The Idea Hive

Changing For Good: Design Thinking, meet Sustainability

nancy — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:47:56 +0000

Part of growing up, if we are lucky, is the ability to see issues from other perspectives, to develop our natural empathy and embrace the value of taking the long view. Part of growing up, if we are not lucky, is becoming more entrenched in our beliefs and approaches to problems, leaving us stuck in a rut of rote learning, craving easy answers. One way to prevent mental constipation is to keep learning, to keep challenging one’s prejudices and beliefs and continually search for new ways of being effective in the world.

Time to change the frame?

In 2010 Helene and Nancy met at a workshop for Open Space Technology, a kind of facilitation that essentially turns the typical conference on its head, by putting a meeting’s participants in charge of the agenda. This technique, which is now popular under the terms BarCamp or UnConference, is a form of fundamental redesign that turns an entrenched, one-to-many experience into an opportunity for co-creation. It occurred to both of us that this is just one example of how a “typical” event can be fundamentally redesigned. What other processes could profit from redesign?

This wonderful TED talk by IDEO’s Tim Brown summarizes how a different view of design, a transition from design to design thinking, can heighten impact and offer new ways of approaching global issues:

During the Open Space training, we realized that we shared a lot of interests. For example, both of us recently went back to school, and we saw in each other’s experience and knowledge an opportunity that we wanted to explore further. The idea for a workshop was born that would combine the application of Helene’s specialty, Design Thinking, with Nancy’s focus on social and environmental Sustainability.

One goal of the workshop is to challenge participants to break out of their thinking “comfort zone,” just as we, as co-teachers, challenge each other.

Helene notes, “ I was very surprised to be challenged by a VP of a nameless corporation recently who did not understand why sustainability should be relevant to his business! I am very excited that working with Nancy on the workshop will allow us to go in depth into diverse aspects of sustainability and hopefully help others understand why is it so critical.”

Nancy admits, “ Yes, I am guilty of some of the prejudices that Tim Brown calls out in his talk: that design was about uber hip dudes in angular glasses making cool objects look nifty and more expensive. Tim’s talk and meeting Helene helped me realize that design thinking is part of the mind shift that is so essential to tackling the issues inherent in sustainability. The tools of design thinking, including ideation, prototyping and ethnographic inquiry, have opened my eyes to possible new approaches to sustainability.”

Our workshop, Design Thinking for a Sustainable World, offered over three days this March at UC Berkeley Extension, will introduce design thinking and sustainability with an eye to helping people from all disciplines become more effective change agents at a time when true, radical change is needed. But we won’t be lecturing about sustainability and design thinking…our goal is to make this a true, hands-on workshop.

As Tim Brown puts it so well, we believe that “Design will have its greatest impact when it’s taken out of the hands of designers and put into the hands of everyone.” Please join us.

Find more information and register at http://extension.berkeley.edu/catalog/course628.html.

If you have any questions regarding the workshop email nancy [at] theideahive.com or guide [at] strategicinsights.biz.

Photo: 08-12-06 © eva serrabassa via iStockphoto

Constraining Consumption: Can Asia Reshape Capitalism?

nancy — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:00:10 +0000

Given the limits of our planet and a population that just topped 7 billion, it may be past time to think about alternatives to an economic system that depends so utterly on continuous consumption to remain viable. On November 14, The Idea Hive is hosting a speaker, Chandran Nair, who will offer an alternative vision for the success of the powerhouse economies of Asia, Earth’s most populous continent.

Mr. Nair offers an alternative paradigm for governments, business leaders, and academics to consider. He argues that economic policy needs to be realigned to avoid the catastrophic outcomes that could result from the relentless promotion of a consumption-led growth model in Asia, at a time when resource constraints are only too apparent. His book, Consumptionomics: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism and Saving the Planet, calls for bans on some forms of consumption, re-pricing of resources, and for the state to play a bigger role.

Chandran Nair is the Founder and CEO of the Global Institute For Tomorrow (GIFT), an independent social venture think tank based in Asia. Its key goal is to guide corporations and their leaders on how to meet the challenges of doing business in Asia, with particular emphasis on the role of social investment, geopolitics, leadership development, business ethics, government and civil society. He is a staunch advocate of a more sustainable approach to development in Asia, and has helped governments and corporations instill these principles into their key decision-making processes through his work at GIFT, individual advisory services and speaking engagements throughout the world. Mr Nair is also Chairman and Co-Founder of Avantage Ventures, a boutique social investment advisory firm based in Hong Kong.

Please join us for a wide ranging and provocative discussion with Chandran Nair. Constraining Consumption: Asia’s Role in Reshaping Capitalism takes place Monday, November 14 — reception and networking at 7pm; lecture begins at 7:30 — at the Hub SoMa in downtown San Francisco. Click here to register.

Where Moguls in the Making Meet Up and Gear Up: Triangle Entrepreneurship Week

nancy — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 07:32:26 +0000

The cliche of the entrepreneur is the solitary visionary, up on a mountaintop or buried in a garage, creating the next Apple, Seventh Generation…or Edsel. But even the most focused entrepreneur needs to kick back and talk with others sometimes, and that’s where Triangle Entrepreneurship Week comes in.

This November 14-18, entrepreneurs from all walks of startup business will come together in Raleigh, North Carolina for the first ever Triangle Entrepreneurship Week. Co-founded by Idea Hive member Sarah Wechsberg, the event aims to increase awareness of North Carolina’s startup entrepreneur community, provide a networking platform, and foster creativity. The event focuses on the local entrepreneur ecosystem and brings together entrepreneurs, funding sources, and the local support system for business innovation.

Many sessions have already sold out — a credit to the entrepreneurial vision of the event’s creators — but all are encouraged to check out the sessions on the TEW website. Sarah will be moderating a sold-out session, ”Starting up Green,” featuring two successful local green companies along with the Executive Director of Green Plus, a local green certification company .

Participants will be able to:

Pitch Investors,
Obtain actionable information and
Network with fellow entrepreneurs.

Speakers include Bob Young (Founder, Red Hat/Lulu), John Harthorne (Founder, MassChallenge), Brooks
Bell (Brooks Bell Interactive) and Heather Hesketh (Founder, hesketh.com) among others.

Follow Triangle Entrepreneurship Week on Twitter @TriangleEW; Sarah tweets regularly about food and health issues as @TheEcoFoodie.

The Economics of Water: Post Abundance

nancy — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 15:51:59 +0000

Can the problem of water scarcity be solved by the creation of appropriate incentives? Can the current supply side model be altered to focus on balancing supply and demand, creating a “proper” price for that most essential of fluids? In a recent thought-provoking discussion, economist David Zetland laid out some proposals that may help to balance efficiency, effectiveness and equity in the market for the world’s water. It is possible that if water were properly priced in a perfect market with perfect knowledge, we would achieve nirvana, or at least an economist’s dream of the perfect market.

For some, abundance is already over.

Zetland referred frequently to his new book, The End of Abundance: economic solutions to water scarcity, as he spoke at the Hub Bay Area on Monday, July 1; the discussion was co-presented by PresidioWater and The Idea Hive.With no trace of irony, Zetland’s book opens with what, to me, is a startling assertion (in italics):

“This book uses economic tools to tackle the end of abundance and manage the scarcity that results from demand exceeding supply. These tools vary from the familiar (markets and prices) to the subtle (behavioral cues, property rights, and community associations). In all cases, they are meant to decentralize decisions, expand choices for individuals, and improve the way our societies manage water. The tools use economics because scarcity lies at the heart of economic thought and economists have a long history of managing scarcity to produce happy individuals and successful nations.” (Pdf pp. 2-3)

I was unaware of economists’ long history of producing happiness. In a footnote Zetland acknowledges, presumably tongue in cheek, that “Lawyers, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, political scientists and others also have good ideas on occasion.” Phew.

Let’s set aside the heroism of economists and focus on his suggestions. Zetland noted that the price of water should reflect its scarcity; now it only reflects the (inexpensive) cost of delivery. For example, water is more expensive in San Francisco, since it is delivered from far away, than it is in parched Las Vegas, where Lake Mead is close to the city. If the price of water reflected its scarcity, then Zetland posits that behavior change (watering lawns, filling pools, etc.) would follow. “We’d consume less water when prices go up in the same way that we consume less gasoline when prices go up.” Recent studies indicate that for gas prices at least, this assumption simply does not hold up. Zetland discusses how he would set water prices here.

Some Shocking Assertions
Zetland is immersed in the minutiae of water management issues, and the detailed arguments in his book bear careful study, but also some critical thinking. Many of his assertions sound good on paper; the dismal science of economics is famous for setting aside inconvenient facts of human behavior, or, say, geographic barriers or greenhouse gas emissions, in favor of models and graphs that predict the interaction of two variables when the rest of the world is controlled for. He makes some blanket statements that can rush by a bit too quickly but could be questioned, such as, “Food shortages and water shortages are both caused by prices that are too low or policies that block trade from surplus to deficit areas.”

Triple Bottom Nothing
Much of Zetland’s discussion revolved around how to integrate economic incentives into the management of scarce water. At the talk, Zetland noted the primacy of policy over regulating behavior, “If you have good water policies, you don’t have to worry about what people are doing.” This dovetails with his dismissal of Triple Bottom Line thinking, where equal value is placed on benefit to people, profit and planet, as largely ineffective, stating, “If it makes economic sense it should make environmental sense.” While that is quite possibly true in a perfect market with perfect pricing, reality has often required some sort of intervention to ensure that social and environmental benefit is not put on the back burner.

Zetland says that his approaches to water and scarcity will work around the world, but that developing countries have additional issues, such as corruption. In looking at the US political structure, it is tempting to retort that here corruption has simply been institutionalized as influence peddling.

Bottled Water As Different Product
Zetland is highly knowledgeable about the politics of bottled water, from consumer behavior to drink companies’ alleged abuse of local sources. Some activists may be scandalized by Zetland’s dismissal of bottled water as an important focus in coming to a different valuation of water. He minimized the importance of bottled water controversy, saying that its biggest problem is plastic litter, and in this it is not unique, saying that bottled water is a different product with different uses than tap water -the two are not comparable, economically.

Despite a somewhat siloed approach, Zetland’s book has a wealth of clearly explained economic concepts and is a valuable resource for the environmentaly concerned who want to drill down in this area of policy and management. The End of Abundance: economic solutions to water scarcity (in both paper and electronic versions) is available via his blog, aguanomics.com.

Photo: 07-18-09 © Anantha Vardhan via iStockphoto

Evolving Business: Time to Reboot?

nancy — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 21:16:42 +0000

“We must now move faster with the implementation of today’s organisational change agenda and, at the same time, work out how to disrupt our economic and business models to reboot capitalism for the 21st century.” John Elkington, founder & executive chairman, Volans; co-founder, SustainAbility

Time to reboot?

In the good/bad old days, when your computer froze, you hit the famous Control-Alt-Delete keys to reboot the machine. Yes, you probably lost some data, but you were able to return to work. And maybe in the interim you realized that some of that lost data wasn’t that important, anyway.

Is there a Control-Alt-Delete for capitalism? Can we preserve the best of business while truly evolving to deal with the complex challenges that can no longer be ignored? Can the concepts of sustainability and capitalism cooperate?

On June 15, The Idea Hive and the California College for the Arts present a distinguished panel to talk about reinventing business in the 21st century.

Please join us on the evening of Wednesday, June 15th, 6.30pm, at California College of the Arts, for a conversation among Rory Bakke, John Elkington, Gil Friend, and Kirsten Ritchie, to hear their thoughts on what comes next and how we can get there. Dr Stuart Candy will be our moderator for the evening.

Go here for speaker bios and more details. We look forward to seeing you!

Photo: via Wikimedia

Thinking in Context, Collectively

nancy — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:40:03 +0000

This week we gave a brief presentation on Systemic Thinking Tools for Social Impact to a group at the coworking space Hub SOMA in downtown San Francisco. We introduced systemic thinking and the definition of complexity via the wonderful cynefin framework originated by Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge (whose blog posts are wide-ranging and always engaging.) We talked about conversation mapping, a systemic thinking tool that draws out the wisdom that lives at all levels of a group, and then we all took a few minutes to create a conversation map on the glass walls of the conference room (don’t worry, the ink was erasable.)

Here’s the presentation:

Systemic Thinking Tools for Social Impact

View more presentations from theideahive.

All in all, a great way to spend a lunch hour.

Future swarming with The Idea Hive

thebees — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 05:26:13 +0000

Welcome to 20 years from now. Believe it or not, newspapers are still being created and you are holding the January 12, 2031 edition of The New California Times in your hands…

On January 12th, we hosted an evening of light-hearted activities around a vision of the SF Bay Area’s future. Some 40 creative visionaries of all ages and interests gathered at Hub Berkeley to meet one another, play, and stretch their imaginations toward the future.

(click through for more pictures from the evening)

We started the evening with a movement exercise to shake up connections between words and action, to create room for new neural pathways, and ready ourselves for fun on a dark winter evening.

Next, we split into smaller groups to author five sections of the January 12, 2031 edition of The New California Times, in under 2 hours, with cut up magazines, glue sticks, markers, post-its, and our imagination as our tools.

In general, the younger participants in our workshop were more apocalyptic minded; others focused on attainable initiatives to move the Bay Area forward. Much discussion on what form the “paper” would take: virtual? customized video? directly beamed in? Depending on which article you read, the future will be an egalitarian paradise or a hellhole of tech gone wild, where human values are ascendant and…we have a lot of the same problems as today:

Global: Tesla Air Launches Electric Fleet
Education: Kids Design Their Own Curriculum Starting at Age 8
Fashion: Spray-on Clothes Reveal All
Technology: Consumers Seek Refuge from Increasing Electronic Interference
Science: Ozone Reversal Approaching Dangerous Levels
Global: India’s Standard of Living Surpasses U.S.; Now Highest in World
Politics: Universality Party Leaders Pledge to Govern From 5 Dimensions
Business: Back to Basics: Bartering Is Here To Stay
Innovation: “Never Forget Again” Brain Back-up System “Change Your hat, change your mind”
Ads: “Mindfulness in a minute” neural re-patterning, Dermal nutritional patches, Cat cloning

No one knows what’s in our future. But last Wednesday, we affirmed that there are plenty of creative visionary people who care, and who will continue their work now with an eye to creating a better future. What’s in your headline of 2031?

Check out the photos of the evening (below) and we look forward to seeing you at our next event!

(click through for more pictures from the evening)

The Wisdom Gap and Our Future

nancy — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 23:40:03 +0000

I’ve been enjoying playing with the Google Books NGram Viewer, where one can graph the occurrence of words or phrases in millions of volumes of printed materials over decades and even centuries. I wondered what it might show about the growth of human knowledge, as opposed to the growth of human chatter (aka data points.) One theory of information is encapsulated in the Knowledge Pyramid, which assumes that there is a hierarchy of learning with a vast foundation of data supporting a narrower layer of information, which with time and care becomes knowledge and then, magically, a slender tip of wisdom. I plugged the four strata words into the Ngram Viewer to come up with the graph below. Judging (unscientifically) by this image, it seems that one thing that has not grown is the tip of the pyramid, the wisdom part. Indeed, we don’t even seem to be thinking more about growing wisdom, as this chart shows what might be called a wisdom gap since 1800 (click on image to enlarge):

The "Wisdom Gap" 1800-2008

While a preoccupation with knowledge has been fairly steady over the past 200 years, somewhere around 1918 (not coincidentally, I fear, the end of World War I) the line for “data” crossed over and surpassed the instances of the word “wisdom.” “Data” continued its streak, besting “knowledge” in the mid 1960s, and even beating out “information”for a while in the 1980s. As occurrences of “data” and “information” have soared, “wisdom” and “knowledge” have not. Is our faith in data processing misplaced as a measure of human progress? Or is our stockpile of wisdom not growing despite the soaring supply of available data? What’s missing? There doesn’t seem to be much of a correlation between the growth of data (or even the growth of population) and the accumulation of wisdom. Maybe there needs to be some tweaking to our approach to, or our belief in, wisdom, to build a brighter future.

This month, let’s get together to see if we can wise up around the future. On January 12 at The Hub Berkeley, The Idea Hive is hosting an evening of playful and participatory activities, a brain swarm around the Bay Area’s future. Creative collaboration? We hope so. An entertaining and interactive evening? Sure! Wisdom in the making? Maybe, with your help. Hope to see you there!

To RSVP for Swarming the Future, click: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1137134199/efblike

New Year’s Greeting from The Idea Hive of the Future

thebees — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 18:15:57 +0000

As we approach the New Year, we’ve been thinking about the future. Waaay into the future. What will The Idea Hive’s clients and services look like in the next 1,000 years?

We brainstormed our company tag line for each century. What’s on The Idea Hive t-shirt of 2111, 2211, and beyond? Take a look…

Creativity is a strange beast. We often think that the more options we have, the more creative we can become. But choices and the lack of boundaries can be paralyzing; sometimes adding a little structure sets us free. By limiting words to a t-shirt tagline while freeing our vision to go to a 1,000 year time horizon, we hoped to liberate ourselves from the chains of the possible….and have a little fun.

Acknowledging our whole-ness is a key structural element: this New Year’s greeting was created not just in our heads, but also by playing with color and image (different colored sticky notes arrayed across two rooms) and by physically walking along and around the 1,000-year stretch of time.

As an added bonus, with the structure of a time limit, in this case a two-hour group session, our collaboration benefited while overanalysis and egos were (mostly!) kept in control.

The 1,000 year exercise was chosen to help us go beyond the predictable, to the intersection of creativity and systemic thinking.

What will your organization’s 3011 t-shirt say?

The Boundaries of ‘I’

nancy — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 17:57:31 +0000

What are the boundaries of your petri dish?

I re-learned a fascinating fact the other day, thanks to an article on fermented foods in the New Yorker: 90% of the DNA in our bodies belongs to microorganisms. This led me to ponder one of the tenets of systemic thinking: the importance of boundary judgments when we are defining a system. Do “I” end at my own DNA, or are we, the microbes and me, also I?

Defining the boundaries of your system is one of the most important ethical questions an organization can make. Draw your boundaries too narrowly: “I’m only going to measure up to the office door because that’s the easiest thing to do!” and you risk engaging in solipsistic NIMBYism. This “not my problem” attitude leads to watersheds that someone else should clean up and carbon emissions that belong to no one. We see the problems that result when cities parse the energy use for which they are responsible, and when countries, such as the U.S., export their carbon-producing industries all over the world and then fail to take responsibility for buying the finished products. (See the graphic on Raj Patel’s blog and on Justmeans — seems that consumption-based CO2 accounting would help us define some problems differently.)

The advantage to careful, inclusive boundary judgments is that our options are expanded and more effective. If we see the microbes within our body as separate from us, we miss a major element that could help to heal and keep us healthy. Maybe that also applies to our business systems?

Photo: via NASA http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/1999/ast14dec99_1/