More Risk: Resilience, Amazon’s Snafu, and the Cloud

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Clouds (Photo credit: richardcox8592)

It’s good to know that most of Amazon’s backup power generators were working at the end of last week as some seriously bad weather hit the most internet-infested part of the planet, aka the DC area. But it is far from good enough. If we are to succeed in shifting data storage to the Cloud, with the vast benefits that many believe will flow, we need to have security-conscious grown-ups making resilience decisions. Else all we are doing is continuing the trend of porting our most valuable data assets into increasingly insecure locations.

Some months back I was invited to visit the Network Operating Center of one of our major corporations, located in Northern Virginia, and got a taste of what it takes to ensure resiliency. They have two separate power access points; an oil-fired generator that is constantly run in readiness; and a huge battery backup. And aside from redundant server capacity on site, they have two more complete operations in another state. Any one of them can be switched in seconds. They have never been down for more than a few.

Cloud suppliers need as a minimum to offer this kind of redundancy to ensure resilience, and to game “two-war” situations in which a major hack attack comes at the same time as a natural disaster (weather, earthquake) or the outbreak of an infectious disease that takes out many of their personnel. Seems to me that unless standards are that rigorous, neither commercial nor government agencies are going to entrust their data, and the Cloud will continue to be – as it is now – on the fringe of data storage and management.

The experience of the past few days raises other issues of resiliency. It is astonishing that the area where the most powerful people in the world reside can’t get its power utility to bury its cables (Europeans are routinely shocked to discover U.S. practice, which is defensible in scattered rural and semi-rural areas, but reeks of the Third World in suburban centers).

And all that before we start talking about the prospect of an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse), which could essentially reproduce the results of the weekend storm right up the East coast and take a year to fix. But I hear a movie is in the works about the Carrington Event, the mid-19th century EMP that melted telegraph wires. Perhaps that will wake up legislators, regulators, and utilities. And consumers.

Amazon Explains Cloud Computing Snafu – Digits – WSJ.

Cloud Redundancy: How Amazon Should Repair Credibility (broadbandconvergent.com)
Thoughts on the AWS outage: making the cloud more resilient to failure (cloudflare.com)

More Facebook Malarkey: Why?

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Rupert Murdoch and Wendi Murdoch at the Vanity Fair party celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If Facebook were looking for further ways to undermine user and (by implication) investor confidence, it is on a roll.

The big story has been their switching 900 million default emails to their own system; with an adjunct (and even nastier) effect in some phones of changing contact lists also. This latter is put down to a bug that is being fixed, though the fact remains that scads of emails will have ended up in Facebook mailboxes rather than where they were intended to go.

There are two other stories floating around. One is that Facebook staff have what has been referred to as a private (anti-) stalking capacity, so they know who checks their own pages. Another is that Facebook has created bogus Facebook pages for non-users.

The basic email switching issue, unlike various others, is not a “privacy” issue. Much of the discussion around Facebook’s approach to its users has centered on what are seen by some as competing ideas of privacy. This decision suggests an overbearing disregard of consumer choice, and, back of that, a failure of judgment and governance. These failures, which become more egregious all the time, are illustrated by the privacy concerns. But they are more fundamental, and now that Facebook is a public company are revealing flaws that need to be taken seriously by the market as well as users.

It seems to me there are, at root, two.

1. Facebook’s governance culture, and the structure which in the post-IPO situation has grown out of it, are distinctive and would much better fit the “old economy” companies that flourished in the 20th century than one prepared for the 21st. Not to go over old ground: The board’s lack of diversity is well recognized (adding one woman has been good but is a marginal shift since she is is an exec who reports to Zuckerberg). And the shareholder governance structure gives Zuckerberg supreme command, in a model reflected most publicly in current business by Rupert Murdoch’s family control of News Corp. It may be a good model for some companies; that is not my point. But no-one would argue that it represents the cutting-edge of governance designed to navigate the Moore’s-Law-driven rapids facing a digital behemoth in the 21st century.

2. There is a dramatic discontinuity between Facebook’s de facto emergence as the world’s major social network, and governance structures that would seem to be utterly unaffected by any interest in, well, “social.” One could mount a more radical argument and suggest that social networks will best be governed using models of shared, stakeholder governance, that will require distinctive corporate and financing structures – either reflecting mutualization or the non-profit status of Wikipedia; or developing innovative models that are both for-profit and multi-stakeholder in nature.

Point here is more limited. Just as the most visionary companies around are slowly learning now to use social engagement to align values and decisions with their customers, the leading social platform doesn’t seem to give a fig for what they think about their own email access.

All of which suggests to me that, qua company, Facebook is aging fast.

Is Facebook Doomed?

Is #Facebook Doomed?

On diversity:

Facebook, Diversity, and Leadership in the C21 Corporation

Facebook’s Email Change Results in Changed Address Books, Fix on Way – ABC News.

Risk, Risk, Risk: Competitive Advantage, Value, and Knowledge in C21

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

A recent HBR blog post from Ernst and Young helpfully summarizes research that shows the increased profitability over time of companies with “mature” risk management functions – engaged with strategic risk and integrated with strategic decision-making. It’s a good read with some solid data behind it.

Here’s another slant. Plainly, in times of general stasis, when technologies, markets, other factors, are changing little, risks are comparatively low. The risk function in major companies, and risk itself as a para-profession, developed in such times. The rapid uptick in disruptive change powered chiefly by the digital revolution (aka Moore’s Law) and (directly and indirectly) related factors such as globalization and the furious growth rates of some less-developed economies have changed everything. Risk has moved from the edges of the business (traditional trade-offs between insurance and self-insurance, data backups, leadership transition planning – the many aspects of prudent housekeeping) to the heart of the enterprise – and its competitive advantage.

The sorry tale that came to a head on Wall Street in 2008 has underlined this in rather crass terms. But the tale is being told in many companies, most recently the effective collapse of Kodak and now RIM – companies built largely around a single product and technology (Kodak) or merely product (RIM) that have suddenly gone the way of the dodo and the travel agent. In an oped for the Sydney Morning Post during my visit to Australia’s finance powerhouse AMP last year I described Groupthink as public enemy number 1. Groupthink, from a specifically risk perspective, is of course about the fundamental mis-rating of risk; a consensus lock-step in ignorance that by understating risk balloons it into 2008 proportions. (I shall paste the piece below.)

Point here: The Risk Management team is the C Suite. The Chief Risk officer is the CEO. Together with certain core functions, like hiring top executives and directing corporate strategy, the key risk function is not one that can be delegated. While this may not always have been true, as we climb the curve of disruptive and often destructive innovation in the second decade of C21 it is now not only true but urgent, vital to the flourishing – and survival – of every business. While finance and banking do not deliver all the best bad risk stories (we have noted RIM and Kodak; we could add BP and Susan Komen), the gearing is much higher and the disasters unravel more dramatically and with more strategic impact. So J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Dimon apologized for letting $2bn slip through inadvertence; a week or two later it now looks closer to $9bn. And Barclays, with other banks, have just been revealed fraudulently manipulating the LIBOR rate. On it goes.

The CEO is Chief Risk Officer. And as I have argued elsewhere (summary in the oped below) one essential risk management tool is the assembling and respecting of widely diverse opinions in every strategic conversation. It’s true of the board; of the executive team; of every context in which – essentially – ideas are put into the furnace to create value and competitive advantage. The further we ascend the Moore’s Law slope, the higher the risks, and the more diverse and respected such voices need to be.

How Mature is Your Risk Management? – Michael Herrinton – Harvard Business Review.

Groupthink – public enemy number 1 as we face the future

Posted on June 8, 2012

Groupthink hasn’t worked, it’s time to embrace the maverick

Giving credence to the outlier thinkers in our midst might have avoided things like the Wall Street crash. Photo: AP

As the Arab spring continues to unravel into an Arab summer, the most important lesson is that hardly anyone knew it was coming. Much like the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Wall Street could it be that as much as conventional wisdom may be conventional it is not always reliably wise?

I recently hosted a conference in Washington on the future of nanotechnology. All kinds of experts were round the table talking tech and policy and business. Then one of them made a stunning statement. She was there on behalf of a big, mainstream environmentalist group. “I have never,” she stated, “been on such a diverse panel in Washington.”

There was a brief but palpable intake of air around the room. I thanked her for the compliment before adding that I was now more concerned for Washington than I was before.

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Whom do we invite round the table when the questions are big and the stakes high? It tends to be those in the centre; the mainstream thinker whose wisdom is regarded as conventional.

When will we ever learn? We are still paying for the lesson we learned from Wall Street in 2008.

Conventional wisdom can be dead wrong, even in the hands of the smartest people because they tend to agree with each other. People with way-out views are kept at arm’s-length.

Whatever the issue, if your views deviate too far from the mean, however articulate you may be, you are unlikely to get invited, funded or promoted.

We have learned a lot this past generation about the value of diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity but we have learned little about the enormous and growing value of diversity of opinion.

Of course, we do disagree about a lot of things. With friends, and with co-workers. But we live in communities of ideas that set boundaries around acceptable diversity of thinking, and make sure we keep out those who challenge our shared assumptions.

We don’t want to rehash old issues we regard as closed. We don’t want to give room to opinions we find deeply objectionable – or threatening. Most of us find it challenging to take forward our thinking when there is someone in the room always, always asking why?

So our natural tendency is to put unconscious faith in Groupthink, the tendency for everyone’s thinking to move in the same direction to the exclusion of any serious questioning.

People in management know all about this as a problem for work groups and other teams. But it is more insidious and far more dangerous on the grand scale.

What brought Wall Street down, and with it threatened the entire global order? The G-word. And on smaller scales: what led Monsanto into huge losses in the late 1990s and ensured that Europe rejected genetically-modified food? What led Detroit to near-oblivion as they insisted on producing 1950s-style autos into the 21st century? What about the power company TEPCO and the nuclear disaster that the entirely predictable tsunami sparked in Japan?

Knowledge is building very fast, disciplines are converging, globalisation is changing the ground-rules of everything. Change powered by Moore’s Law, the digitisation process and the revolution in communication is driving shifts in the technical, economic and social order that most of us strain to grasp. Yet the faster change takes place and the greater its disruptive, innovative power, the harder it will be to make good choices.

So who should be party to the conversation? This is where the outliers come in; people who are articulate and serious, but outside the mainstream assumptions that generally drive conversations. Experts tend to resist the participation of thosewith unorthodox opinions. It needs to become the norm for them to sit round the table in every discussion. All articulate voices round the table; all the time.

This approach is hardly new. The century before last, US poet, essayist and journalist Walt Whitman asked the question his own way. “Have you learned the lessons only of those who admired you, and were tender with you, and stood aside for you? Have you not learned great lessons from those who braced themselves against you, and disputed passage with you?” In the 21st century, great value lies at the extremities of opinion; and we need to harvest it as we move through change faster than we have ever known before.

First appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 2011.

The Law of Digital Instability

Aside

The collapse of RIM’s sales and postponement of its latest model, hard on the heels of what have seemed to be less than adroit management changes, underline a principle that seems obvious enough even though it is generally being ignored.

Digital-age companies, to the extent that their technologies are digitally powered, and to the extent that they essentially are built around one technology, are inherently unstable and liable to rapid collapse.

This directly follows from the profoundly disruptive impact of Moore’s Law over relatively short periods of time.

But it is not widely noted. Which is why during IBM’s centennial year there was speculation about which great contemporary companies would be around in a century. Which is why the valuation of companies such as Facebook is so high – and that applies also to Google, for example, even though it has a much lower P/E ratio. Both Facebook and Google, despite their best best efforts (especially on Google’s part) are essentially one-tech digitally-driven companies – with, which is of course a separate point, one dominant business model and product.

It’s the Law of Digital Instability. The sooner we build it into our valuations, the better. And the sooner companies in its grip realize (as Google gives evidence of realizing) how risky is their position over time, the more likely they will find ways to broaden their product/tech/biz mode base.

IS FACEBOOK DOOMED? https://futureofbiz.org/2012/06/04/is-facebook-doomed/

RIM earnings: BlackBerry maker plans to slash 5,000 jobs, new devices delayed until 2013 | FP Tech Desk | Financial Post.

#Rioplus20 “marks a beginning for the world”?

Aside

The UN Secretary-General has spoken in these ringing terms of the Rio event taking place this week – in which key world leaders such as President Obama decided not to take part.

My view is that we need to start over. The process is essentially running backwards. Whatever one’s take on the three core issues in the debate – whether the world is warming (looks like a Yes), whether humans caused it (lots of evidence, yet some smart people don’t buy it), and whether we can do much about it (hence Rio – and, note, the absence of key leaders, government and corporate) – we face growing issues of global risk (from financial collapse to nanobots) and the world needs to organize itself around sane and consensus risk assessment and mitigation processes. This issue is in fact one among many.

Here’s what I wrote after the Planet under Pressure prep con in April (expanding on the remarks I was invited to deliver). https://futureofbiz.org/2012/04/13/global-risk-planetary-pressure-and-rolling-down-to-rio20-2/

UN Secretary-General says Rio+20 marks a beginning for the world | United Nations Radio.

Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy, Data, Privacy – and Business: 5 Principles

Aside

At the core of 21st century business lies data. And as the digital revolution envelops more and more of our activities that core will only get bigger.

We have become most aware of these issues in the context of social media and the biz models that have grown up around advertising as a way to sustain enterprises that are free to the user/consumer.

But of course it goes deeper, much deeper. National security issues, health, transportation – a thick strand of data/privacy concerns and opportunities runs through sector after sector. In this illuminating piece in the NY Times, the spotlight is on Acxiom, a vast aggregator of consumer data whose name is known to few.

These 5 Principles are clear:

1. Every day, more of our lives will be digitized.

2. Every day, there will be more business opportunity in the mining (refining is the word Acxiom likes) of the data.

3. For a stable business environment to flourish, without GMO-style revolts or data scandals such as have punctuated the short history of social media, we need to move towards consensus policies that give business maximum freedom and citizens maximum control over their lives and their digital output – through the optimal mix of self-regulation and legal oversight.

4. Concerns over cybersecurity are growing. Every expert I know is more more worried all the time – as we aggregate data and in the process raise the risk of its being released by accident (another laptop left on a train) or theft. Some of the smartest people on the planet are entirely focused on hacking into our securest systems, and they keep scoring. Risk assessments need to be candid and – unless this raises its own security issues – public.

5. In these days of globalization and cloud, there is no way to avoid global standards.

Acxiom, the Quiet Giant of Consumer Database Marketing – NYTimes.com.

Of #Risk – as the stakes keep getting higher

Aside

Nassim Taleb, whose book The Black Swan added a term to our vocabulary, has offered a brief discussion of how we might anticipate. As we continue to reflect on the enormous damage done in 2008.

His point is basically to draw a distinction between linear and exponential factors. As well we know, with Moore’s Law driving core aspects of technological change, the impact of exponential factors may be expected to increase, exponentially (my point, not Taleb’s).

Here is his key para:

So here is something to use. And the technique, a simple heuristic, called fragility (and antifragility) detection heuristic works as follows. Let’s say you want to check if a town is overoptimized. Say you measure that when traffic increases by 10,000 cars, travel time to grows by ten minutes. But then if traffic increases by 10,000 more cars, travel time now extends by an extra thirty minutes. Such asymmetry shows that traffic is fragile and you have too many cars, and need to reduce traffic until the acceleration becomes mild (acceleration, I repeat, is acute concavity, or negative convexity effect).

A Method of Detection of Fragility: How to Detect Who Will Go Bust — Nassim Taleb.

Specialism, Generalism, and the Meta Option: Death to Silos

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I was struck by this HBR post last week and reminded of it this evening by conversation on Twitter. Not everything I learn comes through that hose, but a good bit of it . . . .

Vikram Mansharamani tackles head-on the triumph of the expert – and the coming death of expertise as the core skill-set in C21 (I hope that is a fair summary; link below – and do read it; neat piece and not long). Generalism is set for a come-back.

It’s important to see it as a come-back, since while “expertise” has always been deep, it is rather recently that narrowly focused specialism was regarded as key – not simply to the detailed study of X (plainly, it is key) but to managing people who study X, and managing them, and discoursing on the wider significance of X, and on and on.

I endorse @Mansharamani’s analysis, but I’m not sure whether the term “generalism” quite gets us there. Partly of course because it has become a term of reproach, but partly because what I am after is something perhaps more dynamic and future-oriented than it implies.

I’m pasting below also a longer post I wrote two years ago, “Hanging Together Lest we Hang Separately.” Feel free to browse. It’s about the other side of expertise, which is silos, and the problem of silo’d thinking (which as Mansharamani notes is not resolved just by getting people out of their silos and into work groups; not least because of the problem of salience and other well-known group dynamics issues).

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC, hosted a distinguished panel some months back to address the subset issue of “convergence” between disciplines in science and technology, and the need to find ways to address cross-cutting questions and questions that required scientists to cross their disciplinary borders. We began with a panel from MIT, and then leading policy people (including the FDA Commissioner) made their comments. The most memorable observation was that perhaps we now need a new discipline of inter-disciplinarity. I had to stifle a guffaw at this point, as I could just see this fresh silo being built and yet another problem specialism being added to the pile.

But there was also something to be noted in that generally silly suggestion, in that while mere deep expertise is less and less relevant to fast-shifting, innovative, cross-cutting questions, shallow jack-of-all-tradesness is not quite the alternative. We need people who can hold their head up high in one silo, or two, or three. But also, whether scientists or technologists or marketers or lawyers or accountants (yes, even accountants), they need to have high-level second-language skills in a series of other silos and an ability to flip to Esperanto when needed to communicate, raise questions, and shape vision, across the whole. Let’s feel after a word. What about meta-expert?

There are many components in this discussion, some of which I take further in the commentary below, including the exponential growth of knowledge which is now exploding faster than we can create new sub-specialities. But the core questions now span our silos, and if they are going to be addressed so we can gain competitive advantage and propel our vision for the markets and culture of tomorrow, only those operating with meta-expertise will cut it.

Hiring, promotion, and education are just going to have to move along this way. But it won’t come easily. What does?

All Hail the Generalist – Vikram Mansharamani – Harvard Business Review.

https://futureofbiz.org/2010/11/21/hanging-together-lest-we-hang-one-by-one/

Hanging together, lest we hang one by one:

Posted on November 21, 2010

The C-PET Mash-up and American Leadership in Century 21

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Washington, DC

At the heart of our C-PET view of things lie two convictions. First, that knowledge networking is the way to go; and every articulate view should be round the table, not because we naively believe win-win is always possible or indeed desirable, but because a positive sum outcome is always both. Second, that while silos may be necessary (we need strong expert communities) they need to be connected – in fact, connected more deeply than ever. As the sheer quantity of knowledge explodes in giddy exponential fashion (the Petaclasm was my word for it), the knowledge bearers in their tight-knit expert communities need to engage more across and outside them. Or to put it another way, with every new petabyte of data popping from the cauldron of knowledge, the meta-community becomes more important. Of course, this is the opposite of what you would expect. It’s the opposite of what most people expect. More data needs more experts; build bigger silos; bring in bigger forklifts. Fordism in the ever vaster databank.

Yet aside from the eternally valid and inexhaustibly funny Peter Principle (younger readers may need to Google that; studies keep suggesting that Lawrence Peter was absolutely if zanily on the button – and you should read the book; flip from Google to Amazon and grab it before you forget) – the vastness of data creation is what gives the lie to the warehousing siloism we have inherited. The fixation with data threatens to engulf us in a tsunami of facts that quenches not only wisdom (now there’s a word from the past), but the capacity for innovation; like those curious and generally elderly people whose houses are stuffed with every newspaper they ever purchased. What’s leadership tomorrow? Well, let’s start with a mash-up of these two. Wise innovation? Innovative wisdom? Either of those would do us nicely. Fordism in the petaclasm offers a decent, intelligent, worthy way to decline and a suffocating, bureaucratic, death. We need to devote our energies to finding, defining, working, another approach altogether. The new leadership is light-touch, scarily flexible, focused on influencing more than ordering, vision-setting every hour of every day, framing and reframing the lives of everyone on the team, and living at the hub of a metanetwork that hums and whines and fizzes with people who know more than the leader, but who see in the beat of the leaderly baton an order that both descends from and ascends towards tomorrow.

The silos are not, of course, just those created by academic disciplines, though as we know that is bad enough; really bad. Many of our smartest minds end up in the academy, on the receiving end of the substantial federal largesse that the NIH and NSF and other agencies pour into the careers of researchers in the world of STEM. Vannevar Bush, that other Bush (no relation, apparently) whose influence looms large in the America of today – larger, surely than he or his wartime patron FDR could ever have imagined in that far-off world of the 1940s – set up the model in response to his president’s request that the wartime experience of science and government snuggling together be replicated in time of peace. So a measure of government’s commitment to S and T has become its funding of the NIH/NSF apparatus. I’m not offering a view on this conventional-wisdom measure of commitment to innovation, the future, the common good, rationality, and more. (I note my esteemed friend Dan Sarewitz’ recent questioning of this idea, in the hallowed journal Nature of all places; his bearded head, thus extended above the parapet, I am expecting soon to see displayed on a stake over the doors of the National Academies.) But it is undeniable that the billions we are pumping into STEM (well, mainly STE) are shoring up the silos (not sure if that extension of the metaphor works) and underwriting the structure of an S and T establishment in which inter-disciplinary collaboration is as rhetorically appealing as it is destructive of silo-dependent career paths. And while I’m not deliberately setting out to lose my remaining friends in the academy, I do think that academic tenure and the path thereto (there is of course no path therefrom) represent one of the nuttier ideas to have hit the west (aka, for this purpose, America). Sure, put huge pressures on young researchers to achieve A, B, C. Then give them a sabbatical and a pile of moolah. But then start over. The alternative of ensuring that inter-disciplinary efforts are lauded in the tenure process is as plausible as expecting those whom we now charmingly refer to as non-state bad actors to be good sports and kiss the opportunities of asymmetry goodbye. People tend, almost, almost always, to act in their interests.

Yet my point is broader. Little by little academics are collaborating across traditional boundaries; hurrah! It will undoubtedly happen more, partly since academics themselves are developing new mangled disciplines like bioinformatics and of course nanoscale science and engineering, in which the trad distinctions just don’t work.

But the silos in Washington are on another scale, reflecting of course fundamental assumptions within the culture at large but, as tends to happen in the world of policy, drawing them out into an exaggerated and deeply contrasted form. Business. S and T. Policy-in-general. Values. Innovation. Of course, there are relationships. But this fragmented vision is deeply, deeply flawed; and it’s at the heart of our malaise as we seek to face the future – a future exponentially rushing from the past like an express train. We in C-PET are out to put the pieces together. It is together that they will define America’s success in the years ahead. It is together that, at a more profound level, they will define the human future. It is together that they possess the potential to reshape our politics. It is together that they offer leaders, from putative presidents all the way down, an opportunity to shine even as they take up the task of refurbishing an aging policy culture.

Which is my point about hanging together. If we can’t correlate these questions and their respective knowledge communities, they will all fail. In their networked connectedness lies the last best hope of success, the kind of transcendent success that would give to America the commanding heights in century 21 that it attained in 20. Because it is precisely in the correlation of these things that leadership lies. I’ve made the point elsewhere that America must set itself to be both global competitor and global citizen – the true friend as well as the rival of the emerging economic powers. There are many reasons, though network logic is plainly one; without friendship and the affect that it brings, stability in the economic if not the political order will always be in jeopardy, and stakes of all kinds are being raised all the time. We need, if you will, a social Marshall Plan to engulf the rising nations of Asia and Latin America, so that our children truly see our peoples as sharers of one exceedingly small planet and a common human lot. Only that will free us for the kind of economic competition on which the future also depends, but without the xenophobic sense that it is a zero sum game. Remember: tech is deeply changing things. In X years, X being a finite number, we shall have realtime translation devices that enable Facebook friends (or more likely friends on the various interoperable networks that will succeed MZ’s genius creation; by then he will be playing Bill Gates and giving it all away) to span all, all, language groups, in a magnificent reversal of the curse of Babel.

My suspicion is that the technologies will then also, finally, favor the little guy. The bad news? They will instantiate asymmetry, which could lead to continuous strife as a background radiation. The good? They will make things harder not easier for both commercial and governmental control. Such developments will give globalization a whole new bite, and popular movements wholly fresh impact on the global scale. Let’s say Twitter’s successor has two billion members in eight years from now, and something starts to trend and keeps on trending – public opinion as a global force will have arrived. The current (problematic) situation, in which the United Nations treats NGOs (which are often highly partisan) as the representatives of the global public, will be over. I’m not sure the UN will then be the point (I think the UN as in Security Council and GA will be oldline; UNESCO and other elements in the UN system could become a bigger deal, but on the political/economic front groups like G-20 will have all initiative); but whatever intergovernmental organizations there are, we shall see the emergence of global publics.

The point of this seeming digression is to illustrate the kind of world into which America’s projection of leadership will increasingly take place; a world in which silos are breaking down, in which people power will make life a lot more challenging for national governments, a world in which old-style structures like the core of the UN system, with their constitutions and procedures and Robert’s Rules on steroids – in which they remain in place as they fade in significance and are supplanted by the ad-hocery of the G approach. G-whatever is just a bunch of governmental guys who get invited round for a beer. It’s a high-end tweet-up. Now: combine the tweet-up “UN” which the G system is bringing in and global people power through translation software and son-of-Facebook apps, and you can begin to understand the context within which America will be acting, and needing to look good, in just a little while.

So back to integration. By pumping the innovation agenda, and bringing smart and strategic business perspectives to bear on the policy community, we are working to get the long term at the core of Washington’s politics. Embracing the future in a way that is imaginative but non-naïve, we begin to address the impacts of such diverse and extraordinary developments as virtual reality, the brain-machine interface, synthetic biology, humanoid robotics. Once their potential impacts begin to be examined, we are into risk assessment; and in tandem where those impacts stand in relation to our existing notions of the good life, and the varied political traditions that seek to sustain them. In other words, consideration of risk and values issues arise directly from a future-embracing vision. Marty Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and a member of C-PET’s Board of Directors, has raised the question of our handling of risk on a succession of occasions at our monthly roundtables. He urges a principle of caution, which assesses risk side by side with tech developments. He distinguishes this from the “precautionary principle” commonly spoken of in Europe, which seeks to resolve risk issues before developments take place. And Marty’s risk approach could be readily paralleled by a critique on the ground of human values (aka ethics). If you look ahead, you can be circumspect, and work on risk and values side by side with technology. Parallel processing is the key. This kind of embrace of innovation and future-mindedness represents the summum bonum for the tech community. By the same token, they know well that societal values just like environmental and other risk aspects are crucial to commercial success. Which is not to suggest “win-win.” I dislike the concept, not least as it demeans genuine disagreement and devalues the deep value of unresolved, conflicting vision. These are vital elements in progress as well as in the critique that ensures that “progress” really takes us forward, and does in a manner that is (in all its many senses) sustainable. Not win-win. But yes, positive sum outcome. Clarifying key issues; teasing out where agreement and disagreement lie, as all voices are invited to define the issues as well as speak to them; building consensus where possible and establishing both the nature and the weighting to respective parties of issues that remain outside the consensus circle. This process, which bridges silos and builds the knowledge network across disciplines as the context for decision-making, is future-oriented and inherently embraces innovation. But it is not naïve as to risk, it candidly acknowledges that all human conduct is driven by human values, and it recognizes that unease and disagreement in the values arena are huge questions for investors, business leaders, and policymakers alike. That is, the silos interconnect – and do so the more where future and potentially disruptive developments are concerned.

Point being: unless we hang together, we investors and values advocates and innovators and policy mavens and risk gurus, we shall surely hang separately. Build an open-textured knowledge network, draw in all articulate voices, frame and ask tomorrow’s questions. That’s how we man up for today’s decisions. And that’s the C-PET mash-up.