Euro Diaries - Germany (Part 1)

This whole travel project started with an invitation I received to a class reunion at my University in Germany. We were celebrating 40 years after graduation (yep, that much time has already gone by). The idea emerged that if I am going to be in Europe for the reunion, I could plan for a little longer visit. From there the idea developed into using that longer visit to explore some of the centres doing interesting work in innovation. What followed was a long and complicated process of planning and logistics. Finally, I had itineraries, tickets, reservations and meetings more or less lined up. And off I went.

The first stop was in Dresden. After the long transatlantic flight I could have used a nap, but arriving in the morning, there was no chance of getting into my hotel room before noon. Luckily had my friends Jan and Heidi this situation predicted. They picked me up at the airport and drove me direct to their lovely house out in the green fields surrounding Dresden. The weather obliged with 28-30 degrees and I was seated in the beautiful sunny garden with drinks and light conversation. The sunshine helped me adjust faster to local time and after lunch I was driven by my gracious hosts to my hotel.

My first challenge was with getting an Internet connection. The hotel's system requires that you register through your laptop's browser including providing your mobile number. You then receive an SMS message with a code that you need to enter into the browser to gain access to the Internet. One small problem: my European cellular number needed to be activated and I needed the Internet to do so! There was no way to break this vicious circle without outside help. Luckily some of my classmates, who were staying at the same hotel, arrived soon after and I finally achieved connectivity courtesy of the “handy” (as the mobiles are called over here) of my friend and then class president Uwe.

Soon it was already time to go to the initial gathering of the class. I met the first group of three classmates at the hotel lobby. Two I could recognize immediately, but for the third I needed a while (and some hints) to do so! We took the streetcar (tramway) to our destination, a restaurant near the landmark Blaues Wunder (Blue Wonder) bridge over the Elbe River. The public transportation is excellent and Toronto could learn a few things from the Germans in this respect. Just as we were stepping out of the streetcar a violent shower erupted. We took refuge in the entrance of a bakery/café and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw hail rebounding from the street’s surface. So much for my weather expectation mid May!

 After the storm passed we finally got to our destination, a pretty restaurant overseeing the Elbe river. The other classmates were already there. Big round of greetings and hugs. To be completely honest, after 40 years I recognized 4-5 right away but could not recognize many others. Time had taken its toll on all of us and a few had even passed away. At a certain moment in the evening (and with my jet lag kicking in) I wondered what I was doing there among these almost strangers. But with the bier flowing and the taste of German food, long-lost memories emerged suddenly. Speaking in German became easier and easier. And by the end of the evening, I felt almost back among peers and friends. Then the first product of the meticulous preparations of this reunion was unveiled: a beautiful bound volume titled "Kompendium der HF2/68" with highlights from our student years, main reunions, two pages for each class mate summarizing their path in the last four decades. A nice touch: pages were also produced for those mates who were not among us anymore. Leave it to the Germans to organize something; the book was high-quality production with many photos in black & white and in colour. Many of the moving life stories told were also a witness of the turbulent times that followed the reunification of Germany and what they meant to an entire generation.

The next day had a full program. We started by walking through the garden of the Zwinger palace to the anchoring place of the river cruise ships. On the way I caught a rarity from the old GDR days: a limousine made out of 3 old Trabant cars! 

There we boarded a steamship aptly named "Dresden" for a short cruise towards Pillnitz. The conversations around the tables started removing the fog of time and replacing it with concrete persons, names and events. We steamed under the new bridge that for the sake of economic development has cost Dresden its UNESCO designation of "Human Heritage Site". The discussions were still very passionate about the subject. The steam machine was made visible to passengers and it was a jewel of mechanics

In Pillnitz we disembarked for a hike through the green hills where  we sang our first song from the songbooks (two no less!) produced specially for the occasion.

Our destination was a local winery. There we settled for a tasting of the wines with cheese, olives and copious amounts of freshly baked breads in a hall decorated with remarkable sculptures by an artist, who happened to also be the wine master's wife. The sculptures were beautiful and everywhere including the winery. The one displayed here is also a fountain; water drips leisurely from the woman's hair.

I wasn't sure what served as a muse to the other: the beautiful sculpture to the wine master or the good wine to the artist. Probably a case of mutual inspiration :)

The way back was punctuated by stops at a few Biergarten and ended at another nice restaurant on the bank of the Elbe river, where we enjoyed a merry dinner (with some more folks songs authorized by the restaurant personnel) and a celebration of life.
The next stages of the trip follow in Part 2.

Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects

Last week I attended the Collaborative Innovation Summit in Providence, RI. Called BIF-6 in reference to it's organizer, the Business Innovation Factory and it's sixth occurrence, the two-day event exposes participants to thirty exceptional storytellers in a intimate theater setting. I had attended last year's BIF-5 and found it inspiring and energizing, so I went for more.

An even greater value in attending BIF-6 is really in the networking that takes place before, after and between the stories. BIF founder Saul Kaplan calls it "random collisions of unusual suspects" because he and his team use diversity and diversification as a core principle to enrich these collisions. Storytellers as well as participants are from every walk of life imaginable: from serial entrepreneurs, to educators, technologists, business executives, high-school students to a twelve-year old girl that set up a domestic grease collection and reprocessing into bio fuel that helped heat the house of needy families in her town.

Daring to be Great

The last presentation of Day 2 of BIF-6 was by Keith Yamashita, titled originally "Change, to the Power of Ten". Inspired and moved by previous storytellers and encounters with participants, he changed his title to "Is it worth daring to be great?" As he was reflecting on the role of trust between two people in the larger context of teams and organizations, he recounted an incident, when a business partner and mentor (Alan Webber) vested his full trust in him. For 10 seconds he became very emotional and a tear ran down his cheek. He quickly recovered and continued his presentation, but in those 10 seconds I learned about trust and its importance in personal relations and in social networks small and large more than any books or courses could teach.

Random Collision

Later the next day, in the coach taking us to Providence Airport I happened to sit next to another participant, Monika Hardy (@monk51295). With a long wait for our flights, we settled in one of the airport's seating areas, opened our laptops, intended to get some work done. But the conversation started in the coach did not want to go away. I was still reflecting on my learning experience from Keith's presentation, and found myself in an amazing deep-dive conversation with Monika, who turned out to be an innovator herself in the field of children education. I was fascinated and encouraged that in a public school system, a space has been allowed to experiment with new methods and ways. Monika described how children choose what they want to learn and are then guided by a different kind of teacher, a facilitator of learning that connects the dots of the child's interests without imposing an unnatural regiment of learning. In fact, the children go through a "detox" to unlearn some of the old behaviors learned in school.

Emotional Learning

As I was listening to her passionately describe her work , it occurred to me that the "detox" approach might well be applicable to business. We need to unlearn behaviors drilled into us by the existing system, before we can innovate new ways and structures to do business. I am planning on following up on this conversation.

So, what else did I learn? We seem to be wired for absorbing a significantly higher volume of knowledge, when we are emotionally engaged. Traditional learning, however, focuses primarily on information supply, without much of an emotional component. The result is that we learn the information without the full context that gives the information so much richer meanings in multiple dimensions. We do the same in business. As Keith said: "The biggest fallacy of business is that it's only rational. All business is personal and all business is human". That's why one random encounter with an unusual suspect can teach you more than volumes of HBR.

So as I am soaking up all the learning from these two random BIF-6 collisions, the question swirling in my head is: Could we design emotional components to our learning processes at every level? That's a very intriguing idea particularly as we witness the emergence of a new system of learning based on modules of knowledge that learners can pick and choose from. Imagine if each of these modules was designed to enlist an emotional component of learning.

I'll be trying to write about the many other encounters that sparked my brain at BIF-6, so stay tuned!

Obama, Changecamp and the World Economic Forum

This weekend Changecamp was held in Toronto. Inspired by the changes seen south of our borders, it is an event bringing together Canadians from all walks of life to answer the question:
"How do we re-imagine government and governance in the age of participation?"

Unfortunately I was not able to attend in person but many from my Overlap and Unfinished Business friends were there. Through their tweets (tag: #changecamp), their blogs and the event's wiki I was able to follow at least from a distance this remarkable event.

In the course of the discussions my good friend Charles Finley tweeted the following question: "new models of engagement, or technology-enabled versions of what already exists? Will this change structures of governance?". I find this to be a very good questions. Since the success of Obama's new media participatory campaign became known, there have been a tremendous demand to learn the "secrets of the trade" and "how they did it", and to apply learning to organizations of all sorts: corporations, agencies, political parties, and all levels of government.

In the rush to learn the recipe of that success, however, there is great danger to miss the magic that enabled the recipe in the first place. There are many, who can teach the tools and recipes better than me. But here is my take on the real magic behind it all:

The Vision

It started first and foremost with thought leadership, a renewed vision of a truly participatory way for governing. It wasn't fundamentally new; we have been dreaming of it and seeking to achieve it for centuries if not millenia, but our implementations, even in the Western democracies of the past 100 years have been wanting at most. Instead of true conversations, there were and still are many on-way "broadcasts" from the governing to the governed with only a brief opportunity for real feedback, mostly through an election every few years, and frequently in a context of lopsided communications due to interests-driven media.

There is no denying of the inspiration injected into that vision by the Internet's many tools for communications and collaboration. But inspiration alone is not enough to attain success. Even the leadership's vision, while a necessary ingredient, is not sufficient.

Values & Willingness to Adapt

The vision had to be bolstered by strong leader values: authenticity, transparency, mutual respect, fundamental rights, trust in the people, acceptance of interdependency and shared future etc.
The vision had also to embrace a true two-way conversations with people, which meant really listening to what people had to say. It had to be followed to its ultimate logical consequence: the demonstrated willingness to adapt plans and precepts in accordance with the conversations with stakeholders. This is a tall order as most organizations only engage in conversations after they have developed a plan and a strategy and people come up with many ideas and preferences, not all easily reconcilable.

Enablers

If the vision, values, and will are all there, the final prerequisite is for the enablers. Although a technological platform is a major one, it is not the only one. Other enablers include: organizational capacity not only to run the technology, but more importantly to aggregate, analyze, understand, and respond to the conversations engaging the organization. This requires a capacity for rapid decision making and a dynamically adaptive strategy responding rapidly to the evolving conversations. Not your standard business school curriculum!
Another enabler is the relevance of the subject and objectives of the conversations to the audiences engaged in these conversations.

Who's Change?

Engaging in a new media strategy involves hence technological, organizational capacity, and cultural changes. What is important to realize is that these closely entwined elements force the organization implementing them to change significantly. From vision to values, to willingness to adapt, to capacity building and cultural change, the organization is driven by the requirements of a successful new media strategy to become a better, more transparent and capable organization, and to be better connected to its stakeholders and constituents. This is quite a departure from the past, where most media strategies aimed at changing the target audience, not the originating body.

The Moral of the Story

To achieve success all of the prerequisites are needed, technology being only one of them. To my friend Dave Gray and my fellow changecampers I say: Definitely new models of engagement, with serious changes asked of the status quo.

And to the elites of the world as they gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Switzerland) this week to discuss "shaping the post-crisis world" (twitter tag #davos), I say: You would be well advised to reflect on the need to change yourselves as much as changing the world, if not more. Therein lies the true promise of the new media for the WEF and for the world.

Growth vs. Sustainability

The G20 Summit was held over this weekend. In their declaration the leaders state: "We are determined to enhance our cooperation and work together to restore global growth and achieve needed reforms in the world's financial systems."

I have been thinking lately about this granted assumption that "growth" is the ultimate objective for wealth and prosperity. What is wrong with a year-after-year steady reasonable profit instead of this fixation on ever higher sales, higher profits, higher GDP, even higher growth rate?

It seems to me that the core equation is really very simple: we live on a finite globe with finite resources. If you take into consideration the increasing population, you have to accept dwindling average resources per capita. Defining progress as "growth" can only lead to faster depletion of the resources and more extreme unbalance in wealth distribution.

How we got into this messy economic system is history. The important thing now is how to start changing the fundamental assumptions of the current model without wrecking the boat. I am not talking about the current financial crisis and "bail out" measures. The fundamental issues were there long before the current crisis. I am talking about using people's mass intelligence to find new ways to reward sustainable economic behavior pattern.

The widely used concept of "wholesale" for example is just rewarding more consumption by reducing unit cost. From volume discounts on commodity pricing to "two for one" retail promotions, the same principle applies. What if we reversed that, say by charging an increasing unit price for higher volumes; considered the total volumes purchased over the last 12 months when determining the unit price, and applied higher tax rates with increased unit consumption?

The repercussions of applying such new fundamental principles to all aspects of economic activities would be huge and the resulting structural changes would be deep and painful for almost all layers of the current economic system particularly those that benefit most from the "economies of scale". I wish there was a better alternative; I can think only of much worse ones because history shows that the emergence of new structures is usually extremely violent and destructive of previous structures! Like a jet fighter in a spin fall we'll need to accept high-G exposure to get out of it.