NEW FOUNDATIONS OF PLATFORM-ECOSYSTEM THINKING WHITEPAPER
Notes on global risks and value creation narratives: setting the scene for organizational evolutions
Research Update #7
by Stina Heikkilä and Simone Cicero
“Where are we?” — Eric Weinstein kept coming back to this question in his conversation with Balaji Srinivasan on The Portal podcast episode the Heretic and the Virus in late May 2020, as Srinivasan’s early predictions of Covid-19 impacts started to unfold worldwide.
No doubt, the complexity of the world is becoming increasingly visible, and — while the bottom line trends may not have changed per se — people are becoming more and more acutely aware of the situation. We’re witnessing, following our often quoted Indy Johar’s words, a “democratization of the small world thesis”. At the same time, our information ecology is plagued with fake news and tribal warfare while the frequency and severity of environmental and social crises intensify.
This is the 7th in a series of research updates that we share with the community to keep everyone updated on our latest progress on the research for our 2020 White Paper: New Foundations of Platform-Ecosystem Thinking. These updates also help make sure one can join the conversation at any point. We recently came back from a summer break and are now in the process of finalizing the last bits of research for the release of the paper in early November. This will thus be the second last update we publish before the launch. Stay tuned on our website for the latest details or join our newsletter where we forthnightly share all our blogs and much more.
In this update, we take a closer look at the interconnected global risk landscape and the background picture it paints for the evolution of scalable organizational and business models that can function in such contexts of growing systemic risk. We also ponder on the bigger questions behind organizing logic, looking to the East, and to the emergence of new value creation narratives that can resonate with the present times.
We released the whitepaper on 20 November!
Download it directly from our webpage: platformdesigntoolkit.com/new-whitepaper.
The post in brief
- The interconnected and complex nature of global risks requires nothing short of a systems perspective to understand how these can be addressed at multiple scales simultaneously, adapting to both global and local realities.
- The rise of networked governance—enabled by ever-falling coordination costs — shows how decentralized networks can provide both fast and adaptive response mechanisms within complex environments, while holding the potential for new multi-stakeholder coalitions to form.
- At the same, networks are prone to carry their own risks, like polarization or fake news, leading to the importance of new frameworks apt to cope with risk in the network age.
- Emergent trends such as regenerative business, a growing focus on health, and new value definitions based on systems’ “wholeness” point us towards new narratives for value creation that are at the intersection of interconnected risks, system constraints, and micro-entrepreneurship.
- At the local scale, citizens may increasingly become part of civic economies of essentials, helping them connect with global systems on their own terms.
A complex risk landscape — and we keep adding to it!
In 2020, the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risk Report was published before the acceleration of the Covid-19 outbreak globally. As a result, neither infectious disease nor unemployment was featured among the top-five perceived risks in the multistakeholder short-term risk outlook, showing the speed at which assumptions can be overthrown (yet, the report warned that health systems worldwide were ill-prepared for significant outbreaks)[1].
Not in any way have the previous top-five risks gone away, however — quite on the contrary. The newly released “United in Science” report by leading intergovernmental organizations [2] highlights that the pandemic brought only a temporary decline in greenhouse gas emissions and that the world is — yet again — heading towards hitting its warmest five-year period on record. At the same time, polarization is carving its way deeper into the US domestic scene, with repeated political controversies and human tragedies.
If the problems seem to be piling up, they are further tightly interconnected. In the WEF’s Strategic Intelligence portal, Global Risks are mapped interactively against a web of interrelated risks and fed by recent publications, data, and relevant news. While these are not new, it’s worth noting a few figures to get a sense of the spread of these issues [3]:
- The agricultural and industrial expansion has led to a loss of more than 85% of wetlands globally, altered 75% of the world’s land surface, and impacted 66% of ocean area (Climate Crises and Biodiversity Loss).
- Each year between 2008 and 2016, extreme weather forced more than 20 million people to leave their homes (Climate Crises and Biodiversity Loss).
- The potential breakdown of IT infrastructure and networks are top concerns for companies, according to a report published by the Forum in May 2020 (Digital Fragmentation).
- According to the International Monetary Fund, global GDP will likely contract by 4.9% in 2020, marking the deepest slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s (Economic Stability and Social Cohesion).
- Conspiracy theorists and political extremists are seeking to capitalize on the pandemic, and polarizing campaigns could further affect social cohesion (Economic Stability and Social Cohesion).
- Even before the advent of COVID-19, global economic order was showing increased signs of vulnerability. US-China trade relations had become increasingly problematic, […] subsequent disagreement over COVID-19’s origin and handling ultimately re-escalated those tensions (An Unsettling World).
- Even if trade tensions cool and COVID-19 is defeated, the risk remains of entering an era in which the two biggest economies decouple, and Europe and others must decide which system to join (An Unsettling World).
- COVID-19 has exacerbated worrying trends in many countries; an inability to care for many at-risk patients has exposed decades of insufficient investment, mounting workforce limitations, and demand-capacity mismatches (Strained Health Systems).
A systems lens on risk: zooming in and zooming out
Needless to say, a systems perspective is called for to start understanding the magnitude and nature of risks humanity is facing. Owing to several experts that we had the chance to interview for this research, as well as other prominent voices, we have gained interesting viewpoints on some of these trends, underlining the importance of zooming in and zooming out.
Recently complexity scientist Joe Norman pointed us to adopt a multi-scale variety lens to understand how to achieve a deflation of the potential cascading risk factors. On the one hand — global risks are too big for any nation to deal with single-handedly, while on the other hand, the mixed nature of the harm caused by global failure to deal with risks calls for a complex approach to meeting challenges at all the most relevant scales, including but not limited to the global [4].
In a recent conversation with us, policy and venture expert Nicolas Colin highlighted that — in the context of a technologically transformed albeit fragmenting (digital) world — we’re likely to see emerging what he calls the Entrepreneurial Age [5]. This new age will not (according to him) take a uniform global expression. For companies, increasing fragmentation of markets will mean having to deal with multiple geopolitical contexts and — as we move into the age of a multitude of internets, embedded in a multitude of socio-political systems (as pointed out earlier on this blog in Internet Trends 2019: Platforms, Technology & Cosmotechnics) — organizations will be constrained by local policymaking much more than today.
Colin further believes that Europe will soon be “on its own”, as opposed to forming that Western bloc with the US. More than (only) a threat, this could be an opportunity to push the development of truly European local ecosystems and to build scalable profitable companies that — while generating a surplus that enables Europe to remain among the most advanced and developed regions in the world — should be building a new social compact for the Entrepreneurial Age. This new social compact will likely be based on a new type of safety nets and on systems that support entrepreneurial development in what seems to be a new phase of re-bundling of the firm after most of the traditional benefits that were designed for the industrial age have been unbundled from the organization and made available as a service.
On a societal level, there needs to be a reckoning that the accumulation of surplus generated by tech companies needs to be wisely spread across society, so as to generate jobs in service industries, support people in need, cover the cost of expensive infrastructures, and so on. This relates to the idea that our societies might be at an “inflection point”, as we pondered in our Research Update #4 referring to Ritha Gunther McGrath’s interview “Seeing Around Corners” with Aperture Hub, hopefully calling for a Society 2.0 [6].
Government competence will certainly be in question here with regards to the capability of governments to deal with technological innovations and regulation, at the same time providing a good space for entrepreneurs to create all the new solutions needed for the new problems emerging. In the conversation between Eric Weinstein and Balaji Srinivasan mentioned in the prelude to the post, Srinivasan depicts potential spatial and geopolitical developments in the post-Covid-19 era where, in co-existence with the virus, green and red zones emerge where leaders’ ability — whether in business or government — to deal with risk is showcased by results rather than ideology and words (e.g. green zones being those with active testing showing few or no new cases in an extended period) [7]. Competence hence becomes a key stake for organizations and governments seeking to gain trust and attract people and economic activity to a particular area and — at the very least — reassure citizens about their ability to not totally screw up. Taking the Amazon campus as an example, an internally managed health system is emerging that includes testing and tracing infections in order to guarantee a totally green zone. Leaders from countries like New Zealand and South Korea also quickly gained trust from their citizens for their (periodically) demonstrated capacity to stem the spread of Covid-19.
The rise of networked governance
Taking an evolutionary view — as we’ve often done by referring to the Tribes, Markets, Institutions and Networks (TIMN) framework or Spiral Dynamics — networks and their ability to shape decentralized decision-making are inescapable. Like we’ve seen in the early responses to the pandemic, networks were often far ahead of global and national institutions in providing relief efforts and organizing the production of essential equipment. Networks also proved their value in terms of governance, with new strategic alliances — between governments, non-state actors, and research institutions — being unlocked in the face of an emergency.
With networked governance on the rise and decentralized decision-making becoming an increasing reality, the question is — as posed by John Robb during our sense-making event [8]: how we may use these to our advantage while facing interconnected risks of the magnitude witnessed in 2020? And what’s the role of emerging organizational frameworks in this process?
Indeed, some of our most important threats — climate change, cybersecurity, health — require not just a distributed organizational improvisation but also new forms of coherent global governance, as highlighted in the latest RAND report — “Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft” [9]. The connection that David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla draw between governing global commons and the idea of Noopolitik they introduced in the late 1990s — (informational strategies of manipulating international processes through the forming in the general public, by means of mass media, of positive or negative attitudes on certain topics) — offers interesting perspectives in this regard.
Distinguishing between “hard” power (Realpolitik, wartime-like) “soft” power (influence through information and media), they note for example that a worldwide policy shift by the United States, China, Russia, and others “toward neo-mercantilism and unilateralism” reflect harder than soft power strategies vis-à-vis the global commons. In this context, they find that at first seemingly odd allies — like military strategists and civil activists — could form multilateral cooperation structures that unite in a shared interest in the global commons [ibid.]:
“Climate change has been deemed a “threat multiplier” and “an accelerant of instability or conflict” (La Shier and Stanish, 2017, passim). Key concerns include how climate change could affect not only the military’s own operations, infrastructures, communities, supply chains, and budgets but also its outreach roles in humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and border security missions, especially in the event of massive population displacements — roles that could require enhanced abilities to monitor, access, and use all of the commons quickly and efficiently (La Shier and Stanish, 2017). If climate change concerns were to help revalidate the global commons concept, they might also confirm the need for greater contact and coordination between military strategists and civilian activists who favor that concept.” […]
“Work is urgently needed to create new global governance regimes, associations, and frameworks that will organize multilateral cooperation in myriad senses — i.e., intergovernmental, state-non state, public-private, IGO-NGO, civil-military, local-global, and hierarchical-networked — for purposes that include mutual stewardship and shared responsibility”.
The Noopolitik that John and David propose offers a common ground for networked or “systems leadership” [10] on behalf of the global commons, taking up the mission of bringing an ethical — or at least a data-informed and data-poietic — stance to statecraft. In order for healthy networks to form, the need for positive narratives to win is essential to reinforce the good and counter-balancing the use of soft power for “dark” purposes like electioneering and tribal warfare. As our followers know, positive narratives are key elements of platform strategies, owing not the least to the writings of John Hagel and his book The Power of Pull. This thus seems to be a feature that will not only gain in importance, but also in complexity and profoundness.
At the same time, facing the systemic risks also requires removing structural “lock-ins” that are deeply entrenched in our current globalized economic model (like climate change and social injustice) and to unleash the “inherent morality” of interconnectedness — as posited by Indy Johar. In other words: once we understand that treating things in isolation (hence externalizing them) creates dangerous feedback loops — like we’re currently witnessing in natural disasters, the pandemic, etc — we need to develop the capabilities for dealing with interdependencies. This links to the idea of networked governance, since the democratization of digitized information, means that more and more people can reckon with the complexity and interconnectedness in a “small world scenario” [11]:
“what I think the information age has done […] or the age of digitized information, is to change the transaction cost of bureaucracy to near zero. And that has basically allowed for the cost of connecting information to become near zero and has — by application — changed our relationship in the world. So it is no longer about how we see things in isolation, but how we see things in a small world scenario.”
This is where we need to look for organizational models and institution-building mechanisms that are able to play at multiple scales simultaneously and that can embed value creation narratives that do not cause further harm to our already fragile world.
Responding to risk: local resilience and systemic health within nature’s limits
But, if decentralization and networked governance could help to achieve the deflation of risk and a major improvement in resilience, how’s this going to happen? The re-localization of supply and value chains in response to the increasingly common future disruptions, of which the pandemic is a harbinger, seems to be an immediate and intuitive outcome, at least from a supply perspective. As a renowned systems thinker like Dennis Meadows has noted indeed, efficiency and resilience can be opposites when it comes to the former’s stride to reduce diversity, noting that “over the past century, there has been wholesale abandonment of resilient systems in favour of efficient systems — larger scale, less diversity, lower redundancy” [12]. This chimes with the idea that John Robb raised in our interview in April [13]: that local resilience can be achieved only when communities can connect to the global systems “on their own terms”, rhyming with Jack Murphy’s framing of an ending “age of indiscriminate connection” towards what he calls an “era of strategic disconnection” [14].
If part of the discussion on re-entangling our organizational and global governance models on more local contexts, landscapes and communities is about creating the redundant capacity to deal with disruptions — such as with global food supply chains or the electricity network — at the expense of efficiency, this is definitely not the only side of the coin in the re-localization hypothesis.
Safety and health driven concerns are also underlying the desire to deflate global risks. For example, to reduce exposure to risks for infections among workers, accelerated automation can lead companies to bring back production closer to home and increase online sales versus retail. As we noted in our Research Update #3, Mary Meeker’s Coronavirus Trends Report noted that online presence and safe, undisrupted delivery is gaining indeed increasing importance through the pandemic [15]. Jeremiah Owyang also took note — in our Podcast interview in July — that one key trend in ambient computing is that of self-cleaning surfaces [16]. At the same time, people are starting to monitor new metrics that were formerly in the shadow of economic progress, like the performance of countries’ health systems, life expectancy, and other public health indicators. This is likely to have far-reaching impacts in the progress narratives sought by business and national leaders alike, as EU Commission’s president Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the Union address delivered on early September pointed out [17]:
“A virus a thousand times smaller than a grain of sand exposed how delicate life can be.
It laid bare the strains on our health systems and the limits of a model that values wealth above wellbeing. It brought into sharper focus the planetary fragility that we see every day through melting glaciers, burning forests and now through global pandemics.
It changed the very way we behave and communicate — keeping our arms at length, our faces behind masks.
It showed us just how fragile our community of values really is — and how quickly it can be called into question around the world and even here in our Union.”
In line with this growing trend of “salutogenic” thinking, the quest for a systemic shift towards business based on regenerative economics continues to build momentum in the face of the increasingly visible reality of environmental degradation and climate change and further speaks to the systems perspective outlined above. One excellent forum to absorb some of the latest thinking in this movement was offered by the r3.0 community’s 7th international conference, where Ralph Thurm and Bill Baue launched their two new blueprints on Value Cycles [18] and Sustainable Finance. The concept of Value Cycles brings together decades of thinking on planetary boundaries and social equity, where sustainability is seen as the quest of aligning the factual (“what is”) and the normative (“what ought to be”) value definitions in tune with the concepts of carrying capacity, thresholds and thermodynamic accounting, as well as “rightsholdership”. The theory of “rightsholdership” is essentially an extension of the stakeholder concept, but more prescriptive in the sense that “rightsholders have rights that organizations have duties and obligations to respect” [ibid.]. It also posits that well-being of individuals is inseparable from the surrounding system.
In this light, “disentangled” value definitions like the good old shareholder value get under close scrutiny due to their failure to deal appropriately with the idea of thresholds, planetary boundaries, and feedback loops, but rather continue to allow for an over-consuming throughput economy in a world with finite resources.
Instead, they advocate for an approach to value that entails assessing performance within sustainability thresholds and resource allocations in order to create or so-called System Value where the main determinant of value — drawing on the definition applied in an EY background paper— is: “what the corporation, society, and the environment can tolerate and still survive” [ibid.].
In line with this holistic definition of value, the Value Cycles Blueprint draws on theories like doughnut economics, bioregional circulation, and circular economy, while underlining the importance of ensuring that these are seen in a systems perspective, avoiding the temptation to think that circularity or linearity is inherently “good” or “bad” per se.
In this sense, both linearity and circularity are seen as integrated scale aspects in a fractal economy, referring to the fact that all dynamics — whether linear, circular, cyclical, and spiral — are interdependent. As they point out — with reference to Martijn Veening, founder of EntropoMetrics — “which of these dynamics is most readily apparent depends largely on the scale of analysis”. For instance, the growth of a tree may seem linear when measured in terms of days, whereas a seasonal lens provides a cyclical view: buds in spring, leaves in summer, and dormant in winter [ibid.].
New value creation narratives: focusing on the small to ensure thrivability of the systemic
What if the overall health of a system then is to maintain “healthy proportionality” between different dynamics? What if the health of a system can only be seen through a fractal lens? When such across-scale proportionality is disturbed, we see disturbances at the system level caused by seemingly small-scale factors. This is the idea of scale-linking from Daniel Christian Wahl [19]:
“Spatial scale-linking connects individuals, communities, ecosystems, bioregions and nations all the way to the planetary scale (and beyond). Temporal scale- linking can be understood as the way slow processes and fast processes interact. Many of the factors that will cause a loss of resilience at one particular scale, for example within a community and its local ecosystem, will also affect resilience at another scale, the national or planetary level. Localized actions, like the burning of fossil fuel, can accumulate to have global effects like climate change, which in turn can affect local conditions in multiple and unpredictable ways. This is the nature of the fundamentally interconnected nested system (holarchy) in which we live.”
Putting this in a regenerative economies terms, John Fullerton’s quote from 2015 cited in the r3.0 Value Cycle blueprint rhymes with this perspective in that [18]:
“Regenerative economies are built on nested, fractal relationships across many levels, ranging from individual human beings, their families and communities to their regions, countries, global civilization, and the biosphere as a whole. While each subcomponent can be seen as a “whole,” they can never be viewed as separate. Instead, since all levels are interdependent, to whittle away at the health of the small-scale economies and ecosystems is to undermine the health of the larger ones as well.”
What do we get from this? The finding that — ironically enough — despite our efforts in setting boundaries and defining techniques for measuring how and if we cross them, a powerful frame of reference when thinking about the conservation of our planet, and habitat, could be the one of stewardship of the integrity of our micro-environments, such as communities and bio-regions. As complexity scientist and promoter of localism Joseph Norman points out in his “Generating Wholes” [20]:
“We must be humble in our abilities. We must make sure we are perceiving wholes, and not imagining them. The range of scales over which our perception can operate — aesthetic or otherwise — is finite. The stewarding process is a local one, grounded in practice, and relatively uncorrupted by false abstractions.
We can and should take action to protect the wholes that exist at the largest scales — our planet, for instance — but we should not delude ourselves into believing we can sufficiently perceive or intentionally guide them. We will do more harm than good if we forget this.”
If value creation narratives for the 21st century point us in the direction of the protection of wholes, on cultivating wisdom through seeing fractals and cycles, the next question for our inquiry becomes: what are the most meaningful organizational efforts that can make sense and operate through these constraints — or “safe operating spaces” — provided by the emerging global risk landscape?
Exploring organizational evolutions frontiers
The deep process of transformation we’ve depicted above surely can’t be fully devoted to a new organizational design, or structure. As Wendell Berry brilliantly pointed out in his seminal work on “The Unsettling of America“ [21]:
“Although responsible use may be defined, advocated, and to some extent required by organizations, it cannot be implemented or enacted by them. It cannot be effectively enforced by them. The use of the world is finally a personal matter, and the world can be preserved in health only by the forbearance and care of a multitude of persons.”
But with this consciousness in mind, what we can strive to do is to unpack what it means to build organizations in the 21st century, abstracting their key features, trends and artifacts, in a world where the playing field is in constant flux and the need for regeneration (both social and environmental) is pressing. Following Ashby’s law of requisite variety, platform-ecosystem thinking is appealing in this regard, since it allows for envisioning organizations that are able to hold complexity at par with their surrounding environment.
Simone’s latest post on the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organisation (EEEO) explains how building EEEOs can be of help as they tend to develop exploratory structures that can probe the environment and get fit with it at the right scale [22]. We thus believe that the EEEOs framing offers an interesting testbed for incorporating both enough adaptability and holding enough complexity to cope with interconnected global risks by adopting an “outside-driven, organically entrepreneurial but emergently coherent organization design” that allows the organization to be driven in its development by the environment it is embedded within — its own ecosystem — while apparently being more apt to deal with the pandemic. Haier’s organizational structure, upon which the EEEO abstraction builds, proved to outcompete manufacturers whose onus is on Industrial age efficiency, as highlighted by Howard Yu and Mark J. Greeven, pointing to the fact that already in February 2020, Haier fulfilled 99.8% of its orders, while others had to stop production for extended periods [23].
But the key consideration here is: without a deep change in culture, and expectations towards the idea of progress and human experience, no real systemic change can be in sight. While Haier’s adaptive production and innovation capacity is nothing but impressive, it is not to be mistaken for a model that is by default regenerative or sustainable. It may respond to part of the challenges posed by the global risk landscape by offering adaptability and anti-fragility, but can it — at the same time — support the possibility of regeneration?
If current models seem to fall short of meeting the challenges facing humanity in the 21st century, what if new business ethics can emerge from just a different mindset, thinking system and epistemic, one that is more recognizant of the “embeddedness” of our human system?
When Haier’s CEO Zhang Ruimin posits that the purpose of the organization needs to be that of “reinvention, shifting away from self-centeredness” and becoming “just another node in the network”, it’s because he ultimately accepts that the organization shares the same destiny as it’s a network and its environment. When he further suggests that organizations should be more “like water” (following Laozi’s teachings), “benefitting everything and competing with nothing” [24] he gives us a precious hint on the seemingly right posture of the organization of the 21C, but a key question stands: will we be able to do that? Are we adequately equipped to start?
In a recent — still unpublished — conversation we had with Associate Professor of Business Ethics Alicia Hennig, we’ve been able to explore the differences in mindsets that Chinese philosophical tradition brings to organizations versus that of the western one, mainly based on the Christian protestant ethic. Especially Daoism, one of the two main religious and philosophical Chinese traditions with Confucianism, seems to offer a set of very significant frames of reference: first of all its three-way system that aims at achieving harmony not just between the human being and the cosmos (or “god”) but also with nature as it encompasses and embeds the human. Furthermore, also the three so-called Daoist treasures of frugality, humility, and compassion definitely resonate with two of the key emerging discourses of a complexity aware approach to our current systemic challenges; adopting epistemic humility (acknowledgment of the limits of cartesian thinking in facing complexity) and thinking about strategic disconnection as a tool to deflate otherwise cascading systemic risks due to the interconnectivity of our networks.
An eminent image of this idea of frugal, “good enough” approach to co-existence is well evoked in Chapter 80 of the Dao De Jing [25]:
“Reduce the size of the population and the state.
Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them;
And also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.Even when they have ships and carts, they will have no use for them;
And even when they have armor and weapons, they will have no occasion to make a show of them.Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,
Will find relish in their food
And beauty in their clothes,
Will be content in their abode
And happy in the way they live.Though adjoining states are within sight of one another,
And the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.And beauty in their clothes,
Will be content in their abode
And happy in the way they live.Though adjoining states are within sight of one another,
And the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.”Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching — as translated by D.C. Lau -
We find it fascinating how this very idea of social evolution based on achieving “good enough” (versus our dominant idea of continued growth and technological development) rhymes with the concept of holobionts as explained by Ugo Bardi — as he reconnects this idea with the work of Lynn Margulis — and explains pretty well how a new social development project for the 21st Century needs to be one that starts from the acknowledgment of the necessity to co-exist with our Gaian “holobiont” [26]:
“while organisms search for perfection, holobionts strive for the good enough”
This sense of simplicity, or “going back to the basics” would necessarily mean decoupling from current notions of success and narratives of convenience. Like we’ve frequently referenced in many of our conversations, bringing together entrepreneurial drivers with contextual, local needs seems to be pointing us in the direction of an “Economy of Essentials”, or “Universal Basic Everything”, for which the Participatory City initiative in London offers an advanced experiment at neighborhood scale in the boroughs of Barking and Dagenham [27]:
“Universal Basic Everything is the idea that there are systems, tangible and intangible, that we need to survive and thrive. These relationships and friendships, products and services need to be co-created, accessible to everyone, open source, simple in their design, circular in their production”.
In this example, which is one of the case studies we had the opportunity to explore in the research, citizens come together to produce essential products like clothes, food, ceramics, all according to an evolving set of inclusivity principles and in the belief that some services — no matter how well funded — are better developed by citizens themselves than the government. Indeed, this type of initiative stimulates the emergence of “a multiplicity of publics” where the duties once played by the central government are now played by a plethora of different institutions, as both Michel Bauwens and Indy Johar noted in our sense-making event on 23 July [8].
Another interesting (final) point to explore here is related to the future of “humans” within organizations, for which the EEEO and the entrepreneurial age offer new perspectives. When Nicolas Colin talks about the evolution of work in the Entrepreneurial Age, quoting his friend Roy Bahat, managing partner at Bloomberg Beta, he points to two essential things that companies need to provide to retain entrepreneurial talent around their ventures: stability and dignity. Oftentimes, failure to provide either one will lead to loss of employee engagement, or people leaving to try their luck elsewhere. What better example of this than the “essential workers” supporting society to function through a crisis? Surely full of dignity, but lacking stability due to low wages and unsafe working conditions. This also rhymes with the stark questioning of bureaucracy that EEEO proponents have long argued, like Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini suggesting that “turning dead-end jobs into get-ahead jobs — doesn’t require new legislation or billions of dollars in public spending. It just takes commitment to building organizations that kindle the spark of everyday genius in each human being” [28].
Maybe then, one of the keys to unlock entrepreneurial potential to meet 21C challenges lies in coupling stability and dignity around essential products and services, produced locally by citizens coming together to learn, produce and create social ties needed to protect and regenerate wholes.
There are, of course, many assumptions and questions here that do not yet have any clear-cut answers. Maybe we won’t ever have answers; such is the complex nature of the predicament we live in as a species. The paradoxes between the quest for growth and innovation on the one hand, and slowing down to contemplate the state of the world on the other, are likely to be with us throughout the next decades. We better get used to holding these seemingly conflicting ideas simultaneously, training our minds to embrace uncertainty.
A very special thanks to David Kish for the precious review.
[1] World Economic Forum (2020). The Global Risks Report 2020–15th Edition. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Global_Risk_Report_2020.pdf accessed: 28 September 2020.
[2] WMO, Global Carbon Project (GCP), UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (UNESCO-IOC), IPCC, UNEP and the Met Office (2020). “United in Science 2020 — A multi-organization high-level compilation of the latest climate science information”. https://public.wmo.int/en/resources/united_in_science. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[3] World Economic Forum Strategic Intelligence Portal (2020). “Global Risks”. https://intelligence.weforum.org/. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[4] Boundaryless Conversations Podcast — Episode 14. “Organizations as Architectures for Complexity — with Joe Norman”. 16 June 2020. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/organizations-as-architectures-for-complexity-with-joe-norman-5eebf5d1362e. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[5] Boundaryless Conversations Podcast — Episode 16. “The Entrepreneurial Age: Networks and a fragmenting world — with Nicolas Colin”. 23 June 2020. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/the-entrepreneurial-age-networks-and-a-fragmenting-world-with-nicolas-colin-718c066b19bc. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[6] Aperture Hub Structural Shifts podcast — episode 19. “Seeing Around Corners — with Rita Gunther McGrath”. https://medium.com/aperture-hub/seeing-around-corners-19-ec64b2260337 Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[7] The Portal — Episode 35. “Balaji Srinivasan — The Heretic & The Virus”. 22 May 2020. https://art19.com/shows/the-portal/episodes/f3267a63-450c-4342-bd91-70637a43784b. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[8] Heikkila, Stina. “Where do the conversations point us? Reflections from our sense-making session”. Medium. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/where-do-the-conversations-point-us-94a8626482d4
[9] Ronfeldt, David and John Arquilla, “Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft”. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA237-1.html. Also available in print form. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[10] The Boundaryless Conversation Podcast - Episode 10.“Redrawing the Human Development Thesis for the 21st Century — with Indy Johar”, 19 May 2020. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/redrawing-the-human-development-thesis-for-the-21st-century-with-indy-johar-5d45d2770170. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[11] Eugenio Maria Battaglia, Jie Mei, and Guillaume Dumas (2018). “Systems of Global Governance in the Era of Human-Machine Convergence” https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.04255.pdf. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[12] Dennis Meadows, “Limits to Growth and the COVID-19 epidemic” https://www.chelseagreen.com/2020/limits-to-growth-covid-epidemic/ Accessed September 22, 2020
[13] The Boundaryless Conversation Podcast — Episode 3. “Beyond markets: sense-making and organising, in a world of open networks — with John Robb” 6 April. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/beyond-markets-sense-making-and-organising-in-a-world-of-open-networks-3a668c2633a9. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[14] Joe Norman, PhD — Jack Murphy Live #031 https://jackmurphylive.com/joe-norman-phd-jml-031/. Published June 30, 2020. Accessed September 16, 2020.
[15] Bond Capital (2020). “Exclusive: Mary Meeker’s coronavirus trends report”. https://www.axios.com/mary-meeker-coronavirus-trends-report-0690fc96-294f-47e6-9c57-573f829a6d7c.html. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[16] The Boundaryless Conversation Podcast — Episode 17. “The Future of Platforms in the midst of Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning — with Jeremiah Owyang” https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/the-future-of-platforms-in-the-midst-of-silicon-valleys-moral-reckoning-4142f4870d14 Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[17] Ursula von der Leyen’s first State of the Union speech. Euronews. 16 September 2020. https://youtu.be/jBakPRQUq-I. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[18] Baue, B., Thurm, R. (2020): Blueprint 7. Value Cycles — From Value Chains and Circular Economies to System Value Cycles. r3.0. https://www.r3-0.org/blueprint-7-value-cycle/. Accessed: 28 September 2020.
[19] Daniel Christian Wahl (2017). “Scale-linking Design for Systemic Health: sustainable communities and cities in context”. Medium. https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/scale-linking-design-for-systemic-health-sustainable-communities-and-cities-in-context-f38e090795e9. Published July 25, 2017. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[20] Joe Norman (2019). “Generating Wholes”. Thesideview.co. https://thesideview.co/journal/generating-wholes/. Published January 11, 2019. Accessed September 23, 2020.
[21] Berry, W. (2015). The unsettling of America: Culture & agriculture. Catapult.
[22] Cicero, Simone (2020). “Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Enabling Organizations rhyme with 21C Complexity”. Medium. https://stories.platformdesigntoolkit.com/entrepreneurial-ecosystem-enabling-organizations-rhyme-with-21c-complexity-4ed214c0fb0d. Accessed September 28, 2020.
[23] Greeven, Howard Yu and Mark J. “How Autonomy Creates Resilience in the Face of Crisis.” MIT Sloan Management Review, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-autonomy-creates-resilience-in-the-face-of-crisis/. Accessed 1 Sept. 2020.
[24] “Haier CEO Zhang Ruimin exclusive interview on Rendanheyi, Platforms and Ecosystems”. Boundaryless — Platform Design Toolkit Youtube video. https://youtu.be/RgQrz3EVhU0. Accessed September 28, 2020.
[25] Ben Guaraldi. “On the Taoist Utopia: Chapter 80 of the Tao Te Ching”. https://benguaraldi.com/writings/003.html. Accessed September 28, 2020.
[26] Holobiont. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holobiont#:~:text=A%20holobiont%20is%20an%20assemblage,all%20bionts%20is%20the%20hologenome.
[27] Tessy Britton, “Universal Basic Everything, Creating essential infrastructure for post Covid 19 neighbourhoods”, https://medium.com/@TessyBritton/universal-basic-everything-f149afc4cef1. Accessed 28 September 2020.
[28] Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini (2020).“Harnessing Everyday Genius”, HBR. https://hbr.org/2020/07/harnessing-everyday-genius. Accessed 28 September 2020
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