iPlot

Push to Pull

In light of the Arab Spring and the rise of India and China, and propelled by social technologies, the concept of ‘soft power’ (the phrase was coined by Joseph Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power; defined as “the ability to obtain what one wants through co-option and attraction”) is ever more relevant. Or, in marketing terms, Push is out, Pull is in. If an idea, aspiration, product, goal, ideology, culture, narrative, or national identity is attractive to its constituents, it minimizes the need for constant reinforcement and regulation – whether that is advertising, promotions, and other persuasive efforts, or bureaucracy, command-and-control, and coercion. Pull is powerful (as John Hagel illustrates in his riveting book The Power of Pull). It has a lot of Pull (pun intended) because one doesn’t have to push. It saves energy that can be invested otherwise, for example, in whatever “it” is that creates Pull. No surprise then that individuals, organizations, societies, and entire nations wish they could rely on it more.

But how does one create Pull? Even the most ardent Pull apostle will admit that Pull doesn’t just emanate from nowhere. How much hard power do you have to leverage to create soft power? How much Push is needed to generate Pull? I conducted a mini-poll on Facebook asking that exact question, and the responses ranged from “the answer to this you can only feel” to “a lot.” I sketched a diagram for myself to better understand the forces at work between this power couple, and I came up with three Push-to-Pull ratios that may help you get your “Pull-Push balance” right.

- Positive push-to-pull ratio: If you deploy more Push strategies than the Pull that they generate, then you over-invest in Push and inevitably create an undercurrent, a backlash that can even decrease the current amount of Pull you have. You risk dissolving the entropy of the overall system. Your idea, your narrative, your brand will be seen as intrusive, and in the worst case, as spam.

- Neutral push-to-pull ratio: If your Push and Pull energy levels are in balance, then you achieve the perfect equilibrium. You don’t generate any incremental Pull but you also don’t lose any. You need to be vigilant not to overdo your Push efforts, or you compromise your Pull. One could also say that the very point at which Push threatens to exceed Pull is the demarcation line between ‘cool’ and ‘uncool.’

- Negative push-to pull ratio: The last and ideal state is have Pull exceed Push. This happens after a long period of Push when the scale of Push needed to create Pull decreases. Or when the idea, aspiration, narrative, and culture is so strong that it sustains and amplifies itself. If that’s the case, your job is to simply enable connections for the “idea” (in this case, refering to brands, you can speak of “brand ideologies” or “intrinsic brands” such as IKEA, Nike, Apple, or Starbucks).

These three relationships sit along a continuum, and perhaps it makes sense to consider them to be stages in the evolution of organizations. Fledgling start-ups will rely more on Pull (for they often lack resources to invest in Push), but as they mature, they will inevitably explore means to amplify their intrinsic Pull with Push. Eventually they are so established that they can rely solely, or mainly, on Pull, however now with far bigger impact than the one they were able to achieve as start-ups. There are two critical junctures on this continuum and corresponding decisions: When exactly, in the early stage of an organizational or brand development, do you start to invest in Push? And at what point do you decrease the level of Push so you don’t “push too hard,” over-reach, and jeopardize the valuable Pull you’ve generated? (Ever come across an ad from a brand that you adore and disappointed that the company had to advertise in the first place?)

Pull is a function of cultural power, of the routines and rituals, of the energy that is flowing through an organization. Energy here translates to intensity: not only the level of activity (knowledge flows, productivity, social interactions), but also the tension between actors, the battles between conflicting ideas. If your organization experiences tension, then it is “intense.” An intense organization is always stretched, intellectually and resource-wise, and it is constantly operating at capacity of what it is able to imagine and execute on – it is in a state of emergence, a permanent crisis, with a heavy dose of ambiguity, uncertainty, and even paranoia. This is a good thing: the fearful are paralyzed, the paranoid are proactive (and creative).

Pull comes from an original idea, a compelling story, a contagious meme. Astrophysicist and philosopher David Deutsch defines a meme as "an idea that is a replicator." “A rational meme replicates because people find it valuable,” he writes in The Beginning of Infinity. “An anti-rational meme replicates by disabling its holder's rational thinking so that one has no choice but to spread it.” That’s the difference between Pull and Push, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, empowerment and enforcement, creativity and bureaucracy. Brands, countries, and movements that are built on rational memes have real Pull – and almost infinite staying power. The others will be pushed out sooner or later.

[image credit: timmonsandcompanyblog.com]

India Design Forum 2012

I am delighted to speak at the India Design Forum, which will take place in New Delhi on March 9-10, 2012, with the goal of bringing the international discourse on design to India.

The IDF will comprise of a Design Trail (March 2-10, 2012) featuring public exhibitions, workshops, and perfomances in the heart of New Delhi, as well as a two-day conference (March 9-10, 2012). The speaker line-up includes architects Rem Kohlhaas and Thomas Heatherwick, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli, luxury designer Christian Louboutin, Adam Bly from Seed Media, Tom Dixon, and Karim Rashid, among many others.

The IDF founders Rajshree Pathy and Mitra Khoubrou envision the event to be an open, cross-disciplinary conversation between designers to identify the elements that define contemporary design in India. The IDF is conceived of as a platform to improve India’s access to the global design community and help it become a leader in shaping the global design agenda.

Here’s more info about the IDF: indiadesignforum.com

Embracing Openness

Rotman magazine, the print and online quarterly of the Rotman School of Management, has just released its new (Winter) issue, devoted to the theme “Open.” Openness has been a buzzword for a while, ever since Henry Chesbrough wrote his seminal book on Open Innovation, but, to apply Gartner’s Hype-Cycle terminology, now it seems as if Openness has finally reached a plateau of productivity after going through years of troughs of disillusion.

The Rotman issue is thus timely, and it is wise to (re-)frame the topic as “culture (and economy) of sharing,” as the foreword does:

“The fundamental rules that govern how relationships work between organizations and stakeholders are being rewritten: computation, storage and communication capacity – the basic means necessary to produce information, knowledge and culture – are now in the hands of every connected person worldwide (30 per cent of the world’s population of seven billion people.) The result: a culture of sharing powered by ubiquitous access to information that empowers stakeholders and demands radical transparency.

Unfortunately, many business leaders remain flummoxed in the face of stakeholders empowered by new tools that once seemed unimaginable: blogs, Facebook and Twitter, to name a few. Make no mistake, as your stakeholders become more adept at using these tools, they will demand that you become more open about your activities, and that you engage them in conversations that matter. With one billion new middle-class consumers set to enter the global economy in the next decade, the more you understand the new culture of sharing, the better off you and your organization will be.“

Amongst other contributions, the Openness issue features articles from management guru and Rotman dean Roger Martin and Wikinomics author Don Tapscott, as well as interviews with Charlene Li, founder of the Altimeter Group and author of Open Leadership, and Linus Torvalds, the godfather of Linux. (Full disclosure, it also includes an article I originally wrote for design mind, “Openness or How to Design for the Loss of Control”).

Only if you’re open, you can share and be shared with. And if you share, you shall receive the greatest benefit, the greatest gift of all – someone else sharing something with you: their knowledge, their networks, their passion, their ideas. It is worth noting that the TEDGlobal conference 2012 – committed to sharing “Ideas Worth Spreading” – in Edinburgh will be held under the theme Radical Openness: “The world is becoming increasingly interconnected and open. Radically open – manifesting itself in open borders, open culture, open-source, open data, open science, open world, open minds. With the loss of privacy that it implies, openness carries its own dangers. But it breeds transparency, authenticity, creativity, and collaboration.”

My company, frog, is embracing Openness, too. We share our thinking with more than 330,000 followers on Twitter; more than 60% of our employees engage on Yammer in conversations that range from water-cooler topics to crowdsourced insights research firms would kill for; and design mind, the outlet you’re reading, is an open forum for all of our employees to publish their thoughts. We also recently launched SpeedMe, our own ‘speed-dating’ activity, to faciliate the bonding between new hires and ‘old frogs.’ In the words of our NY-based Associate Creative Director Dino Sanchez: “frog has grown quite a bit over the past year and with all our busy schedules it’s been difficult to keep up with new hires. Creativity is something that hinges on critique and in some cases brutal honesty, so knowing your colleagues and being comfortable with them is essential to a productive process.” Openness needs to be designed for.

At a the recent i7 Innovation Summit near Paris, frog ran a session at the beginning of the conference where we asked the conference attendees to break out into pairs and interview each other based on a questionnaire that we had prepared. Questions spanned the professional (e.g. “When was the last time you fired someone?” or “What was your biggest failure with the greatest learning?”) and the more personal (“What is your favorite movie?” – “What was your biggest lie”? etc.). The pairs had to fill in the answers in poster-size sheets which were subsequently mounted to a huge wall in the lobby, as a sort of “physical Facebook.”

David Rowan, editor of Wired UK, ran a similar exercise at WPP Stream in Athens, and in both instances the exercises were true ice-breakers for the attendees, forcing them to experience the implications of Openness first-hand: How open do I want to be? At what point does Openness become uncomfortable? What do I consider private in public? How much do I have to give in order to receive? Rowan argued that this kind of interactive, public data-mining would benefit any gathering as social interactions are typically more valuable when they’re facilitated by even a basic level of familiarity and trust among strangers. (On a related note, I’ve begun lately to ask job candidates to fill out the Proust questionnaire. Sure, professional qualifications matter the most, but at the end of the day you want to know who the person is you hire because chances are you’ll spend more time with them than with your own family.)

Yet pretending that Openness is just like any other business initiative that you can plan and execute would be disingenuous. It is a massive cultural change and requires a whole new mindset. The real challenges await the advocates of Openness after the first glitch, when things, very openly, go awry, and the conservative minds quickly come out of the closet to stigmatize one-time errors as systematic flaws. With every failure of Openness, the power of those who prefer Control rises exponentially. There is no doubt about it – openness, true, radical openness, hurts. It makes you uncomfortable, vulnerable, weak, and deprives you of the subtleties that came with control – but the benefits are huge. Pick the moments of Openness carefully: they will be your worst enemies and your best friends.

The Opposite House

Otherness and other pillars of a new moral economy

“So, what is the reason for your existence?” the German professor at a Chinese business school reception in Shanghai asked me, to start a conversation. I felt like ad man Don Draper in the TV series Mad Men when his false identity is unveiled. Who are you really? Caught off guard, I answered: “I’m a marketer.” The conversation moved on, others had wittier sound bites to contribute, and my unease continued. It had been weighing on me since I had put my foot on Chinese soil a few days earlier, and here in this beautiful mansion, confiscated by the government from the corrupt former mayor of Shanghai, it was a steady companion.

You may think that the homogenized cosmopolitan settings of the tier one cities Beijing and Shanghai would seem familiar and comforting to a seasoned Western business traveler like me, but this time the glitzy, uber-capitalist façade did not alleviate my profound sense of dislocation and alienation. I was a stranger and everything was strange to me. This sentiment was exacerbated when I checked into the Opposite House, a chic designer hotel in Beijing’s Sanlitun village district that literally comprises of two opposing halves, each housing generous rooms, connected through a vast space underneath, which is used as both art gallery and lobby. Designed by the Japanese architect Kengo Kuma and catering to the ‘global soul,’ it was meant to make you feel at home in an open, accessible space of kindness, but it did the opposite to me. It manifested the Otherness of my being here, in the heart of this strange city, with other strangers, who, like me, probably had no clue and so, like me, just marveled at the strangeness of it all.

It occurred to me that the Opposite House was a metaphor for some of the issues I had been pondering for the past few months. “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, and while his words were infinitely wise, I thought that a more intelligent mind than mine may very well hold the two opposites, in Beijing or anywhere, but perhaps even the most intelligent mind would not necessarily be happy in doing so. It’s hard to be happy if you are denied a happy ending, and it’s an unpleasant, arduous task to withstand the temptation to reconcile dual or multiple truths. We are hardwired to believe – and to believe in one truth.

Having just worked through the intricacies of integrating a marketing function and harmonizing two brands (and very different business cultures), I know how exhausting it can be when there is always ‘the other side of the story.’ This ‘other side’ can be the externalization of effects (responsibility), or it can mean putting yourself in someone else’s shoes (empathy). What the other side rarely appreciates is how hard you have worked to be on yours, and how much effort it has been for you to truly believe in it. Whatever it takes then to make you switch sides (or at least recognize the opposite one), it must include some kind of reimbursement for the intellectual and emotional work that went into asserting and upholding your one truth. The grass may or may not be greener on the other side of the fence – the path there, the ‘empathy dividend,’ better be worthwhile. This is true for conflict management at the individual, institutional, societal, and international level: Israel and the Arab world, Shiites and Sunni, Pakistan and India, China and the US, North and South Korea, Occupy Wall Street versus the 1%, and the list goes on – the world is conveniently framed by antagonisms, by dualities that stubbornly resist both reconciliation and the parallel truths that Fitzgerald heralded.

China resolves dualities by grasping Yin and Yang as complementary, interconnected forces, and its defiance of dichotomous moral judgments is not always easy to accept for the Western mind. Henry Kissinger’s views On China are a notable exception to the many books (e.g. Martin Jacques’ When China Rules the World and James Kynge’s China Shakes the World) that have recently examined how an ascendant and increasingly confident China could affect the rest of us. Kissinger seeks to understand China’s place in the world from the conditions of China’s complicated history and rich culture, not through the lens of Western morale. Kissinger does not portray China as hegemonial power but as an introverted nation that aims at protecting its ideal of a ‘harmonious society’ by making calculated offensive moves. He compares them to the Chinese board game Weiqi where the onus is on strategic encirclement rather than the black and white of absolute victory or defeat. Morality, essentially, deals with the question of how we treat the Other – the one who is not identical with us. Empathy, or even sympathy, is its foundation. With respect to China, this raises the question: To what extent can you leave your comfort zone, your moral center of gravity, to understand the Other before your absolute truth becomes relative, your ethical behavior situational, and your moral compass rudderless?

Moreover, a concept of morality based on Otherness presumes the Cartesian continuum of Ego and Self. But what if the line between Self and Other is fuzzy? In his writings, the British moral philosopher Derek Parfit (who became famous through his teleporter thought experiment and was recently portrayed in this stunning New Yorker article) rejects the integrity of personal identity and instead proposes a reductionist view of human life that renders the Kantian concept of the Self’s moral autonomy obsolete. If parts of your brain cells were to be transplanted into another body, he wonders, what would that do to yours and the other body’s personal identity? Who would be you? Parfit claims there would be two Selves (or none). Consequently, morality, in his view, is meta-personal and non-relational, and can only be derived from universal truths. To him, the loss of the concept of a separate Self is liberating, which puts him him in close proximity to Buddhists, who identify and recognize themselves in the Other:

“My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness... [However] When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.” [Derek Parfit]

Sam Harris’ latest book The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values covers reductionist terrain as well, albeit from a very different vantage point. Harris seeks to constitute moral relevance from the alleged objectivity of scientific findings. But do we really want to entrust science all of our moral decisions? Science is not an authority on morality; it is its very subject. The moral landscape is not as flat as Harris wants us to believe. Or to riff on William Gibson: “Morality is here, it is just not very evenly distributed.”

Steven Pinker, in his recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, argues that the spread of literacy led to a “circle of empathy,” propelled by many rights movements of 20th century that brandished immoral behavior as anti-social and by doing so accomplished to largely ban it from Western societies. If you look at the Occupy Wall Street movement – as nascent as it may appear – one wonders if we may see a similar social norm-shifting phenomenon emerge in the corporate world. Writer and Techonomy conference curator David Kirkpatrick wrote a poignant piece on how the new social power we witnessed in the Arab Spring may lead to a corporate revolution, and indeed one may wonder: Will the American Fall usher in the demise of the corporation as we know it?

Trade is an arbiter of peace, as Pinker argues. Collaboration and inclusion produce morale, an effect that is amplified by the tremendous amount of social capital generated by social media and in particular through the principle of reciprocity at work on social networking sites. Facebook, through this lens, can be viewed as the biggest morale producer of our times, not in the sense of giving to charities or supporting causes one click at a time – the so-often-derided ‘clicktivism’ – but through rich interactions and an appreciation and experience of Otherness that is made possible through the voyeurism emanating from the transparency of individual behaviors at public display.

On the other hand, hyper-connectivity may yield the opposite effect: When everything and everyone is connected all the time, will the individual moral Self be neutralized by a seamless collective that absorbs Otherness into Sameness? In this vein, Eli Pariser argues that the Social Web is a self-selecting Filter Bubble, and that rather than experiencing the Other, we’re just experiencing an increasingly narrow projection of ourselves, so that our social graph, based on our web history of purchases, clicks, friends, and likes, will ultimately become congruent with the social universe of One. Then our lives and the lives of others will be identical, and even with our identity spread beyond our Selves, it will not occur in the way Parfit envisioned it.

This debate on the Other is the main debate we ought to have in light of the crisis of our economies. A ‘moral economy’ puts the Other at the center of all its activities, and if it truly does, it will no longer need the qualifier ‘moral.’ However, our largely secularized and rationalized economy is struggling to restore its moral and spiritual acumen (see Umair Haque’s musings on The Meaning Organization and my own piece on the Chief Meaning Officer), and simply borrowing best practices from religion as proposed by Alain de Botton’s “Atheism 2.0” (see a good rebuttal here) won’t suffice when what we are really lacking is not a practical “god-free” tool kit but an idealistic and spiritual vision, a social contract that is meaningful at the personal level. Economist Robert C. Solomon described it aptly: “Markets systems are justified not because of efficiencies and profits but because humans are first and foremost social and emotional beings, and markets provide a sympathetic community for social exchange.” Consequently, Brad McLane, in a recent Huffington Post article, makes the case for the role of a “Chief Community Officer,” a leader who can reconcile individual interests with the satisfaction of trusted cooperation (research has shown that trust and trustworthiness produce oxytocin, the “hormone of love”).

Embracing Otherness has been the foundation for business since its inception – business serves the Other, as in the customer, or the stakeholders of today and tomorrow (future generations), but it has gained new relevance. Another, perhaps more important side to it is innovation. Otherness is the very source of innovation. The deviation from the normal, the conventional, and the routine is how new and different ideas are born – ideas that change the world for the better, which at the end of the day is the entrepreneur’s fundamental moral obligation. This is the legacy of Steve Jobs and other “fools” who “saw the world as it is not” – and changed it.

The new moral leadership starts with business school education. Harvard Business School professor Rakesh Khurana therefore asks for a “reprofessionalization of the manager,” so that he can overcome the self-interest-driven homo economicus, the self-inflicted Machiavellian mechanisms of competition and short-term gain, and instead focus again on his true task – to build and nurture long-term cooperative relationships that allow an economy, a plurality of interactions and transactions between trusted and trusting Others guided by shared values, to thrive.

Back to the initial question: what justifies my existence? As a marketer, it is my responsibility to understand the Others and connect them through many parallel truths – even if it’s just for a moment, a flickering desire, a shared passion and experience, or a common purpose. I am an engineer of trust, and I enjoy communicating for the very act of communicating. I can create and cultivate “sympathetic communities” that rely on “woven interactions” rather than “vector communications.” In the best case, I can help build a house of opposites on the basis of the social capital and goodwill generated by meaningful brands that serve as moral stewards, embrace paradox, and balance the dialectic forces of competition and cooperation, codified behavior and open-ended innovation. I am not here to generate impressions; I am here to reward attention with lasting value.

(c) picture by Coolhunting

design mind - The Connective Issue

 
 

frog (formerly frog design), my company, just released the latest edition of its award-winning design mind magazine in a new, large broadsheet format. The seventh print issue of design mind (and its fourteenth overall) - "The Connective Issue" - investigates the theme of connectivity. With more devices tapped into the Internet than there are people on Earth, we are now more connected than ever. In more than 18 original articles, poster-sized infographics, and interviews with technology and cultural luminaries, The Connective Issue of design mind explores all the ways we come together: from a rare behind-the-scenes look at how Facebook, the world's most popular social network executes its design strategies to successfully connect almost one billion people online, to in-depth essays on how death, government transparency, and courtship are all being re-defined in the age of connectivity.

"How we connect to each other is often defined by what we do online, but connecting is so much more than that," says my colleague Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind. "With this issue we wanted to explore how easy access to information and communication is affecting our analog lives, as well as our digital ones."

In addition to frog's designers, strategists, and technologists, special contributors to this issue include Allison Arieff, The New York Times columnist and former editor of dwell magazine, Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson, and noted journalists James Nestor, David A. Greene, Nate Berg, and Michele Travierso.

Highlights include:

Facebook's Design Strategy: A Status Update: frog consulting editor Reena Jana goes behind the scenes of Facebook, revealing the rarely seen creative culture behind the social network that is approaching one billion worldwide users - and sparks many a debate on privacy and aesthetic issues.

The Tech Evolution: frog executive creative director David Merkoski sits down with author and visionary Kevin Kelly to discuss Kelly's theory that all of technology is an organism, with needs and wants of its own.

Go Ahead, Remake My Product: Atlantic associate editor Nicholas Jackson discusses why companies should embrace, rather than prosecute, hackers who illegally tweak their goods and services.

Single Nation: Shanghai-based writer Michele Travierso, contributor to The Economist, Monocle, and Wired, looks at how dating and marriage in China today is getting more complicated as the Chinese economy skyrockets and citizens pursue their love of commerce.

The Connected Company: Dave Gray, partner in the Dachis Group and founder of visual-thinking company XPLANE, views corporations as living ecosystems. Tech and the City: journalist Nate Berg explores how New York City's first chief digital officer, Rachel Sterne - and her counterparts in other metropolitan governments - are using social and other digital media to boost transparency and accessibility.

Networks to Neighborhoods: frog content and community manager Kristina Loring analyzes how everyday people are enhancing their relationships and productivity both online and offline, thanks to today's digital tools from Quora to Skillshare.

The End: writer and TV producer David A. Greene investigates what happens with our online selves when we die physically, and how death itself is finding a new identity in the Internet age.

Death and Beauty: created by award-winning author Rebecca Solnit, this map plots 2009 murders in San Francisco and tells a story of a city's disconnected neighborhoods-those of privilege and safety, and those of poverty and violence, in an elegant graphic.

You can check out The Connective Issue online or order the print issue here.

Enjoy!

Social Media and Good Design (Telecom TV)

Airbus Envisions Air Travel in 2050

Can flying be fun again? Yes, it can. Airbus just released a video and a series of images that envision air travel in 2050 as a fully immersive, human-centered experience. The company’s designers and engineers conceptualized a plane with "bionic structure and interactive membrane” that provides spectacular panoramic views through its almost fully transparent skin.

The travel experience puts the passenger firmly back in control. Leg room issues in coach would be a thing of the past. Instead of dividing into classes, the aircraft of the future offers spaces based on user preferences. Passengers would be able to spend some of their time on board in a ‘smart tech’ section, a few hours in the ‘interaction’ section, or they could relax and enjoy the views in in the ‘vitalizing’ section upfront. Oh, and there will be automorphing seats, virtual golf, a lot of contextual info on touchscreens (of course), and many other neat interactive features.

Some of the ‘futuristic’ concepts are so intriguing that one wonders why they can’t be implemented sooner than 2050. Sure, innovation cycles in the aviation industry are notoriously long, but still: Why do planes by and large still look like in the 70’s and the in-flight experience is getting worse every year. Do we really have to wait 40 years before flying is fun again?

Designing the Designers

I recieved this following post from Lang Davison, as a response to my response on his (and John Hagel's) book "The Power of Pull." Enjoy!

-- By Lang Davison, Andrew Markell, Kate Markell

Control is every tyrant's dream. It may be the rest of ours, too.

Ernest Becker argued that all human behavior is basically an attempt to control anxiety about death. Management scientists use control theory to model and command their circumstances. Japanese engineers designed elaborate earthquake constructions to protect them from temblors-which were proved an epic failure after the Kobe quake. Authoritarian governments in places such as Egypt and Tunisia believed military control would insulate them from revolt, right up until uprisings forced them to flee.

Control is a holy grail of the human species.

But if control of circumstances has ever really been possible—a dubious proposition, to be sure—it's even less possible in the digital era. As we've argued elsewhere, the 21st century has become swifter, more turbulent, and harder to predict. The “unexpected” is becoming commonplace. Probability distributions are increasingly less normal. Power laws are ever more prevalent. We live in an age of uncertainty.

All the while, power is shifting from institutions to individuals in their roles as consumers and talented employees.

Recognizing the impossibility of control, foresighted thinkers like JP Rangaswami are calling for big institutions to ”learn to design for the loss of control." Tim Leberecht, the chief marketing officer of frog design, recently reviewed the early attempts companies and design firms are making to achieve this design, including: open ideation/crowdsourcing (openIDEO); open strategy (NPR and its ThinkIn on the future of digital media); open branding (Continuum's Transparent Design Project); and open- (source) social networks (Lockheed Martin's Eureka Streams).

From Control to… Control

While these well-intentioned attempts are effective in their own right, they fall short of grasping the fuller implications of a design for loss of control. Many of them, such as the crowdsourcing examples, exchange one more obvious form of control-centralized and hierarchical-for a distributed approach that's controlling in its own right, if more subtly so. Crowdsourcing and similar approaches are primarily interested in eliminating the hierarchical methodology for the production of ideas rather than discovering any new ground upon which to see and inquire about the world. Thus they remain prisoner to old lenses and dispositions that may or may not be congruent with the continually changing world of near-constant disruption around us.

This occurs in part because too often they specify the incoming issues to be solved while failing to ask the more provocative questions that a design for loss of control would seem to require. At the front end of InnoCentive's crowdsourcing approach, for example, companies state the problem they want to solve-and immediately foreclose other possibilities.

To be sure, specifying the incoming question scopes the endeavor so that it can be more efficiently managed. But isn't efficient management itself a re-imposition of control-albeit at a less controlling level than companies who have yet to crowdsource?

Take NPR's ThinkIn, an all day brainstorming session held in the studios of frog design to explore the future of digital media. While impressively innovative at a number of levels-the convening of an exceptional group of executives, designers, and innovators; the live-commentary and streaming through social media channels; the potential for a “brand hijack” in which NPR wouldn't even be involved in the conversation-the ThinkIn failed to ask more primary questions that might help transcend subtly powerful and pervasive assumptions about NPR's strategy. Namely, “Should NPR even exist?”

Don't misunderstand: we're fans of NPR, and think the world would be poorer without it. But shouldn't a discussion of NPR's strategy, if it is to be truly designed for loss of control, start with the most primary questions, such as: what kind of world do we live in now? How does that world operate? What does an organization like NPR contribute to the needs of the world? Asking primary questions helps us avoid taking for granted, at an ontological level, the necessity of NPR and the ways in which it's needed in our world. As we temporarily hold in abeyance our desire to help NPR, we hold ourselves open to a more foundational set of questions. This provides a quite different starting point.

Once we see what emerges in the space cleared by asking primary questions, we can then connect what's revealed to the original intention-in this case rethinking and improving NPR's strategy. We don't jettison the original intention of the exercise but approach it from a starting point that's less controlled by incoming assumptions-one that challenges common sense and conventional “wisdom” and better allows the exposure of anomalies. Wouldn't that be closer to a true design for loss of control?

Einstein's famous dictum declares that no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. If we are to design for the loss of control we must confront the possibility that we are operating from the same level of consciousness as the problems we're trying to solve, and our design must help us re-create the basis upon which we ask questions of our world, ourselves, our designs, and our institutions.

A New Interior Design

If our attempts to design for the loss of control in fact substitute new forms of control in place of the ones we have discarded, there's a familiar reason why that might be so. Humans in nearly all our endeavors struggle to embrace new ideas, approaches, practices, and dispositions while letting go of old ones.

Why? Brain science shows that our behaviors, dispositions, and beliefs are hard-wired into our nervous systems. That's why it's so hard to teach old dogs new tricks. A widely cited Johns Hopkins study of cardiac patients who were told to change their lifestyle behaviors or die found that nine out of ten of them couldn't change, even with their lives on the line. Their behaviors were hard-wired into their nervous systems-right to the grave.

Stress makes it all the worse. Humans have a difficult time learning while under stress. And our modern age is anything if not stressful. When we're under pressure, most of us fail to learn the new thing and go back to the old thing instead. Even when we try to design for loss of control we revert back to trying to find the control we've discarded.

As humans, we literally embody our need for control in our neurophysiology. To let it go requires re-mapping our neural circuitry. All of which leads to a profound implication: the design for loss of control is interior to us. We need a new interior design, as it were, if we are to arrive at a true exterior design for loss of control.

Until we remap our neuronal networks we will inevitably revert to whatever's hard-wired into the existing map, no matter how powerful our intention to create a design for loss of control might be, no matter how smart we are, and no matter how diverse a group of accomplished thinkers we bring into the room. In nearly every case we will create a design that tries to re-impose control.

Until this interior design flaw is remedied it doesn't matter how many apparently good ideas we come up with for the world outside of us. Either the design itself will be misconceived or, if it isn't, we'll be unable to embrace and adopt it. We'll go old school instead.

Re-wiring

But how do we re-wire our nervous systems? There are differing points of view about this. Oliver Sacks, one of our most learned scholars on the subject, suggests traveling to new places, learning a new language, or taking up a musical instrument. These activities will no doubt help build new neural connections, but they strike us as rather marginal practices. Can we really re-map our hard-wired neural circuitry simply by learning French? Surely a more intensive approach is required.

Building muscles requires putting our musculature under pressure-through lifting weights, for instance. For anything to evolve, it must be subject to pressure. So how do we put the nervous system under similar pressure? One answer comes from the Chinese fighting arts, which has created a practice specifically designed to put the nervous system under pressure. It's called zhan zhuang, or standing practice. Beginning practitioners of this practice stand with their arms outstretched as if holding a barrel, knees bent 6-8 inches or so, and their feet a bit past shoulder width for 15 to 20 minutes per day. (As practitioners advance the techniques get more involved but remain deceptively simple.)

As we stand, our big muscles begin to fail, and we're forced to recruit smaller, suppler muscles and connective tissue in order to stay in position. This recruitment awakens parts of the nervous system (many of our bigger nerves are in fact mostly composed of connective tissue) that were previously offline. It literally builds new neural pathways in the body while strengthening those that already exist. As standing puts our muscles under pressure it forces us to recruit new ones, and as we do, the nerves embedded in those muscles get recruited too. In turn, new neural pathways improve the brain's ability to integrate complexity.

Biologists have long been aware that external stimuli and information are integrated through the human nervous system-it's the same for all animals. The question is how we integrate those stimuli. Do we go right to stress? Do we remain a prisoner of the past and do what we've always done, even if it no longer fits the reality around us? Or do we have the nervous system capacity needed to integrate new complexity at a higher level?

To design for loss of control in the exterior world we need to have first built the nervous system capacity necessary to tolerate the anxiety and discomfort that comes with letting go of control, to be able to let go of old ways and learn new ones. And we need to be able to integrate the complexity that primary questions inevitably raise.

In the past 15 years we've trained thousands of people how to integrate greater complexity in their nervous systems, from inner-city gang members to entrepreneurs, designers, executives, bankers, IT managers, professors, and nuns. Nearly all of them learned to make new choices, even while under stress. They expanded the capacity of their nervous system to tolerate the discomfort and anxiety that come with uncertainty and loss of control.

And that's the big implication for designers: At its deepest level, design is now about making choices with regard to our bodies. Are we expanding the capacity of our nervous systems? Until we do we will be unable to grapple with the most pressing design question of our era: the design for loss of control. Instead we'll create designs that subtly re-impose control.

Leading designers rightfully see themselves as prime movers in human culture. In many respects they're the history makers. They design the technology, and the spaces. They capture beauty, functionality, and significance-much of what it means to be human. But right now, despite the very real success of the green design movement, designers are essentially missing the point. The most pressing design question today is human design: the design of humans so that we evolve more quickly. By deepening their nervous system capacity, designers may well discover and disclose to the rest of humanity an entirely new field of possibilities, one that better addresses the many species-imperiling crises we face.

For designers, the great challenge of the 21st century is not sustainability or cradle-to-cradle systems or whatever the best solar panel array might look like. It's finding and disclosing new worlds of possibility for the dangers we face, and for making this world truly a paradise on earth. Until we expand the capacity of our nervous systems, this new world will continue to escape us.

Lang Davison, Andrew Markell, and Kate Markell are principals at Exile, a leadership and innovation firm in Portland, OR. Lang is co-author of the book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion (Basic, 2010). They can be reached at www.exileleadership.com.

On Beauty (and Leadership)

“What’s difficult? Creating beauty is difficult, whether it’s the tangible beauty of a brilliant innovation or the intangible essence of exceptional leadership. Beauty exists in an elegant and novel approach to a problem. Maybe it’s captured in a simple device that works intuitively, reliably, and efficiently or in an effective solution—a 'beautiful' solution—to an organizational dysfunction. And it exists in the act of connecting with and leading people.”

From “To Win, Create What’s Scarce" by Seth Godin

India: Urgent Emergence

This was India’s year. Obama visited, as did Sarkozy, and many other statesmen of lesser political weight or star appeal. With an annual growth rate of close to 8.9% and foreign direct investments projected to exceed $100 billion, the booming Indian economy defied the global recession. For the first time ever, eight Indian companies made it onto the Fortune 500 global list. And even PR crises like the ill-organized Commonwealth Games and political corporate scandals that were an easy target for India’s cynical media did not eclipse the nation's staggering rise – in fact, these events just seemed to magnify the spotlight. Without a doubt, the sub-continent became ready for primetime in 2010, and to many outside observers a new confidence appeared to take hold of India’s economic and intellectual elite.

This year also marked my first visit to India. I had the privilege of assuming leadership for a team in Gurgaon (New Delhi), Bangalore, and Chennai, and to immerse myself in a country I had never been to before. I vividly remember the first five minutes after my arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi in September, the dusty air, the thick fog, the vanilla scented perfume tree in the car, and the calm driver whom I, for lack of any alternative, decided to wholeheartedly trust as he was racing me to my hotel amidst the polyphony of honks. Other countries are in your face or slowly creep into your soul with their mores, oddities, and sensations. India is around you, all the time. It is simple as the tourist cliché of itself (especially when you live in the airport-lounge-and-luxury-hotel bubble of the global business traveler) and yet complex as a vertical staggering of infinite parallel worlds which make sense each by themselves but fail to strike a consonant chord – like in the movie Inception.

When I attended the India Economic Summit in Delhi in November a few weeks after my first trip, jointly hosted (for the 26th time) by the World Economic Forum and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), President Obama had just passed through India, leaving an indelible mark on the Indian collective psyche with his now famous line that “India is not emerging, it has emerged.” The mood was bullish, if not exuberant, and many considered the visit a breakthrough moment for India. The economic reality had not changed but the awareness of the sheer scale of the opportunity ahead and the self-assurance that it might indeed be feasible to accomplish it, had moved to a whole new level, seemingly overnight. No wonder the optimism was palpable at the Summit.

The official theme was “Implementing India” but the actual theme that emerged during the three conference days was “Inclusive Growth” – how can India sustain its tremendous growth and at the same time narrow the social divide? While India’s growth numbers are impressive, many of the speakers acknowledged that its so-called “demographic dividend” (a term coined by Harvard demograph David Bloom) is a double-edged sword. By 2020 half of India’s population will be below 25, and it will account for 25% of the global workforce. But this demographic trend is unevenly distributed. India’s northern states, with their high fertility rates, are the main contributors to population growth (by 2025, the median age will be 26) whereas the south faces rapid aging (a median age of 34 by 2025). This means that “India’s demographic dividend is actually a double hump, one of which is already nearly exhausted,” Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekan writes in his seminal book Imagining India.

This “double hump” makes capitalizing on the remaining, “unexpensed” demographic dividend rather urgent. Experts foresee a demographic disaster unless India’s young workforce is properly skilled and employable by global standards. Unfortunately this is far from being the case today: For starters, 300 million people live in extreme poverty, that is, they live on less than one dollar per day, and 90% work in the informal economy. 70% of India’s 509 million-strong working population has not received a primary education, and only 11% of those aged 17-23 receive a higher education. India has the lowest education indicators among the G20 economies and the world’s highest number of illiterate people. One of the main challenges for India will be to create jobs for the 270 million people expected to enter the working-age population over the next 20 years. Will these people become the world’s workforce, as some predict, or the world’s worry?

Sustainable growth, many argue, will come from frugal (or reverse) social innovation, through public-private partnerships that scale at the base of the pyramid. It is well known that IBM has more employees in India than in any other country, and many of India’s big IT outsourcing companies (e.g. Wipro, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services etc.) have long been competing with multinationals. But no longer is India just the development center of excellence of the world or an emerging consumer market of massive scale; it is increasingly home to bottom-up innovations in areas such as energy, healthcare, and automotive, spurred by the urgency of structural change. Crisis has always proven to be a hotbed of innovation, and the need to improve the livelihood of a society is a powerful driver for entrepreneurship.

India is already the front of some radical product and service innovations such as the $3,000 car or the two cents per minute nationwide cell phone service. Moreover, with the deep penetration of low-cost telephony, the country’s emerging middle class could be a testing ground for the burgeoning mobile health (mHealth) technology market, in particular telemedicine and rapid diagnostic services. Globally, mHealth revenues are projected to grow by 25% annually, from $1.5 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion by 2014. India is seeing many of its pioneering efforts, for example start-ups such as mDhil and eHealthpoints. The Indian healthcare industry, in general, is one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy, growing at 23% per annum.

A basic enabler of “inclusive growth” is to provide the rural population with access to information- and communication technologies and financial services. Although India is the second largest telecom market in the world and tele-density has increased to 56.6% in 2010, 44% of rural Indian households are still unwired, and of India’s 6,000,000 rural villages less than ten percent have a local bank branch. Microfinance, long heralded as an able solution to this shortcoming, has recently suffered a serious setback. The rapidly growing private microcredit industry faced imminent collapse when almost all borrowers in Andhra Pradesh, one of India’s largest states, stopped repaying their loans. Critics accused microfinance institutions of making “hyperprofits off the poor” by extending loans to poor villagers at exorbitant interest rates and without enough regard for their ability to repay. It will take some time for the industry to restore trust (and some more regulatory oversight from the state will help, too). But again, this crisis may spur much needed innovation in the Mobile Money space.

India’s villages are increasingly becoming a breeding ground for innovation, as its rural poor develop inventions out of necessity. Mansukhbhai Jagani, Mansukhbhai Patel, Mansukhbhai Prajapati, and Madanlal Kumawat, and three others are on a recent Forbes list of rural Indian entrepreneurs (compiled by IIM-Ahmedabad professor Anil K. Gupta) “whose inventions are changing lives” of the people across the country. Jagani developed a motorcycle-based tractor for India's poor farmers, which is both cost effective – costing roughly $318 – and fuel efficient. A farmer, Patel invented a cotton stripping machine that significantly cut the cost of cotton farming and revolutionized India’s cotton industry. Prajapati, a potter, invented a clay non-stick pan that costs Rs 100 and a clay refrigerator that runs without electricity for those who cannot afford a fridge or their electricity and maintenance costs. Madanlal Kumawat, a grassroots innovator with no more than a fourth-grade education, developed a fuel-efficient, multi-crop thresher that yields cleaner grains, which can be bagged directly and eliminates the cost of cleaning.

Design and design-driven innovation are quickly entering the business vocabulary here, too, and when I met with editors of business publications in Delhi a few weeks ago, their interest in design was as keen as their conviction that India will soon become a powerful innovation engine with global impact, propelled by a distinct national design style and a throng of young, ambitious, and fearless entrepreneurs. It will require a mix of national policy and education providing the economic framework, global design and innovation firms bringing quality standards and best practices to India, and – perhaps most importantly – Indian companies embracing design as a key differentiator and value-driver, with some quick and visible market successes.

Whether you’re strolling through Old Delhi or driving along the campuses of Bangalore’s IT firms, you can’t help but marvel at the tremendous pace with which the country and its people are happening. The whole country is on the move, which offers plenty of opportunities for upward social mobility but also disrupts traditional lifestyles and cultures. New high-rise developments for the burgeoning middle class (91 million urban households are projected to be part of it by 2030, up from 22 million today) stand in stark contrast to the poor villages right next to them, which are in the progress of upending their local identities and cultural roots. According to the United Nations Development program, it is expected that 41% of India’s population will live in cities by 2020, compared to less than 30% in 2010. That is 590 million people, nearly twice the population of the US today. A recent McKinsey report (“India’s Urban Awakening: Building Inclusive Cities, Sustaining Economic Growth”) estimates that 70% of net new employment will be generated in cities by 2030 and that 85% of total tax revenue will come from the urban economy.

Needless to say, that this migration will further contribute to stresses on the already insufficient infrastructure. McKinsey expects 68 Indian cities to have a population of more than one million by 2030 (up from 42 today vs. 35 in Europe). It warns that the current urban policy framework will lead to urban decay and gridlock. Today, India is investing eight percent of its GDP in infrastructure, which is a high number by international standards. And as much as $300 billion are forecast to be devoted to urban infrastructure over the next 20 years, a twofold increase in per capita spending of $17 today. But McKinsey believes that $1.2 trillion capital investments are necessary to meet the projected demand in Indian cities. The firm proposes fundamental city governance reforms to ensure these funds are not only raised but put to work efficiently. Unlike China, India cannot issue sharp policy shifts to appease a young population that may not be satisfied with the living standards of their parents. If urban policies fail, social upheaval, fuelled by underlying religious and ethnic divides, will likely be the result. Or as Nandan Nilekan puts it: “This is our biggest, but also our last chance.”

India is aware of its “moment” and understands that the window of opportunity for inclusive growth is limited. The government is seeking to balance the hustle, the frenzy, and the urgency with calm and confidence. It is the only possible attitude when you have to govern what seems to be genuinely ungovernable. I thought of a line from a song by Thom Yorke: “You have all the time in the world. Don’t squander it.”

[picture: painting by Vangobot. Vangobot is "a robot who paints with the soul of the human artists who taught him how to see."]