined by environmentalist Jay Westerveld in 1986, back when most consumers received their news from television, radio and print media – the same outlets that corporations regularly flooded with a wave of high-priced, slickly-produced commercials and print ads. The combination of limited public access to information and seemingly unlimited advertising enabled companies to present themselves as caring environmental stewards, even as they were engaging in environmentally unsustainable practices.

So reported The Guardian back in 2016.

Is it any wonder that scepticism is so prevalent when these ideas have been so abused?

Purposeful hiring

The only way we can genuinely move forward in this is that the whole company, top to bottom, commits to it. And today’s (relatively) young people are making that easier to achieve.

I prefer the word “company” to the word “corporate”. Why? It helps remind you that you are part of a company of people working together towards a common goal. One of the perpetual challenges of a good company is finding and retaining the best staff. Sure, part of that is money. And another part is perks. But those may not longer be enough on their own.

As the Millennial generation become ever more numerous in the workforce — and in increasingly senior positions, too — the need to integrate purpose into your business may be growing ever more urgent. Millennials really like working with businesses whose values align with their own. In fact, research shows it’s more important to many of them than money.

The first responsibility of a company is to sustain itself. Without financial sustenance, it cannot do anything else. It can’t employ people. But it can’t achieve sustainability without good people. And if those people demand that the business has purpose, then it must treat purpose and profit as two equal, interdependent drivers.

Future Purpose

This gives at least some grounds for optimism that this version of corporate good might last a bit longer than the ones that predated it. After all, a sustainable business has to look to the long term:

“Maybe we will stop talking about purpose in 10 years’ time because it will just be ingrained in any organisation as a taken-for-granted – that any company that wants to be successful must pursue purpose,” said Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at London Business School (LBS). “A purposeful company will still focus on long-term performance even when times are difficult. The best companies stick to their purpose rather than be distracted by short-term demands.”

Whipple’s talk showed that some leaders are willing to go this way. The participants in my session show that there are many people who would like to join in on that journey.

And even a sceptical old Gen X journalist like myself is quite interested in seeing where they go together.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

The post Purpose and profit are the twin hearts of sustainable business appeared first on NEXT Conference.

These days, any reporting of such site tends to be of some new, terrible and unexpected societal harm done by a mega-internet platform. Politicians seeking an electoral platform make promises — or threats — about how they’ll curtail the power of the digital colossuses. The mockery of a decade ago — “bedroom bloggers”, “photos of people’s lunch” — has swag wildly into the direction of faceless political operatives skewing the debates of nations. A clear and present danger, indeed.

It all feels like a very long way away from the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, doesn’t it? That was an ethos born of a different time, though. A time when “cyberspace”, that terribly dated term for the digital world, was only home to a tiny minority of us, and where we could be, to a large extent, self-policing.

The last 20 years have not been kind to that view of digital, though, and we have to acknowledge that the worlds of the physical and the digital are not as separate as we’d like to have imagined. And that means that digital has to be political because it is intertwined with our lives. Our failure to acknowledge that the digital and the political are, and always will be, deeply connected has opened the gateways for the abuses and errors that have defined the past five years.

The cyber hippies of Silicon Valley aren’t the only ones to blame, here, though. The cynical media were just as bad, classifying “virtual” relationships or “ebusinesses” as somehow inferior to ones without an online component. This deep assumption that the digital was less real, and therefor less consequent led to a society-wide underestimation of the likely price we would pay.

Paying the price at the digital/physical interface

Fundamentally, the digital world is a space made up of data, emotions and ideas. And what is politics if not the intersection of those three? Professor Richard Dawkins, best known these days as the grumpy high secular priest of the New Atheists, was once better known for writing books about science, and in one of them he actually coined the term “meme” — the sense that ideas could travel and spread in exactly the same way that viruses do — virally, if you will.

Now, the idea was not universally popular. Dawkins was and is a biologist, and the sense that he is trying to slave all other fields to his area of expertise is a criticism that has been levelled at him many times. But undoubtedly his ideas took on new life when they intersected with digital — and we use those very words “meme” and “viral” to explain what happens online to this day.

What was once amusing — and most of the early memes spread because they were just plain funny — is now being harnessed for political ends. Political organisations all over the world are harnessing memes and social videos in the causes of community building, propaganda and misinformation. As the role of partisan organisations and state-sponsored propagandists in the elections of the past five years or so becomes ever more clear, we’ve been made brutally aware of how effectively the digital has been rendered political.

Earlier this week, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published a report that has consequences for how we think about the intersection of digital and politics. The report analyses three news publications — in India, South Africa and the Philippines — and characterises how they have built audience engagement around their brand. (I’ve written about it more extensively elsewhere.) But it is clear that all three have suffered from what the authors term “platform capture” — the combination of their own businesses being trapped on platforms they don’t control — often Facebook-owned ones — and their own platforms for community engagement being captured by hostile forces. Political and ideological wars are being fought online with equal or greater ferocity than in the real world.

The opinionated algorithm

Taking a step beyond that, beyond what we might characterise as the misuse of platforms, we also have to acknowledge that the platforms themselves are not neutral. A page of Google search results is an opinion. The composition of your newsfeed on Facebook is another. The idea of an algorithmically-generated opinion might seem like a strange or even unlikely one until you recall that algorithms (even machine learning-based ones) are still set in motion by humans. They determine the core process, and the data the algorithms work from.

If you start from a biased start state, you get those biases magnified by the algorithms. And when these are starting to be entrenched into things like job applications, then you can have bias utterly entwined with a system in a way that it’s very hard to see.

This is a symptom of the Dark Ages that James Bridle talked about; the technology is making it harder to see the harm being done, even as it makes it easier for that harm to propagate. The digital is political because politics is built into the very code that we write.

The digital is created by humans. We are political animals, and all our work is tainted with it. To call for an unpolitical internet is as naive as the calls some fans have for media that “just has good stories, without politics”. Even a cursory glance at the context and meaning of many nursery rhymes will tell you how imbecilic that it is. It’s a cry that they don’t like the politics the creator is putting in, but they’re hiding that behind the thin veil of apolitical art.

Even simple art can be deeply political, as this display I saw at the NEXT speakers reception makes clear:

Smurf that in your smurf and surf it. 😉

Navigating the political internet

The only way we can move forward is by creating manoeuvres (to borrow Bridle’s word) to adapt to the landscape we’re in.

And, for once, we’re actually beginning to see effective political oversight of the new digital power players. The last time Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was dragged in from a hearing in the US government, he was lobbed softball questions by politicians who clearly barely — if at all — understood the technology at play. Last week, he was taken apart methodically and ruthlessly by legislators with a real understanding of the issues at stake — and how the political and the digital intersect.

Political regulation of the internet is now all-but inevitable. It’s better to engage with that, and shape it to healthy ends, rather than pine for some utopian dream of an unregulated digital space. After all, when have humans every managed to successfully coexist without some form of regulation?

We also need to acknowledge that the digital can have a profound impact on the physical. The New York Times published a piece over the weekend, pointing out that digital shopping is having a profound impact on the congestion in our physical streets, especially in compact towns and cities, while the traditional town centres struggle for life, as fewer and fewer people head out shopping.

Accepting the reality of the impact of the digital on our own world is critical to formulating the correct responses — and planning for them. These are not Parallelwelten. They are manifestations of the same world.

Connecting the parallels

But digital has quite genuinely created some very real Parallelwelten. And perhaps the biggest challenge for us is in reversing this; in connecting our polarised societies up again. My fellow blogger here dragged up the issue that’s dividing the UK at the moment: Brexit. As it drags its interminable way towards an uncertain conclusion (yet another extension, I see), the country remains ever more riven in two, with the most passionate gathering in self-isolated groups on Facebook or Twitter, Remoaners or Brextremists only encountering each other in digital combat on the internet. These are not the conversations envisaged by another of the early, idealistic internet’s seminal works, the Cluetrain Manifesto. These are just tribal clashes, with any attempt to listen to the other side seen as treachery.

This is not entirely a symptom of the digital — it has manifestation in physical space, too. There are leave areas of Britain, just as there are remain areas. But digital has allowed those problems to both entrench themselves, and become defined as an identity.

The web is 25 years old. It’s an adult now, even if it’s still a young adult. We try to shield our human children from politics in their early years.  But, as they coming into their own as adults, they realise strongly that they need to engage with politics, because it directly affects them. So, too, our attitude to digital needs to mature. It’s time for us as a society to understand that the internet is inherently a political place, and that we cannot avoid that. Indeed, by trying to avoid that, we have created spaces for dark and terrible things to grow.

Adults accept politics and complexity. It’s time for a truly adult approach to the digital world, before we inflict as much damage on our electronic commons as we have on the environment of the planet, and take our societies into a more literal dark age than even Mr Bridle predicted.

Photo by Randy Colas on Unsplash

The post The digital is inescapably political: it’s time to accept that appeared first on NEXT Conference.

David Mattin expressed it most clearly, as he often does. The problems we’re facing as societies and businesses are inherently driven by the growing complexity of the world, he said.

James Bridle had laid the groundwork, though, with his warnings of a Dark Age: an age where computing systems were hiding things, not making them more obvious. It’s a more complex Dark Age than the one that Europe endured centuries ago – it’s not a retreat of knowledge per se, but a growing realisation that more things are being hidden or obscured from us.

The tension that emerged through these two talks was fascinating: the internet at once has made us aware of so much more than we could have imaged only a couple of decades ago. Many of us lived in an era when “looking something up” meant picking a book off the shelf – or taking a trip to the library. The flood gates of knowledge have been opened – and we’re drowning in the tide.

The illusion of knowledge and competence

But that sheer volume of information gives us the false impression that we know more than we do — and sometimes, the information we aren’t getting becomes the obsession, because we’ve so very used — entitled, even — to information being readily accessible, that uncertainly feels like an assault.

That’s dangerous. That way conspiracy thinking and polarisation lie.

The problem is that there aren’t simple, productisable solutions to complexity. Some politicians exploit this gap: people yearn for simplicity in the face of complexity, which makes soundbite solutions attractive at the ballot box. But technology does not univalent itself, and nobody is about to shut down the internet and take our phone away.

And so we must face complexity: and stare our own ignorance in the face, much like Christian Mio Loclair’s computer staring at its own reflection. We, however, have the ability to recognise what we see – and in that, perhaps, lies some of the answers.

Conversely, sometimes we’re just unaware of what we don’t know. The internet has had something of a homogenising effect on worldwide culture. We can peer through our black glass windows and see lives on continents our grandparents could never have dreamed of visiting.

Sometimes that exposure fools us into thinking we understand more than we do. Many of the China and Africa-centric sessions at NEXT19 had the effect of exploding the myths we might have held about these regions — and making us aware of how very different their own digital ecosystems are. Perhaps, this should have been obvious. Different cultures and environments create different problems, and the need for different solutions.

But, again, the homogenising tendency of the internet hides the real complexity from us. Everyone is on Facebook – apart from all the people who aren’t. Everyone is on WeChat, apart from everyone who isn’t. Parallel worlds, with only a few people moving fluidly between them.

But, to return to David Mattin’s talk, perhaps the only solution to this is to turn inwards. To reassess who we are as people, and our models of what humanity actually is. Technology is shaping the behaviour of each new generation, and Eliza Filby’s talk challenged us to think how technology has shaped our own generations, and how we can help the next generation navigate the changes that are coming.

These are challenging, long term solutions:

• Acknowledge complexity.
• Reset our scale.
• Welcome a life of parallel worlds.
• Rethink what we understand humans to be.

Does disruptive change need to be catastrophic?

We are a world edging towards some catastrophic changes, be they social born of the internet, or environmental, born of the industrial age. It was hard to forget that during the Friday of NEXT, as tens of thousands took to the streets of Hamburg to protest the climate crisis.

Solutions to the major challenges of the 21st century can only be addressed by looking at the reality of the complexity around us – and finding new ways of navigating them. Perhaps Sophie Howe gave us one way forward – a politics that looks to future generations, not just the next election. And Brian Whipple another path: building businesses that take purpose into their core in a meaningful and essential way.

Systems thinking trumps product thinking – but that doesn’t mean that products aren’t vital building blocks of what we do.

We need some way forward: where we are now is burning, and will not exist for long. We need to choose which parallel world we bring to fruition in our own lives.

This is the first in a series of racap posts from NEXT19. Later posts will pull on some of the threads introduced in the this post, and cover issues alluded to like geographic complexity, cultural complexity and business complexity — and the attendees’ reactions to the talks.

The post NEXT19 Recap: embracing complexity and rethinking humanity appeared first on NEXT Conference.

Thomas Webb is a multi-disciplinary artist and creative hacker living in London, UK. He spoke during the afternoon session of NEXT19 on 20th September 2019.

Watch the full video here

If you Google Webb – you’ll find a Wikipedia page about him, that he wrote. He made it up, and made it look authoritative. He hacked Google by putting keywords into his domain name. He started experimenting with technology magic, tricking people with technology – fake newsing the world.

Disney created Disneyland to immerse people in fairytales. It was a huge success. Webb claims his Dad wrote a hit 80s video game called Out Run. He didn’t get world famous or rich. In the 80s, the government were trying to get people to learn to code, so they used stories about the outliers who became rich and famous to encourage that.

His dad also sold the original Motorola phone 45 years ago. People used to reject those early mobile phones because they didn’t want to be contactable. Now he’s living that life all the time – always available. We all are. Virtually nobody in the theatre uses Find My Friends, according to a quick show of hands. Gen Z do it all the time. They’re used to their friends just knowing where they are. How has that happened? Parents insist that it’s turned on when they give them a phone. We see the merit of these decisions – but we can’t see the impact in 10 years.

Technology now is being controlled by a few companies. The social media boom has been controlled by a company that’s a bit… questionable. They are essentially unaccountable. As Webb travelled to Hamburg, he found Heathrow full of screens advertising Facebook’s privacy. But the interesting thing was the degree to which it connected the digital realm and the physical realm.

AR versus VR

His definition of these terms:

• AR is a tool
• VR is creating immersion in a fractious world.

Facebook has cloned Snapchat’s best features into Instagram. People don’t know that Facebook owns Instagram – or WhatsApp. Or Oculus Rift. So where are they going with all this technology?

Read this. All of our communication is increasingly attached to our social profiles. The document shows that Zuckerberg wants to destroy phones via VR/AR. He sees it as the next big computing platform. And he wanted to buy the Unity video game engine. But they wouldn’t sell.

Johanna (@johwska) made a couple of beauty filters that garnered her thousands of followers. But she can’t code. How did she did this? She used Spark AR, the language that Facebook created because it couldn’t buy Unity. And once a few people became famous like her, they made it available to everyone – while destroying the ability of the filter creator to go viral.But they’d trained 100,000s of people to use their node AR programming system.

That’s what they’re doing.

It’s mind-bending when you connect the dots. Facebook decides our future.

Watch the full video here

The post Thomas Webb: VR and the future of society appeared first on NEXT Conference.

Ben Sauer is Director of Conversation Design at Babylon Health. He spoke during the afternoon session of NEXT19 on 20th September 2019.

Watch the full video here

Let’s start with a war between two nations. How can a button that slows everyone down win a war?

Kaizen is a process pioneered by Toyota in Japan, looking for continuous improvement in their processes. Anybody could stop the production line, and initiate a discussion on improvements they thought needed to be made. It worked. They tried it in the US, and it didn’t work. The middle-managers couldn’t get their heads around the idea of a worker shutting down the line for a chat. In fact, they were producing cars that had mistakes, because they pushed for speed over everything else.

The US lost the car war, because they couldn’t slow down.

Today, we are also over-indexing on speed. Many people feel they are pushing Jira tickets up a hill, like Sisyphus, without actually achieving anything.

Sauer makes a habit of reading people he disagrees with – like Dominic Cummings, the architect of Brexit. He wrote that many organisations make slow decisions quickly, and quick decisions slowly. Motorsport tells you the value of fast decisions. Design research shows you the value of your taking your time.

The digital world is full of euphemisms for speed.

One of the signs of speed-obsession is “design sprints”. He encountered a manager who confused a “design sprint” with “design”. Others include:

• The process zealot — who is so obsessed by the process that it becomes proxy for the result.
• Scientism – using vanity metrics to prove progress. We’re prone to forgetting the human in digital, and using proxy metrics instead. Google analytics does not tell you how you are affecting people’s lives.
• Speed freaks – Moving fast leaves you less time to think. We have a bias to build. When you have a down cycle, fix things or improve things.
• Unrealistic roadmaps – demanding shiny things often lets to disappointment.

Manoeuvres for better decisions

• Mind your decision speed – if you make every decision quickly, you prevent deep thought. There are two types of decisions, as Jeff Bezos articulated. One set are really important – and need taking slowly. Some are less important, and easily reversible. Assess how well your decisions have worked out.
• Know your environment – some of the best decisions came from environments where there’s no pressure to deliver. The more pressure there is to deliver the more often you need slow decisions making. There are four broad groups of organisation, and all organisations are a mix of them:
  • Clans (doing things together)
  • Adhocracy (doing things fast)
  • Hierarchy (doing it right)
  • Markets (getting the job done).

• Cultivate listening – the Toyota story above is a micro habit of people getting together and listening. Are their voices in your team that dominate the discussions? Tenderness builds connection, and the right amount is necessary for efficient collaborations.
• Sweat your vision – when people are being very efficient at producing something, they usually understand it. The Spotify model gives teams a lot of autonomy – but you need really strong alignment on purpose. Use a template for the value proposition – if the team all give different answers, you have an issues. And relentless revise your value proposition.

When we see something that works fast and brilliantly, we often forget all the slow work and practice that it took to get there.

Watch the full video here

The post Ben Sauer: making the case for slower digital decisions appeared first on NEXT Conference.

Marcello Schermer is in charge of international expansion at Yoco. He spoke during the afternoon session of NEXT19 on 20th September 2019.

Watch the full video here

Africa is often characterised as the continent of poverty and need – or the continent of animal and wildlife. Charities sell that need, saying that for €10 you can save the life of an African child. That’s putting a price on that life.

Schermer believes differently. He believes that the future is being built in Africa.

He was inspired by the StartupBus that travelled across Africa, and that led to him getting involved with an incubator and then a fintech startup. Africa is a continent with abundant young people and fast-growing economies, often at 10 or 12% a year. 21 of the 30 fastest growing cities in the world are in Africa. By 2030 the five biggest cities in the continent will be the size of Germany.

There’s an idea that countries move on a continuum from undeveloped to developed. That’s not how it works. Countries leapfrog some steps – and often invent other destinations. The “developed world” is less relevant than it once was. The “emerging world” already has the majority of the population. Soon it will have the bigger economy, too.

Africa has the potential to solve problems for the “developing” world that the “developed” world doesn’t even realise is a problem.

African problem solvers

Zipline

This company uses drones to send medical supplies between hospitals in Ghana and Rwanda. This skips the whole issue of building our road infrastructure and the logistics to go with it.

Positivo BGH

This company manufactures laptops in Rwanda, for use there.

SafeBoda

A motorbikes-on-demand startup in Kenya and Uganda. They’re very popular – as well as fast and affordable. They brought their drivers in to the financial ecosystems, and started offering them bank accounts, petrol discounts – and insurance. The company took an industry that existed in the dark, and lifted it into the formal sector.

The scale opportunity

In many cases these problems are found all over Africa – or elsewhere in the developing world. There’s huge opportunity for scale there. We are moving into a world where we — Europeans and Americans — will be in the minority. The rest of the world will be creating cities and products that look nothing like those in Hamburg or London.

We never had a monopoly on innovation – and that’s more clear than ever.

Nobody is sitting there waiting for somebody to come and fix their problems. Stop trying to make Africa like us. Start learning the lessons we can learn from the innovation on the continent.

Watch the full video here

The post Marcello Schermer: why the future is being built in Africa appeared first on NEXT Conference.

Efosa Ojomo is a senior researcher at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. He spoke during the afternoon session of NEXT19 on 20th September 2019.

Watch the full video here

In 1997 Clayton Christiansen wrote the book on disruptive innovation. But can innovation play a role in helping people live ore prosperous lives? The Institute team decided to find out.

The consumption and non-consumption economies

Let’s think about the economy differently; think of it as having two sides: consumption and non-consumption. The smallest number of people have the most wealth and therefore the best access to good resources. Many companies start by targeting this circle. You’d then think of ever larger circles, bringing in people with less wealth – and less access. These are people who would benefit from access to some resources – but they don’t have it. Often, it’s just down to money.

There are four main barriers:

• Lack of access – it’s just not available. The Nigerian President went to Germany for healthcare, because the particular treatment wasn’t available in his country.
• Lack of time – it takes too long for someone to consume the product
• Lack of money – the most obvious
• Lack of skill – some products require a certain level of skill for people to consume

How do we overcome them?

Not all innovations are created equal

Who is an innovation targeted at? Its value lies in its ability to democratise access. If we target the rich, it makes it unavailable to the poorer. How can we democratise access? Virtually everyone here has a computer in their pockets. 60 or 70 years ago, that was not the case. Computers filled rooms, and needed a highly skilled team to operate them. But we have democratised access first via the personal computer and then the smartphone. To do this, they needed to create new business models and ecosystems.

This leads us to three styles of innovation:

1. Market-creating innovations – which make products affordable and accessible. They create growth and jobs, and lead to economic development. But they need capital to create the ecosystem to support them.
2. Sustaining innovations – they make good products better. They keep economies vibrant, but they create little net growth. Look at new cameras on phones. The phone company does not need to hire new people or build new facilities to do that.
3. Efficiency innovations – they make good products cheaper. They also eliminate jobs and can negatively impact geographic regions. But they do free up capital.

This is a cycle. The final stage frees up capital for the first.

Some Examples

For example, look at mobile phones. 20 years ago selling them in Africa seemed impossible. But one man figured out a way of creating a business model that would work. When that new market emerged, it pulled in other investors and entrepreneurs, and capital. It created transformative development.

Some examples of innovations leveraging digital technology:

• Kobo360 – handing distribution and logistics by creating a truck specific to the African market, and using digital technology to connect drivers to clients.
• max.ng – they’re trying to make motorcycles safer.
• MicroEnsure – a business model to target lower income people for insurance via their phones
• Medsaf – addressing the counterfeit drugs market

Henry Ford said that the highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to do more for the betterment of life. That’s one of their guiding principles.

Watch the full video here

The post Efosa Ojomo: understanding the cycle of innovation appeared first on NEXT Conference.

Payal Arora is a professor at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, and author of The Next Billion Users. She spoke during the morning session of NEXT19 on 20th September 2019.

Watch the full video here

For the last decade Arora’s been fascinated by the internet in low income areas – the slums of India, the Favelas of Brazil.

The people there are young, and they live outside the west. They are low income – but they are upwardly mobile. There’s an exponential growth in young people in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. We expect to have 2bn people in informal settlements by 2030 – they’re criminals just by where they’re born, and they’re governed by alternative, and often criminal, structures.

The women are 25% less likely to be online than men. There are structural issues behind that – but there’s also a conscious retreat from toxic behaviours online. Women are killed in India simply because they are videoed clapping at a wedding.

Jio provides the cheapest data in the world right now, and it’s in India. The highest video content consumption is from the lowest socio-economic classes.

Myth 1: the global poor are more utility-driven than us.

If anything, they are very much like you and I. They want entertainment, music, porn, to socialise and to game. In many cases the internet leisure economy is their only leisure economy. They’re stuck in mundane, repetitive tasks in the rest of their lives.

Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs (which has some serious problems as a theory) suggests that the poor need to go through a hierarchy before they get to “wants”. We need to turn that pyramid on their head. They are driven by wants.

Myth 2: The West is imitated by the Rest

Less than 4% of people in Europe would accept a friend request from a stranger. In other parts of the world, 50% of their friends can be strangers. The majority of people in these slums see themselves as global citizens through the connections they make on these apps.

The piracy economy dictates 60 to 80% of consumption. The traitional media is out of their reach – a CD would cost a month’s wage. That is not realistic.

How about porn? The body is often a taboo subject in these communities. Sexual desire is so important – and PornHub is the major educator for many of the young. And that has serious implications – including honour killings. Yet, we shy away from researching this. The top Indian search is “sister-in-law”…

Myth 3: Trickle down tech & catch up philosophy

The idea that the west invents and gives to others is total bullshit. Look at battery life. Electricity is a luxury in many parts of the world. China is way ahead on FinTech. Singapore is breaking ground on smart city-ification. Many of the young in these communities aspire to live in Singapore.

Mike Pence, the US Vice President, said that the West was in an information war with the East. So, are you with us or against us? But the US has lost its moral authority. You cannot be both a leader and protectionist. It’s pure anti-competitive behaviour.

Myth 4: Privacy is a key driver for innovation

The next billion users have been hidden and ignored. And now they want to be seen and heard. They feel special when they are paid attention to – even by marketers. They’re often more worried about being surveilled by their family, or the local crimelords, than they are by the digital corporations.

Myth 5: Automation is our future

The idea of putting “healthcare in an app” or “education in an app” is completely the wrong direction. We need to look at technology as assistive technology – because that is what it is. Human communities are embedded in humanity.

• Multimodality matters – they pay far more for their data than we do. So they want value. That’s why a Facebook Zero failed – it was a lesser version of the app.
• Design matters – they are conspicuous consumers, because it signals status. It took Apple 12 years to catch up on the gold phone trend.
• Governance matters – they want one-stop-shops for convenience and time efficiency. They work 14 to 16 hours without breaks. Time is scarce.

We have a pessimism bias. We cannot reform that which we do not love. Fall in love with technology. It’s a marriage not an affair – you need to work on it.

Watch the full video here

The post Payal Arora: dispelling the myths about the next billion appeared first on NEXT Conference.