Archive | March, 2023

Innovation for a Sustainable Planet, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Mar

Editor’s Note: This post is a lightly edited version of the second presentation I made to students at Georgia Tech University earlier this month. Delays in posting were attributable to several things, one of which is the relentless policy challenges in technology, in peace and security, and related matters which I am having to work harder and harder just to keep up. Still the opportunity to address younger audiences — to share and reflect and even to apologize — is one which I value highly and never take for granted.

I want to begin this afternoon by referencing an MIT study from 1972 which was updated in 2021.  There is much to fear regarding the conclusions of this study and its three proposed scenarios, primarily its contention that the global community is headed for a systemic collapse by 2040 if we cannot change our current course and, more specifically, the way in which we as a species choose to innovate in all its dimensions.  

Of the three scenarios outlined for 2040, two are relatively hopeful but the third is the one deemed most likely — the problematic “business as usual” scenario where the innovation we need to forestall disaster is still buried under an avalanche of AI and other tech “advances”  designed primarily to be monetized, benefitting some at the likely expense of the many.

So, let’s talk a bit about innovation today, something about which all of you are learning to be proficient in this place.  From my own limited vantage point, there are three basic types of innovation we need to consider:   Making new things, adapting existing things and adjusting our own priorities as a species.  I will return to the first of these towards the end. 

Regarding innovation as adaptation, the notion of dual use is built into our contemporary understandings, most prominently perhaps in areas of defense and weapons technology where much of that research and development has eventual implications for the consumer sector as well.  But such implications are only rarely adapted to context and are only occasionally designed to help real people in the real world live in a manner that protects their future as well as enriches their present.  The impetus driving these adaptations is too often what someone wants to sell rather than on some irresistible clamor from prospective consumers.  How many of you, for instance, stay awake at night pining for self-driving cars or cruise ships with an amusement park on the top deck?

We increasingly recognize the importance of reuse to sustainable lifestyles, resisting the temptation to merely toss things into landfills when we have finished with them.  As such the kind of innovation we need now is also about finding new uses for the things already in our midst, uses which can be both life-affirming and take us well beyond what the enclosed instructions of our consumption seem to encourage.

It is here that I want to introduce innovation in the form of a “hack,” that is, striving to adapt alternative uses for the things around us beyond conventional application and, in some instances, beyond wastefulness as well.   In preparing for this talk, I spent some time on YouTube researching some of the many hacks that the clever among us have come up with.  Some of the hundreds of examples include:

  • Making a broom out of plastic bottles
  • Opening beer bottles with an opener made of folded paper (my personal favorite)
  • Using a collapsed balloon to make a  cell phone case
  • Putting lemons in a microwave to get more of the juice when you squeeze
  • Making bibs for babies out of plastic bags (babies don’t mind)

These are simple transactions that don’t move the` needle much. But the mentality associated with  this type of innovation is important, cultivating the habit of seeing what we can do with things aside from merely turning them into rubbish.  I spent the last evening in the Georgia mountains with Dr. Thomas and decided to bring back all my recycling to deposit in the bins here at Tech. Granted, my action doesn’t do much for the world in and of itself but it does reinforce habits of both hands and heart, including mindfulness directed towards trying to give our world a few more hopeful options, about lending my support to something that all of you should soon be expert in – extending the life of the items that our mostly privileged lives routinely use.

Moving on to priorities adjustment, as the MIT study suggests, our behavior in the main is unfortunately not innovating sufficiently to avoid widespread systemic collapse by 2040. We are still too indifferent to the suffering of others, we start too many armed conflicts on too little evidence, we prioritize our own “needs” in competition with others, and we continue to destroy the carrying capacity of the environment beyond its ability to repair.  We talk about lofty things in places like the UN but with too-little confidence that the quality of our innovation will match the volume of our rhetoric.  At the same time, we permit ourselves to be deceived by credentials and claims of expertise – not only credentials that don’t often generate impact that is sustainable, but even those credentials-holders who manage to stifle as much hopeful innovation as they enable.

This begs the question which some of you in this room are actually in this room to try and answer.  How do we innovate for sustainability?  And how do we measure and communicate that impact?  The answer to these questions is not just about what we are “doing” or the impressiveness of our LinkedIn page, but what difference it makes, what difference we wish to make, and to whom we wish to make it.   

We live in a time when branding is a de facto substitute for impact. In this moment of our history, if you can convince others that you are on the right track, and they are willing to invest resources based on that judgment, it doesn’t really matter at one level whether you are on the right track or not. If you get more social media attention than the one sitting next to you, you can claim impact no matter how ephemeral such affirmation might be.  Indeed, the confusion over position or wealth and its alleged ability to move the pile on our collective survival  is compounded by our seemingly endless confusion over exactly who the influencers are and what precisely is being influenced.

It seems clearly dangerous to our prospects for 2040 to promote any further such linkages between position, money, brand and impact.  Branding and status often drive investment, but neither necessarily implies impact that is both sustainable and scalable. And sometimes when funders or investors insist on “outcomes,” they are insisting on something that is abstract or inappropriate to the needs of constituents, let alone to the current needs of our threatened world.

For me, there are two rules related to impact no matter how delusional and out-of-touch they might seem on the surface:  The first rule is that what we support or enable will always be greater than what we do ourselves.  And the second is that in this enormously complex, competitive and at times corrupt world, a healthy regard for the skills of others, skills to be honored but also cultivated, is key to ensuring that “business as usual” might soon not be so “usual.”. What we can do ourselves is but a tiny fraction of what needs to be done in this threatened world. What we enable in others based on a healthy regard for their own innovation potential can set off a chain reaction of sustainable progress that we desperately need.

This sounds more like a passion for ministry than a passion for acquisition, but it is really about ensuring your own personal values are integrated into what and how you innovate, ensuring as best you are able that what you help to create or recreate makes a healthier planet and not only – or even primarily — a healthier stock price.

So let’s return now to the issue of innovation as “making new things.” 

For those of us who work in tech-informed policy, whether through the UN or NGOs (we try to do both) there are issues that come up routinely for us, including in our work to examine impacts and opportunities of what has become a veritable “wild west” of technological development:

  • How does the direction of technological development get younger and more inclusive by gender, race and culture? 
  • How do we inspire innovation without increasing the economic and social gaps which already divide people and stoke conflict? Where are the pressure points related to innovation and access?
  • How can we regulate technology without killing innovation?  Is it even possible?  Given regulatory absence there is an ethical void which leads to the potential for corruption in the sector, corruption not so much related to bribery and other classic manifestations of misuse but about innovation which is intended only for the benefit of the few, innovation which mostly serves to magnify rather than shrink gaps of access and inclusion.
  • How do we ensure attention to “what can go wrong” in a time when  technology appears to be running significantly ahead of efforts to impose some ethical standards to guide its introductions?  In this context, I am reminded of a radio host who asked an AI expert about prospects for government control in the technology sector.  The expert paused, then laughed, and then said “I think that horse has already left the barn.”  If true, those of us in policy are left to work on a few identifiable excesses but have lost touch with the pace of what is now coming into view off and online, and coming with little regard for how the genies might be returned to their bottles, if needed, once they have been released.   

UN working groups do address access and inclusion questions, as well as what it calls “malicious uses” of the internet as it seeks to create voluntary norms for technological assessments. But it is still not clear whose job it is to assess the impacts of technology before it is unleashed on an unsuspecting public.  What are the effects of so much mediated reality and how do we call attention to the dangers without stifling the entrepreneurial creativity that our world also needs? We must all contribute more towards addressing these concerns and dilemmas while there is still time and room to do so.

Back to the MIT prediction now. Where are you likely to be if and when these computer-generated prophecies come to pass?

I will surely be dead in 2040.  You all will be middle-aged, also mid-career if you decide to go that route.  Many of you will have children of your own, children who may have some legitimate fears but perhaps also many questions about why we didn’t change course when it was clear that course correction was an urgent necessity. At the moment, we still have options going forward, but if the MIT folks are correct, business as usual is going to mean a good deal of unpleasantness for you and everyone you care about. And when that time comes, if that time comes, your response options will likely be severely constrained regardless of your academic degrees or financial resources.

Innovation has a key role to play in forestalling disaster, but innovation which exists beyond technology itself and certainly beyond its relentless and rapid monetization.  We need more innovation which is context specific, adaptable to scale, committed to new uses, and which does not obscure the importance of growth in the personal realm, of becoming more like the people we have the potential to be, people who can move beyond business as usual and embrace the tasks and responsibilities of business as unusual. There is a lot of talent in this room.   There is a lot of anxiety in this room as well. Time for all of us to get busy and stay busy to ensure that “business as usual” doesn’t back us into corners we will eventually find it almost possible to escape.   

The hard lesson in all of this is to be careful what you innovate.  Be mindful of what you innovate.  We in the educational and policy realms are barely staying connected to all that has come and all that is to come as technology now seems to be driving humanity, perhaps eventually off a cliff, if we cannot together find ways to retain control of the steering wheel. 

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Servant Leadership, Systems Thinking and Sustainable Development: A Hopeful Trio, Dr. Robert Zuber

12 Mar

Editor’s Note: This past week, at the end of 2 months away from New York, I was honored once again to address students at the Scheller School of Business at Georgia Tech University. Courses offered by our close colleague, Dr. Robert Thomas, cover issues related to Servant Leadership and Social Entrepreneurship and have attracted a large following of students who seem to be seeking ways to utilize skills and privilege to expand their options in the service of a planet and its people under considerable strain. This is a lightly edited version of my Servant Leadership presentation. The Social Entrepreneurship piece will soon follow.

Today, this weary road-warrior will attempt to blend three objectives together.   First the beneficial implications of Servant Leadership which I value highly.

Second the objective of this week’s lessons which is the benefit of Systems Thinking which I also value highly, though not without caveats.

And the third to discern implications of all of this for fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals which, at least some of you may recognize, is a focal point for this week of activities here at Georgia Tech. It is certainly a focal point for much of our work in New York as well.

First up, why servant leadership?  I and a small group of colleagues are in the process of writing a book grounded in large measure on inights from the Inner Economy model lovingly developed by Dr. Lisa Berkley in California, a model which among other benefits assists us to explore the feelings, values, connections and inspirations that many of us in this world overlook but which make us who we are, help define who we might become and influence how we can better use our skills and talents to make a better future for the world.  At the UN, our phase for this is “better policy requires better people” people who see more deeply, hold the mirror up to themselves as well as others, and invest in the wellbeing of colleagues across the political spectrum as well as their own.  It’s about leadership which is committed to raising all the boats in the harbor not simply the largest and most expensive. It is also about the realization that none of the problems – some grave – that we now face are ultimately unsolvable without a commitment to deeper connection and a more comprehensive and supportive engagement with the skills and aspirations of others. As a general rule, we need to risk more closeness while committing to vigorous shaking of the asset tree in our diverse communities and then making better use of what falls from it.

What we seek here is not only about a more honest relationship with ourselves, but also about a more robust and open claim on connection with others, with those we know and those we don’t know yet.  One of the motivations for my own involvement in the aforementioned book project is the recognition by psychologists and neuro-biologists, and certainly but by folks in other walks of life, that we have collectively done grave damage to what is in fact our hard wiring for connection.  Despite a bevy of social media tools, we have become, on the whole, more cynical and suspicious than is either empirically-justified or generally good for us.  We have swapped out broad circles of connection and replaced it with performative and materially focused gestures.  People who wouldn’t dream of making eye ontact in a café willingly pose in front of camera possibly to be seen by thousands.  People increasingly would, to quote the great Wendell Berry, rather own a neighbor’s farm than have a neighbor.  The movements represented by Inner Economy and Servant Leadership remind us in part of the fundamental value of human connection, of not only having neighbors on farms and in offices but doing more to help their various contributions and labors have the impact that our stressed-out world needs them to have.

So now, what does “systems thinking” contribute to these ends?

Systems thinking is a way of making sense of the complexity of the world by looking at it in terms of wholes and relationships rather than by splitting it down into constituent and independent parts.  Systems thinking also involves a sensitivity to the circular nature of the world we live in; an awareness of the role of both local cultures and global structures in creating the conditions we experience; a recognition that there are powerful laws of nature and economy operating on us that we are largely unaware of; a realization that there are consequences to our actions that we are oblivious to. Systems thinking helps strike a better balance between how the various elements of life fit together and the small acts and insights that help define our contexts and ensure an improvement of the fit. 

Systems thinking is also an aid to increasing our sensitivity to how patterns shift over time, patterns that operate within us and outside us, most beyond the events of the moment.  I am trained a bit in counseling and there is a tendency here for the one being counseled to focus on the life events which both provoked their narrative and allegedly proved that narrative as well.  But any such narrative is inevitably more complex, more inter-connected than articulated.  And despite our desire at time to hold it in place, our narratives continue to evolve as we also continue to evolve.  As I reminded a successful friend of mine, “we were not always this way.”  You will not always be the way you are now.  Regardless of how hard you try not to change, how much you might want to maintain your habits, preferences and “explanations” for both, the constant drip of life ensures that our outer and inner economies will at least in some key ways be transformed, not only in wrinkles but in disappointments and loss, in satisfaction and success.  And all of that is integrated into a human system which in our cases has already experienced much and which is connected to far more than we generally recognize.  

Finally, systems thinking enhances our ability to examine skillfully what at the UN we call the “root causes” of events and issues, causes which are often considerably more complex than what we are able or willing to acknowledge.  Again with reference to counseling, we hear a lot of the “someone done me wrong narrative” that ostensibly forms the basis for the pain and drama that motivated the person to seek counseling in the first place.  But of course the story is always more complex.  Yes, we have been done wrong, sometimes gravely  But we have likely also done wrong.  We have enabled bad behavior.  We have held our tongue when speaking out was warranted.  We have stood by when intervention would have been the more virtuous path.  And we have accepted systems of education, business, politics and even religion that could be so much more than they are, so much more engaging and hopeful if only we would commit to make them so.

The problems we face in policy are most often chronic and systemic, rather than a one-off.  This is true as well in our personal lives.  But our problems also have a context that is evolving, one that is constantly incorporating new experiences and new reactions, one that includes habits forming but also habits dissolving, one which urges us to ask different questions, better questions, including of yourself, than you might have been willing to ask before.

Perhaps I am making too much of this, but this last point seems particularly important.  Most of us are terrible at asking questions.   When we ask, it is only rarely without agendas, rarely drawing people out, rarely open-ended.  Many of our questions take the form of accusations.  Someone is suspicious of something or other.  Someone is trying to “catch” us in something.  Back in the days of transactional analysis, there was this game which so many of us play and which was defined as “now I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.”  This is how we roll now.  Catching people in one half-truth or another is the goal rather than helping them to explore or grow.   

Given this, we collectively tend to recoil at being asked questions, seeing questions as a threat or an intrusion or a source of judgment – justified or not — rather than an opportunity to connect, to broaden our thoughts and other engagements with the world. Indeed, one could make the case (and I would make it here) is that the way we ask and respond to questions is a strong indicator of the state of our social world and, more specifically, the state of ourselves.

Finally we come to the Sustainable Development Goals which is more or less systems-thinking-on-steroids for sustainability.  This is SDG week here at Tech and the SDGs offer some important insights into how servant leadership and systems thinking interconnect.  On the plus side, we are reminded that Sustainable Development Goals and targets are interrelated, that progress on racial justice or women’s rights or green energy access has direct implications for food security, smarter cities, ocean health or the creation of more peaceful societies.  When we discriminate, when we fail to acknowledge the degree to which our prejudices keep too many on the sidelines as we attempt to solve the problems which will directly impact your future, problems which are related, which affect all and which must be solved by all. Our prejudices and other limitations jeopardize fulfillment of the SDG promises we have made and, more importantly, the promises that you who will soon come to full fruition in this crazy world will require.   We owe you this, we owe you all of it, including a strong and impactful role for each of you who desire it in helping the rest of us ensure that promises made are promises kept.

But as important as this is, it leaves out an important dimension, that of context and localization.  Yes, we want people in general to be guaranteed access to education, to fresh water, to cities that are healthy and functional, to governance and justice systems that at the very least attempts to be fair.  But like other people we also want to ensure water access for our own families and neighbors, we also want better transportation which serves our own neighborhoods, we also want education for our own children which prepares them to live in the world to come and not only the world that was.

All of these desires and aspirations have specific contexts and all of this requires energies and strategies which are tailored to meet the needs and aspirations of real people in real places. Rethinking transportation options takes a different form in Bangkok than in Atlanta.   Water access means something different in Miami than in the Sahel.   And contexts can shift, sometimes dramatically.   Los Angeles this winter had torrential rain and sleet storms with feet of snow on mountains visible from local beaches after years of drought.  Little stays the same except, unfortunately, the way in which we address changes, the levels of determination and fairness that we apply in the struggle to ensure more equitable access to sustainable resources. 

There is a lesson here for Servant Leadership as well.   Yes, we want leaders who are concerned about our well-being beyond our workplace functions.  And yes we appreciate policies that help make our labors more effective and humane.  But we need service provision that to some degree responds to context.  Persons with disabilities often need different forms and levels of service than so-called “normal” people.  Immigrants often need different forms of support than residents.  Children and the elderly often require sustained care beyond what those of us in this lecture room generally require.   It is the job of sustainable development policy to as we say “leave no-one behind.”  But the needs of aspirations of people are not a function of some computer-generated abstractions.   They all reside somewhere specific.  They all have a metaphorical address and we must do better at delivering to those addresses.

So this to me is the great challenge of servant leadership which embraces systems thinking and contributes to sustainable development.   We must better train ourselves to see the connections between projects and people, between issues and outcomes.  And we need to get better at being honest about the things that can go wrong when we attempt to lead or make policy based on sometimes-willfully incomplete assessments, such as when we release new technology to market before we have properly interrogated its potential for harm.   But we also need leadership which moves beyond algorithms and other abstractions to the system which exists around us and within us, a system which we both create and carry with us, a system which needs to remain humane and reassuring, a system which has inflicted pain and had pain inflicted on it, a system currently characterized by too many disconnects and half-fulfilled, decontextualized promises.

Because you are who are you and because you are in a place such as Georgia Tech, you will likely always have options in life.  But you will also face your cross-roads, some of your own making, where even the most provileged and self-directed of you will need a hand to help you out of some metaphorical ditch.  One key to the fulfillment of the SDGs is to integrate more of those hands into our institutions and policy chambers, to reflect over and over on the responsibilities of leadership to enable a world of sustainable connection and shared development. It is often said at the UN that we are running out of time to fix the world.  Servant leadership reminds us that we are also running out of time to fix ourselves.

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