Tag Archives: innovation

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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Village Idiocy: An Educational Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

10 Jul
Edvard Munch

I don’t know why I cannot sleep – I slept just fine at school.  Kathy Kenney-Marshall

You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Doris Lessing

Instruction does much, but encouragement everything.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.  Jacques Barzun

Once a student’s mind is set on fire, it will find a way to provide its own fuel.  Sydney J. Harris

You can’t eat straight A’s.  Maxine Hong Kingston

Under a cruel eye outworn, The little ones spend the day In sighing and dismay.  William Blake

The first week of the 2022 High Level Political Forum (HLPF) is now history. Some interesting and important discussions took place over these past few days on ocean health, gender equality and food security , important not only because they represent top-level priorities for the global community but because they serve as a reminder of our numerous dangling promises, dangling in that the urgency of our collective actions continues to fall short of the responses which the urgency of these times demands.

The HLPF also took up the issue of “education” this week, which as usual for such conversations at the UN was a bit of a hodge-podge of aspirations and cliches, largely dodging the core question of how we who have made a mess of the planet can possibly guide and inspire the youth who are soon to inherit it.

Yes, the “children are our future.” Yes, life-long learning is an aspiration worthy of pursuit. Yes, education in one form or another is essential to the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals, if in fact they are to be fulfilled by our 2030 deadline. Yes, education needs to become more universally accessible, in part because so many children need to “catch up” from pandemic disruptions and in part because we continue to leave on the table so many skills and aptitudes, every one of which will be needed in some form if we are to set this carbon-saturated planet on a healthier course while we still have time to do so.

But in our rush to promote “education” as a sustainable development aspiration, in our campaigns to “innovate” the educational landscape (as with one HLPF side event), I worry that “well-educated” adults are dodging questions and concerns which may not complicate discussions in UN conference rooms but which plague educators (and those who aspire to educate) in a variety of settings.

I have been blessed in my life with some excellent teachers, both in and out of schools, especially in my early adult years, teachers who shared what they knew and gave what they could, teachers far less interested in replication than invention, who rooted for me to become more than I actually became. I have also been blessed to know a bevy of gifted teachers who are contemporaries — John Thompson, Bev Haulmark, Christopher Colvin, John Suggs, Barbara Zelter, Virginia Cawagas, Rien van Nek, Carolyn O’Brien — these and many others who have worked from time to time within school structures but also understand something of the limitations of classrooms, the degree to which the “self-perpetuating thought-regime” we represent can serve as a lifeline for some youth but can also constitute something of a “prison” for others.

In this age, we tend to be enamored of “school” as a physical entity, a place full of chairs and desks in a row, rooms that are age-segregated and hierarchical, driven largely by the expertise of the one in front of the room, concentrating on skills and tasks that we have concluded are essential to “educated” beings but which may not in fact be sufficient to the lives they are destined to lead, lives in significant portion defined by the storms which congregate on the horizon and which they had no real part in creating.

What, we might rightly ask, constitutes that base of skills and knowledge about which some broad consensus is feasible? As we know, at least in the US, schools have become something of a battleground for the ideas and values which parents seek to have reinforced through formal education. How do we talk with children about their own national history in all its messiness and complexity without resorting to slight-of-hand measures such as redefining slavery as “involuntary relocation?” How do we expect schools and our professional educators to prepare students to address existential threats such as climate change and hate speech the existence of which some parents and state officials are unwilling to acknowledge? How are teachers, including the very best of them, supposed to accompany and encourage young people in keeping with the aspirations which motivated their own professional choices when the trust and friendship necessary to accompaniment is institutionally discouraged?

So many of the teachers I know in so many global settings are stuck somewhere between lighting fires in the young and extinguishing them, between sharing lives from which young people could potentially learn much and hinding behind an ever-thickening professonal protocol, between reinforcing the metrics of school assessment and telling them the truth about the genuinely tenuous relationship between good grades and good lives. While they are in school, we want students to do well, to pay attention and resist the temptation to either snooze or act out. But school is not life, it may not in many instances even be sufficient training for life as it is now unfolding and, in any event, you “can’t eat straight A’s.”

The equation which many now draw, even inadvertently, between education and schooling is dangerous both to successful schooling itself and to a world which fails to examine the many factors which influence how students learn, what they learn and, most importantly, what they do with what they know, including how (or if) they continue on a path towards higher levels of wisdom and cognitive synethsis. The educational configuration enveloping our youth is surely in large part about school, increasingly about social media, but also about churches and corporations, families and libraries, neighbors and public servants. It is, in my view at least, important to keep all these formal and informal options alive and assessed, not only for the benefit of young people who may not thrive in more formal settings, but also to reinforce the idea that education is not only what teachers do, but what we all have some responsibility to do, each within our own domains and each with varying degrees of formality and bureaucracy. So long as “education” is left to increasingly harried, overly-scrutinized and under-appreciated teachers, the gaps separating those who make decisions in this fractured world and those who may well become victimzed by those decisions will only widen.

If indeed lifelong learning is a viable educational goal in this world of multiple threats, it will take more than classrooms to inspire it. More than grades and degrees. More than standards-driven learning which over-simplifies reality and prepares students ,for a world which will surely have shifted and shaken under their feet barely before they can even get those feet “wet.”

In the UN General Assembly this week, in a discussion surely relevant to the HLPF, delegates met in informal session to debate elements of a “Declaration on Future Generations” to be presented in September at the GA’s 77th session. While there were no teachers or students present for this conversation, there were a few helpful observations from delegations, including from South Africa and Japan, both of which noted the heavy threat levels under which schooling and related social functions are now forced to take place. Japan expressed the hope that such a Declaration, including its educational elements, could serve to “turbo-charge” our commitment to the SDGs, fulfill our promises to future generations and restore some of the confidence lost by many global youth in many of us global adults.

This is not about “business as usual” rhetorical flourishes on the value of sustainability and innovation. Indeed, as a UN Special Rapporteur reminded, “innovation does not come cheap.” It requires more of our resources, but also more of our humanity including our sharing of lessons learned along our own life paths, the lessons we were often too slow to learn ourselves. There is too much in our world as it is, including violence and strife in multiple forms which, as South Africa and the European Union implored, we should all be loathe to pass on to future generations. But as it now stands, pass on we shall, and the question is who and what can we entrust to the preparation of the young people who are set to assume some weighty responsibilities, whether they are ready to do so or not.

Lest we add villages of idiots to our long generational list of dubious “accomplishments” we must invest more of ourselves in the education of the young in the best and broadest sense of the term. Invest more of ourselves in all aspects of the “configuration” which shapes the values, hopes, anxieties and aspirations of our young people. More than curricular “innovations” and snappy, data-driven assessments. More than the perpetuation of systems which denigrate teachers and create apartheid-like systems of access. More than adults who claim to know more and possess greater wisdom than we do interfacing with young people who know we don’t.

These urgent times require more from each of us if our young people will be able to manage what we are now likely to bequeath to them. I hope at least a portion of them are still listening.

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Money Ball:  The UN Navigates Investor Expectations and Urgency for Policy Innovation, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Feb

This past week at the UN, in the shadow of the Commission on Social Development, a modestly attended but most suggestive event highlighted what is an increasingly perplexing conundrum for policymakers and their donors:  finding the proper balance between fiscal accountability and program innovation.

The event was actually a joint meeting of Executive Boards of diverse UN agencies including UNICEF, UNDP and UN Women. All agency heads and participating diplomats wrestled with, as the Secretary General put it, the task of remaining ‘fit for purpose;’ learning as much as we can from our failures but doing so without neglecting established patterns that have already yielded positive results.   While flexibility is to be praised, the SG noted, innovation must never be seen as an end in itself.

The dilemma of innovation is hardly unique to the UN:  Sports teams, entertainment corporations and many other businesses struggle with the dual demands of ‘staying fresh and relevant’ while satisfying the expectations of their investors.   But there is so much on the line at the UN, so many lives potentially impacted by policy decisions that can err on the sides of recklessness or caution. Given this, the willingness of senior UN officials to both interrogate their failures and offer new ideas to address stubborn development and security patterns with the potential to foment social unrest (as cited by the ILO’s Torres at a separate event) was most welcome.

The stakes in this discussion are higher than they might at first appear, and the SG’s remarks are one starting point.  The largest state contributors to UN operations are responsible to their own local constituents who are in some cases coping with economic crises at home.  But even those supportive of government assistance to UN programs seek assurances (as Japan has urged in several UN forums) that funds dispersed are used for the purposes intended.   Beyond this caution, Zambia urged more attention to ‘predicting’ failure caused in part by a lack of policy attentiveness to social and political context.

If states are not provided the assurances they seek, there is risk that donations will dry up further, or in the case of small states like Zambia that the trust issues lingering with respect to some UN agencies will grow larger.  In either case, the ability of the UN to deliver on its promises – from fulfilling SDGs to drying up sources of illicit arms – will be compromised.  Unlike the private sector, UN officials have hands that are tied a bit tightly by state interests, especially by the largest donor states.  But some of this ‘tying’ as Denmark noted has positive value – insisting that innovation in policy never be divorced from issues of cost effectiveness.  Clearly it is important to avoid throwing money at problems recklessly; but it is also important to think creatively beyond the matching of the most obvious short-term needs with the most immediately available resources.

It seems more and more apparent that currently funded policy and implementation strategies employed by the UN and its partners continue to lag behind both global challenges and response opportunities.  For all our good and reasonably well-funded efforts, we have not yet found the means to eliminate terror threats or gender-based violence, reduce weapons flows, stem chronic unemployment, or reverse the melting of the polar ice caps.  And it is equally clear that money, for all of its potential benefits, can have a negative impact on the innovation we still desperately need.   We see this in the NGO community all the time, where access to funding is as likely to breed caution as creative engagements with UN objectives and working methods. But even at senior Secretariat levels, funding impacts loom large, or at least larger than might be optimal for the development of more innovative approaches to longstanding planetary challenges.

As UNDP’s Helen Clark noted, it might not be funding per se, but rather the assessment of results that funders rightly require that leads to ‘risk phobia’ among some leaders, a sentiment echoed by UNICEF’s Anthony Lake.  While important, “results” can be like puzzle pieces essential to a fully completed puzzle but not to be equated with it.  There are formidable challenges afoot that require creative, if humble engagements beyond piecemeal measures.  And while there are certainly financial risks attached to creative innovation, we need to be reminded, as UNICEF’s Lake noted, that there are also staggering costs from NOT innovating.  It is widely recognized that we already throw too many of the world’s resources at problems that have already proven resistant to our standard working methods and operating procedures.   We would thus do well to share more openly the potential benefits and risks of our innovative policy options; not only with over-stretched donor states but especially with their increasingly anxious constituents.  And, as UNDP’s Clark noted, we should do more to create systemic ‘safe space’ for innovation, inviting the innovation-minded to leave the margins and find a place closer to the center of policy formulation.  Sports franchises and other corporations shrivel in the absence of such space.   International policy also suffers when innovation has no safe space to test assumptions and offer alternatives.

Some of this need can be addressed through greater institutional investment in creative policymaking that reassesses resources and their modes of application.  As one step in that investment, UN Women’s Lakshmi Puri floated an idea that we have also advocated previously – the need to promote the UN as more of a ‘learning community.’  This ‘community’ would not only take account of the SG’s urging that we learn more from our failures, but that we also take heed of opportunities to learn more from each other – including updates on current challenges, and how we might respond – and respond differently – if we are to one day fulfill the trust placed in us to bring ‘big’ matters such as climate change, atrocity crimes and weapons proliferation to successful resolutions.

Clearly we need to be more open to innovation in light of the evolving needs of constituents who, at the end of the day, constitute the core of our mandate.   UNOPS’s Grete Feremo noted with some irony that only small children seem immune from ‘change resistance.’   And UNICEF’s Lake noted that we who set the agendas for global policy must learn to ‘leave our egos and even our logos’ at the door.

This is wise, if elusive counsel.   Needless to say, the UN was not chartered to protect bureaucratic turf or provide employment opportunities for diplomats and NGOs.  It was chartered to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war (and, we might add, other threats to human security).  To ‘win’ at this ever-more critical responsibility, we must spend wisely but also learn sincerely and innovate constructively.  We cannot continue to stifle policy innovation while the global challenges we are tasked to address continue on their own, dangerous, evolutionary path.

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