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eliingraham · 5 years

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The SDG Imperative

May 8, 2019

I was recently asked by a journalist on LinkedIn for my thoughts on various CSR and SDG-related questions in connection with Innovation360′s Fix the Planet initiative that invites innovators to submit ideas around four of the Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs].

Here are my thoughts:

1. CSR vs Sustainable Development

First, I think we need to differentiate between CSR, ESG, and Sustainable Development; three concepts that are bandied about, and often conflated, or confused.

CSR [Corporate Social Responsibility] or “responsible business” is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model whereby business monitors and ensures its active compliance with the spirit of the law, ethical standards and national or international norms. CSR assumes that business is motivated by a social conscience, rather than shareholder profit. Lots of companies self-report on their voluntary CSR activities but have proven false to its real power. CSR is largely considered a myth [1] by some, as well as a marketing gimmick [2] that benefits the company, but does not actually fix the planet.

ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] conflates sustainability and corporate governance issues but ignores the economic dimension. Sustainability investors are concerned with how companies manage all factors contributing to profitability: supply chain, production, employees, regulatory relationships etc. They focus on the relationship between economic, social and environmental factors, as well as financial performance. However, corporate governance, designed to balance the interests of management and shareholders is a structurally different system. ESG arose when investment managers combined two areas of research [corporate governance and sustainability research], which gave them a convenient way to communicate both activities to clients. [3] ESG has gained a lot of traction, but it is not a considered a ‘real’ thing by many professionals in the impact space.

Sustainable Development was coined in 1972 by the Bruntland Commission as “development that meets the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. [4] In January 2016, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs] of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, were adopted as a universal framework. The SDGs are intended to mobilize efforts to end all forms of poverty, fight inequalities, and tackle climate change, while ensuring that no one is left behind, and with meaningful progress being made by 2030. The SDGs also recognize the interconnectivity of global issues, that ending poverty must go hand-in-hand with strategies that build economic growth and addresses a range of social needs including education, health, social protection, and job opportunities, while tackling climate change and environmental protection. [5] The SDGs are also unique in that they expect action by ALL countries, poor, rich and middle-income to promote prosperity while protecting the planet.

What differentiates the SDGs from CSR and ESG is:

Universal framework for action that is inclusive and collaborative

Universal framework for measuring impact at target/indicator level

Interconnectivity of social, economic, and environmental issues

Global call to action for: governments, business, and civil society

Aggressive timeframe, by 2030

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2. Is CSR Spiking?

It depends what you are really asking. Is the number of CSR reports filed by companies increasing over time? Yes. Is their actual impact increasing? Hard to know. Some illuminating facts from the August 2017 Journal of Accounting and Economics [6]:

Publicly traded companies face increasing pressure to prepare CSR documents to inform stakeholders about their voluntary activities to operate in an economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable manner.

Percentage of firms that voluntarily issue CSR reports has increased considerably. As of 2015, 92% of Fortune Global 250 firms issued voluntary CSR reports, up from only 35% in 1999 [KPMG, 2015]. As of 2017, 85% of the S&P 500 were filing CSR reports [7]:

Existing standards regulate only a fraction of accounting for socially relevant corporate activities disclosed in annual reports; reporting CSR performance through other channels [stand-alone CSR reports] remains largely voluntary and unregulated.

Lack of regulation has resulted in diverse reporting practices [length, performance indicators, readability, etc.]. Additionally, verification of these reports by accounting firms is neither comprehensive nor stringent compared with verification of corporate annual reports.

While mandatory disclosures are highly regulated and subject to stringent external audits, the discretionary nature of CSR reporting provides managers with opportunities and motivations to signal their superior commitment to CSR or to pose as ‘good’ corporate citizens when their CSR performance is poor.

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3. Are Companies More Responsible or is That an Illusion?

There is mounting evidence that key social trends are having a positive impact on companies taking their “social responsibility” much more seriously. Clearly, companies face increasing pressure from employees and customers to take a stand on critical issues. [8]

Workplace Harassment/Bias

#MeToo movement

Gender pay equity

Diversity and inclusion

Brand Activism

Gun Reform; #MarchforOurLives

Women’s reproductive freedom

Transgender rights; #WontBeErased

Paris Agreement

White supremacy

Shift from Disaster Recovery to Climate Resilience

More CSR in the C-suite

Higher Standards for Suppliers

Prioritizing Privacy and Data Protection

In addition, as companies continue to take a stand on big issues, they are shifting the relationship between private enterprise, governments, and civil society, often speaking up where and when governments are not. Companies that pursue legitimate CSR activities “experience positive reputations, improved customer loyalty, and strong risk management processes.” In other words, ‘sustainability’ is now being associated with long-term sustainability of companies, as well. Those companies offering scalable solutions with immediate impact will succeed, giving companies a competitive edge, and making CSR more central to their business strategies. [9]

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4. Are Startups Leading the Charge or Larger Enterprises?

Right now, national and multi-national companies have the visibility, influence, and the resources to #BetheNeedle, driving sustainable change from the top down. According to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, “More than three-quarters of people worldwide want CEOs to take the lead on change instead of waiting for the government to act.” [10]

We have seen the emergence of activist CEOs taking very public stands in the form of:

The Giving Pledge

CEO Action on Diversity & Inclusion

Global CSR Summit Declaration

Global Investors for Sustainable Development Alliance

We have also seen high-profile global CEOs adopting sustainable business practices in support of the SDGs while also delivering value to shareholders [11]:

Paul Polman, Unilever

Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo

John Noseworthy, Mayo Clinic

Richard Davis, USBancCorp

These, and others, like Larry Fink at Blackrock, who writes an annual letter [12] to CEOs of companies in which they invest, are linking stewardship and sustainability with profitability:

“We advocate for practices that we believe will drive sustainable, long-term growth and profitability.”

Both peer pressure [from other CEOs] and pressure from the citizenry [in the form of customers] are driving change. No one pillar [business, government, civil society] can achieve the magnitude of the SDGs by 2030 by itself.

However, business alone has the capital, resources, technology, and innovative energy to #BetheNeedle in solving the world’s most challenging issues.

“Unnerved by fundamental economic changes and the failure of government to provide lasting solutions, society is increasingly looking to companies, both public and private, to address pressing social and economic issues. These issues range from protecting the environment to retirement to gender and racial inequality, among others.”

The question then becomes profitability. Does purposefulness necessarily compromise profits? Larry Fink argues, to the contrary, that purpose is the animating force for achieving profits:

“Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose – in fact, profits and purpose are inextricably linked. When a company truly understands and expresses its purpose, it functions with the focus and strategic discipline that drive long-term profitability. Purpose unifies management, employees, and communities. It drives ethical behavior and creates an essential check on actions that go against the best interests of stakeholders. Purpose guides culture, provides a framework for consistent decision-making, and, ultimately, helps sustain long-term financial returns for the shareholders of your company.”

So what about startups and early stage companies? How do they stack up in terms of Sustainable Development? Whereas huge corporation have the responsibility to turn the entrenched wheels of their behemoth production models toward sustainability, young companies have the enormous opportunity to define and direct their mission, values, and strategic plans specifically toward one or more of the Sustainable Development goals, targets, and indicators, right from the start.

Startups are notoriously strapped for cash and resources, which often supersedes their integrating loftier ideals like the SDGs into their investment proposals. This is extremely shortsighted. As innovators, they typically pride themselves on being ahead of the curve. Well, be ahead of the curve, by taking the lead in a new order of things.

A number of incubators, accelerators, and advisories are encouraging startups and early-stage companies to do just this:

UN SDG Action Campaign

UN SDG Accelerator Program

Impact Entrepreneur Center

Sustainable Development Goals Accelerator

There are undoubtedly, many more out there, working with founders, investors, and advisory networks to increase competency with, and commitment to, the SDGs. Startups and early stage companies can #BetheNeedle by driving sustainable change from the ground up.

Here are some fundamental ways new and emerging businesses can support the SDGs [13]:

Externally align your purpose with one or more of the SDG goals, targets or indicators. Communicate this intention in all your strategic documents, marketing materials, and employee training. In other words, COMMIT.

Internally align your business processes with sustainable business practices. There are a number of steps companies can take to help protect the planet, such as tracking and reducing emissions, increasing the energy efficiency of their operations, using clean energy sources, reusing materials and responsibly using resources like water.

Promote the rights and well-being of employees, customers and workers throughout your supply chains. Companies can strengthen their support of human rights by developing a human rights policy and working to integrate human rights into management education.

Act as responsible members of the communities in which you work, including using your standing as social leaders to stand up for justice and speak out against hate.

Take action to reduce the inequalities that harm lives and threaten global stability. Business leaders can provide decent jobs and fair wages, work to expand opportunities and skills training to underserved communities and push for more diversity in their ranks.

Collaborate with governments and international organizations to scale effective solutions. Time and again, we've seen the power of multi-sector partnerships to change lives, from expanding access to vaccines to turning the tide against diseases like HIV/AIDS.

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5. How Can Startups Like Innovation360 Galvanize the Public Around the SDGs?

I heartily applaud efforts that offer both tools and advisory services to innovators. Fix the Planet is certainly a “call to action” for innovative ideas on four specific SDGs. Like any initiative that wants to make a difference, it must have a clear purpose, process, and path to success. But if your goal is truly to coalesce serious ideas that have the potential to actually “fix the planet,” then it needs to convey the urgent, gritty, gut-wrenching gravitas of other organizations taking up arms in this daunting task.

It also needs to be grounded in the firmament of reality. Fixing the planet is going to require complex partnerships between governments, business, and civil society. It going to require revamping entrenched systems that have been governing our world for centuries. Its going to require deftness in navigating the intersectionality of socio-economic-environmental relationships, while also employing the underlying principle of the 2030 Agenda: inclusivity. No one gets left behind. Any combination of ideas and initiatives that can do that would be like inventing innovation ‘fire’, for sure.

As of January 2019, global land and ocean surface temperature was 0.88°C (1.58°F) above the 20th century average and tied with 2007 as the third highest temperature since global records began in 1880. [14] According to the recent UN report, one million species “already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss”. [15] In a world where "issues of mind-numbing irrelevance are more important than the collapse of our life support systems" [to quote George Monbiot] those taking up the #SDG charge need to do so with the attitude and determination, not of a startup unicorn, but of an impact ninja. We need results. Not monetary results, mandatory results.

In short, if you are going to get our attention and rally us around ideas to fix the planet, then you’d better be ready to implement for impact. We do not have time to waste. We do not have time to indulge creative fantasies. 2030 is ELEVEN years away. #BetheNeedle or go home.

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Footnotes:

[1] https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_myth_of_csr

[2] https://doublethedonation.com/tips/why-corporate-social-responsibility-is-important/

[3] https://www.sri-connect.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11&Itemid=88

[4] https://www.sustainabledevelopment2015.org/AdvocacyToolkit/index.php/earth-summit-history/historical-documents/92-our-common-future

[5 https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/development-agenda/

[6] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1815566917300164

[7] https://www.ga-institute.com/press-releases/article/flash-report-85-of-sp-500-indexR-companies-publish-sustainability-reports-in-2017.html

[8] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanmcpherson/2018/01/12/8-corporate-social-responsibility-csr-trends-to-look-for-in-2018/ - 202767ad40ce

[9] https://www.mbastudies.com/article/how-corporate-social-responsibility-is-changing-in-2018/

[10] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnonprofitcouncil/2019/02/26/businesses-and-social-change-were-at-the-starting-point-not-the-finish-line/ - 447dd61e4bad

[11] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2019/01/31/how-4-ceos-set-a-new-leadership-standard/ - 486be96fec64

[12] https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/investor-relations/larry-fink-ceo-letter

[13] https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesnonprofitcouncil/2019/02/26/businesses-and-social-change-were-at-the-starting-point-not-the-finish-line/ - 447dd61e4bad

[14] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201901

[15] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/05/1037941

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eliingraham · 8 years

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Social Technologies & GenG: Interview

[Noble & Greenough, December 2016]

1. What project or initiative with PBS/NPR had the most impact, or inspired you the most?

The Forum Network was undoubtedly my favorite project at WGBH, as it was the modern-day expression of WGBH’s original mission, which was to inspire and educate the citizens of Boston through free public lectures, as articulated in the Lowell family’s founding grant after the Industrial Revolution. In the early days of the online media explosion (early 2000s), however, offering “online lectures” wasn’t considered very sexy. While others were replicating the success of YouTube and its disruptively short online video format (3 minutes), we were pioneering how to create low-cost, low-end, long-form online video content. This was four years before TEDTalks started online!

Essentially, we partnered with hundreds of universities, libraries, museums, think tanks, policy centers, and professional organizations that offered live event lectures in Boston. We recorded many events ourselves but quickly realized that we needed to scale our model. So we taught our partners the art of videography (at no cost) and helped them purchase their own low-end equipment (through group discounts), which allowed us to focus on the craft of digitizing, editing, and curating content. We created an amazing ecosystem of partnerships in Boston that collaborated to provide free educative content to its citizens (and beyond) online, long after the live event had come and gone. In particular, I am very pleased to say that my team recorded and curated the many public conversations on marriage equality as it played out in Boston. To this day, I’m sure WGBH has the only recordings of this civic debate from start to finish that occurred in obscure rooms of Boston law firms, at historic gathering places like Faneuil Hall and the Old South Meeting House, as well as on the student-activated campuses of local universities.

As a digital startup, we experimented a lot, and were very early adopters of emerging online technologies, including RSS feeds and podcasts (we worked with Dave Winer and Adam Curry, credited with inventing these tools). The Forum Network project was so successful in Boston that we decided to syndicate it nationally to all 350 public television and radio stations across the U.S. Our intention was to create a national park of online content generated by public stations creating local partnerships in their respective communities. In order to do this, we broke ranks again and built an entire video delivery and online community platform in open source code, which was essentially against the risk-adverse, proprietary grain of PBS and NPR at the time. This decision allowed us to extend this technology cheaply to all stations, regardless of size or funding. Now, they could contribute content to our growing archive, and in return, offer a much larger online resource to their local audiences.

And then came “social media”. I’m proud to say that the Forum Network was the first public media asset to incorporate social media functionality into its DNA. In addition to building a brand and community on Facebook and Twitter, we were the first team to hire a dedicated social media marketer and community manager. It sounds silly now, but this discipline was uncharted territory at the time, especially for public media. Our team became the internal social media experts, helping to create social strategies and campaigns for other projects like NOVA and Frontline. We were also part of a small but growing external community of social media and social enterprise practitioners, and were invited to participate in the iTunes/iTunes U and Google/YouTube Video launches.

Fundamentally, the Forum Network was about community and collaborative partnerships. It was about leveraging resources and expertise for the greater good. And it was about the innovative, unencumbered fun of innovation and entrepreneurship.

2. Based on your broad and deep experience in social networks, what do you see as the opportunities and challenges for adolescents? Other digital natives?

I have an 11-year old daughter, who just got her first iPhone, and I’m both fascinated and concerned by how she engages with technology and social media with her peers. It’s equally interesting to see how she grapples with my knowing more than the average “old person” about the use and impact of these tools. Most adults grew up with an understanding of IQ, and then came to appreciate the importance of EQ (emotional intelligence) as an equally important dimension of success. Nowadays, we have DQ, or digital intelligence, the set of social, emotional and cognitive abilities that enable people to adapt to the demands of digital life. Our kids have a much broader swath of dynamics to assimilate, master, and employ extemporaneously in their daily lives. Their “digital dossier” can literally start at conception with a sonogram, then evolve into a bigger digital persona or identity within social networks, onto a heightened awareness of digital safety and security, then move outward to explore digital communication and collaboration, and finally to embrace the power of digital literacy and rights, including privacy, intellectual property, freedom of speech and protection from hate speech. That’s a lot more than we had to contend with wrestling with our Walkman and email spam.

Experts say that 90% of the entire population will be connected to the Internet within 10 years. They also say that on average, adolescents spend upwards of seven hours a day in front of some kind of screen, with research that speaks to the “rewiring” of young neurological pathways subjected to excess stimulation. Still, we need to stop acting like they’re “watching too much TV”. That’s the equivalent of earlier generations telling their kids they were listening to too much music when audio recordings disintermediated live music. The Internet of Everything is not going away. This is their world. It’s our world, too. Wait until AI starts telling you what to do.

Our kids are in an almost constant state of connectivity. They get “community” without having to actually understand it as a discrete concept. A vibrant community for them may be the constant pinging between the stars and planets in their digital galaxy, the knowing that “you’re out there”, regardless of any real-world interaction. Even more intriguing is their bending of the time-space continuum by engaging in this virtual behavior while standing right next to each other at the bus stop, or at after-school and weekend gatherings. It’s not necessarily good or bad, it’s just new behavior facilitated by digital tools, and more often defined by the desire to include others, not present, that would appreciate the meme. Further, their community pride seems based on the ability to keep up with the infinite threads of their solar system, responding in real-time to everyone’s micro-movements. Influence and intimacy can be measured in text message timestamps and Snapchat time limits. This heightened community engagement, or social contract, is remarkable when considered in the context of increased homework and after-school activities, old-fashioned chores imposed by unyielding parents, heightened community service in a more socially-conscious world, and other constructs of “raising kids” in today’s world. Personally, I think their capacity is astonishing, and something we can all learn from. Equally important, we adults need to stay relevant, helping to discern “what to keep, what to leave behind” in order to support their balance and well-being in today’s hyper-connected world.

As parents and teachers, and Old World Yodas still tethered to #OldSchoolValues, we need to grasp their reality while also deeply rooting them in the essential elements of respect, civility, empathy and prudence. We need to remind them to disconnect, to have device-free days, or zones, that allow them to reconnect with their rugged individualism, to candidly contemplate and compare the trade-offs, to feel the natural world that they live in, to remember that there’s no substitute for real interactions where people converse in complete sentences. Interpersonal relationships require actual skills, good grammar prevents things from eating shoots and leaves, knowing how to write well can influence elections. These enduring and powerful values will help them become masters of technology instead of being digitally remastered by it.

3. Has the use of social plateaued? What’s next in social? Where should institutions seeking to increase engagement invest resources?

Social has certainly not plateaued, any more than we have exhausted the potential of the Internet. As I mentioned earlier, the Internet of Things, and more broadly, the Internet of Everything, is really just beginning. We’re only starting to understand the ways in which social, or exponential, technologies will impact our lives. Most thought leaders in this space consider us to be entering the third stage of digital transformation, having floundered our way through competence and usage over the last decade or so. Different demographics may prefer different modalities of social-digital interaction (more boys play video games/more girls use social media; older gens use Facebook/younger gens use Instagram and Snapchat) but we are still in the nascent years of a truly “networked” world, fueled by online communities and interconnected devices.

The invitation to young people is to take charge of the positive impact of their engagement in social media. Enjoy the fun aspects, for sure, but also recognize the power of people on platforms. How can they use these tools to affect change? How can they use exponential technologies to collaborate with peers around the world to influence public policy? How can they create global networks to address the real challenges facing our world? How can they leverage these tools as emerging leaders? There is a compelling need for talent in our Age of Accelerated Disruption. Nobles, and other academic institutions, need to support entrepreneurial digital education to nurture the next generation, young professionals who understand digital industry but who also have an entrepreneurial (or intrapreneurial) mindset and can make things happen. We need to be more serious about enabling the change agents of tomorrow. Sustainability should also mean sustaining future generations by investing in the success of our children today.

At the same time, we need to be vigilant about not living in The Bubble Filter. You see this trend emerging out of the election with the rise of “Fake News” and the subsequent backlash at Facebook and Google, in particular. These platforms have matured and need to assume the mantle of responsible stewardship. It’s the classic evolution of Clayton Christensen’s ‘Innovator’s Dilemma’ where the disruptive startup eventually needs to adopt some of the enduring elements of the traditional business, or culture, to survive. New models, new ways of thinking and doing things, need to emerge, but civilization cannot lose its grip in the process. Certain constructs (governance, industry standards) and norms (inclusivity, equality, justice) endure for a reason, because they help stabilize the very change that’s at the core of what we call “progress”.

In terms of where institutions need to invest, I think they need to devote both human and other capital to the convergence of GenG sensibilities (wired, socially-conscious, global citizens) and accelerating technology. These young people have grown up as social and digital natives. Thankfully, their view of the world is not encumbered by the constructs of gender, sexuality, and race that have undermined previous generations. This generation organically gravitates to idea-sharing, co-creating and connecting globally through social and digital tools, which have always existed for them. They prefer ‘wirearchies’ over hierarchies, hacking to non-transparent firewalls, radical candor to disingenuous sound-bites. These young professionals will leverage asynchronous online communities and enterprise social networks to drive change and innovation at scale. Right now, they are incubating opportunities to collaborate, challenge, and innovate as Yodas of the New World Order. They will naturally engage at a deeper, more intrinsic level around the ‘connectedness of life and all things’. They will show us new ways of maintaining wholeness, of creating more holistic relationships and partnerships, of blending the boundaries between personal and professional.

If there were ever a time for new ways of being and working together with open communication and open collaboration to achieve The Greater Good, it is now. I say, bring it on.

4. What kinds of work are you supporting through Astia and why?

I joined Astia as an advisor and angel investor because its mission is to propel women as entrepreneurs and leaders of businesses that fuel innovation and drive economic growth. Astia Advisors is a global community of 5000+ seasoned experts (50 are also angels) that provide startup ventures with proposal review, access to capital, business networks, and opportunities to become more robust market players. Although the number of women-owned businesses in the U.S. continues to climb (now accounting for over 30% of all U.S. businesses and generating an estimated $1.5 trillion in annual revenue) female entrepreneurs still typically start their companies with 50% less capital than male entrepreneurs. Despite this disparity, women entrepreneurs are aggressively identifying gaps in the market on an unprecedented scale, and as purpose-driven problem-solvers, they are developing products and services that are good for the economy, good for consumers, and good for the planet. The movement of social entrepreneurs, fueled largely by Millennials and GenG young professionals, is combining commerce, with exponential (social) technologies, and social responsibility to make a difference. Social impact is an incredibly exciting space right now. I am privileged to be part of Astia, one organization in the larger ecosystem that’s emerged to support women entrepreneurs as they take on the challenges facing our world.

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eliingraham · 10 years

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The New Visionaries: Eli Ingraham

Published by Stowe Boyd on March 18, 2014

I met Eli Ingraham not too many years ago, but have only really been talking with her actively during the past few months, as we’ve been strategizing the Future of Work community together, where she’s been instrumental and has taken a leadership role, especially with regard to our advisory council (announced earlier today).

Eli Ingraham is a digital innovator, social strategist and collaborative economy thought leader. She was recently head of Social Business at Aetna, Inc., has worked in social business strategy with clients like Pearson, PBS, and with the Community Roundtable, and was director of digital and social media at WGBH, the Boston-based PBS station.

The Interview

Stowe Boyd: In a recent article on collaboration — The Future of Collaboration Isn’t What It Used to Be — you seem to be using the term in several ways. You wrote,

Together we build and rebuild, together we make sense of things, together we decide what to take and what to leave behind. Together, we are not overwhelmed, because Collaboration is the Mother of Intervention of our time.

This sounds more like connection than collaboration to me: the sense that we are linked together, and that our understanding of the world is tempered by an awareness of being networked with others, and the power of networks as a means of agency.

Eli Ingraham: My intention with this comment harkens back to a compelling passage in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, actually. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and agricultural industry changes. As the Joads set out for California in search of a better future, there is a moment when they ask, “What shall we take? What shall we leave behind?”. To me, this was a fitting metaphor for how we bring forward the best elements of our past into a technologically advanced future. On a greater scale, as an entire culture, we prefer to decide that together. When things get unsettled, we have a tendency to band together in order to restore equilibrium.

The humanization of business constructs, leadership models, economic benchmarks, domestic habits, seems far more fathomable than reengineering political doctrine. – Eli Ingraham

I believe connection, collaboration, and cooperation are intertwined and interdependent forces. Rather than splicing and dicing these terms, I see greater value in elevating them as a collective of powerful and interoperable methodologies, capable of creating meaning, opportunity, and stability, in a time of great change. While intellectual frameworks are helpful, the key is to interpret these words into reality, in a simple and focused way — to define unencumbered tools, participation models, and policies that support the greater good, and address the bigger issues. I think your expression, “the power of networks as a means of agency” is spot on. Networks are attracting talent, coalescing resources, and starting to have real impact, both within the workplace and in the world-at-large. Networks are reinventing and reinvigorating our way of life, turning even the prolonged negative aspects of a Great Recession into new ways of doing things, as evidenced by the emerging Collaborative Economy.

SB: In your piece, you make a case for the ‘collaborative economy’ and how it might disrupt business, but I felt you were missing the single distilled value proposition for those two words side-by-side. What is the 140 character answer to ‘what does a collaborative economy mean?’

EI:

@eliingraham: The #CollaborativeEconomy means redefining our relationships w each other in order to redefine our relationship to “stuff” cc @rachelbotsman

In other words, the future of this world should no longer be determined by institutions acting in their own best interest, but by people, individuals acting collectively in empowered networks, as well as in those organizations conducting business in ways that reflect currency, meaning, sustainability, and genuine public interest. But We the People have to take a hard stand to not buy goods and services from companies that do not improve our civilization. Easier said than done, but people are doing it.

Companies are getting it. Convenience and Consumption are being replaced by Awareness and Access. What’s compelling about the Collaborative Economy, is that people are disintermediating companies by forming their own marketplaces. They are slowly diverting the economic lifeblood by creating conduits around the entrenched, encumbered mainstream.

The tipping point will come when companies realize that it’s economically and ethically profitable for them to cooperate in new ways, to elevate themselves by honestly advancing the Greater Good. Collaboration is everyone’s responsibility. I see a whole new field emerging of professionals deeply skilled at translating things like “sharing” and “sustainability” into household management, lifestyle changes, community development, small business operations, and ultimately, big business. I believe this could be a bigger and more strategic role for social business practitioners.

SB: Like you, I have hopes for new sorts of cooperation between organizations and society, to avert the disasters looming in our future and to find new ways for us to work together for a more equitable and sustainable world. You wrote about a new scale of connection as a way to harness this potential,

a new global fascia — a structure of connective tissue that like our biological mesh, binds some structures together, while permitting others to slide smoothly over each other — that are getting the job done.

I’ve agreed with social critics like Frederick Jameson and Zygmunt Bauman that solidarity has been difficult if not impossible to find in the present day, which explains why we seem unable to find common cause, and incapable of coming together to erect new institutions, but instead — as the Arab Spring and other recent upheavals have demonstrated — we seem only capable of pulling institutions down.

I suggest that fluidarity, not solidarity, may be our only path forward. Fluidarity is the notion that we don’t have to agree on everything to agree on a few things. We can act connectively, not collectively. Your thoughts?

EI: You make an important distinction here. The humanization of business constructs, leadership models, economic benchmarks, domestic habits, seems far more fathomable than reengineering political doctrine. That said, the Arab Spring movement clearly indicates an intense desire for change and more democratic, evenly-distributed, governance. The mechanistic, command and control methods employed to contain growing populations are precisely the reasons people are revolting. The more rigid and impervious the power structure, the more the solution seems to be revolution rather than reform. Plain and simple, sometimes it’s too hard and agonizing to put “new wine in old skins”. It generally doesn’t work, it’s inefficient, and it doesn’t bring about real change. Let’s face it, governments are enormous, complex infrastructures. Sometimes you have to tear down before you can build anew.

This is why networks are compelling. They are flexible and fluid, capable of circumventing rigid, unresponsive systems of any kind and on any scale. They are receptive, self-regulating, and adaptive, while holding fast to commonly held principles that propel toward a common goal. In 1980 Gdansk, it may have been 17,000 workers, aligned under the “Solidarity” movement, that seized control of the Lenin Shipyard and won the right to self-govern in an independent trade union, but it was a much wider network of public support around the strike that toppled Communism in that country. According to Radek Sikorski, a former deputy foreign and defense minister, “that was one of those moments when, suddenly, millions of people felt that they wanted the same thing, which was free trade unions to represent them against the [Communist] Party. It gave people hope that perhaps communism could be reformed. We now know that it couldn’t.”

Maybe networks are the trade unions of the Digital Era. Through networks we coalesce our voices and values to drive the changes we believe are in our mutual best interest. Maybe social networks are harnessing socialist principles without the scary politics. The post-modern “consumer society” of Frederick Jameson’s world is starting to free itself from this consumptive shackle, and to align itself with a more enlightened mandate defined not by production and consumption, but by distribution and access; driven not by profit, but by prosperity — for everyone. I agree with Zygmunt Bauman [and you] that fluidarity rather than solidarity has a greater chance of succeeding. The notion of “not having to agree on everything” before taking action is liberating. And as you suggest, acting “connectively, not collectively” resonates with people’s natural preference for “unity over uniformity”. We cannot wait until we are all in agreement to start doing something about global warming. We do not need a perfect plan to begin the process of healthcare, tax or education reform. It has never happened that way. We understand it’s a process. Networks are crowd-sourced lobbyists, putting pressure on regulatory and legislative bodies to do their jobs, to make something happen, or move out of the way.

In addition to fluidarity, networks have “reflexivity”, a term introduced by sociologist William Thomas. I’m not a social theorist, but in the context of networks, I would argue that reflexivity is a community’s ability to be self-aware, to have consciousness and commentary on themselves that “bends back on” and informs their mission and efforts. It is both aspirational, a self-fulfilling prophecy, as in “if we want this badly enough, it will happen” and self-referential, as in ” if we want this to happen, we’d better manifest it ourselves”. This internal reflexivity lowers the viscosity of networks so they remain agile and laser-focused. Relexivity not only keeps them honest, it keeps them engaged and effective, by reducing the factors that cause them to solidify, primarily distrust and personal gain at the expense of others. Over time, networks become increasingly more self-aware, reflective, and empowered.

Cyborg anthropologist, Sheldon Renan, is credited with saying,

As society progresses, the creation of value liquefies and begins to flow unfettered. The production time it takes for value to occur declines. To survive, products and interfaces must quickly flow from spaces of high-resistance and poor usability to spaces of low resistance and user interaction.

So while the Arab Spring movement may appear to have overthrown only a handful of corrupt leaders, the unrest in Tunisia liquified into upheavals in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Sudan, Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara, and the Palestinian territories. Heck, it even migrated to America as part of the Occupy movement.

The rebuilding of the political and socio-economic frameworks will come, but the powerless standing around and waiting for something to happen has ended. We have demonstrated our spectacular ability to harness networks to break the log-jam, to end the grand game of The Emperor’s New Clothes we’ve been playing, in business and politics, especially. Now we are realizing their enormous potential to help us devise powerful solutions, to replace broken systems, to create marketplaces, innovation labs , even new currencies.

It’s not that we are becoming more decent, more honest, more creative, more caring. It’s that we are becoming more connected and discovering that, thankfully, the majority of us share these values, even though some bad apples have done real damage for a long time. We now have the ability to stop the madness, to band together and take things in a different direction. All aboard the new and improved Cluetrain, people.

Afterword

I admire Eli’s aspirations, and her hope that we will be able to usher in a brand new era, a ‘collaborative economy’. My focus here, is to examine how that is happening in the world of work.

I will put aside any sort of analysis about the myriad Springs — Arab, Egyptian, Syrian, Ukrainian — that we have seen rise, and the numerous chills that have followed. For today, I will restrict myself to the changing world of work, where the dark currents of war, revolution, and conquest are at most metaphoric, and not a natural consequence of our actions.

Like Eli, I believe in harnessing the power of connection — of the reflexivity of networks — and the slow emergence of a new work culture that transcends the shallow and limited cultures found in organizations. That work culture is firmly based on an appreciation of humanness, and the degree to which we are benefitted by and shaped by our connection to one another.

As I have been saying for years,

I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections.

This, then, is the new work culture, where we build on our capacity to find meaning and purpose through dedication to work, through the achievement of mastery, and the willingness to help others to do the same. Cooperation means that there is room for each of us to pursue our own ends while still connected and working toward shared goals, too.

And it is my hope that if we can rework the old ways of work — to break out of the industrial blinders and hierarchical mindset that pervades nearly all corners of business — then perhaps we can take that experience and take a long hard look at the greater problems that Eli touched on, the many aborted Springs that have sprung up in recent years. We may be able to reweave the ties that bind us in nations, states, and as a world, but let’s focus on the world of work, first.

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eliingraham · 10 years

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Rethinking Work In the Collaborative Era

[Published by Dion Hinchcliffe on March 2, 2014 in response to my previous post]

http://dionhinchcliffe.com/2014/03/02/rethinking-work-in-the-collaborative-era/

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Excerpt:

"Over this weekend I came across Eli Ingraham’s terrific exploration on CMSWire of how collaboration is currently changing. I believe she’s come as close as anyone has been able to get in framing up this new way of thinking about the transformation of work in our times."

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Over the last few years, there has been an enormous amount of industry discussion about how the digital world is changing the way we work. To any reasonable observer, the ways that we communicate, interact, and collaborate with each other are all in the midst of profound change. At least the why seems fairly clear.

At at high level, there appear to be three major root causes for why collaboration — the very core of how people come together and function as a business — is in the midst of reinvention:

Hierarchical management styles break down in the face of the inherent complexity and scale of the modern business environment.

New digital tools have put us in constant and direct contact with nearly every person in the developed world at virtually no cost or effort. Thus businesses are now primarily subject to the power laws of networks, rather than the legacy rules of business.

There has been a sustained shift in the power of creation, as the edges of our organizations and marketplaces now have readily in hand as much — and often more — productive power and reach than our institutions. The obvious cause is today’s pervasive global platforms for self-expression (yes, by this I largely mean social media, but also all forms of digital connectedness.)

Harold Jarche calls the reaction of our existing businesses to this new operating environment the “industrial disease” for which complexity is the single biggest challenge to working effectively:

Today’s complicated organizations are now facing increasingly complex business environments that require agility in simultaneously learning and working. Typical strategies of optimizing existing business processes or cost reductions only marginally improve the organization’s effectiveness. Faster markets challenge the organization’s ability to react to customer demand. Decision-making becomes paralyzed by process-based operations and chains of command and control.

Organizations need to understand complexity instead of adding more complication.

The long and short of it, despite many attempts, is that we still don’t have generally accepted management theories about how to cope with these changes. That’s not today there haven’t been many attempts to describe aspects of it. Over the years these have included Enterprise 2.0, social business, wirearchy, podularity, holacracy, to name just a few of the more well-known ones.

But as we are still in early days — although we’re perhaps past the end of the beginning — of the story of how digital networks are remaking work, and it is still very much unfolding. Frankly, we’re just trying to learn enough about what’s really happening to our organizations to articulate it well. Certainly, the reasons why we must try to understand how work is changing are many, not the least because it’s what we must do to create value for ourselves and society. But we’re finding even how value itself is created and evaluated is in the midst of change.

Currently, I believe we’re about to enter another major phase of conception in how we think about work in general, even though we’re not yet done absorbing the last few generations of ideas. This new phase will be more comprehensive, transformative, and almost immediately challenging (yes, even that overused word, disruptive) to our businesses and institutions.

The Three Major Collaborative Changes

Furthermore, I now think we can get a glimpse of this new conception. Over this weekend I came across Eli Ingraham’s terrific exploration on CMSWire of how collaboration is currently changing. I believe she’s come as close as anyone has been able to get in framing up this new way of thinking about the transformation of work in our times.

Eli says that today’s overall changes to work can be organized and described as top-level concepts:

I see three major forces in The Collaborative Intervention: the Future of Work, the Collaborative Economy and Global Solutions Networks. Their tenets transcend geography, generation, gender and any other constructs that divide us. They are about how we co-exist, and co-innovate, on the planet as human beings.

I’ve rearranged it a bit in my framing of these three major and interlocking new dimensions of work in the visual above but I think this is the right articulation.

First, we are seeing the emergence and primacy of network collaboration. Today’s technologies are remaking team, departmental, and organization-wide collaboration, primarily via social tools, online communities, and other new systems of engagement such as rich collaborative experiences.

Second, at the next structural level, we see that businesses are beginning to use industry-wide and/or domain-specific business networks (communities) to come together to solve problems they are not able to solve by themselves. Don Tapscott’s global solutions networks is probably the clearest articulation to date, but the ideas have been evolving for a while.

And finally, third, we have the collaborative economy, best identified and described so far by Jeremiah Owyang, which is how a large section of the global economy is rapidly being restructured around open and highly-scaled digital collaboration between new network-centric businesses and their communities of users.

The implication, if this summarizes the most significant things happening in work today, is that most businesses will have to come to terms with these transformational changes and restructure themselves around them. Given how rapidly this is taking place in certain quarters, particularly the fast-growing and highly disruptive startups of the collaborative economy, they will have to adapt to this new reality fairly soon.

As I wrote recently, digital communities are upending our organizations, and not slowly any longer. But they don’t have to. There is growing and decent evidence that organizations can make the change, if they are fully committed and pro-active. What’s more, the results seem to indicate they’re very much worth making, if you’re prepared to change what’s necessary.

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eliingraham · 10 years

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The Future of Collaboration Isn't What It Used To Be

Published by CMSWire on February 28, 2014

Collaboration is not just a word, or tool, or outcome. It is a value system, a mindset that we choose to live and work by. It determines whether we see ourselves as the center of our universe, around which everything revolves, or whether We the People are the universe, an interdependent, networked ecosystem.

I’m intrigued, amused even, by the expression “the future isn’t what it used to be” coined by French poet Paul Valery to describe European pessimism after World War I. Understandably, many found it hard to envision a future as they looked out over the devastation of their past. In 2008, journalist Joel Garreau linked what he considered “a decline in American willingness to think hard about the future” with feeling overwhelmed by the pace of technological change. He quoted Danny Hillis,

I don't think people try to imagine the year 2050 the way we imagined 2001 in 1960. Because they can't imagine it. Because technology is happening so fast, we can't extrapolate."

Collaboration is mitigating the technologically-accelerated transformation of our world by making it seem more familiar, more manageable, like a return to the tent-pegs of our past that we hold dear. If hope is the assured expectation of things not beheld (the aspirational aspect of technology and change), then collaboration is its entourage, the devout disciples that guarantee its arrival, interpretation and acceptance into our culture. Collaboration assures we are no longer in isolation, left to ponder our future by ourselves. Together we build and rebuild, together we make sense of things, together we decide what to take and what to leave behind. Together, we are not overwhelmed, because Collaboration is the Mother of Intervention of our time.

The Future of Work

Stowe Boyd explored the Future of Work in his article, “The Fall of Collaboration, The Rise of Cooperation.” Although I disagree with his claim that we should retire the term collaboration, I do agree with his thesis that we are trying to do today's jobs with yesterday's tools. But while Stowe examines collaboration primarily through the lens of tool architecture “based around outmoded structures of control rather than the shape of our work today,” my interest lies with how these traditional models and mindsets continue to define and diminish (intentionally or not) the social business transformation now in its 10th year.

As a social business practitioner, I believed in the potential of collaborative platforms and social communities to create value in the workplace. I believed that when executives invested in social technologies it meant they understood what they were designed to disrupt. I believed they were part of a visionary shift in leadership, moving from hierarchies to wirearchies, from command and control to distributed decision-making, from C-suite preferentiality to the elevation of the employee as the most valued and valuable enterprise asset. I’m here to tell you that no one at the top is giving up his or her purchase any time soon.

If ever the future of collaboration was unevenly distributed, it’s in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Although many companies have achieved positive outcomes in productivity, sales enablement, employee engagement, corporate communications, even process optimization, through these collaborative technologies, they have not succeeded in ushering in a New Order of Things. We need new mindsets and models of leadership, or "Leanership" (to use Stowe’s term) to achieve the workplace transformation we had envisioned. Not surprisingly, tech and start-up companies like Asana, Xiaomi, Dropbox, Airbnb, and FitBit, are leading the lean, mean, business machine charge. To them, “collaboration” is intrinsic and inalienable, and just like the word “social” in social business, it’s irrelevant, because it’s just the way they do business.

The Collaborative Economy

When Lucy Shea of UK firm Futerra used the term “swishing” in 2000 to describe ad hoc clothes swapping between friends, she may not have envisioned the concept extending to highly organized, world-wide exchanges of goods and services between complete strangers. Today, the Collaborative Economy has reached its “swishing point” and is considered one of the Top 5 Trends to Watch in 2014. Jeremiah Owyang, founder of Crowd Companies, describes the Collaborative Economy as “the next phase of social business.” The Collaborative Economy, predicated on trust between people, sharing rather than owning resources, distributed power and sustainability, allows us to believe the world is rotating again on a familiar and precious axis, even if the technologies powering it (like Bitcoin, 3-D printing, and geo-location) make us slightly nervous.

I recently attended the first Resilient Summit: Exploring the Rise, Impact and Opportunity of the Collaborative Economy in Kansas City, Mo. co-hosted by Jeremiah Owyang and Ben Smith, principal, Social: IRL. It was held in Union Station, home to Kansas City’s Science Center and Maker Studio. It had the intimacy of a retreat for early adopters and the intensity of a movement about to blow the doors off.

Here are some of the takeaways that most inspired or surprised me:

Brands collaborating with start-ups: Large brands are realizing they‘d better adapt or be disintermediated. Marriott Hotels now certifies Airbnb homes as Marriott extensions. In 2013, Airbnb had 300,000 listings, compared to Marriott’s 535,000 rooms worldwide.

Physical world collaborating with digital: On Valentine's Day, Uber teamed up with ProFlowers to offer 15 percent off orders made with the ProFlowers iPhone app using the code UBER. The campaign had its own hashtag #LittleThings so customers could share their experiences on Twitter.

Libraries collaborating with Makers: Nashville’s Public Library redefined its mission as a learning center by becoming a hub for local makers. According to USA Today, “Makers pump $29 billion into the economy each year. “ It’s no wonder the White House announced it is hosting a Maker Faire later this year.

Startups collaborating with community: In Boston, organizations like The Grommet have quietly reimagined a new collaborative marketplace since 2008. This March, The Grommet hosts its Second Annual Product Pitch Contest, where winners earn a product launch and crowd-funding campaign. The event includes a hackathon, where local students crowdsource a solution to a real community need.

The Global Solutions Networks

Since the historic Bretton Woods gathering after World War II, We the People have expected institutions like the United Nations, IMF, G8 and World Trade Organization, to assume responsibility for fixing the world’s greatest problems. But as the world’s ills grow more unwieldy, and reasonable solutions seem inconceivably out of reach, it’s obvious this nation-state model has not delivered on the promises we made for it.

We can debate how we ever thought that governments, defined by economic competitiveness and political unilateralism would be the vanguard of a global consciousness, but that’s the future we saw out of our past at the time. Now, due to the participatory power of the internet, combined with the international scale and scope of businesses, “We no longer need government officials to convene for the rest of us to align our goals and efforts,” according to Don Tapscott in the March 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Don Tapscott, author of Macrowikinomics, introduced a new model of collaboration called "global solutions networks" at the 2103 SXSW Interactive festival. Global solution networks are independent groups that coalesce “around a global problem or task they all perceive as important but that none can handle on its own.” They are guided by the need to communicate, cooperate, coordinate and collaborate around sustainable, socially just and inclusive problem-solving. Their purpose is “to make faster, stronger progress“ in response to real global challenges — like poverty, climate change, water scarcity, infectious disease and human rights — not to protect prevailing political or market forces.

Tapscott’s research has identified 10 types of global solutions networks, one of the most notable being on Climate Change. Unlike state-based institutions that have “failed to align on a plan for even a 6 percent reduction in carbon emissions,” the Climate Reality Project boasts 20 million members that are already taking action.

Technology, networks and an honest commitment to doing good are leveraging new patterns of connection into an enormous potential for improving our world. Individuals, consumer-owned brands, peer-to-peer communities, open cities, corporations and governments are equal participants in affecting change. We can, and should, share this responsibility.

But it is the inventive collaborations between these groups that are creating a new global fascia — a structure of connective tissue that like our biological mesh, binds some structures together, while permitting others to slide smoothly over each other — that are getting the job done. In contrast to the sentiments of Joey Garreau and Danny Hillis, the real power of collaboration lies not in the realization that we can imagine our future, but in the understanding that as we look out over our past, our vision for a sustainable future is a shared vision.

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