Turning Non-Profits On Their Heads

Talking today with entrepreneur yogi and friend Doug Craver about reinventing non-profits. He argues that social and therapeutic services clients might value their experience more if they had to pay even a nominal sum. I proposed that it could be barter of time, talent or any objects of value. As it turns out this is exactly what his addiction therapist mother did in her practice. Lawns were cut, art was made, food was cooked.

In this model, people could pay it back or forward to their service providers, other clients and people in their communities. What’s most interesting is how this model empowers people with otherwise unengaged expressions of gratitude, generosity and empathy.

And as Doug points out, it gives people an experience of their own value and connection to their world. The significance of this is huge since many dysfunctions have roots in not feeling valued and valuable to others. Instead of being problems to be fixed, people become gifts to be engaged.

A major game changer, turning non-profits on their heads.

The Butler

Saw the new film, The Butler, today. It is a beautiful, palpable narrative of the civil rights movement from the rich context and paradoxical perspectives of the White House butler whose career spanned several Presidents. It should be required for every high school and college student in America, if for no other reason than to sensitize them to the possibilities and moral urgencies of social justice.

Socialbots

Socialbots are tapping into an ever-expanding universe of social media. Last year, the number of Twitter accounts topped 500 million. Some researchers estimate that only 35 percent of the average Twitter user’s followers are real people. In fact, more than half of Internet traffic already comes from nonhuman sources like bots or other types of algorithms. Within two years, about 10 percent of the activity occurring on social online networks will be masquerading bots, according to technology researchers. Researchers say this new breed of bots is being designed not just with greater sophistication but also with grander goals: to sway elections, to influence the stock market, to attack governments, even to flirt with people and one another.

via I Flirt and Tweet. Follow Me at #Socialbot. - NYTimes.com

Content Curators

Thankfully we have writers and bloggers who curate content for us. They promise in genres and deliver efficiencies of discovery. This blog is a grateful artisan in this august guild, curating insights, research and stories on how we think about the future of our work. Everyone wins. Curating is a messy business and the value of the messiness is in the serendipity that makes like infinitely richer for the path.

Designing For Learning

This is one of my more recent Twitter posts: >How do we redesign communities & institutions around the neuroscience that capacity for learning increases with age?

An interesting question. What would these look like in a culture where people are expected to be learning abled instead of learning disabled? The question’s significance looms in the unprecedented growth of older citizens across the globe.

There is enough actionable evidence that quality of life in the third trimester of life reflects capacity for learning. And learning must become the spark to new design principles. Think technologies, built environments, retirement careers, health care and well-being indicators in communities and regions.

Forget About The Old Career Planning Models

As technologies disrupt economies, jobs will disappear. But learning new skills will keep people in business.

By 2030, more than 2 billion jobs will disappear, roughly 50% of all the jobs on the planet. This is not intended as a doom and gloom scenario, but rather as a wakeup call for the new skillsets we’ll need in the future.

According to McKinsey’s Global Institute, 12 disruptive technologies are at the heart of this disruption: mobile Internet, automation of knowledge and work, Internet of things, cloud technology, advanced robotics, autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles, next-generation genomics, energy storage, 3-D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery, and renewable energy.

via Disappearing Future 4. Jobs and Workplace Processes | World Future Society

The only way to be authentically and sustainably prepared for this change which is already on is way is to help people increase their capacity for engagement - for new learning, connecting and adapting. These are the core skills that every educational institution needs to test for.

You Should Write A Book Right?

It happens more often than expected. When people learn I’m working on book 14 and have this over 10 year old daily blog, they confess to a dream of writing or finishing a book. I am always as encouraging as possible. Self-publishing is too easy especially in digital contexts. Most excuses for not are irrelevant. Writing is transformative. It doesn’t matter if it takes the form of journaling, blogging, social media posts, articles, web discussion contributions or books. It can be stage and screen scores, poetry or cartoons.

Writing adds a unique dimension of attentiveness to our world and ourselves that few other endeavors afford.

Whether you do it for yourself or your world, write. Your life will be better for it.

The Future Of Engagement

This week I did a new short piece on the art and power of facilitation: The Future Of Engagement. Engaged people are creative, connected and confident. They bring their best to the table.

The job of any leader, teacher and administrator is to create cultures of engagement. We can no longer afford old models and costs that actively create disengagement. We now have the methodologies to given them new skill sets.

Creating Cultures Of Innovation

Sustained Innovation is the state attained by organizations that have built a “culture of innovation,” capable of innovating at every point of the compass–a full 360 degrees of innovation–in all aspects of the business–management, operations, customers, suppliers, and among every team.

Several research initiatives by our BTM Institute, BTM Corporation’s research think tank, have found similar insights in the behavior of mature organizations. A couple of years ago, BTM released the Sustained Innovation Index, which showed that sustained innovation predicted greater capital efficiency, better margins, more revenue growth, and more contained volatility–such as evidenced by the performance of various size companies.

via Can Innovation Actually Be Measured? | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

As it turns out, weaving new thinking and interacting connections creates a sustainable culture of innovation. The thinking connections are between creativity and analysis. The interactive connections are cross-disciplines and functions.

The Post-Tipping Restaurant

For over eight years, I was the owner and operator of San Diego’s farm-to-table restaurant The Linkery, until we closed it this summer to move to San Francisco. At first, we ran the Linkery like every other restaurant in America, letting tips provide compensation and motivation for our team. In our second year, however, we tired of the tip system, and we eliminated tipping from our restaurant. We instead applied a straight 18% service charge to all dining-in checks, and refused to accept any further payment. We became the first and, for years, the only table-service restaurant in America where you couldn’t pay more money than the amount we charged you. + You can guess what happened. Our service improved, our revenue went up, and both our business and our employees made more money. Here’s why:

via After I banned tipping at my restaurant, the service got better and we made more money – Quartz

This is San Diego restauranteur Jay Porter reporting on the paradox that working without tips has all manner of benefits to servers, customers and managers.

Smart Bikes

So how do you improve a bicycle? You give it a brain. You make it smart. You make it safer. You give it eyes and a voice. That’s what the Helios Bars do. For just $199, you can give your bike a brain transplant.

Designed by Kenny Gibbs, Antonio Belmonto, and Seena Zandipour, the Helios Bars can be dropped on any bicycle to turn it into a smart bike, with built-in LED headlights, automobile-style turn signals built into the handles, Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, and GPS tracking. But it’s how Helios Bars use this technology that counts.

via 1 | Smart Handlebars Give Any Bicycle A Bluetooth Brain Transplant | Co.Design: business + innovation + design

Huge Education Failure

The number of New York students passing state reading and math exams dropped drastically this year, education officials reported on Wednesday, unsettling parents, principals and teachers and posing new challenges to a national effort to toughen academic standards. In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the tests in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department.

via Scores on Math and English Tests Plummet After State Adopts New Standards - NYTimes.com

Seriously. The New York school system like so many have a 70% failure rate. In an era where teachers across the board complain they they have to compromise the true value of education for teaching to the tests. In an era of unprecedented lip service to being globally competitive in education.

Time for a major rethink.

Laburgers

A hamburger made from cow muscle grown in a laboratory was fried, served and eaten in London on Monday in an odd demonstration of one view of the future of food.

via A Lab-Grown Burger Gets a Taste Test - NYTimes.com

Early tasters denied enthusiastic reviews even though at production scale the meat would sell at $30 per pound and there are the promises of ecological and animal rights justice. It’s one of those innovations that will die or dominate in future meat markets.

Designing for creativity

According to a 16-year study by Idea Champions, only 3 percent of the 10,000 people they interviewed said that they come up with their best ideas at work. The other 97 percent said their best ideas come to them while they are in the shower, on vacation, taking walks, enjoying a glass of wine, or just doing nothing. While a highly structured, tightly scheduled workplace may foster productivity, a more relaxed, unstructured environment unlocks creativity.

Employers can extend this “creative space” by allowing flexibility in where and when people work, and by providing the collaboration and mobility tools to allow them to work anywhere, any time.

via The Workplace of the Future: Connected, Collaborative, Creative

This is a call for redesigning our physical, virtual, social and psychological work spaces for creativity. Notice that in each case where new ideas flowed more easily, people were more in the present than they normally are at work where presence is less prevalent. Spaces that bring about presence bring about creativity. Simple.

The Future Of Leadership

In my work with organizations as engagement artisan I’m starting to talk more about research supported and unsupported models of leadership. It’s only been the last couple of decades where we have had solid research on what makes for well-performing organizations in the information era compared to the industrial era. I’m not talking about the tautology that just about anything a high profile star performing company is by definition a “best practice” simply because they do it. The data supporting best practice applications to other contexts is weak at best.

The research is coming from the likes of Gallup, Deloitte, and universities focused on new sciences like the neurosciences and positive psychology.

What’s striking is that the actual research today paints a very different model of successful leadership for this era than the research unsupported models from previous eras. Since the original industrial era models of the 1890’s, old models have become more irrelevant and actually a major obstacle to what might work today.

The research supports a shift from parent-child leadership to engaging leadership. It understands that culture trumps structure and strategy and so creating engaging and resilient cultures connected to dynamic and connected markets is core to leadership value and success.

The future of leadership will continue to thrive on the constant evolution of research rather than default devotion to old models that no longer have relevance to a world of unprecedented change, complexity and connectivity.

The Walking Distance Indicator

Everything is in walking distance if you have the time. This was a social media post today that raises interesting questions about well-being indices in communities. On the short list:

• The number of frequented places and spaces within walking distance to anyone
• The number of people in walking distance to these venues
• The average walking distance to these venues
• The definition of walking distance most common by members of the community

Every community can map these indicators and use the data in several planning contexts.

Thriving Immigrants

What if every legal immigrant seeking citizenship was partnered with a volunteer hospitality person in the community where they live? The hospitality guide would be available for a specific period of time to help with connections to the community for resources, navigation and engagement. These guides would be network weavers. Imagine the possibilities of how immigrants can find better ways faster to become meaningful contributors to their communities.

More Education, More Disengagement

College-educated workers in America are less likely to be engaged at work than their less-educated peers. And that’s a sign of a serious problem in the country’s higher education system, as well as a troublesome point for the future of the economy, according to a new Gallup poll.

The majority of American workers with a college degree said they do not have “the opportunity to do what [they] do best every day” at work, a survey of more than 150,000 adults found. Overall, the majority of American workers said they are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” at work. Only 30 percent said they feel engaged.

“We have either too few jobs for college grads in general, or too many degrees misaligned with the jobs available in the workplace,” said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education, in a blog post.

Researchers based the engagement findings on workers' assessments of different workplace elements related to performance outcomes, such as productivity, customer service, quality, retention, safety and profit.

For those with a high school diploma or less, about 33 percent said they felt engaged. But as workers climbed up the educational ladder, they became increasingly more likely to report feeling the opposite.

Just more than 50 percent of workers who completed technical school or had some college education said they do not feel engaged at work, meaning they are satisfied with their workplace but are not emotionally connected to it. Another 20 percent said they were “actively disengaged,” meaning they are “emotionally disconnected” from their work and workplace and jeopardize their team’s performance, the survey says.

via Is College Worth It? Grads Feel More Disengaged at Work - US News and World Report

The New Urban MicroLiving

Though tiny has long been typical in Manhattan, mini-apartments are popping up in more U.S. cities where land is finite, downtowns have regained cachet and rents have risen. In a digital age when library-sized book collections can be kept on a hand-held device, more Americans see downsizing as not only feasible but also economical and eco-friendly.

How small? Many anti-McMansions — also known as “aPodments,” “micro-lofts,” “metro suites” or “sleeping rooms” — are about 300 square feet, which is slightly larger than a single-car garage and one-eighth the size of the average new U.S. single-family home (also shrinking in recent years).

City officials often welcome this mini-sizing, which is common in Tokyo and many European capitals, as a smart-growth, lower-priced solution to a housing phenom: people living alone. Nationwide, the share of households occupied by a single person reached 27% in 2010, up from 8% in 1940 and 18% in 1970. The number exceeds 40% in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Denver, Pittsburgh, Seattle, St. Louis and Washington, according to Census data.

via Mini-apartments are the next big thing in U.S. cities

The Shape Of Possibility Space

A great idea comes into the world by drips and drabs, false starts, and rough sketches. Via Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity: Creativity started with the notebooks’ sketches and jottings, and only later resulted in a pure, powerful idea. The one characteristic that all of these creatives shared— whether they were painters, actors, or scientists— was how often they put their early thoughts and inklings out into the world, in sketches, dashed-off phrases and observations, bits of dialogue, and quick prototypes. Instead of arriving in one giant leap, great creations emerged by zigs and zags as their creators engaged over and over again with these externalized images.

via Strokes of genius: Here’s how the most creative people get their ideas