The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure, Section A

Section A (again)[1]

How often do you hear “one thing leads to another” or it’s slightly cruder version “it’s just one damned thing after another!” That’s the way life seems: we just have to deal with one challenge or opportunity after another and hope our planning and preparation are sound enough to handle it.

The problem, of course, is that it’s not really the way life works today in the Connected Age. All too often, it’s really a bunch of “damned things” all happening at the same time!

Life in America is really about dealing with a lot of things that not only appear to happen at the same time, but also the many things that interact with each other. These interactions typically affect the outcomes of the other events that happen – some scientists call that complexity.

Whatever you call it, it makes anticipation and prediction pretty tough. That’s probably why Yogi Berra said that prediction is always tough, particularly when it’s about the future. Interaction of these “damned things” make it hard to understand what’s happening and what it means for the future. Nowhere is that truer than in trying to understand how people and ecosystems interact and what the consequences will be.

And, the modified “old adage” is really true when we try to understand how our environment and the infrastructure we’ve designed should work together. The intersection of the environment and our infrastructure in America is its own ecosystem. This merged ecosystem is perhaps the most potentially productive “system of systems” we have for progress in America: Mother Nature provides the one, and we provide the other.

Sustaining the Platform: Balance

This next topic in the FAPTICA platform deals with one of the richest and most difficult interactions we have to face in modern times: the interaction of our environment and our American infrastructure, as well as what it means to our quality of life and our future as a nation.

Just think about it: America is a complex ecosystem of diverse, interacting parts…it’s truly a lot of things all happening at the same time. An ecosystem works because it has interdependent parts that actually get along with each other well enough to produce growth and sustainment, even in the face of apparently simultaneous and self-serving actions.

Life works like that in culture, politics and families, too. As Americans, however, we’re failing more and more to get our “parts” working together enough to survive and grow. Good growth requires balance.

Throughout the FAPTICA effort, we’ve emphasized how important balance has been to our past successes as a nation and to our future. We need balance in our culture, society and political system…balance that helps to heal disconnects between our habitats, our societal dysfunctions and the environment in which we live on this world.

Ecosystems find this balance somehow or they perish. The ecosystem of environment and infrastructure sustain a working balance, or they would if we don’t ignore or abuse them. Today, the American ecosystem is losing its balance in so many ways that it’s getting harder and harder for us to find a common path to the future that all of our age groups can appreciate and in which they can find hope and mutual support. Protecting our environment and nurturing our infrastructure…keeping them in balance…builds that path to the future.

If you’re looking for a prime example of how our balance is off-kilter, think about what we call habitats, more specifically human habitats. This means where we live, raise our families, participate in our communities, find inspiration, and make a living. All of these things are part of our habitat.

As Americans we are squeaking by, some better than others, but the sad thing is that we probably know more about (or at least agree on) the habitat needs of white-tailed deer or horseshoe crabs than we do about human habitats. At this point in our American story, we seem to ignore our own habitat needs just as we ignore the environment and neglect our infrastructure.

Thinking a little more about human habitat, suppose you could “ask” a deer or any other living thing, (metaphorically speaking, of course) if living in an apartment surrounded by concrete on a busy highway is a good habitat. Apart from it being the only affordable place available, why we would we do this to ourselves? If deer could talk, surely they’d tell us “Don’t live like that – take better care of yourself, your family and the world that sustains us all!” If you forced a deer to live in that kind of hardscrabble setting, it would almost certainly suffer a premature death after experiencing significant dysfunction—stress, illness, malnutrition, etc. Oh wait – that’s what happens to people!

Unfortunately, humans often ignore their instincts and create and live in unfavorable habitats that fail to tap the promise of effectively synergizing our environment and infrastructure. Humans too can suffer a premature death after experiencing significant dysfunction—stress, illness, obesity, malnutrition, depression, chemical dependencies, family strife, crime…the list goes on. More and more it appears our habitats contribute to many of our leading societal ills, including political and societal woes.

Jan Hauser, a long-time consultant to FAPITCA notes “where we live, how we live, and what we demand creates situations of such complexity that any single set of rules will not suffice, and understanding what the key important factors are creates what is all too often a daunting problem.” Complexity scientists, such as previously quoted Harold Morowitz, might say “this is due to the complex and dynamical nature of various environmental factors and the complexity of adaptive bio-systems,” Jan points out. We’ll return in the future to this concept of a multiple “set of rules” since it also addresses the idea of sustainability and access to opportunity.[2]

Jan also adds that “much lip service has been given to ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable communities,’ but often times when we take a closer look, we find “greenwashing” or improvised models which omit or obscure important shortfalls.” Such shortfalls, Jan says “are usually a product of good human intentions, but are often incorrect due to a natural tendency for our typical thought patterns to unwittingly have many misrepresentations, omissions, and errors.”

Bottom line: the interaction of our environment and our infrastructure sustain the American society and our failure to recognize this and make good long-term decisions to correct our shortfalls practically ensure we will lose balance in America. We’ll also talk more about contemporary ideas on decision-making as a function of maintaining balance and creating opportunity in the near future.

As with many problems we identify and propose as “critical” in FAPITCA, this challenge of balancing the protection of the environment with the need to generate and sustain infrastructure creates tough, tough narratives to understand yet alone resolve. In our next installment of this two-part post on “The Platform, Part IV – Environment and Infrastructure,” we’ll begin to look at how our recent history offers insights into approaching ways to leverage and protect the synergies we seek between environment and infrastructure in America. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/27/2014.

Notes:

[1] Yes, this is another 2-parter! Several of the FAPITCA Platform proposals exceed the commonly accepted length of blog post of around 1000 words (okay, 800-1000 words! Of course, we routinely bust that limit…sorry!). Since we’ve been successful in getting some outside expertise in some of these pieces, we want to ensure we take the space necessary to express relevant and diverse thinking. In this piece, we welcome Carl’s friend Jan Hauser. Jan has been a long-time advocate for looking at the environment and infrastructure in a synergistic light. His background is in the footnote below.

[2] Jan Hauser is a pioneer of developing and applying science and technology to business, social and environmental problems. He was formerly a principal (technology) architect at Sun Microsystems and a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. Jan is also responsible for Sun Microsystems joining The Santa Fe Institute and has lectured at the Smithsonian Institution on “Complexity and Gaia” a topic closely related to this post. He periodically spends time working on the difficult and complex problems of “Global Sustainability” (see www.janhauser.com). Editor’s Note: speaking of the Naval Postgraduate School, these ideas about environment and infrastructure also reflect inspiration from the National Strategic Narrative, quoted previously in FAPITCA posts.

The Platform, Part III: Transforming Consumption, Section B

In the last post, we wrote about the challenges that today’s Consumption-Production-Marketing (and Investment) model present to us in creating a sustainable American economy and access to opportunity. We’ve repeated that model in the graphic below to help us refer to the processes and interrelationships of the processes.

High-level model suggesting relationships of key components related to “Acquiring Stuff” within the American capitalist-based economy.

In this post, we want to consider how we might start to transform these processes, particularly the one that every American can control: Consumption. We want to talk a bit about assessing and exploiting the information that this model generates and how we might use Connected Age technologies to create more value and an eventual solution-based approach to smarter consumption and production. Most importantly, we want to tie this model to creating greater access to opportunity to Fulfill the American Promise.

Value

Note that none of the data native to or generated by the loop in the above model offers any informational insight about the quality or value of the stuff produced or consumed (either goods or services). In our current economy, the pertinent information has to do with the financial gain that can accrue to the Producer, Marketer or Investor; while it’s true that money can also be a source of information, this is not the kind information flow that best depicts the American economy.

Today, the Consumer, who ultimately funds the cycle and is the ultimate source of return on investment, has the least input into the process in terms of identifying value or generating information. The Consumer, who should be on a level playing field in terms of information flow, could provide much more useful information for the entire system if we better harness the connecting technologies we have available to us today. Big Data analysis won’t be nearly as useful to knowledge generation about our economy if all it’s concerned with is tracking how much stuff Consumers buy!

The Consumer, who should be creating both the demand and the means of identifying value, actually has only a small role in this loop, other than to acquire stuff. In the graphic above, note how the solid arrows point one way. Apart from tracking what stuff consumers buy, where is the information flow on behalf of the Consumer?

This loop affects how the American Promise might be fulfilled in a big way! New technologies and the resulting gadgets we can buy because of new inventions and innovations have subtly changed the way we look at opportunity and value in America. We’ve forgotten the interdependent responsibilities of buying and selling, the basis of a value-creating capitalistic culture. We’ve become ill-informed Consumers of goods and services in this great nation, and it’s past time we transformed that part of American life.

That’s right: both Producers and Consumers have a complementary responsibility to help drive the cycle of Production, Marketing and Consumption (and thus effectively influence Investment). The model today is Production and Marketing driving Consumption, whereas the market should really be Consumption driving Production (and Marketing as needed in the case of value creation that has not yet been adequately promoted). Investment will chase after either model as long as the information flows are there.

Consumers must influence Producers to make and deliver sustainable goods and services that account for long-term value, not the whims of today’s hottest craze. This was also a lesson that former City of Lewes, DE Mayor Jim Ford imparted in a recent post.

Solutions?

So, what do we do to bring about more value-driven Consumer behaviors? How do we make our stuff tell a better story about our lives as individuals, communities and as a nation committed to a long-term, sustainable economic future?

One way to begin Consumer behavior change is to start using the transformational power of our information technology to inform ourselves about what has happened to the United States in the last 40-50 years as far as politics and budgets are concerned. We need to overcome the political influence that some have sought to leverage in distorting the use of IT to separate us from each other. The gulf that edge-driven politics has created using IT today also inhibits bringing about a sustainable economy through generation of maximum opportunity to participate in that economy.

Fixing these kinds of problems requires individual responsibility and even an individual change in the way we Consume and Produce goods and services in the United States and abroad. Producing, selling and buying simply to make money can no longer be the primary rationale for the American Connected Age form of capitalism.

Production and Consumption requires more intelligence than that in a globally Connected Age. We need to harness IT innovation and change our political infrastructure to leverage these new opportunities to succeed as a people – we need to create better access to opportunity for all to participate in these new economies. Buying and selling and making money is inherent to capitalism and is great as long as Producers deliver real value and not just bottom lines. It’s even greater if everyone has an equal shot at participating in the opportunities we create as a nation.

Perhaps the most important responsibility we need to take on as Americans is to transform ourselves away from the compulsion to acquire stuff. We all need to contribute to reassigning value to what America Produces and Consumes through the “Stuff Acquisition” model. This is how we ensure Producers produce good and meaningful stuff that helps us sustain a good environment and infrastructure that America needs to prosper. Consumers can and must drive this!

We are a connected people in this country and we need to start using that connectivity to become The United States once again. Our nation can once again reflect concern for our future generations by transforming the way we buy and use stuff. We can live up to the important and relevant responsibilities we’ve taken upon ourselves to lead the rest of the world in supporting societies that embrace freer and more open forms of government and care for the environment in which we all live together.

If there’s one place innovative thinking could be introduced with the prospect of good return on investment, it’s in the development of an adaptive model of American capitalism that embraces smarter Production, Investment, Marketing and Consumption. We welcome the discussion of what that model looks like as we move forward with FAPITCA! The graphic above is the “as-is” model but what we need is the “to-be” model, as engineers call them. Please join in this critical discussion to help our nation design this model!

Our next post in this series on Building a Platform will look at protecting and securing our environment and infrastructure, two deeply interconnected challenges for America which have a significant role to play in how we use, consume and ultimately dispose of our stuff!

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/12/2014.

The Platform, Part III: Transforming Consumption, Section A

Consumption and Production: A Model

Life in the Connected Age can be as simple or as complex as we want it to be. Fulfilling our Needs and Wants in today’s super-connected world almost ensures complexity and the emergence of unforeseen consequences. This complexity guarantees we “discover” sources of “stuff” we don’t really need or want, but for some reason keep buying…that’s a potential challenge for America that we want to examine in our Platform.

The odds are good that we actually contribute to making our lives more complex and even confusing in our quest to satisfy desires for more stuff. Even though our brains probably use the same thinking mechanisms to satisfy Needs or Wants, neuroscience indicates that using one thinking process to deal with the two distinct issues of both Needs and Wants leads us to acquire a lot of “stuff” we don’t actually require to live happily.

We may subconsciously get confused about what’s really a “Need” and what’s really just a “Want” or even extraneous. This causes additional challenges for the economy, the environment and access to opportunity. Our intuition about acquiring stuff influences us in ways we don’t always realize and stuff kind of sneaks into our lives before we know it, whether the stuff has real value to us or not.

This passion for more stuff, whether a Need or a Want, affects a lot more than our overstuffed closets and garages that no can longer hold cars. Consumption of goods and services directly affects Production, Marketing and even Investment in companies that serve our Consumption zeal. All four processes are deeply interconnected and as we claimed at the closing of the last post, also affect our economy, our government systems and by extension, access to opportunity.

At a very high-level, we’ll look at the interactive, interdependent nature of Consumption, Production, Marketing and Investment in this post and start to see how this affects our individual and collective ability to Fulfill the American Promise in the Connected Age. This high-level examination begins with a very simple model:

High-level model suggesting relationships of key components related to “Acquiring Stuff” within the American capitalist-based economy.

The simple “Stuff Acquisition” model above suggests these four processes and their relationship. Note the unidirectional nature of the arrows and the ultimate target for Investment, Production and Marketing: Consumption (better known as the “Consumer”). Production and Marketing share both a direct and indirect relationship and often influence each other.

Note also what the objectives of these three processes are in targeting Consumption: Acquiring Stuff! The two broad categories of Wants that we acquire are planned and impulse, where impulse acquisition is most aggravated by the Connected Age technologies we mention below. This is also the one area that we could favorably impact on behalf of our nation if we can only harness these same connecting technologies to become more enlightened Consumers. We’ll discuss that below and in Section B.

It really doesn’t matter to the Producers and Marketers (and all too often, the Investors) whether the stuff is a Need or a Want, as long as we Consumers acquire it. After all, that’s how capitalism works and that’s fine as long as we realize our role as Consumers in this model and how the choices we make affect America. We need to understand that we (all Americans) are the central focus of this Consumption process and be smarter about the role we play.

Thoughts about Consumption Today

There’s a lot of research about why we acquire stuff in our lives, but we’ll only talk about a couple of simple explanations in this post. In their 2012 book, The Stuff Cure, Betty and Mike Sproule propose several ways to simplify life and live happily in less clutter. The book examines ways to make our lives less of a burden to ourselves and to others. It suggests how we put sustainable economic growth at risk. The Sproule book reveals how far we’ve drifted from simple, elegant and productive lifestyles that are as much about our families, communities and our nation as they are about our individual selves.

The Sproules suggest that we likely “attribute meaning to obsolete objects,” and we acquire so much stuff because these things reflect “the story of our lives. Material objects conjure up feelings that, together, constitute our humanity. When looked at, or thought about, the items that we keep enable us to clarify what our experiences of living add up to.” Bottom line: our stuff tends to tell our story and that’s something hard to give up.

For the past seven years or so, Annie Leonard, creator of The Story of Stuff, has been a chief proponent of satisfying the competing interests of our need to have stuff and our need to protect our environment. As we mentioned previously, her online movies help us visualize both problems and solutions related to acquisition of the things we feel compelled to acquire and consume. Her stories tell us a great deal about the relationships of Consumption and Production.

In large part, we have become a nation of Producers, Marketers and Consumers because that’s what great nations do: they make stuff, they sell it and they use it. As we mentioned above, and subtly demonstrated in the graphic of our model, Investment also plays a role because success in capitalism tends to attract more investment.

This model, while essentially valid in any economy, has enjoyed almost no meaningful refinement in the Connected Age, except to enhance Production and Consumption. Search engines help us find stuff more quickly, including “serendipitous discovery” which leads to acquitting more stuff! Companies like Amazon know how to exploit this to the max!

But here’s the key for FAPITCA: how we think about and ask questions concerning new ways to build, consume and market the things we need and want are critical to the way our nation’s future will unfold. Will we be a smart global leader that uses resources, including technologies like search engines and online markets, wisely and efficiently or will we consume everything in sight as we practically have since the blending of the Industrial Age and the Connected Age in America?

We’ve built for ourselves an almost never-ending loop where producers deliver goods and services in anticipation of being able to sell practically anything to someone as long as it can be marketed effectively enough to gain some attention somewhere. Niche products abound and are more easily discoverable through Connected Age technologies. Technologies like “3-D Printing” will make it even simpler to satisfy wants in the near future (and produce more stuff!).

Producers drive markets as much as Consumers do, building stuff consumers never knew they “needed” before they saw it in a store, online or on TV. It doesn’t matter how useful the stuff is as long as Marketers can create a craving or demand so that someone will buy the stuff. This Production-Marketing-Consumption “loop” is a magnet for Investors who are looking for someplace to make more money.

In Section B of this post on Transforming Consumption, we’ll look more closely at how we define and create value in the Production-Consumption model as well as the real-life contributions we can make as smarter consumers to Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 6/6/2014.