2011 SBS Sydney | Martin Stewart-Weeks, The Resilient State: Smarter, Connected

THE RESILIENT STATE: SMARTER, CONNECTED
Social Business Summit, Dachis Group, Sydney, March 2011
Martin Stewart-Weeks
Internet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems
Chair, Australian Social Innovation Exchange

The argument

Volatile and unpredictable change is creating massive new risks and opportunities
Dealing with those risks and opportunities successfully means navigating some big transitions (assets, institutions, infrastructure…)
At the heart of those transitions are new digital capabilities both as enablers and as critical new assets in their own right

And at the heart of those capabilities is the art and practice of connection through distributed networks of people and technology
Those distributed networks make possible new connections to people, ideas and resources which create richer and more useful shared knowledge to inform human judgment
The result is new, more resilient patterns of knowledge, action and power

Some examples

NATO’s Policy Jam
4,000 participants
10,000 logins
124 countries
5 days
10 streams
26 online hosts
75 facilitators

The Tanta Effect
“Blogging ‘turbocharged’ the ecology of intellectual discussion – enabling us to tap into the insights of people who would never have received the attention they were due back in the old days where reputations took a decade or more to build and were corralled into specialisms with little cross fertilisation and ‘contestability’ between them.”
Thanks to Nicholas Gruen

Some theory

The Big Shift in Three Waves
1
Infrastructure
2
Knowledge flows
3
Institutions
“…a world in which citizens gain political power relative to political institutions. A world in which talented employees capture economic value relative to the firm. A world in which consumers have increased market power relative to vendors.”
“…innovations in institutional architectures such as the ability to foster and participate in creation spaces where performance accelerates as more participants join” p58

“The challenge is designing and managing creation spaces is to provide scalable environments that can accommodate a large and growing number of participants and create the conditions for them to learn faster from each other as the number of participants grows “
p130

Push-based institutions are the antithesis of serendipity. In a world of carefully scripted push programs, unexpected encounters are generally treated as signs of inefficiency and worrisome unpredictability.
p107

A new theory of the business

We have to be willing to risk looking like we don’t know the answer or maybe even the question, We’ve got to wean ourselves from overdependence on the expertise we’ve laboured to hard to accumulate.
p118

Some more examples

ExpertNet

.
Cure Violence takes a 21st-century approach to “meeting people where they’re at” and invites the messengers to ‘communicate with the tools they’re already using like social networking utilities and SMS technology to distribute firsthand text and multimedia responses to violence in their own cities. Users can comment and connect with one another and affect change through actionable content submitted by Cure Violence partners and local and national organizations who adopt it to organize and mobilize. Cure Violence content will be accessible via web, mobile device, broadcast, public projection and exhibitions.

Dialogue Cafe
Lisbon
Rio de Janeiro
Tel Aviv
Ramallah
Toronto
Amsterdam
Berlin
London

Speculations

Control?
Resilience?
l

Much of this economy is formed around distributed systems, rather than centralised structures. It handles complexity not by standardisation and simplification imposed from the centre, but by distributing complexity to the margins
Open Book of Social Innovation, The Young Foundation, NESTA, 2010

Social innovation doesn’t have fixed boundaries: it happens in all sectors, public, non-profit and private. Indeed, much of the most creative action is happening at the boundaries between sectors, in fields as diverse as fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming, waste reduction and restorative justice.

We define social innovations as new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words, they are innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act.

Line = a relationship between two people
more embedded = central
less embedded = periphery
Node = a person
Centre and edge 1
“embedded”: the degree to which a person is connected within a network

Centre and edge 2
“We have grown used to the centre taking more and more of the decisions, despite the fact that in almost all cases the knowledge, expertise and experience required to inform those decisions are at the edge.”
Beth Noveck, author of Wiki Government and former Deputy CTO, Open and Transparent Government, The White House

Dispersing power, authority and control

Communities and networks, as well as organisations and institutions

Systematic serendipity

Coherence, Scale, Accountability

The
Public Purpose
Sector

Resilience has become the central task of governing well. The ability to connect highly distributed networks of people, expertise and assets for common action is turning out to be critical to the chances of success.

Four dimensions of the resilient state
Managing transitions
Renewing the instincts and institutions of self-government
The Resilient State
Improving the art and practice of connection
Redefining the relationship between the centre and the edge

2011 SBS Sydney | Martin Stewart-Weeks, The Resilient State: Smarter, Connected

by Dachis Group on May 24, 2011

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2011 SBS Sydney | Martin Stewart-Weeks, The Resilient State: Smarter, Connected — Presentation Transcript