Business Innovation Factory – 7 #BIF7 – Live blogging Sept 20

Could we build a Noosphere? Piere Teilhard de Chardin.

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We are the only species in the world that creates the future out of our own imagination. Blanchard invited us to be a part of a new story.

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Entrepreneurship is not a word that should be reserved for business owners – a shocking devaluation of the word.

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This conference is dedicated to pattern recognition. The range of space Wurman talks of creating for conversation is wonderful – it affords room for truth, to capture and share a moment of truth about ourselves with each other. Wurman recommended that we seek out Geoffrey West, the former head of the Santa Fe Institute, to indicate the caliber of the people who are participating.

He also highlighted his next conference will be on prophecy. 25 people will be invited to share a prophecy which they believe and may be able to substantiate. Wurman continues to push and shake the status quo. Witty, profane and intriguing all at once.

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Angus Davis has been an entrepreneur for years (since he was 18) He currently working on Swipely.

Rebecca Onie, co-founded and his the Chief Executive Officer of Health Leads (formerly Project HEALTH) with Dr. Barry Zuckerman, Chair of Pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. Her work is focused on transforming healthcare opportunities by deploying a trained and mobilized corps of 660 college volunteers serving nearly 6,000 low-income patients and their families in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, New York, Providence, and Washington, D.C.

The profound health concerns of these low income people are rooted in the absences of basic rights of life, such as access to food and shelter, and many healthcare providers were practicing a, “Don’t ask. Don’t tell,” policy in response. They simply didn’t know what to do. Health Leads model of intervention is based on a similar model espoused by a doctor in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960’s, Jack Geiger.

Rebecca noted that so many factors need to be aligned. She boiled them down to three areas of focus for Health Leads:

1. Amateurs talk about strategy. Professionals talk about logistics. – General Omar M. Bradley
2. Health Leads connects social resources with mostly healthy patients, which falls completely outside the current healthcare model. Does this mean that they fall outside the conversation?
3. Don’t become the problem we are trying to transform.

Every victory between here and there is so much more significant when the stakes are so high – the transformation of healthcare. Health Leads success is to transform healthcare delivery, how do we innovate and make sure that actually happens.

A social research scientist and Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo!, Duncan Watts shared his research. Starting out as a Physicist, he switched to Engineering and Math before becoming a Sociologist and finally went to work at Yahoo!

Watts highlighted a book written by a social scientist and reviewed by physicist in which the physicist disparaged the domain of social science essentially saying that physicists could solve all these problems “in a trice.” Obviously, the complexity of the systems at play were beyond the reviewer. As Watts explained, social systems are incredibly complex but don’t appear to be complex. He highlighted how crazy it was for former Senator Bill Frist to say, “It’s not rocket science,” when discussing fixing healthcare.

The challenge is to reflect on what we think is obvious – the concept of obviousness is a deep problem because it distracts us from seeing the data right in front of us. Common sense is more of an impediment to innovation and creativity than you would think. Our problem is when we miss-apply common sense to problems that are not concrete, everyday situations. Complex systems are not fit places for common sense to be applied.

Stories are powerful, but that power helps us generalize about the past to make predictions about the future which often leads us into trouble. This works for repeatable situations. But for complex system, history never repeats itself, it is always rife with unintended consequences.

To address this:

• Augment common sense with experimentation
• Policy, strategy and marketing could benefit from a more systematic approach
• Social sciences data constraints which meant problems were intractable can be addressed through data mining available on multiple social media platforms like – Twitter, Mechanical Turk at Amazon.

Watts is the author of Everything is Obvious* (*Once you know the answer)

Complex systems are not fit places for common sense to be applied. – Duncan Watts

Sebastian Ruth, the violinist shared music that inspires him and the ways in which music can reach into people to challenge them to reveal meaningful and personal truths. He asked:

• Can music make us feel something truly new?
• Can that feeling grow in such a way that it changes us?

Author, Co-chairman, Deloitte Center for The Edge, John Hagel took the lead after the last break of Day 1. He worked with John Seely Brown and is often featured at the HBR Online blog site. He decided to explore some of the distinctions between stories.

He illustrated his views based on three personal stories. He setup the internet practice at McKinsey in the early 1990’s and when he asked other partners if he could speak to their clients about the internet they said, politely, “No.” So instead of pushing his way into clients he wrote a book instead called, Net Gain, which had an interesting effect in that it was widely shared and the McKinsey phones started to ring and clients pulled partners into a dialog about the internet. From a dead start the internet practice became a $500M practice in 5 years.

Hagel’s second story related his childhood obsession with dragging his family out to large construction sites to sit on the huge equipment and imagine what he might build. And then twenty years ago he had the same kind of “builder’s fascination” with the potential for what might be accomplished with the internet. He became increasingly excited by what people could do with the platforms that the internet provided. With the internet Hagel found he could overcome his childhood shyness by developing relationships and community online that evolved into real life community.

The third story Hagel shared was about the United States. He spoke of the risks that people faced and experienced in order to come to the USA to create a new life. He noted how exciting it was that the USA attracts this whole group of people who are predisposed to creating, innovating, exploring, and learning the new. All of which drives the USA today.

Each story Hagel shared represents the difference between a story and a narrative. Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Narratives have no end, they are continuously unfolding. The McKinsey story is a true story. The second story was a personal narrative about what excites Hagel to contribute. The third story is a national narrative and they are powerful for inviting participation.

In uncertain times we have more degrees of freedom to change our future and that is exactly when we become most risk averse.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats have gone to a threat-based narrative. Both of which ask us to focus on risk and threat aversion. Hagel proposes a more opportunity-focused narrative (back to Coopperrider’s work – see above.)

Dale Stephens created Uncollege and earned won Theil Fellowships, offering $100,000 to entrepreneurs to drop out of college and pursue their dreams. Essentially he is applying the spirit and practice of homeschooling to higher education. Self-directed, low-cost, participatory, collaborative, and steeped in design thinking.

We’re mortgaging away our freedom to innovate to college debt.

Stehpens noted, “I’m passionate about education but I dropped out of college because the opportunity cost was too high.”

He hacked his education, worked on campaigns, went to France, built businesses all of which he fashioned into his own education experience. He never doubted he would go to college, but found that the idealism he sought was lacking or miss-applied to partying. He found a like minded peer who, also homeschooled, helped him realize that their inability to fit within the college framework was not their problem but lay in a profoundly broken system.

What happens in class stays in class – every day in higher education is like a trip to Vegas.

Next up was Fred Mandell, a life change artist. He began with a story of August Renoir who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis. Who painted every day into late 80’s assisted by his family. He died after spending the day painting. As he finished he said to his son, “I think I’m beginning to understand something about it.” Mandell asked, do we know what “it” is? This quest shapes our life to our last day and it shaped and formed by a set of poor skills with which we struggle to understand our “it.”

Matthew Moniz is one of the youngest alpinists. He has been climbing since he can remember. He shared the story of his best friend with pulmonary hyper-tension (PH), Iain Hess, and how he found out learned more about his friend’s disease. He said that climbing gives him a way to experience that kind of feeling.

He shared his affinity for learning about the Himalayas through the porters who loved their lives in the mountains. During this time he met a Korean reporter who gave Matt the idea that he could use his age and his passion as a way to inspire others to work in the field of PH. Matt noted that he chooses to do high-altitude mountaineering while his friend Iain experiences the equivalent feelings 24×7; which gives him a better understanding of what his friend is going through.

Matt gave us a travelogue of his mountain adventures. He seems to have lived more in his short life than many in world. His spirit and youthful passion for his sport are an inspirational.

But wait there’s more! Matt then decided to do 14 14’s (14,000 foot mountains) in 14 days as a way of honoring Iain’s struggle. And in doing this people with PH found a way that they could explain their disease to others. In doing so they raised $25,000 for the Iain Hess Breath Easy Fund.

And yet another decision was to do the 50 highest peaks in each of the 50 states in 50 days. With so many different environments the terrain was wildly divergent. As a result he was names one of the adventurers of the year by National Geographic in 2010. Matt Moniz is an inspiration…and a machine.

See more of Matt’s journeys here.

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What a day! A huge round of applause goes out to the storytellers and the great folks at the Business Innovation Factory for their phenomenal effort. Looking forward to Day 2 tomorrow. Below is the Shepard Fairy OBEY mural in downtown Providence, RI. A great piece of art in a great town.