Global System Architects – Tomorrow’s New Power Brokers

Posted by admin on June 24th, 2011
Global System Architects – Emerging New Power Brokers
I often describe the future with human-like characteristics. By doing so, it helps me think through our relationship with the future in novel ways. So here is an example of this:
The future hates complacency. It hates complacency so much so that it has built-in self-sabotaging mechanisms to continually hold our feet to the fire. It will not allow us to shift into neutral. If we are not moving forward, we are moving backwards. There is no middle ground.
People are at their best when they are challenged. If we don’t challenge ourselves, the future has a way of giving us challenges anyway. There is great value in our struggles and human nature has shown us that we only tend to value the things we struggle to achieve.
We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments. Forward accomplishments help erase past problems. They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest undertakings in the future will come in this area.
Yes, I understand this sounds a bit abstract, but bear with me.
Our need for future accomplishments will also create a need for better systems to regulate, manage, and leverage the activities surrounding them. These systems will need to be global in nature, and over time, a few will emerge to challenge the power of nations. That time is coming very soon.
From National Systems to Global Systems
The ringing of the bell marks the opening and closing of each day on the New York Stock Exchange.  For decades this symbolic beginning and ending of the workday has set the pace for business in the US.  For decades, work only seemed to mattered when the money people were watching.
However, that all changed once the Internet gave day-traders the ability to manage accounts around the world on the Tokyo, Honk Kong, Indian, Athens, and London stock exchanges. Start and stop times suddenly became blurred, and eventually went away.  The metronome of business began to pulse to a different beat, and the once distinct start and stop times of Wall Street ended, it created never-ending business routines framed around a non-stop marathon of opportunities.
This ever quickening pace of business has given strategists a whole new playbook, which has, in turn, forced companies to devise new systems and strategies to not only give them a competitive edge, but in the process, trump the competition.
Government, on the other hand, has virtually no competition, and consequentially, little motivation to innovate.  Like a lumbering elephant alongside the sleek cat-like speed of business, government has done little to keep pace with change, and even less to experiment, innovate, and improve.
Our governmental systems are evolving at speeds that are exponentially slower than the
businesses that use them.
People in government are synchronized to a radically different clock. They are neither driven to compete nor incentivized to reinvent themselves.  With their change-resistant inertia firmly anchored in the past, internal government systems have grown increasingly dysfunctional, sparking a growing voice of discontent among business veterans.  Deteriorating education, increasingly expensive healthcare, a legal system with an unfathomable number of laws, seemingly corrupt financial institutions, incomprehensible tax codes, and an adversarial attitude toward change have all paved the way for a new breed of governing entities to emerge.
FedEx as a Global System
The original idea for FedEx came when Fred Smith wrote a term paper as an undergraduate at Yale about a very simple observation: As society automated, as people began to put computers in banks to cancel checks, and people began to put sophisticated electronics in airplanes, the corporate world was going to need a completely different logistics system.
Fred was working as a charter pilot at the Tweed New Haven Airport flying to various airports in the New England states talking to pilots who worked for many of the high-tech companies like IBM and Xerox and found out what a difficult proposition it was to keep their field-service engineers and their parts and logistics systems operating. Many of the corporate airplanes had to be repurposed to fly computer and machine parts around whenever something broke down.
Several years later, after a stint in the Marines, Fred revisited the problem and found out that things had become significantly worse.
Emery Air Freight was trying to solve the exact same problem, but was trying to use an infrastructure built around passenger planes, which weren’t designed to handle freight. So they were force-fitting the rapid movement of high-value-added and high-technology products into a transportation system that wasn’t designed for it.
So FedEx was proposed as a customized system to solve this problem. To do this they had to have a nationwide clearinghouse – an integrated system with trucks and planes to give the level of service that customers needed.
For their network, they used the Federal Reserve Bank clearing house system, where all payments converge on a central location to complete the transaction, as their model.  And that’s where the Federal Express name came from. Fred wanted something that sounded substantial and nationwide, and American Express had already been taken.
It was all made possible when the government began to deregulate the airline industry. Prior to that time, both surface and air transportation was erroneously based on linear routes, with complicated systems for making connections.
It all came together during 1977-78 when the airlines were deregulated. A couple years later in 1980, the US federal government deregulated interstate transportation. Because the Postal Service had a monopoly on delivering mail, document delivery wasn’t allowed from a legal standpoint until 1978. The standards changed in 1978 as to what constituted an item that was covered by the postal monopoly. Merrill Lynche and a few others waged an ongoing assault through lobbyists and the press saying, telling Congress that the USPS service was not acceptable.  At the time, Merrill was being hamstrung in its efforts to move bond “Blue Books” and other types of financial prospectuses.
Bowing under the pressure, congress exempted certain types of publications and documents from the postal monopoly in legislation called the Private Express Statutes. As long as a company was delivering something overnight, and charged twice as much as the First Class postage stamps, then it was exempt from the Postal monopoly. So that defined the business FedEx went into.
Backed with venture capital funding amounting to $91 million, along with another $4 million that Fred Smith had personally received as an inheritance, FedEx started out with 14 planes, initially flying between 25 cities.
In 1985 FedEx began regularly scheduled flights to Europe, adding service to Japan in 1988, the Middle East in 1989, and the rest of the world in 1991.
In just 18 years FedEx had become a global delivery system, not unlike many of our other global systems, most of which took centuries to develop.
Eight Current Global Systems
Global systems are a fascinating area of study because they provide a context so few ever consider.
When we look at early systems such as written communications with Phoenician cuneiform, Mayan numerals, or the systems that had to be in place for engineering and building the Egyptian pyramids, it’s easy to see that system thinking has been around a long time.  But global systems are a more recent innovation.
The most obvious advantage to global systems are the efficiencies they create.  As an example, when a person who has spent their life hunting and fishing for food is able to walk to a store and purchase food, they suddenly have far more time in their life to do other things.
Similarly, when a company who has had to make painful arrangements for the delivery of goods from the other side of the world can begin working with FedEx who provides painless global delivery, the company suddenly has time to focus on other critical problems.
Here are eight examples of global systems and their development:
1. Global Trade – In 1264 when Marco Polo traveled the fabled “Silk Road” from Europe to what is now Beijing, China, he made some of the first inroads into creating a system for global trade.
2. Global Sea Transportation – On the evening of August 3, 1492, Columbus set sail under the Spanish flag from Palos, Spain with three ships on his journey to America.  This historic journey triggered an age of exploration, but more importantly gave rise to a new era of global sea transportation system.
3. Global Measurement System – In his 1670 book, the Observationes diametrorum solis et lunae apparentium, French scientist Gabriel Mouton proposed the basis for what would later become the metric system.  Mouton described a decimal system of measurement based on the circumference of the Earth, creating a global measurement system recognized (although not fully adopted) by countries around the world.
4. Global News Service – While the telegraph was still in the early stages of development, in 1848 Paul Reuter founded the Reuters News Agency using carrier pigeons to provide the missing link between Berlin and Paris. The carrier pigeons were much faster than the post train, giving Reuter faster access to stock news from the Paris stock exchange. In 1851, the carrier pigeons were retired with the installation of a direct telegraph line. Paul Reuter played a critical role in the development of today’s global news services.
5. Global Time Zones – In October 1884, at the request of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur, the International Meridian Conference was held in Washington, D.C. to form the basis for times and time zones around the world. Twenty-five countries were represented by 41 delegates to establish what has become today’s global time zone system.
6. Global Air Transportation – Charles Lindbergh, better known as “Lucky Lindy,” became famous for completing the first solo, non-stop flight across the Atlantic, from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, to Paris in 1927 in the “Spirit of St. Louis.” This single act ushered in the age of global air transportation.
7. Global Navigation System – Launched in 1978, the GPS system serves as a Global Navigation Satellite System utilizing a constellation of 24 medium Earth orbit satellites that transmit precise microwave signals enabling a GPS receiver to determine its location, speed and direction.
8. The Internet – In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee developed the Internet protocols that would become the World Wide Web, as a hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Switzerland. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined as Web technology spread.
While these are just a sampling of the global systems that now exist, many more are on their way.  In fact, the Internet has become the perfect platform for global systems to be designed, tested, and flourish.
Eight Emerging Global Systems
Here are some examples of global systems that are currently emerging online.  I think it is safe to say that none of these were started with the intention of becoming “global systems,” but in the DNA of their business structures, they now exist as global systems in the making.
1. Global Search – Google, Yahoo, Baidu
2. Global Encyclopedia – Wikipedia
3. Global Atlas – Google Earth, Google Maps, Mapquest
4. Global Social Networking – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Hi5
5. Global Video Archive – YouTube, Vimeo, MetaCafe
6. Global 3-D Virtual World – Second Life, World of Warcraft, Club Penguin
7. Global Marketplace – eBay, Amazon, Craig’s List, Buy.com
8. Global Music Store – iTunes, last.fm, Amazon
Pay close attention to the nature of this list.  We have just made the transition from top-down organizational structures to bottom-up organic systems that are participant driven and constantly evolving.
The driving force behind developing new global systems is that each one represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity.  Yes, in addition to making life easier, they make great economic sense.
The next wave of global systems, however, will not be run by corporations, but rather by a new breed of what I call Experimental Nation States, governmental-like entities that experiment with new ways for managing the world.
Eight Future Global Systems
Future global systems will emerge from today’s existing industry associations. Many already have members living in multiple countries, and many seek to balance their decision-making councils with representation from each member country.
Here are eight possible future global systems:
1. Global accounting standards for publicly traded companies
2. Global currency
3. Global airport authority to manage airport standards and policies around the world
4. Global oceans authority for managing everything that happens in international waters
5. Global genealogy system and standards
6. Global ownership authority to govern standards and regulations, for personal ownership rights
7. Global ethics standards
8. Global patent system
Many of these organizations already exist on some level. But over time, the organizations that manage global systems will grow in influence and authority and begin to usurp the power of nations.
As an example, WIPO, the World Intellectual Property Organization is responsible for bridging the chasm between existing intellectual property laws that exist in nations around the world. Even with WIPO in place there are huge problems with competing rules, laws, and standards in the world of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
If we start with the vision that sometime in the future, a person will be able to file a patent and it will be universally recognized and honored around the world, the natural question becomes, who will that organization be and what will it take for them to achieve that level of clout and authority?
By its very nature, any global system aspiring for power will become a threat to existing national organizations. The evolution of global systems will involve countless hard fought battles against their current member base. Even though the need for global systems will be billed as a solution for the bias, fraud, and self interest of nations and the corporate interests they represent, it will be more complicated than that.
In some cases, the corruption and self-interest inside the leadership of global system councils will be greater than the corruption inside the counties they represent. This is simply the nature of this type of authority.
Defining moments will occur when the global organizations begin to challenge the authority of their national counterparts. In some cases the organizations will be set up as e-democracies with members voting on every key issue.
Global System Architects – Tomorrow’s Great Power Brokers
One hundred years from now, what will be the most powerful entities in the world?
Will corporate CEO’s have more power and control than leaders of individual countries? Will religious organizations, wielding their international clout, begin to usurp the authority of their host nations? Will groupings of countries such as the European Union, OPEC, and the UN supersede the power of their member states? Will non-governmental organizations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and perhaps even ICANN rise in influence to a point where they can usurp the authority of individual countries? Will the economic ties of large professional organizations, such as IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers – currently with 365,000 members worldwide), transcend the authority of the countries where their members live?
In the past, the power of a nation was considered the ability to defeat an enemy and protect its own people. But power today is more about the ability to influence and control others, even though a few still cling to the notion that it’s about defeating the enemy.
In the future, a few dominant countries will continue to serve as the global police to quash uprisings and resolve disputes. But as communication systems improve, we will see fewer and fewer willing to openly wage war with an enemy.
Most of the power shifts between now and 2050 will result from subversive economic battles, and the ability to control or disrupt revenue streams. For the disruptors, the tools for creating chaos are becoming more destructive, and soon a single individual with the right kind of gear will be able to shut down, perhaps even destroy, an entire nation.
The power centers of the future will be the countries with systems most adept at competing in the global marketplace. Large countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India, Japan, England, and USA will still play major roles, but smaller countries will have a distinct advantage with their ability to quickly adapt and experiment with new approaches.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Global System Architects 771

I often describe the future with human-like characteristics. By doing so, it helps me think through our relationship with the future in novel ways. So here is an example of this:

The future hates complacency. It hates complacency so much so that it has built-in self-sabotaging mechanisms to continually hold our feet to the fire. It will not allow us to shift into neutral. If we are not moving forward, we are moving backwards. There is no middle ground.

People are at their best when they are challenged. If we don’t challenge ourselves, the future has a way of giving us challenges anyway. There is great value in our struggles and human nature has shown us that we only tend to value the things we struggle to achieve.

We are currently out of balance between backward-looking problem-solving and forward-looking accomplishments. Forward accomplishments help erase past problems. They solve problems in a different way. We need more forward-looking accomplishments, and our greatest undertakings in the future will come in this area.

Yes, I understand this sounds a bit abstract, but bear with me.

Our need for future accomplishments will also create a need for better systems to regulate, manage, and leverage the activities surrounding them. These systems will need to be global in nature, and over time, a few will emerge to challenge the power of nations. That time is coming very soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, people making a difference, powerful idea, prediction, technology trends 7 Comments »

Building a Rapid Job-Creation Engine

Posted by admin on June 17th, 2011
Building a Rapid Job-Creation Engine
Two hundred years ago, the most stable jobs involved the needs of a community and the work of a skilled craftsman to meet those needs. People holding jobs such as cobblers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and butchers found themselves in high demand.
But those jobs hold very little relevance in today’s world. So is there such a thing as a “forever” job, a position that will endure forever through time? Will we always need policemen, firemen, teachers, farmers, doctors, and nurses, or is it possible that those professions will also go away?
So if we start with the premise that there are no such thing as a forever job, that all jobs will eventually fade into the sunset, we must assume new jobs will be needed to take their place. And with the pace of life constantly speeding up, we must also consider the possibility that jobs will disappear far faster in the future than they do today. If that is the case, we will need a job-creation engine that can equally match or exceed the rate of job decay.
In the future, people will worry far less about how safe their current job is and far more about where there next job will be coming from.
For this reason I would like to suggest a 4-part approach for systematizing a rapid job-creation engine.
Putting it in Perspective
A recent survey conducted by the Women Impacting Public Policy organization concluded that small businesses will account for 93% of all hiring this year. At the same time, money needed for hiring and business expansion has become increasingly hard to get. A recent New York Times survey showed that in the third quarter of 2010, only five percent of small businesses even bothered applying for a loan.
As presidential politics moves into full gear the demand for new jobs will the battle cry heard throughout the country. When you listen to the banter, it’s important to note that the same laws that were devised to protect workers in the past are the same laws that are now preventing companies from hiring in the future.
Hiring people today is a complicated process encumbered with layer upon layer of rules and regulations, and for the company, a seemingly never ending stream of financial obligations. The average U.S. job comes with over $10,000 in hidden obligations that workers generally never see.
My intent, however, is not to assign blame for things done poorly in the past. Rather, the forces of change are demanding new approaches.
From a job-seekers perspective it’s hard to understand, but companies have an obligation to hire the fewest number of people they can get away with. They have made commitments to their shareholders, current staff, and customer base, and these commitments form the boundaries around which the business makes its current decisions.
Any company’s first order of business is to survive, and because of this they have very little latitude for risk-taking. For this reason, the vast majority of all risk-taking in business happens inside the small and early stage companies. They simply have less to lose.
The obvious question to ask is how to channel funding and resources to the risk-takers, and do it in a way that makes sense both for the loaners and the loanees.
As automation and technology continues to eat away at our current job-base, the discussion will change from “do we need to make a change?” to “how quickly can we make it happen?”
The risk of doing nothing will soon outweigh even the high risks of investing in startup businesses. So here is the 4-part approach I would like to propose:
Part One – Create a Standard for the Minimal Fundable Enterprise
In case you hadn’t gotten the memo, there are no ready sources of money for startup ventures. Yes, it may be possible to find private investors or talk family and friends into making an investment, but the time and opportunity costs of obtaining this money puts it out of reach of all but a fractional percentage of startups.
This doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with a particular new business model. Rather, the process is so ill-defined and so non-systematized that few can pilot their way through to launching a functional startup.
The fact remains, when there is no money for the new kids on the block, the advantage goes to the incumbents, and the incumbents aren’t hiring.
So how can we change this?
I would like to propose the idea of establishing a baseline for the “minimal fundable enterprise.” To achieve this status, an aspiring startup will need to orient their thinking around five basic proofs:
1. Proof of domain expertise. A demonstrable understanding of an existing industry, market, technology, and their customers.
2. Proof of concept. A functional working prototype of the product or service being offered.
3. Proof of sales. Completion of at least a small number of sales to prove that customers are willing to pay for the product.
4. Proof of market. Understanding the size and nature of a future market is critical to a startup. Who are the decision-makers, how many of them are there, and what are the logistics of reaching them?
5. Proof of scalability. Businesses are based on repeatable processes that can be scaled to greater levels over time. This may involve a range of scalable elements from process scaling to team-building capabilities.
With this kind of criteria in place, early stage companies will be able to focus their efforts around achievable targets and better align themselves with funding requirements.
Part Two – Introducing the Seed Capitalist
People who are skilled in traditional forms of lending have very little understanding of how to size up and analyze the risks of an early stage startup. Bankers, mortgage brokers, commercial lenders, and even venture capitalists are woefully inadequate for the type of scrutiny and understanding needed to match the resourcefulness, drive, and passion of an individual to the obligations that come from an investment.
For this reason, a new profession is needed – the Seed Capitalist.
The Seed Capitalist will be a hands-on evaluator who works outside the traditional filling-out-forms mindset. They will be tasked with making personal visits to the homes and workplaces of the entrepreneurs and founders, ferreting out salient details of character and initiative that separate the “probables” from “likelies.”
When it comes to resources, Seed Capitalists will have far more than purse strings at their disposal. If a prospect is not yet ready, they will have the ability to suggest and recommend new options, suppliers, and strategies for shoring up whatever deficiencies may currently exist.
Part Three – Funding Guarantees
On Tuesday I flew to the Washington, DC area to give a talk on the future of libraries, an institution I believe will weather the winds of change better than most if they make the necessary adjustments.
But Washington, DC is the home of the two twins that don’t get along – the source of all problems and the source of all solutions.
Early stage funding is a sloppy business and even those groomed for picking prime talent will be proven wrong somewhere along the way.
But in the coming world of hyper-change business environments, the need for rapid job-creation will take precedent over virtually all other systems. As a result, a new governmental structure will need to be put into place to guarantee the funds invested by the seed capitalists.
More specifically, this is a system that must remain autonomous and untouched by the SBA and all current bank lending systems. Without this autonomy the whole system will fail.
Part Four – Business Colonies
Startup businesses are becoming very fluid in how they operate, and the driving force behind this liquefaction is a digital network that connects the needs of a company with available talent in a quick and efficient manner.
A business colony is a new kind of business structure serving as an organizational magnet for work projects and the free-agent talent needed to complete the work.
The operation will revolve around some combination of resident people based in a physical facility and a non-resident virtual workforce. Some will forgo the cost of the physical facility completely, opting instead to form around an entirely virtual communications structure.
Most will be organized around a topical area best suited for the talent base of the core team. As an example, a team of photonics engineers will attract projects best suited for that kind of talent. Likewise, a working group of programmers specializing in computer gaming applications will serve as a magnet for new gaming projects.
In some instances, large corporations will launch their own business colonies as a way to expand capability without adding to their headcount. Staffed with a few project managers, the company will use the colony as a proving ground for experimental assignments best performed outside of the cultural bounds of existing workflow.
Colonies will develop their own standard operating procedures with consistent agreements, payment processes, legal structures, management software, and methods for resolving disputes. Over time they will be rated on their ability to complete tasks with specific ratings on efficiency, quality of work, and how well they treat the talent. More on business colonies here.
Putting it All Together
I find the interplay between this four-part approach intriguing. As a newly minted standard, the “minimal fundable enterprise” will give prospective entrepreneurs a reasonable target to hit. The seed capitalists will use it as part of their primary tool kit. With fund guarantees in place, the government will both set the stage for next generation entrepreneurship and benefit from its thriving new tax base. And the business colonies will serve as a boiling cauldron for ideas as aspiring startup founders build their networks and form alliances with talented people who will help build their future companies.
Currently, our governmental systems are evolving at speeds that are exponentially slower than the businesses that use them. With the rapid-fire demands and micro-second shifts in the way business operates today, that needs to change.
Is it actually possible to build a job-creation engine that can exceed the rate of job decay happening around the world?
All I can say with certainty is that the solutions that served us well in the past will most definitely not be the solutions that serve us well in the future. We can either be the servants of change, or the masters of change. There is no middle ground.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

job_creation 386

Two hundred years ago, the most stable jobs involved the needs of a community and the work of a skilled craftsman to meet those needs. People holding jobs such as cobblers, blacksmiths, chandlers, and butchers found themselves in high demand.

But those jobs hold very little relevance in today’s world. So is there such a thing as a “forever” job, a position that will endure forever through time? Will we always need policemen, firemen, teachers, farmers, doctors, and nurses, or is it possible that those professions will also go away?

So if we start with the premise that there are no such thing as a forever job, that all jobs will eventually fade into the sunset, we must assume new jobs will be needed to take their place. And with the pace of life constantly speeding up, we must also consider the possibility that jobs will disappear far faster in the future than they do today. If that is the case, we will need a job-creation engine that can equally match or exceed the rate of job decay.

In the future, people will worry far less about how safe their current job is and far more about where there next job will be coming from.

For this reason I would like to suggest a 4-part approach for systematizing a rapid job-creation engine.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, new strategy, powerful idea, technology trends 10 Comments »

The Rise of the Cause-Architect

Posted by admin on June 10th, 2011
The Rise of the Cause-Architect
In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the famous Emancipation Proclamation, a piece of legislation that gave freedom to all of the slaves. But true freedom was still a century away for those who lived in the black vs. white world leading up to the Civil Rights movement, an effort that began in earnest in the 1950s.
The movement for freeing the slaves was a social cause that tore the country apart, resulting in a civil war and a century’s worth of social scarring that needed to heal before the effort could begin again.
In 1954 the stage was set with a Supreme Court ruling that made segregation illegal. After years of marches, protests, and demonstrations, the Civil Rights movement peaked in 1963 with Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. After a few more tumultuous years of social unrest involving the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King the movement came to an end in 1968 with the passage of several pieces of legislation aimed at outlawing racial discrimination.
In the past, movements like this were filled with tension and riddled with conflict. But that is quickly changing.
Every cause has a beginning, middle, and an end. When deep-seated differences are involved, tensions will rise and fighting will occur. But for most movements, where the stakes are less divisive, society simply adjusts and moves on.
In the fluid society we find ourselves in today, with massive communication systems for organizing and influencing public opinion, social causes are far easier to orchestrate. And this ease with which we can manage a movement is giving rise to a new breed of influencer – the cause architect.
As our ability to communicate, influence, and organize increases, the likelihood of violence decreases. This also means the life-cycle of most causes today will be far shorter than those of the past. More things happen quicker.
It has also turned the “cause architect,” the key person serving as the movement’s organizer and inspirational leader, into a respected position.
Once we begin to understand the life-cycle of a cause, and the stages of activity that take place at the beginning, middle, and end, leaders can begin to manage far more organized efforts than ever in the past.
Stage One – Launching a New Cause
Whenever there are polarizing differences between two groups of people, there is an opening for a new cause to emerge. In the past, the launching points stemmed from things like poverty and wealth gaps. Today it may be caused by differences in customs, immigration standards, ethics, and values.
However, those ingredients alone do not constitute a movement.
Movements begin with a single event that triggers a significant reaction, something I call a fuse-lighting event. This particular event will begin a chain reaction of other events leading to the creation of a stage-one social movement. For example, the Civil Rights movement grew from the reaction to Rosa Parks, a black woman, riding in the whites-only section of a bus.
Similarly, the Polish Solidarity movement, which eventually toppled the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, resulted from trade union activist Anna Walentynowicz being fired from work.
In one we know far less about in the U.S., the South African shack dwellers’ movement began because a road blockade was set up in response to the sudden selling off of a small piece of land promised for housing to a developer.
Typically, social movements are created around some charismatic leader with the right combination of skills to both engineer and execute a strategy, and organize and manage a following.
After the social movement sees its first sparks of activity, there are two likely phases of recruitment. The first phase will gather the people deeply interested in the primary goal and ideal of the movement. The second wave of recruits will usually come after the movement has had some success and becomes trendy. The later recruits typically don’t stick around very long.
Stage Two – Defining Success
Many movements fall apart because they are not focused around any kind of success strategy. If there is an implicit demand for change, there needs to be a clear description of what that change will look like.
The most successful movements will develop a series of benchmarks to help measure progress along the way. And they will not succeed if the whole effort is simply oriented around a need.
Needs are ongoing but causes have a definable life cycle with an actual endpoint. More important than the endpoint, definable life cycles have definable criteria for success. Success criteria creates the foundational underpinnings of good management metrics.
Tomorrow’s tools will allow us to micro-analyze virtually any situation and find the primary inflection points where a change can be most effective, and good metrics can be put into place. If the metrics are measurable, progress can be tracked.
In the past, people with a big heart, who dedicate their lives to helping the needy, were held in high esteem. It was a virtuous life filled with personal fulfillment. In the future, an even greater virtue will be bestowed upon those who are capable of solving the predicaments that create the needy class in the first place. Cause architects will extend their work far beyond working with the disadvantaged, and set out to wrestle social injustice to the ground. Cause architecture will become an exciting new profession well suited for inspired young people who both want to make a name for themselves and live a life of meaning.
Stage Three – Finding the End
Virtually every piece of music has a beginning, middle, and end. Much like telling a good story, books and television scripts also have a discernable beginning, middle, and end.
The best cause architects will be the ones who continually work themselves out of a job. Their role will be to construct a realistic action plan, execute, and complete the process of solving major social problems.
Future cause architects will come armed with tools unimaginable by today’s standards, as well as tools they invent along the way.
However, the most important element in the whole equation comes with knowing when it’s over. Asking for too much is as bad as asking for too little. A good cause architect will know when they’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.
Final thoughts…
Causes represent a natural system for checks and balances. Done correctly they can be a very effective tools for righting social wrongs and correcting the excesses of government and the political system.
The reason why movements are not used more often is because they’re messy. In a social setting with lots of moving parts, it’s very challenging to find the right way to puzzle everything together and make something significant happen.
But that’s about to change.
With the right tools, a cause architect can be very effective in bringing about change quickly. People with money will find a change-agent with a plan very attractive.
Philanthropists aspire to a higher calling. They don’t want to just fund the needy, they want to change the outcome of the poor. And they are far more likely to funnel money through someone who understands what success looks like.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Cause Architect 764

In 1863, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the famous Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that granted some freedom to slaves. But true freedom was still a century away for those who lived in the black vs. white world leading up to the Civil Rights movement, an effort that began in earnest in the 1950s.

The movement for freeing the slaves was a social cause that tore the country apart, resulting in a civil war and a century’s worth of social scarring that needed to heal before the effort could begin again.

In 1954 the stage was set with a Supreme Court ruling that made school segregation illegal. After years of marches, protests, and demonstrations, the Civil Rights movement peaked in 1963 with Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. After a few more tumultuous years of social unrest involving the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King the movement came to an end in 1968 with the passage of several pieces of legislation aimed at outlawing racial discrimination.

In the past, movements like this were filled with tension and riddled with conflict. But that is quickly changing.

Every cause has a beginning, middle, and end. When deep-seated differences are involved, tensions will rise and fighting will occur. But for most movements, where the stakes are less divisive, society simply adjusts and moves on.

In the fluid society we find ourselves in today, with massive communication systems for organizing and influencing public opinion, social causes are far easier to orchestrate. And this ease with which we can manage a movement is giving rise to a new breed of influencer – the cause-architect.

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business trends, historical perspective, new strategy, people making a difference, powerful idea, social trends 7 Comments »

When Wikipedia No Longer Matters

Posted by admin on June 2nd, 2011
When Wikipedia No Longer Matters
At what point will Wikipedia no longer matter? I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I predict a competitor will emerge to steal the majority of both mindshare and eyeballs from Wikipedia within the next ten years.
No, I’m not saying this because they don’t have a sustainable business model, and no, it’s not because the information on Wikipedia is not credible. Rather, they, like the encyclopedias they helped put out of business, will be upended by a company with better ways of aggregating information. They too will become irrelevant.
This may seem rather ironic to predict the demise of the world’s best known crowd sourced encyclopedia at the same time most people are finally recognizing the value and utility of its content. Yet it is their overarching pursuit of perfection and internal drive for credibility that will be their undoing over the coming years.
At the DaVinci Institute, with the help of our CU student intern David Baur-Ray, we began a series of Wikipedia research projects to uncover “what’s missing,” and the results are very telling. Two of the tests showed well over 50% of important content entries either missing or incomplete, and by another measure, over 95% missing.
Missing content is in direct correlation to the relevancy Wikipedia will hold in the minds of people in the future. It is also a clear signal to startup entrepreneurs that a new opportunity awaits. He’s how I came to this conclusion.
Wikipedia Goes Main Stream
Started in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia is now in its 10th year of operation with the number of articles in its 10 primary language versions approaching 10 million entries. They represent the 4th largest web property on the Internet attracting 150 million unique visitors a month.
Recent headlines would seem to indicate the exact opposite trend to what I am predicting. Here are a few recent ones:
• BBC – “Hundreds of Medical GPs admit to using the website Wikipedia as a medical research tool”
• Washington Post – “National Archives hires 1st ‘Wikipedian in Residence’ to connect with Internet encyclopedia”
• New York Times – “Worthy Online Resource, but Global Cultural Treasure?”
• Times of India – “Wikipedia seeks UNESCO recognition”
• Chronicle of Higher Education – “Academics, in New Move, Begin to Work With Wikipedia‎”
With doctors, educators and the UN staffers listing themselves as avid users, it’s as if the world has finally woken up to the inherent value of Wikipedia as a solid source of information.
But perhaps the most telling sign that the end is near comes from the last one. When the perennial late-adopters in academia start to recognize its importance, it’s a clear sign that Wikipedia has lost its ability to continue as a disruptive enterprise.
In the constantly changing tombs of Wikipedia, now boasting over 1 billion individual edits to the entries, the question we were confronted with was, “How can we apply relevancy metrics to this type of business model?”
So we devised a series of unique tests to see how well Wikipedia is able to keep up with the times. Here is what we found.
DaVinci Institute – Test #1
We began with the question – “Who is the most famous person in the world who is not listed in Wikipedia.”
Naturally there are many ways to rate fame, but we decided to look at the most avid Twitter users on Twitaholic.com and listed the top 400 ranked according to their number of followers.
Using this as our criteria, the most famous person not listed in Wikipedia is Noah Everett (@noaheverett), founder of Twit Pic, ranked number 66 on Twitaholic with 2,448,297 followers on Twitter. (NOTE: Since these rankings and numbers are constantly changing, this was a one-day snapshot.)
Out of the top 400 people on Twitaholic, 18 were left out completely and another 9 only had brief mentions. This means 6.5% of the entries were missing.
DaVinci Institute – Test #2
As another measure of important people with missing entries, we made a list of the last 200 people who appeared as speakers at TEDx events around the world. This was a random selection that included of all the people in sequential events until we reached 200. This group is important because people chosen to speak at these events have achieved sufficient notoriety to warrant their selection by an event committee.
The results showed that 41% of the entries were missing, 15% were incomplete, and 44% had full entries.
DaVinci Institute – Test #3
As a 3rd test, we checked the list of Fast Company Magazine’s “100 Most Creative People in Business” to see if they had entries in Wikipedia. Once again this was an important list because the people selected have achieved a certain level of significance in the minds of editors at Fast Company Magazine.
The results showed that 54% of the entries were missing, 13% were incomplete, and 33% had full entries.
DaVinci Institute – Test #4
The fourth test was a simple comparison we did with LinkedIn and Facebook. Wikipedia is now nearing 10 million entries and we are estimating less than half are entries for people, so less than 5 million. By comparison, LinkedIn has over 100 million entries for its members, and Facebook is now closing in on 700 million members. (NOTE: We were not able to find a reliable source for the number of “people entries” in Wikipedia)
Using this rough estimate, entries in Wikipedia represent less than 0.07% of the world’s population, less than 0.7% of Facebook’s members, and less than 5% of LinkedIn’s base. This means that only a relatively small percentage are worthy of being listed on Wikipedia.
Gatekeepers Alive and Well at Wikipedia
Early on people were very skeptical of whether they could trust the information they read on Wikipedia. Educators and editors on every level harbored a strong distrust of information that anyone could post.
For this reason Wikipedia set out to become credible and they implemented a number of procedures to add rigor and validation to every entry. They removed any entries that seemed frivolous or self-serving, and in doing so, they created an invisible league of gatekeepers, not unlike what you’d find at top newspapers, to determine the worthiness of every post.
During the early years, volunteers who found writing and editing for Wikipedia to be the worthy cause missing from their life showed up in droves. But once too many rules and restrictions came into play, the fun had vanished and it started feeling like work again.
According to a 2009 article in the Wall Street Journal, “More than 49,000 editors left Wikipedia’s English-language edition during the first three months of 2009, compared with only 4,900 for the same quarter a year earlier.”
The article went on describe how arguments over various articles have also taken their toll. “Many people are getting burnt out when they have to debate about the contents of certain articles again and again,” and “the rules often trip up new contributors who find their content removed without understanding why.”
Wikipedia by the Numbers
According to comScore Media Metrix for the month of April 2011, Wikipedia served up slightly over 2 billion pageviews to 149 million unique visitors, and each stayed on average of 11.8 minutes per visit.
In terms of content, Wikipedia worldwide has a combined total of more than 1.74 billion words in 9.25 million articles in approximately 250 languages. That said, growth is beginning to decline.
According to Wikipedia’s own statistics, growth has been slowing since 2006.
As growth continues to slow, it becomes easy to see a point where content begins to stagnate and the company as a whole begins to lose relevance. This will be especially true if and when a viable startup model emerges and begins to steal mindshare from its current user base.
Additional Observations
Entries in Wikipedia are still very U.S. oriented. While they boast articles in 250 different languages, the majority are still in English. And with 6,500 known languages in the world, the 250 current languages still leaves vast populations, regions, and cultures untapped.
However, that wasn’t the only omission.
As our researcher David Bauer-Ray worked his way through the lists he commented, “It seemed like I could always find an entertainer (e.g. musician, filmmaker, actor, singer, author, or artist) but it was less consistent to find an entrepreneur, founder, CEO, or educator. This concerns me because it suggests the priorities of Wikipedia are rather backwards when assessing pragmatic importance to society.”
Another trend in the lists was the number of Brazilian personalities that Wikipedia doesn’t recognize. As we were able to glean for other comments, they haven’t done a good job of establishing themselves in South America.
What Comes Next
If everyone had their own page on Wikipedia, would it become more relevant or less?
Like so many of the king-maker information sources of the past, Wikipedia has decided on a rather high bar for entry. With legions of invisible editors poised as gatekeepers in the background, getting a new post published today is little different than getting an article in the New York Times or Washington Post.
A business model with these kinds of restrictions works well for premium products or exclusive clubs charging top dollar for admission. But it seems like a confusing strategy for a free information site with no tangible benefit to be gained from “culling the herd.”
We live in a world full of information objects that can theoretically be written about. The competitor that replaces Wikipedia will likely have a far more expansive offering in the form of a fully unrestricted encyclopedia.
Using a more expansive view of the information world, the ultimate encyclopedia may include:
• Every person on earth, either living or dead
• Every business in the world including founders, history, products, and other details
• Every house, building, and piece of land complete with description and photos
• Every movie, film, book, and song could have a separate listing
• Every comic book super hero, every cartoon character, along with every character in a movie, book, or legend
• Every law in every country including rules, ordinances, regulations, policy, and other guidelines.
The posting of this information will naturally have to be contingent upon the consent of the individual or owner of the content. Undoubtedly new rules will come into play as conflicts arise.
My sense is that Wikipedia is run as a very sparsely staffed organization managing legions of undisciplined volunteers. They have finally gotten a handle on running the operation they currently have, but expanding it exponentially to include everything described above is not something that they could even consider.
For this reason I deem it highly likely that a competitor will emerge over the coming years to steal their market.
By Futurist Thomas Frey

Wikipedia 2020 3

When the disruptors become the disrupted

At what point will Wikipedia no longer matter? I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I predict a competitor will emerge to steal the majority of both mindshare and eyeballs from Wikipedia within the next ten years.

No, I’m not saying this because they don’t have a sustainable business model, and no, it’s not because the information on Wikipedia is not credible. Rather, they, like the encyclopedias they helped put out of business, will be upended by a company with better ways of aggregating information. They too will become irrelevant.

This may seem rather ironic to predict the demise of the world’s best known crowd sourced encyclopedia at the same time most people are finally recognizing the value and utility of its content. Yet it is their overarching pursuit of perfection and internal drive for credibility that will be their undoing over the coming years.

At the DaVinci Institute, with the help of our CU student intern David Baur-Ray, we began a series of Wikipedia research projects to uncover “what’s missing,” and the results are very telling. Two of the tests showed well over 50% of important content entries either missing or incomplete, and by another measure, over 95% missing.

Missing content is in direct correlation to the relevancy Wikipedia will hold in the minds of people in the future. It is also a clear signal to startup entrepreneurs that a new opportunity awaits. Here’s how I came to this conclusion.

Read the rest of this entry »

business trends, future scenario, historical perspective, new strategy, powerful idea, prediction 14 Comments »