20 January 2022. Innovation | Future
Social innovation when there are minimal resources. Charlie Stross, 2022, and ‘who ordered that’.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Social innovation when resources are minimal
There’s an article about doing social innovation when resources seem non-existent on the Transforming Policy blog that seems as if it might have wider resonance.
The strengths approach is a collaborative practice based on working with people rather than doing things for them. It reaches for the potential in even the most challenging situations, resulting in the kind of social innovation that is driven by those with the most skin in the game.
There are some underlying principles:
there are resources in every situation, no matter how tough they seem
people, communities and organisations can change
everyone’s contribution is valued and needed
difficulties can also be a source of resilience and creativity
we don’t know the potential of others so shouldn’t put limits on their aspirations.
The writer, Avril Bellinger, notes that:
These are a basis for hope and action in any situation and can produce unimagined results
—
(Medical student Olivia Collins volunteering on START. Photo: Plymouth University)
Obviously the need for such approaches has intensified after a decade of austerity. It reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous line about “Do what you can, with what you've got, where you are.”
Bellinger has a case study about a project in Plymouth that brought together students and refugees into a “micro-activist organisation”, START.
(START) harnesses the motivation and idealism of students who enable refugees to access their rights as part of their studies... START has enabled more than 2000 refugee households to take control of their lives: to exercise choice; access their entitlements and to have their aspirations taken seriously. It has brought more than £1.3 million to the city from grants and foundations and been part of a culture change for Plymouth from a ‘city of hate’.
A couple of notes from me, because the approach seems to draw on several different elements.
The first is the Indian model of jugaad innovation, designed to enable innovation in settings that are resource constrained and chaotic.
The second is a version of “nothing about us without us”, where inclusion in the process becomes a source of strength.
The third is the notion that sits behind appreciative enquiry, that energy comes from focussing on successes rather than problems.
The fourth is that to start system change, you need to find a pool of energy of some kind—money, time, knowledge etc—to shift the existing system. As Anthony Hodgson taught me, systems don’t change without some kind of new input. In this case, the project used the time of students who needed to do some practical work to fulfil their degree conditions.
And the last point is that systems seek out sources of abundance, in this case the neglected energies of the refugees involved in the system. (This point is made by Bill Sharpe in much of his work). While it’s true that innovation can usefully start from constraints, a future system needs to be able to access a source of abundance if it is to function.
#2: 2022 and ‘who ordered that’
Every so often the science fiction writer Charlie Stross stops writing about fiction on his blog and just lets rip, as he did a couple of weeks ago, on the subject of 2022 and the future. It’s a long piece, so I’m just going to pull out a few highlights and then suggest you read the whole thing.
(Charlie Stross. Photo by Byronv2 via flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0)
First, the political upheavals of 2016 changed his calculus on the proportion of the future that you can anticipate with a degree of confidence. This is the old version:
About 15 years ago, when I was working on Halting State, I came up with a rule of thumb for predicting the near-future setting in SF. Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there's about a 5-10% element that comes from the "who ordered that" dimension: nobody in 2010 expected Elon Musk's SpaceX to be flying astronauts to the space station in a reusable, privately developed spaceship by 2020.
This is the new one:
Global climate change, accelerating technological developments in various fields (notably AI/deep learning and batteries), and political instability (in large part a side-effect of social media) made everything much more unpredictable. We're now up to about 20% of 10-year-hence developments being utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets. COVID19 is clearly part of the 20% "who ordered that" collection.
On COVID19, he has a take that I haven’t seen before: that we are fantastically lucky that we didn’t have a global pandemic until 2020. The reason for this is that the tools and the science networks that allowed us both to identify the virus as quickly as we did, and then develop vaccines quickly as well, are fairly recent things.
Laurie Garrett won a Pulitzer prize for her book, The Coming Plague in 1994, which predicted more or less exactly what we're living through today. What she didn't predict in 1994 (writing in 1991-93) is almost more interesting than what she did— nobody in the 20th century imagined that within just two decades we'd be able to sequence the genome of a new pathogen within days, much less hours, or design a new vaccine within two weeks and have it in human clinical trials a month later. If the SARS family of coronaviruses had emerged just a decade earlier it's quite likely we'd be on the brink of civilizational, if not species-level, extinction by now.
And just in case that sounds like writer’s hype: “SARS1 has 20% mortality among patients, MERS (aka SARS2) is up around 35-40% fatal, SARS-NCoV19, aka SARS3, is down around the 1-4% fatality level.” There’s a whole lot more on the pandemic, and all of it is interesting.
But the third thing I want to pick out here are his speculative thoughts on 2031:
it seems likely that the end of internal combustion engines will be in sight. Some countries are already scheduling a ban on IC engines to come in after 2030—electric cars are now a maturing technology with clear advantages in every respect except recharge time. Once those IC cars are no longer manufactured, we can expect a very rapid ramp-down of extraction and distribution industries for petrol and diesel fuels, leading to a complete phase-out possibly as early as 2040. As about half of global shipping is engaged in the transport of petrochemicals or coal at this point, this is going to have impacts far beyond the obvious.
(Saul Griffith made the same point—but coming from a different direction—in the piece I shared on the energy transition earlier this week).
Stross isn’t optimistic about climate change (“we’re boned”) or politics (“we’re boned there too).
He finishes with some recent headlines that would probably seemed in, well, in the realms of fiction a decade ago. There are the gangsters making counterfeit helicopters in Moldova. The man who has his bored ape NFTs stolen by hackers (“Everybody loves unregulated derivatives markets until their imaginary wallet full of monkey jpegs gets stolen.”) Or the Christian fundamentalists and “the quantum Bible”—an explanation, apparently, of why the thing they remember from the James I bible isn’t there when they try to find it again.
The whole thing is here.
Notes from readers: I wrote a few days ago on the FT’s Raha Foorahar speculating on the effect that the migration of remote jobs might have on American culture and politics. My American former colleague J. Walker Smith was sceptical about her conclusions:
(1) Bill Bishop's work (on the Big Sort) from a while back showed that people were making lifestyle choices in picking places to live, and these lifestyle choices were closely correlated with politics. So there's no reason to think that people leaving the cities won't do the same thing, which is to say, relocate to like-minded clusters outside of the city. Which won't increase interaction and won't change politics. Although it might carry division from cities-vs-rural areas to within rural areas.
(2) While relocation is occurring, it's not occurring at enough scale to matter. Cities and rural areas both have enormous majorities in their politics. Getting a few more liberal city people into rural areas that vote conservative in overwhelming numbers is not likely to change outcomes.
In short, the future is more like Austin, Texas: Blue enclaves in Red-voting areas.
j2t#247
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