Tom Munnecke’s Eclectica

Imagine Robin Williams meeting Gandhi. People say that the shortest distance between two people is laughter. I’m playing with this idea and the Uplift Improv with
Izzy Gesell for my Positive Media Workshop in New York next month…

I am also playing with a “what if” on notion of Social Capital as the Ultimate Homeland Security:

What if we had self-organizing Uplift Improv meetings? What if we triggered local meetups around the country, pulsed by national events or programs? Could we learn anything from the structure of this workshop to make it something folks could do with strangers at their local Starbucks? Could we use the Internet to gather feedback on what’s working in local communities? Can humor and improv help us get past cynicism and alienation? What if we conditioned a public network with a kind of community resiliency, folks used to coming together in face to face meetings as the result of media events. If terrorists realized that their acts triggered greater community involvement and compassion, would not this be the ultimate form of homeland security?

Seems like a fun windmill to tilt. If anyone with a passion for positive media, informed by a background in the media, wants an invite to attend this laughable event, drop me a line.

Way back when, I started graduate school in economics. The first minute of the first course, the professor said, “Assuming linear demand.” My hand shot up, “What about non-linear demand?” He answered rather icily that the model we were talking about was linear. That was my “do something else” moment in my academic career. I went into computer software instead, in retrospect, a much better choice. I recently met a graduate student on a mailing list, and was inspired to write this story:

---

Imagine a Harry Potter-like scene in a stone-walled academy, not unlike Hogwarts. A young apprentice is defending her ideas, surrounded by dark, dismal dementors hovering about, ready to suck the life out of any idea which contradicts the true model of economics – that people are lazy, greedy, rational consumers who live in a world of scarcity; that commons are tragedies to be defended against, and exceptions to this line of thinking are “externalities.”

“Wait,” says our apprentice. “There might be another way!” The dementors become agitated, their dark vortices swirling towards her. “Look at the values Pierre Omidyar used to start eBay:

We believe people are basically good

We believe everyone has something to contribute.

We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people.

We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual.

We encourage you to treat others the way that you want to be treated

“He’s rich now, so he must be right,” she said, “eBay has 100 million people bouncing around in it, and the more people join and trust each other, the better it becomes. In fact, this trust might even spill over into the rest of society. Their community is bigger than France – and rapidly growing.”

The dementors become enraged at this kind of talk. How can we have an economy based on people being good and treating others the way you want to be treated. Fearing a riot of do-gooders in the academy, they swirl in on the apprentice, about to suck the life out her ideas. But wait! The door bursts open, and David Bornstein sweeps into the room and throws a copy of “How to Change the World, Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas” to the apprentice. She thrusts the book at the dementors like a magic wand, and they disappear in a flash of blinding white light.

The apprentice scans the book quickly:

“…one of the most important things that can be done to improve the state of the world is to build a framework of social and economic supports to multiply the number and effectiveness of the world’s social entrepreneurs

…more people today have the freedom, time, wealth, health, exposure, social mobility, and confidence to address social problems in bold new ways

…people share the desires of people everywhere: to apply their talents in ways that bring security, recognition, and meaning – and to have some fun. What has changed in recent years is that the citizen sector now offers a broad avenue to satisfy those needs: to align what you care about, what you are good at, and what you enjoy doing – every day – and have real impact.”

With the dementors banished from the room, the apprentice is free to reflect. “What if this citizen sector idea becomes the norm? What if the ‘real’ economy becomes citizen-based, and the ‘commercial’ sector becomes an ‘externality?” to it?” She reads some more, “It’s got to strike you that a quarter century ago outside the US there were very few NGOs, and now there are millions of them all over the world.”

Tom pops into the room. “What you are dreaming about is an uplift economy. Folks could make a living doing good things. That pre-Columbian artifact we call our accounting system (literally, it dates back to before Columbus) it the problem. It tries to take apples and oranges, convert them to grapefruits, and add them up to get the bottom line. Adding more bottom lines – converting them to bananas, too – isn’t going to solve the problem. Nor is blending them in a smoothie going to help. The basic issue is, you can’t understand complex, evolving systems by adding up the snapshots we call transactions. It’s as if we are trying to understand cats by evaluating them as toasters.”

“But how do you herd cats?” the apprentice asks.

“Well, it’s easier if you figure out where the cat food is,” says Tom, parroting something he recently heard on a mailing list. “You align the incentives, and things just flow. You create a path of least resistance to a better world.”

• 

I am holding a workshop in New York City Aug 16-17 on Positive Media. It will be a small, cozy event with folks who have a certain passion for making things better, who are also connected with the media. I am playing with the “Weapons of Mass Affection” theme, doing a positive flip similar to the way that “Random Acts of Kindness” movement flipped “Random acts of violence.”

Who knows if this will take off, but it seems like a pretty good windmill to tilt.

The success of these things depends hugely on the caliber of the folks attending; so far, so good. If anyone else is interested in attending, let me know.

I am also using the workshop as an experiment to learn about Improv and Yes-And discourse. Izzy Gesell, who was recommended to me by several independent sources, will facilitate the workshop as an “improv.” He has had me nearly laughing out of my chair as we discussed the meeting. As someone who is a little humor-challenged, this is also something really exciting to me. Humor is one way to get positive messages out without hitting people over the head with virtue.

I just reviewed the list of this year’s Reuters Digital Vision Program at Stanford. As one from way back in ’03, it is exciting to see this new set of faces, and wonder what will emerge from this group, now and in the future.

This is a great program, one which I think could serve as a model for universities all over the world. Bring in folks mid-career or at a “do something” point in life; and create a fellowship of people working together, drawing on community and academic resources.

It is also good to provide a safe space for people to explore their ideas. For example, I wrote my fellowship application in the context of my earliest ideas about “frictionless philanthropy,” thinking that the problem was that we weren’t shipping money to the poor people fast enough. Over the term of the fellowship, I changed my point of view radically.

Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse, attended my first presentation, and we talked well into the night. This was quite an eye-opener for me, listening to the lessons learned from one of the great visionaries of our time.

The fellowship came at a time when I was making a radical career shift, and having the time and connections to do this was immensely valuable. Had I blindly executed my initial plans, I may have had a learning experience of a different source.

Thanks, Reuters and Stanford, it was a great year.

P.S. My thinking evolved from “frictionless philanthropy” to “uplift academy” – focusing on the desired end result of the interaction, rather than the monetized transactions.

Adina Levin has some interesting ideas about Mass Listening in contrast to mass broadcasting:

“Mass listening tools can provide a richer perspective than polling, which captures answers to loaded, pre-defined questions.”

This is interesting, but something goes “tilt” between the “mass” and the “listening” part. Isn’t listening fundamentally about smaller, more intimate relationships?

It strikes me that the really interesting thing would be to look at listening networks – folks specifically offering to listen to others. Jerry Michalski tells a story of a group he knew which specifically opened the floor to a participant, allowing them 5 minutes to say whatever they wanted, while the group attentively listened. He says that they majority of the speakers ended up in tears, because no one had ever listened to them before. Seems like powerful stuff.

Listening is also part of the “Yes-And” Improv dialog form I am now researching. Improv actors have to listen to their partners… what a concept. They also learn that accepting a partners’ offer is different than agreeing with it. And that “yes,but” creates a zero sum conversation, while ‘yes, and’ opens up a much more richer dialog. Izzy Gesell has been filling me in on this, and I’m sure I’ll be talking more about this soon.

National Heatlh Information Infrastructure 2004 Conference was just held last week in Washington, DC:

“In an Executive Order issued on April 27, 2004, President George W. Bush called for widespread deployment of health information technology within 10 years. As part of this announcement, he formed the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONCHIT). An important aspect of the President’s initiative is the development of a nationwide interoperable health information technology infrastructure that can facilitate improvements in safety, quality, efficiency, and care coordination.”

This is my old briar patch, having spent 30 developing two of the largest hospital information systems in the world, for the Veterans Administration and the Department of Defense hospitals world wide.

I really am trying to be optimistic about this, and all of the surface rhetoric is great, about improving care, “tipping points” and all that.

However, I am greatly concerned that the deep structure of our health care system – the structures which have lead it to become an industry whose preventable errors are now one of the leading causes of death in America - are are still very much at work. Making the forces of this deep structure more “efficient” with “improved” information technology could easily end up making things get worse faster.

Our doctors have 1.2 million terms for how to be sick, yet virtually none to describe health, a list that is growing 5% per year.

We have a disease industry, not a health care sector. It is based on supply and demand of disease. Regardless of whatever nice, soft images your local hospital might put on billboards, their business is for you to be sick enough to come there.

A hospital that invests in a patient safety system which reduces readmissions would see its revenues drop, forcing them to be “altruistic” to save lives. The grocery industry has been using bar code scanners for decades for cookies and magazines; medicine is just now moving towards them – for drugs which have life-threatening consequences. Why has this taken so long? (And why are they moving to paper-based labels instead of RFID?)

Every provider and organization in the US probably has a vision statement which includes something stating that they are “patient centered.” The subtext of this should read, “You come first, after me.” The organization is at the center of their world, the patients are at the periphery. The standardization process, HIPPA, and a whole zeitgeist are structured around stovepiped, organization-centric models to which the patient is peripheral.

In our litagous age, the value of a wide spread electronic record would be far greater to malpractice lawyers doing Monday morning quarterbacking than doctors improving our health. This will lead to an upsurge in defensive medicine, as docs are drawn to ever-greater scrutiny. I suspect that these investments are little more than an income transfer scheme from health care to the trial lawyers. The chances of improving our health in all of this.

I wish I could imagine otherwise, but it sure seems to me that we are trying to get out of hole by digging it deeper.

For some of my musings on how to get out of this hole, see HealthSpace , Health and the Devil’s Staircase, A Transformational View of Health, Towards a Language of Health, and Creating an Epidemic of Health.

P.S. Very little of this rant applies to the VA health care system, largely due to the fact that their “deep structure” is aligned – they really do benefit from having healthier vets.

I was at a retreat last week at which the leader spoke of a “Yes, And” dialog model. A group begins a discussion with each speaker beginning with “Yes, But” for the first half, then switched to “Yes, And” for the second half. The effect on the group, apparently, was remarkable… “Yes, and” triggers an affirmation of the previous speaker’s remarks, and the “and” extends them in a positive way.

Apparently, this comes out of Improvisational theater. In Robert Lowe’s Improvisation, Inc.: Harnessing Spontaneity to Engage People and Groups.

J.J. Hendricks picked up on this for public administration, of all places: FUN AND GAMES IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: EVOKING CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION IN THE MPA CURRICULUM:

?Yes, And? is a ?rule? to which improv actors adhere. It improves upon the concept of a brainstorm. It harnesses the power of collaboration and builds trust. In improv, any idea is better than no idea. This game has to do with accepting the ?offer? of a partner and willingly, building upon that offer no matter how offbeat. It also enhances, as does most improv, the ability to think quickly on one?s feet. Further, it presents an opportunity to risk and to demonstrate that risk even to the point of silliness, overcomes fear of failure. Quite simply, a suggestion or offer is made by an actor, and is built upon by the next actor in line. Actor one: ?Let?s have a party in Hawaii;? Actor two: ?Yes, and we could wear grass skirts.? However, most of us are far more familiar with the activity called Blocking. A block effectively throws cold water on an offer. It kills the spirit of an offer and leaves our collaborator out in the cold soaking wet. It dampens collaboration. Actor one: ?Let?s have a party in Hawaii;? Actor two; ?Are you kidding, I hate beaches and coconut.? Lowe describes the essence of the determination needed to flow with ?Yes, and,? as epitomized in the following sequence, ?You are an incredible fool.? ?Yes, and let?s talk about the word ?incredible.? ?

Continue Reading »

This from the July 16, 2004 Wall St. Journal:

“So much of today’s contentious immigration debate focuses on those arriving from Latin America to work in agriculture or take low-level service jobs that Americans tend to spurn. But a new study by The Multiplier Effect, Stuart Anderson of the National Foundation for American Policy reminds us that the contributions of skilled foreign-born professionals and their offspring are no less important to the U.S. Without them the country would be hard pressed to maintain its world-wide advantage in such fields as math and science.”

? More than half of the engineers with Ph.D.s working in the U.S., and 45% of the nation’s computer science doctorates, are foreign-born.

? Children of immigrants comprise 65% of the 2004 U.S. Math Olympiad’s top scorers (13 of 20) and 46% of the U.S. Physics Team (11 of 24).

? At this year’s Intel Science Talent Search, which recognizes the nation’s top math and science students, 60% of the finalists and seven of the top 10 award winners were immigrants or their children. Last year, three of the top four awardees were foreign-born.

Thanks to Harold Koenig for pointing this out.

I just got an email from longtime friend Mark Watson, pointing out Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World blog. Dave pointed out a very interesting Blog being started by Seth Godin called Change This.

This is are very interesting links, typical of what the Internet can do for us in creating new relationships. The amazing thing about this interchange is that I just had dinner with Seth last Friday, and took a long walk with Dave last Saturday, and we never got around to these topics. It was only afterwards that I discovered these additional links.

I would have thought that the face to face connection was a richer communication process, but it seems that there might be something to this new-fangled internet medium.

Its commonly said that one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel. If this is the case, then as we increase the size of the barrel, several things happen:

The probability of the bad apple appearing goes up

The potential damage to the barrel increases.

The attractiveness to the bad apples eventually assures that the bad apple will appear to spoil the barrel.Look at the explosion of spammers as our email “barrel” has grown to the millions of users.

What if we flipped this around, so that good apples could improve the whole barrel?Here is a story which illustrates this.

---

Natalia Wieseltier, an Israeli, once dialed a wrong number and ended up talking to a Palestinian man named Jihad. This chance event triggered a friendship which transcended the social and political tensions of the area. She realized the power of this form of communication, and decided to do something to spread it to others. She contacted the Forum for Bereaved Families which supported the creation of a dial-in service called Hello Peace. www.hellopeace.net Over 25,000 people dialed in the first few months. Her Aha! and subsequent actions had widespread positive effects. As reported in the New York Daily News, Dec 8, 2002, ?Palestinian-Israeli hotline melts hate?,

?Sammy Waed never thought he would become friends with an Israeli soldier, especially one who had occupied his hometown of Ramallah. But a month ago, the 20-year-old called a new hotline and ended up speaking to Arik, a 23-year-old from Tel Aviv??Before, I thought Israelis didn’t care at all when innocent Palestinians suffer and are killed,” he said. “But now I know they do care. And now I have hope that there can be peace.”

---

If we look at this story from the perspective of what works, rather than the problems it is solving, we begin to discern a subtler layer of activity. This story touches on many landmines of highly excitable subjects, such as the Middle East crisis, the US elections, Iraq, and terrorism, to name a few. The subtler aspects of the story easily get lost in the media frenzy.

For me, the story diffuses much of the emotional tensions in the situation by relating to individuals and their personal stories. It opens the doors to trustworthy organizations who are Doing Something which appears to be self-evidently positive. It also introduces the question, ?would this work in other hot spots around the world? What about Northern Ireland?. Rather than wondering if we can fix the Protestant/Catholic problem, would creating a safe space for them to talk to each other be a Good Thing? To do so, we need to figure out a way of talking about the positive, life-affirming things independent of specific religious or political perspectives.

To stimulate the Good Apple Effect, I think, we need to create safe spaces within which it is OK to talk about the subtler good things, even in light of terrible events which may be swirling around. We need to be able to talk about what works – uplift – without being swamped by what’s wrong – the specific problems which are so evident.

I’m holding a Good Apples in the Big Apple workshop in New York City Aug 17 with media folk to talk about ways of drawing attention to the Good Apples of the world in the media. This is invitation only, but please email me if you may be interested.