A quick reflection on digital for posterity

On the eve of moving to Ottawa to join the Service Canada team (squee!) I thought it would be helpful to share a few things for posterity. There are three things below:

  • Some observations that might be useful
  • A short overview of the Pia Review: 20 articles about digital public sector reform
  • Additional references I think are outstanding and worth considering in public sector digital/reform programs, especially policy transformation

Some observations

Moving from deficit to aspirational planning

Risk! Risk!! Risk!!! That one word is responsible for an incredible amount of fear, inaction, redirection of investment and counter-productive behaviours, especially by public sectors for whom the stakes for the economy and society are so high. But when you focus all your efforts on mitigating risks, you are trying to drive by only using the rear vision mirror, planning your next step based on the issues you’ve already experienced without looking to where you need to be. It ultimately leads to people driving slower and slower, often grinding to a halt, because any action is considered more risky than inaction. This doesn’t really help our metaphorical driver to pick up the kids from school or get supplies from the store. In any case, inaction bears as many risks as no action in a world that is continually changing. For example, if our metaphorical driver was to stop the car in an intersection they will likely be hit by another vehicle, or eventually starve to death.

Action is necessary. Change is inevitable. So public sectors must balance our time between being responsive (not reactive) to change and risks, and being proactive towards a clear goals or future state.

Of course, risk mitigation is what many in government think they need to most urgently address however, to only engage this is to buy into and perpetuate the myth that the increasing pace of change is itself a bad thing. This is the difference between user polling and user research: users think they need faster horses but actually they need a better way to transport more people over longer distances, which could lead to alternatives from horses. Shifting from a change pessimistic framing to change optimism is critical for public sectors to start to build responsiveness into their policy, program and project management. Until public servants embrace change as normal, natural and part of their work, then fear and fear based behaviours will drive reactivism and sub-optimal outcomes.

The OPSI model for innovation would be a helpful tool to ask senior public servants what proportion of their digital investment is in which box, as this will help identify how aspirational vs reactive, and how top down or bottom up they are, noting that there really should be some investment and tactics in all four quadrants.

Innovation-Facets-Diamond-1024x630My observation of many government digital programs is that teams spend a lot of their time doing top down (directed) work that focuses on areas of certainty, but misses out in building the capacity or vision required for bottom up innovation, or anything that genuinely explores and engages in areas of uncertainty. Central agencies and digital transformation teams are in the important and unique position to independently stand back to see the forest for the trees, and help shape systemic responses to all of system problems. My biggest recommendation would be for the these teams to support public sector partners to embrace change optimism, proactive planning, and responsiveness/resilience into their approaches, so as to be more genuinely strategic and effective in dealing with change, but more importantly, to better plan strategically towards something meaningful for their context.

Repeatability and scale

All digital efforts might be considered through the lens of repeatability and scale.

  • If you are doing something, anything, could you publish it or a version of it for others to learn from or reuse? Can you work in the open for any of your work (not just publish after the fact)? If policy development, new services or even experimental projects could be done openly from the start, they will help drive a race to the top between departments.
  • How would the thing you are considering scale? How would you scale impact without scaling resources? Basically, for anything you, if you’d need to dramatically scale resources to implement, then you are not getting an exponential response to the problem.

Sometimes doing non scalable work is fine to test an idea, but actively trying to differentiate between work that addresses symptomatic relief versus work that addresses causal factors is critical, otherwise you will inevitably find 100% of your work program focused on symptomatic relief.

It is critical to balance programs according to both fast value (short term delivery projects) and long value (multi month/year program delivery), reactive and proactive measures, symptomatic relief and addressing causal factors, & differentiating between program foundations (gov as a platform) and programs themselves. When governments don’t invest in digital foundations, they end up duplicating infrastructure for each and every program, which leads to the reduction of capacity, agility and responsiveness to change.

Digital foundations

Most government digital programs seem to focus on small experiments, which is great for individual initiatives, but may not lay the reusable digital foundations for many programs. I would suggest that in whatever projects the team embark upon, some effort be made to explore and demonstrate what the digital foundations for government should look like. For example:

  • Digital public infrastructure – what are the things government is uniquely responsible for that it should make available as digital public infrastructure for others to build upon, and indeed for itself to consume. Eg, legislation as code, services registers, transactional service APIs, core information and data assets (spatial, research, statistics, budgets, etc), central budget management systems. “Government as a Platform” is a digital and transformation strategy, not just a technology approach.
  • Policy transformation and closing the implementation gap –  many policy teams think the issues of policy intent not being realised is not their problem, so showing the value of multidisciplinary, test-driven and end to end policy design and implementation will dramatically shift digital efforts towards more holistic, sustainable and predictable policy and societal outcomes.
  • Participatory governance – departments need to engage the public in policy, services or program design, so demonstrating the value or participatory governance is key. this is not a nice to have, but rather a necessary part of delivering good services. Here is a recent article with some concepts and methods to consider and the team needs to have capabilities to enable this, that aren’t just communications skills, but rather genuine and subject matter expertise engagement.
  • Life Journey programs – putting digital transformation efforts,, policies, service delivery improvements and indeed any other government work in the context of life journeys helps to make it real, get multiple entities that play a part on that journey naturally involved and invested, and drives horizontal collaboration across and between jurisdictions. New Zealand led the way in this, NSW Government extended the methodology, Estonia has started the journey and they are systemically benefiting.
  • I’ve spoken about designing better futures, and I do believe this is also a digital foundation, as it provides a lens through which to prioritise, implement and realise value from all of the above. Getting public servants to “design the good” from a citizen perspective, a business perspective, an agency perspective, Government perspective and from a society perspective helps flush out assumptions, direction and hypotheses that need testing.

The Pia Review

I recently wrote a series of 20 articles about digital transformation and reform in public sectors. It was something I did for fun, in my own time, as a way of both recording and sharing my lessons learned from 20 years working at the intersection of tech, government and society (half in the private sector, half in the public sector). I called it the Public Sector Pia Review and I’ve been delighted by how it has been received, with a global audience republishing, sharing, commenting, and most important, starting new discussions about the sort of public sector they want and the sort of public servants they want to be. Below is a deck that has an insight from each of the 20 articles, and links throughout.

This is not just meant to be a series about digital, but rather about the matter of public sector reform in the broadest sense, and I hope it is a useful contribution to better public sectors, not just better public services.

The Pia Review – 20 years in 20 slides

There is also a collated version of the articles in two parts. These compilations are linked below for convenience, and all articles are linked in the references below for context.

  • Public-Sector-Pia-Review-Part-1 (6MB PDF) — essays written to provide practical tips, methods, tricks and ideas to help public servants to their best possible work today for the best possible public outcomes; and
  • Reimagining government (will link once published) — essays about possible futures, the big existential, systemic or structural challenges and opportunities as I’ve experienced them, paradigm shifts and the urgent need for everyone to reimagine how they best serve the government, the parliament and the people, today and into the future.

A huge thank you to the Mandarin, specifically Harley Dennett, for the support and encouragement to do this, as well as thanks to all the peer reviewers and contributors, and of course my wonderful husband Thomas who peer reviewed several articles, including the trickier ones!

My digital references and links from 2019

Below are a number of useful references for consideration in any digital government strategy, program or project, including some of mine 🙂

General reading

Life Journeys as a Strategy

Life Journey programs, whilst largely misunderstood and quite new to government, provide a surprisingly effective way to drive cross agency collaboration, holistic service and system design, prioritisation of investment for best outcomes, and a way to really connect policy, services and human outcomes with all involved on the usual service delivery supply chains in public sectors. Please refer to the following references, noting that New Zealand were the first to really explore this space, and are being rapidly followed by other governments around the world. Also please note the important difference between customer journey mapping (common), customer mapping that spans services but is still limited to a single agency/department (also common), and true life journey mapping which necessarily spans agencies, jurisdictions and even sectors (rare) like having a child, end of life, starting school or becoming an adult.

Policy transformation

Data in Government

Designing better futures to transform towards

If you don’t design a future state to work towards, then you end up just designing reactively to current, past or potential issues. This leads to a lack of strategic or cohesive direction in any particular direction, which leads to systemic fragmentation and ultimately system ineffectiveness and cannibalism. A clear direction isn’t just about principles or goals, it needs to be something people can see, connect with, align their work towards to (even if they aren’t in your team), and get enthusiastic about. This is how you create change at scale, when people buy into the agenda, at all levels, and start naturally walking in the same direction regardless of their role. Here are some examples for consideration.

Rules as Code

Please find the relevant Rules as Code links below for easy reference.

Better Rules and RaC examples

Where next: Spring starts when a heartbeat’s pounding…

Today I’m delighted to announce the next big adventure for my little family and I.

For my part, I will be joining the inspirational, aspirational and world leading Service Canada to help drive the Benefits Delivery Modernization program with Benoit Long, Tammy Belanger and their wonderful team, in collaboration with our wonderful colleagues across the Canadian Government! This enormous program aims to dramatically improve the experience of Canadians with a broad range of government services, whilst transforming the organization and helping create the digital foundations for a truly responsive, effective and human-centred public sector 🙂

This is a true digital transformation opportunity which will make a difference in the lives of so many people. It provides a chance to implement and really realise the benefits of human-centred service design, modular architecture (and Government as a Platform), Rules as Code, data analytics, life journey mapping, and all I have been working on for the last 10 years. I am extremely humbled and thankful for the chance to work with and learn from such a forward thinking team, whilst being able to contribute my experience and expertise to such an important and ambitious agenda.

I can’t wait to work with colleagues across ESDC and the broader Government of Canada, as well as from the many innovative provincial governments. I’ve been lucky enough to attend FWD50 in Ottawa for the last 3 years, and I am consistently impressed by the digital and public sector talent in Canada. Of course, because Canada is one of the “Digital Nations“, it also presents a great opportunity to collaborate closely with other leading digital governments, as I also found when working in New Zealand.

We’ll be moving to Ottawa in early March, so we will see everyone in Canada soon, and will be using the next month or so packing up, spending time with Australian friends and family, and learning about our new home 🙂

My husband and little one are looking forward to learning about Canadian and Indigenous cultures, learning French (and hopefully some Indigenous languages too, if appropriate!), introducing more z’s into my English, experiencing the cold (yes, snow is a novelty for Australians) and contributing how we can to the community in Ottawa. Over the coming years we will be exploring Canada and I can’t wait to share the particularly local culinary delight that is a Beavertail (a large, flat, hot doughnut like pastry) with my family!

For those who didn’t pick up the reference, the blog title had dual meaning: we are of course heading to Ottawa in the Spring, having had a last Australian Summer for a while (gah!), and it also was a little call out to one of the great Canadian bands, that I’ve loved for years, the Tragically Hip 🙂

Lessons from Canada and France: FWD50 2018 and SIIViM

A couple of weeks ago I had a whirlwind trip to Canada, France and back again, in 6 days! I spoke at the FWD50 conference in Ottawa, Canada, which is an optimistic and inspiring event focused on the next 50 days, weeks and years of society, with a special focus on transforming our public sectors for the 21st century. Then I went to Nevers, France for SIIViM, a regional Governments event exploring digital government, open data, open source and smart cities. At both events I shared my lessons and work, as well as met with folk from the Canadian, regional French, US and Taiwanese Governments (amongst others). I also met with OECD, industry and open source folk and came back with new ideas, connections and opportunities to collaborate for our ambitious human-centred digital government transformation work in NSW. Many thanks to the FWD50 organisers and ADULLACT (a French Free Software non-profit organisation) for bringing me over and providing the opportunity to learn and share my experiences.

My contributions

I gave several speeches in my personal professional capacity (meaning I was not formally representing any of my employers past or present) which may be of interest:

Insights from Canada

In between the three presentations I gave, I got to catch up with a range of wonderful people to talk about transforming and improving public sectors.

I spoke to the Canadian School of Public Service:

  • The Canadian Government is creating a Digital Academy to develop better digital acumen across the public sector, better digital leaders, and a community that is ongoing, engaged and mutually supportive. Check out this video on the value of the Canadian Digital Academy.
  • There was strong interest in innovation of public management, including AI in regulation making.
  • They are building a modern policy capability, a tiger team approach, to support policy modernisation and transformation across government.

I visited the Canadian Digital Service and had a great chat with some of the people there, as well as a tour of their new office. It was great to see how much has been achieved in the last year and to exchange stories and lessons on trying to drive change in government. A big thank you to Sean Boot who coordinated the visit and showed me around, great to catch up Sean!

  • We spoke about the challenges faced when under pressure to deliver services whilst trying to transform government, and the need to balance foundational work (like reusable components, standards, capability uplift, modular architecture) with service redesign or improvements.
  • We spoke about legislation as code and the New Zealand entitlements engine we developed as an example of reusable rules for more integrated service delivery. I recommended the Canadian dev team chat to the NZ dev team about OpenFisca Aotearoa.
  • We spoke about emerging tech and how we can prepare public sectors for change, as well as the challenges and benefits of product vs service vs system design.
  • I heard about several great Canadian projects including one helping veterans get access to services and entitlements.
  • We also talked about GCcollab, the open source all of government collaboration suite which is being heavily used across agencies, particularly by policy folk.

I also got to catch up with some folk from the Canadian Treasury Board Secretariat to talk about open government, digital transformation, funding approaches, policy innovation and more. Thanks very much Thom Kearney who is always doing interesting things and connecting people to do interesting things 🙂

I managed to also get a little time to chat to Michael Karlin, who is driving the ethical AI and algorithmic transparency work in the Canadian Government. It was great to hear where the work is up to and find opportunities to collaborate.

I also met a lot of non-Canadians at the conference, a few takeaways were:

  • Audrey Tang, Digital Minister for Taiwan – Audrey was, as usual, wonderfully inspiring. Her talk pushed the audience to think much bigger and bolder about radical transparency, citizen empowerment and an engaged State. Audrey shared some great pamphlets with me in 8 languages that showed how open government in Taiwan works, which includes issues raised by citizens, prioritised by government, consulted on openly, and fixed collaboratively with citizens. Audrey also shared how they do public consultations in the local language of an area and then transcribe to Mandarin for accessibility. I love this idea and want to consider how we could do multi-lingual consultations better in Australia.
  • I caught up with the always extraordinary Audrey Lobo-Pulo who is a brilliant data scientist and advocate for Opening Government Models. Audrey introduced me to Natalie Evans Harris who had worked in the office of the US Chief Technology Officer and had a lot of expertise around digitising public services.

Insights from France

The SIIViM conference itself was fascinating. A lot of focus on open data, “Smart Cities”, IoT, Virtual Reality, and autonomous cars.

Whilst there we got into a discussion about digital asset valuation and how software/data may be measured as an asset,but is usually not valued as a public asset. Often when data is valued as an asset it quickly leads to cost recovery activities or asset depreciation which can get tricky when we are talking about foundational datasets that could be available as digital public infrastructure for digital society.

When in Paris, I was delighted to meet up with Alex Roberts from the OECD (formerly of DesignGov and Public Sector Innovation Network fame) and Jamie, to talk about innovation in government. We talked about the new OECD Declaration of Public Innovation Alex has developed which beautifully frames the four different innovation types as being across two spectrums of certainty/uncertainty, and directed/undirected, which nicely frames the different forms of innovation efforts I’ve seen over the years. Great work Alex! There is also a report on innovation in the innovation in the Canadian Government worth reading. Perhaps OECD could come to NSW Government next? 😉

I also met with Roberto Di Cosmo who founded the Software Heritage initiative, which is like a super archive for software repositories that stores the code in a uniform data model for the purpose of analysis, science and posterity. Roberto has been involved in the French Free and Open Source Software community for a long time and he told me about the French Government investment in Open Source with 200m euros invested in 10 years (40% public money and 60% private investment). Fascinating and it explains why so many great French Government technologies are Open Source!

I got to catch up with the excellent Matti Schneider, who worked with my team in New Zealand for a few weeks on OpenFisca. I highly recommend Matti’s talk about the French State Incubator (a public sector innovation lab) or another talk on turning legislation into code from New Zealand. Matti kindly gave me a short tour of central Paris from a historical context, and I got to hear about the three Parisian revolutions and see significant landmarks along the way. Fascinating, and as always, there are lessons relevant to the present moment.

To wrap it all up, Patrick introduced me to Mark from the US National Archives who shared some thoughts about https://www.lockss.org/ and the importance of ensuring validity of historic digital archives. I also met Margaret from ICANN who talked about the personal empowerment of staff to make good decisions and to engage in stopping things that are wrong, unfair or inconsistent with the mission. She encouraged me to be humble about evidence and realistic about change being inevitable.

Useful links:

An optimistic future

This is my personal vision for an event called “Optimistic Futures” to explore what we could be aiming for and figure out the possible roles for government in future.

Technology is both an enabler and a disruptor in our lives. It has ushered in an age of surplus, with decentralised systems enabled by highly empowered global citizens, all creating increasing complexity. It is imperative that we transition into a more open, collaborative, resilient and digitally enabled society that can respond exponentially to exponential change whilst empowering all our people to thrive. We have the means now by which to overcome our greatest challenges including poverty, hunger, inequity and shifting job markets but we must be bold in collectively designing a better future, otherwise we may unintentionally reinvent past paradigms and inequities with shiny new things.

Technology is only as useful as it affects actual people, so my vision starts, perhaps surprisingly for some, with people. After all, if people suffer, the system suffers, so the well being of people is the first and foremost priority for any sustainable vision. But we also need to look at what all sectors and communities across society need and what part they can play:

  • People: I dream of a future where the uniqueness of local communities, cultures and individuals is amplified, where diversity is embraced as a strength, and where all people are empowered with the skills, capacity and confidence to thrive locally and internationally. A future where everyone shares in the benefits and opportunities of a modern, digital and surplus society/economy with resilience, and where everyone can meaningfully contribute to the future of work, local communities and the national/global good.
  • Public sectors: I dream of strong, independent, bold and highly accountable public sectors that lead, inform, collaborate, engage meaningfully and are effective enablers for society and the economy. A future where we invest as much time and effort on transformational digital public infrastructure and skills as we do on other public infrastructure like roads, health and traditional education, so that we can all build on top of government as a platform. Where everyone can have confidence in government as a stabilising force of integrity that provides a minimum quality of life upon which everyone can thrive.
  • The media: I dream of a highly effective fourth estate which is motivated systemically with resilient business models that incentivise behaviours to both serve the public and hold power to account, especially as “news” is also arguably becoming exponential. Actionable accountability that doesn’t rely on the linearity and personal incentives of individuals to respond will be critical with the changing pace of news and with more decisions being made by machines.
  • Private, academic and non-profit sectors: I dream of a future where all sectors can more freely innovate, share, adapt and succeed whilst contributing meaningfully to the public good and being accountable to the communities affected by decisions and actions. I also see a role for academic institutions in particular, given their systemic motivation for high veracity outcomes without being attached to one side, as playing a role in how national/government actions are measured, planned, tested and monitored over time.
  • Finally, I dream of a world where countries are not celebrated for being just “digital nations” but rather are engaged in a race to the top in using technology to improve the lives of all people and to establish truly collaborative democracies where people can meaningfully participate in the shaping the optimistic and inclusive futures.

Technology is a means, not an ends, so we need to use technology to both proactively invent the future we need (thank you Alan Kay) and to be resilient to change including emerging tech and trends.

Let me share a few specific optimistic predictions for 2070:

  • Automation will help us redesign our work expectations. We will have a 10-20 hour work week supported by machines, freeing up time for family, education, civic duties and innovation. People will have less pressure to simply survive and will have more capacity to thrive (this is a common theme, but something I see as critical).
  • 3D printing of synthetic foods and nanotechnology to deconstruct and reconstruct molecular materials will address hunger, access to medicine, clothes and goods, and community hubs (like libraries) will become even more important as distribution, education and social hubs, with drones and other aerial travel employed for those who can’t travel. Exoskeletons will replace scooters 🙂
  • With rocket travel normalised, and only an hour to get anywhere on the planet, nations will see competitive citizenships where countries focus on the best quality of life to attract and retain people, rather than largely just trying to attract and retain companies as we do today. We will also likely see the emergence of more powerful transnational communities that have nationhood status to represent the aspects of people’s lives that are not geopolitically bound.
  • The public service has highly professional, empathetic and accountable multi-disciplinary experts on responsive collaborative policy, digital legislation, societal modeling, identifying necessary public digital infrastructure for investment, and well controlled but openly available data, rules and transactional functions of government to enable dynamic and third party services across myriad channels, provided to people based on their needs but under their control. We will also have a large number of citizens working 1 or 2 days a week in paid civic duties on areas where they have passion, skills or experience to contribute.
  • The paralympics will become the main game, as it were, with no limits on human augmentation. We will do the 100m sprint with rockets, judo with cyborgs, rock climbing with tentacles. We have access to medical capabilities to address any form of disease or discomfort but we don’t use the technologies to just comply to a normative view of a human. People are free to choose their form and we culturally value diversity and experimentation as critical attributes of a modern adaptable community.

I’ve only been living in New Zealand a short time but I’ve been delighted and inspired by what I’ve learned from kiwi and Māori cultures, so I’d like to share a locally inspired analogy.

Technology is on one hand, just a waka (canoe), a vehicle for change. We all have a part to play in the journey and in deciding where we want to go. On the other hand, technology is also the winds, the storms, the thunder, and we have to continually work to understand and respond to emerging technologies and trends so we stay safely on course. It will take collaboration and working towards common goals if we are to chart a better future for all.

Pivoting ‘the book’ from individuals to systems

In 2016 I started writing a book, “Choose Your Own Adventure“, which I wanted to be a call to action for individuals to consider their role in the broader system and how they individually can make choices to make things better. As I progressed the writing of that book I realised the futility of changing individual behaviours and perspectives without an eye to the systems and structures within which we live. It is relatively easy to focus on oneself, but “no man is an island” and quite simply, I don’t want to facilitate people turning themselves into more beautiful cogs in a dysfunctional machine so I’m pivoting the focus of the book (and reusing the relevant material) and am now planning to finish the book by mid 2018.

I have recently realised four paradoxes which have instilled in me a sense of urgency to reimagine the world as we know it. I believe we are at a fork in the road where we will either reinforce legacy systems based on outdated paradigms with shiny new things, or choose to forge a new path using the new tools and opportunities at our disposal, hopefully one that is genuinely better for everyone. To do the latter, we need to critically assess the systems and structures we built and actively choose what we want to keep, what we should discard, what sort of society we want in the future and what we need to get there.

I think it is too easily forgotten that we invented all this and can therefore reinvent it if we so choose. But to not make a choice is to choose the status quo.

This is not to say I think everything needs to change. Nothing is so simplistic or misleading as a zero sum argument. Rather, the intent of this book is to challenge you to think critically about the systems you work within, whether they enable or disable the things you think are important, and most importantly, to challenge you to imagine what sort of world you want to see. Not just for you, but for your family, community and the broader society. I challenge you all to make 2018 a year of formative creativity in reimagining the world we live in and how we get there.

The paradoxes in brief, are as follows:

  • That though power is more distributed than ever, most people are still struggling to survive.
    It has been apparent to me for some time that there is a growing substantial shift in power from traditional gatekeepers to ordinary people through the proliferation of rights based philosophies and widespread access to technology and information. But the systemic (and artificial) limitations on most people’s time and resources means most people simply cannot participate fully in improving their own lives let alone in contributing substantially to the community and world in which they live. If we consider the impact of business and organisational models built on scarcity, centricity and secrecy, we quickly see that normal people are locked out of a variety of resources, tools and knowledge with which they could better their lives. Why do we take publicly funded education, research and journalism and lock them behind paywalls and then blame people for not having the skills, knowledge or facts at their disposal? Why do we teach children to be compliant consumers rather than empowered makers? Why do we put the greatest cognitive load on our most vulnerable through social welfare systems that then beget reliance? Why do we not put value on personal confidence in the same way we value business confidence, when personal confidence indicates the capacity for individuals to contribute to their community? Why do we still assume value to equate quantity rather than quality, like the number of hours worked rather than what was done in those hours? If a substantial challenge of the 21st century is having enough time and cognitive load to spare, why don’t we have strategies to free up more time for more people, perhaps by working less hours for more return? Finally, what do we need to do systemically to empower more people to move beyond survival and into being able to thrive.
  • Substantial paradigm shifts have happened but are not being integrated into people’s thinking and processes.
    The realisation here is that even if people are motivated to understand something fundamentally new to their worldview, it doesn’t necessarily translate into how they behave. It is easier to improve something than change it. Easier to provide symptomatic relief than to cure the disease. Interestingly I often see people confuse iteration for transformation, or symptomatic relief with addressing causal factors, so perhaps there is also a need for critical and systems thinking as part of the general curriculum. This is important because symptomatic relief, whilst sometimes necessary to alleviate suffering, is an effort in chasing one’s tail and can often perpetrate the problem. For instance, where providing foreign aid without mitigating displacement of local farmer’s efforts can create national dependence on further aid. Efforts to address causal factors is necessary to truly address a problem. Even if addressing the causal problem is outside your influence, then you should at least ensure your symptomatic relief efforts are not built to propagate the problem. One of the other problems we face, particularly in government, is that the systems involved are largely products of centuries old thinking. If we consider some of the paradigm shifts of our times, we have moved from scarcity to surplus, centralised to distributed, from closed to openness, analog to digital and normative to formative. And yet, people still assume old paradigms in creating new policies, programs and business models. For example how many times have you heard someone talk about innovative public engagement (tapping into a distributed network of expertise) by consulting through a website (maintaining central decision making control using a centrally controlled tool)? Or “innovation” being measured (and rewarded) through patents or copyright, both scarcity based constructs developed centuries ago? “Open government” is often developed by small insular teams through habitually closed processes without any self awareness of the irony of the approach. And new policy and legislation is developed in analog formats without any substantial input from those tasked with implementation or consideration with how best to consume the operating rules of government in the systems of society. Consider also the number of times we see existing systems assumed to be correct by merit of existing, without any critical analysis. For instance, a compliance model that has no measurable impact. At what point and by what mechanisms can we weigh up the merits of the old and the new when we are continually building upon a precedent based system of decision making? If 3D printing helped provide a surplus economy by which we could help solve hunger and poverty, why wouldn’t that be weighed up against the benefits of traditional scarcity based business models?
  • That we are surrounded by new things every day and yet there is a serious lack of vision for the future
    One of the first things I try to do in any organisation is understand the vision, the strategy and what success should look like. In this way I can either figure out how to best contribute meaningfully to the overarching goal, and in some cases help grow or develop the vision and strategy to be a little more ambitious. I like to measure progress and understand the baseline from which I’m trying to improve but I also like to know what I’m aiming for. So, what could an optimistic future look like for society? For us? For you? How do you want to use the new means at our disposal to make life better for your community? Do we dare imagine a future where everyone has what they need to thrive, where we could unlock the creative and intellectual potential of our entire society, a 21st century Renaissance, rather than the vast proportion of our collective cognitive capacity going into just getting food on the table and the kids to school. Only once you can imagine where you want to be can we have a constructive discussion where we want to be collectively, and only then can we talk constructively the systems and structures we need to support such futures. Until then, we are all just tweaking the settings of a machine built by our ancestors. I have been surprised to find in government a lot of strategies without vision, a lot of KPIs without measures of success, and in many cases a disconnect between what a person is doing and the vision or goals of the organisation or program they are in. We talk “innovation” a lot, but often in the back of people’s minds they are often imagining a better website or app, which isn’t much of a transformation. We are surrounded by dystopic visions of the distant future, and yet most government vision statements only go so far as articulating something “better” that what we have now, with “strategies” often focused on shopping lists of disconnected tactics 3-5 years into the future. The New Zealand Department of Conservation provides an inspiring contrast with a 50 year vision they work towards, from which they develop their shorter term stretch goals and strategies on a rolling basis and have an ongoing measurable approach.
  • That government is an important part of a stable society and yet is being increasingly undermined, both intentionally and unintentionally.
    The realisation here has been in first realising how important government (and democracy) is in providing a safe, stable, accountable, predictable and prosperous society whilst simultaneously observing first hand the undermining and degradation of the role of government both intentionally and unintentionally, from the outside and inside. I have chosen to work in the private sector, non-profit community sector, political sector and now public sector, specifically because I wanted to understand the “system” in which I live and how it all fits together. I believe that “government” – both the political and public sectors – has a critical part to play in designing, leading and implementing a better future. The reason I believe this, is because government is one of the few mechanisms that is accountable to the people, in democratic countries at any rate. Perhaps not as much as we like and it has been slow to adapt to modern practices, tools and expectations, but governments are one of the most powerful and influential tools at our disposal and we can better use them as such. However, I posit that an internal, largely unintentional and ongoing degradation of the public sectors is underway in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and other “western democracies”, spurred initially by an ideological shift from ‘serving the public good’ to acting more like a business in the “New Public Management” policy shift of the 1980s. This was useful double speak for replacing public service values with business values and practices which ignores the fact that governments often do what is not naturally delivered by the marketplace and should not be only doing what is profitable. The political appointment of heads of departments has also resulted over time in replacing frank, fearless and evidence based leadership with politically palatable compromises throughout the senior executive layer of the public sector, which also drives necessarily secretive behaviour, else the contradictions be apparent to the ordinary person. I see the results of these internal forms of degradations almost every day. From workshops where people under budget constraints seriously consider outsourcing all government services to the private sector, to long suffering experts in the public sector unable to sway leadership with facts until expensive consultants are brought in to ask their opinion and sell the insights back to the department where it is finally taken seriously (because “industry” said it), through to serious issues where significant failures happen with blame outsourced along with the risk, design and implementation, with the details hidden behind “commercial in confidence” arrangements. The impact on the effectiveness of the public sector is obvious, but the human cost is also substantial, with public servants directly undermined, intimidated, ignored and a growing sense of hopelessness and disillusionment. There is also an intentional degradation of democracy by external (but occasionally internal) agents who benefit from the weakening and limiting of government. This is more overt in some countries than others. A tension between the regulator and those regulated is a perfectly natural thing however, as the public sector grows weaker the corporate interests gain the upper hand. I have seen many people in government take a vendor or lobbyist word as gold without critical analysis of the motivations or implications, largely again due to the word of a public servant being inherently assumed to be less important than that of anyone in the private sector (or indeed anyone in the Minister’s office). This imbalance needs to be addressed if the public sector is to play an effective role. Greater accountability and transparency can help but currently there is a lack of common agreement on the broader role of government in society, both the political and public sectors. So the entire institution and the stability it can provide is under threat of death by a billion papercuts. Efforts to evolve government and democracy have largely been limited to iterations on the status quo: better consultation, better voting, better access to information, better services. But a rethink is required and the internal systemic degradations need to be addressed.

If you think the world is perfectly fine as is, then you are probably quite lucky or privileged. Congratulations. It is easy to not see the cracks in the system when your life is going smoothly, but I invite you to consider the cracks that I have found herein, to test your assumptions daily and to leave your counter examples in the comments below.

For my part, I am optimistic about the future. I believe the proliferation of a human rights based ideology, participatory democracy and access to modern technologies all act to distribute power to the people, so we have the capacity more so than ever to collectively design and create a better future for us all.

Let’s build the machine we need to thrive both individually and collectively, and not just be beautiful cogs in a broken machine.

Further reading:

Chapter 1.2: Many hands make light work, for a while

This is part of a book I am working on, hopefully due for completion by mid 2018. The original purpose of the book is to explore where we are at, where we are going, and how we can get there, in the broadest possible sense. Your comments, feedback and constructive criticism are welcome! The final text of the book will be freely available under a Creative Commons By Attribution license. A book version will be sent to nominated world leaders, to hopefully encourage the necessary questioning of the status quo and smarter decisions into the future. Additional elements like references, graphs, images and other materials will be available in the final digital and book versions and draft content will be published weekly. Please subscribe to the blog posts by the RSS category and/or join the mailing list for updates.

Back to the book overview or table of contents for the full picture. Please note the pivot from focusing just on individuals to focusing on the systems we live in and the paradoxes therein.

“Differentiation of labour and interdependence of society is reliant on consistent and predictable authorities to thrive” — Durkheim

Many hands makes light work is an old adage both familiar and comforting. One feels that if things get our of hand we can just throw more resources at the problem and it will suffice. However we have made it harder on ourselves in three distinct ways:

  • by not always recognising the importance of interdependence and the need to ensure the stability and prosperity of our community as a necessary precondition to the success of the individuals therein;
  • by increasingly making it harder for people to gain knowledge, skills and adaptability to ensure those “many hands” are able to respond to the work required and not trapped into social servitude; and
  • by often failing to recognise whether we need a linear or exponential response in whatever we are doing, feeling secure in the busy-ness of many hands.

Specialisation is when a person delves deep on a particular topic or skill. Over many millennia we have got to the point where we have developed extreme specialisation, supported through interdependence and stability, which gave us the ability to rapidly and increasingly evolve what we do and how we live. This resulted in increasingly complex social systems and structures bringing us to a point today where the pace of change has arguably outpaced our imagination. We see many people around the world clinging to traditions and romantic notions of the past whilst we hurtle at an accelerating pace into the future. Many hands have certainly made light work, but new challenges have emerged as a result and it is more critical than ever that we reimagine our world and develop our resilience and adaptability to change, because change is the only constant moving forward.

One human can survive on their own for a while. A tribe can divide up the labour quite effectively and survive over generations, creating time for culture and play. But when we established cities and states around 6000 years ago, we started a level of unprecedented division of labour and specialisation beyond mere survival. When the majority of your time, energy and resources go into simply surviving, you are largely subject to forces outside your control and unable to justify spending time on other things. But when survival is taken care of (broadly speaking) it creates time for specialisation and perfecting your craft, as well as for leisure, sport, art, philosophy and other key areas of development in society.

The era of cities itself was born on the back of an agricultural technology revolution that made food production far more efficient, creating surplus (which drove a need for record keeping and greater proliferation of written language) and prosperity, with a dramatic growth in specialisation of jobs. With greater specialisation came greater interdependence as it becomes in everyone’s best interests to play their part predictably. A simple example is a farmer needing her farming equipment to be reliable to make food, and the mechanic needs food production to be reliable for sustenance. Both rely on each other not just as customers, but to be successful and sustainable over time. Greater specialisation led to greater surplus as specialists continued to fine tune their crafts for ever greater outcomes. Over time, an increasing number of people were not simply living day to day, but were able to plan ahead and learn how to deal with major disruptions to their existence. Hunters and gatherers are completely subject to the conditions they live in, with an impact on mortality, leisure activities largely fashioned around survival, small community size and the need to move around. With surplus came spare time and the ability to take greater control over one’s existence and build a type of systemic resilience to change.

So interdependence gave us greater stability, as a natural result of enlightened self interest writ large where ones own success is clearly aligned with the success of the community where one lives. However, where interdependence in smaller communities breeds a kind of mutual understanding and appreciation, we have arguably lost this reciprocity and connectedness in larger cities today, ironically where interdependence is strongest. When you can’t understand intuitively the role that others play in your wellbeing, then you don’t naturally appreciate them, and disconnected self interest creates a cost to the community. When community cohesion starts to decline, eventually individuals also decline, except the small percentage who can either move communities or who benefit, intentionally or not, on the back of others misfortune.

When you have no visibility of food production beyond the supermarket then it becomes easier to just buy the cheapest milk, eggs or bread, even if the cheapest product is unsustainable or undermining more sustainably produced goods. When you have such a specialised job that you can’t connect what you do to any greater meaning, purpose or value, then it also becomes hard to feel valuable to society, or valued by others. We see this increasingly in highly specialised organisations like large companies, public sector agencies and cities, where the individual feels the dual pressure of being anything and nothing all at once.

Modern society has made it somewhat less intuitive to value others who contribute to your survival because survival is taken for granted for many, and competing in ones own specialisation has been extended to competing in everything without appreciation of the interdependence required for one to prosper. Competition is seen to be the opposite of cooperation, whereas a healthy sustainable society is both cooperative and competitive. One can cooperate on common goals and compete on divergent goals, thus making best use of time and resources where interests align. Cooperative models seem to continually emerge in spite of economic models that assume simplistic punishment and incentive based behaviours. We see various forms of “commons” where people pool their resources in anything from community gardens and ’share economies’ to software development and science, because cooperation is part of who we are and what makes us such a successful species.

Increasing specialisation also created greater surplus and wealth, generating increasingly divergent and insular social classes with different levels of power and people becoming less connected to each other and with wealth overwhelmingly going to the few. This pressure between the benefits and issues of highly structured societies and which groups benefit has ebbed and flowed throughout our history but, generally speaking, when the benefits to the majority outweigh the issues for that majority, then you have stability. With stability a lot can be overlooked, including at times gross abuses for a minority or the disempowered. However, if the balances tips too far the other way, then you get revolutions, secessions, political movements and myriad counter movements. Unfortunately many counter movements limit themselves to replacing people rather than the structures that created the issues however, several of these counter movements established some critical ideas that underpin modern society.

Before we explore the rise of individualism through independence and suffrage movements (chapter 1.3), it is worth briefly touching upon the fact that specialisation and interdependence, which are critical for modern societies, both rely upon the ability for people to share, to learn, and to ensure that the increasingly diverse skills are able to evolve as the society evolves. Many hands only make light work when they know what they are doing. Historically the leaps in technology, techniques and specialisation have been shared for others to build upon and continue to improve as we see in writings, trade, oral traditions and rituals throughout history. Gatekeepers naturally emerged to control access to or interpretations of knowledge through priests, academics, the ruling class or business class. Where gatekeepers grew too oppressive, communities would subdivide to rebalance the power differential, such a various Protestant groups, union movements and the more recent Open Source movements. In any case, access wasn’t just about power of gatekeepers. The costs of publishing and distribution grew as societies grew, creating a call from the business class for “intellectual property” controls as financial mechanisms to offset these costs. The argument ran that because of the huge costs of production, business people needed to be incentivised to publish and distribute knowledge, though arguably we have always done so as a matter of survival and growth.

With the Internet suddenly came the possibility for massively distributed and free access to knowledge, where the cost of publishing, distribution and even the capability development required to understand and apply such knowledge was suddenly negligible. We created a universal, free and instant way to share knowledge, creating the opportunity for a compounding effect on our historic capacity for cumulative learning. This is worth taking a moment to consider. The technology simultaneously created an opportunity for compounding our cumulative learning whilst rendered the reasons for IP protections negligible (lowered costs of production and distribution) and yet we have seen a dramatic increase in knowledge protectionism. Isn’t it to our collective benefit to have a well educated community that can continue our trajectory of diversification and specialisation for the benefit of everyone? Anyone can get access to myriad forms of consumer entertainment but our most valuable knowledge assets are fiercely protected against general and free access, dampening our ability to learn and evolve. The increasing gap between the haves and have nots is surely symptomatic of the broader increasing gap between the empowered and disempowered, the makers and the consumers, those with knowledge and those without. Consumers are shaped by the tools and goods they have access to, and limited by their wealth and status. But makers can create the tools and goods they need, and can redefine wealth and status with a more active and able hand in shaping their own lives.

As a result of our specialisation, our interdependence and our cooperative/competitive systems, we have created greater complexity in society over time, usually accompanied with the ability to respond to greater complexity. The problem is that a lot of our solutions to change have been linear responses to an exponential problem space. the assumption that more hands will continue to make light work often ignores the need for sharing skills and knowledge, and certainly ignores where a genuinely transformative response is required. A small fire might be managed with buckets, but at some point of growth, adding more buckets becomes insufficient and new methods are required. Necessity breeds innovation and yet when did you last see real innovation that didn’t boil down to simply more or larger buckets? Iteration is rarely a form of transformation, so it is important to always clearly understand the type of problem you are dealing with and whether the planned response needs to be linear or exponential. If the former, more buckets is probably fine. If the latter, every bucket is just a distraction from developing the necessary response.

Next chapter I’ll examine how the independence movements created the philosophical pre-condition for democracy, the Internet and the dramatic paradigm shifts to follow.

My Canadian adventure exploring FWD50

I recently went to Ottawa for the FWD50 conference run by Rebecca and Alistair Croll. It was my first time in Canada, and it combined a number of my favourite things. I was at an incredible conference with a visionary and enthusiastic crowd, made up of government (international, Federal, Provincial and Municipal), technologists, civil society, industry, academia, and the calibre of discussions and planning for greatness was inspiring.

There was a number of people I have known for years but never met in meatspace, and equally there were a lot of new faces doing amazing things. I got to spend time with the excellent people at the Treasury Board of Canadian Secretariat, including the Canadian Digital Service and the Office of the CIO, and by wonderful coincidence I got to see (briefly) the folk from the Open Government Partnership who happened to be in town. Finally I got to visit the gorgeous Canadian Parliament, see their extraordinary library, and wander past some Parliamentary activity which always helps me feel more connected to (and therefore empowered to contribute to) democracy in action.

Thank you to Alistair Croll who invited me to keynote this excellent event and who, with Rebecca Croll, managed to create a truly excellent event with a diverse range of ideas and voices exploring where we could or should go as a society in future. I hope it is a catalyst for great things to come in Canada and beyond.

For those in Canada who are interested in the work in New Zealand, I strongly encourage you to tune into the D5 event in February which will have some of our best initiatives on display, and to tune in to our new Minister for Broadband, Digital and Open Government (such an incredible combination in a single portfolio), Minister Clare Curran and you can tune in to our “Service Innovation” work at our blog or by subscribing to our mailing list. I also encourage you to read this inspiring “People’s Agenda” by a civil society organisation in NZ which codesigned a vision for the future type of society desired in New Zealand.

Highlights

  • One of the great delights of this trip was seeing a number of people in person for the first time who I know from the early “Gov 2.0” days (10 years ago!). It was particularly great to see Thom Kearney from Canada’s TBS and his team, Alex Howard (@digiphile) who is now a thought leader at the Sunlight Foundation, and Olivia Neal (@livneal) from the UK CTO office/GDS, Joe Powell from OGP, as well as a few friends from Linux and Open Source (Matt and Danielle amongst others).
  • The speech by Canadian Minister of the Treasury Board Secretariat (which is responsible for digital government) the Hon Scott Brison, was quite interesting and I had the chance to briefly chat to him and his advisor at the speakers drinks afterwards about the challenges of changing government.
  • Meeting with Canadian public servants from a variety of departments including the transport department, innovation and science, as well as the Treasury Board Secretariat and of course the newly formed Canadian Digital Service.
  • Meeting people from a range of sub-national governments including the excellent folk from Peel, Hillary Hartley from Ontario, and hearing about the quite inspiring work to transform organisational structures, digital and other services, adoption of micro service based infrastructure, the use of “labs” for experimentation.
  • It was fun meeting some CIO/CTOs from Canada, Estonia, UK and other jurisdictions, and sharing ideas about where to from here. I was particularly impressed with Alex Benay (Canadian CIO) who is doing great things, and with Siim Sikkut (Estonian CIO) who was taking the digitisation of Estonia into a new stage of being a broader enabler for Estonians and for the world. I shared with them some of my personal lessons learned around digital iteration vs transformation, including from the DTO in Australia (which has changed substantially, including a name change since I was there). Some notes of my lessons learned are at http://pipka.org/2017/04/03/iteration-or-transformation-in-government-paint-jobs-and-engines/.
  • My final highlight was how well my keynote and other talks were taken. People were really inspired to think big picture and I hope it was useful in driving some of those conversations about where we want to collectively go and how we can better collaborate across geopolitical lines.

Below are some photos from the trip, and some observations from specific events/meetings.

My FWD50 Keynote – the Tipping Point

I was invited to give a keynote at FWD50 about the tipping point we have gone through and how we, as a species, need to embrace the major paradigm shifts that have already happened, and decide what sort of future we want and work towards that. I also suggested some predictions about the future and examined the potential roles of governments (and public sectors specifically) in the 21st century. The slides are at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1coe4Sl0vVA-gBHQsByrh2awZLa0Nsm6gYEqHn9ppezA/edit?usp=sharing and the full speech is on my personal blog at http://pipka.org/2017/11/08/fwd50-keynote-the-tipping-point.

I also gave a similar keynote speech at the NerHui conference in New Zealand the week after which was recorded for those who want to see or hear the content at https://2017.nethui.nz/friday-livestream

The Canadian Digital Service

Was only set up about a year ago and has a focus on building great services for users, with service design and user needs at the heart of their work. They have some excellent people with diverse skills and we spoke about what is needed to do “digital government” and what that even means, and the parallels and interdependencies between open government and digital government. They spoke about an early piece of work they did before getting set up to do a national consultation about the needs of Canadians (https://digital.canada.ca/beginning-the-conversation/) which had some interesting insights. They were very focused on open source, standards, building better ways to collaborate across government(s), and building useful things. They also spoke about their initial work around capability assessment and development across the public sector. I spoke about my experience in Australia and New Zealand, but also in working and talking to teams around the world. I gave an informal outline about the work of our Service Innovation and Service Integration team in DIA, which was helpful to get some feedback and peer review, and they were very supportive and positive. It was an excellent discussion, thank you all!

CivicTech meetup

I was invited to talk to the CivicTech group meetup in Ottawa (https://www.meetup.com/YOW_CT/events/243891738/) about the roles of government and citizens into the future. I gave a quick version of the keynote I gave at linux.conf.au 2017 (pipka.org/2017/02/18/choose-your-own-adventure-keynote/), which explores paradigm shifts and the roles of civic hackers and activists in helping forge the future whilst also considering what we should (and shouldn’t) take into the future with us. It included my amusing change.log of the history of humans and threw down the gauntlet for civic hackers to lead the way, be the light 🙂

CDS Halloween Mixer

The Canadian Digital Service does a “mixer” social event every 6 weeks, and this one landed on Halloween, which was also my first ever Halloween celebration  I had a traditional “beavertail” which was a flat cinnamon doughnut with lemon, amazing! Was fun to hang out but of course I had to retire early from jet lag.

Workshop with Alistair

The first day of FWD50 I helped Alistair Croll with a day long workshop exploring the future. We thought we’d have a small interactive group and ended up getting 300, so it was a great mind meld across different ideas, sectors, technologies, challenges and opportunities. I gave a talk on culture change in government, largely influenced by a talk a few years ago called “Collaborative innovation in the public service: Game of Thrones style” (http://pipka.org/2015/01/04/collaborative-innovation-in-the-public-service-game-of-thrones-style/). People responded well and it created a lot of discussions about the cultural challenges and barriers in government.

Thanks

Finally, just a quick shout out and thanks to Alistair for inviting me to such an amazing conference, to Rebecca for getting me organised, to Danielle and Matthew for your companionship and support, to everyone for making me feel so welcome, and to the following folk who inspired, amazed and colluded with me  In chronological order of meeting: Sean Boots, Stéphane Tourangeau, Ryan Androsoff, Mike Williamson, Lena Trudeau, Alex Benay (Canadian Gov CIO), Thom Kearney and all the TBS folk, Siim Sikkut from Estonia, James Steward from UK, and all the other folk I met at FWD50, in between feeling so extremely unwell!

Thank you Canada, I had a magnificent time and am feeling inspired!

FWD50 Keynote: The Tipping Point

I was invited to an incredible and inaugural conference in Canada called FWD50 which was looking at the next 50 days, months and years for society. It had a digital government flavour to it but had participants and content from various international, national and sub-national governments, civil society, academia, industry and advocacy groups. The diversity of voices in the room was good and the organisers committed to greater diversity next year. I gave my keynote as an independent expert and my goal was to get people thinking bigger than websites and mobile apps, to dream about the sort of future we want as a society (as a species!) and work towards that. As part of my talk I also explored what the big paradigm shifts have happened (note the past tense) and potential roles for government (particularly the public sector) in a hyper connected, distributed network of powerful individuals. My slides are available here (simple though they are). It wasn’t recorded but I did an audio recording and transcribed. I was unwell and had lost my voice so this is probably better anyway 🙂

The tipping point and where do we go from here

I’ve been thinking a lot over many years about change and the difference between iteration and transformation, about systems, about what is going on in the big picture, because what I’m seeing around the world is a lot of people iterating away from pain but not actually iterating towards a future. Looking for ways to solve the current problem but not rethinking or reframing in the current context. I want to talk to you about the tipping point.

We invented all of this. This is worth taking a moment to think. We invented every system, every government, every means of production, we organised ourselves into structures and companies, all the things we know, we invented. By understanding we invented we can embrace the notice we aren’t stuck with it. A lot of people start from the normative perspective that it is how it is and how do we improve it slightly but we don’t have to be constrained to assumption because *we* invented it. We can take a formative approach.

The reason this is important is because the world has fundamentally changed. The world has started from a lot of assumptions. This (slide) is a map of the world as it was known at the time, and it was known for a long time to be flat. And at some point it became known that the world was not flat and people had to change their perspective. If we don’t challenge those assumptions that underpin our systems, we run the significant risk of recreating the past with shiny new things. If we take whatever the shiny thing is today, like blockchain or social media 10 years ago, and take that shiny thing to do what we have always done, then how are we progressing? We are just “lifting and shifting” as they like to say, which as a technologist is almost the worst thing I can hear.

Actually understanding the assumptions that underpin what we do, understanding the goal that we have and what we are trying to achieve, and actually having to make sure that we intentionally choose to move forward with the assumptions that we want to take into the future is important because a lot of the biases and assumptions that underpin the systems that we have today were forged centuries or even millennia ago. A long time before the significant paradigm shifts we have seen.

So I’m going to talk a little bit about how things have changed. It’s not that the tipping point is happening. The tipping point has already happened. We have seen paradigm shifts with legacy systems of power and control. Individuals are more individually powerful than ever in the history of our species. If you think way back in hunter and gatherer times, everyone was individually pretty powerful then, but it didn’t scale. When we moved to cities we actually started to highly specialise and become interdependent and individually less powerful because we made these systems of control that were necessary to manage the surplus of resource, necessary to manage information. But what’s happened now through the independence movements creating a culture of everyone being individually powerful through individual worthy of rights, and then more recently with the internet becoming a distributor, enabler and catalyst of that, we are now seeing power massively distributed.

Think about it. Any individual around the world that can get online, admittedly that’s only two thirds of us but it’s growing every day, and everyone has the power to publish, to create, to share, to collaborate, to collude, to monitor. It’s not just the state monitoring the people but the people monitoring the state and people monitoring other people. There is the power to enforce your own perspective. And it doesn’t actually matter whether you think it’s a good or bad thing, it is the reality. It’s the shift. And if we don’t learn to embrace, understand and participate in it,particularly in government, then we actually make ourselves less relevant. Because one of the main things about this distribution of power, that the internet has taught us fundamentally as part of our culture that we have all started to adopt, is that you can route around damage. The internet was set up to be able to route around damage where damage was physical or technical. We started to internalise that socially and if you, in government, are seen to be damage, then people route around you. This is why we have to learn to work as a node in a network, not just a king in a castle, because kings don’t last anymore.

So which way is forward. The priority now needs to be deciding what sort of future do we want. Not what sort of past do we want to escape. The 21st century sees many communities emerging. They are hyper connected, transnational, multicultural, heavily interdependent, heavily specialised, rapidly changing and disconnected from their geopolitical roots. Some people see that as a reason to move away from having geopolitically formed states. Personally I believe there will always be a role for a geographic state because I need a way to scale a quality of life for my family along with my fellow citizens and neighbours. But what does that mean in an international sense. Are my rights as a human being being realised in a transnational sense. There are some really interesting questions about the needs of users beyond the individual services that we deliver, particularly when you look in a transnational way.

So a lot of these assumptions have become like a rusty anchor that kept us in place in high tide, but are drawing us to a dangerous reef as to water lowers. We need to figure out how to float on the water without rusty anchors to adapt to the tides of change.

There are a lot of pressures that are driving these changes of course. We are all feeling those pressures, those of us that are working in government. There’s the pressure of changing expectations, of history, from politics and the power shift. The pressure of the role of government in the 21st century. Pressure is a wonderful thing as it can be a catalyst of change, so we shouldn’t shy away from pressure, but recognising that we’re under pressure is important.

So let’s explore some of those power shifts and then what role could government play moving forward.

Paradigm #1: central to distributed.

This is about that shift in power, the independence movements and the internet. It is something people talk about but don’t necessarily apply to their work. Governments will talk about wanting to take a more distributed approach but followup with setting up “my” website expecting everyone to join or do something. How about everyone come to “my” office or create “my” own lab. Distributed, when you start to really internalise what that means, if different. I was lucky as I forged a lot of my assumptions and habits of working when I was involved in the Open Source community, and the Open Source community has a lot of lessons for rest of society because it is on the bleeding edge of a lot of these paradigm shifts. So working in a distributed way is to assume that you are not at the centre, to assume that you’re not needed. To assume that if you make yourself useful that people will rely on you, but also to assume that you rely on others and to build what you do in a way that strengthens the whole system. I like to talk about it as “Gov as a Platform”, sometimes that is confusing to people so let’s talk about it as “Gov as an enabler”. It’s not just government as a central command and controller anymore because the moment you create a choke point, people route around it. How do we become a government as an enabler of good things, and how can we use other mechanisms to create the controls in society. Rather than try to protect people from themselves, why not enable people to protect themselves. There are so many natural motivations in the community, in industry, in the broader sector that we serve, that we can tap into but traditionally we haven’t. Because traditionally we saw ourselves as the enforcer, as the one to many choke point. So working in a distributed way is not just about talking the talk, it’s about integrated it into the way we think.

Some other aspects of this include localised to globalised, keeping in mind that large multinational companies have become quite good at jurisdiction shopping for improvements of profits, which you can’t say is either a good or bad thing, it’s just a natural thing and how they’re naturally motivated. But citizens are increasingly starting to jurisdiction shop too. So I would suggest a role for government in the 21st century would be to create the best possible quality of life for people, because then you’ll attract the best from around the world.

The second part of central to distributed is simple to complex. I have this curve (on the slide) which shows green as complexity and red as government’s response to user needs. The green climbs exponentially whilst the red is pretty linear, with small increases or decreases over time, but not an exponential response by any means. Individual needs are no longer heavily localised. They are subject to local, national, transnational complexities with every extra complexity compounded, not linear. So the increasing complexities in people’s lives, and the obligations, taxation, services and entitlements, everything is going up. So there is a delta forming between what government can directly do, and what people need. So again I contend that the opportunity here particularly for the public sector is to actually be an enabler for all those service intermediaries – the for profit, non profit, civic tech – to help them help themselves, help them help their customers, by merit of making government a platform upon which they can build. We’ve had a habit and a history of creating public infrastructure, particularly in Australia, in New Zealand, in Canada, we’re been very good at building public infrastructure. Why have we not focused on digital infrastructure? Why do we see digital infrastructure as something that has to be cost recovered to be sustainable when we don’t have to do cost recovery for every thing public road. I think that looking at the cost benefits and value creation of digital public infrastructure needs to be looks at in the same way, and we need to start investing in digital public infrastructure.

Paradigm #2: analog to digital.

Or slow to very fast. I like to joke that we use lawyers as modems. If you think about regulation and policy, we write it, it is translated by a lawyer or drafter into regulation or policy, it is then translated by a lawyer or drafter or anyone into operational systems, business systems, helpdesk systems or other systems in society. Why wouldn’t we make our regulation as code? The intent of our regulation and our legislative regimes available to be directly consumed (by the systems) so that we can actually speed up, automate, improve consistency of application through the system, and have a feedback loop to understand whether policy changes are having the intended policy effect.

There are so many great things we can do when we start thinking about digital as something new, not just digitising an analog process. Innovation too long was interpreted as a digitisation of a process, basic process improvements. But real digitisation should a a transformation where you are changing the thing to better achieve the purpose or intent.

Paradigm #3: scarcity to surplus.

I think this is critical. We have a lot of assumptions in our systems that assume scarcity. Why do we still have so many of our systems assume scarcity when surplus is the opportunity. Between 3D printing and nanotech, we could be deconstructing and reconstructing new materials to print into goods and food and yet a large inhibitor of 3D printing progress is copyright. So the question I have for you is do we care more about an 18h century business model or do we care about solving the problems of our society. We need to make these choices. If we have moved to an era of surplus but we are getting increasing inequality, perhaps the systems of distribution are problematic? Perhaps in assuming scarcity we are protecting scarcity for the few at the cost of the many.

Paradigm #4: normative to formative

“Please comply”. For the last hundred years in particular we have perfected the art of broadcasting images of normal into our houses, particularly with radio and television. We have the concept of set a standard or rule and if you don’t follow we’ll punish you, so a lot of culture is about compliance in society. Compliance is important for stability, but blind compliance can create millstones. A formative paradigm is about not saying how it is but in exploring where you want to go. In the public service we are particularly good at compliance culture but I suggest that if we got more people thinking formatively, not just change for changes sake, but bringing people together on their genuinely shared purpose of serving the public, then we might be able to take a more formative approach to doing the work we do for the betterment of society rather than ticking the box because it is the process we have to follow. Formative takes us away from being consumers and towards being makers. As an example, the most basic form of normative human behaviour is in how we see and conform to being human. You are either normal, or you are not, based on some externally projected vision of normal. But the internet has shown us that no one is normal. So embracing that it is through our difference we are more powerful and able to adapt is an important part of our story and culture moving forward. If we are confident to be formative, we can always trying to create a better world whilst applying a critical eye to compliance so we don’t comply for compliance sake.

Exploring optimistic futures

Now on the back of these paradigm shifts, I’d like to briefly about the future. I spoke about the opportunity through surplus with 3D printing and nanotech to address poverty and hunger. What about the opportunities of rockets for domestic travel? It takes half an hour to get into space, an hour to traverse the world and half an hour down which means domestic retail transport by rocket is being developed right now which means I could go from New Zealand to Canada to work for the day and be home for tea. That shift is going to be enormous in so many ways and it could drive real changes in how we see work and internationalism. How many people remember Total Recall? The right hand picture is a self driving car from a movie in the 90s and is becoming normal now. Interesting fact, some of the car designs will tint the windows when they go through intersections because the passengers are deeply uncomfortable with the speed and closeness of self driving cars which can miss each other very narrowly compared to human driving. Obviously there are opportunities around AI, bots and automation but I think where it gets interesting when we think about opportunities of the future of work. We are still working on industrial assumptions that the number of hours that we have is a scarcity paradigm and I have to sell the number of hours that I work, 40, 50, 60 hours. Why wouldn’t we work 20 hours a week at a higher rate to meet our basic needs? Why wouldn’t we have 1 or 2 days a week where we could contribute to our civic duties, or art, or education. Perhaps we could jump start an inclusive renaissance, and I don’t mean cat pictures. People can’t thrive if they’re struggling to survive and yet we keep putting pressure on people just to survive. Again, we are from countries with quite strong safety nets but even those safety nets put huge pressure, paperwork and bureaucracy on our most vulnerable just to meet their basic needs. Often the process of getting access to the services and entitlements is so hard and traumatic that they can’t, so how do we close that gap so all our citizens can move from survival to thriving.

The last picture is a bit cheeky. A science fiction author William Gibson wrote Johnny Pneumonic and has a character in that book called Jones, a cyborg dolphin to sniff our underwater mines in warfare. Very dark, but the interesting concept there is in how Jones was received after the war: “he was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin’s point of view he might have seemed like something less.” What does it mean to be human? If I lose a leg, right now it is assumed I need to replace that leg to be somehow “whole”. What if I want 4 legs. The human brain is able to adapt to new input. I knew a woman who got a small sphere filled with mercury and a free floating magnet in her finger, and the magnet spins according to frequency and she found over a short period of time she was able to detect changes in frequency. Why is that cool and interesting? Because the brain can adapt to foreign, non evolved input. I think that is mind blowing. We have the opportunity to augment our selves not to just conform to normal or be slightly better, faster humans. But we can actually change what it means to be human altogether. I think this will be one of the next big social challenges for society but because we are naturally so attracted to “shiny”, I think that discomfort will pass within a couple of generations. One prediction is that the normal Olympics has become boring and that we will move into a transhuman olympics where we take the leash off and explore the 100m sprint with rockets, or judo with cyborgs. Where the interest goes, the sponsorship goes, and more professional athletes compete. And what’s going to happen if your child says they want to be a professional transhuman olympian and that they will add wings or remove their legs for their professional career, to add them (or not) later? That’s a bit scary for many but at the same time, it’s very interesting. And it’s ok to be uncomfortable, it’s ok to look at change, be uncomfortable and ask yourself “why am I uncomfortable?” rather than just pushing back on discomfort. It’s critical more than ever, particularly in the public service that we get away from this dualistic good or bad, in or out, yours or mine and start embracing the grey.

The role of government?

So what’s the role of government in all this, in the future. Again these are just some thoughts, a conversation starter.

I think one of our roles is to ensure that individuals have the ability to thrive. Now I acknowledge I’m very privileged to have come from a social libertarian country that believe this, where people broadly believe they want their taxes to go to the betterment of society and not all countries have that assumption. But if we accept the idea that people can’t thrive if they can’t survive, then our baseline quality of life if you assume an individual starts from nothing with no privilege, benefits or family, provided by the state, needs to be good enough for the person to be able to thrive. Otherwise we get a basic structural problem. Part of that is becoming master buildings again, and to go to the Rawl’s example from Alistair before, we need empathy in what we do in government. The amount of times we build systems without empathy and they go terribly wrong because we didn’t think about what it would be like to be on the other side of that service, policy or idea. User centred design is just a systematisation of empathy, which is fantastic, but bringing empathy into everything we do is very important.

Leadership is a very important role for government. I think part of our role is to represent the best interests of society. I very strongly feel that we have a natural role to serve the public in the public sector, as distinct from the political sector (though citizens see us as the same thing). The role of a strong, independent public sector is more important than ever in a post facts “fake news” world because it is one of the only actors on the stage that is naturally motivated, naturally systemically motivated, to serve the best interests of the public. That’s why open government is so important and that’s why digital and open government initiatives align directly.

Because open with digital doesn’t scale, and digital without open doesn’t last.

Stability, predictability and balance. It is certainly a role of government to create confidence in our communities, confidence creates thriving. It is one thing to address Maslov’s pyramid of needs but if you don’t feel confident, if you don’t feel safe, then you still end up behaving in strange and unpredictable ways. So this is part of what is needed for communities to thrive. This relates to regulation and there is a theory that regulation is bad because it is hard. I would suggest that regulation is important for the stability and predictability in society but we have to change the way we deliver it. Regulation as code gets the balance right because you can have the settings and levers in the economy but also the ability for it to be automated, consumable, consistent, monitored and innovative. I imagine a future where I have a personal AI which I can trust because of quantum cryptography and because it is tethered in purpose to my best interests. I don’t have to rely on whether my interests happen to align with the purpose of a department, company or non-profit to get the services I need because my personal bot can figure out what I need and give me the options for me to make decisions about my life. It could deal with the Government AI to figure out the rules, my taxation, obligations, services and entitlements. Where is the website in all that? I ask this because the web was a 1990s paradigm, and we need more people to realise and plan around the idea that the future of service delivery is in building the backend of what we do – the business rules, transactions, data, content, models – in a modular consumable so we can shift channels or modes of delivery whether it is a person, digital service or AI to AI interaction.

Another role of government is in driving the skills we need for the 21st century. Coding is critical not because everyone needs to code (maybe they will) but more than that coding teaches you an assumption, an instinct, that technology is something that can be used by you, not something you are intrinsically bound to. Minecraft is the saviour of a generation because all those kids are growing up believing they can shape the world around them, not have to be shaped by the world around them. This harks back to the normative/formative shift. But we also need to teach critical thinking, teach self awareness, bias awareness, maker skills, community awareness. It has been delightful to move to New Zealand where they have a culture that has an assumed community awareness.

We need of course to have a strong focus on participatory democracy, where government isn’t just doing something to you but we are all building the future we need together. This is how we create a multi-processor world rather than a single processor government. This is how we scale and develop a better society but we need to move beyond “consultation” and into actual co-design with governments working collaboratively across the sectors and with civil society to shape the world.

I’ll finish on this note, government as an enabler, a platform upon which society can build. We need to build a way of working that assumes we are a node in the network, that assumes we have to work collaboratively, that assumes that people are naturally motivated to make good decisions for their life and how can government enable and support people.

So embrace the tipping point, don’t just react. What future do you want, what society do you want to move towards? I guess I’ve got to a point in my life where I see everything as a system and if I can’t connect the dots between what I’m doing and the purpose then I try to not do that thing. The first public service job I had I got in and automated a large proportion of the work within a couple of weeks and then asked for data.gov.au, and they gave it to me because I was motivated to make it better.

So I challenge you to be thinking about this every day, to consider your own assumptions and biases, to consider whether you are being normative or formative, to evaluate whether you are being iterative or transformative, to evaluate whether you are moving away from something or towards something. And to always keep in mind where you want to be, how you are contributing to a better society and to actively leave behind those legacy ideas that simply don’t serve us anymore.

How we got here, Chapter 1: Clever Monkeys

This is part of a book I am working on, hopefully due for completion by early 2017. The purpose of the book is to explore where we are at, where we are going, and how we can get there, in the broadest possible sense.  It is in “stream of consciousness” phase so your comments, feedback and constructive criticism are welcome! The final text of the book will be freely available under a Creative Commons By Attribution license. A book version will be sent to nominated world leaders, to hopefully encourage the necessary questioning of the status quo and smarter decisions into the future. Additional elements like references, graphs, images and other materials will be available in the final digital and book versions and draft content will be published weekly. Please subscribe to the blog posts by RSS and/or join the mailing list for updates.

Back to the book overview or table of contents for the full picture.

If we look back at our earliest roots, humans have some pretty special characteristics that define and drive us, even today, and have made us arguably the most successful species in the world. We have populated every continent, developed complex social structures and specialisation of labour, shaped the environment around us, even traveled to the moon. The rate of human change, progress and indeed, evolution, is only getting faster over time. Though there are certainly issues around the sustainability of how we currently live, we have also come to an age of greater self awareness as a species of our impact, capabilities and responsibilities and can develop new ways to live more sustainably.

By understanding the basic but persistent characteristics of our collective psyche, we can better understand what will drive our decisions and trends of our future.The core human characteristics that collectively differentiate us from other animals are language and symbology, collaboration and specialisation, cumulative learning, curiosity and our thirst for fun.

Language and symbology has given us the ability to both communicate and record ideas, but also to`explore and express abstract concepts. Because we are a highly social and collaborative animal, we also have the ability to share the workload and specialise, such that individuals can become highly skilled at a subset of the skills needed for the group survival and prosperity. This in turn makes us more interdependent on the rest of the group, as highly specialised individuals are necessarily without all the skills needed to prosper. This is no less the case today than it was in ancient hunter and gather communities, though the necessary interdependence of individuals is often forgotten amidst  modern ideologies of liberalism and individual rights. The individual needs the collective to share the load of survival in order to have the comfort, time and space to thrive, otherwise that individual little time to think or develop skills beyond the next meal or shelter. As such, the good of the collective is necessary for the good of the individual. One of the interesting things about our social structures, work specialisation and necessary interdependence is that it fosters some element of stability and predictability in life, which we also are taught to pursue. Stability and predictability have historically made it easier to survive and thrive however, this was easier when the rate of change was slower. In any case, stability and predictability when combined with basic needs being met also creates opportunity for growth and advancement.

The characteristics that most significantly contributed to the rise and rise of homo sapiens is our capacity for cumulative learning and cooperative competition. Individuals inherit knowledge, and then build upon that foundation to develop new knowledge, continually passing exchange, enhancing and improving. As very early humans started to travel and trade, knowledge was increasingly exchanged between different groups creating an increased rate of development. The introduction of modern and instantaneous global communications pushed that capacity even further with cumulative learning – and the progress of invention and ideas – becoming faster than ever, with more people than ever able to contribute to and derive from a collective knowledge commons. The fact that the Internet also harbours unprecedented amounts of entertainment with which individuals could simply spend their life creating nothing of substance does not take away from the fact that same individual, if motivated, could educate themselves on almost anything to contribute to making a better world. With so many people so immediately and easily connected around the world, we also have new means of cooperating and competing. Even when our basic needs are met, we still have an inherent instinct to work with others to improve things. Often cooperation and competition are presented as zero sum game principles however, historically, it is by both cooperating and competing that we have flourished. Cooperating on the common, and competing on the distinct. Both are built into everyday life, from sharing cookies with schoolmates at an athletics competition, to sharing workspaces of competing startups in business incubators. In an era of surplus, many of us aren’t competing for resources at the cost of others, but rather are competing with ideas, beliefs and a changing perspectives of success. All competition naturally builds on the back of cooperation as the best of the best will stand on the shoulders of giants who have come before. Similarly, all cooperation is built on a little competition as the people involved in any venture will try harder with their peers watching, and will strive to be the best they can.

Finally, our natural curiosity and fun seeking natures continually compel us to explore the world around us and improve our lives. Curiosity is certainly not unique to humans however, our constant thirst for knowledge, for ever more shiny distractions and entertainment, for invention and fun, can help in predicting how we may behave in future. Once something, anything, becomes uninteresting or onerous, people tend to look elsewhere. Whatever people find interesting (or can be convinced to be interested in) becomes the basis for new markets, entertainment, memes, finances, invention and development. We like to play. In every form of human society throughout time we have made time to have fun, even when our basic needs aren’t met. We have made play such an important part of our lives that we have created entire areas of specialisation that appear to serve no purpose apart from pleasure, though often contain the ingredients for developing skills, building social cohesion and sharing knowledge. Play is a critical part of human development and life, and we tend to work hard to improve our lives specifically to make space and time for fun.

Although we have developed many complicated systems for how we survive and thrive, we are in fact fairly predictable in our basic desires and motivations. We crave shiny things, new knowledge, social acceptance and control over our lives. We aim to make our lives easier so we can have more time to play. We arm ourselves with the tools required to satisfy our desires (whether innate or influenced) and can build on the efforts and knowledge of those who have come before to constantly innovate and improve, working cooperatively and competitively with others around us. We try to avoid what we aren’t naturally motivated to do, and we like to explore and enjoy the world around us, seeking ever new and exciting experiences. Regardless of how complicated a system we build, these traits have endured and apply to us at both a macro and micro level. For instance, an organisation or body of people is no more likely to do something not in its best interest as an individual, and are just as likely to react badly to existential threats. This should shape how we design and deliver public policy, laws, services, regulation and other broad programs but we often build new systems without taking a pragmatically empathetic view to those affected.

These basic characteristics have brought us here and continue to underpin our lives, so they can tell us something about the fundamental trajectory of human development over time and into the future. They also demonstrate clearly the opportunity to thrive when basic needs are met.

Further reading:

  • The “Big History” website is amazing and well referenced.
  • References to include research papers on psychology, rate of evolution, anthropological and historical references to growth and changes in human society including emergence of highly interdependent specialisation, research on human motivations and thrive vs survive reactions.

Back to the book overview or table of contents for the full picture.

Choose Your Own Adventure, Please!

This is a book I am working on, hopefully due for completion by mid 2018. The original purpose of the book is to explore where we are at, where we are going, and how we can get there, in the broadest possible sense. Your comments, feedback and constructive criticism are welcome! The final text of the book will be freely available under a Creative Commons By Attribution license. A book version will be sent to nominated world leaders, to hopefully encourage the necessary questioning of the status quo and smarter decisions into the future. Additional elements like references, graphs, images and other materials will be available in the final digital and book versions and draft content will be published weekly. Please subscribe to the blog posts by the RSS category and/or join the mailing list for updates.

NOTE: The outline below has been updated to reflect a pivot in intention from individuals to addressing systemic issues including the potential role of governments, in late 2017.

Overview

Where are we going and how do we get there? An optimistic book exploring the possibilities for our future as a species that shows how our global society is changing, what opportunities lie ahead, and what we need to collectively address if we are to create the kind of life we all want to lead. It challenges individuals, governments and corporations to critically assess the status quo, to embrace the opportunities of the new world, and to make intelligent choices for a better future.

We have seen a fundamental shift of several paradigms that underpinned the foundations of our society, but now hold us back. Like a rusty anchor that provided stability in high tide, we are now bound to a dangerous reef as the water lowers. We have seen a shift from central to distributed, from scarcity to surplus and from closed to open systems, wherein the latter of each is proving significantly more successful in the modern context. And yet, many of our assumptions are based on the default idea that centricity, scarcity and closed are the desired state. Are they?

Meanwhile the complexity of people’s lives is exponentially growing, with local, national and transnational rules and systems that overlap, intersect and contradict. This means new solutions need to be exponential by design as linear solutions simply won’t scale over time.

There are many books that talk about technology and the impact it has had on our lives, but technology is only part of the story. The immense philosophical shift, particularly over the past 250 years, has created a modern perspective that all people can be influential, successful and mighty, certainly compared to our peasant ancestors who had very little control over their destinies. People — normal people — are more individually powerful than ever in the history of our species and this has enormous consequences for where we are heading and the opportunities ahead. This distribution of power started with the novel idea that individuals might have inalienable rights, and has been realised through the dramatic transformation of the Internet and wide spread access to modern technologies and communications.

How can we use this power to build a better world? Are we capable of identifying, challenging and ultimately changing the existing ideologies and systems that act to maintain a status quo established in the dark ages? We have come to a fascinating fork in our collective road where we can choose to either maintain a world that relies upon outdated models of scarcity that rely upon inequality, or we can explore new models of surplus and opportunity to see where we go next, together.

This requires both individual efforts, as well as systemic transformation of the institutions and organisations we have created.

This book is in three parts and will include case studies, research and references and questions about the status quo:

  • How we got here – looking at the history of modern society including our strengths, weaknesses and major paradigm shifts along the way, including the massive distribution of power from the centre to the periphery over recent centuries and decades. It will also consider the combination of human traits that have served us so well including communication, shared cumulative learning, curiosity, cooperation and competition, experimentation and a constant quest for new forms of stimulation.
  • Exploring optimistic futures – exploring possible optimistic futures we could consider and the urgency need for a vision for our society for people to naturally converge on, taking new trends and technologies into account. Opportunities such as nanotech and 3D printing to address poverty and hunger, the possibilities of human augmentation given the brain’s capability to adapt to genuinely foreign inputs, the inevitable shift from the Olympics to the Paralympics, and the shift from nationalism to transnationalism, with significant implications for politics and other traditional geopolitically defined power structures.
  • How do we get there – the final part of the book will look at the different actors involved in society and the potential roles of governments (public and political sectors) in enabling an optimistic and inclusive future. It will also address artificial systems, thinking and structures we have put in place that will continue to hold us back from our potential, including how the law is always behind reality, how a variety of entrenched systems of thinking present the next major philosophical hurdles to progress, how centrist competitive models are failing against distributed cooperative models, and how our ability to move forward relies on being able to let go of the past. This chapter will cover traditional thinking about property, copyright and law, capitalism and zero sum thinking, traditional belief systems, globalism and digital literacy issues.

Below is a more detailed index of draft chapters which will be linked as they are written on this blog for your interest and feedback. Many thanks to everyone who has encouraged me in doing this, and I hope to make you all proud 🙂 Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Foreword & Introduction

Chapter 1: How we got here

The skills, attributes and context that brought us to where we are.

  1. Clever monkeys – key traits that brought us to where we are
  2. Many hands make light work, for a while – the growth of communities, diversification of skills and impact of interdependence
  3. Emancipation and individualism – human rights, suffrage movements and liberalism
  4. Paradigm shifts of the 20th century – from kings in castles to nodes in networks, scarcity to surplus, closed to openness and other changes
  5. Increasingly powerful citizens – the emergence of technocracy (for now this is linked to a paper I did on the distribution of power and emergence of a ‘technocracy’ of sorts)

Chapter 2: Exploring optimistic futures

Some predictions, opportunities and analysis of where we are likely to go, based on trends and the consistent predictable human attributes explored in Book 1.

  1. Exploring optimistic visions for the future – what could good look like? Whose good and who for?
  2. Massive distribution of everything – things will only get further distributed, so what does this mean for how powerful individuals could become?
  3. Augmented humanism – wearable and embedded tech is just the first step, so what does it means to be human and how far could we go? Why limit ourselves to replicating human limitations in technology when we could dramatically enhance our selves?
  4. Restoring cooperative competition – models of cooperative competitive are clearly succeeding but how far can it go, what is the role of traditional power structures (like government) and how can we enable people rather than things?
  5. Challenging the bell curve – “normal” was broadly popularised and promoted with mass media (radio and television) but the Internet has laid bare our immense variety. Perhaps there is no norm in the future?
  6. The ghost in the machine – automation, robotics, AI and how we blend the best  of technology and humans for a symbiotic future without outsourcing what makes us human. How does this change us, our lives and work as we know it?
  7. Competitive citizenships – companies already jurisdiction shop for the most beneficial environment, and citizens have started doing the same. With the reducing cost of travel and access to global work opportunities, nations will have to start properly competing to attract and retain citizens.
  8. Distributed and participatory democracy – how could we transform democracy to be more participatory (not just better consultations or voting). How can our lives be more broadly represented in a transnational sense when national institutions are limited to national interests?

Chapter 3: How do we get there

What are the key things we need to question moving forward and make conscious decisions about if we are to fully explore new possibilities for the future.

  1. Open society, open future, open government – what is the role of government in all this and how can we ensure government – both the political and public sectors – best serves the interests of the people on an ongoing basis?
  2. Overcoming collective amnesia, tribalism and othering – how can we ensure we have a well informed, skilled, empowered and supported community where individuals and groups can thrive?
  3. Economy vs society – how do we measure progress, what are we working towards, who will benefit and how do we embrace a long term vision for society? How can capitalism evolve to a post capital world?
  4. From fake news to real news – how can we ensure that reasons prevails? That evidence and science form the basis of major policy and programs that affect us all?
  5. How to collaborate at scale to collectively address and adapt in response to increasingly complex and fast pace of change.

Conclusion and call to action

Individuals, governments, corporations and all other human created entities, what roles, responsibilities and rights should you have into the future? What sort of future do you want for your children? What can you do about it today and what systems do we need to reform on the path to get there?

Further reading

Note: the index will change over time, as the book develops 🙂