How Self-Organization Happens — Open Participatory Organization How Self-Organization Happens … and why you can trust it Values drive all organizational life If you pay attention throughout the day, you will see that your thoughts are constantly floating on waves of shifting values. While your thoughts govern your conscious actions, the underlying values directly influence your unconscious behaviors, like shifting in your seat, checking your email, getting up for the fourth cup of coffee. What I am calling values-streams are technically called the “intentional-motivational state” of a person. It is helpful to think of values as streams. Values are the most powerful markers of what is real in our experience. These effects, however, are not confined to you and your body, you and your perceptions, you and your stories.
On KYC and blockchains It’s official: Blockchains for everything! KYC is a challenge that blockchains are being thrown at (see here, here, here). The premise is “KYC is a headache and blockchains are trendy”. However there is rarely much detail on the problem and insight as to why a blockchain might or might not be a good idea. I aim to explore this use-case more fully in this post. Firstly, some definitions Knowing Your Customer (KYC) is a process that occurs in financial services mandated by regulation. For financial services providers it means having a good idea of who you are providing financial services to, whether they are individuals or businesses. In the case of individuals, the process ranges from proof of identification and address through to understanding a person’s source of wealth, business interests and family connections, especially if they have politically active family relations. AML and CFT AML and CFT is mainly about detecting patterns and is out of scope for this post. Blockchains The KYC problem
A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making Reprint: R0711C Many executives are surprised when previously successful leadership approaches fail in new situations, but different contexts call for different kinds of responses. Before addressing a situation, leaders need to recognize which... In January 1993, a gunman murdered seven people in a fast-food restaurant in Palatine, a suburb of Chicago. A version of this article appeared in the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.
The Viable Systems Model Guide 3e Autonomy or Authority If you have organisational problems such as lack of efficiency or jobs just not getting done there are basically two options: You can appoint managers who have the authority to make sure that these problems get dealt with. You can design a system which ensures that the problems are dealt with autonomously. The first option has been used for hundreds of years in all kinds of society and it is only recently that its limitations are becoming clear. This new emphasis on making all workers more autonomous has been obvious to people in co-operatives for decades - what has been lacking is the systems needed to ensure it works properly. The first essential is for each Operational unit to be clear about its role within the whole organisation and should therefore produce its own Mission Statement. This may take some negotiation with everyone else, but will ensure that the Operational unit works as an integrated part of a greater whole. Allocation of Resources . Diagnosis:
Smart Contracts: The Good, the Bad and the Lazy - Blockchain News I’m not a fan of the term “smart contracts”. For a start, it has been used by so many people for so many different things, that we should probably just ban it completely. For example, the first known reference is from 1997, when Nick Szabo used it to describe physical objects that change their behavior based on some data. I want to focus here on “smart contracts” in the sense of general purpose computation that takes place on a Blockchain. So is the future bright for smart contracts in private Blockchains? In private Blockchains, smart contracts combine four good ideas with one bad one. So what are the good ideas? And the bad one? If you’re aware of the deterministic nature of computation, know about the halting problem, and understand how data dependencies prevent concurrency then you may already be convinced. Understanding Ethereum In order to understand Ethereum-style smart contracts, we need to start with bitcoin, the first (and still most popular) public Blockchain. Breaking it down
The toxic “Age of Me” culture, Part 2 The toxic “Age of Me” culture, Part 2 Instead of building real value, the “Age of Me” culture is steeped in “how a person with money hires a person without for the lowest possible wage to make as much profit as possible for the one with money.” Bear that in mind as marginal costs for companies head towards zero even as the cost of basic necessities like food, shelter, clothing, transportation, etc spiral upwards. Are human going to go the way of horses? “Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.” Because people are “costs” to be minimized, the increasingly transactional nature of companies means that what once bounded people together and to their companies have largely disappeared. As early as in 1983, Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief had compared humans with horses: “The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.” References
The Big Hidden Problem With Uber? Insincere 5-Star Ratings Last night, I rode home with a stranger. He shot me a cursory glance in the mirror as I climbed into the backseat, but otherwise didn’t acknowledge me. For the next 13 minutes, he jabbered away on a hands-free phone and I sat white-knuckled as we whipped around corners and barreled through stop signs. It was a five-star experience. Or at least that’s what I reported to Uber when prompted to rate my ride. I’m not the only undiscerning reviewer out there. In an industry built entirely on trust between strangers, this is an alarming notion. Yet, despite a prevailing code of transparency and trust, these companies aren’t exactly encouraging honest feedback. Uber is even more emphatic about maintaining a five-star fleet. With so punitive a code, it’s no wonder so many riders dole out inflated ratings. That’s not to say rideshare ratings systems are all bad. So what should a perfect score look like? Yet, community feedback is a critical mechanism for regulating the peer-to-peer economy.
Principles and Glossary of Presencing There are two parts to this page. At the top, you will find a set of principles that inform the work we do. Below, you will find a glossary of words that are commonly used in our community but may not be familiar to all. Principles (1) Energy follows attention. (2) Follow the three movements of the U. Going down the U: “Observe, observe, observe.” (3) Go to the edges of the self. (4) Pass through the eye of the needle. The U Process of Co-sensing and Co-creating — Presencing (5) Transform the three enemies. (6) Always start by “attending to the crack.” (7) Transform the fields of conversation from downloading and debate to dialogue and collective creativity. (8) Strengthen the sources of presencing in order to avoid the destructive dynamics of absencing. What do we call social systems that have these three characteristics? We live in the tension of these two fields. The social spaces of collective creation (presencing) and destruction (absencing) Glossary Macro: The institutional level.
The Carlota Perez Framework I was reading William’s post on the potential crash in the Bitcoin sector this morning and I thought of Carlota Perez. Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a huge fan of Carlota’s work, her research around technology revolutions and financial capital, and her book about all of that. In 2011, I got to interview her on stage at the Web 2.0 expo, which was one of the highlights of my career. For those that are not familiar with Carlota’s work, she studied all of the major technological revolutions since the industrial revolution and how they were impacted by and how they impacted the capital markets. And the “turning point” between the two phases is almost always marked by a financial crash and recovery. I’m not going to guess if we’ve seen the “collapse phase” of the Bitcoin technological revolution, or if we are in it, or if it is coming. In any case, as my friend Tom Evslin like to say “nothing great has ever been accomplished without irrational exuberance”.
Von Hippel : le paradigme de l’innovation par l’utilisateur A l’occasion de l’inauguration de l’Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation (« l’I3 », prononcez i-cube), le 14 juin 2012, un institut de recherche fondé par Mines Paris-Tech et Télécom Paris-Tech, qui associe 6 laboratoires et groupe de recherche sur l’innovation et la société numérique, les organisateurs de l’évènement avaient invité le célèbre spécialiste de l’innovation, Eric von Hippel, à faire une lecture de ses récents travaux. Une invitation inaugurale de bon augure qui souligne que l’étude de l’innovation doit se tourner vers l’étude des comportements des utilisateurs et pas seulement vers le seul fonctionnement des entreprises. « Nous sommes au milieu du plus grand changement de paradigme dans le management depuis des décennies », estime le célèbre professeur de management. « Nous passons du paradigme Schumpeterien d’une innovation centrée sur les producteurs à une innovation centrée sur les utilisateurs. Image : les paradigmes de l’innovateur et du producteur.