Tag Archives: Edgeryders

Storytelling, Divination, Forgiveness: my most important tools and where I picked them up

I wrote this post as an Edgeryders mission on learning. The idea is to do a reality check on education: which are our most important skills? And where do we learn them? My job in Egderyders is to manage it, not play missions, but this one was so intriguing I could not resist. If you want to see how others have addressed the same question, go here.

I am a knowledge worker. I spend most of my day interacting (mostly online) with other humans to produce and manipulate information into knowledge. So, to a first approximation, the skills I use everyday are reading, writing, summarizing, researching. I use English a lot, French occasionally. I read and write budgets and contracts. I occasionally deploy math (game theory, or graph theory, or run-of-the-mill calculus or linear algebra) to decode a theoretical model. But that does not tell you very much: it is just a cloud of skills. I believe they can be grouped into just three high-level skills, which are my indispensable tools of the trade.

The first one is storytelling. Cognitive science tells us humans think in terms of stories, and solve the uncertainties implied by inhabiting a rapidly changing world by framing their situation as a story (picked from a rather small repertoire of archetypes), and themselves as a character in that story. Suppose you have to decide whether to choose between a safe, perhaps slightly boring professional path and a more high-risk, but socially relevant one. Computing probabilities is impossible, you just don’t know the full range of implications of your choice. But you do know you are like Neo in Matrix, and Morpheus is right there offering you to choose between a blue and a red pill, so the choice becomes obvious. You are The One, that’s your path, and that’s the end of it.

The ability to tell stories unlocks the power to steer your career and your life. For example, it unlocks fundraising: unless you are doing standardized stuff, people will fund you because they recognize a story, and their role in that story is to support you. In an older project of mine, Kublai, I persuaded the Ministry of Economic Development in Italy to do a very advanced project because they bought into the narrative of the “helpful State”, reaching out to work with citizens rather than against them. I try to narrativize every important thing that I do: all important professional projects, but also stuff like going to live abroad.

The second ability I will call divination. By this I mean a stance which combines formal analysis with a humble approach, that downplays the role of individual people and organizations in the unfolding of things. The personality of the CEO is important in a company, but even more important are market conditions, corporate culture, long-term trends like globalization. Many people we consider powerful feel they are not powerful at all, and that they really are in the hands of the organizations they are supposed to lead, or just of the next turn of events. So, divination for me means looking for causes and for forces to align with at the bottom of society, in the countless interactions we engage in every day. This ability unlocks analysis: once you have it, you are not going to delude yourself that, if just the Prime Minister changed her mind, everything would be different. It also disqualifies conspiracy theories and the need for people to blame (the politicians, the banks, the media).

The third ability is forgiveness. By this I mean the deep acceptance that there is no point in pushing people to conform to a certain standard: people are what they are, and it is more constructive to try to find out what they are good at and organize activities around them rather than bend them around activities (which is mostly impossible anyway). I once worked with a young man who was crazy. I don’t mean he was odd: I mean he was constantly negotiating illness. At one point he was forcibly hospitalized and put on medication with a pretty heavy psychiatric diagnosis. And yet, this person is a brilliant coworker in the kind of projects I tend to be involved in. He works superhard. He is the best connector ever. He always has time for people, and he tends to be online and available about 16 hours a day. Mind you, he is not brilliant despite being ill: he is brilliant because he is ill. He is obsessive, and if you channel his obsession he becomes a happy, well functioning overachiever. Of course, he is not good at everything, but then neither am I, or anyone. This ability unlocks management: once you let go of standards you can get down to the real work, which is to design environments for people (as they are, not as they should be in some ideal world) to get results. It is also useful in personal life: if you have no standards you can enjoy the company of people very different from you.

I learned storytelling mostly from reading fiction and comics. An economist called David Lane explained me why that is important in a university seminar, long after I had finished my degrees. High school contributed somewhat to me picking up this skill, especially as I studied history. In retrospect, if I had had a good art teacher I could have learned a thing or two about storytelling by Renaissance painting, but no luck there.
I learned divination from economics. For some reason a phrase by Albert Hirschman (taken from his introduction to his main book) stuck in my mind: he participated in the rolling out of the Marshall plan, and that experience “developed in him a healthy respect of the market’s ability to outsmart you”. This humble statement by somebody involved in the most successful economic planning exercise of all times struck me at a very deep level. Later, complexity science gave me a framework for that.
I learned forgiveness from an older coworker in my first job, who later became my best friend.

I don’t see why these things could not be taught in schools. In my time (and in my place, the Italian province) the approach to knowledge was old fashioned: you were taught notions rather than skills. But that must have changed. Maybe they do teach them now?

Introducing the citizen expert

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I have been studying Internet-enabled collaboration between citizens and institutions for some years now. I have had the chance to explain its basics to many people from different backgrounds. There is a point that has almost everyone take issues, at least in the beginning when I say online collaboration works so well because participants are not selected by anyone. This is counterintuitive. How can an unfiltered environment perform better than one where participants are carefully chosen? And yet, that’s the way it works, thanks to the combination of large numbers (unfiltered spaces are more crowded, so they have more brainpower to throw at issues) and self-selection (people flock to spaces where the discussion is about things they are knowledgeable and passionate about). I am well aware I will have to repeat my case over and over, but as far as I am concerned the case is closed. Online collaboration between citizens and institutions works. Get used to it.

This brings a new figure to political processes: the citizen expert. All successful experiences I know have produced authoritative figures, citizens who are passionate about the discussion and bring to it contribution of astonishingly high quality. These people are typically complete unknowns: they seem to materialize from nowhere, but they become very important to the processes and take observers by surprise for the quality and integrity of the role they play. Davide Davs’s air pollution graphs in the Area C group attract a lot of attention, and they have more or less established in that space the principle that it is a good idea to back your claims with data.

All this works well online. My team and I have decided to run an experiment within Edgeryders, the project I manage at the Council of Europe: bring our citizen experts to an offline event, Our idea is this:

take a group of citizens, NOT selected but rather self-selected.
socialize them through an online community, oriented towards constructive discussion.
organize a conference for them to interact with policy makers and academics.
cast them as experts: official invitation, travel and accomodation costs covered, commitment to produce some deliverables. The message is loud and clear: you are not on the receiving end of public policy. You are a protagonist, a policy maker.
ask them to produce proposals for reform – in our case, of European youth policies.

I am convinced that the results will be extraordinary. All the conditions are there: policy makers can explain the latitude and the limits of their mandate; academics contribute with statistical data and analysis. Citizen experts can bring to the table the “living data” of their experiences, which generalize to ideas and proposals more naturally than you may think. If there are enough of them (and there will be) they can also contribute by seeking consensus on certain points, like a large focus group. Thanks to the months spent interacting in the Edgeryders platform, our way to discuss has been washed clean of normative thinking (“the world should not be like this!”), non-demonstrated statements (“it is clear that the age of capitalism is coming to an end”) and trolling (“you are all slaves to big business anyway”). Participants have recognized each other as partners in this particular effort – the Edgeryders researchers themselves use the platform to interact with the community they are a part of – and that makes us free to spend our time at the conference actually getting things done. We did a small-scale prototype in March – a workshop, open to a few community members – and it went really well: the discussion was productive, effortless and fun. It shows even in the photos!

We believe in this solution so much to invest in a quarter of Edgeryders’s budget in the conference – i.e. in covering travel and accommodation costs for citizen experts. We should be able to cover 100 to 120 people, mostly young, converging onto Strasbourg from all over Europe on 14 and 15 June. The community is already organizing an unconference for 16-17, so as to have more time to hang out and plot out our common future. If you care about the transition of young people to an independent active life, think about putting yourself forward to be a citizen expert: on the Edgeryders blog you can find out how to get an invitation, the program and Vinay Gupta’s call to arms. Why, you might even find yourself being part of a small innovation: a new online/offline interaction format for citizens-institution collaboration!

Beyond the three Fs: basic income as innovation policy

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Three months into Edgeryders I am in awe at the generosity and the creativity with which so many young people take their journey through life. Some leave the career path that seems easiest, even at considerable personal sacrifices, insearch of something deeper; most desire to “do something useful”. They think big, and are not afraid to confront global problems like food security, the redesign of social ties, access to housing. All this energy is channeled into innovation, often marked by a refreshing radicality: urban farming, co-housing, social currencies, open public sector data, urban games to reappropriate public spaces, home schooling, peer-to-peer learning, you name it.

Innovators are a minority, as they always have been. But this minority differs from those of the past in two ways: it is numerically large, probably up in the millions, rather than the tens of thousands of a century ago; and it is self-selected, and internally very diverse. Though many innovators are members of the élites, with immaculate academic credentials, others are free spirits, university dropouts intolerant of departmental hierarchies, self-taught. The best indicator of the distance between young innovators and the élites is simple: so many of them are poor, barely able to make a living but not of amassing any wealth (hat tip: Vinay Gupta). There is a joke going around: if you are looking for the capital to launch a social innovation initiative, don’t waste your time asking banks, venture capitalists or governments agencies. The only people who support this stuff are “the three Fs”: family, friends and fools (hat tip: Alberto Masetti-Zannini).

The scale and diversity of the minority of innovators opens up the way to a completely new perspective: an adaptive innovation policy. Current public policies for innovation operate by selecting a priori, with the help of famous academics, a limited number of strategic research strands, normally framed in big science terms (like cold fusion or nanotech) and throwing money at them. A different approach has just become possible: do a great many small investments in a logic of diversification, letting a great many innovators choose which issues to tackle and how; monitor for lucky breaks or interesting solutions; and then scale the investiment on those that have already yielded something tangible. The idea is to reward innovative activities not for their direction, but for their results. This approach has the advantages of depending far less on the a priori wisdom of policy makers; and of discovering a posteriori which issues the innovators community finds more worthy of their efforts, and which lines of work are more likely to yield concrete results. It is a low-cost approach to evaluation, which can be very costly if you do it properly.

I was thinking about these things on Sunday, as I participated in a conference on basic income. Basic income is income decoupled from work or wealth: everybody has a right to it, just for existing. I am no expert, but I understood it is framed as a measure targeted at establishing the dignity of the individuals, making them more safe and harder to intimidate. All of this makes a lot of sense; still, I can’t help thinking that basic income could also be seen as an instrument of innovation policy: free from immediate need, (mostly young) citizens would be enabled to take some extra risks and try out more new ideas. Most would fail, as is always the case, but failures would be effectively too cheap to even meter, while successes could have large impacts, easily able to pay off the whole operation. I suspect the social cost of basic income would be near zero: people are surviving anyway, so the whole thing amounts to a reallocation of purchasing power from the wealthy and employed to the poor and unemployed.

All of this translates into an innovation policy mix that invests less on activities (lab research) and organization (corporate R&D units or universities) and more on people. The basic idea is give them the means to attack problems they care about solving, then get out of their way and, later, evaluate their results. It’s common sense, really, unless you think people – young people, in this case – are generally cynical, lazy or worse.