Momentum Misplaced

by Carl Hunt

Well, I’m actually talking about two kinds of momentum in this long-delayed post: the momentum slipping away from the Founders’ dream; and admittedly my own. As the primary author of this blog, it’s my responsibility to find the motivation and momentum in “my inner being” to post something meaningful at least once a month…that was the goal starting this out last February.

Events of the past two months dampened my motivation a wee bit. I didn’t lose it…I just misplaced it. Chuck, my brother and coauthor, and I will find it again soon (see the ending of this post), but for the time being, I’m afraid it’s lying underneath a pile of books and papers on my desk.

One reason for that pile on my desk is that I was fortunate to get back to a paying job. Since this new work is for the United States government, Chuck and I have been trying to figure out what we can say and how we can say it while still making the occasional comment (blog post) about how much America has been disconnected from its promise and its leaders.

We still passionately believe in our nation and the experimental system that was put in place in 1789 to make it work in a world that was quite unsteady at the time. In spite of our politicians’ hubris today in thinking they know better about how to run a government in 2014 than the Framers did back then, it’s still an experiment…the world is no less unsteady today either. Americans lose track of that too often.

The bottom line is that the Framers developed a way of thinking about national and international affairs that was novel for their time; that’s why their approach was different than anything other nations were doing in the late 18^th Century. Our politicians, courts and statesmen need to do the same thing for our time.

In truth, the United States is more of a laboratory for freedom, security and prosperity now than it was 225 years ago. This is a big factor in why we gravitated towards documents like The National Strategic Narrative by Wayne Porter and Puck Mykeby. As we noted, the “Narrative” recognizes the need to become more flexible and adaptive in this day and age and restart a dialogue among Americans about what’s important today. The Narrative offers to reexamine the empirical evidence we’ve gathered during the first 225 years of our nation’s “Great Experiment.”

Now on to my momentum misplacement: I won’t say that the election of November, 2014 inhibited my momentum but it does give me pause when I hear certain politicians say “the American people have spoken.” The evidence I observed in the post-election analyses indicated that most of the American people in fact did not speak (at least very loudly, not at 39.6% of the eligible electorate). For either party to keep claiming that “the American people have spoken” when so few actually did is childish and speaks to how poorly our politicians are at motivating Americans to be a part of our experiment.

That really shouldn’t be a momentum killer for any of us, however. It should offer us all a challenge to embrace the experimentation of our Founders and Reconnect to the American Promise. This is where our politicians should also be focusing: creating new and fresh opportunities for more people to succeed in achieving the American Promise and be part of our nation’s experiment. This is how our nation will regain the momentum our Founders established.

As for me, I’ll start clearing my desk more often and find my own momentum again. In fact, my friend Walt Natemeyer, about whom I wrote last March, has agreed to team up on a blog post soon that will address two important functions of leaders, political and otherwise: creating shared vision and developing a framework for common agreement, both critical duties of leaders that those in our Congress have apparently forgotten in recent years. Chuck and I are looking forward to collaborating with Walt on this project.

A Postscript: A bit unrelated to the post above, we just read a New York Times blog post entitled “Social Media Deepens Partisan Divides. But Not Always.” This post was based in part on a slightly dated paper called “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline” (which does offer empirical evidence, by the way…the kind of evidence that politicians should also be looking for). Both pieces were encouraging, particularly about our younger Americans. It appears that the battle between polarized media outlets may not be as good for channelizing Americans as some politicians had hoped. That’s good news for all of us as it offers to keep alive our critical need to Reconnect to the American Promise.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 11/21/2014.

Thomas Paine: IT Legend of the 70s (1770s, that is)

by Carl W. Hunt

In the 21^st Century, we “moderns” tend to view technology, and most specifically information technology, as both the harbinger and the facilitator of a revolution in life. Search companies help us find information immediately, hardware companies deliver incredibly fast processing and presentation capabilities and software companies find ways to make information easy to store, access and manipulate. The revolution in information technology has been astounding!

What hasn’t been so astounding or particularly revolutionary is what this information really says and how it touches us as Americans who are still part of a great revolutionary experiment started 238 years ago. Apart from the scientific insights that modern IT has packaged and presented to a more widespread audience, and the promise of revolutions in medicine, transportation and robotics, where are the great ideas about social change? And I don’t mean Facebook or Google+!

The ideas and concepts that have been pushed around through modern IT haven’t been nearly as revolutionary as those of one Englishman who did as much as any Founding Father to set America on an enduring and revolutionary course of its own. [i] Of course, this revolutionary master of IT in the days of the Founders is Thomas Paine. [ii]

Thomas Paine in his role as an early information technologist and yes, revolutionary, is a merger that we need today more than ever. America and its “revolution” in IT could use someone who could think about America’s future and articulate those ideas in ways that haven’t been before: that was a hallmark of Thomas Paine.

Common Sense: We Still Need It!

Source Data Below.

Perhaps where we’ve erred the most in recent years in establishing and maintaining good governance in America is by letting it get too complex, too big and too convoluted. In Common Sense, Paine wrote “I draw my idea of the form of government from a principle in nature which no art can overturn, viz. that the more simple any thing is, the less liable it is to be disordered, and the easier repaired when disordered.” If we revisited and even “rewrote” Common Sense today, that principle of simplicity would endure, even in a nation of over 318 million.

But, we would still have government lest anarchy prevail, a point that Paine also made. Government is more than a necessary evil, as Paine wrote about the British government (and government in general), and we would do well to follow his “common sense” advice about how we move forward with our own government today.

Paine originally wrote that representatives of the people to the government should be direct representatives, thereby giving the electorate more say in those that governed them. In a nation closing in on 320 million people, that won’t work as well today as it might have in 1776, but that’s where “common sense” IT could come into play.

Back in April, Chuck and I wrote about Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration. Our nation has made dramatic progress in pioneering and implementing collaborative IT tools that have started to change government for the better.

Unfortunately, these tools haven’t changed politics for the better. Government, as an abstract entity outside politics, is poised to harness the tools of collaboration. Politics harnesses the tools to seek gain for the party’s objectives and enhance reelection potential. In America, the government and politics coevolve and today, politics have been the dominant force. I think Thomas Paine would say that’s just not “common sense.”

It’s way past time to go back and reread Paine and the Founders to see how Common Sense guided the formation of our nation and made it possible to get through our very rough first century and endure through this century.

What’s Holding Common Sense Back Today?

Perhaps the single greatest inhibition to a return to “Common Sense” in government today is a stark lack of courage. Our laws in 2014 are a hodge-podge of patches that sometimes don’t even reflect the original problems they were meant to address: Tax, Transportation and Immigration laws being three of the worst collections of such “fixes”. Our elected leaders, mostly in Congress, refuse to address fundamental rewrites of these laws that reflect 2014 rather than 1914 (1814?) for fear of electoral backlash…gutless only begins to describe these “leaders” who somehow keep getting reelected! [iii] Add to that a tendency to bring more people into government to write, interpret and enforce these patchwork laws, and government gets even more complex. There’s no “common sense” here!

Another inhibition to a return to “common sense” approaches to government is a media that’s divided even more than our Congress, pandering to intellectual and geographic divides in an “arms race” to be more popular or sell more ads than their competitors. Okay, this is the American way, but without some level of “common sense” applied to the media, the American Way may disappear into islands of disconnectedness and lack of concern for a national entity that made the freedom of the press possible in the first place. Come on, media…get your act together and use some “common sense” to promote America rather than tear it down!

Source Data Below.

From a material standpoint, our systems of production and consumption have ceased to follow any recognizable pattern of “common sense” as well. Chuck and I already beat on this idea in past blog posts and the FAPITCA Platform, so there are only a couple of pointers in this post: here and here. But, Thomas Paine noted an interesting contrast about society and government that applies, writing that “Society is produced by our wants” (the essence of our production and consumption of both goods and ideas) with government serving as a constraint by “restraining our vices.” [iv] This indicates that government does in fact have some (at least a limited) role in moderating production and consumption so that the wants of society do not destroy all the resources that could be consumed in meeting those wants. That’s just “common sense” too!

If these appeals to look at America in the light of Thomas Paine as a revolutionary IT legend make sense, we’re way behind the power curve and we need to rebuild some “common sense” into American government now! To make these changes, and include a modernization of Common Sense, it’s worth going back and revisiting a blog post I wrote in April called A Narrative for our Nation and our Promise. The authors of the National Strategic Narrative provide some deep insights on how to move forward…these guys got it right and best of all, they used “Common Sense.” I think Thomas Paine would agree.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt, 8/22/2014.

[i] Chuck and I wrote a bit about Thomas Paine as an influential thinker of the American Revolution who appreciated the sacrifices and commitment of the Continental Congress in 1776, contrasting it to what he might think about today’s Congress. Unfortunately, Congress’s contributions to the American people have only been on the decline since we wrote that post in February.

[ii] Speaking of mastery of the IT of the time, Paine’s Common Sense sold over 500,000 copies in 1776, still the largest selling book in proportion to the population in American history, which was estimated at 2.5 million at the time. That’s some legendary IT there!

[iii] Obviously, President Obama did address Health Care in his first term, but neglected to embrace the input of the opposition party. This shortcoming has only been exacerbated by the political divide that makes it almost impossible to address the shortcomings in a sensible…”common sense”…fashion.

[iv] The actual quote from Common Sense, in context is: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” Paine went on to write that “Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil” but it is necessary in any event. A key premise of FAPITCA has been that government is necessary, but it does need to be done right, and in recent years it has not been done right. Also, remember that Thomas Paine was a revolutionary who successfully raised the issues but did not accomplish much at all when he was placed in positions of authority to fix the problems he identified (including government positions in England, France and of course, America)! As America has often been able to do, we must find and leverage the strengths of our people, in the right ways at the right time.

Image Sources:

Common Sense: Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Commonsense.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Commonsense.jpg

Lewes, UK Tavern Sign: “White Hart Paine plaque” by Sussexonian. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons; http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:White_Hart_Paine_plaque.jpg#mediaviewer/File:White_Hart_Paine_plaque.jpg. This commemoration of Thomas Paine is particularly significant in that Paine lived and developed many of his original ideas while living in Lewes, Sussex Country, UK, working for the local government…Lewes, DE, named for its UK sibling, is the author’s home.

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.

A Narrative for our Nation and our Promise

In 2010, I had the privilege of participating in the first of two Highlands Forum meetings I attended that year. This first meeting was in Newport, RI, and hosted a small group of remarkable thinkers and professionals from diverse industry, academic and government organizations. You won’t find much about the Highlands Forum from the official website, but there is a publically accessible site that talks about its background and purpose when it was first established.[1]

One of the government folks I met in Newport was Captain Wayne Porter, United States Navy. At the time, Wayne was serving as a personal advisor to Admiral Mike Mullen, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I had several intimate chats with Wayne, including a marvelous breakfast in which we shared our thoughts about the effects of cyberspace and emergence on the nation and the rest of the world. During breakfast, Wayne shared with me some of the initial thoughts he and his office mate, Colonel Mark “Puck” Mykleby, United States Marine Corps, were working on in a paper they were crafting for the Chairman.

The title of the paper Wayne and Puck created was illuminating. Wayne called it “A National Strategic Narrative.” He explained that they decided to call it a narrative rather than a “strategy” because the nation had plenty of strategy documents (e.g., National Security Strategy, National Military Strategy, and a host of others). What America really needed, Wayne said, was a narrative (a coherent story) that served to remind us of who we were and how we should think about going forward in the future as a “whole of nation” (or government) to maintain the essence of what made America great.

Wayne’s ideas really resonated with me at the time and thanks to a new project to which I’ve been invited to participate, it’s more meaningful than ever. Add to that the work in which Chuck and I collaborate with Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age, and the narrative becomes greatly relevant and compelling.

The “final” version of A National Strategic Narrative is available on the web, along with other supporting information about the project, but I’m reserving the remainder of this post to describe the priorities of the effort and compare it to some of the objectives of FAPITCA as we’ve presented them in this blog.

Wayne and Puck, originally writing under the pseudonym of “Mr. Y” (in memory of George Kennan),[2] assert that their foundation is “built upon the premise that we must sustain our enduring national interests – prosperity and security – within a ‘strategic ecosystem,’ at home and abroad….” This notion of a strategic ecosystem is also compelling and forms the basis of the remaining narrative. An ecosystem, as we’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, is energized by coevolution and emergence, and is another appealing way of expressing FAPITCA.

The Narrative proposes three “Investment Priorities” that align with FAPITCA. The first priority is “intellectual capital and a sustainable infrastructure of education, health and social services to provide for the continuing development and growth of America’s youth.” This priority is perfectly matched to the basis for achieving the American Promise: “freedom of access to an equal opportunity to succeed (or to fail).”[3] Investing in the social “infrastructure” of America empowers greater access to opportunity.

The second priority of the Narrative is “ensuring the nation’s sustainable security – on our own soil and wherever Americans and their interests take them.” According to Wayne and Puck, this requires us to think about American “power” as more than just defense and security, although these are vitally important areas. We should also think about America as a source of inspiration to our nation and the world for “domestic and foreign trade, agriculture and energy, science and technology, immigration and education, public health and crisis response….” This enables us to also observe national security through the lenses of our economy, the environment, our willingness to help other people and nations, and indeed our social fabric. This perspective can also link the Center of America to the rest of our world through Connected Age technologies.[4]

Finally, the third priority of the Narrative is to “develop a plan for the sustainable access to, and cultivation and use of the natural resources we need for our continued wellbeing, prosperity and economic growth in the world marketplace.” This priority has a clear connection to the second priority and speaks to sustaining a global ecosystem of natural resources that supports not only America but the whole world. In this way, America reemphasizes its role as a truly exceptional nation both in terms of leadership and stewardship of human and natural resources. This is consistent with one of FAPITCA’s key principles: “We are borrowing this land, culture and governance system from our progeny; what we pay back to them reflects on our legacy and lays the foundation for their legacy.”[5]

There’s quite a bit more to A National Strategic Narrative that deserves mention in this blog, and we’ll revisit it from time-to-time. Having the privilege of chatting with Wayne and Puck in years past makes this Narrative more personally meaningful as Chuck and I undertake our work with FAPITCA. I’m glad I recently rediscovered it and have a chance to cite it as an additional source for our effort. If the FAPTICA project makes sense to you, please read the National Strategic Narrative and understand where it could take us in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

Originally posted by Carl Hunt, 4/24/2014.

 

[1] The Highlands Forum is a remarkable effort that has informed the development of US strategy, research and development for over a decade, and is superbly managed by Dick O’Neill, Captain, US Navy (ret.). Some of the presentations at Highlands Forum meetings are also available on the public website.

[2] As a National War College alumnus, I appreciate the nod to George Kennan, who was a professor at NWC in the mid-1940s when he was forming thought about maintaining a balance of power with the Soviet Union, a paper called “The Sources of Soviet Power” which he authored in Foreign Affairs in July 1947, under the pseudonym of Mr. X.

[3] As quoted from the Principles of FAPITCA.

[4] As proposed in the FAPITCA Principles.

[5] As articulated in the FAPITCA Principles.

Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration, “Section B”

– Creating Collaborative Law, Part III, Section B

NOTE: Due to the length and technical nature of this post, there are two sections: This is Section B (a technical discussion of a proposed solution as a thought experiment).

In Section A of this post, we proposed to use Lewes, DE as small town representation for a thought experiment. Our experiment proposed to implement collaborative technologies to enhance the way America might begin to initiate a stronger focus on bringing us to Center-based solutions and avoid edge-driven approaches. This experiment provides the basis for a response to the question we posed: “How can technology impact our potential to collaborate?”

To keep the description of these tools simplified, we’ll revisit the Wattpad application we mentioned in Part I of this series, as an example of an approach we could use. After what might be called an open online “solicitation for legislation” provided by the City, we could turn to something like Wattpad. As we learned before, this application allows multiple authors to co-create novels, articles and almost anything suitable for publication in a very public way that proposes drafts, refinements and ultimately “finished” products.

Citizens affected by the proposed legislation, in groups or even as individuals could respond to the solicitation using Wattpad in an online environment. The results could offer a reasonable starting point to address the initial solicitation for the required legislation. This should sound a bit like the discussion on emergence from the last blog post.

Once we have a fairly robust starting document that encompasses a variety of insights (likely divergent in both the social and political senses), we could turn to the development of a model accompanied by a collaborative visualization tool that allows the public to interact, pose questions and do online “what-if analysis” that can be recorded and played-back. [1]

One of the main the kinds of modeling technologies we have in mind include the agent-based modeling simulation and analysis environment. This modeling environment allows for encoding a variety of factors, including:

• Rules of behavior (of both actual and virtual entities such as people, property, traffic flow or existing law)
• Assumptions about future growth and behavior
• Virtual operating and interaction environment (that allows users to constrain or loosen actions to real-world conditions)
• Rules for conducting “what-if” analysis of new evidence or possible outcomes
• Real-world sensors; new sensor-based simulation capabilities even allow modelers to capture and reflect human emotion and a broad range of behaviors (both rational and otherwise) that can increase the fidelity of these virtual interactions

Another requirement for community-based collaboration is a visualization tool that allows the community users to interact over the same presentation of assumptions, modeling results and geographic information systems (GIS) data that helps orient us to the “real-world.” One low-cost GIS tool that has found initial success is in use by Texas A&M University’s Sea Grant Texas, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Delaware-supported Cape Henlopen Regional Plan to conduct community-based collaborative planning for better understanding coastal watersheds and sea-level changes. The implementation details for an example of this sort of tool, weTable, are worth reading but beyond the scope of this blog post. The figure below depicts the weTable.

The “weTable” in use during a Texas Sea Grant project. Picture credit to NOAA and the Texas Sea Grant Project.

These are the kinds of technologies and tools that allow us to come together as a community rather than keep us apart in our separate, “idealized” political environments that seem to split communities. Users would thus collaborate to produce not only proposed legislation, but also empirical evidence of the proposal’s ability to address requirements (both originally projected requirements as well as those generated in the modeling environment).

Whether any of this scales from a community like Lewes to a state or national-level “community” requires experimentation, but this is worth doing to improve the likelihood of success in collaborative law and policy.

There are some distinct advantages to these kinds of experiments. Such a system could allow users to:

• Control for bias and undue influence (e.g. model edge-driven media attempts at “public persuasion” and politically-driven campaign contributions)
• Provide filters for information overloaded concepts and terms
• Reduce waste of precious financial resources through low-cost highly-collaborative experimentation
• Better cope with disparate backgrounds and emotions
• Generate better and increasingly novel questions about assumptions and outcomes

We’ll talk in more detail more about these new kinds of decision-support tools in future posts and how they can help generate better and more objective lines of inquiry. Maximum objectivity is a fundamental key to Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

We also think that asking the “right questions” and seeking objective results and outcomes are the basis for better collaboration and interaction to produce policy and law that help us understand the increasingly complex world in which we live. Objective inquiry can help us overcome human bias and prejudice, a factor we must explore in addressing the second question posed in Section A: “Why are we reluctant to embrace new opportunities to collaborate (politically)?”

In proposing an answer to that second question, we’ll talk about how much power, influence and access to money sway those who resist using these tools and how much they would have to give up in a political or organizational setting. That’s for next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/18/2014.

[1] A recent, though early example of this sort of approach actually did take place in the Lewes, DE area, as described in the Cape Gazette article, “Technology, talk allow towns to tackle ‘wicked problem’,” of 3/18/2014. This article describes some of the planning objectives, collaboration processes and technologies involved.

Harnessing the Tools of Collaboration, “Section A”

– Creating Collaborative Law, Part III, Section A

NOTE: Due to the length and technical nature of this post, there are two sections: A (this post) and B (a more technical discussion that immediately follows this post in sequence).

We’ve recently written a lot about collaboration and cooperation in producing common good for America. We’d like to think it’s straightforward to see what collaboration has to do with creating effectively implemented law and policy. After all, people have to interact with each other, whether in full agreement or not. How else do we achieve some level of cooperation and willingness in order to find ways to produce a meaningful common good that extends beyond the individual self?

Americans have been collaborating for centuries to produce what has become today’s United States of America. We’ve found ways to cooperate and produce the freest and most participative forms of economics and government known to history. However, many of us sense something is different now – collaboration and agreement have become difficult to achieve. The current environment for equal access to opportunity in America is diminished from what it was even 20 years ago.

We’re going to explore the current environment by posing and attempting to answer two key questions that reflect on our ability as a nation to Fulfill the American Promise in the Connected Age:

• How can technology impact our potential to collaborate? (discussed in this 2-part post)
• Why are we reluctant to embrace new opportunities to collaborate (politically; discussed in next week’s post)?

Technology has created an almost limitless fabric in which to communicate. In the “days of old” a political leader [1] relied on newspapers, local surrogates and a whistle-stop or two to communicate a message. Today they can almost drench the electorate with information right from their offices. [2] In fact, the trick now is to figure out how to wisely engage the electorate to avoid confusing or irritating them.

But it’s really a two-way street. It’s now easier than ever for information to flow from the constituent to the political leader. Sometimes the data come from sources outside their jurisdiction and leaders must discern the relevance from that perspective as well: does it apply to the local constituency or the national…or both? Different income groups may attempt to fill cyberspace with specific positions. This can generate a bias that even the most objective implementations of technology are hard-pressed to overcome.

Applying technology to enhance a collaborative process is messy at best, much like freedom and democracy are described through the ages. Unfortunately, while the tools and technologies are in fact emerging, we’re a long way from having the will and experience necessary to harness the full potential of this two-way street (really super-highway) of information; there are currently too many barriers, social and technological.

Most in the Center feel we must overcome these barriers and build meaningful and accurate information environments to support enhanced collaboration between voters, political leaders and the rest of the nation. Carl heard an interesting insight about the reality of these barriers in a talk given by United States Senator Chris Coons (DE) this past weekend during a community meeting in Lewes, DE.

Senator Coons pointed out that the media, congressional staffers and lobbyists often work aggressively to keep our congressional legislators from talking to each other and sharing information that might lead to collaboration. This is a disappointing insight about the reality of the barriers, particularly coming from someone recognized as one of the most collaborative and objective members of Congress. This begins to address the second question we posed above, but it also informs the way we want to respond to the first question.

We’ll address the technical aspects of the initial question we posed above in a separate piece that immediately follows this one, what we are labeling Section B. As an introduction to Section B, however, we’ll note that the new tools to which most Americans now have access offer the potential for much greater participation and inclusiveness than ever before; these new Connected Age tools can bring us together in ways no human has ever experienced. But, as most technology solution consultants do these days, we propose to start small — a thought experiment that might suggest an eventual prototype.

Imagine a community, perhaps a town like Lewes, DE (2,841 population, 2012 statistics) which wants to go beyond the usual public hearings and city boards to rigorously test proposed legislation affecting an important city function: say zoning from commercial to residential. This can be a divisive issue at the best of times.

There are clearly multiple stakeholders and positions involved when it comes to zoning any community, particularly one which prides itself in striving to balance history, tradition and diversity (as reflected in the Lewes Core Values). How might we better use Connected Age collaboration tools to pose relevant questions, model processes and outcomes and project solutions that lead to balance and preservation of core values?

We’ll answer that question and further address our initial question about technology in Section B of this post. See you after the break!

 

[1] Many call these “leaders” simply politicians, but we’ve decided to emphasize (perhaps challenge?) the positive and present the function of leadership to persuade our elected officials to behave like leaders in a political and social sense, serving on behalf of the nation rather than themselves.

[2] All too often this is politically dogmatic information rather than objective insight about how new law and policy actually support perpetuating American freedom, security and opportunity.

A More “Democratic” Democratic Republic

Connecting to the Principles, Part 5

In the months of discussions leading up to starting Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age, we debated a lot about what to say and how to say it. As much as possible, we wanted to avoid specific political positions. We wanted to expose and discuss in detail the problems we faced as a nation when we allowed ourselves to be governed from the extreme edges, whether right or left. Also, we didn’t want to rely on one party’s interpretation of the “correct way” to govern and develop policy.

It would have been easy to criticize attempts to close the government over fringe-led positions against health-care, just as it would have been easy to criticize the very methods used to create the current health-care law. The various factions of media (red, blue, “neutral”) have all presented their versions of critiques of Congress and the Administration. Rather than piling on more criticism, we wondered about the effect these critiques had. We wanted to know how they resulted in productive change in our system of governance.

Admittedly, we haven’t introduced a lot of insights on issues like that, other than try to expose both sides of the extreme edges for what they often appear to be: power-loving men and women seeking to serve themselves before the nation. We have recalled a few instances where our nation’s leaders could actually get along and sufficiently agree to create and maintain America (e.g., the Continental Congress). We also highlighted what is possible when Americans emphasize unity, shared sacrifice and progress rather than division (e.g., the United States in World War II and NASA from the 1960’s through today’s time).

Regardless of a given party’s dogmatism and over-confidence about “being right” that pervades the fringes of at least two political parties, no one person can know everything. We can think and do the best we can, leveraging a proper dose of humility, and try to move our nation forward. And it appears we do that best when we connect with each other and keep the communication lines open. That’s why the Connected Age part of this website is integral to the blog.

With this post, we are going to start focusing on the Connected Age side of FAPITCA for a bit. In keeping with the title of this piece, we want to look at ways to create a more inclusive “democratic” way to do politics and policy development in America. We want to explore techniques and tools that bring us closer together as a nation rather than pull us further apart…ways that expand access to opportunity.

A recent article in the NY Times, Web Fiction, Serialized and Social, got us thinking about web-based governance. This is hardly new, as E-Government and Web-Based Government Services have been discussed and implemented to varying degrees in recent years. Anyone who has visited My Social Security knows how much access to information Americans can have concerning their own individual role in the economy, for example. This type of access relates to personal information and is typically subscriber-based at an individual level.

We all subscribe in different ways to the success of America, however, and most of us don’t have a lot of individual and collective input to the process…yet. Next time, we’ll tell you how we think we might enhance the opportunity we have of Fulfilling the American Promise using the Connected Age tools available to us today. We think this approach might actually minimize the extreme edges, incentivize better politics and policy development and make us all better citizens at the same time.

If you’re into homework, take a look at the kind of technology that a tool like Wattpad offers (from the NY Times article) and see what you think. Hint: look at the title of this post again! Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 3/25/2014.

Editor’s Note: Also starting with this post, we intend to take Harold Morowitz’s advice from a couple of weeks ago and start writing shorter pieces. If the Message is the Medium as Marshal McLuhan noted, we want to help our readers get the message through a more accessible medium!

Compliments to the Complements

Connecting to the Principles, Part 4

Millennials have sought to build a social life that is more visible, more networked and more transparent than any generation before them. To be sure, Gen Y’ers and even Boomers have used online social networks in numbers that would likely have surprised anyone 20 years ago…some might say “everybody’s doing it!” Millennials have grown up connected, however – that’s why they’re also called digital natives. The effects of all that connectivity compose the basis for one of our main premises in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

There are some important questions to ponder about all this though. What are the effects of an online social life? Are we over-connected? What are the consequences of the new forms of connectivity in terms of the future of collaboration? How do we make collaboration work better in the connected age?

These are some of the questions we posed to ourselves as we articulated the Principles last month. We thought long and hard about collaboration when postulating that competition and compromise are key complementary components of our political process. We also thought about collaboration’s effects on capitalism the way it’s practiced in America. We were driven to think about this because our current Congress seems to have forgotten how collaboration works, even though we see business succeeding more and more through collaboration in the connected age.

So with this post we’re looking a little more closely at the complementary relationship of compromise and competition and the resulting outcome of improved collaboration in the connected age. We’re also examining how this improved collaboration is exploited by Millennials. Focusing on connectivity, a look at collaboration through this lens helps us better understand why competition is good, and so is compromise. If we learn how to balance the two, in collaboration, we can rebuild the American Center and perhaps even draw more from the extreme edges back to the Center.

Just to review, a complement is “something that completes something else or makes it better…or makes perfect.” While we’re not describing a perfect relationship in our thinking, we are proposing that competition and compromise work together…complete each other…to make it more likely for collaboration to succeed. If we only rely on competition of ideas or ideology to improve our ability to lead, and in the process avoid compromise altogether, we are destroying the potential for collaboration to work…that’s not leadership.

Since we’re all human, none of us can get it right all the time, no matter how strong the ideology behind our beliefs. There aren’t even two sides to most arguments in Congress so how is it even possible to be right all the time? How is it possible to think only in terms of the “other side is wrong” and has nothing to contribute? How did the concept of compromise become a negative? If we could answer these questions collaboratively we might find a way forward. Fortunately, at least two US Senators are trying to address these issues…that is leadership.

The “normal” way of doing business in Congress in recent years appears to be built on only competition, spurning compromise because that is allegedly some sort of sign of weakness, or failure to be responsive to a particular voting base. But that’s not how our nation came to be. In 1775-1776, ideas competed but the Continental Congress recognized that compromise made those competing ideas stronger when effectively blended. The Founders inherently understood that successful collaboration requires that compromise and competition work together to improve the chances of achieving good policy and valuable outcomes.

This isn’t just the case in government, either. In the FAPITCA Principles, we proposed as an objective that “American capitalism is largely based on the complementary functions of competition and compromise between buyers and sellers in the market.” This means that one party, sellers, provide value to the other party, buyers, through a complementary relationship that brings together a market that might not otherwise exist. This happens in the normally collegial world of academics, as well. Value is added through the synergy of compromise and competition.

The Millennial generation leverages their digital native nature through their online social life and has benefitted from the effects the synergy of competition and compromise has on collaboration. At any early age, they began to play online games together and discovered the power of cooperation and compromise to overcome the big “Boss” adversary in each level of the virtual world in which they played and interacted. Typically, they never even met their playing partners.

Millennials have friends, by their definition, on Facebook that they’ve also never met and yet still share ideas and learn from each other. The same is true to a considerably lesser degree to the older generations but it was tougher since it was like learning a new language at an older age. Millennials grew up with speaking this language!

Competition and compromise are the effects of the digital age that the digital natives have accepted and in which they now thrive. The consequences of this life (the life of the generation from which we’ve borrowed the Boomer and Gen Y environments, as we discussed in the last post) are leading to fascinating findings that will soon be informing the growth of the American Center.

An appreciation of this change is happening everywhere but the halls of Congress, apparently. The Boomers squatting on the edges of that hallowed venue have just not sufficiently learned enough of the lessons of connecting in this age. They have not learned the value of compromise as a complement to competition to make it possible to collaborate on issues like healthcare, employment, immigration, the environment, redistricting, campaign finance, military missions and expenditures, social welfare and almost anything else we could imagine. What collaborative tools they have at their disposal if only they could truly immigrate to the connected age!

Unfortunately, we’re not prepared to say that any effects or consequences the digital natives are experiencing in the connected age will flow into the halls of Congress and State Houses anytime soon. They all think they are connected and doing the peoples’ business using the tools of social media like the Millennials. The problem is they’re primarily using these tools to get reelected, and all too rarely to take care of the nation and their constituents. That’s the biggest difference between those so-called political-digital immigrants and the digital natives of the Millennial generation. That’s where leadership will come in, but that’s for another post – we’ll get to that soon!

Next time, we’ll be publishing our first guest blog post…from a real Millennial! We’re delighted to highlight the perspectives of the real future of America, and hope it opens the door to more posts from the generations younger than the Boomers who are currently the “caretakers” of America. It’s time that the learning and sharing flow both ways.

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 3/11/2014.

Opportunity and the Connected Age

Throughout our lives, all of us have all enjoyed the fruits of opportunity. This is particularly true if we are fortunate enough to live in America. In fact, it seems a distinct American trait to feel proud about hard work and subsequent achievement.

To be fair, however, each of us who has enjoyed any success in our labors must look back towards the original opportunity we had to apply our hard work. We all start with opportunity and make our success from there. More than any other nation on earth, opportunity followed by hard work has been the American way.

The potential dilemma we face in fulfilling the American Promise in this age of cyberspace has to do with the possibility that it’s actually now more difficult to find and exploit good opportunities. For instance, a question we could ask is “has being so super-connected in America helped or hindered the basis of America being the land of opportunity?”

It’s easy to make the argument that of course cyberspace enhances our opportunities. We now seem to know more about each other, how we live and what we do for a living. We can more easily see online information about what our schools teach, what jobs are open and what states have the best employment figures.

Doesn’t that kind of interconnectedness mean everyone has equal access to the same employment opportunities? Maybe…but maybe not. If you’ve been unemployed and unable to move to one of those states with good employment chances, you’re probably saying equal access to opportunity isn’t really all that alive and well in American today.

In the last post, we made the case that opportunity shared is superior to opportunity held close. Sharing opportunity across a community strengthens that opportunity through diverse approaches to thinking and taking advantage of it. Enabling greater “equal access” to opportunity gives us all a better chance to succeed in the hard work of accomplishment Americans do so well. Cyberspace should help us create those greater access options to find and exploit opportunity, right? Again, maybe and maybe not.

Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go to renew equal access to opportunity for all. In a super-connected America, we would think that the free flow of information would indeed help reduce barriers between us…share in opportunity. Paradoxically, cyberspace and super-connectivity do as much to inhibit as to enable access to opportunity.

One example of creating an environment that helps fixate us on our differences rather than our commonality as Americans is a relatively new technologically-enabled ability to selectively gather news from “like-minded” sources. Too many of these sources appear to have increased barriers and inhibit the growth of opportunity rather than expand it. These “sources” include: Drudge Report, Red State Nation, Dailykos, MSNBC, Fox News, and even E! (an instance of an “entertainment” channel that seems equally influential to many) to just name a very few.

In fact, just the use of the term “channel” when describing the medium upon which a television network broadcasts is pretty suggestive that media producers explore ways to separate just as much as appeal to our different interests. We might call this a form of diversity, but we might also call it segregation.

Always on 24-hour news, which chooses to report on the most heinous crimes and government missteps from around the globe, has further degraded our sense of personal security and identity. This insecurity, coupled with the current levels of economic uncertainty, has arguably eroded our willingness to embrace shared access to opportunity. This all too often drives us to seek safety in like-minded communities that also look more like “us.” For a well reasoned analysis of this phenomenon related to national politics and education, spend a worthwhile 15 minutes watching the recent interview of Colin Powell on NBC News.

Our Constitution’s first amendment guarantees no one will abridge “the freedom of speech, or of the press…” but as we see from the growth of such diverse sources of “news”, this also promotes the creation of barriers between the way people think about freedom and opportunity. It could be viewed as a paradox of sorts, but only balanced thinking about fairness of access to opportunity (as opposed to “Fair and Balanced” reporting) can help us break through these types of barriers.

America has offered access to opportunity in ways no previous national entity ever has. And today, in a super-connected world, America should be the undisputed leader in demonstrating the power of universal access to opportunity. Instead, our political system through tactics like “winner-take-all” has further divided us.

“Winner-take-all Redistricting” for state and federal elections is just one often-cited issue that gives us an example of this at the government leadership level. Fortunately, the value of that tactic is at last being questioned by even conservative perspectives…opportunity still has value to many, conservative or liberal.

We’ll be coming back to the critical requirement of equal access to opportunity as the basis for the best chance of success for America in the connected age. The next couple of postings are going to look at leadership in the era of cyberspace, at all levels, as an immediate application to help us ensure the growth of opportunity in our nation. Thoughtful, effective leadership offers us the best near-term chance to leverage the connected nature of America and move opportunity forward for all of us.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts on other ways to create and exploit opportunity in America.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt and Charles E. Hunt, 2/11/2014.

The Opportunity of the American Promise

A few years before he retired from the Army, Carl attended the National War College in Washington, DC. It was an amazing educational opportunity, attending classes under a premier faculty and studying shoulder-to-shoulder with members of all the military branches of the US and many of our allies and other international militaries. Equally importantly, the student body included representatives from all the branches and departments of our nation’s government. It was a truly rewarding year.

One of the things that the faculty reinforces to students at NWC is the old adage that “where you stand depends on where you sit.” Most students had probably heard that one before…it is an old adage, after all. What the faculty at NWC did, however, was to require in students’ discussions of policy and history that they look at things from others’ perspectives and indeed “sit” in a different chair, as it were.

That changes one’s context, of course. We begin to see why others might have a different take on history or why a proposed policy was really bad rather than good, no matter how well intended or timely it initially was. Such an exercise in context comes about from a sincere interest in helping us understand each other…helping us to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes” or see through their eyes.

Too many Americans, and far too many of our elected and policy-making officials have forgotten how to do that, if indeed they ever learned. They choose to dismiss the American Promise of opportunity for all by focusing only on themselves or very narrow constituencies. All too many leaders choose to forsake an important function of leadership: develop and encourage followers to recognize and learn from opportunity. These kinds of “leaders” have chosen to keep opportunities to themselves rather than expand opportunity.

Perhaps the problem is that many Americans have forgotten what the word opportunity really means. The online version of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “a favorable juncture of circumstances” or “a good chance for advancement or progress.” Unfortunately, many politicians and leaders tend to add the prefix of “photo” to the word opportunity and miss its real meaning completely.

Opportunity, a word we emphasized in the previous post, is the crux of the American Promise. America itself is a “favorable juncture of circumstances” with its rich body of natural resources, ideal geographical setting and innate essence that just inspires people to do great things and build amazing communities. From its very beginnings, America offered a “good chance for advancement” for both those who wanted community and those who sought to explore the wondrous wilderness in solitude. America offered then, just as it could now, almost limitless opportunity.

Opportunity in America has served as the engine that energized the imagination, spurred creativity and attracted some of the very brightest people on the planet to want to live here. It’s at the heart of the American narrative. However, for us to maximize the power of the national narrative of opportunity, we must be open to extending opportunity to all. We must come to understand that opportunity increases for all when we seek to share it.

The reality, however, is that while we have gained through opportunity, we have also lost ground seeking to withhold opportunity in America. Undoubtedly, there is less systemic discrimination in our nation than there was decades ago, yet problems persist as too many of us rationalize that we must discriminate to hold on to personal gains we achieved by protecting our own “hard-earned” opportunities.

That “hard-earned” stuff comes from the “American Dream,” not the American Promise. Working hard is important, but all of us who have had the privilege of working hard first had the blessing of opportunity before we could even think about hard work creating a benefit. When we mistake benefitting from working hard with holding opportunity too closely to ourselves, we show we really don’t understand opportunity or the Promise of America. Opportunity grows best for all when shared among all, not just individuals who think they earned something because they’re somehow special or work harder than others. Opportunity is the engine, hard work is the output.

This also means that America is not really a world of “winner take all”…it never has been: that’s a fictitious narrative that political entities and pundits seek to exploit. America is now and always has been a nation of community seeking the welfare of the public, with respect for individual rights, even as it has become ever more diverse in its 235-plus years. Since the beginning, our nation embraced public works to enhance our lives, such as public roads and waterways, land grant colleges and the protection of individual rights. These enhancements strengthened the American Promise of opportunity.

Institutional remedies, such as misguided political efforts to redefine equal opportunity as equal results, have clouded and confused the American Promise, no doubt. It was gratifying to see President Obama reflect more on opportunity than equality in his 2014 State of the Union speech, but of course that may have less impact than it should because it’s viewed as politics. Perhaps both political parties can find a way to achieve some agreement on equality of opportunity being a better way forward for America than “income inequality.” It would be a favorable step forward anyway, and more consistent with our Founders’ vision for America.

We’re going to keep emphasizing opportunity as the essence of Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age because it’s still the engine of our success. We’ll talk a lot more about opportunity in the connected age, as well. We hope to sway more people to “sit” in someone else’s “chair” and understand why opportunity is about more than just themselves, even if that chair is somewhere else in cyberspace. We’d like to demonstrate that opportunity is best savored when everyone has access to it…to show how opportunity is only constrained from growth when people decide to limit it.

America does not limit opportunity, but too many of its people do…let’s help stop that nonsense, perhaps even by “sitting in a different chair.” Please keep tuning in as we, and hopefully you, make a few modest proposals in future blog posts.

Originally posted by Carl W. Hunt and Charles E. Hunt, 2/8/2014