Power zones

So, I'm working on this book, and one of the main themes in it will be the idea of "power zones", where the old and the new paradigm is converging.
Our industrial culture is fading, and new ways of organizing and cooperating are becoming more relevant in order to thrive under today's and tomorrow's circumstances.
But it’s not a complete change. The old ways are still with us, and they are still useful in many contexts. What’s interesting to study is not so much the extreme cases of way new behaviours. Rather, it’s the areas where the old and the new overlap and converge that are most important. The zones in which there’s some of both.
I call them the power zones, because that’s where the action is.
They are dynamic. This is where you find fast growth and development, this is where the business model of the new economy are created, and this is where you can observe the demand for new skills and mindsets – and a need for new kinds of organization and cooperation.

So here are some of the power zones of convergence:


Producers/consumers
Consumers are not taking over the entire production, but increasingly they have a say in determining what gets created. They participate in the creation, they configure, contribute content, give feedback and spread the word to others... They interact with the producers – and vice versa - in order to get exactly the product or service they want in their current, personal context.
Producers who fail to involve and listen to their users are more at risk of commoditization; rather than competing by meeting individual demands, they can only differentiate their product on price.

There is still a place for expertise and professional skills and experience, but amateurs, who are passionate about their interest, are getting the tools to create to standards that used to be exclusive to professionals. Companies are finding that the greatest experts on their products are often the fans and users, rather than the employees.



Topdown/bottom up
Not a complete rejection of leadership and hierarchy but an increasing share of inputs and initiative come from the periphery rather than the center of the system. The network manages itself, but there is still a need for leadership and vision in order to align.

Competing, yes, but cooperating as well. Co-creating in order to establish a greater platform to do business on.


Me/we
Not entirely altruistic, but conscious that in a connected world of tightening resources, the well being of the system is in the individuals’ own interest – and that any harm or defects to the system quickly translate into negative consequences for the individual.

Not a complete surrender to the collective, still motivated by personal goals and gains, but with an understanding of increasing interdependence and the value of cooperation. The circle of empathy, responsibility and accountability is widening, but there are clashes at the boundaries.

Not letting go of all secrets and possessions, but moving from a completely protected and closed mindset to one of reciprocal sharing – enabling rapid innovation and learning for the benefit of all players.

Not giving up all privacy, but finding a new balance where accountability to the system gives you better service and guards the majority against the excesses of the few.



Here/there
Not gone entirely into a virtual world, but simultaneously present in both the virtual and physical reality. The experience of the local physical reality is augmented, but also distracted by a digital layer of information.

Physically present here, but communicating and acting with consequences elsewhere. And likewise, not just acting on what’s taking place here, but affected by information streams or events that are remotely controlled by others.


A merging of disciplines
Not giving up deep knowledge of a subject, but augmenting your understanding with insights from other fields – transferring systemic features, cross fertilizing disciplines. In many cases because the context and the problems that need to be solved are so complex that the solutions require knowledge from a range of disciplines.

Hybrid taxis

Stockholm has a lot of Toyota Prius hybrids running as taxis. Nice touch. As usual, we can learn from the Swedes.

Starting up a new book

I guess I might as well advertise it: I’ve started writing on my next book, and this time it will be in English. It will be a business book, focusing on how society and the economy is getting more complex and how this will demand a very different attitude and perspective than what the industrial age called for.
I’ve tried to get an overview of the (intended) content by writing the headlines – and I’ve posted it all here. For anyone interested in the subject, I hope this list of headlines can convey a sense of where the content is heading.
Obviously, I’d love to have any comments.

Parallel lives

In the background: Jean Nouvel's Torre Agbar in Barcelona

Ars electronica: A new cultural economy

Just noticed that this years' Ars Electronica festival will be about "A new cultural economy - the limits of intelletual property". It's curated by Joi Ito. Sounds interesting - maybe a bit too predictable? What I usually find really stimulating about Ars E. is their ability to define completely new agendas, that may have been evolving just below the surface.

Zero Carbon Cities - konference

Sorry, this announcement is in Danish:
Jeg har været en del involveret i Project Zero, et meget ambitøst projekt om at gøre Sønderborg området carbon-neutralt inden 2030. Det er et langt, sejt træk, og det er ikke noget en enkelt by kan løse alene. For at få kontakt til andre der arbejder med de samme problemstilinger, holder Project Zero en konference den 17. juni om bæredygtig byplanlægning - specielt med fokus på små og mellemstore byer, der har ganske andre udfordringer end storbyer på miljøområdet.
Vi har fået indlægsholdere fra de 3 europæiske projekter vi mener er de mest interessante: Freiburg, Växjö og Wien. Desuden vil der være præsentationer fra en stribe danske byer som arbejder i retning af carbon reduktion: Frederikshavn, Lolland, Albertslund - og selvfølgelig Sønderborg.
Programmet kan downloades her

World out of sync

This seems seriously spooky. Cherry trees blossoming in London a couple of days ago - on february 5th.

Davos podcasts are coming online

The candy store is open: http://gaia.world-television.com/wef/worldeconomicforum%5Fannualmeeting2008/

What does "Bright Green" mean?

At work we throw the phrase "Bright Green" around a lot. I've made another attempt to define what it might mean:

Bright green is a strategy for meeting our needs and securing a pleasant, modern lifestyle without reducing the opportunities of future generations and harming the foundation for civilization in the long run.
In that sense, the term ”bright green” means the same as ”sustainable”, but by choosing a different phrase we get to rethink the issue and define a vision that is more in line with the realities of today.

No one owns the definition of ”bright green”, but as we see it, the following are some of the characteristics:

Bright Green is basically about understanding ones actions and their consequences in a global and long-term perspective. It is becoming increasingly clear that it is in our own interest that the entire system which we depend upon remains healthy.
Bright Green thinking is circular; realizing that resources, activity and waste are connected in a cycle which is becoming tighter on a planet where a rising population of people are rapidly increasing their consumption – while natural resources are dwindling or depleted despite amazing progress in developing more efficient technologies.

Meeting the future needs of humans calls for radical new technologies, so Bright Green technology must be based on science and facts. Bright Green solutions do not depend on faith or luck – they are proven, well documented and robust technologies with an effect that is reliable and well understood.

Obviously, money is not the only value in life, but the spreading of bright green products and solutions should be driven by market forces. They have to be attractive and make economical sense. Bright green solutions may be supported by regulation - and indeed taxation and regulation are important ways of determining what is economical in society - but basically Bright Green solution should be chosen based on competitive merits and not because of guilt or good will. Bright green solutions are efficient as they seek to optimize the use of natural resources.

Bright Green solutions are thought through at a systemic level and they work in large and complex contexts. Bright Green thinking implies deliberately looking at the larger picture – understanding that whether a solution is in fact positive is determined in a complex interaction between many, interdependent factors. Bright Green is no about quick, local fixes.

Bright Green solutions can scale to mass markets. They are not hand crafted or targetted at small and special groups of users. Rather, they can be rolled out at an industrial scale and be useful to millions of people.

Bright Green solutions offer transparency and overview. They enable users to act appropriately and participate in optimizing their outcome. They invite users to act in a responsible way – to become co-creators rather than passive consumers.

Strictly speaking, the best environmentalist is a dead environmentalist – no longer wearing on nature’s resources. But Bright Green thinking is not about excusing our presence and minimizing our existence. Bright Green should be an attractive, hopeful and fun vision of the future. Nature is not grey and frugal. Nature is an explosion of colours, variety and opportunity, but this richness of the planet has co-evolved as an entire system. Our wealth can only be maintained in balance with the rest of the system – and evolution is littered with designs that did not respect that.

Nowhere to surrender

I was at a meeting the other day in London, just off Kensington highstreet. It was raining and cold in the late afternoon. On the pavement there was a young girl crouching, holding a paper cup with the rim chewed up in front of her. If you looked closer at her, she seemed quite out of it, very red around her eyes, looking like she was not even capable of asking for help. Very, very sad, simply.
Lots of people were walking by, including me; busy, used to seeing beggars. She was probably around twenty, not that much older than my own daughter.
For some reason I was very disturbed by this, but I didn’t know what to do, apart from giving her a couple of pounds. I don’t live in London, I feel like a stranger who doesn’t really know what the rules are, and besides, like everyone else, I had an important meeting waiting.

It seemed she ought to be able to contact someone – a police man – and say, I give up, I’m freezing, I’m crying, I’m sick, I’m sitting on the street in an insane world of people that see me, that care for a moment, who don’t want to harm me – but on the hand, never stop and offer a bit of their precious time to help.

The weird thing was that the meeting was with the author of a book describing how business needs to keep creative, changing and adapting in order to stay fit in the evolutionary game of the market place.

And it makes me wonder, if we are entering a paradigm where each of us is supposed to be more responsible and self determining, co-creating and participating in shaping our circumstances – and if evolution culls those that are less fit... where does that leave those that are not creative and able to assume responsibility. The sick, the weaker minds, those in crisis of some sort.
Once the old ideologies of the industrial mass society are discarded – what mechanisms are left to take care of the weakest? Particularly given that the distance between rich and poor in most countries is growing. How far will polarization go this round?

London - The Hayward Center

The figures of the net

In a podcast from the O’reilly Open Source Conference, Tim o’Reilly rattles off some interesting figures about web 2.0-like services:
- Wikipedia has 5 million articles, written by 100.000 contributors
- Amazon has 10 million reviews written by more than 100.000 reviewers
- Del.icio.us has 2.5 million users contributing probably tens of miliions of shared bookmarks
- The 10 million users of Flickr have so far shared 750 millions photos
- There are 122 million Independent websites on the World Wide Web generating 10-20 billion pages.

I can add another piece of statistics:
according to World internet statistics, there are 1,244,449,601 persons on the planet with internet access – 18.9% of the population.

What’s the mileage on your house?

The price of petrol is one of the most important signals in the climate/environmental discussion. It’s so visible; we can follow the prices rising and falling advertised with big signs along the roads. Most have a pretty good idea of how far their car drives pr. Litre - and of course we do, because we’re confronted with the economic consequences every time we fill our car.
The cost of heating our houses or the price of electricity is a different matter. Very few know the price of a kilowatt hour, or how much it costs to operate their appliances – even though 40% of our energy consumption is spent in our houses, much more than for transportation.
We’re not as aware of whether our house is efficient or not, because we’re not confronted with the information. Experiments have shown that simply installing a gauge that tells the driver what mileage he or she is getting currently improves the fuel economy considerably.
My guess is that if it were more visible, in realtime, how much we’re spending to heat or cool our houses, or to use our devices and appliances, we would save a lot of energy and create a huge demand for energy efficiency in buildings.

A good laugh - Pixar "lifted"

Oh, they've done it again:

Literacies for the networked society

I've been working for years on various iterations of a piece that should describe how the paradigm shift we're living through calls for a rethinking of the skills that we need - and thus also points to the need to rethink our educational curriculum.
So, I've put the latest version on my website - and yes, it's long: 20 pages, but I actually think it is important stuff.
Here's an excerpt, from the beginning:

Society is making its way through a profound change. We are leaving the industrial age and entering a new paradigm - one which we could name the network society.
The main characteristic of this is connectivity. Humans, machines, cultures and economies are connected ever closer, more often, in more detail and across greater distances. Developments in completely different realms are increasingly influencing and interfering with each other.
Acceleration is another characteristic. As each new technical development helps us taking the next step even faster even change itself is accelerating.

The network society offers us countless new opportunities - but at the same time it confronts us with a demand for new competences. Clearly, the type of work that we will be making our living from in a globally connected hi-tech world will be very different from the work which our welfare society was built upon.
We need a new approach, one that's suitable for the new rules of the game. We need a different perception of the mechanisms which drive change - and we need to weed out old concepts and structures that have become irrelevant and which often end up as barriers to necessary change.
All of this implies a deep cultural shift in attitude and understanding of learning, innovation and action - a shift that's needed all the way from kindergartens to retirees.

In primary schools one uses the term ”literacies”, to describe the basic skills that are necessary in order to get by in society. In Denmark the law emphasizes 5 literacies: reading, writing, math, English as second language, and basic IT skills. If you lack one or more of these, you will experience that the doors to further learning are shut.
But what's considered basic literacies obviously changes as the conditions in society change. As we shift from the industrial society to a networked society we will need to acquire a number of new, basic competences to supplement the old literacies.

Put briefly, these new competencies are about understanding the way in which globally connected, complex, dynamic systems work. The internet, international politics, stock markets, or living systems, like our body… These are the sort of complex systems that we need to engage with, and our future welfare will depend on our ability to do so in smart ways.
We will need a completely internalized understanding of the mechanisms that drive such systems. At the moment it may sound very abstract, but concepts like evolution, non-linearity, feedback, self organization and ecology will increasingly be crucial to us in order to asses situations correctly and to act intelligently in relation to the forces that shape our circumstances.

Goodbye sunday paper

A couple of months ago I decided to cancel my sunday newspaper subscription. Somehow it seemed that they never really printed anything in there worth reading anyway. It was nagging me to recieve all of that paper which I basically just wasted time flipping through and discarding. The decisive moment came when they started to deliver the paper wrapped in plastic.

So my life is little bit lighter, and frankly I haven’t missed it at all.

The great carbon cover up, part 2

In Denmark we like to pride ourselves that as a nation we have decoupled economic growth and the use of fossil fuels.
But in fact our C02 emission modesty looks quite different if we include the emissions from the Danish shipping industry. A number of the worlds largest shipping companies are Danish – most notably Maersk.
It turns out that the combined emissions from the Danish fleet of ships amount to 25% of the total Danish emissions. Only the shipping emissions don’t show up in the usual statistics, because fuel for international transport is exempt from the Kyoto protocol – and from taxation.

The great carbon cover up, part 1

In Denmark we are proud to have committed to the Kyoto goals of reducing our emissions. It’s still very much doubtful that we will in fact hit the target, but at least we feel we are doing something.
However, you never hear any discussion of the impacts of our agricultural industry on the greenhouse effect.
There are 5 mio. People living in Denmark, but at any time there is also about 13.5 mio. Pigs. Annually, about 25 mio. Pigs are slaughtered in Denmark.
The Average Danish person emits around 10 tons of carbon dioxide annually. According to The Economist, ”every year the average sow and her piglets produce 9.2 tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent through the methane emissions from their effluent”.
In that case, it seems that the true Danish carbon emissions are about 3 times the official figure.

Apart from the damaging effect of all the methane that these pigs produce, it also takes considerable energy to raise those 25 mio. Pigs annually.
Obviously, you lose a lot of calories when you raise meat, somewhere between a factor 5 to 10, as far as I have been able to research.
Pigs are slaughtered at the age of 4-5 months, when they have reached a weight of about 100 kilo.
Even though Denmark is a wonderfully fertile country we cannot produce enough to feed those pigs, so a considerable part of this is shipped in from Brazil, Argentina and other soy producers. It takes a lot of energy to grow that soy, for fertilizers, machinery and transportation. Fertilizer is produced from natural gas and transportation fuel is almost all fossil as well.
(To make matters worse, the land used for producing soy in Brazil and Argentina is partly forests that have been cleared – and thus no longer help to stabilize the climate.)
Finally, 80% of the meat is exported, adding more transportation and more emissions.

Oh, did I forget cows? Denmark is a big dairy producer. We have 650.000 cows – and cows fart too.

Welcome to the machine

SFO, San Francisco

"Bright green" - what does it mean?

I kinda like the term ”bright green” that the folks at worldchanging.com use to describe their vision of a sustainable future. One of the problems with words like sustainable or organic is that so many interpretations have been heaped on them. They’re tired, they’ve lost their power to engage, and what’s worse, in many cases they actually turn off people, who may be worried about the environment and wish to turn away from a destructive life style, but don’t want to be part of the sustainability brigade.

But what might ”bright green” mean?
Here’s my list – please add to it.

I see bright green as a a strategy for meeting our needs in a way that makes good use of facts, science and technology. Bright green solutions are robust and they can achieve massive, industrial scale. They have reliable outcomes, documented effects, it’s understood how they work.

They are transparent. They enable users to become participants in optimizing their outcome. They invite users to act in a responsible way – to become co-creators rather than passive consumers.

Obviously, money is not the only value in life, but the spread Bright green products and solutions should be driven by market forces. They have to be attractive and make economical sense. They may be supported by regulation, but basically they should not be chosen out of guilt or good will, but based on competive merits.

Bright green solutions are holistic and complex. They are not discrete, local fixes. They take the larger context into account, and this can be done by using sensors, networks and by approaching reality as an ecosystem of interconnected and interdependent factors.

...to be continued