Next-generation purposes require next-generation systems, but how?
By Javi Creus, Founder & Director. (Originally published in Spanish)
The Edelman Trust Barometer 2020 states that 56% of the world's population has lost trust in companies, institutions, the media and NGOs. None of these agents are perceived as ethical and competent at the same time, and the feeling that they do not align with the needs and desires of the population is widespread since before the pandemic. In this scenario, only collaboration among agents seems to be the way to complement capabilities and restore trust. Thus, public-private or company-NGO collaborations are multiplied every day.
And the lessons learned from the pandemic also point towards working together. One year after the onset of the health crisis, basic systems for life have proven unprepared to offer universal and equitable coverage. This is the case of health, housing, the economy, food, energy, access to the network and mobility, education or work. The emergency has highlighted the pre-existing social and economic gaps in these areas, and has made the digital and generation gap emerge even more strongly. The planet also tells us that, thus, there is no future.
However, over the past year, our society has demonstrated unprecedented social plasticity, capacity for change, and speed of reorganisation. Scientific cooperation for the development of vaccines, collaboration between industrialists and makers for the production of medical equipment and the organisation of neighbourhoods in order to care for the elderly are just some of the many actions that show the need to work as a team to truly make an impact in the whole system.
Better systems, better results
All these cases exemplify a principle that Professor Stafford Beer (1926-2002) already announced in 1972: “the purpose of a system is what it does”. The radical nature of this statement forces us to exclusively examine the facts or results of a system, without taking into account the intentions, expectations, prejudices or knowledge of the circumstances in which the agents operate.
In all three examples, the purpose has configured the system: it has encouraged the relationship between incumbent and emerging agents, it has broken the boundaries between industries, it has accelerated the adoption of available technologies and it has invented new uses.
The message is clear: if we want better results we need better systems. As people and things connect, at least two relevant effects occur: interdependencies and feedback loops become more evident, and data production multiplies and generates new spaces for analysis.
Achieving radical purposes for systems, the new match point
If the system is the unit of transformation, we need solutions that stimulate its transformation. At Ideas for Change, we have accumulated knowledge, methodologies and experiences that allow us to put a system to work to achieve radical and shared purposes, what we call #FuturesThatRock.
There are many hypotheses that we have put in place in recent months in this area: how is it possible to make freight transport time in El Salvador more predictable and shorter? How can we design a 24/7 home care system that is affordable for the population and generates decent jobs? What new business models arise from the potential of immobility or excess energy thanks to renewables? What new businesses allow accelerating the energy transition based on customer savings? How can more knowledge and new proposals for action be generated driven by the capacities of citizens and the new low-cost biological sensors?
Challenges, all of them, for a new generation system. Challenges that define a new system, that bring together and combine all those who can potentially contribute to the design and development of new combinations of capabilities that, multiplied by foreseeable technological and social innovation, generate new standards of provision. A new level of results: do more, with less and better.
Disruptive processes that broaden the field of what is possible and reveal inner abundance
A system evolves in the direction in which it is investigated. For this reason, in our processes it is the participants, organised by teams, who first explore the consequences of the exit challenge and anticipate what new technologies, capabilities or new forms of collaboration will emerge in this new scenario. For us, expanding the field of what is possible is the first step to be able to commit to the desirable and, fortunately, the circumstances accompany it. We live not only in a time of maximum pressure for change and collaboration, but also in a mutually accelerating cycle of technological and social innovation.
The value of an asset or a capacity depends on the purpose. A hammer is worth little to paint walls. That is why the second phase of our methodology invites participants to reassess what their organisations already have: data, tangible and intangible assets, people's capabilities, tools and knowledge, depending on their contribution to the purpose raised. If you change your point of view, you change the way you see things. Each participant identifies those elements with a future in their organisation and the teams combine them: we bring out the internal abundance of the system.
Exponential impact is achieved when one's abilities are leveraged on the development vectors of the environment. With each new wave of technology, a new space of the possible opens up. If in the past we rented apartments by the week with the landline phone and today we rent apartments by the day with the mobile phone, in the future we will rent rooms by the hour with the lock connected. It is about designing models for the generation and capture of value that anticipate and grow with the deployment of a new connectivity or cost standard, with the new units of value and assets available and driven by new citizen capacities, other emerging systems or communities.
At the end of our ideation processes, participants develop levels of mutual knowledge and trust that predispose them to put their ideas into action.
This makes one think of the father of cosmonautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 - 1935), who not only calculated the rocket equation, but also the mental strength of people who jointly think of the same idea. According to this physicist, philosopher and writer, "two like-minded thinkers multiply the power of their minds by seven, and three thinkers by forty-nine."
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