2011 sbs sydney | martin stewart-weeks, the resilient state: smarter, connected

Cisco Confidential 1© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

THE RESILIENT STATE: SMARTER, CONNECTED Social Business Summit, Dachis Group, Sydney, March 2011

Martin Stewart-WeeksInternet Business Solutions Group, Cisco Systems

Chair, Australian Social Innovation Exchange


The argument

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 4Education Virtual Event

1. Volatile and unpredictable change is creating massive new risks and opportunities

2. Dealing with those risks and opportunities successfully means navigating some big transitions (assets, institutions, infrastructure…)

3. At the heart of those transitions are new digital capabilities both as enablers and as critical new assets in their own right


4 And at the heart of those capabilities is the art and practice of connection through distributed networks of people and technology

5 Those distributed networks make possible new connections to people, ideas and resources which create richer and more useful shared knowledge to inform human judgment

6 The result is new, more resilient patterns of knowledge, action and power


Some examples


NATO’s Policy

Jam

4,000 participants10,000 logins124 countries

5 days10 streams

26 online hosts75 facilitators


The Tanta Effect

“Blogging ‘turbocharged’ the ecology of intellectual discussion – enabling us to tap into the insights of people who would never have received the attention they were due back in the old days where reputations took a decade or more to build and were corralled into specialisms with little cross fertilisation and ‘contestability’ between them.”

Thanks to Nicholas Gruen


Some theory


The Big Shift in Three Waves

Infrastructure

Knowledge flows

Institutions

“…a world in which citizens gain political power relative to political institutions. A world in which talented employees capture economic value relative to the firm. A world in which consumers have increased market power relative to vendors.” “…innovations in institutional architectures such as the ability to foster and participate in creation spaces where performance accelerates as more participants join” p58

1

2

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“The challenge is designing and managing creation spaces is to provide scalable environments that can accommodate a large and growing number of participants and create the conditions for them to learn faster from each other as the number of participants grows “

p130


Push-based institutions are the antithesis of serendipity. In a world of carefully scripted push programs, unexpected encounters are generally treated as signs of inefficiency and worrisome unpredictability.

p107


A new theory of the business


We have to be willing to risk looking like we don’t know the answer or maybe even the question, We’ve got to wean ourselves from overdependence on the expertise we’ve laboured to hard to accumulate.

p118


Some more examples


ExpertNet


Cure Violence takes a 21st-century approach to “meeting people where they’re at” and invites the messengers to ‘communicate with the tools they’re already using like social networking utilities and SMS technology to distribute firsthand text and multimedia responses to violence in their own cities. Users can comment and connect with one another and affect change through actionable content submitted by Cure Violence partners and local and national organizations who adopt it to organize and mobilize. Cure Violence content will be accessible via web, mobile device, broadcast, public projection and exhibitions.

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Dialogue Cafe

Lisbon Rio de Janeiro

Toronto

Tel AvivRamallah

Amsterdam London Berlin


Speculations


Control? Resilience?

l


Much of this economy is formed around distributed systems, rather than centralised structures. It handles complexity not by standardisation and simplification imposed from the centre, but by distributing complexity to the margins

Open Book of Social Innovation, The Young Foundation, NESTA, 2010


Social innovation doesn’t have fixed boundaries: it happens in all sectors, public, non-profit and private. Indeed, much of the most creative action is happening at the boundaries between sectors, in fields as diverse as fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming, waste reduction and restorative justice.



We define social innovations as new ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words, they are innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act.



Node = a person

Line = a relationship between two people

“embedded”: the degree to which a person is connected within a network

more embedded = central

less embedded = periphery

Centre and edge 1


Centre and edge 2

“We have grown used to the centre taking more and more of the decisions, despite the fact that in almost all cases the knowledge, expertise and experience required to inform those decisions are at the edge.”

Beth Noveck, author of Wiki Government and former Deputy CTO, Open and Transparent Government, The White House


Dispersing power, authority and

control


Communities and networks, as well as organisations and

institutions


Systematic serendipity


Coherence, Scale, Accountability


Public Purpose The

Sector


Resilience has become the central task of governing well. The ability to connect highly distributed networks of people, expertise and assets for common action is turning out to be critical to the chances of success.


Four dimensions of the resilient state

The Resilient State

Redefining the relationship between the centre and the edge

Managing transitionsIm

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Ren

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